The Transfer of Phenomenological Diction in "The Other Side of Silence" by Craig Irvine

Sammanfattning: Abstract This paper investigates the difficulties to translate a text containing phenomenological diction from English to Swedish. The source text comes from a journal that deals with medical motifs from a literary perspective called Literature and Medicine. The source text is an article called “The Other Side of Silence: Levinas, Medicine, and Literature” (2005) and was written by Craig Irvine. The translation difficulties have involved different aspects of phenomenology’s way with words. This analysis shows how these problems were dealt with by studying philosophical theories of translation, notably Philip Lewis’s model of abusive fidelity. These theories are presented by Jeremy Munday in Introducing Translation Studies (2008). The main problem with phenomenological diction is to choose the equivalent target language word or phrase in cases where there is no recognizable word or phrase in a dictionary. Here, several aspects like concrete or abstract and active or passive had to be considered in order to transfer the abuse that is present in the original correctly (Lewis). This aim was reached by using parallel texts and reasoning in accordance with theory. Thesauruses were also used, as well as dictionaries in cases where it was possible.   Key words: phenomenology, Levinas, experimental translation, the same, the other.