Abstract

This article examines the idea of translation beyond communication that has been inaugurated by Walter Benjamin in his seminal works on translation and language. Translation has traditionally been envisaged as a practice, which must establish communication by transferring message or information between two foreign languages, when immediate comprehension is missing. The idea of translation that is “more than communication” opens a horizon for a critical approach to the history of translation. Through this critical approach translation will appear as a socio-cultural and political practice that precedes individual languages and cultures, and moreover, configures the space where languages and cultures are constituted as distinguishable entities. In the first part of the article, the key concepts of Benjamin’s theory will be taken into consideration, especially the notions of pure language and kinship of languages, while in the next step I will go into the analysis of the concept of heterolingual address of the Japanese theoretician of translation Naoki Sakai.