罗兰·巴特曾提出“作者之死”一说。本文受其启发,拟探讨“译者之死”的概念。笔者认为“译者之死”源于翻译过程中缺乏人为介入,且在机器翻译方面表现最为显著。文章以台湾诗人夏宇的双语诗集《粉红色噪音》为分析对象,力求阐释语义和句法因翻译过程中偏离原文而出现新生涵义的原因。诗人以透明胶片为物质媒介,机器翻译为中介手段,此种做法引发笔者思考:翻译是否可使读者真正读“透”原文?倘若可以,其能“透明”至何种程度?就文学翻译而言,如何诠释文本意义的“透明性”?《粉红色噪音》中,机器翻译以阻滞理解的方式促使读者关注译入语,藉此形成译入语的“透明”物质性。
This paper explores the notion of the death of the Translator, inspired by Barthes’ formulation of the death of the Author. It argues that the death of the Translator is caused by a loss of human agency in translation and is therefore most clearly exemplified in machine translation. Based on an avant-garde bilingual poetry project by a Taiwanese poet, the paper demonstrates that machine translation can churn out unexpected new meanings through unpredictable routes of semantic and syntactic divergences from the source text. The poet’s use of transparency as physical medium and of machine translation as mediator raises the following questions: does translation actually allow us to “read through” a source text? If so, to what extent is such translation “transparent”? How should we even come to terms with the concept of “transparency” with respect to the meaning of a literary text in translation? The paper argues that in the bilingual project in question, machine translation plays the crucial function of bringing the reader’s attention back to the target language by way of delaying/blocking comprehension, hence rendering the corporeality of the target language “transparent”.
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