There is a widespread feeling in many circles that such enterprises as the interpretation, criticism, and translation of texts, especially of literary texts, but also true of scientific-technical texts, require some sort of humanistic approach rather than any scientific expertise. This feeling is often wedded to a certain rootedness in practice (rather than theory) or in the specificity of a region with its needs (rather than the abstract generality of a discipline with its vicissitudes); in such cases, there is no problem in principle.
For instance, the person saying translators do not need linguistics may be practicing translator who finds that the urgent exigencies of real life call for an immediate activism that leaves no time for the subtleties of scientific research or understanding. Or the person may be someone loyal to the cause of, say, Gujarati studies (or, say Folk Culture Studies) who believes that this unified cultural discipline must take priority, both in funding decisions and in the thinking of those who wish to study Gujarati and the Gujaratis, over intersecting international enterprises like linguistics or sociology or archaeology which try to define objects of study in disciplinary terms. Such rootedness in practice and loyalty to regional realities may lead to distrust of or impatience with the scientific enterprise of (say) linguistics.
But these are soluble problems. They do not represent the hostile, anti-scientific forces that the present section is mostly concerned with. An activist or a regionalist is committed to urgent needs and will not reject a scientific enterprise which respects this sense of urgency, an enterprise which in its applied wing tries to meet activists and regionalists halfway.
Thus, to the extent that a humanistic approach to the interpretation, criticism, and translation of texts simply means that the regional specialist or the practicing translator concentrates on a language (or a language - pair) as a preferred domain of activity and brings the accumulated knowledge of a life-time of such concentration to bear on the task of evaluating the ideas and suggestions of cosmopolitan or scientific linguists who wish to work with regionalists and practitioners, there is obviously no real quarrel between the specificity of the humanistic approach and the generality of the scientific enterprise.
Consequently, linguists too can endorse, to this extent, the widespread view that such fields as translation studies and language teaching should be constructed around the autonomous activities of practitioners who need not have specialized training in technical linguistic science. But the tacit understanding is that these practitioners, while retaining their independence, will freely draw upon the resources which linguistics makes available to them. |
