The translaborative case for a translational hermeneutics

This paper takes the notion of translaboration as a stepping stone for an exploration of translational hermeneutics. It aims to expand translaboration’s focus beyond collaborations between multiple translators, or authors and translators, and theorises translaboration as a means of framing textual agents reading and writing each other within texts. The argument draws on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Paul Ricoeur’s conceptions of the interpretative agent, and of translation as an object of philosophical enquiry, and adopts a “hermeneutics of decipherment” (Maitland 2017, 38) as an alternative to dialogic models of understanding and translating. Similarly, the relationship between philosophical and translational hermeneutics is interrogated and recast as a translaborative endeavour rather than as an immediately reciprocal dialogue. Translaboration thus also furthers the move away from what Blumczynski (2016, 29) calls “an arborescent epistemological paradigm” of interdisciplinarity and animates a transdisciplinarity that is fundamentally “rhizomatic” (ibid.; see Deleuze and Guattari 2004) in nature