Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

The hermeneutic (or subjective) approach

This approach is based on the assumption that a unique reading of a text is impossible. When readers are faced with a text, they bring to it their

own personal background knowledge, their beliefs and their attitudes. The role of the reader is considered highly important in this method.

The foregrounding of the reader is the result of the emergence of an intellectual climate, especially in France with R. Barthes who has highlighted the importance of semiotics in literature and other domains.
Thus, the view of the reader has been redefined; a reader is not
so much someone who consumes a given text but rather a producer of that text. (Bassnett-McGuire 1980).
The implications of this view of the reader have far reaching consequences. This can be summed up in the following statement by Mehrach (2003: 19):
Since there is more than one reading, there is also more than one rendering of any particular text. Language is not neutral.
In connection with this, Chau adds:
This denial of objective or standard reading of the SLT cannot but have profound influence on translating and translating criticism. (Chau 1984: 145)
In short, the aim of the hermeneutic method is to create new meanings and not to reconstruct the original text meaning. For Godamer (1978: 58, cited in Chau 1984: 151),
the hermeneutic interpreter considers it sterile merely to reconstruct the “meaning” hidden in a text, like collecting and piecing together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle already lying around… Instead, every act of interpreting should be like a genuine conversation, through which “something different has come to be”.
Chau concludes that postulating unique interpretations of a text “frees the translator from anxieties concerning retrieving his author’s intentions” (Ibid: 153).

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