ABSTRACT
Recent discussions highlight the need for a broader concept of ‘translation’ to cope with the growing internationalization of Translation Studies, and some voices call for also taking Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work into account to inform the debate. In such a project, I suggest one should not lose sight of the fundamental distinction between the stances of empirical sciences, on the one hand, and philosophical discourse, on the other, as they might interact but are not mutually reducible. Yet, there is a hitherto unexplored kinship between Wittgenstein’s radical anti-essentialism and contemporary questionings of the basic tenets of traditional discourse about translation—no matter how diverse they might appear at surface level. Such a kinship is to perceive at the ‘epistemic level’ where one describes and/or tries to explain “the workings of our language” (Philosophical Investigations § 109). This essay is ultimately about the interplay between ‘conception of language’ and ‘theory of translation’, the former being a ‘condition of possibility’ for the latter. Under this perspective, ‘translation’ is not only a particular ‘language game’ but amounts even more to specific moves in the different language games, within the multiple discourses available in our ‘forms of life’.
