The hermeneutic motion

This extract from George Steiner's 1975 study After Babel shows how his thinking about translation derives from German Romanticism and the hermeneutic tradition. He views a translation as an interpretation of the source text that is at once profoundly sympathetic and violent, exploitative and ethically restorative. For Steiner, language does not transparently communicate meaning but constitutes it, and so translation always faces the moral risk of falling short of or going beyond the ideal of "exchange without loss."