For Gadamer, translation operates as an illustrative “extreme case” of interpretation, of interest to the extent that it can push the logics of less-extreme interpretative practices. Yet the main thing Gadamer consistently says about what is extreme in translation seems to be that it is a strangely intellectual process, bereft of lived experience. One can nevertheless trace threads of lived experience within translation knowledge, both through what translators say and from what translation process research reveals. Further, the nature of that experience, in exceeding its interpretations, can justify an empirical attitude to its study. Hence hermeneutics could do worse than incorporate empirical attitudes into its work on translation, rather than endlessly repeat inherited insights.

Since at least the latter half of the 20th century, scientific theorizing has been marked by a tendency to focus increasingly on the concept of complexity. However, within the field of Translation Studies, we continue to work primarily with non-complex, uni-dimensional models. The relationship between the source text and the target text is commonly established in uni-dimensional terms, that is: either via sense (linguistics, hermeneutics) or via the function or skopos (Skopos theory, functionalism). Terms like equivalence (Nida, Kade) and adequacy (Vermeer) are also based on uni-dimensional models. In the late 1980s, Neubert suggested a two-dimensional approach using the notions of content and purpose to overcome uni-dimensional models. In my paper I would like to present a more complex approach to translation based on semiotics and interpretation philosophy. It consists of two levels: the intratextual level focusing the interrelation of signs (word, sentences, texts) within texts, and the extratextual level focusing the interrelation of signs with extratextual phenomena. Each level is divided into three dimensions. I use the concepts of meaning, function, and information to describe what a translator has to take into account on the intratextual level to be able to elaborate an equivalent target text, i.e. a text that fits into the constraints of a given linguistics settings. In addition to that, I use the concepts of sense, purpose, and form to describe what a translator has to take into consideration on the extratextual level to elaborate an adequate target text, i.e. a text that fits into the constraints of a given translatological setting. Whereas the uni-dimensional arrow just stands for the simple relation between source and target text, this new model establishes a whole translational space between both texts which is able to show the complexity of translational decisions to be taken.

Due to the fact that hermeneutical approaches have widely been ignored or falsely understood as missing the scientific requirements in Translation Studies, this article wants to demonstrate how Translational Hermeneutics as an approach based on grounded understanding is crucial and endorses various other approaches in the research of translation. Explaining the scholarly perspective here as an individual worldview, the external opinions can be defeated. Concepts like subjectivity, intuition, sense of the text to be understood, and ever unfinished time-sensitive translations within a cultural context are discussed. Various aspects of understanding and formulation come together in the translator’s dynamic competence. Translational Hermeneutics links up with linguistic theories such as text-linguistics, semantics, rhetoric, the sociological systems theory, cognition research, and empirical methods of inquiring into the translator’s thinking. It connects less to corpus studies or language-based inter-lingual transfer and the technology-based process analyses. Didactics based on an hermeneutical approach may strengthen the translator’s self-confidence by preparing the background of understanding.

The topic of this contribution is the relationship between hermeneutics and translation practice. In the first theoretical part, some relevant central concepts dealing with the ontological valence of language and the ontological foundation in humans are introduced and discussed; in this part the concern is with the possibility and the meaning of translation between languages and cultures. Considerations by some important scholars and philosophers, linguists, and semioticians such as Augustine of Hippo, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Fritz Paepcke, and Umberto Eco are included in this section. The starting point is the antagonistic thinking which characterizes two main perspectives in translation studies; this antagonism has always characterized the history of translation and is now deeply anchored in European Translation Studies. Even if some theoretical answers to the ancient antagonism have been presented in the last years (e.g. Mary Snell-Hornby, Christiane Nord, Sergio Bolanos Cuellar), this contribution aims to criticize the theoretical exclusion of perspectives by proposing a comprehensive approach that takes into account both opposing but complementary viewpoints. As a key to good translation two main concepts are thus proposed: the idea of negotiation introduced by the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco and the concept of compromise as explained by the German initiator of philosophical hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer. The theoretical reflections on language and human communication are then illustrated with reference to the practice of translation. The point is to show how the interweaving of theory and practice is particularly adequate for the task of translation, especially when the hermeneutic approach is employed in order to find the right translation solution. This work shows both the challenges translators face in their encounter with the foreign text and the practical and theoretical refinements that a hermeneutic reading of the translating process can bring, especially when it invites translators to take into account the thinking, the feeling and the action of the subjects involved in the translation process. This illustration is done with the help of text examples and by discussing the steps of a personal translating process as applied to some literary poems translated from German into Italian.

This paper tracks the influence wielded by ancient Chinese thought on not only the German Romantics but on dissident Western thought coming out of Renaissance esotericism into the “dark side” of the Enlightenment (the so-called “Endarkenment”), with the idea that tracing that history of intercivilizational influence may help us identify some strands of German Romantic theories of translation that have hitherto been overlooked, and to bring a better adapted analytical framework to bear on those theories.

There has been an increasing amount of published scholarly work on hermeneutics and translation studies. However, hardly any work has been done to connect hermeneutic approaches to translation and hermeneutic approaches to psycholinguistics. This essay accordingly seeks to identify some of the key features common to both translation theory and psycholinguistics. At issue is finding areas of interaction and overlap between these two areas of enquiry, especially in relation to the hermeneutic account of text understanding processes.