How to Wrestle With the Translation of Wittgenstein’s Writings

The translations of Wittgenstein’s German philosophy absolutely requires the translator’s full judgment, precision, and experience to re-imagine and reconstruct Wittgenstein’s original writings transposed into other languages and cultures. There exists no “authoritative” interpretation of any text or manuscript, so translation can turn into overtranslation and undertranslation in revision, re-translation, and self-translation. To bring the material of translation to life, the examples taken from Wittgenstein’s works are accompanied by critical comment to reveal the “good” or “bad” character of the field of translating Wittgenstein’s philosophical texts. Wittgenstein wrote in readable language, but his German differs radically from “ordinary” language into specialized metalanguage. The ideal goal of translation of philosophical texts is to deconstruct the metatexts within the synonymy of words and sentences into rebuilding meaningful propositions. The sameness of source and target texts creates for the isolationist translators the paradox of equivalence. Without the previous plan of annotation in the extensive glossary of Wittgenstein’s texts, the target translation makes assumptions which are at best plausible, at worst arbitrary synonyms of the source texts. The proposed glossary imposes absolute accuracy of source and target vocabulary and terminology to generate the adequacy of the collective translations.

Alle er hjertelig velkomne!