Los límites de la

interpretación. Objetividad y
método en el análisis de
traducciones.

(forma parte del tema 2) 

 Now one might raise the question at this point about what it
means to say that the choice of a particular expression is
motivated. Does it mean that the choice is deliberate? How
do we know that unless we consult the person who
composed the text? This we usually cannot do, and even if
we could, we might not get a straight answer. Perhaps the
writer is not aware of making any choice at all, but is simply
using different expressions in free variation. In this case,
surely, nothing of any significance attaches to the use of
one rather than another. Not necessarily, though, one
might argue: for the choice of a particular expression may
well be made subliminally, below the level of conscious
awareness, and so can still be taken as evidence of an
underlying ideological attitude, all the more insidious,
indeed, for being instinctive. Writers, and speakers, might
be unaware of the underlying ideological significance that
lurks in the textual variants they produce. Similarly,
readers, and listeners, may be unaware of the
indoctrinating effects these variants have upon them. This,
the argument runs, is why we need critical analysis: to
reveal to the unwary language user the ideological
influences they may be unwittingly subscribing to.
(Widdowson 2007:71-2)
 an army of refugees

 But:
armies of earwigs
armies of weeds
armies of chickens
armies of fans
armies of helpers
armies of supporters
armies of shoppers
armies of little boys
 (Fawcett 1998:106)

“...with the spread of deconstruction and

cultural studies in the academy, the
subject of ideology, and more specifically
the ideology of power relations, became
an important area of study, and claims
about ideology proliferate in many fields,
though they are not always well
substantiated”
Main criticisms towards CDA
 a) Overinterpretation
 b) Narrowness of object of research
 c) Lack of enough empirical data to
support ideology biases
 d) Theoretical circularity
 Umberto Eco (1992), Interpretation and Overinterpretation

 In order to read both the world and texts

suspiciously one must have elaborated some kind
of obsessive method. Suspicion, in itself, is not
pathological: both the detective and the scientist
suspect on principle that some elements, evident
but not apparently important, may be evidence of
something else that is not evident — and on this
basis they elaborate a new hypothesis to be
tested. But the evidence is considered as a sign
of something else only on three conditions: that it
cannot be explained more economically; that it
points to a single cause (or a limited class of
possible causes) and not to an indeterminate
number of dissimilar causes; and that it fits in
with the other evidence. (48-9)
 inferential fallacies

