INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES PDF

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INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES Chapter 1 – Main issues of translation studies THE CONCEPT OF TRANSLATION  the English term translation, first attested in 1340, derives from Old French translation or more directly from the Latin translatio coming from the participle of the verb transferre, today has different meanings: -

the general subject field or phenomenon the product, that is the text translated the process of producing the translation

The process of translation between two languages involves the changing of an original written text (the source text) in the original verbal language (the source language) into a written text (the target text) in a different verbal language (the target language). Jakobson has described three categories of translation: -

INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION, OR REWORDING – an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language, and occur when we produce a summary or rewrite a text in the same language. INTERLINGUAL TRANSLATION, OR ‘TRANSLATION PROPER’ – an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language, and it has been the traditional focus of translation studies. INTERSEMIOTIC TRANSLATION, OR ‘TRANSMUTATION’ – an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of non-verbal sign systems, and occurs when a written text is translated into a different mode, such as a musical

Maria Tymoczko discusses the very different words used for ‘translation’ in other cultures, indicative of a conceptual orientation where the goal of close lexical fidelity to an original may not therefore be shared. For instance, in India there is the Bengali rupantar = change of form. What is translation studies?  the study of translation as an academic subject only really began in the second half of the twentieth century. This discipline is now known as “translation studies” thanks to James S. Holmes. Mary Snell-Hornby talks about ‘the breathtaking development of translation studies as an independent discipline’. First, just as the demand for translation has increased, so has there been an expansion in specialized translating and interpreting programmes. Second, the past decades have also seen a proliferation of conferences, books and journals on translation in many languages. Third, as the number of publications has increased so has the demand for general and analytical instruments such as anthologies, databases, encyclopedias, and so on. Fourth, international organizations have also prospered, for instance the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs or the European Society for Translation Studies. An early history of the discipline  in the west, the different ways of translating were discussed by, among others, Cicero and Horace and St.Jerome. The translation of the Bible was to be the battleground of conflicting ideologies for well over a thousand years. Before the latter part of the twentieth century, translation had often been relegated to an element of language learning. Study of a work in translation was generally disliked once the student had acquired the necessary skills to read the original. As far as teaching was concerned, translation then tended to become restricted to higher-level and university language courses and professional translator training. In 1960s USA, literary translation was promoted by the translation workshop concept. The workshops were intended for the discussion of the finer principles of the translation process and of understanding a text. Running parallel to this approach was that of comparative literature, where literature is studied and compared transnationally and transculturally, necessitating the reading of some works in translation. Another area was that of contrastive linguistics, which means the study of two languages in contrast in an attempt to identify general and specific differences between them. The contrastive approach influenced important linguistic research into translation, such as Vinay and Darbelnet’s Stylistique compare du français et de l’anglais. THE HOLMES/TOURY ‘MAP’  a fundamental paper in the development of translation studies as a discipline was James S. Holmes’s ‘ The name and nature of translation studies’. He introduced an overall framework, describing what translation studies covers. This framework was subsequently presented by the leading translation scholar Gideon Toury. The objectives of this frameworks are: -

the description of the phenomena of translation the establishment of general principles to explain and predict such phenomena (translation theory)

Developments since Holmes  contrastive linguistics has resurfaced thanks to the advances in machine translation (traduzione automatica) and corpus-based studies. The science of translation has continued strongly in Germany, but the concept of equivalence associated with it has been questioned and reconceived. Germany has seen the rise of theories centered around text types and text purpose (e.g. skopos theory). The Hallidayan influence of discourse analysis, which views language as a communicative act in a sociocultural context, came to prominence in the early 1990s, especially in the UK and Australia. The late 1970s and the 1980s saw the rise of a descriptive approach. A pioneering centre was Tel Aviv, where Gideon Toury chased the idea of the literary polysystem in which, among other things, different literatures, including translated and non-translated works, compete for dominance. A key volume was the collection of essays The manipulation of Literature, which gave rise to the name of the ‘Manipulation School’. Bassnett and Lefevere’s work then introduced the term ‘cultural turn’. This dynamic, culturally oriented approach held sway (dominato) for much of the following decade. The 1990s saw the incorporation of new approaches and concepts: the Cannibalist School, promoted by Elsa Vieira and ‘postcolonial’ translation theory. In the USA, the cultural analysis of Lawrence Venuti called for greater visibility and recognition of the translator. THE VAN DOORSLAER ‘MAP’  in his maps van Doorslaer made a distinction between ‘translation’ and ‘translation studies’, reflecting the different centres of interest of research. ‘Translation’ looks at the act of translating and it is subdivided into:    

lingual mode media (printed, audiovisual, etc..) mode (covert/overt; direct/indirect, etc..) field (political, literary, religious, etc..)

