Amongst the Ruins: Wittgenstein and Translation

Paul Ricœur describes two ‘ruinous alternatives’ often reached interpreting translation philosophically: either translation is taken as a mechanical process, and there is a theoretical search for a logically universal language in which all words can be at home, or the diversity of languages and natural limits of translation motivate scepticism regarding the possibility of translation. This paper shows how these alternatives, as represented by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Quine’s ‘radical translation’, tend to collapse into and “translate each other” (Derrida 57) due to a shared intellectual standpoint which theorises our human limits (the finitude of translation) as limitations (fatal or sceptical flaws). I demonstrate how Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and its vision of language respond to these philosophical theorisations of translation by accepting the human limits to translation and reclaiming and returning us to our ordinary practice of translation.