http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210831910000056
Journal of King Saud University - Languages and Translation
Volume 23, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 29–45
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Towards an understanding of the distinctive nature of translation studies
Open Access funded by King Saud University
Under a Creative Commons license
Show more
Abstract
This paper has emerged out of the conviction that linguistic theory has more to offer to translation theory than is so far recognized and vice versa. As Gutknecht (2001) claims, the translation theorists have made little systematic use of the techniques and insights of contemporary linguistics. However, two points must be emphasized: (1) although translation has existed for many centuries, it was not until the second half of this century that ‘Translation Studies’ developed into a discipline in its own right, and (2) although translation has taken on concepts and methods of other disciplines, “it is still conceived as a subdiscipline of applied linguistics” (Schaffner, 2004, p. 2). On the other hand, the past fifteen years or so have seen the focus of translation studies shift away from linguistics and increasingly to forms of cultural studies. There has also been a shift towards studies that have incorporated models from functional linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, locating the text within its sociocultural context. More recently, technological advances, which have transformed the working conditions of professional translators and researchers and have spawned new forms of translation, have also produced new areas of research, some linked to the effects of globalization and some to forms of intersemiotic translation.
The present study, therefore, attempts to outline the scope of the discipline of translation studies (TS), to give some indication of the kind of work that has been done so far. More importantly, it is an attempt to demonstrate that (TS) is a vastly complex field with many far-reaching ramifications.
Keywords
Linguistic theory translation theory;
Translation Studies;
Cultural studies sociocultural context;
Technological advances;
New areas of research;
Intersemiotic translation
1. Introduction
The activity of translation has a long-standing tradition and has been widely practiced throughout history, but in our rapidly changing world its role has become of paramount importance. Nowadays, knowledge in which cultural exchanges have been widening, has been increasingly expanding and international communication has been intensifying, the phenomenon of translation has become fundamental. Be it for scientific, medical, technological, commercial, legal, cultural or literary purposes, today human communication depends heavily on translation and, consequently, interest in the field is also growing. Accordingly, the discussion, in the present study, proceeds primarily from the perspectives of “Translation Studies” and “Linguistics”. One major goal is to show the interrelationships between linguistics and translation, and how they benefit from each other. The basic underlying theme, here, is that “inside or between languages, human communication equals translation. A study of translation is a study of language” (Bassnett-McGuire, 1980, p. 23). In addition, both translators and linguists deal with two linguistic systems, each with, perhaps, a different cultural system. So, if we agree that ‘all communicators are translators’ (Bell, 1991), we must remember that the role of the translator is different from that of the ‘normal communicator’: the translator is a bilingual mediating agent between monolingual communication participants in two different language communities.
Moreover, the focus of translation studies has been, recently, shifted away from linguistics to forms of cultural studies. The present study, therefore, attempts to shed some light on the nature and development of the discipline of translation studies (TS), with a view to giving some indication of the kind of work that has been done so far. It is an attempt to demonstrate that TS is a vastly complex field with many far-reaching ramifications.
2. Translation: brief historical perspective
The term “Translation Studies” was coined by Holmes in his well known paper, “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies”, originally presented in 1972 to the translation section of the Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics in Copenhagen, but published and widely read only as of 1988. Holmes (1988, p. 71) outlined the field of what he termed “Translation Studies” and its two main objectives: (i) to describe the phenomena of translating and translation(s) as they manifest themselves in the world of our experience, and (ii) to establish general principles by means of which these phenomena can be explained and predicted. Since Holmes’ paper, TS has evolved to such an extent that it has turned into an interdiscipline, interwoven with many other fields. As Zakhir (2008) points out, when we talk about the history of translation, we should think of the theories and names that emerged at its different periods. Each era is characterized by specific changes in translation history. For centuries, people believed in the relation between translation and the story of the tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis. According to the Bible, the descendants of Noah decided, after the great flood, to settle down in a plain in the land of Shinar. There, they committed a great sin. Instead of setting up a society that fits God’s will, they decided to challenge his authority and build a tower that could reach Heaven. However, this plan was not completed, as God, recognizing their wish, regained control over them through a linguistic stratagem. He caused them to speak different languages so as not to understand each other. Then, he scattered them all over the earth. After that incident, the number of languages increased through diversion, and people started to look for ways to communicate, hence the birth of translation (Benabdelali, 2006). With the birth of translation studies and the increase of research in the domain, people started to get away from this story of Babel, and they began to look for specific dates and figures that mark the periods of translation history.
Writings on translation go back to the Romans. Jacobsen (1958) claims that translating is a Roman invention (see McGuire, 1980). Cicero and Horace (first century BC) were the first theorists who distinguished between word-for-word translation and sense-for-sense translation. Their comments on translation practice influenced the following generations of translation up to the 20th century. Another period that knew a changing step in translation development was marked by St. Jerome (fourth century CE). “His approach to translating the Greek Septuagint Bible into Latin would affect later translations of the scriptures” (Munday, 2001). Later on, the translation of the Bible remained a subject to many conflicts between western theories and ideologies of translation for more than a thousand years. As Zakhir (2008)points out, the invention of printing techniques in the 15th century developed the field of translation and helped in the appearance of early theorists. The 17th century knew the birth of many influential theorists, such as Sir John Denhom, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden who was famous for his distinction between three types of translation; metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation. In the 18th century, the translator was compared to an artist with a moral duty both to the work of the original author and to the receiver. Moreover, the study of translation started to be systematic; Alexander Tayler’s volume “Principle of Translation” is a case in point. The 19th century was characterized by two conflicting tendencies; the first considered translation as a category of thought and saw the translator as a creative genius, who enriches the literature and the language into which he is translating, while the second saw him through the mechanical function of making a text or an author known (McGuire, 1980). This period of the nineteenth century knew also the birth of many theories and translations in the domain of literature, especially poetic translation. An example of these translations is the one used by Edward Fitzgerald for Rubalyat Omar Al- Khayyam. In the second half of the 20th century, studies on translation became an important course in language teaching and learning at schools. The period is also characterized by pragmatic and systematic approach to the study of translation.
Nowadays, translation research has started to take another path, which is more automatic. The invention of the internet, together with the new technological developments in communication and digital materials, has increased cultural exchanges between nations. This leads translators to look for ways to cope with these changes and to look for more practical techniques that enable them to translate more and waste less. They also felt the need to enter the world of cinematographic translation, hence the birth of audiovisual translation. The latter technique, also called screen translation, is concerned with the translation of all kinds of TV programs, including films, series, and documentaries. This field is based on computers and translation software programs, and it is composed of two methods; dubbing and subtitling. In fact, audiovisual translation marks a changing era in the domain of translation.
In short, translation has very wide and rich history in the West. Since its birth, translation was the subject of a variety of research and conflicts between theorists. Each theorist approaches it according to his viewpoint and field of research, the fact that gives its history a changing quality.
3. Discussion
3.1. What is translation?
At the outset, it may be important to point out that translation has been defined in many ways, and every definition reflects the theoretical approach underpinning it. As Shuttlworth and Cowie (1997) observe throughout the history of research into translation, the phenomenon has been variously delimited by formal descriptions, echoing the frameworks of the scholars proposing them. For example, Bell (1991: XV) starts with an informal definition of translation, which runs as follows: the transformation of a text originally in one language into an equivalent text in a different language retaining, as far as is possible, the content of the message and the formal features and functional roles of the original text. At the beginning of the ‘scientific’ (Newmark, 1988, p. 2) study of translation, Catford (1965, p. 20) described it in these terms: […] the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by the equivalent textual material in another language (TL). That his concern was with maintaining a kind of ‘equivalence’ between the ST and the TT is apparent.
Thirty years later, in Germany, the concept of translation as a form of ‘equivalence’ is maintained, as we can see from Koller’s definition (1995, p. 196): “The result of a text processing activity, by means of which a source language text is transposed into a target-language text. Between the resultant text in L2 (the target-language text) and the source text in L1 (the source language text) there exists a relationship, which can be designated as a translational, or equivalence relation”. Because complete equivalence (in the sense of synonymy or sameness) cannot take place in any of his categories, Jakobson (1959) declares that all poetic art is, therefore, technically untranslatable. That is, the translator has to take the question of interpretation into account in addition to the problem of selecting a TL phrase which will have a roughly similar meaning. Exact translation is impossible. In this regard, Bassnett (1996) claims that all texts, being part of a literary system descended from and related to other systems, are “translations of translation of translations”: every text is unique and at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.
Central to reflections on the nature of translation, the task of the translator has always been the question of the translator’s responsibility towards the original. To what extent, scholars have been asking for hundreds of years, can the translator add to, omit from, or in any way alter the source text? Debates on this issue have given rise to much theorizing and are at the heart of the age-old free/literal translation paradigm. In modem times, considerations of the relationship between translation and original have often focused on principles of ‘faithfulness’ and ‘accuracy’. While usually understood in widely diverse ways, faithfulness has assumed the status of an ethical responsibility, with translators in many countries required to take an oath to guarantee the accuracy and correctness of their work before being officially licensed to practice. Translators, thus, are expected to present their readers with an ‘accurate’ picture of the original, without any ‘distortions’, and without imposing their personal values, or those of their own culture, on the intellectual products of other nations. For a long time this valorization of the original did not disrupt the almost universally accepted precept of ‘natural’ translation. A translated text, it is often still emphasized, should read like an original composition and not call attention to its translatedness – an effect that is usually created through ‘free’ translation strategies. According to Robinson (1997a, p. 126), free translation became an orthodoxy in the West from the Renaissance onwards.
In recent years, however, challenges to the ‘transparency’ principle have been mounted chiefly by postmodernist and postcolonial critics. Perhaps the most widely circulated and influential of these challenges can be found in the work of Lawrence Venuti. Venuti has called attention to the ethnocentrism innherent in what he has termed ‘domesticating translation’, which assimilates the foreign text to the values of the receiving culture to create an impression of a natural text, whose translator is invisible. Indeed, Venuti equates domesticating translation with ‘ethnocentric violence’, a violence which involves appropriating others and assimilating them into the target culture’s worldview, “reducing if not simply excluding the very differences that translation is called on to convey” (Venuti, 1995/2008). Venuti also maintains that domesticating translation consolidates the power hierarchy that imposes hegemonic discourses on the target culture by conforming to its worldview. In Anglo-American culture, for example, it has contributed to “closing off any thinking about cultural and social alternatives that do not favor English social elites” (ibid., p. 35). Venuti has recently refined his position on domesticating translation. While domestication as a practice is still generally denounced, Venuti introduces a new potential function for it. He conceives of the possibility of a “foreignizing fluency that produces the illusion of transparency and enables the translation to pass for an original composition” (ibid., p. 267). How the illusion of transparency might be distinguished from actual transparency is not made clear, but this newly recognized practice remains in essence a “foreignizing intervention” with the same purpose as foreignizing translation proper: “to question existing cultural hierarchies” (ibid.).