Translation studies is subdivided into:    

approaches (cultural, linguistic, etc..) theories (general translation theory, polysystem theory, etc..) research methods (descriptive, empirical, etc..) applied translation studies (criticism, institutional environment, etc.. )

Alongside these there is a distinction between strategy (an overall orientation of a translated text) and procedure (a specific technique used at a certain point in a text) Chapter 2 – Translation theory before the twentieth century ‘WORD-FOR-WORD’ OR ‘SENSE-FOR-SENSE’?  up until the second half of the twentieth century, western translation theory seemed locked in what George Steiner calls a ‘sterile’ debate over literalism, paraphrase and free imitation. The distinction between ‘word-for-word’ and ‘sense-forsense’ translation goes back to Cicero and St. Jerome. The roman rhetorician and politician Cicero outlined his approach to translation in De optimo genere oratorum. He defines the ‘interpreter’ as the literal translator, while the ‘orator’ as the one who tries to produce a speech that moves the

listeners. St. Jerome used Cicero’s approach to justify his own Latin translation of the Christian Bible. For the Old Testament, he decided to return to the original Hebrew; this was a controversial decision for those who maintained the divine inspiration for the Greek translation (the Greek Septuagint). St. Jerome defends himself against accusations of ‘incorrect’ translation, saying that he rendered not word-for-word, but sensefor-sense. EARLY CHINESE AND ARABIC DISCOURSE ON TRANSLATION  St. Jerome’s statement is usually taken to be the clearest expression of the ‘literal’ and ‘free’ poles in translation. These poles surface (emerge) in the rich translation tradition of the Arab world. Over the years, there was an increased use of Arabic neologism rather than the transliteration of Greek terms. Arabic translators also became very creative in supplying explanatory commentaries and notes. HUMANISM AND THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION  Latin had a stranglehold (or grip) over knowledge and religion until challenged by the European Humanist movement of the fourteenth century. The Humanist sought liberation from the power of the church by recovering the refinement of Classical Latin and Greek and their secular writers. Then, in the fifteenth century, the Protestant Reformation of northern Europe began to challenge Latin through the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. The French humanist Etienne Dolet was condemned by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne in 1546, apparently for adding, in his translation of one of Plato’s dialogues, the phrase rien du tout (nothing at all) in a passage about what existed after death. Non-literal translation came to be used as a weapon against the Church. The most notable example is Martin Luther’s influential translation into East Central German of the New Testament and later the Old Testament. His use of a regional dialect went a long way reinforcing the variety of the German Language as standard. He follows St. Jerome in rejecting a word-for-word translation strategy since it would be unable to convey the same meaning as the ST. FIDELITY, SPIRIT AND TRUTH  the concept of fidelity had initially been dismissed as literal translation by Horace. Indeed, it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that fidelity had come to be generally identified with faithfulness to the meaning rather than the words of the author. Spirit was used in the sense of the creative energy of a text or language. It was not until the twelfth century that truth became fully equated with content. EARLY ATTEMPTS AT SYSTEMATIC TRANSLATION THEORY: DRYDEN, DOLET, TYTLER AND YAN FU  John Dryden brief description of the translation process had an enormous impact on subsequent translation theory and practice. In the preface to his translation of Ovid’s Epistles, he reduces all translation to three categories: -

metaphrase – literal translation paraphrase – translation with latitude, this involves changing whole phrases and more or less corresponds to faithful or sense-for-sense translation imitation – ‘forsaking’ both words and sense, this corresponds to free translation and is more or less what today might be understood as adaption.

Dryden prefers paraphrase. Etienne Dolet set out 5 principles in order of importance as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

the the the the the

translator translator translator translator translator

must perfectly understand the sense and material of the original author should have a perfect knowledge of both SL and TL should avoid word-for-word renderings should avoid Latinate and unusual forms should assemble and liaise words eloquently

In is essay on the principles of translation Alexander Tytler defines a good translation as being oriented towards the target language reader. Where Dolet has 5 principles, Tytler has 3 general laws and rules: 1. 2. 3.

the translator should give a complete transcription of the idea of the original work the style and the manner of writing should be the same character with that of the original the translation should have all the ease of the original composition

SCHLEIERMACHER AND THE VALORISATION OF THE FOREIGN  in Germany, the work of philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder on language and thought was to have an important influence over the German Romantics. Their interest was to use translation as a means for improving German literature and culture. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics express a Romantic approach to interpretation based not on absolute truth but on the individual’s inner feeling and understanding. He first distinguished two types of translator working on two different types of text. These are: -

the Dolmetscher, who translate commercial texts; the Ubersetzer, who works on artistic texts

But the real question was how to bring the ST writer and the TT reader together. His method is to ‘give the reader, through the translation, the impression he would have received as a German reading the work in the original language.’ TOWARDS CONTEMPORARY TRANSLATION THEORY  George Steiner lists a small number of fourteen writers who represent those who have said anything fundamental or new about translation. The list includes St. Jerome, Luther, Dryden and Schleiermacher. The main problem with the writings on translation in this period was that the criteria for judgments were vague and subjective and that the judgments themselves were highly normative. Chapter 3 – Equivalence and equivalent effect During the 50s, a new debate revolved around ‘meaning’ and ‘equivalence’, discussed in Roman Jakobson’s 1959 paper ROMAN JAKOBSON: THE NATURE OF LINGUISTIC MEANING AND EQUIVALENCE  Jakobson goes on to examine ‘linguistic meaning’ and ‘equivalence.’ He points out that ‘there is ordinarily no full equivalence between code-units’. For a message to be ‘equivalent’ in ST and TT, the code-units will necessarily be different since they belong to two different languages which partition reality differently. They occur at:   

the level of gender – e.g. honey is masculine in Italian, neuter in English; the level of aspect – in Russian, the verb morphology varies according to whether the action has been completed or not; the level of semantic fields, such as kinship terms – e.g. the German ‘geschwister’ is normally explicated in English as ‘brothers and sisters’, since ‘siblings’ in rather formal.

