ABSTRACT
This chapter questions the analogy between spatial translation and linguistic translation by considering translation on a purely geometrical level. Drawing from the works of mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré, phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and physiologist Alain Berthoz, the chapter argues for an embodied understanding of linguistic translation. While Poincaré explains in Science and Hypothesis (1902) that geometrical translation can only be understood through a correlative movement of the body, Husserl, in The Origin of Geometry (1939) argues for a sense of geometry that originated from active practices of the sensing body such as surveying fields or measuring in order to build. The chapter acknowledges the primacy of bodily experience in the linguistic translation phenomenon, whereby an originary sense of geometrical transformation is reactivated during the process of linguistic translation. The chapter also attempts to map out bilingual geometrical space with a series of translations of the word ‘umbrella,’ and in doing so suggests the idea of linguistic geometry or the geometry of language.