Manfredi (2008) points out that if we look for a definition of translation in a general dictionary, we can find it described as: (1) the process of translating words or text from one language into another; and (2) the written or spoken rendering of the meaning of a word, speech, book or other text, in another language […] (The New Oxford Dictionary of English 1998). On the other hand, if we consider the definition offered by a specialist source like the dictionary of translation studies by Shuttlworth and Cowie (1997, p. 181), we can find the phenomenon of translation explained as follows: “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 identity 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 […] furthermore, many writers also extend its reference to take in related activities which most would not recognize as translation as such” (see Malmkjar, 2005; House, 2006a, House, 2006b and House, 2008).
In his analysis of the above definition, Manfredi (2008), points out that the above distinction can be divided into two main perspectives, those that consider translation either as a ‘process’ or a ‘product’. To this twofold categorization, Bell (1991, p. 13) adds a further variable, since he suggests making a distinction between translating (the process), a translation (the product) and translation (i.e., “the abstract concept which encompasses both the process of translating and the product of that process”). Also, it is postulated that translation entails different kinds of texts, from literary to technical. Moreover, from Schuttleworth and Cowie’s definition it is also clear that nowadays translation includes other forms of communication, like audiovisual translation, through subtitles and dubbing. Also, the reference to machine translation in the quotation above makes clear that today translation is not seen as exclusively a human process and that, at least in certain professional areas, input from information technology has also had an impact, through, for instance, automatic or machine-assisted translation. Moreover, thanks to advances in new technologies, today we can also incorporate into TS the contribution of corpus linguistics, which allows both theorists and translators analyses of large amounts of electronic texts (Manfredi, 2008). On the other hand, Halliday (1992, p. 15) takes translation to refer to the total process and relationship of equivalence between two languages; we then distinguish, within translation, between “translating” (written text) and “interpreting” (spoken text). Halliday, thus, proposes distinguishing the activity of “translation” (as a process) from the product(s) of “translating”, including both “translation” (concerning written text) and ‘interpreting’ (regarding spoken text). This of course reflects his notion of ‘text’, which “[…] may be either spoken or written, or indeed in any other medium of expression that we like to think of” (Halliday in Halliday and Hasan 1985/89, p. 10). Nord’s definition, conversely, clearly reflects her closeness to ‘skopos theory’ (Reiss and Vermeer, 1984); hence the importance attributed to the purpose and function of the translation in the receiving audience: “Translation is the production of a functional target text maintaining a relationship with a given source text that is specified according to the intended or demanding function of the target text (translation skopos)” (Nord 1991, p. 28). According to House (2001, p. 247) translation is thought of as a text which is a “representation” or “reproduction” of an original one produced in another language (see Anne Brooks-Lewis, 2009).
Hatim and Munday (2004, p. 3) point out that we can analyze translation from two different perspectives: that of a ‘process’, which refers to the activity of turning an ST into a TT in another language, and that of a ‘product’, i.e., the translated text. Long time ago, Mounin (1963), the French theorist perceives translation as a series of operations of which the starting point and the end product are significations and function within a given culture. In this regard, Bassnett (1996, p. 23) points out that the emphasis always in translation is on the reader or listener and the translator must tackle the SL text in such a way that the TL version will correspond to the SL version. The nature of that correspondence may vary considerably, but the principle remains constant. Hence Albrecht Neubert’s view that Shakespeare’s Sonnet ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? cannot be semantically translated into a language where summers are unpleasant is perfectly proper, just as the concept of God the Father cannot be translated into a language where the deity is female. To attempt to impose the value system of the SL culture onto the TL culture is dangerous ground, and the translator should not be tempted by the school that pretends to determine the original intentions of an author on the basis of a self-contained text. The translator cannot be the author of the SL text, but as the author of the TL text has a clear moral responsibility to the TL readers. In this regard,Levy (1963), cited in Holmes (1970) insisted that any contracting or omitting of difficult expressions in translating was immoral. The translator, he believed, had the responsibility of finding a solution to the most daunting of problems, and he declared that the functional view must be adopted with regard not only to meaning but also to style and form (see Moruwamon and Kolawole, 2007).
3.2. The development of translation studies
Translation was initially studied as a linguistic phenomenon, as a process of meaning transfer via linguistic transcoding, and consequently, translation studies was conceived as a linguistic discipline. Attempts were made to develop a “science of translation” (e.g. Nida 1964), or a linguistic theory of translation (Catford 1965), whose aim was to give a precise description of the equivalence relations between signs and combinations of signs in the source language (SL) and the target language (TL). After centuries dominated by a recurring and, according to Steiner, ‘sterile’ (1998, p. 319) debate over ‘literal’, ‘free’ and ‘faithful’ translation, in the 1950s and 1960s more systematic approaches to the study of translation emerged and they were linguistically oriented (see Munday, 2001, p. 9). Over the following years, as Ulrych and Bolleteiri Bosinelli emphasize, the ties between translation and linguistics got even stronger, thanks to the development within linguistics of new paradigms which considered “[…] language as a social phenomenon that takes place within specific cultural context”, like discourse analysis, text linguistics sociolinguistics and pragmatics “(Ulrych and Bosinelli, 1999, p. 229).
Since the early 1960s significant changes have taken place in the field of translation studies, with the growing acceptance of the study of linguistics and stylistics within literary criticism that has led to developments in critical methodology and also with the rediscovery of the work of the Russian Formalist Circle. The most important advances in translation studies in the 20th century derive from the groundwork done by groups in Russia in the 1920s and subsequently by the Prague Linguistic Circle and its disciples. Since 1965, great progress has been made in translation studies. The work of scholars in the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, German and the United States seem to indicate the emergence of clearly defined schools of translation studies, which place their emphasis on different aspects of the whole vast field. Moreover, translation specialists have benefited a great deal from work in marginally related areas (Bassnett, 1996). Emerging in the 1970s, developing in the 1980s, and flourishing in the 1990s (Bassnett 1999, p. 214), TS has evolved enormously in the past 20 years and is now in the process of consolidating. TS has gradually evolved into a discipline in its own right, or rather, as said, into an ‘interdiscipline’, which draws on a wide range of other discipline and hence could be effectively described as “a house of many room” (Hatim 2001, p. 8).
One of the first moves towards interdecsiplinarity can be considered Snell-Hornby’s (1988/1995)“integrated approach”. The approach was meant to bridge the gap between linguistic and literary-oriented methods, aiming at proposing a model which would embrace the whole spectrum of language and cull insights from other disciplines, such as psychology, ethnology, philosophy, as well as cultural history, literary studies, socio-cultural studies and, for specialized translation, the study of the specific domain involved (medical, legal, etc.). In Europe translation was seen for many decades either as simple linguistic transcoding (studied as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics, and only focusing on specialized translation), or as a literary practice (viewed as a branch of comparative literature and only concerned with the translation of canonical works of art). Lefevere (1978) proposed that the name translation studies should be adopted for the discipline that concerns itself with the problems raised by the production and description of translation. The Routledge Encyclopedia of translation studies (Baker, 1998) defines ‘Translation Studies’ as “[…] the academic discipline which concerns itself with the study of translation”. As Baker points out, although initially focusing on literary translation, TS “[…] is now understood to refer to the academic discipline concerned with the study of translation at large, including literary and nonliterary translation” (1998, p. 277). Hatim defines TS as the discipline “[…] which concerns itself with the theory and practice of translation” (Hatim, 2001, p. 3). When Lefevere (1978) tried to define the goal of translation studies, he suggested that its purpose was to produce a comprehensive theory which can also be used as a guideline for the production of translations, and whilst some may question the specificity of this statement, his clear intention to link theory with practice is indisputable. The need for systematic study of translation arises directly from the problems encountered during the actual translation process and it is as essential for those working in the field to bring their practical experience to theoretical discussion, as it is for increased theoretical perceptiveness to be put to use in the translation of texts. To divorce the theory from the practice, to set the scholar against the practitioner as has happened in other disciplines would be tragic indeed (see El-dali, 2008).
The practice of translation without a theoretical background tends toward a purely subjective exercise. AsYallop (1987, p. 347) reminds us one of Halliday’s main contributions to linguistics is his desire to build bridges between linguistic theory and professional practice. “When dealing with translation, we firmly believe that this need is even stronger. Proficiency in two languages, the source one and the target one, is obviously not sufficient to become a competent translator” (Manfredi, 2008 and Hatim and Munday, 2006).
Translation theory is relevant to translators’ problems, and not only for academic purposes, but also to the practice of a professional translator, since it can “[…] offer a set of conceptual tools [that] can be thought of as aids for mental problem-solving” (Chesterman, in Chesterman and Wagner, 2002, p. 7). Theory and practice are indissolubly linked, and are not in conflict. Understanding of the processes can only help in the production and, a theory of translation without a link to practice is simply an abstraction.
Moreover, as Bassnett (1996) points out, although translation studies covers such a wide field, it can be roughly divided into four general areas of interest, each with degree of overlap. Two are product-oriented, in that the emphasis is on the functional aspect of the TL texts in relation to the SL text, and two of them are process-oriented, in that the emphasis is on analyzing what actually takes place during translation. The first category involves the History of Translation and is a component part of literary history. The type of work involved in this area includes investigation of the theories of translation at different times, the critical response to translations, the practical processes of commissioning and publishing translations, the role and function of translation in a given period, the methodological development of translation and, by far the most common type of study, analysis of the work of individual translators. The second category, translation in the TL culture, extends the work on single texts or authors and includes work on the influence of a text, author or genre, on the absorption of the norms of the translated text into the TL system and on the principles of selection operating within that system (see Genc and Bada, 2005). The third category, translation and linguistics, includes studies which place their emphasis on the comparative arrangement of linguistic elements between the SL and the TL text with regard to phonemic, morphemic, lexical, syntagmatic and syntactic levels. Into this category come studies of the problems of linguistic equivalence of language-bound meaning of linguistic untranslatability of machine translation, etc. and also studies of the translation problems of non-literary texts. The fourth category, loosely called translation and poetics, includes the whole area of literary translation, in theory and practice. Studies may be general or genre-specific including investigation of the particular problems of translating poetry, theatre texts and the affiliated problem of translation for the cinema, whether dubbing or sub-titling. Under this category also come studies of the poetics of individual translators and comparisons between them, studies of the problems of formulating a poetics, and studies of the interrelationship between SL and TL texts and author-translator-reader (see Sehsah, 2006).
Ulrych and Bosinelli (1999, p. 237) described the burgeoning discipline of TS as follows: the term ‘multidiscipline’ is the most apt in portraying the present state of translation studies since it underlines both its independent nature and its plurality of perspectives. Translation studies can in fact be viewed as a ‘metadiscipline’ that is able to accommodate diverse disciplines with their specific theoretical and methodological frameworks and thus to comprehend areas focusing, for example, on linguistic aspects of translation, cultural studies aspects, literary aspects and so on. Their account of TS is akin to Hatim’s view that “[t]ranslating is a multi-faceted activity, and there is room for a variety of perspectives” (Hatim, 2001, p. 10). According to Snell-Hornby (2006, pp. 150–151) […] Translation studies opens up new perspectives from which other disciplines – or more especially the world around – might well benefit. It is concerned, not with languages, objects, or cultures as such, but with communication across cultures, which does not merely consist of the sum of all factors involved. And what is not yet adequately recognized is how translation (studies) could help us communicate better – a deficit that sometimes has disastrous results.
