Michelle Bolduc,
Professor and Director of Translation Studies,
The University of Exeter, UK
No video replay
Derrida’s 1998 lecture, “Qu’est qu’une traduction 'relevante'?”, as its title suggests, turns on the concept of “relevance”. Although relevance expresses for Derrida the definition of translation’s very essence (Derrida 2005, 28; 2001, 182), it is a lexical item marked by grammatical, semantic, and epistemological uncertainty. In this lecture, Derrida encourages us not only to ask ourselves what makes a translation relevant, but even to interrogate the very concept of relevance, tout court. However, rather than coming up with easy conclusions about translation’s relevance, Derrida compels his listeners to follow his unravelling of the multilingual and polysemic meanings of the lexical items relevance and in particular of ‘relève’. This unravelling is pivotal, but not because it allows him to offer a conclusion about the relevance of translation as praxis and as theory. Instead, Derrida’s lecture compels us to consider translation as a means to think about, and through, other concepts, metaphysical, ethical, and especially rhetorical.
