Sarukkai, S. (2002): Translating the World, New York, University Press of America, xxi + 161 p. + index.

Translation Studies (TS) is a new kid on the academic block, still somewhat uncertain of her place in the academy. Precisely because her legitimacy as an academic discipline is still open to question, translation-scholars have been trying harder and producing some good work, though some of it may belong to TS only arguably. Translating the World (TW from now on) by Sundar Sarukkai (SS from now on) is a very good example of that work. Given the contemporary modularization of knowledge and the consequent professionalization, increasingly mimicking the natural and life sciences, some would argue that TS is perhaps the only field in the human and social sciences that seems not to focus on questions of its own. Whereas the now relatively old contemporary linguistics, at least in its North-American avatar, established itself on the grounds of a maximalist insistence on its autonomy from other cognitive domains, TS seems to want to establish itself on grounds that can be said to be maximally non-autonomist. TW can be seen as the final step in that direction. Arguments on behalf of TS provide a new window on the constant tension between the centrifugal and centripetal forces within the academy, and TW certainly invites some reflection on these forces. It is a sustained reflection on the nature of scientific discourse by someone who was trained in physics and philosophy. He tells us that in his enterprise he was helped by the vocabulary and the tools provided by modern theorizing in TS. The activity of science, he further claims, “shows striking similarities with that of translation (p. viii).Hence this review here. Predictably SS defines translation as any activity undertaken in response to an original. For science, the original is the world; for translation in the ordinary sense, the original is the source text. Sure, there are differences between what is normally called translation and what is normally called science, but according to him, the similarities between them are, at the appropriate level of abstraction, overwhelming. The classical theories of both claim that they are quintessentially non-interventionist, but the author, drawing upon the work of contemporary continental thinkers, argues that in fact they are both necessarily mediated interpretations. Just as the naïve view of science harbours the illusion that it can objectively transcribe the world, the naïve view of translation takes the position that translations only change the language of the text. These illusions have been shattered recently, and it is the instruments used for accomplishing that shattering that SS uses to begin an engagement where there has been almost none so far. He looks at how science constructs its meanings or embodies them in its discourses, how, in other words, theories are written in science. In order to accomplish his goal, he undertakes a detailed investigation of how science is written, read, and practiced. The heart of the matter, according to SS, is that scientific discourse is multi-semiotic – it uses natural language, equations, charts, graphs, and other semiotic systems. It uses these varied “languages” and claims convergence of the sort that the naïve view of translation used to claim for the language-independent meaning of the source text. TS has, however, clearly shown that talk about meaning independently of the language in which it is expressed cannot be taken seriously. I have no quarrels with that demonstration or with the conclusion SS draws from it, but how about poor Wittgenstein? I don’t question the claim that TS has provided rich empirical evidence for that claim, but I am not sure if people should be given credit for being unfamiliar with Wittgenstein, Weinreich and …