3.2.1. Translation studies and linguistics
Along with the convinction that a multifaceted phenomenon like translation needs to be informed by multidisciplinarity, Manfredi (2008) believes that, within this perspective, linguistics has much to offer the study of translation. Since linguistics deals with the study of language and how this works, and since the process of translation vitally entails language, the relevance of linguistics to translation should never be in doubt. But it must immediately be made clear that we are referring in particular to “[…] those branches of linguistics which are concerned with the […] social aspects of language use” and which locate the ST and TT firmly within their cultural contexts (Bell, 1991, p. 13).
Mounin (1963) acknowledges the great benefits that advances in linguistics have brought to translation studies; the development of structural linguistics, the work of Saussure, of Hjelmslev, of the Moscow and Prague linguistic circles have been of great value, and the works of Chomsky and the transformational linguists have also had their impact, particularly with regard to the study of Semantics. Mounin feels that it is thanks to developments in contemporary linguistics that we can (and must) accept that: (1) personal experience in its uniqueness is untranslatable; (2) in theory the base units of any two languages (e.g. phonemes, monemes, etc.) are not always comparable; (3) communication is possible when account is taken of the respective situations of speaker and hearer, or author and translator. In other words, Mounin believes that linguistics demonstrates that translation is a dialectic process that can be accomplished with relative success: “Translation may always start with the clearest situations, the most concrete messages, the most elementary universals. But as it involves the consideration of a language in its entirety, together with its most subjective messages, through an examination of common situations and a multiplication of contacts that need clarifying, then there is no doubt that communication through translation can never be completely finished, which also demonstrates that it is never wholly impossible either” (p.4).
One of the first to propose that linguistics should affect the study of translation was Jakobson who, in 1959, affirmed: “Any comparison of two languages implies an examination of their mutual translatability; the widespread practice of interlingual communication, particularly translating activities, must be kept under constant scrutiny by linguistic science” (1959/2000; 233–234). In 1965, Catford opened his, “A Linguistic Theory of Translation”, with the following assertion: “Clearly, then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language – a general linguistic theory” (Catford, 1965, p. 1). As Fawcett (1997, p. 2)suggests, the link between linguistics and translation can be twofold. On one hand, the finding of linguistics can be applied to the practice of translation; on the other hand, it is possible to establish a linguistic theory of translation. Bell even argues that translation can be invaluable to linguistics: “[…] as a vehicle for testing theory and for investigating language use” (Bell, 1991: xvi). Fawcett’s view is that, without a grounding in linguistics, the translator is like “[…] somebody who is working with an incomplete toolkit” (Fawcett 1997: foreword). Taylor (1998, p. 10) affirms that “translation is undeniably a linguistic phenomenon, at least in part”.
Linguistics, thus, can be said to have “[…] had the advantage of drawing [translation] away from its intuitive approach and of providing it with a scientific foundation” (Ulrych and Bosinelli, 1999, p. 229). According toMunday (2001, p. 9) “[t]he more systematic and ‘scientific’ approach in many ways began to mark out the territory of the academic investigation of translation”, represented by Nida (1964). In spite of all this, on many sides the relevance of linguistics to translation has also been critiqued, or worse, neglected. Bell (1991) showed his contempt for such a skeptical attitude. He finds it paradoxical that many translation theorist should make little systematic use of the techniques and insights offered by linguistics, but also that many linguists should have little or no interest in the theory of translation. In his view, if translation scholars do not draw heavily on linguistics, they can hardly move beyond a subjective and arbitrary evaluation of the products, i.e. translated texts, they are, in short, doomed to have no concern for the process. Similarly, Hatim warns against those introductory books on TS which tend to criticize the role of linguistics in the theory of translation and blame it for any, or all, failure in translation. According to Hatim (2001) these books seem to ignore those branches within linguistics which are not divorced from practice and whose contribution to translation is vital. However, despite this scepticism, a genuine interest in linguistics does continue to thrive in TS. Even though Snell-Horney takes her distance from it, recently TS seems to have been characterized by a new ‘linguistic turn’ (Snell-Hornby, 2006). Up to the end of the 1970s, as Snell-Hornby reports (1988, p. 15), most linguistically-oriented theories were centered around the concept of equivalence. In the 1980s, the concept reappeared in a new light, ‘resuscitated’, as it were, by Neubert (1984), who put forward his idea of ‘text bound equivalence’.
3.2.1.1. Why the separation between linguistics and TS
It is my conviction that linguistic theory has more to offer to translation theory than is so recognized, and vice versa (see El-dali, 2008). Perhaps one reason for the relative separation between the two fields is the domination of formal approaches to language study over modern linguistic thinking and research for a considerable period of time. Formal approaches to language, with their focus on structure and confinement to the sentence boundaries, are of limited benefit to translation theory and practice, for which a textually-oriented approach is more appropriate. With the spread of functional linguistics in the last three decades, there have been growing hopes for establishing links between linguistics and translation studies. Although there have been a number of contributions in this direction, much work is still possible, and still required, to help establish such links (Halliday, 1985 and Al-Wahy, 1999; Hatim and Mason, 1997). In 1961, Hallidaywrote a paper on linguistics and machine translation in which he made the remark: “It might be of interest to set up a linguistic model of the translation process, starting not from any preconceived notions from outside the field of language study, but on the basis of linguistic concepts” (p. 57). The translation theorists, almost without exception, have made little systematic use of the techniques and insights of contemporary linguistics (the linguistics of the last twenty years or so) and the linguists, for their part, have been at best neutral and at worst actually hostile to the notation of a theory of translation (Gutknecht, 2001). This state of affairs seems particularly paradoxical when one recognizes the stated goal of translation: the transformation of a text originally in one language into an equivalent text in a different language retaining, as far as is possible, the content of the message and the formal features and functional roles of the original text. It does seem strange that such a process should, apparently, be of no interest to linguistics, since the explanation of the phenomenon would present an enormous challenge to linguistic theories and provide an ideal testing ground for them. Equally, it is difficult to see how translation theorists can move beyond the subjective and normative evaluation of texts without drawing heavily on linguistics. The need for access to and familiarity with the accumulated knowledge about the nature and function of language and the methodology of linguistic enquiry must become more and more pressing and less and less deniable if translation theory is to shake off individualist anecdotalism and the tendency to issue arbitrary lists of ‘rules’ for the creation of ‘correct’ translations and set about providing systematic and objective description of the process of translation. This paradox has arisen as a result of a fundamental misunderstanding, by both translation theorists and linguists, of what is involved in translation; which has led, inevitably, to the failure to build a theory of translation which is at all satisfactory in a theoretical or an applied sense (Ibid, p. 693).
According to Hatim and Mason (1997, p. 22), the emergence of linguistics as a new discipline in the 20th century brought a spirit of optimism to the pursuit of language study, a feeling that the groundwork was at last being laid for a systematic and scientific approach to the description of language. Insights into the way language functions as a system might be expected to shed light on the kinds of language problems experienced in social life. Many areas of social life called for investigation from a linguistic standpoint: the teaching of modern languages, the treatment of language disorders, the role of language in education, the status and treatment of minority languages, language planning policy in emergent notions and, of course, translation. Hatim and Mason (1997) suggest some of the reasons why earlier developments in linguistics theory were of relatively little interest to translators. Structural linguistics sought to describe language as a system of interdependent elements and to characterize the behaviour of individual items and categories on the basis on their distribution. Morphology and syntax constituted the main areas of analysis, largely to the exclusion of the intractable problem of meaning, which was either ignored or else dealt with purely in terms of the distribution of lexical items: the statement of meanings is, therefore, the weak point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present stale’ (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 140). In their evaluation of this issue, Hatim and Mason (1997, p. 25) argue that “since meaning is at the very heart of the translator’s work, it follows that the postponement of semantic investigation in American linguistics was bound to create a gap between linguistics and translation studies. Quite simply, linguists and translators were not talking about the same thing”.
In addition, linguistic description was in general limited to single language systems. For the translator, every problem involved two language systems, a statement of the distribution of an item in one language is of no particular value. However, structuralist theories of language were, nevertheless, influential in translation theory and there were some serious attempts to apply structuralist notions to translation problems (Catford, 1965). As a result of Catford’s work with its emphasis on contextual meaning and the social context of situation in which language activity takes place, translation theory becomes a branch of contrastive linguistics, and translation problems become a matter of the non-correspondence of certain formal categories in different languages. This has led to an investigation of “equivalence probability”: “an attempt to arrive at a statistical calculation of the degree of probability that a given SL category will, in any given text, be rendered by an equivalent TL category” (Hatim and Mason, 1997, p. 26). According to Nida (1964), the non-correspondence of grammatical and lexical categories is the main source of information loss and gain in translation. The influence of contrastive structural linguistics has made itself felt in translation teaching methodology. Many published manuals of translating devote separate sections to the translation of verbs, objectives, pronouns, and prepositions (Astington, 1983).
Among the insights brought by Chomsky and others to language analysis was the distinction between ‘surface structure’ and ‘deep structure’; that is “the notion that the arrangements of elements on the surface of discourse, ‘the words on the page’, so to speak, mask an underlying structural arrangement, reflecting the actual relations between the concepts and entities involved” (Hatim and Mason, 1997, p. 31). In this regard, Nida (1964, p. 68) went as far as to suggest that the activity of translating involved: (1) breaking down the SL text into its underlying representation or semantic ‘kernels’; (2) transfer of meaning from SL to TL ‘on a structurally simple level’, and (3) generation of ‘stylistically and semantically equivalent expression in the TL. Moreover, in its insistence on according priority to the investigation of ‘competence’, over the investigation of ‘performance’, transformational grammar drew attention away from language as communication, the very substance of the translator’s work.
It was Dell Hymes (1971) who questioned the limitations of the notion of grammatical ‘competence’ as narrowly conceived within Chomskyan linguistics. Hymes claims that linguistics addresses itself to accounting for the fact that children acquire the ability of how to produce utterances which are not only grammatical but also appropriate. They, in other words, acquire “communicative competence”. This concept is directly relevant to translation studies. As Hatim and Mason (1997, p. 33) point out, “the translator’s communicative competence is attuned to what is communicatively appropriate in both SL and TL communities and individual acts of translation may be evaluated in terms of their appropriateness to the context of their use”. In this regard, Widdowson (1997) makes a useful distinction between “usage” defined as a “projection of the language system or code” (p. 8), and ‘use’ defined as the actual use of language in communication. As Hatim and Mason (1997, p. 33) claim, the preoccupation in translation studies with non-correspondence of grammatical categories in individual languages was an exercise in usage rather than in use, in language-as-system rather than in language-as-communication.
Moreover, the scope of linguistics has widened beyond the confines of the individual sentence. Text linguistics attempts to account for the form of texts in terms of their users. If we accept that meaning is something that is negotiated between producers and receivers of texts, it follows that the translator, as a special kind of text user, intervenes in this process of negotiation, to relay it across linguistic and cultural boundaries. In doing so, the translator is necessarily handling such matters as intended meaning, implied meaning, presupposed meaning, all on the basis of the evidence which the text supplies. The various domains of sociolinguistics, pragmatics and discourse linguistics are all areas of study which are germane to this process (Hatim and Mason, 1997, p. 33). In their evaluation of all these developments, Hatim and Mason (1997, p. 35) said that “Taken together, all of these developments … have provided a new direction for translation studies. It is one which restores to the translator the central role in a process of cross-cultural communication and ceases to regard equivalence merely as a matter of entities within texts.
