Translation Studies

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TRANSLATION STUDIES

INTRODUCTION

  1 CENTRAL ISSUES

    Language and culture

          The first step towards an examination of the process of translation must be to accept that although translation has a central core of linguistic activity, it belongs most properly to semiotics, the science that studies sign systems or structures, sign processes and sign functions (Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, London, 1977). Beyond the notion stressed by the narrowly linguistic approach, that translation involves the transfer of ‘meaning’ contained in one set of language signs through competent use of the dictionary and grammar, the process involves a whole set of extra-linguistic criteria also.

           Edward Sapir claims that ‘language is a guide to social reality’ and that human beings are at the mercy of the language that has become the medium of expression for their society. Experience, he asserts, is largely determined by the language habits of the community, and each separate structure represents a separate reality:

           “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”

            Sapir’s thesis, endorsed later by Whorf, is related to the more recent view advanced by the Soviet semiotician, Lotman, that language is a modelling system. Lotman describes literature and art         in general as a secondary modelling systems, as an indication of the fact that they are derived from the primary modelling system of language, and declares as firmly as Sapir or Whorf that ‘No language can exist unless it is stepped in the context of culture; and no culture can exist which does not have at its center, the structure of natural language.’ Language, then, is the heart within the bodies of culture, and it is the interaction between the two that results in the continuation of life-energy. In the same way that the surgeon, operating on the heart, cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator treats the text in isolation from the culture at his peril.

     Types of translation

         

         In his article ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, Jackobson distinguished three types of translation:

  1. Intralingual translation, or rewording  (an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs in the same language).
  2. Interlingual translation or translation proper  (an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language).
  3. Intersemiotic translation or transmutation  (an interpretation of verbal signs of non-verbal sign systems).

             

           Having established these three types, of which (2) translation proper describes the process of transfer from SL to TL, Jackobson goes on immediately to point to the central problem in all types:  that while messages may serve as adequate interpretations of code units messages, there is ordinarily no full equivalence through translation. Even apparent synonymy does not yield equivalence, and Jackobson shows how Intralingual translation often has to resort to a combination of code units in order to fully interpret the meaning of single unit. Hence a dictionary of so-called synonyms may give perfect as a synonym for ideal or vehicle as a synonym for conveyance but in neither case can there be said to be complete equivalence, since each unit contains within itself a set of non-transferable associations and connotations.

           

       Because complete equivalence  (in the sense of synonym or sameness) cannot take place in any of his categories, Jackobson declares that all poetic art is therefore technically untranslatable:

                 ‘Only creative transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition – from one poetic shape into another, or interlingual transposition – from one language into another, or finally intersemiotic transposition – from one system of signs into another, e.g., from verbal art into music, dance, cinema or painting.’

         

     What Jackobson is saying here is taken up again by Mounin, the French theorist, who perceives translation as a series of operations of which the starting point and the end product are significations and function within a given culture. So, for example, the English word pastry, if translated into Italian without regard for its signification, will not be able to perform its function of meaning within a sentence, even though there may be a dictionary ‘equivalent’; for pasta has a completely different associative field. In this case the translator has to resort to a combination of units in order to find an approximate equivalent. Jackobson gives the example of the Russian word syr (a food made of fermented pressed curds) which translates roughly into English as cottage cheese. In this case, Jackobson claims, the translation is only an adequate interpretation of an alien code unit and equivalence is impossible.

   

Decoding and recoding

      The translator, therefore, operates criteria that transcend the purely linguistic, and a process of decoding and recoding takes place. Eugene Nida’s model of the translation process illustrates the stages involved:

        

SOURCE LANGUAGE          RECEPTOR LANGUAGE

         TEXT          TRANSLATION

        

     ANALYSIS        RESTRUCTURING
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           TRANSFER

     As examples of some of the complexities involved in the interlingual translation of what might seem to be uncontroversial items, consider the question of translating yes and hello into French, German and Italian. This task would seem, at first glance, to be straightforward, since all are Indo-European languages, closely related lexically and syntactically, and terms of greeting and assent are common to all three. For yes standard dictionaries give:

    French: oui, si

    German: ja

    Italian: si

    It is immediately obvious that the existence of two terms in ...

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