The Linguist

14 The Linguist Vol/62 No/4 thelinguist.uberflip.com FEATURES How can the translator hope to render complex theoretical concepts in another language? Spencer Hawkins looks to Freud to argue for a controversial translation approach T he meaning of theoretical concepts such as Anlehnungstypus (Sigmund Freud's name for the opposite of narcissism) is debated among native speakers. So how can translators hope to render them 'accurately' and keep the same nuances of interpretation in the target text? I would argue that 'differential translation' can broaden our understanding of such complex concepts. Differential translation is my name for any context-sensitive approach to translating polysemous vocabulary. Notable published examples include translations of Machiavelli's virtù as both 'virtue' and 'skill', Hegel's Geist as 'mind' and 'spirit', and Heidegger's Grund as 'ground' and 'reason'. Some translators select one term or another; others alternate between translations rather than settling on one. That is what I mean by differential translation. This translation strategy reveals points of friction between languages, exposes layers of meaning in foreign words and, at best, can provide more nuanced insight into writers' use of concepts. It is controversial because it amounts to 'inconsistent translation'. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis lament the inconsistent translation of the word nachträglich in published translations of Freud's work. 1 The word has several overlapping but related meanings for Freud; it can mean 'after the fact', 'belatedly' or simply 'later on'. Laplanche and Pontalis consider it important to track occurrences of that word in order to understand Freud's theory of trauma, whereas inconsistent translation makes it "impossible to trace its use". Indeed, Freud uses the word to refer to the delay between a potentially traumatic event (in the wolfman's case, a small child witnessing his parents having sex) and the later trigger for neurotic symptoms (like seeing a housekeeper clean the floor in a similar position to his mother during sex). However, Laplanche himself admits that Freud sometimes just means 'later on' when he writes nachträglich. 2 Even if differential translations did impede readers from noticing Freud's repetition of the word, and thus downplayed the concept's relevance for the formation of trauma symptoms, they also result in more precise translations of this concept. This can be seen in Louise Adey Huish's translation: 3 It would be entirely typical behaviour if the threat of castration now took belated [nachträglich] effect. The effectiveness of the scene has been postponed [nachträglich], and loses none of its freshness in the interval that has elapsed between the ages of 18 months and 4 years. Huish avoids the traceability problem by putting the source word in brackets, but this would probably not satisfy Laplanche, Pontalis and their Lacanian-trained colleagues. Context is everything Huish was at liberty to disregard the French psychoanalysts' wish for consistent translation of nachträglich thanks to her 21st-century publication context. Her translation of History of an Infantile Neurosis for Penguin was commissioned by Adam Phillips, who encouraged a literary approach. In literary translation, differential translation is more than acceptable; varying one's word choice is a matter of good style. Phillips, a writer and psychoanalyst who does not speak German, argues for this approach not because he thinks it will provide readers with a more nuanced understanding of Freud's concepts, but simply because it will expose more of the wit, suspense and beauty of his writing – qualities readers can appreciate whether Freud's theories are correct or not: "Freud could then be given a go as the writer he wanted to be, and is, as well as the scientist he wanted to be, and might be." 4 In his 1918 authorised English translation, James Strachey could also translate nachträglich differentially by context, but only because Freud himself did not explicitly treat the word as a technical psychoanalytic term. Quite different is the case of the 1925 translation of Freud's explicitly technical term Anlehnungstypus. 5 In that essay, Freud argues that narcissists are capable of loving fantasy versions of themselves and others who remind them of themselves, whereas a non-narcissist (Anlehnungstypus) can love "the woman who feeds him; the man who protects him; and the succession of substitutes who take their place". What is a good English term for this supposedly healthy shift, made in early childhood, from a fixation on oneself to a fixation on one's caregivers? Strachey calques the term in a footnote as "Literally, 'leaning- on type.'" In the text itself, he translates it differentially as 'anaclitic' and 'the attachment type'. 'Anaclitic' is a neologism, a semantically impenetrable, sublimely obscure Greek loan translation loosely mimicking the German Better in theory

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