3.2.1.2. Translator’s competence
‘What is the translators’ need to know and be able to do in order to translate?’ We are seeking, in other words, a specification of ‘translator competence’. In this regard, Bell (1991) argues that the professional (technical) translator has access to five distinct kinds of knowledge; target language (TL) knowledge; text-type knowledge; source language (SL) knowledge; subject area (‘real world’) knowledge; and contrastive knowledge. This means that the translator must know (a) how propositions are structured (semantic knowledge), (b) how clauses can be synthesized to carry propositional content and analyzed to retrieve the content embedded in them (syntactic knowledge), and (c) how the clause can be realized as information bearing text and the text decomposed into the clause (pragmatic knowledge). Lack of knowledge or control in any of the there cases would mean that the translator could not translate. Without (a) and (b), even literal meaning would elude the translator. Without (c), meaning would be limited to the literal (semantic sense) carried by utterance which, though they might possess formal cohesion (being tangible realizations of clauses), would lack functional coherence and communicative value (Bell, 1991). As Raskin (1987)argues, given the goal of linguistics to match speaker’s competence, an applied linguistic theory of translation should aim at matching the bilingual native speaker’s translation competence. This would necessarily involve seeking an integration between the linguistic knowledge of the two languages with specific and general knowledge of the domain and of the world via comparative and contrastive linguistic knowledge.
One approach would be to focus on the competence of the ‘ideal translator’ (Katz, 1978) or ‘ideal bilingual’ who would be an abstraction from actual bilinguals engaged in imperfectly performing tasks of translation … but (unlike them) operating under none of the performance limitations that underlie the imperfections of actual translation. This approach reflects Chomsky’s view of the goal of the linguistic theory and his proposals for the specification of the competence of the ‘ideal speaker–hearer’. Accordingly translation theory is primarily concerned with an ideal bilingual reader–writer, who knows both languages perfectly and is unaffected by such theoretically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention or interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying this knowledge in actual performance.
An alternative to the ‘ideal translator’ model would be to adopt a less abstract approach and describe translation competence in terms of generalizations based on inferences drawn from the observation of translator performance. A study of this type suggests an inductive approach: finding features in the data of the product which suggest the existence of particular elements and systematic relations in the process. We would envisage a translator expert system (Bell, 1991). A final alternative would be to deny the competence–performance dichotomy and redefine our objective as the specification of a multi-component ‘communicative competence’ which would consist, minimally, of four areas of knowledge and skills; grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, discourse competence and strategic competence (Swain, 1985 and Hymes, 1971). This approach would lead us (adapting Hymes’ definition of communicative competence) to attempt to specify ‘translator communicative competence’: the knowledge and ability possessed by the translator which permits him/her to create communicative acts – discourse – which are not only (and not necessarily) grammatical but … socially appropriate (Halliday, 1985). A commitment to this position would make us assert that translator must possess linguistic competence in both languages and communicative competence in both cultures.
3.3. Shift to socioculturally oriented concept of translation
3.3.1. Translation: two languages and two cultural traditions
“Translation is a kind of activity which inevitably involves at least two languages and two cultural traditions” (Toury, 1978, p. 200). As this statement implies, translators are permanently faced with the problem of how to treat the cultural aspects implicit in a source text (ST) and of finding the most appropriate technique of successfully conveying these aspects in the target language (TL). These problems may vary in scope depending on the cultural and linguistic gap between the two (or more) languages concerned (see Nida, 1964, p. 130). Language and culture may, then, be seen as being closely related and both aspects must be considered for translation. The notion of culture is essential to considering the implications for translation and, despite the differences in opinion as to whether language is part of culture or not, the two notions appear to be inseparable. Lotman’s theory states that “no language can exist unless it is steeped in the context of culture; and no culture can exist which does not have at its centre, the structure of natural language” (Lotman and Uspensky, 1978, p. 211–232). Bassnett (1980, pp. 13–14) underlines the importance of this double consideration when translating by stating that language is “the heart within the body of culture,” the survival of both aspects being interdependent. Linguistic notions of transferring meaning are seen as being only part of the translation process; “a whole set of extra-linguistic criteria” must also be considered. As Bassnett further points out, “the translator must tackle the SL text in such a way that the TL version will correspond to the SL version …. To attempt to impose the value system of the SL culture into the TL culture is dangerous ground” (Bassnett, 1980, p. 23). Thus, when translating, it is important to consider not only the lexical impact on the TL reader, but also the manner in which cultural aspects may be perceived and make translating decisions accordingly (Pym et al., 2006).
Denigration of linguistic models has occurred especially since the 1980s, when TS was characterized by the so-called ‘cultural turn’ (Bassenett and Lefevere, 1990). What happened was a shift from linguistically-oriented approaches to culturally-oriented ones. Influenced by cultural studies, TS has put more emphasis on the cultural aspects of translation and even a linguist like Snell-Hornby has defined translation as a “cross-cultural event (1987), Vermeer (1989) has claimed that a translator should be ‘pluricultural’ (seeSnell-Hornby, 1988, p. 46), while V. Ivir has gone so far as to state that “translating means translating cultures, not languages” (Ivir, 1987, p. 35).
Accordingly, modern translation studies is no longer concerned with examining whether a translation has been “faithful” to a source text. Instead, the focus is on social, cultural, and communicative practices, on the cultural and ideological significance of translating and of translations, on the external politics of translation, on the relationship between translation behaviour and socio-cultural factors. In other words, there is a general recognition of the complexity of the phenomenon of translation, an increased concentration on social causation and human agency, and a focus on effects rather than on internal structures. The object of research of translation studies is thus not language(s), as traditionally seen, but human activity in different cultural contexts. The applicability of traditional binary opposites (such as source language/text/culture and target language/text/culture, content vs. form, literal vs. free translation) is called into question, and they are replaced by less stable notions (such as hybrid text. hybrid cultures, space-in-between, intercultural space). It is also widely accepted nowadays that translation studies is not a sub-discipline of applied linguistics (or of comparative literature, cf. Bassnett and Lefevere, 1990, p. 12) but indeed an independent discipline in its own right (Chesterman and Arrojo, 2000). However, since insights and methods from various other disciplines are of relevance for studying all aspects of translation as product and process, translation studies is often characterised as an interdiscipline (cf. Snell-Hornby et al., 1992). In other words, translation itself being a crossroads of processes, products, functions, and agents, its description and explanation call for a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach (Shamma, 2009).
Since translation involves texts with a specific communicative function, the limitations of a narrow linguistic approach soon became obvious. Thus, from the 1970s, insights and approaches of text linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, communication studies, were adopted to translation studies. Translation was defined as text production, as retextualising an SL-text according to the TL conventions. The text moved into the centre of attention, and notions such as textuality, context, culture, communicative intention, function, text type, genre, and genre conventions have had an impact on reflecting about translation. Texts are produced and received with a specific purpose, or function, in mind. This is the main argument underlying functionalist approaches to translation, initiated by Vermeer (1989)with his Skopos Theory.
As Robinson (2005, p. 191) points out, it is probably safe to say that there has never been a time when the community of translators was unaware of cultural differences and their significance for translation. Translation theorists have been cognizant of the problems attendant upon cultural knowledge and cultural difference at least since ancient Rome, and translators almost certainly knew all about those problems long before theorists articulated them. The more aware the translator can become of these complexities, including power differentials between cultures and genders, the better a translator/he will be. Cultural knowledge and cultural difference have been a major focus of translator training and translation theory for as long as either has been in existence. The main concern has traditionally been with so-called realia, words and phrases that are so heavily and exclusively grounded in one culture that they are almost impossible to translate into the terms – verbal or otherwise – of another. Long debates have been held over when to paraphrase, when to use the nearest local equivalent, when to coin a new word by translating literally, and when to transcribe. And these “untranslatable” culture – bound words and phrases continue to fascinate translators and translation theorists (see Rheingold, 1988 and Rener, 1989).
Nevertheless, Manfredi (2008, p. 66) argues that taking account of culture does not necessarily mean having to dismiss any kind of linguistic approach to translation. As we have seen, even from a linguistic point of view, language and culture are inextricably connected. Moreover, as House (2002, pp. 92–93)clearly states, if we opt for contextually-oriented linguistic approaches – which see language as a social phenomenon embedded in culture and view the properly understood meaning of any linguistic item as requiring reference to the cultural context, we can tackle translation from both a linguistic and cultural perspective: […] while considering translation to be a particular type of culturally determined practice, [to] also hold that is, at its core, a predominantly linguistic procedure (House, 2002, p. 93).
Culturally-oriented and linguistically-oriented approaches to translation “[…] are not, necessarily mutually exclusive alternatives” (Manfredi, 2007, p. 204). On the contrary, the inextricable link between language and culture can even be highlighted by a linguistic model that views language as a social phenomenon, indisputably embedded in culture. Chesterman (2006) does not support the linguistic-cultural studies divide that is typically used to categorize the shift or conflicting focus of research in translation studies. Instead, Chesterman proposes a classification “consisting of four complementary approaches. These are ‘the textual, the cognitive, the sociological and the cultural” (p. 20). ‘Textual’ covers old (linguistic) chestnuts, such as equivalence, naturalness, fluency and translation universals, and calls for observation of translation products (source text-target text pairs); ‘cognitive’ covers the study of different forms of decision-making, the way a translator processes a text (studied by think-aloud protocols) eye-tracking, or interviews with translators; the ‘sociological’ involves the study of the people, not only the identity and history of translators and their profession but also the networks established with publishers, commissioners, reviewers and others; the ‘cultural’ looks at the role of ideologies, values, power and ethics in translation and sees translation in Bourdieu’s terms as ‘cultural capital’. Since these different spheres are overlapping, Chesterman attempts to define ‘a set of shared assumptions’ for investigation in a field that, hermeneutically, draws on literary analysis, cultural studies and postmodernism and, empirically, on methods from human sciences such as sociology and psychology (p. 24).
Chesterman considers that the growth in translation studies as an interdiscipline has led to fragmentation and that concepts and methodologies are ‘borrowed [from other disciplines] at a superficial level’ which leads to ‘misunderstandings’ since those working in translation studies are often lacking expertise in the other field and even borrowing concepts that may be outdated (p. 19). This is an important criticism; Chesterman’s solution is for collaborative work with scholars in other fields. Chesterman’s proposal is for the adoption of the term ‘consilience’, which has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of the unity of knowledge and was recently revisited in the field of sociobiology by Edward Wilson. Consilience is relevant, in Chesterman’s view, since ‘modem translation studies […] announces itself as a new attempt to cut across boundaries in the search for a deeper understanding of the relations between texts, societies and cultures’ (p. 25). Discenza (2006) summarizes the advantages of this multidisciplinary approach: translation studies help us to recognize the various goals and components of translation without focusing on only one or degrading some, allowing scholarship to extricate itself from modem notions of fidelity to the text to recover the strategies of particular eras, movements, or translators. The direction translation studies is taking is firmly towards the idea of the translator and interpreter as active mediating agents in an activity and a product where cultural difference, social roles and linguistic and economic power are most clearly expressed and need to be problematized and theorized through relevant frameworks from sociology, ethnography and related disciplines.
