UC Irvine

Perhaps the strongest case to be made for indeteminacy of translation is the plethora of emerging interpretations of Quine's work. In the belief that Quine is not so inscrutable as all that, we should like to try to separate and develop one important strand in the extant Quine - that which is properly called the indeterminacy of translation - and consider its role in Quine's case against linguistics. A translation is a theory that the sentences of a given language map in a specified way onto sentences of a home language under a certain relation called synonymy. Given a translation, classical semantics would posit for each translation relation a meaning or idea shared by the alien sentence and its home translate. Now, three distinct theses appear in Quine regarding translation and meaning: (1) Applying all the canons of good scientific methodology, the totality of possible evidence supports equally well more than one translation of a given language. (2) There are no translation relations except relative to a given manual of translation, or translation theory. (3) There are no translation relations, period. (Thus there is nothing there, no fact of the matter, for translation to be right or wrong about.)