Babel não revisitada

Abstract

The myth of Babel is a recurring reference in contemporary theoretical reflections on translation, as evidenced by the seminal contributions of authors like Georges Steiner, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Umberto Eco, as well as a number of other commentators. This strong presence of a religious narrative in our universe of discourse strikes as curious, as our context is clearly marked by another kind of basic narrative, of a science that clearly accepts the existence of different explanatory paradigms at the basis of its own practices. Do not revisit Babel means, instead, an attempt to link translation theory to other myths of origin, other narratives, more consistent with the paradigms that we accept as valid in our research practices and in the conception(s) of language that give them support. In this paper, I discuss this question under the perspective of the conceptions of language that we use to form our theories of translation and than recur to some authors who seek to explain the diversity of languages based on the actual evolution of the human species and language, as Michael Tomasello (2008) and Mark Pagel (2012), in the search of the implications of their thought for translation. This is basically another move aimed at the dissolution of false paradoxes, such as the statement of a theoretical untranslatability followed by real translation of the very same concrete case – as part of an ongoing project in the interface of translation theory with philosophy of language, taking as a main source the late Wittgenstein and the hermeneutical tradition.