ABSTRACT
That the questions concerning translation are central to anthropological field work is indubitable: Evans-Pritchard claims that they are ‘the major problem we are confronted with in the subject we are discussing’ (Evans-Pritchard 1965, p. 12). The example he gives to illustrate the difficulties involved will serve to introduce us to the position of Quine’s radical translator. A language in Central Africa has a word, ‘anzo’, which we translate as ‘dog’: For Evans-Pritchard, the trouble is that there is an extremely rough equivalence between the aliens’ use of ‘anzo’ and our use of ‘dog’, the significance which dogs have in the alien society is very different from that which they have in England. Thus there is no real identity of meaning between the terms, only a partial overlap: we might say that while the terms have the same reference, they have a different connotation. Such difficulties raise the possibility that we will never be able to provide a precise translation of the language of a society radically different from our own, suggesting that a full understanding of those societies is impossible.
