Un texte de Robyn Creswell
Like Jewish and Christian commentators, Muslim exegetes understood the Babel story to be a parable of how mankind’s hubris, in the form of a desire for knowledge or an attempt to reach the heavens, leads to divine punishment. The subsequent confusion of human idioms and scattering of peoples is a second fall from grace, an expulsion from the paradise of monolingualism. Henceforth, translation becomes at once necessary and impossible—impossible in the sense that no translation could ever match the transparency of the original Ur-Sprache...

Un texte de Keith Gessen
In translation circles, a great deal of time and energy is spent in discussion of the rules and styles and theories of translation. They assume that another discussion has already been undertaken, and undertaken knowledgably, which I think in most cases it has not. What I would like to hear, as a complement to but also as a predecessor to "theories of translation," is theories about or at least a discussion of what ought to be translated. Why this and not that, why now and not later? Most of all: What will it bring to the host country or literature that it does not yet have?

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