For Jakobson, ‘all is conveyable in any existing language’; for him, only poetry is considered untranslatable and requires ‘creative transposition’. NIDA AND ‘THE SCIENCE OF TRANSLATING’  Nida’s theory took concrete form in two major works in the 1960s: Toward a Science of Translating and The Theory and Practice of Translation. His more systematic approach borrows theoretical concepts and terminology both from semantics and pragmatics and from Noam Chomsky’s work on syntactic structure. THE INFLUENCE OF CHOMSKY  Chomsky’s generative-transformational model analyses sentences. The key features of this model can be summarized as follows:



phrase-structure rules generate a deep structure which is transformed by transformational rules relating one underlying structure to another (e.g. active to passive), to produce a final surface structure, which itself is subject to phonological and morphemic rules.

The most basic of such structures are kernel sentences, which are simple, active, declarative sentences that require the minimum of transformation. Nida incorporates key features of Chomsky’s model into his ‘science of translation’. In particular, Nida sees that it provides the translator with a technique for decoding the ST and a procedure for encoding the TT. ‘Kernel’ is a key term for this model. Just as kernel sentences were the most basic structures of Chomsky’s initial model, so, for Nida and Taber, kernels ‘are the basic structural elements out of which language builds its elaborate surface structures’. Nida and Taber claim that all languages agree far more on the level of kernels than on the level of more elaborate structures such as word order. THE NATURE OF MEANING: ADVANCES IN SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS  central to Nida’s work is the move away from the old idea that a word has a fixed meaning and towards a functional definition of meaning in which a word acquires meaning through its context and can produce varying responses according to culture. Meaning is broken down into:   

linguistic meaning – Nida provides examples to show how the meaning differs even where similar classes of words are use (e.g. ‘his’ can have different meaning in different sentences; referential meaning – the denotative ‘dictionary’ meaning; emotive or connotative meaning – the associations a word can produce.

Hierarchical structuring differentiates series of words according to their level and techniques of componential analysis seek to identify and discriminate specific features of a range of related words. Another technique is semantics structure analysis, which central idea is to encourage the trainee translator to realize that the sense of a complex semantic term such as ‘spirit’, varies and most particularly is ‘conditioned’ by its context. Nida stresses (sottolinea) the importance of context for communication when dealing with metaphorical meaning and with complex cultural idioms, for example, where the sense of the phrase often diverges from the sum of the individual elements. Techniques of semantic structure analysis are proposed by Nida especially for those working with widely differing languages. FORMAL AND DYNAMIC EQUIVALENCE AND THE PRINCIPLE OF EQUIVALENT EFFECT  Nida exposes two types of equivalence: formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. 



formal equivalence focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content. One is concerned that the message in the receptor language should match as closely as possible the different elements in the source language. It will later be called ‘formal correspondence’. Most typical of this kind of translation are ‘gloss translations’, with a close approximation to ST structure, often with footnotes. This type of translation will often be used in an academic or legal environment. dynamic equivalence: later called ‘functional’ equivalence, is based on what Nida calls ‘the principle of equivalent effect’, where the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message.

Naturalness is a key requirement for Nida. This receptor-oriented approach considers adjustments of grammar, of lexicon and of cultural references to be essential in order to achieve naturalness. For Nida, the success of the translation depends above all on achieving equivalent effect or response. It is one of the four basic requirements of a translation which are:    

Making sense; Conveying the spirit and manner of the original; Having a natural and easy form of expression; Producing a similar response.

Nida considers that ‘correspondence in meaning must have priority over correspondence in style’ if equivalent effect is to be achieved. NEWMARK: SEMANTIC AND COMMUNICATIVE TRANSLATION  Peter Newmark’s Approaches to Translation and A Textbook on Translation have been used on translator training courses and combine some practical examples of linguistic theories with practical application for translation. Yet Newmark departs (si allontana) from Nida’s receptor-oriented line. He feels that the success of equivalent effect is illusory. Newmark suggests replacing the old terms with those of semantic and communicative translation. -

Communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original. Semantic translation attempts to render the exact contextual meaning of the original.

Newmark distances himself from the principle of equivalent effect, since that effect ‘is inoperant if the text is out of TL space and time’. He holds literal translation to be the best approach. Only if semantic translation would result in an ‘abnormal’ TT or would not secure equivalent effect in the TL, then communicative translation should be preferred. DISCUSSION OF NEWMARK  Newmark’s used terms have generally received far less discussion than Nida’s ones. This may be because they raise some of the same points concerning the translation process and the importance of the TT reader. He points out that translation itself is an ‘art’ (if semantic), or a ‘craft’ (if communicative). KOLLER:...