Apology of the Ukrainian Kantiana: once again on how not to evaluate philosophical translations

Abstract

The paper deals with the review of the translation of Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason”, published by Vitaly Chorny in this magazine last year as a continuation of the review by I. Ivashchenko and V. Terletsky (treating the translation of “Critique of Pure Reason”) which is scrutinized in the previous issue. The new review turned to be a similar attempt to prove a biased statement about the unsatisfactory quality of Ukrainian translation. It is shown that this attempt is even more unsuccessful than the previous one: it is characterized by a much lower level of professionalism and significant illogicality. The vast majority of its claims to translation are proven to be again insolvent or insignificant, i. e. in both cases they are only imitations of proof of its pretended unsuitability. The cardinal flaw of the review, as well as the previous one, is the lack of any appropriate method of translation evaluation. The reviewer tries to compensate for the weakness of the argument by sharp rhetoric, unrestrained exaggerations, such as “terminological chaos”. The justification of the last verdict is unsuccessful: in fact only a few translation omissions and some minor shortcomings are given. In the same way, the allegations of a large number of gross translation errors due to the translator's incompetence remained unproven, excepting adduction of a few real flaws due to oversight. In fact, the review, like the previous one, proves only that the translation, as any other one, is not error-free. In addition to the obvious damage, there is some benefit from it, namely a modest contribution to the list of corrections to the translation.