What has changed in recent translation scholarship on culture is an increasing emphasis on the collective control or shaping of cultural knowledge; the role played by ideology, or what Gramsci (1971) called “hegemony”, in constructing and maintaining cultural knowledge and policing transfers across cultural barriers. Beginning in the late 1970s, several groups of scholars began to explore the impact of cultural system on what gets translated, and why, and how, and how the translation is used. And beginning in the late 1980s, other group of scholars began to explore the ongoing impact of colonization on translation – especially the surviving power differentials between “first world” and “third world” countries and how they control the economics and ideology and thus also the practice of translation (Robinson, 2005 and Baker, 2006).
Pym (1992, p. 25) attempted to define culture as follows: “How might one define the points where one culture stops and another begins? The borders are no easier to draw than those between language and communities. It is enough to define the limits of a culture as the points where transferred texts have had to be (intralingually or interlingually) translated. That is, if a text can adequately be transferred [moved in space and ‘or time] without translation there is cultural continuity. And if a text has been translated, it represents distance between at least two cultures”. In this regard, Robinson (2005, p. 192) argues that texts move in space (are carried, mailed, faxed, e-mailed) or in time (are physically preserved for later generations, who may use the language in which they were written in significantly different ways). Cultural difference is largely a function of the distance they move, the distance from the place or time in which they are written to the place or time in which they are read; and it can be marked by the act or fact of translation. As we approach cultural boundaries, transferred texts become increasingly difficult to understand, until we give up and demand a translation – and it is at the point, Pym suggests, that we know we have moved from one culture to another.
The first group of scholars to begin to move the cultural study of translation out of the realm of realia and into the large-scale political and social systems have been variously identified as the polysystems, translation studies, descriptive translation studies, or manipulation school (see Gentzler, 1993). Beginning in the late 1970s, they – people like Holmes, 1975, Even-Zohar, 1979, Even-Zohar, 1981, Toury, 1995,Lefevere, 1992 and Bassenett, 1980, Snell Hornby, 1995 and Hermans, 1985 – explored the cultural systems that controlled translation and their impact on the norms and practices of actual translation work. One of their main assumptions was, and remains today, that translation is always controlled by the target culture; rather than arguing over the correct type of equivalence to strive for and how to achieve it, they insisted that the belief structures, value systems, literary and linguistic conventions, moral norms, and political expediencies of the target culture always shape translations in powerful ways, in the process shaping translators’ notions of “equivalence” as well. This “relativistic” view is typical of the cultural turn translation studies has taken over the past two decades or so: away from universal forms and norms to culturally contingent ones; away from prescriptions designed to control all translators, to descriptions of the ways in which target cultures control specific ones. In the late 1980s and 1990s several new trends in culturally oriented translation theory have expanded upon and to some extent displaced descriptive translation studies. In particular, feminist and postcolonial approaches to translation have had a major impact on the field.
The cultural turn might best be highlighted by imaging two scenarios. In the first scenario, God created heaven and earth and everything on it, including translation. To everything he gave a stable form, appearance, and name. To the act of restating in a second language what someone has expressed in a first he gave the name translation; its appearance was to be lowly, humble, subservient; its form fidelity or equivalence, as exact a correspondence as possible between the meaning of the source and target texts. These properties he decreed for all times and all places. This and only this was translation. Anyone who deviated from the form and appearance of translation did not deserve the name of “translator”, and the product of such deviation could certainly not be named a “translation”. In the second scenario; translation arose organically out of attempts to communicate with people who spoke another language; its origins lay in commerce and trade, politics and war. Translators and interpreters were trained and hired by people with money and power who wanted to make sure that their messages were conveyed faithfully to the other side of a negotiation, and that they understood exactly what the other side was saying to them. Eventually, when these people grew powerful enough to control huge geographical segments of the world; these power affiliations were dressed up in the vestments of universality – whence the first scenario. But translation remained a contested ground, fought over by conflicting power interests: you bring your translator, I’ll bring mine, and we’ll see who imposes what interpretation on the events that transpires. Today as well, professional translators must in most cases conform to the expectations of the people who pay them to translate. If a client says edit, the translator edits; if the client says do not edit, the translator does not edit. If the client says do a literal translation, and then a literal back-translation to prove you’ve followed my orders, that is exactly what the translator does. Translators can refuse to do a job that they find morally repugnant, or professionally unethical, or practically impossible; they can also resist and attempt to reshape the orders they get from the people with the money. But the whats and the hows and the whys of translation are by and large controlled by publishers, clients, and agencies – not by universal norms (Robinson, 2005, p. 196). The happy universalism of liberal humanist thought, according to which people are basically the same everywhere, everybody wants and knows basically the same things and uses language in roughly similar ways, so that anything that can be said in one language can be said in another, has come under heavy attack. That universalism is increasingly seen as an illusion projected outward by hegemonic cultures (patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism) in an attempt to force subjected cultures to conform to centralized norms: be like us and you will be civilized, modern, cultured, rational, intelligent; be like us and you will be seen as “truly human”, part of the great “brotherhood of man”.
3.3.2. Translation in cultural studies
It can be said that the first concept in cultural translation studies was cultural turn that in 1978 was presaged by the work on Polysystems and translation norms by Even-Zohar and in 1980 by Toury. They dismiss the linguistic kinds of theories of translation and refer to them as having moved from word to text as a unit but not beyond. They themselves go beyond language and focus on the interaction between translation and culture, on the way culture impacts and constraints translation and on the larger issues of context, history and convention. Therefore, the move from translation as a text to translation as culture and politics is what they call it a Cultural Turn in translation studies and became the ground for a metaphor adopted by Bassnett and Lefevere in 1990. In fact, Cultural Turn is the metaphor adopted by Cultural Studies oriented translation theories to refer to the analysis of translation in its cultural, political, and ideological context. The turn has been extended to incorporate a whole range of approaches from cultural studies and is a true indicator of the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary translation studies. As the result of this so called Cultural Turn, cultural studies have taken an increasingly keen interest in translation. One consequence of this has been bringing together scholars from different disciplines. It is here important to mention that these cultural theorists have kept their own ideology and agendas that drive their own criticism. These cultural approaches have widened the horizons of translation studies with new insights but at the same there has been a strong element of conflict among them. It is good to mention that the existence of such differences of perspectives is inevitable.
The first theory developed in this field was introduced by Mounin in 1963 who underlined the importance of the signification of a lexical item claiming that only if this notion is considered will the translated item fulfill its function correctly. The problem with this theory is that all the cultural elements do not involve just the items, what a translator should do in the case of cultural implications which are implied in the background knowledge of SL readers? Discussing the problems of correspondence in translation, Nida confers equal importance to both linguistic and cultural differences between the SL and the TL and concludes that “differences between cultures may cause more severe complications for the translator than do differences in language structure” (Nida, 1964, p. 130). It is further explained that parallels in culture often provide a common understanding despite significant formal shifts in translation. The cultural implications for translation are thus of significant importance as well as lexical concerns. Nida’s definitions of formal and dynamic equivalence (see Nida, 1964, p. 129) may also be seen to apply when considering cultural implications for translation. According to Nida, a “gloss translation” mostly typifies formal equivalence where form and content are reproduced as faithfully as possible and the TL reader is able to “understand as much as he can of the customs, manner of thought, and means of expression” of the SL context (Nida, 1964, p. 129). Contrasting with this idea, dynamic equivalence “tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture” without insisting that he “understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context” (idem). According to him problems may vary in scope depending on the cultural and linguistic gap between the two (or more) languages concerned.
Vermeer (1989) introduced ‘skopos theory’ which is a Greek word for ‘aim’ or ‘purpose’. It is entered into translation theory as a technical term for the purpose of translation and of the action of translating. Skopos theory focuses above all on the purpose of translation, which determines the translation method and strategies that are to be employed in order to produce a functionally adequate result. The result is TT, which Vermeer calls translatum. Therefore, knowing why SL is to be translated and the what function of TT will be are crucial for the translator. Reiss and Vermeer (1984) in their book with the title of ‘Groundwork for a General Theory of Translation’ concentrated on the basic underlying ‘rules’ of this theory which involve: (1) a translatum (or TT) is determined by its skopos, (2) a TT is an offer of information in a target culture and TL, considering an offer of information in a source culture and SL. This relates the ST and TT to their function in their respective linguistic and cultural contexts. The translator is once again the key player in the process of intercultural communication and the production of the translatum because of the purpose of the translation.
Newmark (1988) defines culture as “the way of life and its manifestations that are peculiar to a community that use a particular language as its means of expression” (1988, p. 94), thus acknowledging that each language group has its own culturally specific features. He further clearly states that operationally he does “not regard language as a component or feature of culture” (Newmark 1988, p. 95) in direct opposition to the view taken by Vermeer who states that “language is part of a culture” (1989, p. 222). According to Newmark, Vermeer’s stance would imply the impossibility to translate whereas for the latter, translating the source language (SL) into a suitable form of TL is part of the translator’s role in transcultural communication. When considering the translation of cultural words and notions, Newmark proposes two opposing methods: transference and componential analysis (Newmark, 1988, p. 96). As Newmark mentions, transference gives “local colour”, keeping cultural names and concepts. Although placing the emphasis on culture, meaningful to initiated readers, he claims this method may cause problems for the general readership and limit the comprehension of certain aspects. The importance of the translation process in communication leads Newmark to propose componential analysis which he describes as being “the most accurate translation procedure, which excludes the culture and highlights the message” (Newmark, 1988, p. 96).
Venuti (1992) mentioned the effective powers controlling translation. He believed that in addition to governments and other politically motivated institutions which may decide to censor or promote certain works, there are groups and social institutions which would include various players in the publication as a whole. These are the publishers and editors who choose the works and commission the translations, pay the translators and often dictate the translation method. They also include the literary agents, marketing and sales teams and reviewers. Each of these players has a particular position and role within the dominant cultural and political agenda of his/her time and place. Power play is an important theme for cultural commentators and translation scholars. In both theory and practice of translation, power resides in the deployment of language as an ideological weapon for excluding or including a reader, a value system, a set of beliefs, or even an entire culture. Baker (1992) believed that it is necessary for a translator to have knowledge about semantics and lexical sets. Because in this case S/he would appreciate the “value” of the word in a given system knowledge and the difference of structures in SL and TL. This allows him to assess the value of a given item in a lexical set, and S/he can develop strategies for dealing with non-equivalence semantic field. Baker stated that SL word may express a concept which is totally unknown in the target culture. It can be abstract or concrete. It maybe a religious belief, a social custom or even a type of food. In her book, In Other Words, she argued about the common non-equivalents to which a translator comes across while translating from SL into TL, while both languages have their distinguished specific culture.
Coulthard (1992) highlighted the importance of defining the ideal reader for whom the author attributes the knowledge of certain facts, memory of certain experiences … plus certain opinions, preferences and prejudices and a certain level of linguistic competence. Then the translator should identify TL reader for whom he is translating and match the cultural differences between two languages. He said that the translator’s first and major difficulty is the construction of a new ideal reader who, even if he has the same academic, professional and intellectual level as the original reader, will have significantly different textual expectations and cultural knowledge.
