Apropos Translation Services: What is Translating? 4 (Apropos Derrida)

French philosopher Jacques Derrida, one of the exponents of the poststructuralist school, is largely known for his strategy of deconstruction, a critical analysis that emphasises and exposes hidden or suppressed meanings, assumptions, and inconsistencies in philosophical and literary texts. His inquiries exposed a certain insolubility with regard to a definitive meaning of a text, resulting in an increase in the number of possible meanings, rather than in a delineation.

Below is a report from the Los Angeles Times (April 12, 2002) on a conference during which Derrida raised a few interesting ideas about translations and translating. Highlighted phrases may again be taken as synonyms for Apropos.

"The paradox of translation, Derrida said, is that the translator must strive to be as faithful as possible to the original author's style and intent, while at the same time recognizing that it's impossible to reconstitute the unique meaning of the original words. The alchemy of translation, he said, occurs precisely at that point where an essentially new work is created. "A translator is a creative writer," Derrida said. "You have to find the best way to be untrue to the original, to perjure in the best way. This is the double bind."

Growing up in a Jewish family in French colonial Algeria, Derrida said, he always "had the vague feeling" that even his own native tongue, French, was a foreign language. "Even the native speaker can't appropriate his own language," he said. "It is always the language of the Other.""

Apropos translated Deconstruction in Music, a thesis that was presented as an interactive Internet site and that awarded dr. Marcel A. Cobussen his PhD degree in 2002.