Phenomenology and Translation: Exploring Roman Ingarden’s Spots of Indeterminacy Impact on Literary Translation

Abstract: The present study investigates the concept of spots of indeterminacy as coined by Roman Ingarden in his theory of the reader experience. Ingarden perceives the typology of the literary text to be marked with spots of indeterminacy, which are to be “filled” by the reader in his quest to concretize the aesthetic experience. Needless to argue, here, the relevance of this theory in the understanding of translation process where reading plays an intrinsic role. The research is a probe into the nature of the translator’s task in his attempt to balance between their own concretization of the aesthetic experience and the preservation of the potential concretizations comprised in the source text. Ergo, in order to explore the nature of such a challenge, two different approaches are discussed; the first is Hans- Georg Gadamer’s notion of highlighting and clarification, while the second is Umberto Eco’s principle of negotiation. The study concludes that Eco’s approach to indeterminacy spots is more selective and relative than Gadamer’s, emphasizing the target reader’s active role in shaping the aesthetic experience, though never identical to the source text. Keywords: Phenomenology, hermeneutics, literary translation, Spots of indeterminacy.