ABSTRACT
The argument of this book is that humanistic translation expertise entails massive “part-whole thinking,” leading to “big details.” This argument requires identifying specific varieties of part-whole thinking relevant to humanistic translation. This chapter discusses varieties deriving from Husserl’s so-called phenomenology. Although this phenomenology is largely absent from translation studies, it enlightens humanistic translation in at least three ways. First, it shows that attention is a form of part-whole thinking in perception and linguistic communication. This helps us understand how the spoken words of audio description (a translation technique for visually impaired people) can accomplish what film images accomplish for sighted people—albeit with some differences. Second, Wolfgang Iser, the literary scholar and student of Husserl, applies part-whole thinking to novels and the reading experience, enlightening the work of literary translators. The varieties of part-whole thinking developed by Iser concretize perspective in novels and the temporal viewpoint of the reader—two crucial phenomena in order to understand translation expertise for written and audiovisual fiction. Equally relevant to translation is Iser’s analysis that significant indeterminacies of narrative wholes—that is, textual aspects highly open to interpretation—also reside in details of formulation. Third, and generally, phenomenology addresses the human factor in humanistic translation.
