Effabilty in Translation Study
Effability in Thought
Every proposition or thought can be encoded in a natural language. Theorists believe in the natural use of language to convey a complete thought. Furthermore, Frege (1918/1956) discussed in ‘The Thought’ that thoughts are complete and hence eternally or timelessly true. There are different types of sentence structures and different thoughts are encoded, and sometimes sentences fail to express the complete thought to the extent due to the use of indexical elements of language, such as “now”, “here”, “there”, “before”, “after”, etc.
Definition of Effable (Effability)
Effable means ‘capable of being uttered or expressed’ (Merriam-Webster). A sentence or content conveys a complete proposition (thought) that makes sense of effable.
Generally, the indexical or context-dependent linguistic elements point out a specific time, location, or thing in a given context, and they have no mean out of that context, therefore, the sentences contain indexical elements' specific mean and contain to perform any action. If a sentence does not contain a complete-time indication, there will not be a complete thought, and text will miss the effabilty (Frege).
In a similar context, Quine said that to achieve a complete thought or a specific proposition without relying on references, one should use an eternal sentence. For instance, a sentence that is specific and contains the proper details of the object referred to.
Example: [James believes the window is open.]
In the above sentence “James” is the proper name and the incomplete description of “the window”. In Quine’s viewpoint, we may say that: James can be explicitly elaborated on rather than leaving the matter to circumstances of utterance, therefore, we may add further details about “James” surname, address, etc. Furthermore, the explicit elaboration of [the window is open] rather than leaving the matter to circumstances of utterance, we may add more details like where the window is and what time is intended. Eternal sentences are those sentences whose truth values stay fixed through time as well as from speaker to speaker.
There are two types of elements in a sentence to complete a proposition (thought). The first one is “eternal”: a sentence that gives complete details about the person, and time within the sentence, and on the other hand “indexical” contains ambiguous content like, here, there, he, she, etc. Indexical sentences can be replaced with eternal sentences whose referent stays fixed with variations in time, place, speaker, etc. (Katz 1971).
Thesis of Effable and Ineffable
According to theorists that no proposition (thought) can be encoded by a sentence of a natural language is “ineffability of thesis” in a sentence. Another theorist Robyn Carston believes that no sentence fully encodes natural language. (Carston 2002). Furthermore, to simplify the concept of ineffable content, he argues that we may call it “private content”. Private content is fruitless for the public because the subject may mean to communicate in private content to a private person.
Indexical elements have great use in a language. Moreover, some contents of our attitudes have “perspectival aspects” that can be expressed only with indexical elements such as “I”, “we”, “you”, “here”, and “now’, etc. Perry (1979) said that indexical elements are essential, although they could be substituted by expressions that are strictly speaking co-referential. In this way “perspectival” contents are ineffable in terms of “eternal” sentences (Wettstein 1979).
Example: [She saw the house.]
We will explain the above example as Carston has defined ineffable. She illustrated the expression of ineffability in different kinds. In the above case “she” and “the house” have incomplete descriptions and lack facts in the sentence. Ineffibility depends on facts that are missed in the example. Furthermore, Wettstein (1979, 1981) said that in general there is no way to determine the exact or one definite description expressed that the speaker has in mind and the listener can imagine the same about “she”, or “the house”. In this way we have no reason to pick one description rather than another, the content is ineffable