Venuti (1995) insisted that the scope of translation studies need to be broadened to take the account of the value-driven nature of socio-cultural framework. He used the term invisibility to describe the translator situation and activity in Anglo-American culture. He said that this invisibility is produced by: (1) the way the translators themselves tend to translate fluently into English, to produce an idiomatic and readable TT, thus creating illusion of transparency; and (2) the way the translated texts are typically read in the target culture: “A translated text, whether prose or poetry or non-fiction is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning the foreign text; the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the original” (Venuti, 1995). Venuti discussed invisibility hand in hand with two types of translating strategies: domestication and foreignization. He considered domestication as dominating Anglo-American (TL) translation culture. Just as the postcolonialists were alert to the cultural effects of the differential in power relation between colony and ex-colony, so Venuti bemoaned the phenomenon of domestication since it involves reduction of the foreign text to the target language cultural values. This entails translating in a transparent, fluent, invisible style in order to minimize the foreignness of the TT. Venuti believed that a translator should leave the reader in peace, as much as possible, and he should move the author toward him. Foregnization, on the other hand, entails choosing a foreign text and developing a translation method along lines which was excluded by dominant cultural values in target language. Ventuti considers the foreignizing method to be an ethno deviant pressure on target language cultural values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad. According to him, it is highly desirable in an effort to restrain the ethnocentric violence translation. The foreignizing method of translating, a strategy Venuti also termed ‘resistancy’, is a non-fluent or estranging translation style designed to make visible the persistence of translator by highlighting the foreign identity of ST and protecting it from the ideological dominance of the target culture. In his book ‘The Scandals of Translation’ Venuti, 1998 and Venuti, 1998b insisted on foreignizing or, as he also called it, ‘minoritizing’ translation, to cultivate a varied and heterogeneous discourse. As far as language is concerned, the minoritizing or foriegnizing method of Venuti’s translation comes through in the deliberate inclusion of foreignizing elements in a bid to make the translator visible and to make the reader realize that he is reading a translation of the work from a foreign culture. Foreignization is a close adherent to the ST structure and syntax. Venuti also said that the terms may change meaning across time and location.
Simon (1996) mentioned that cultural studies bring to translation an understanding of the complexities of gender and culture and it allows us to situate linguistic transfer. She considered a language of sexism in translation studies, with its image of dominance, fidelity, faithfulness and betrayal. She mentioned the seventeenth century Image of “les belles infidels” (unfaithful beauties), translations into French that were artistically beautiful but unfaithful. She went further and investigated George Steiner’s male-oriented image of translation as penetration. The feminist theorists, more or less, see a parallel between the status of translation which is often considered to be a derivative and inferior to the original writing and that of women so often repressed in society and literature. This is the core feminist translation that theory seeks to identify and critique the tangle of the concepts which relegate both women and translation to the bottom of the social and literary ladder. Simon takes this further in the concept of the committed translation project. Translation project here can be defined as such: an approach to literary translation in which feminist translators openly advocate and implement strategies (linguistic or otherwise) to foreground the feminist in the translated text. It may seem worthy to mention that the opposite of translation project occurs when gender-marked works are translated in such a way that their distinctive characteristics are affected.
With the spread of deconstruction and cultural studies in the academy, the subject of ideology became an important area of study. The field of translation studies presents no exception to this general trend. It should also be mentioned that the concept of ideology is not something new and it has been an area of interest from a long time ago. The problem of discussing translation and ideology is one of definition. There are so many definitions of ideology that it is impossible to review them all. For instance as Hatim and Mason (1997) stated that ideology encompasses the tacit assumptions, beliefs and value systems which are shared collectively by social groups. They make a distinction between the ideology of translating and the translation of ideology. Whereas the former refers to the basic orientation chosen by the translator operating within a social and cultural context. In translation of ideology they examined the extent of mediation supplied by a translator of sensitive texts. Here mediation is defined as the extent to which translators intervene in the transfer process, feeding their own knowledge and beliefs into processing the text.
Hermans (1999) stated that Culture refers to all socially conditioned aspects of human life. According to him translation can and should be recognized as a social phenomenon, a cultural practice. He said that we bring into translation both cognitive and normative expectations, which are continually being negotiated, confirmed, adjusted, and modified by practicing translators and by all who deal with translation. These expectations result from the communication within the translation system, for instance, between actual translations and statements about translation, and between the translation system and other social systems. Regarding cultural translation, Schulte (2002) mentioned that for dealing with the cultural gaps cultural transposition is needed. According to him cultural transposition has a scale of degrees that are toward the choice of features indigenous to target language and culture rather than features which are rooted in source culture. The result here is foreign features reduced in target text and is to some extent naturalized. The scale here is from an extreme which is mostly based on source culture (exoticism) to the other extreme which is mostly based on target culture (cultural transplantation): (1) exoticism: the degree of adaptation is very low here. The translation carries the cultural features and grammar of SL to TL. It is very close to transference; (2) calque: calque includes TL words but in SL structure, therefore, while it is unidiomatic to target reader but it is familiar to a large extent; (3) cultural borrowing: it is to transfer the ST expression verbatim into the TT. No adaptation of SL expression Into TL forms. After a time they usually become a standard in TL terms. Cultural borrowing is very frequent in history, legal, social, political texts; for example, “La langue” and “La parole” in linguistics; (4) communicative translation: communicative translation is usually adopted for culture specific cliches, such as idioms, proverbs, fixed expression, etc. In such cases the translator substitutes SL word with an existing concept in target culture. In cultural substitution the propositional meaning is not the same but it has similar impact on target reader. The literal translation here may sound comic. The degree of using this strategy sometimes depends on the license which is given to the translator by commissioners and also the purpose of translation, and (5) cultural transplantation: the whole text is rewritten in target culture. The TL word is not a literal equivalent but has similar cultural connotations to some extent. It is another type of extreme but toward target culture and the whole concept is transplanted in TL. A normal translation should avoid both exoticism and cultural transplantation.
According to Wiersema (2004), cultures are getting closer and closer and this is something that he believed translators need to take into account. In the end it all depends on what the translator, or more often, the publisher wants to achieve with a certain translation. In his opinion by entering SL cultural elements: (a) the text will be read more fluently (no stops); (b) the text remains more exotic, more foreign; (c) the translator is closer to the source culture, and (d) the reader of the target texts gets a more genuine image of the source culture. He mentioned that of the many factors that may lead to misreadings in translation are cultural presuppositions. Cultural presuppositions merit special attention from translators because they can substantially and systematically affect their interpretation of facts and events in the source text without their even knowing it. He pinpointed the relationship between cultural presuppositions and translational misreadings. According to him misreadings in translation are often caused by a translator’s presuppositions about the reality of the source language community. These presuppositions are usually culturally-derived and deserve the special attention of the translator. He showed how cultural presuppositions work to produce misreadings in translation. According to Ping “Cultural presupposition,” refers to underlying assumptions, beliefs, and ideas that are culturally rooted, widespread. According to him anthropologists agree on the following features of culture: (1) culture is socially acquired instead of biologically transmitted; (2) culture is shared among the members of a community rather being unique to an individual; (3) culture is symbolic. Symbolizing means assigning to entities and events meanings which are external to them and which cannot be grasped alone. Language is the most typical symbolic system within culture; and (4) culture is integrated. Each aspect of culture is tied in with all other aspects.
3.4. Globalization
Snell-Hornby’s important book, “Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach”, first published in 1988, was one of the very first publications which argued strongly for the recognition of translation studies as an academic discipline in its own right. She situates translation into the wider context of multilingual and multicultural communication. She illustrates how recent trends, notably globalization and advances in technology, have influenced international communication and translation, and she discusses the consequences for the job profile of the translator. Globalization, however, is accompanied by an opposite trend, tribalisation, which too, has an effect on our perception of language, and also on translation. Snell-Hornby argues that advances in technology have affected people’s production and perception of language. The fact that ever-increasing amounts of information are (to be) processed with ever increasing speed, has consequences for the languages. However, there seems to be a counter-trend: with the rapidly growing number of Internet users, the number of languages is growing too. However, English is still by far the most widely used language, the language by which a global market can best be reached (Bielsa, 2005).
Wiersema (2004) in his essay “globalization and translation” stated that globalization is linked to English being a lingua franca; the language is said to be used at conferences (interpreting) and seen as the main language in the new technologies. The use of English as a global language is an important trend in world communication. Globalisation is also linked to the field of translation studies. Furthermore, globalisation is placed in the context of changes in economics, science, technology, and society. Globalization and technology are very helpful to translators in that translators have more access to online information, such as dictionaries of lesser-known languages. According to him such comments can be extended to the readers of translations. Should the target text be challenging for a reader, the Internet can help him understand foreign elements in the text. Thus the text can be written in a more foreignising/exoticising manner. He mentioned a relatively new trend wherein culturally bound elements (some, one might say, untranslatable), are not translated. He believed that this trend contributes to learning and understanding foreign cultures. Context explains culture, and adopting (not necessarily adapting) a selection of words enriches the target text, makes it more exotic and thus more interesting for those who want to learn more about the culture in question. Eventually, these new words may find their way into target language dictionaries. Translators will then have contributed to enriching their own languages with loan words from the source language. He considered these entering loan words into TL as an important aspect of translation. Translation brings cultures closer. He stated that at this century the process of globalization is moving faster than ever before and there is no indication that it will stall any time soon. In each translation there will be a certain distortion between cultures. The translator will have to defend the choices he/she makes, but there is currently an option for including more foreign words in target texts. Therefore, it is now possible to keep SL cultural elements in target texts. According to him translator has three options for the translation of cultural elements: (1) adopting the foreign word without any explanation; (2) adopting the foreign word with extensive explanations; and (3) rewriting the text to make it more comprehensible to the target-language audience.
3.5. Postcolonial translation studies
Post-colonialism is one of the most thriving points of contact between cultural studies and translation studies. It can be defined as a broad cultural approach to the study of power relations between different groups, cultures or peoples in which language, literature and translation may play a role. Spivak’s work is indicative of how cultural studies and especially post-colonialism has over the past decade focused on issues of translation, the translational and colonization. The linking of colonization and translation is accompanied by the argument that translation has played an active role in the colonization process and in disseminating an ideologically motivated image of colonized people. The metaphor has been used of the colony as an imitative and inferior translational copy whose suppressed identity has been overwritten by the colonizer. The postcolonial concepts may have conveyed a view of translation as just a damaging instrument of the colonizers who imposed their language and used translation to construct a distorted image of the suppressed people which served to reinforce the hierarchal structure of the colony. However, some critics of post-colonialism, like Robinson, 1997a and Robinson, 1997b, believe that the view of the translation as purely harmful and pernicious tool of the empire is inaccurate.
