My Dutch colleague Dinda Gorlée (cf.
previous posts), who is among other things Associate Editor of
American Book Review, has written a book entitled
Wittgenstein in translation: Exploring semiotic signatures. It is to be published this spring by De Gruyter Mouton (Berlin). Translation theory is her specialty, and she has for years been affiliated with
the Wittgenstein archives in Bergen (see her
profile page), Norway, so this should be a valuable publication.
Here's a blurb that I got from Dinda:
Apart from the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not write whole manuscripts for books, but composed short fragments. The current volume reveals the depths of Wittgenstein's soul-searching writings - his "new" philosophy - by concentrating on ordinary language and using few technical terms. Wittgenstein followed St. Augustine (as translator) and Plato (as teacher). Wittgenstein is finally given the accolade of a neglected figure in the history of semiotics, when he moved from Saussure to Peirce and Jakobson. This volume provides an application of Wittgenstein's methodological tools to study the multilingual dialogue in philosophy, linguistics, theology, anthropology, and literature. Translation shows how the translator's signatures in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish can be in conflict with personal or stylistic choices in linguistic form, but also in cultural content. This book undertakes the "impossible task" of uncovering the reasoning of Wittgenstein's original and translated texts in order to construct, instead of a paraphrase, the ideal of a terminological coherence of Wittgenstein's fragmentariness in philosophy.
