摘要:I should say that Clark Cunningham is both a former student and a friend. I have read several earlier drafts of his paper and discussed them with him. I think that Clark Cunningham's article, The Lawyer as Translator, 1 is a wonderful piece of work, full of life and interest and originality. I especially admire: his ability to make vivid to the reader the ways in which languages do truly differ, and differ beyond our efforts to bridge them -- as he shows when he imagines an attempt to translate our most common professional terms into Chinese; his recognition of the kind of force that our languages have over our minds, both as we see the world and as we tell stories about it; his sense that what we think of as "events" are really texts calling for interpretation, and his consciousness that interpretation in turn is a mode of thought by which the practices of our own minds can be made the object of critical attention; his development of the idea that the practice of translation entails an ethic of respect for the difference and equality of persons; and his constant awareness that his own use of language, both as a lawyer in the Johnson case and as a scholar-critic writing about it, is an ethical performance, and one at which he -- and in our turn, we -- not only can, but in some sense certainly will fail. This last is the most important point, for ...