What is it about?
The argument, rehashing my 1996 book Translation and Taboo, that taboos on the translation of sacred texts lingered in displaced forms even well into the Christian era, when according to official doctrine all taboos on communication with and about the deity were supposedly revoked.
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Why is it important?
It's an attempt to explain the odd blockages in the way we think and talk about translation today, through a series of historical (but silent, politically unconscious) mandates: 1. Don’t translate. 2. Don’t translate accessibly, “openly,” so that your target text is easily understandable by a target reader. 3. Don’t add anything to or subtract anything from the source text. 4. Don’t present translations as translations. 5. Don’t talk about translation.
Perspectives
Translation and Taboo was a painful book to write. I thought it was a brave and bold expose of taboos that hobble our ability to think and talk about translation, but it felt more like airing dirty laundry. And then it seemed as if the book got mostly ignored, picked up only by a few (like Naomi Seidman). This handbook entry was like a postmortem on that book, written about it more than two decades later.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Chapter 1.5. The sacred and taboo, June 2018, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/btl.142.06rob.
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