Vocativity and dialogue in the process of reading for translation

Scott, Clive (2021) Vocativity and dialogue in the process of reading for translation. CounterText, 7 (1). pp. 133-152. ISSN 2056-4406

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Abstract

This article sets out to identify those modes of reading likely to make the process of translation optimally fruitful. It opens with the proposition that translation peculiarly has the capacity to transform our habits of reading and, by doing so, to re-empower language. Such a capacity depends on our establishing a vocative (coparticipational) relationship with the text to be translated, rather than an accusative one (source text as analysable document). The pursuit of the vocative entails giving prominence to prosodic or paralinguistic features of language, and to the situation of speech, and preferring the notion of sense to that of meaning. The nature of this vocative relationship is further clarified and refined by reference to Martin Buber s Ich und Du (1923). To properly appreciate translation as the multiform and connective activity that it is, we must understand the divinity of Babel s dialogic and dialectical reciprocities rather than see in Babel a condemnation to untranslatability. The article closes with a translation of Rilke s Sonette an Orpheus, I, 26, which in both subject and translational method plays out the foregoing arguments.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Publisher Copyright: © 2020 Uniciencia. All rights reserved.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	accusativity,deixis.,ergänzung,paralanguage,prosody,situation of speech,vocativity,literature and literary theory ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1208
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	07 Oct 2025 14:32
Last Modified:	11 Oct 2025 15:33
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100669
DOI:	10.3366/COUNT.2021.0221

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