Translation und/oder Trans-aktion?

Abstract

“Special thanks to Anna Chita and Konstantina Koufala, who translated the manuscript into German with great commitment and intensive cooperation with me.” (Vartziotis 2017, 175). With these words, a special translation process ends, while a journey of thoughts concerning the ideal conditions of a translation job begins. Based on the book “Comments on Wittgenstein's quotes” by D. Vartziotis, translated from Greek into German, the focus is on the decisive role of the client of a translation, which is also the author of a text, which includes all types of text, and at the same time presupposes philosophical, scientific and literary knowledge both in the reception, as well as in the transfer phase. The ideal condition that the author knows absolutely both, the source language and the target language imcluding their specialist languages, is rare to find. For the optimal understanding, he reanimated words and meanings interactively and pantomically and reflected them in the world of mathematics. Therefore, the central question is: what would the translation have been without his intervention and without the interaction? Would “unborn” and “existing” versions of the translation be equivalent? The rule is that the author is not at all part of the translation process. To whom, however, are the translators' instruments faithful? The word or the content? And finally, who can judge whether these are in the spirit and sense of the author? In this case, the author himself laid the foundation stone to create a functional and purpose-oriented target text.