The historical overview covering Schleiermacher and the disciplinary status of translational hermeneutics was written by Cercel, the sections on important concepts and research within the paradigm of translational hermeneutics was authored by Stolze, and Stanley wrote the last three sectionsdealing with language games, a concrete research project and the role of phenomenology in research. The text was geared towards providing some background information on translational hermeneutics, a field which has bearing not only on the practice of translation but also on research in TS. From the vantage point of translational hermeneutics, research in translation studies takes its point of departure from the translator’sperspective: The guiding question is one centered on how a translator deals with the texts he or she has to translate.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the place Hans-Georg Gadamer makes for the activity of translation within his philosophy of interpretation. In general terms, the interest of Gadamer’s approach lies in the effort to inscribe translation within what is described as the ‘hermeneutic circle’. This essay accordingly offers a brief, but detailed account of the Gadamerian arc of interpretation, but suggests that the critical issues – along the lines suggested by Werner Hamacher in his book Premises – concern the way in which the circle begins to turn, and furthermore, how one actually enters the hermeneutic circle. If these are matters basic to the Gadamerian way with textual interpretation tout court, the principal claim of this essay is that it is the translatorwho experiences the most serious diffi culties in beginning, and indeed, in entering the ambit of hermeneutics. In detailing these particular difficulties, one reaches a limit-case of the hermeneutical interpreter – the translator as one to whom Gadamer grants a privileged place in his philosophy, but also as one who reveals to hermeneutics the nature of the problems that beset hermeneutic philosophy from the outset.

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.

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.

This paper attempts to show that the unit of translation, even though it has long been used by both translators and theorists, is not a very fruitful concept when it comes to describing the translation process. The way in which it has been defined up to now is either too restrictive to be valid or too broad to be manageable. It will appear that it is much more productive to consider translation from a hermeneutic point of view on the basis of both the working unit of translation (the portion of source text which is being processed at a particular time) and the complexity of the factors involved in the process. The notion of hermeneutic halo will be proposed as a useful tool in this context. Combined with the working unit of translation, it helps describe the translation process and is a means of accounting for the great variety of translations a single original can lead to.

This paper sets out to analyse the hermeneutical process of highlighting at work in Seamus Heaney’s preface to his 1999 retranslation of Beowulf. My analysis takes into account the generic identity of the preface by considering it as a textual subgenre where the translator becomes a metatranslator in order to voice herself out of invisibility, engaging thereby in a (self-reflexive) hermeneutical analysis and ‘justification’ by commenting on the selection of the text to be translated and her own translation choices. The analysis is carried out with the help of two concepts elaborated by Gadamer: situatedness and self-understanding. These concepts will help show how the Northern Irish poet fuses different horizons in the process of his retranslation. In this essay, I also take into account the specificity of retranslation as a particular instance of hermeneutical activity. To do so, I focus on how Heaney introduces his own rendering of Beowulf, and on how he explains the translational choices and processes he opted for in order to render this canonical text into contemporary language. I argue that the closely related notions of situatedness and self-understanding can help bring to the fore how Heaney establishes an intrinsic link between his own retranslation choices on the one hand and, on the other, his cultural identity and poetics. Taking into consideration the hermeneutical dimension of this preface, it will be argued, gives us valuable insight into the retranslation project of Seamus Heaney. It will show that he does not seek to impose on Beowulf a transcendental truth or to fix it in a definite retranslation and interpretation. Instead, situatedness and self-understanding help shed light on how he engages creatively with the epic Anglo-Saxon poem: at issue is both how his retranslation is situated and grounded in his own subjectivity, and indeed with respect to his existential questions, as well as in a wider socio-cultural context.

The work of Jiři Levý, the pioneering Czech translation scholar of the 20th century, shares a lot of common ground with the (neo)hermeneutic approach in translation studies. A closer look reveals, however, a good number of differing, and even opposite stances. For chronological reasons, Levý himself cannot be regarded a member of the neohermeneutic movement in translation studies; thus, the following questions arise: 1) What is the extent of overlap between Levý’s work and that of the main representatives of the hermeneutic approach in translation studies, mainly in Germany, and 2) how can this overlap be explained? This article seeks to demonstrate the following: There are full ‘matches’ between the two approaches, including some aspects of methodological approach, the value of texts, creativity, translating as a decision process as well as Levý’s concept of perception on the one hand and the hermeneutic circle on the other. A partial overlap between the two approaches has been identified in terms of the following matters: the applicability of translation theory, the language and style of theoretical works, the application of game theory, and the focus on individuals (recipient, translator). As regards differences, these include thematic focus, the idea of a personal link between the text and its recipient, and the concept of subjectivity. The purpose of the article is to show that, rather than being a (direct) predecessor, Levý can be regarded as a precursor of the hermeneutic approach in translation studies. Hopefully, illustrating this affinity between Levý and the hermeneutic approach will foster an interest in his theory, which is marked by openness and dynamism – qualities that also abide in the hermeneutical approaches of our present time.

Hermeneutics is a discipline that has traditionally focused its inquiries on understanding and on the link between the process of understanding and communication. This area, namely understanding and the link to communication, has not figured predominantly in translation studies, and the new developments in machine translation make it increasingly obvious that exploring this aspect of human translation is particularly relevant. In this essay I show how the set of premises upon which hermeneutics rests differs in very significant ways from the fundamental premises upon which the natural science paradigm is based; it is this difference that makes research into the nature of understanding so crucial to Translational Hermeneutics. Scholars working in the field of Translational Hermeneutics have to clearly mark this difference vis-a-vis translation studies, otherwise scholars working in translation studies cannot understand the relevance of Translational Hermeneutics for translation professionals. Furthermore, the work geared towards gaining an empirically and phenomenologically well-founded, accurate description of the process of understanding has to be given first priority and pursued as expeditiously as possible, for this has to serve as the foundation for the further development of Translational Hermeneutics.