 the post hoc ergo ante hoc effect

 the principle of false transitivity

 the principles of facility

 post hoc ergo ante hoc
 [1] “If there is no longer temporal linearity
ordered in causal links, then the effect may act
on its own causes. This actually happens in
theurgical magic but it also happens in philology.
The rationalist principle of post hoc, ergo propter
hoc is replaced with post hoc, ergo ante hoc. An
example of this type of attitude is the way in
which Renaissance thinkers demonstrated that
Corpus Hermeticum was not a product of Greek
culture but had been written before Plato: the fact
that the Corpus contains ideas that were
obviously in circulation at the time of Plato both
means and proves that it appeared before Plato.”
(152-3).
 false transitivity
 [2] “The morphological phenomenon cannot be
evidence of a relationship of cause and effect
because it does not fit in with other data
concerning causal relationships. Hermetic
thought made use of a principle of false
transitivity, by which it is assumed that if A bears
a relationship x to B, and B bears a relationship y
to C, then A must bear a relationship y to C. If the
[orchid] bulbs bear a relationship of
morphological resemblance to the testicles and
the testicles bear a causal relationship to the
production of semen, it does not follow that the
bulbs are causally connected to sexual activity.”
(ibid. 168).
 principles of facility
 “excess of wonder leads to
overestimating the importance of
coincidences which are explainable
in other ways” (167).
 Economy, then is the basis of Eco’s
reasoning; if this principle does not help to
ascertain which interpretations are the
“best” ones, at least it works to ascertain
which ones are “bad”. (169). Eco’s
rationalism does not affirm that our
interpretation does convey truth or that it
acquires an ontological character, but that
rational principles, if they “do not provide
for the recognition of a physical order to
the world, they do at least provide for a
social contract” (147).
 Richard Rorty’s rejoinder to Eco
 “...el pensamiento según el cual un comentador
ha descubierto lo que un texto realmente hace
―que realmente desmitifica un constructo
ideológico, o realmente desconstruye las
oposiciones jerárquicas de la metafísica
occidental, por ejemplo, en lugar de ser
susceptible sólo de usarse para esos propósitos―
es, para nosotros los pragmatistas, sencillamente
ocultismo. Es otra pretensión más de haber
descifrado el código y, por lo tanto, de haber
detectado Qué Está Realmente Ocurriendo, un
ejemplo más de lo que leí satirizado en El péndulo
de Foucault de Eco.” (119)
 Cada una de estas lecturas suplementarias simplemente
nos ofrecen un contexto más en el que situar el texto, una
plantilla más que colocar sobre él o un paradigma más al
cual yuxtaponerlo. Ninguna porción de conocimiento nos
dice nada sobre la naturaleza de los textos o la naturaleza
de la lectura. Porque ninguno de los dos tiene una
naturaleza. [...] Leer textos es una cuestión de leerlos a la
luz de otros textos, personas, obsesiones, retazos de
información o lo que sea, y luego ver lo que pasa. Lo que
pasa puede ser algo demasiado extraño e idiosincrático
como para preocuparse por ello, como es probablemente el
caso de mi lectura, de El péndulo de Foucault. O puede ser
estimulante y convincente, como cuando Derrida
yuxtapone a Freud y Heidegger, o cuando Kermode
yuxtapone a Empson y Heidegger. Puede ser tan
estimulante y convincente como para tener la ilusión de
que por fin vemos aquello de lo que cierto texto trata
realmente. Pero lo que estimula y convence es una función
de las necesidades y los fines de quienes se encuentran
estimulados y convencidos. De modo que me parece más
sencillo desechar la distinción entre usar e interpretar, y
sólo distinguir entre usos de diferentes personas para fines
diferentes. (122-3)
 semiosis
 the action of signs
 a property inherent in all signs,
whereby signs experience a
unfolding of meaning in every
interpreting act
 Language and communication are
modalities of semiosis.
 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (1966)

 Truth is not exactly the object of scientific

research, but verisimilitude.

 Absolute truth may well be unattainable; the

object of science is truth in the sense of better
approximation to truth or greater verisimilitude.

 Popper defines “aproximation to truth” as a

greater content of truth and low content of falsity
(1972 [2001]:62), and truth as correspondence
between statements and facts (52-3). Knowledge
is conjecture about such correspondence.
 Also, truth is defined by statements or theories
which convey better descriptions of the factual
world (Popper 2001:264).
 Jonathan Potter’s constructivism
 La metáfora de la construcción funciona en dos
niveles cuando se aplica a las descripciones. El
primero es la idea de que las descripciones y los
relatos construyen el mundo, o por lo menos versiones
del mundo. El segundo es la idea de que estos mismos
relatos y descripciones están construidos. Aquí,
«construcción» sugiere la posibilidad de montaje,
fabricación, la expectativa de estructuras diferentes
como punto final, y la posibilidad de emplear
materiales diferentes en la fabricación. Esta noción
destaca que las descripciones son prácticas humanas
y que podrían ser diferentes. No hay mucho que hacer
con el reflejo en un espejo; podemos limpiar el espejo,
comprobar que sea plano y liso, pero esto sólo está
relacionado con su capacidad de recibir pasivamente
una imagen. Sin embargo, una casa es construida por
personas, y podría tener tres chimeneas y montones
de ventanas, o podría carecer de chimeneas y tener
varias contraventanas. Podría cons­truirse a base de
cemento, ladrillos, o vigas y cristal, y podría ser muy
 He elegido la metáfora de la construcción por cuestiones
pragmáticas. Es la más productiva de las dos porque
permite formular un conjunto de preguntas que no tienen
sentido si aceptamos la metáfora del espejo. Si tratamos las
descripciones como construcciones y como constructivas,
podemos preguntarnos cómo se ensamblan, qué materiales
se emplean, qué tipos de cosas o sucesos producen, etc. No
creo que la cuestión principal sea aquí el debate filosófico
de la ontología; es decir, el debate sobre qué tipos de cosas
existen y cuál es su condición. En cambio, estos
argumentos sobre las metáforas pretenden despejar el
camino para que podamos centrarnos en cuestiones
analíticas y prácticas. De hecho, la formulación abstracta
de este problema puede ser positivamente engañosa
porque se centra en la relación existente entre una
descripción y «la realidad» en abstracto, en vez de
considerar los tipos de prácticas en las que opera el
discurso descriptivo.
(Potter 1996:130-1)
 Al tiempo que elaboro esta metáfora, destacaré
brevemente algunos problemas. Su principal
defecto es que trata las partes como sólidas
antes de la edificación. Lo que realmente
necesitamos imaginar es que los ladrillos son
blandos y de perfil impreciso y sólo adquieren su
forma cuando los colocamos en su sitio. Y las
piezas prefabricadas también deben ser algo
incipientes, estableciéndose su solidez a medida
que se van ensamblando. Todo existe en un
estado borroso y fluido hasta que cristaliza en
unos textos o unas interacciones particulares.
(Potter 1996:136)
 b) Narrowness of object of research

