Scientific translation, or translation-as-description

From the brief study (available to read here):

....Ricoeur’s labyrinth of translation problems builds on the dead-ends of hypothesized linguistic incommensurability, linguistic relativity, and unavoidable information loss. It extends further by hypothesizing that human language centrally involves tasks of “safeguarding the secret”, preservation of otherness (or foreignness), and “non-communication”.[1] Therefore, the "other" person speaking, in your own language or another language, is always partly or fully incomprehensible to you. This is not so much proved as presupposed by Ricoeur (whose appeals to the philosophy and sciences of language are not robust), and defended on the basis that it is impossible to refute. Why? Because, Ricoeur claims, there is never a way to verify that one has properly understood the other.... (p. 4)

....What can brighten the outlook for translation? Given that the practice of science, for some 23 centuries at least, has sought to describe phenomena with increasing accuracy, and decreasing misrepresentation,[2] a scientific practice of translation, i.e. translation-as-description, deserves consideration. This essay’s major hypothesis is: A scientific practice of translation is able to counter-act two dynamics that, alone or together, undermine translation accuracy: insufficient control of translation accuracy, and theoretically motivated surrender of the goal of translation accuracy....  (p. 5)

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[1] Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, E. Brennan (trans.), Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, 8, 22-23, 28, 35.
[2] H.G. Gauch (Jr.), Scientific Method in Brief, Cambridge: CUP, 2012, 34-51.