Is (Translational) Hermeneutics of any Use for the (Cognitive) Analysis of Translation Products?

Abstract

Traditionally, translation scholars have analyzed translation products by putting emphasis on the purely linguistic phenomena of a target text as related to a source text. However, the author of this paper claims that in order to analyze a translation product in all its facets, it is necessary to add a phenomenology-oriented approach to it, along with the accounts of the translators who translated the text in question. The aim of the article is to present how a standard way of the analysis of a translation product, including a cognitive one, might be enriched by considering the phenomenological and hermeneutic points of view. By analyzing a fragment of a women’s fiction novel, the author tries to demonstrate how a translation critic might evaluate translation products in order to gain insights into how translators go through the translation process. As well as that, the paper aims to refrain from regarding the act of translation and translation products as purely ‘objective’ phenomena but more on stressing the need for taking into account the subjectivity and inter-subjectivity of the act of translation as embedded in the relationship between a text and its readers (translators).