Once, the tongues were divided at the occasion of the Tower of Babel. But now, tongues are filled with wisdom due to the glory of knowing God. [...] The epiphany of the holy spirit has united the divided tongues of those who were parted in strife. [...] When he confused the languages, the Holy One divided the nations. When he distributed the tongues of fire, he summoned all to unity.
(Ernst Benz, Geist und Leben der Ostkirche, 67)
a) Interactional Mode of the One (i.e. 'assimilation') J.W. Goethe "The most beautiful metempsychosis is the one in which we recognize ourselves in the shape of the other."
b) Interactional Mode of the Two (i.e. 'encounter') H. von Hoffmannstahl "In the embrace, strangeness and estrangement are fatal, cruel, paradox--in the encounter, each is shrouded in its eternal solitude as in a precious cloak."
If connotation in language arises out of a translation of the literal into the figurative, the literal meaning is simultaneously bracketed yet visible in order to provide guidance for what is to be figured. What is bracketed and not meant is used to delineate what the figurative adumbrates, and this reshuffling can at best be described as a performance, arising out of the difference between the literal and the figurative.
(Wolfgang Iser, The Translatability of Cultures, 295)
The blurring of cultural boundaries obscures the task of translation. Cultural interpenetration appears to mean that the act of translation becomes less difficult. But is this so? Or does the convergence of cultures not rather make translation more difficult as the boundaries between the own and the other seem to fade? Does not translation rather imply that what is read, assimilated, and therefore remembered, hovers at the edge of identity, as something that is neither quite own nor quite other?
(Gabriel Motzkin, "Memory and Cultural Translation", in TOC 266)
The translator, who works with varying degrees of calculation, under continuos self-monitoring and often with active consultation of cultural rules and resources (from dictionaries and grammars to other texts, translation strategies, and translations, both canonical and marginal), may submit to or resist dominant values in the target language, with either course of action susceptible to ongoing redirection. Submission assumes an ideology of assimilation at work in the translation process, locating the same in a cultural other, pursuing a cultural narcissism that is imperialistic abroad and conservative, even reactionary, in maintaining canons at home. Resistance assumes an ideology of autonomy, locating the alien in the cultural other, pursuing cultural diversity, foregrounding the linguistic and cultural differences of the source-language text and transforming the hierarchy of cultural values in the target language. Resistance too can be imperialistic abroad, appropriating foreign texts to serve its own cultural political interests at home; but insofar as it resists values that exclude certain texts, it performs an act of cultural restoration which aim to question and possibly reform, or simply smash the idea of, domestic canons.
(Lawrence Venutti, The Invisibility of the Translator, 308-9)
All literature and humanities programs, especially on the graduate level, should incorporate translation workshops into their curriculum. [...] What translation workshops can achieve is a reorientation in the interaction with foreign cultures through their literary works. Students have to step outside of their own linguistic and cultural frame and enter into patterns of thought and culture and perceive patterns by which they approach the interpretation of the world around them. It is this constant flow from the one to the other that heightens our awareness of otherness and activates a mental alertness to the fact that no two cultures perceive the same phenomenon in the same way--as no two people see the same thing in the same situation.
(Rainer Schulte, "Translation Studies as Model for Revitalizing the Humanities", in TLTC, 44)