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Si le traducteur n’est pas guidé par cette intention lorsqu’il traduit des textes étrangers, à savoir par l’idée de Bildung de sa nation, sa traduction, au lieu de devenir une réalisation patriotique, peut avoir l’effet contraire en le rendant coupable d’agissements destructifs envers le langage et la culture de sa nation, mettant ainsi en péril sa véritable essence ou, comme on dirait aujourd’hui, son identité. Les romantiques allemands théoriciens de la traduction établissaient des distinctions politiques entre les différentes méthodes de traduction littéraire.
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However natural and self-evident this image of translator and this understanding of translation appear to us today, they are in fact historically particular and ideologically framed. Moreover, in its past, the theory of translation conceived of this linguistic practice in a very different way. For German romantic philosophers and theorists of language and literature, translation is far from being socially neutral and politically unbiased. For Wilhelm von Humboldt, for instance, it always has a socially formative function; concretely, it plays a crucial role in what he calls Bildung (education, formation, building, creation) of a nation. It is precisely because of this function that translation cannot be morally neutral in itself. If a translator translating foreign texts is not lead by this interest, i.e. by the idea of the Bildung of his nation, his translation, instead of becoming a patriotic achievement, can become the opposite, making him guilty of acting destructively toward the language and culture of his nation and thus jeopardizing its very essence or, as we would say today, its identity. German Romantic translation theorists also differentiated between various methods of literary translation in a clearly political sense. They distinguished the so-called German school of translation from its French counterpart, which at the time—the era of the Napoleonic wars—had a patriotic political stance in mind. The idea of translator taking a position in the middle between the original text and its translation, a position equally distant from two different languages, cultures, or nations, was strange to Schleiermacher too. For him there is no space for neutrality and equidistance in translation. Either a translator leaves the readers in peace and moves the author toward them, making the text of the original sound as though it had been originally written in the language of the translation, or he leaves the author in peace and moves the readers toward him, estranging the language of translation.[1] The latter, so-called literalist (word for word) method, preferred by Schleiermacher, was considered to be “German.” It favoured foreignizing rather than domesticating the language of translation, i.e. it welcomed the foreign (das Fremde, W. v. Humboldt) as an added cultural value for the language and culture of the translator. In short, it was teleologically inscribed into the politics of nation-building. This is why the “German” method was also considered “nation
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