Herders Übersetzungstheorie zwischen Linguistik, Ästhetik und Geschichtsauffassung

Herder's at times contradictory reflections about translation need to be assessed in terms of his conception of language and of linguistic development, as well as of his understanding of history. It's important to underline how Herder sets a knowledge of an aesthetic nature at the basis of the origin of language. This aesthetic origin of language explains not only the poetic nature Herder attributes to primitive languages, but it enables us to understand the complexity of his conception of linguistic meaning. This very conception, together with the idea of the evolution of languages and Herder's hermeneutic sensibility, helps to illuminate his idea of translation. It has to be, in a way, a "dialogical" text, an infinite approach to the original, in order to maintain open one's own as well as the foreigner's dialectics and to underline the historicity of both original and translation.