摘要：Translators increasingly have to work on texts written in two or more languages. Such texts might typically be working documents, minutes of meetings or similar interim reports on the activities of scientific research teams, international bureaucracies or multinational companies. Indeed, they are likely to emanate from any institutional framework where more than one language is used. The result is that many technical translators are now called upon to work from a multilingual source texts, and do so quite successfully. Yet their success is at the same time a failure for many traditional and not-so-traditional ways of looking at translation. The rendering of these texts requires a mode of pragmatics that adopts an economic-probabilistic approach to the genealogy and authority of texts, ultimately accepting that the place of source-text production may be more intercultural, indeed more hybrid, than that of translations. I hope to illustrate this through three playful examples, including a fragment of my own translating in this field. I will finally argue that this kind of work should make us think seriously about alternatives to translational discourse itself.
