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After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

When it first appeared in 1975, George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation created a sensation, quickly establishing itself as both a controversial and seminal study of literary theory. Taking issue with modern linguistics, the author locates the root of the "Babel problem" in our deep instinct for privacy and territory, noting that every people has in its language a unique body of shared secrecy.

...Polysemy, the capacity of the same word to mean different things, such difference ranging from nuance to antithesis, characterizes the language of ideology. Machiavelli noted that meaning could be dislocated in common speech so as to produce political confusion. Competing ideologies rarely create new terminologies. As Kenneth Burke and George Orwell have shown in regard to the vocabulary of Nazism and Stalinism, they pilfer and decompose the vulgate.

In the idiom of fascism and communism, 'peace', 'freedom', 'progress', 'popular will' are as prominent as in the language of representative democracy. But they have their fiercely disparate meanings. The words of the adversary are appropriated and hurled against him. When antithetical meanings are forced upon the same word (Orwell's Newspeak), when the conceptual reach and valuation of a word can be altered by political decree, language loses credibility. Translation in the ordinary sense becomes impossible.

From George Steiner (1975), After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

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