Translating with Heidegger: worldliness, disclosure and disruption

Abstract

There is major interest in contemporary translation studies in relational approaches inspired by thinkers including Latour, Bourdieu, Derrida and Gadamer. These thinkers were heavily influenced by Martin Heidegger; nonetheless, there has been little explicit consideration of Heidegger within translation studies. This is a serious omission because an understanding of his thought can help us to better understand later relational approaches and because Heidegger’s thinking itself offers a powerful set of tools for thinking about translation relationally. Drawing on his early and most influential work Being and Time, my argument moves through four stages: first, I propose that the concept of ‘being-in-the-world’ can help in thinking about the existential embedding of translators and meaning within a significant world; second, that Heidegger’s concepts of ‘Articulation’ and ‘articulation’ can help us understand how those relationships work; third, that thinking in terms of ‘world disclosure’ offers a valuable path between naïve realism and strong constructivism; and fourth, that the existential importance of translation lies in its capacity to redisclose the relationships which make up the world, allowing us to see them in new ways. In so doing I aim to both draw attention to a neglected thinker and situate translation on a basic, ontological level.