(Steiner 1975: Preface to the second edition ).在解释翻译的阐释性运作过程中衍生了如下的观点：理解就是寻求有意义的思想，这种需求不仅具有主观性，而且具有破坏性。因此，理解就存在着全面错用的风险，因此就需要后续的补偿。《巴别塔之后》是一篇翻译专著，体现了作者关于语言和文化的思考。作者在语言、诗学、语文批评和文化史方面的广博学识，使他很好的解释了翻译行为。他指出，语言永远处于动态变化之中，口译和笔译都是为了人类的交流。他提出了自己“对翻译行为、以及这一行为现象逻辑和哲学方面的深邃理解”。
“After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges” (ibid.:xii).“
《巴别塔之后》提出，在每一次交流行为中，在每一次和所有的意义形式释放和接受过程中，翻译在形式和实际上都是不清楚的，不管是最广义的符号学还是更特指的言语交流中。”
Since Steiner’s proposition of the hermeneutic approach to translation, translation scholars have come to further recognition of the nature of translation in light of the philosophical
hermeneutics.
在斯坦纳提出翻译的阐释学方法之后，翻译学者开始进一步认识到了哲学阐释视角下的翻译本质。
The Hermeneutic Motion
By George Steiner
The hermeneutic motion, the act of elicitation and appropriative transfer of meaning, is fourfold. There is initiative trust, an investment of belief, underwritten by previous experience but epistemologically exposed and psychologically hazardous, in the meaningfulness, in the “seriousness” of the facing or, strictly speaking, adverse text. We venture a leap: we grant ab initio that there is “something there” to be understood, that the transfer will not be void. All understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding which is translation, starts with an act of trust. This confiding will, ordinarily, be instantaneous and unexamined, but it has a complex base.
阐释运作，即启发行为和意义的适当转换，是一种四重性行为。面对一篇文本甚至是对自己不利或者充满敌意的文本时，（译者）首先要对文本意义内涵和严峻性给予初步信任，也就是信心的投入。这种信任有赖于先前的经验，这在认识论层面是显而易见的，但是在心理上却存在一定的危险。我们且冒险向前跃出了一大步：我们一开始认为“那里的某些东西”需要理解，（对意义的）转换不会毫无意义。所
有的理解，以及对这种理解的外在表述的翻译，都起始于一种信任行为。这种表达一般而言具有瞬时性，也没有经过验证，但是却具有非常复杂的基础。
It is an operative convention which derives from a sequence of phenomenological assumptions about the coherence of the world, about the presence of meaning in very different, perhaps formally antithetical semantic systems, about the validity of analogy and parallel. The radical generosity of the translator (“I grant beforehand that there must be something there”), his trust in the “other”, as yet untried, unmapped alternity of statement, concentrates to a philosophically dramatic degree the human bias towards seeing the world as symbolic, as constituted of relations in which “this” can stand for “that”, and must in fact be able to do so if there are to be meanings and structures.
这是一种操作习惯，它起源于一系列的表象假设（phenomenological
assumptions），包括对世界的整体性、非常不同甚至形式上相对的
句法系统中展现的意义、以及类比和比较正当性的表象假设。然而在没有尝试和计划使用其他的表述之前，译者的宽宏（之前我就认为那里存在某些东西），也就是对“他者”的信任，从哲学的角度看，它很大程度上是人类的一种偏见，也就是把世界看做是符号性的，存在了某种可以用“这个”替代“那个”的关系，而且只要存在意义和结构，就可以有这种替代行为。
But the trust can never be final. It is betrayed, trivially, by nonsense, by the discovery that “there is nothing there” to elicit and translate. Nonsense rhymes, poesie concrete, glossolalia are untranslatable because they are lexically non-communicative or deliberately insignificant.
但是这种信任永远都不会是最终的。如果发现“那里不存在”需要启发和翻译的东西，根本不存在意义，那么这种信任也就受到了这种无意义导致的恶意背叛。无意义的音律、具体诗（poesie concrete）、捏造出来的词组都是不可翻译的，因为他们从词汇角度上就不具备交流的特质，有可能是有意制作的这种无意义的表达。
The commitment of trust will, however, be tested, more or less severely, also in the common run and process of language acquisition and translation (the two being intimately connected). “This means nothing” asserts the exasperated child in front of his Latin reader or the beginner at Berlitz. The sensation comes very close to being tactile, as of a blank, sloping surface which gives no purchase. Social incentive, the officious evidence of precedent—“others have managed to translate this bit before you”—keeps one at the task. But the donation of trust remains ontologically spontaneous and anticipates proof, often by a long, arduous gap (there are texts, says Walter Benjamin, which will be translated only “after us”). As he sets out, the translator must
gamble on the coherence, on the symbolic plentitude of the world. Concomitantly he leaves himself vulnerable, though only in extremity and at the theoretical edge, to two dialectically related, mutually determined metaphysical risks. He may find that “anything” or “almost anything” can mean “everything”. This is the vertigo of self-sustaining metaphoric or analogic enchainment experienced by medieval exegetists. Or he may find that there is “nothing there” which can be divorced from its formal autonomy, that every meaning worth expressing is monadic and will not enter into any alternative mould. There is Kabbalistic speculation, to which I will return, about a day on which words will shake off “the burden of having to mean” and will be only themselves, blank and replete as stone.
无论是从一般意义上，还是在语言习得和翻译过程中（这两者是紧密相关的），这种信任的付出都会或多或少的受到严格的检验。“这毫无意义”也证明了孩子在面对拉丁语读者的那种抓狂和初学者面对berlitz语读者时候的彷徨。这种感觉非常贴近那种触摸一种空白毫无抓手的斜面的感觉。社会上的刺激、以及先前的非正式的经验—“在你之前，已经有人尝试翻译这句话了”—都会让译者要做这项工作（付出信任）。但是从本体论上看，这种信任的付出是自然而然的，而且期望得到证明，但是有时候会有很大的差距（瓦尔特.本杰明说，有些文本只有在“我们之后”才可以进行翻译）。译者开始着手翻译的