Translation as Different: A View from Linguistic Relativity

The implications of the recent bilingual turn in psycholinguistics have not yet been fully explored in translation studies, a discipline that has bilingualism at its very center. Addressing this gap has far-reaching implications both for translation and for broader debates in comparative literature that invoke translation in the discussion of an ever-broader array of literary works. This article argues that linguistic relativity—the notion that a language can influence, though it does not determine, its speakers’ perception and thought processes—offers a novel perspective on the inherent differences between original writing and translation. By virtue of relying on an original text written in a different language—its defining characteristic—literary translation represents a distinct source of literary value that, far from approximating what the author may have written in the target language, could not have arisen from an original writing process. This article thus calls for a more concerted study of the translated text as a distinct kind of literature and reevaluates, starting with self-translation, the relationship between literary translation and other forms of literature. In doing so, it creates a precedent for an approach to all literary texts that is grounded in its cognitive-linguistic origins.