ANTHONY PYM FOR EMPIRICISM

THE ARGUMENT The one thing an activist cannot say, and which any empiricist must say, prior to all else, is this: “I don’t know.” © Intercultural Studies Group

ERIC PICKLES If you translate for immigrants, they will not learn English. Stopping the automatic use of translation and interpretation services into foreign languages will provide further incentive for all migrant communities to learn English, which is the basis for an individual’s ability to progress in British society. It will promote cohesion and better community relations. And it will help councils make sensible savings, at a time when every bit of the public sector needs to do its bit to pay off the deficit. ranslation-into-foreign-languages © Intercultural Studies Group

DATA 138,000 speak no English – census: The number of people living in England and Wales who could not speak any English was 138,000, latest figures from the 2011 census show. (BBC News 30 January 2013) In 2011, less than half a per cent (138,000) of all usual residents aged three years and over could not speak English. (Office for National Statistics 2013: 2) © Intercultural Studies Group

DATA Lindholm et al. (2012) study 3071 patients with Limited English Proficiency (LEP): “the length of hospital stay for LEP patients was significantly longer when professional interpreters were not used at admission or both admission/discharge” “patients receiving interpretation at admission and/or discharge were less likely than patients receiving no interpretation to be readmitted within 30 days” © Intercultural Studies Group

DATA Diamond LC, Schenker Y, Curry L, Bradley EH, Fernandez A Fagan MJ, Diaz JA, Reinert SE, Sciamanna CN, Fagan DM Flores, G Gallagher RA, Porter S, Monuteaux MC, Stack AM Hampers Louis C., Cha S, Gutglass DJ, Binns HJ, Krug SE Hampers, Louis C., and Jennifer E. McNulty. (2002). Hudelson P, and Vilpert S Jacobs, Elizabeth A., Laura S. Sadowski, and Paul J. Rathouz John-Baptiste A, Naglie G, Tomlinson G, Alibhai SM, Etchells E, Cheung A, Kapral M, Gold WL, Abrams H, Bacchus M, Krahn M Karliner, Leah S., Elizabeth A. Jacobs, Alice Hm Chen, and Sunita Mutha Levas MN, Cowden JD, Dowd MD, Lindholm, Mary, J. Lee Hargraves, Warren J. Ferguson, George Reed Quan, Kelvin JD Wallbrecht J, Hodes-Villamar L, Weiss SJ, Ernst AA © Intercultural Studies Group

GOOD RESEARCH Identifies problems. Helps to solve them. Has an empirical component. Contributes to the collective constitution of knowledge. © Intercultural Studies Group

EPISTEMOLOGICAL GIVENS All data is interpreted. There is no neutral description. All research is motivated. The researcher is never external with respect to the object of knowledge. One most expose oneself to falsification (hypothesis testing). Our knowledge is always probabilistic. © Intercultural Studies Group

EPISTEMOLOGICAL GIVENS Empiricism opposed theocratic knowledge in the 12 th century And in the 19 th century (positivism) Became relativist and probabilistic in the late nineteenth century. And included the observer in the 20 th century (Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy). Is quantitative, qualitative, and self-reflexive And can upset (“une science qui dérange”). © Intercultural Studies Group

WHEN THE GIVENS ARE NOT GIVEN Some activist positions preclude falsification through double binds: We must boycott Israeli scholars. Something good happens: The boycott is working. We must continue. Something bad happens. More boycott is needed. © Intercultural Studies Group

Narrative is “the principal and inescapable mode by which we experience the world” (Baker 2008: 9). [No dialogue?] Narrative theory further allows us to piece together and analyse a narrative that is not fully traceable to any specific stretch of text but has to be constructed from a range of sources, including non- verbal material. (4) [No linearity?] [No narrator?] NARRATIVE ONTOLOGY

© Intercultural Studies Group Translators without Borders (TWB) is taken to task because it purports to do good things while in reality it is nothing more than “an offshoot of a commercial translation agency” (159). TWB “proudly lists among its top clients several companies that are widely thought to be implicated in the very atrocities that TWB presumes to bring to our attention, including General Electric and L’Oréal” (160). ONLY THE PURE?

