Cotter, S. Chomsky versus Foucault, and the Problem of Knowledge in Translation (2023)

Cotter, S.
Chomsky versus Foucault, and the Problem of Knowledge in Translation (2023) Know, 7 (2), pp. 171-183.

Extract
[…]
With the advantage of several decades on Said’s 1999 essay, we may compare the Reflexive Water translation with the original debate, available on YouTube.13 Despite occasional markers of conversational verisimilitude (“yeah” or “may I interrupt”), the translation that Said read “on paper” is not transparently transcribed but extensively mediated, a bilingual conversation rendered in monolingual and extensively edited English. In the print version, the statements are reworded, expanded, trimmed, or removed entirely—as much for translated passages as for those originally in English. In this process, the text erases the translations Chomsky and Foucault perform while talking to teach other: Chomsky in English restates Foucault’s French terms, Foucault repeats his own points in English. The result of these erasures is a translation that exaggerates Chomsky and Foucault’s differences, as it eliminates this connecting material. At one key moment, Foucault ends his description of resistance to the French justice system with a strong opposition of “la guerre” to “la justice”: “il faut attaquer la pratique de la justice, il faut attaquer la police, il faut attaquer la pratique policière, mais en termes de la guerre et n’en pas en termes de la justice.”14 The English translation, however, deletes a key term, by translating “la guerre” with “social struggle”: “Rather than thinking of the social struggle in terms of ‘justice,’ one has to emphasize justice in terms of the social struggle.”15 In the translation, Chomsky responds, “Yeah, but surely you believe your role in the war is a just role.” The conversational marker “yeah” obscures the intervention of the translator, who unmoors Chomsky’s translation (“the war”) from Foucault’s original intervention. As a result, the two seem to be “talking past each other,” and Chomsky-as-translator becomes Chomsky-as-opponent. As a response to “social struggle,” Chomsky’s reference to “your role in the war” sounds at best casual, at worst condescending. While the two speakers’ “moral universes” are indeed different, the difference is exaggerated by the erasure of translation.