ABSTRACT
Hermeneutics is the discipline concerned with understanding and explicating texts that are not not immediately intelligible. Viewing translation in relation to hermeneutics highlights the contiguity of intra- and interlingual translating as the negotiation of difference and otherness. Hermeneutics takes its name from ancient Greek mythology, in which the god Hermes ran messages between the gods and between gods and mortals. The historical development of hermeneutics in Europe and the Middle East is rooted in the separate disciplines of exegesis and philology. Modern hermeneutics begins in the Romantic period with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher. The hermeneutic task consisted in removing obstacles of language, genre, perspective or historical distance so as to allow a full and clear view of the meaning of a text. On a practical level Schleiermacher divides hermeneutics into grammatical and technical interpretation. An approach to translation informed by hermeneutics recognizes that every translation embodies an interpretation of the source text.
