WHAT IS TRANSLATION?

WHAT IS TRANSLATION?

l  Translation is a phenomenon that has a huge effect on everyday life. This can range from the translation of a key international treaty to the following multilingual poster that welcomes customers to a small restaurant near to the home of one of the authors

l  Example A1.1

                How can we then go about defining the phenomenon of ‘translation’ and what the study of it entails? If we look at a general dictionary, we find the following definition of the term translation:

l  Example A1.2 Translation n. 1 the act or an instance of translating. 2 a written or spoken expression of the meaning of a word, speech, book, etc. in another language. (The Concise Oxford English Dictionary)

                The first of these two senses relates to translation as a process, the second to the product. This immediately means that the term translation encompasses very distinct perspectives. The first sense focuses on the role of the translator in taking the original or source text (ST) and turning it into a text in another language (the target text, TT). The second sense centres on the concrete translation product produced by the translator. This distinction is drawn out by the definition in the specialist Dictionary of Translation Studies (Shuttleworth and Cowie 1997:181)

l  DEFINITIONS OF TRANSLATION

                Translation An incredibly broad notion which can be understood in many different ways. For example, one may talk of translation as a process or a product, and identify such sub-types as literary translation, technical translation, subtitling and machine translation; moreover, while more typically it just refers to the transfer of written texts, the term sometimes also includes interpreting.

               

                J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter children’s books have been translated into over 40 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. It is interesting that a separate edition is published in the USA with some alterations. The first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury 1997), appeared as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the USA (Scholastic 1998). As well as the title, there were other lexical changes: British biscuits, football, Mummy, rounders and the sweets sherbet lemons became American cookies, soccer, Mommy, baseball and lemon drops. The American edition makes a few alterations of grammar and syntax, such as replacing got by gotten, dived by dove and at weekends by on weekends, and occasionally simplifying the sentence structure.

l  In his seminal paper, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’ (Jakobson 1959/2000, see Section B, Text B1.1), the Russo–American linguist Roman Jakobson makes a very important distinction between three types of written translation:

1. intralingual translation – translation within the same language, which can involve rewording or paraphrase;

2. interlingual translation – translation from one language to another, and

3. intersemiotic translation – translation of the verbal sign by a non-verbal sign, for example music or image.

l  CONCEPT BOX THE AMBIT OF TRANSLATION

1. The process of transferring a written text from SL to TL, conducted by a translator, or translators, in a specific socio-cultural context.

2. The written product, or TT, which results from that process and which functions in the socio-cultural context of the TL.

3. The cognitive, linguistic, visual, cultural and ideological phenomena which are an integral part of 1 and 2.

                Here Holmes uses ‘translating’ for the process and ‘translation’ for the product. The descriptions and generalized principles envisaged were much reinforced by Gideon Toury in his Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (1995) where two tentative general ‘laws’ of translation are proposed:

1. the law of growing standardization – TTs generally display less linguistic variation than STs, and

2. the law of interference – common ST lexical and syntactic patterns tend to be copied, creating unusual patterns in the TT.

                More priority is afforded to the ‘pure’ side, the objectives of which Holmes considers to be twofold (1988:71):

1. to describe the phenomena of translating and translation(s) as they manifest themselves in the world of our experience, and

2. to establish general principles by means of which these phenomena can be explained and predicted.

l  Concept box Universals of translation

                Specific characteristics that, it is hypothesized, are typical of translated language as distinct from non-translated language. This would be the same whatever the language pair involved and might include greater cohesion and explicitation (with reduced ambiguity) and the fact that a TT is normally longer than a ST. See Blum-Kulka and Levenson (1983), Baker (1993) and Mauranen and Kujam臾i (2004) for more on universals.

l  Translation strategies

                If we were to sample what people generally take ‘translation’ to be, the consensus would most probably be for a view of translating that describes the process in terms of such features as the literal rendering of meaning, adherence to form, and emphasis on general accuracy. These observations would certainly be true of what translators do most of the time and of the bulk of what gets translated. As we shall see as this book progresses, these statements require much refinement and betray a strongly prescriptive attitude to translation. But they are also the product of some of the central issues of translation theory all the way from Roman times to the mid twentieth century.

l  FORM AND CONTENT

                Jakobson goes on to claim that only poetry ‘by definition is untranslatable’ since in verse the form of words contributes to the construction of the meaning of the text. Such statements express a classical dichotomy in translation between sense/content on the one hand and form/style on the other.

                sense/form                         content/style

l  LITERAL AND FREE

                In Classical times, it was normal for translators working from Greek to provide a literal, word-for-word ‘translation’ which would serve as an aid to the Latin reader who, it could be assumed, was reasonably acquainted with the Greek source language. Cicero, describing his own translation of Attic orators in 46 BCE, emphasized that he did not follow the literal ‘word-for-word’ approach but, as an orator, ‘sought to preserve the general style and force of the language’ (Cicero 46 BC/1960:364).

l  LITERAL AND FREE

l  Four centuries later, St Jerome described his Bible translation strategy as ‘I render not word-for-word but sense for sense’ (Jerome 395/1997:25).

l  The literal and free translation strategies can still be seen in texts to the present day.

l  LITERAL AND FREE

                The concept of literalness that emerges from these examples is one of exaggeratedly close adherence on the part of the translator to the lexical and syntactic properties of the ST. Yet, once again, the literal–free divide is not so much a pair of fixed opposites as a cline:

                literal                                                                                    free

                Different parts of a text may be positioned at different points on the cline, while other variables, as we shall see in the coming units, are text type, audience, purpose as well as the general translation strategy of the translator.

l  COMPREHENSIBILITY AND TRANSLATABILITY

                Such literal translations often fail to take account of one simple fact of language and translation, namely that not all texts or text users are the same. Not all texts are as ‘serious’ as the Bible or the works of Dickens, nor are they all as ‘pragmatic’ as marriage certificates or instructions on a medicine bottle. Similarly, not all text receivers are as intellectually rigorous or culturally aware as those who read the Bible or Dickens, nor are they all as ‘utilitarian’ as those who simply use translation as a means of getting things done. Ignoring such factors as text type, audience or purpose of translation has invariably led to the rather pedantic form of literalism, turgid adherence to form and almost total obsession with accuracy often encountered in the translations we see or hear day in day out. We have all come across translations where the vocabulary of a given language may well be recognizable and the grammar intact, but the sense is quite lacking.

l  SUMMARY

                Some of the main issues of translation are linked to the strategies of literal and free translation, form and content. This division, that has marked translation for centuries, can help identify the problems of certain overly literal translations that impair comprehensibility. However, the real underlying problems of such translations lead us into areas such as text type and audience that will become central from Unit 6 onwards.