translatology themed Seinfeld episode where Elaine goes out with a german guy who is an ardent admirer of Walter Benjamin's Task of the Translator so she starts using german idioms translated word for word into english¹. George, a strict adherent to Vermeer's Skopos Theory² ("always been a skopos guy. it's straight to the point. what's going on in hermeneutics? nobody knows! no idea, no skopos!"), makes fun of her for this but then grows a moustache and retrieves his toupé to resemble Benjamin more closely so Wilhelm will think he's in deep translatological thought when he's just looking out the window. the plan backfires, as Steinbrenner associates his new look with Trotsky³ ("shave that beard off George, we're running the Yankees here, not a newspaper!") Jerry is dating a brasilian girl who studied under Rosemary Arrojo, and is accused by Kramer of supporting monolingual regimes bc he wouldn't learn portuguese for her. However, concluding he should show more interest in her work, he tries to impress her by reading Cixous' Reading with Clarice Lispector, in reaction to which the girl breaks up with him ("she broke up with me, George! she said she wanted Cleopatra in bed, not a colonizer!" "Cleopatra?!" "Yes! Can you believe it?" "Nah, you don't have the nose for it.")⁵ Kramer misunderstands Anthropophagic Translation⁶ and thinks Newman wants to eat him.
Translator's Notes
¹ Walter Benjamin's 1923 essay Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers contains the idea that a translation should not read like a text conceived in the target language but should rather emulate the rhythms and patterns of the source language, so a translation from german to french shouldn't germanify the text but rather frenchify the german language. This of course can be read in many different ways, but the most straightforward reading is one closely resembling the translator's note from Three Body Problem that keeps making the rounds on tumblr, and so what to some may seem like a groundbreaking new revelation in translation is indeed an idea that just recently celebrated its 100th birthday. Which is of course not to say that the Benjamin essay isn't valuable reading, but it is very clearly a document from a time where translation studies weren't established as a field yet and theoretic approaches to translation were mostly done by translator's explaining their choices or in the realm of philosophy, in both cases almost always on literary translation, leaving out vast areas of the field and often largely ignoring the material circumstances that affect the production of translations.
² Skopos Theory, coined by Hans Vermeer, is the idea that the deciding factor of a translation is its purpose, so who, why, when a given translator is translating for should decide the strategy and thus the criteria by which to judge the translation. A strategy that works for poetry doesn't necessarily work for dishwasher manuals and shouldn't be judged by its standards, to pick a blunt example.
³ Benjamin, Trotsky, Costanza
⁴ Rosemary Arrojo is a brasilian translatologist who contributed greatly to the field of translation studies. One of these contributions is an essay she published in response to french writer and feminist Hélène Cixous' Reading with Clarice Lispector, a book describing a feminist approach to women's literature that, as Arrojo shows, merely takes advantage of the existing power relations, putting her own ideas into Lispector's mouth in the knowledge that rarely anyone in the imperial core will understand brasilian portuguese well enough to correct her on it. in reading Cixous, Jerry shows that he has indeed understood nothing and relies on his imperial core worldview in much the same way as Cixous.
⁵ another contribution of Arrojo is the 1986 book Oficína de Tradução, where in a chapter she likens translation to Cleopatra, who takes on new forms throughout the ages yet remains an idea in the public imaginary, much in the same way translation does. So it is easy to understand what is meant by "a coloniser" but why is it said the gf wanted Cleopatra? This is not difficult, like most reasonable ppl she is into femboys. why one would assume Jerry to take on the femboy role can easily be understood when reading Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct, so in spite of Jerry clearly being in the wrong, this leaves open the possibility of a misunderstanding of social roles that is mutual. George's comment ("you don't have the nose for it") makes playful reference to Elaine's plot, as having the nose for something ("den richtigen Riecher") is a german way of phrasing an instinctive understanding, that would be rendered in english as a "hunch" or "gut feeling", which Jerry clearly has neither for women nor for translatology. This is in character behaviour for George, see Seinfeld episodes The Pledge Drive, where he starts eating candy bars with knife and fork after Elaine talks about having seen Mr Pitt do it, and The Cartoon, where he dates a woman who looks exactly like Jerry. in tying Arrojo's translatological thought to Jerry's dainty Hollywood nose, so unlike Cleopatra's, this plotline translates core ideas of postcolonial translation into USamerican gendered body politics.
⁶ everyone knows what Anthropophagic Translation is
