ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a semantic challenge facing English-language translators of German philosophy. After discussing the two languages’ differing sociolinguistic histories, the chapter explores the translation questions that three philosophers’ work raises because their terms have Germanic cognates in English as well as Latinate equivalents with more fittingly abstract denotations. Immanuel Kant's work presents Begriff as his translation of the Latin conceptus, and while most English-language translations return to the Latinate “concept,” they could opt for the visceral Germanic “grasp.” Edmund Husserl lets Strom metaphorically refer to a “stream of consciousness” à la William James, but the Latinate “flux” (from fluxus, “river, flow”) would capture the abstractness of time. Martin Heidegger argues against claims invoking the philosophical term Grund as a translation of the Latin ratio (reason) but recovers truth in these very claims if we interpret Grund as the earthen “ground” beneath us. The chapter concludes with the argument that “differential translation” (sentence-context-based translation of terms) captures the play of conceptual ambiguity that Jacques Derrida called différance.
