번역이론과 언어의 대화성

Abstract

Language, in the Bakhtinian sense, is not just a social code system but a particular individual utterance with specific views and emotional-volitional tones. And it is also full of heteroglots, for which a language can be dialogic. It means that language internalizes various cultural, ideological struggles through dialogic inter-relatedness among various language activities in a given society. This view, opposed to the structuralist linguistics which thinks little of cultural, ideological aspects of language, helps to reveal the limits the linguistics-based translation theories have. Translation theories before Eugene Nida, stressing on structural differences between two languages, did not care much of social, cultural functions of translation. Bakhtin's view on language, and his theory of dialogism in particular, make much of ideological tones of a particular utterance (parole), or the function of language in the cultural struggles of a society, which happens to be one of the main topics in the polysystem theory of Zohar and Toury. Venuti's post-colonial translation theory, interestingly enough, also shows a similar interest in terms of the subversive function of heteroglossia against the cultural dominance of Anglo-Americanism. It could be said that current translation theories are divided into two groups: the linguistics-based ones and the cultural, ideological ones. But there does not seem to be much understanding or interrelation between them. This is why Bakhtin's theory of language can be of some help for translation studies. It provides a new perspective which finds the two tendencies converging in today's translation studies. This paper, outlining some typical problems of translation theories in terms of Bakhtin's linguistic theory and dialogism, seeks for a possible alternative to the current translation studies.