© Intercultural Studies Group We soon configure something like skopos theory as a narrative in our minds: the theory evokes (for me at any rate ) an industrialized, affluent society populated by clients and highly professional translators who belong to the same ‘world’ as their clients, who are focused on professionalism and making a good living, and who are highly trained, confident young men and women. These professional translators and interpreters go about their work in a conflict-free environment and live happily ever after. They do not get thrown into Guantánamo or shot at in Iraq, and they do not end up on the border of Kosovo and Albania in the middle of a nasty war, where they would have to decide whether or not to fulfil their commission at the expense of treating potential victims with compassion and respect. (2008. STORIES FROM GNOMELAND

© Intercultural Studies Group Translators and interpreters play a crucial role in disseminating public narratives within their own communities and ensuring that all members of a society, including recent migrants, are socialized into the view of the world promoted in these shared stories. (36) [What about schools?] NARRATIVE ONTOLOGY APPLIED

© Intercultural Studies Group “[The narrative paradigm] is radically democratic where the traditional rational paradigm is arguably elitist” (163) TWB has “a casual and charity-based attitude to ‘doing good’ that is arguably self-serving and exploitative” (162) “ Arguably […] we are constantly being socialized into barbarous narratives even today” (12) “ARGUABLY”

© Intercultural Studies Group “[The narrative paradigm] is radically democratic where the traditional rational paradigm is arguably elitist” (163) TWB has “a casual and charity-based attitude to ‘doing good’ that is arguably self-serving and exploitative” (162) “Arguably […] we are constantly being socialized into barbarous narratives even today” (12) “ARGUABLY”

© Intercultural Studies Group “empiricist epistemologies claim direct or unmediated access to a reality or truth” (2013: 67). “the past decade has witnessed relatively few projects in which translations have been studied in specific cultural situations at specific historical moments” (2013: 6) “the empirical orientation of translation studies marginalized research into issues of philosophy and cultural politics” (61). VENUTI CHANGES EMPIRICISM

© Intercultural Studies Group “Translation theory, for instance, cannot do without the solid, specific data yielded by research in descriptive and applied translation studies, while on the other hand one cannot even begin to work in one of the other fields without having at least an intuitive theoretical hypothesis as one’s starting point.” (Holmes 1988: 78, cit. Venuti 2013: 8) Here Holmes makes the empiricist assumption that knowledge is merely given to observation rather than constructed on the basis of theoretical concepts. […] Holmes’s model is scientific, deploying the inductive method […] treating translation theory as derived from empirical fact. (Venuti 2013: 9-10) VENUTI CHANGES EMPIRICISM

© Intercultural Studies Group “Translation theory, for instance, cannot do without the solid, specific data yielded by research in descriptive and applied translation studies, while on the other hand one cannot even begin to work in one of the [two] other fields without having at least an intuitive theoretical hypothesis as one’s starting point.” (Holmes 1988: 78, cit. Venuti 2013: 8) Here Holmes makes the empiricist assumption that knowledge is merely given to observation rather than constructed on the basis of theoretical concepts. […] Holmes’s model is scientific, deploying the inductive method […] treating translation theory as derived from empirical fact. (Venuti 2013: 9-10) VENUTI CHANGES EMPIRICISM

© Intercultural Studies Group “Translation theory, for instance, cannot do without the solid, specific data yielded by research in descriptive and applied translation studies, while on the other hand one cannot even begin to work in one of the two other fields without having at least an intuitive theoretical hypothesis as one’s starting point.” (Holmes 1988: 78, cit. Venuti 2013: 8) “theoretical speculation is reduced to a ‘hypothesis’” (2013: 9) VENUTI CHANGES EMPIRICISM

© Intercultural Studies Group my arm scarcely manages to encircle the thin new-moon line of your waist: in love you have loosened yourself like sea water: I can scarcely measure the sky's most spacious eyes and I lean down to your mouth to kiss the earth. mi brazo alcanza apenas a rodear la delgada línea de luna nueva que tiene tu cintura: en el amor como agua de mar te has desatado: mido apenas los ojos más extensos del cielo y me inclino a tu boca para besar la tierra. EN TI LA TIERRA

© Intercultural Studies Group my arm scarcely manages to encircle the thin new-moon line of your waist: in love you have loosened yourself like sea water: I can scarcely measure the sky's most spacious eyes and I lean down to your mouth to kiss the earth. mi brazo alcanza apenas a rodear la delgada línea de luna nueva que tiene tu cintura: en el amor como agua de mar te has desatado: mido apenas los ojos más extensos del cielo y me inclino a tu boca para besar la tierra. EN TI LA TIERRA

© Intercultural Studies Group O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the enameled plain! America! God shed His grace on thee, “The unconscious desire in Walsh’s translation is that a major Chilean poet, noted for his leftist attacks on American capitalism, should instead express his affection towards the United States…” EN TI LA TIERRA?

© Intercultural Studies Group Venuti cannot say “I don’t know”. EMPIRICALLY…

© Intercultural Studies Group ACTIVISM?