The most succinct and accessible introduction to postcolonial translation studies is offered by Jacquemond (1992) and Robinson, 1997a and Robinson, 1997b. Jacquemond is specifically concerned with translation between France and Egypt, but is also interested generally in the power differentials between cultures, in particular between “hegemonic” or dominant or more powerful cultures (usually former colonizers) and “dominated” or less powerful cultures (usually former colonies). The translator from a hegemonic culture into a dominated one, he says, serves the hegemonic culture in its desire to integrate its cultural products into the dominated culture – this is the classic case where the source culture controls translation. Even when the target culture desires, or seems to desire, the translation, that desire is manufactured and controlled by the source culture. Going the other way, the translator from a dominated culture into a hegemonic again serves the hegemonic culture, but this time not servilely, rather as the “authoritative mediator” (Jacquemond, 1992, p. 156) who helps to convert the dominated culture into something easy for the hegemonic culture to recognize as “other” and inferior. He covers four broad areas of comparison: (1) a dominated culture will invariably translate far more of a hegemonic culture, (2) when a hegemonic culture does translate works produced by the dominated culture, those works will be perceived and presented as difficult, mysterious, inscrutable, esoteric, and in need of a small cadre of intellectuals to interpret them, while a dominated culture will translate a hegemonic culture’s works accessible for the masses, (3) a hegemonic culture will only translate those works by authors in a dominated culture that fit the former’s preconceived notions of the latter, and (4) authors in a dominated culture who dream of reaching a “large audience” will tend to write for translation into a hegemonic language, and this will require conforming to some extent to stereotypes. Interestingly, while post colonial approaches to translation have tended to analyze the power structures controlling translation and call for more resistance to those structures, feminist approaches have been more oriented toward resistance than toward analysis Robinson, 1997a and Robinson, 1997b.
One theorist who has paid attention to the project of translation in the context of post-colonialism is Gayatri Spivak. With experience in the translation of Derrida, as well as texts by Mahasweta Devi and other Bengali writers, Spivak is one of the few cultural studies theorists to speak of translation from a practical as well as a theoretical point of view. She presents these ideas principally in “The Politics of Translation” (Spivak 1993).
4. Concluding remarks
Reviewing translation studies for 2005 (Anderman, 2005, Anderman and Rogers, 2005, Armstrong, 2005,Bermann and Wood, 2005, Englund, 2005, House et al., 2005, Hung, 2005, Malmkjar, 2005 and Santaemilia, 2005) clearly demonstrates that the most recent development in TS shows the strong interest in non-Western traditions, translation history and the interface with other disciplines, especially with sociology and identity theory. This situation reflects “a booming discipline, or interdiscipline, but also in some ways a divergence of opinion as to the core subject of study” (Munday, 2008, p. 1). The year 2006 continued these foci but was remarkable for the number, breadth and quality of publication (Delabastita et al., 2006, Snell-Hornby, 2006, Duarte et al., 2006, Pym, 2006, Baker, 2006 and France and Kenneth, 2006; Morini, 2006 and Boase-Beier, 2005; Woods, 2006, Van Coillie et al., 2006, Lathey, 2006,Cronin, 2006, Cheung, 2006 and Hermans, 2006).
The question which imposes itself in this regard is, “How do we prepare future professional translators more and more effectively for the continuously changing requirements of the world? What are the consequences of a changing job profile for translator training at institutions? Today, for example, specialization becomes more and more necessary. But can, and should, universities prepare their translation students for highly specialized translation in a variety of subject domains? Is training in specialized translation better left to translation agencies or to professional organizations? Should training at institutions rather focus on developing an awareness of what professional decision-making in translation involves? Is training in technology-management skills, business and customer-management abilities to be part of translator training? Do we risk that what we do today will be outdated tomorrow because the developments are extremely fast? What exactly is the task of a university in this context?
Decisions as to a general translation policy in a country (e.g. who decides how many and which texts are translated, from and into which languages?), including a policy of translator training (where are translators trained? in which languages? based on which curriculum and syllabus?) are also influenced by the status of translation studies as an academic discipline. As Snell-Hornby (1988) argues, globalization puts new demands on the discipline as well. What kind of academic discipline is it? Where is the discipline today, and where is it going? Over the last years, it has increasingly been recognized and more and more forcefully argued within the discipline that translation is not a purely linguistic activity. As a consequence, knowledge and methods from other disciplines, notably psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, communication studies, anthropology, and cultural studies, have been integrated into translation studies, making it into an interdiscipline par excellence.
Although most scholars today do agree that translation studies is not a sub-discipline of (applied) linguistics, the questions ‘where do we stand?’ and ‘where do we go?’ are being discussed more and more vigorously. Translation Studies continuously brings new theoretical developments to bear upon its disciplinary object. What is obvious in the substantially growing literature is that scholars have come to translation (studies) from a variety of fields and disciplinary backgrounds. Whereas traditionally its background was linguistics (or its sub-disciplines, particularly pragmatics, textlinguistics), and also literature. Nowadays there is an increasing input from Cultural Studies. One of the consequences is terminological inconsistency (Schaffner, 1999). When we take concepts from different disciplines we should clearly define them and clarify their disciplinary origin. It seems to be a general phenomenon that different academic disciplines use the same labels, however, with different meanings.
References
A. Al-Wahy
Translation and the textual meaning of the clause: a systematic-functional perspective
Philology, XXXIII (1999), pp. 68–106
Anderman, G., 2005. Europe on Stage: Translation and Theatre. Oberon.
Anderman, G., Rogers, M. (Eds.), 2005. In and Out of English: For Better, For Worse? Multilingual Matters.
Anne Brooks-Lewis, K., 2009. Adult learners’ perceptions of the incorporation of their L1 in foreign language teaching and learning. Language Learning, vol. 62.
Armstrong, N., 2005. Translation, Linguistic Culture: A French–English Handbook. Multilingual Matters.
E. Astington
Equivalence. Translation Difficulties and Devices, French–English, English–French
Cambridge University Press (1983)
M. Baker
In Other Words: A Course Book on Translation
Routledge, London/New York (1992)
M. Baker (Ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Routledge, London/New York (1998)
M. Baker
Translation and Conflict
Routledge, London and New York (2006)
S. Bassenett, A. Lefevere (Eds.), Translation, History and Culture, Printer, London (1990)
Bassenett, S., 1980/1991/2002. Translation Studies. Routledge, London/New York.
S. Bassenett
Translation Studies
Routledge, London (1996)
S. Bassenett (Ed.), Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, Routledge, London and New York (1999)
R.T. Bell
Translation theory; where are we going?
META, 31 (4) (1991), pp. 403–415 (Montreal)
Benabdelali, 2006. Fi Attarjama [in translation], first ed. Dar Toubkal, Casablanca.
Bermann, S., Wood, M. (Eds.), 2005. Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation Princeton University Press.
Bielsa, E., 2005. Globalization as Translation: An Approximation to the Key but Invisible Role of Translation in Globalization. CSGR Working Paper, No. 163/05.
L. Bloomfield
Language
Holt, New York (1933)
J. Boase-Beier
Stylistic Approaches to Translation. Translation Theories Explored
St. Jerome (2005)
John C. Catford
A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay on Applied Linguistics
Oxford University Press, London (1965)
A. Chesterman
Memes of Translation: The Spread of Idea in Translation Theory
John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia (2006)
A. Chesterman, E. Wagner
Can Theory Help Translators? A Dialogue Between the Ivory Tower and the Wordface
St. Jerome, Manchester (2002)
Andrew Chesterman, Rosemary Arrojo
Shared Ground in Translation Studies
Target, 12 (1) (2000), pp. 151–160
Cheung, M. (Ed.), 2006. An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project, vol. 1. St. Jerome.
Coulthard, M., 1992. Linguistic Constraints on Translation. In Studies in Translation. Universidada Fedaral de Santa Catarina, pp. 9–23.
Cronin, Michael, 2006. Translation and Identity. Routledge.
Delabastita, D., Lieven, D., Reine, M. (Eds.), 2006. Functional Approaches to Culture and Translation: Selected Papers by Jose Lambert. Benjamins Translation Library, John Benjamins.
Discenza Nocole, G., 2006. The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boerthius. New York State, UP.
J. Duarte, A. Ferreia, R. Assis, S. Teressa (Eds.), Translation Studies of the Interface of the Disciplines, John Benjamin, Benjamins Translation Library EST Subseries (2006)
El-dali, H., 2008. How Much Translation is Permitted in FL Instruction? Perspectives from Translation Studies and Linguistics. Paper Presented at the First International UAE Conference on Translation and Globalization.
Englund, D., 2005. Expertise and Explicitation in the Translation Process. Benjamins Translation Library, John Benjamins.
I. Even-Zohar
Polysystem theory
Poetics Today, 1 (1–2) (1979), pp. 283–305
I. Even-Zohar
Translation theory today: a call for transfer theory
Poetics Today, 2 (4) (1981), pp. 1–7 (Reprinted as “Translation and Transfer”. Poetics Today 11, 1 (1990) 73–78)
Peter Fawcett
Translation and Language: Linguistic Theories Explained
St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester (1997)
France, P., Kenneth, H. (Eds.), 2006. The Oxford History of Literary Translation into English, vol. 4. Oxford University Press, pp. 179–190.
Genc, B., Bada, E., 2005. Culture in Language Learning and Teaching. The Reading Matrix, vol. 5, No. 1.
Edwin Gentzler
Contemporary Translation Theories
Routledge, London and New York (1993)
Antonio Gramsci
Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated and Edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
International Publishers, New York (1971)
C. Gutknecht
Translation
M. Aronoff, J. Miller (Eds.), The Handbook of Linguistics, Blackwell Publishers (2001)
Halliday, M., 1961. Linguistics and machine translation. In: McIntosh, A., Halliday, M. (Eds.), Theory of Translation. Methuen, London.
Halliday, M.A.K., 1985/1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar, second ed. Arnold, London.
M.A.K. Halliday
Language theory and translation practice
Revista Internazional di tecnia della traduzione (1992), pp. 15–25
Halliday, M.A.K., Hasan, R. 1985/1989. Language, Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-semiotic Perspective. Deakin University Press/Oxford University Press, Australia/Oxford.
B. Hatim
Teaching and Researching Translation
Pearson Education Limited, Harlow (2001)
Basil Hatim, Ian Mason
The Translator as Communicator
Routledge, London and New York (1997)
B. Hatim, J. Munday
Translation: An Advanced Resource Book
Routledge, London/New York (2004)
B. Hatim, J. Munday
Translation: An Advance Resource Book
Routledge, London and New York (2006)
Hermans, Theo (Ed.), 1985. The Manipulation of the Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. Cropom Helm, London.
Theo Hermans
Translation in Systems. Descriptive and System-oriented Approaches Explained
St. Jerome, Manchester (1999)
Hermans, Theo (Ed.), 2006. Translating Others, vol. 1. St. Jerome.
J. Holmes
The Nature of Translation
Mouton, The Hague (1970)
James S. Holmes
The Name and Nature of Translation Studies
Translation Studies Section, Department of General Literary Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam (1975)
S. Holmes
Translated Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies
Rodopi, Amsterdam (1988)
House, J., 2001. In: Steiner, E., Yallope (Eds.), How Do We Know When a Translation is Good? Cambridge University Press, pp. 127–160.
House, J., 2002. Universality versus culture specificity in translation. In: Richardi, A. (Ed.), Translation Studies: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline. Cambridge, CUP, pp. 92–110.