 The task that cda sets itself is to discover

traces of ideological bias in texts. They
undertake this not just as an academic exercise
in analysis but as a campaign against what is
seen to be a stealthy undercover operation by
those in power to control opinion to their own
advantage. CDA is critical in the sense that it calls
into question ideas and assumptions that have
become taken for granted as self-evidently valid
on the grounds that they actually preserve a
status quo which in effect sustains inequality and
injustice by privileging the elite and the powerful
at the expense of everybody else. So cda is
committed to a cause and puts its own ideological
agenda up front. Its proponents are not simply
analysts but activists. The question arises,
however, as to how far these two roles can be
reconciled. (Widdowson 2007:71)
 CDA’s statements of ideological
committment
 “Finally, even when engaging in social discourse
analysis, the analysts may do so in a distanced
and disinterested way, trying to be 'objective', as
the dominant norms of scholarship require.
However, they may also become more actively
involved in the topics and phenomena they study,
as one would most probably do (whether
intentionally or not) as soon as one studies power
abuse, dominance and inequality as it is
expressed or reproduced by discourse. The
critical scholars make their social and political
position explicit; they take sides, and actively
participate in order to uncover, demystify or
otherwise challenge dominance with their
discourse analyses.” (van Dijk 1997:22, ap.
Widdowson 2007:106-7);
 “Critical studies of language, Critical Linguistics
(CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) have
from the beginning had a political project: broadly
speaking that of altering inequitable distributions
of economic, cultural and political goods in
contemporary societies. The intention has been to
bring a system of excessive inequalities of power
into crisis by uncovering its workings and its
effects through the analysis of potent cultural
objects - texts - and thereby to help in achieving
a more equitable social order. The issue has thus
been one of transformation, unsettling the
existing order, and transforming its elements into
an arrangement less harmful to some, and
perhaps more beneficial to all the members of a
society. (Kress 1996:14, in Caldas-Coulthard &
Coulthard 1996), my emphasis.
 So what?

 Widdowson’s criticism itself stems

from a narrow conception of what
language (and science, and
academic analysis) should be used
for.
 Mason 1995 and Hatim and Mason 1996
(Miguel León-Portilla’s article entitled
“¿Tiene la Historia un Destino?”, translated
into English as “History or Destiny” in the
Unesco Courier.

 Jeremy Munday’s 2007 analysis of Chávez

and Castro’s speeches in English
translation
 c) Theoretical circularity
 (‘analysts find what they expect to find', Stubbs, 1997:
102)

 This accusation of circularity is not easy to dispel and

it is conceded here that there is substance to it.
Nevertheless, even though it is a fact that CDA
political preconceptions are generally confirmed by
tangible (textural) data, this does not imply that all
critical analysts must 'cook the books' in order to
reaffirm their prior knowledge. This book seeks to
avoid circularity by:
1. making no prior political claims about what the
corpus will show
2. limiting any required prior information on the
communicative situation analysed to 'matters of facts'
(e.g. procedures, genres, etc.)
3. not setting out to demonstrate power
differentials or political motivations, as has been seen
above; the initial hypothesis which sets off this book