J. House
Communicative Styles in English and German
European Journal of English Studies (10) (2006), pp. 249–267
J. House
Text and context in translation
Journal of Pragmatics, 38 (2006), pp. 338–358
J. House
Beyond intervention: universals in translation
Trans-kom (1) (2008), pp. 6–19
House, J., Rosairo, M., Martin, B., (Eds.), 2005. Translation and the Construction of Identity. International association for Translation and Intercultural Studies.
E. Hung (Ed.), Translation and Cultural Changes: Studies in History, Norms and Image-Projection, John Benjamins, Benjamin Translation Library (2005)
D. Hymes
On communicative competence
J. Pride, S. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1971)
V. Ivir
Procedure and strategies for the translation of culture
Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics [Special issue on Translation Across Cultures. G. Toury (Ed.)], 13 (2) (1987), pp. 35–46
F. Jacobsen
Translation: A Traditional Craft
Nordisk Forlag, Copenhagen (1958)
Jacquemond, Richard, 1992. Translation and cultural hegemony: the case of French–Arabic translation. In: Lawrence, Venutti (Ed.), Rethinking Translation. Routledge, London and New York, pp. 139–58.
R. Jakobson
On linguistic aspect of translation
(2002/2004) L. Venuti (Ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (second ed.), Routlegdge, New York/London (1959), pp. 138–143
J. Katz
Propositional Structure and Illocutionary Force. A Study of the Contribution of Sentence Meaning to Speech Acts
Harvester Press, New York (1978)
W. Koller
The concept of equivalence and the object of translation studies
Target, 7 (2) (1995), pp. 191–222
Lathey, G. (Ed.), 2006. The Translation of Children’s Literature: A Reader. Multilingual Matters.
Lefevere, A., 1978. Translation studies: the goal of the discipline. In: Holmes, James S., Lambert, Jose, van den Broeck, Raymond (Eds.), Literature and Translation. Louvain, ACCO.
Lefevere, A., 1992. Translation Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. Routledge, London.
Levy, J., 1963. The Art of Translation. Prague.
Lotman, J., Uspensky, B., 1978. On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture. New Literary History, pp. 211–32.
Kirsten Malmkjar
Linguistics and the Language of Translation
Edinburg Textbooks in Applied Linguistics, Edinburgh UP (2005)
M. Manfredi
The issue of ‘visibility’ in translating topography and the culture of London and Bombay/Mumbai
L. Jottini, G. Del Lungo, J. Douthwaite (Eds.), Cityscapes: Islands of the Self. Language Studies, vol. 2CUEC, Cagliari (2007), pp. 203–214
Manfredi, M., 2008. Translating Text and Context: Translational Studies and Systematic Functional Linguistics, vol. 1. Cagliari, CUEC.
S. McGuire
Translation Studies
Methuen, London (1980)
Morini, Massimillano, 2006. Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice. Ashgate.
S. Moruwamon, S. Kolawole
Critical approaches to the notion of translatability and untranslatability of texts in translation studies
Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences, 4 (3) (2007), pp. 375–379
G. Mounin
Les problèmes théoriques de la traduction
Gallimard, Paris (1963)
J. Munday
Introducing Translation Studies
Routledge, London/New York (2001)
Munday, J., 2008. Translation Studies: Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. The English Association.
A. Neubert
Text-bound translation teaching
W. Willis, G. Thome (Eds.), Translation Theory and its Implementation in the Teaching of Translating and Interpreting, Narr, Tubingen (1984), pp. 61–70
P. Newmark
A Textbook of Translation
Prentice Hall, New York/London/Toronto/Sydney (1988)
E. Nida
Principle of correspondence
L. Venuti (Ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London (1964)
C. Nord
Text Analysis in Translation: Theory, Methodology, and Didactic Application of a Model for Translation-oriented Text Analysis
Rodopi, Amsterdam/Atlanta (1991)
Anthony Pym
Translation and Text Transfer: An Essay on the Principle of Intercultural Communication
Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main (1992)
Pym, A., 2006. Globalization and the Politics of Translation Studies. Meta: Translators’ Journal, vol. 65. pp. 1–16.
Pym, Anthony, Mariam, Shesinger, Zuzana, Jettmarová (Eds.), 2006. Sociocultural Aspects of Translating and Interpreting. Benjamins Library, John Benjamins.
Raskin, V., 1987. Linguistics and natural language processing. In: Nirenburg, S. (Ed.), Language Processing. Manchester, pp. 42–58.
K. Reiss, J. Vermeer
Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationtherie
Niemeyer, Tübingen, Germany (1984)
F. Rener
Interpretation: Language and Translation from Cicero to Tyler
Radopi, Amsterdam and Atlanta, G.A. (1989)
G. Rheingold
They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon on Untranslatable Words and Phrases
Tarcher, New York (1988)
D. Robinson
Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained
St. Jerome, Manchester, UK (1997)
D. Robinson
Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche
St. Jerome, Manchester (1997)
D. Robinson
Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation
Routledge, London and New York (2005)
José Santaemilia (Ed.), Gender, Sex and Translation: The Manipulation of Identities, St. Jerome (2005)
Schaffner, C., 1999. Globalization, Communication, Translation. Current Issues in Language and Society, vol. 6, No. 2.
C. Schaffner
Metaphor and translation: some implication of a cognitive approach
Journal of Pragmatics, 36 (2004), pp. 1253–1269
R. Schulte
The Geography of Translation and Interpretation: Traveling Between Languages
Edwin Mellen, Lewiston, NY (2002)
J. Sehsah
Problems of Literary Translation (with Specific Reference to Theatre Translation)
Cairo Studies in English, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, Egypt (2006) pp. 63–111
Shamma, T., 2009. Translating into the Empire: The Arabic version of Kalila wa Dimna. The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication, vol. 15 No. 1. pp. 65–86.
M. Shuttlworth, M. Cowie
Dictionary of Translation Studies
St. Jerome, Manchester (1997)
Sherry Simon
Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission
Routledge, London (1996)
Mary Snell Hornby
Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach, Revised Edition
John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA (1995)
Snell-Hornby, M., 1988/1995. Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach. Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Snell-Hornby, M, 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Snell-Hornby, Mary, 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? Benjamins Translation Library, John Benjamins.
Mary Snell-Hornby, Franz Pochhacker, Klaus Kaindl (Eds.), Translation Studies. An Interdiscipline, Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia (1992)
G. Spivak
“The Politics of Translation”, Outside in the Teaching Machine
Routledge, New York and London (1993)
E. Steiner
A register-based translation evaluation: an advertisement as a case in point
Target, 10 (2) (1998), pp. 291–318
M. Swain
Large-scale communicative testing: a case study
Y. Lee (Ed.), et al., Testing Communicative Competence of L2 Learners, Harvester Press, New York (1985)
C. Taylor
Language to Language
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998)
Toury, G., 1978. (revised 1995). The nature and role of norms in translation. In: Venuti, L. (Ed.), The Translation Studies Reader. Routledge, London.
Gideon Toury
Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond
John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, P.A. (1995)
Ulrych, M., Bollettieri Bosinelli, R.M., 1999. The State of the Art in Translation Studies: An Overview. Textus XII (2), 219–241.
Van Coillie, Jan, Walter P. Verschueren (eds.), 2006. Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies. St. Jerome.
Lawrence Venuti
Translation as cultural politics: regimes of domestication in English
Textual Practice, 7 (2) (1992), pp. 208–223
Venuti, Lawrence, 1995/2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, second ed. Routledge, London and New York.
L. Venuti
Introduction
The Translator, 4 (1998), pp. 135–144 (Special Issue on “Translation and Minority”)
Lawrence Venuti
The Scandals of Translation: Towards on Ethics of Difference
Routledge, London and New York (1998)
Vermeer, H., 1978/1989. Skopos and commision in translational activity. In: Venuti, L. The Translation Studies Reader. Routledge, London.
H. Widdowson
Exploration in Applied Linguistics
Oxford University Press, Oxford (1997)
N. Wiersema
Globalisation and translation
Translation Journal, 8 (1) (2004), pp. 1–5
Woods, Michelle, 2006. Translating Milan Kundera. Multilingual Matters.
C. Yallop
The practice and theory of translation
R. Steele, T. Threadgold (Eds.), Language Topics: Essays in Honour of Michael Halliday, vol. 1John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia (1987), pp. 347–351
Zakhir, M., 2008. The History of Translation. haraps22@hotmail.com.
http://theoldtree.ru/inostrannye_yazyki_i_yazykoznanie/establishing_and_development_of_the.php
Establishing and development of the theory of translation as a science in the XX century
Establishing and development of the theory of translation as a science in the XX century Ministry of Science and Education of Republic of Kazakhstan Colledge of the Foreign Languages Establishing and development of the theory of translation as a science in the XX century Karaganda 2008 Introduction Many years ago, according to the Bible, all people living on the Earth spoke the same language. As they had had a great desire to reach the God, they began building a very high tower to be closer to him. The God decided to punish them and one morning when they woke up they were speaking the different languages and could not understand each other. Since that very time people have been needing interpreters. Functionally, an interpreter is a person who converts a source language to a target language. The interpreter's function is conveying every semantic element (tone and register) and every intention and feeling of the message that the source-language speaker is directing to the target-language listeners. Language interpreting or interpretation is the intellectual activity of facilitating oral and sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two or more users of different languages. Functionally, interpreting and interpretation are the descriptive words for the activity. In professional practice interpreting denotes the act of facilitating communication from one language form into its equivalent, or approximate equivalent, in another language form. Interpretation denotes the actual product of this work, that is, the message as thus rendered into speech, sign language, writing, non-manual signals, or other language form. This important distinction is observed to avoid confusion. Peter Trent, a senator from Westmont, Canada was sure that: “To think that you can be an interpreter only because you know two languages is the same to think that you can play the piano only because you have two hands”. Each interpreter must know foreign languages very well and of course he must know theory of translation, because it is impossible to translate perfectly without knowing the main basic aspects of the theory of translations. The theme of this work has been chosen because the theory of translation is of great importance in my future life. It has a very interesting history, and was widely developed in the XX century. This century is often called a century of great discoveries, development and progress. Business relations among people, different kinds of communications lead to intensive development of the theory of translation in the XX century. This course paper's aims are to show the history of interpreting, establishing of the theory of translation and its development in the last century. The course paper consists of introduction, two chapters, conclusion and bibliography. In the first chapter devoted to the history of interpreting and establishing of the theory of translation the attention is paid to the definition of the terms “translation” and “interpreting”. It is shown that the history of translation has a very long way, beginning from the ancient times. A special attention is paid to the history of theory. In the second chapter which is dedicated to the development of the theory of translation in the twentieth century attention is paid to Modern western Schools of translation and difference among them is shown. In this chapter the difference between simultaneous and consecutive translation is shown and types of interpreting are stated. History of interpreting and establishing of the theory of translation Translation and interpreting Translation is the interpreting of the meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an equivalent text, likewise called a “translation”, that communicates the same message in another language. The text to be translated is called the “the source text”, and the language that it is to be translated into is called the “target language”; the final product is sometimes called the “target text”. Translation must take into account constraints that include context, the rules of grammar of the two languages, their writing conventions, and their idioms. A common misconception is that there exists a simple word-for-word correspondence between any two languages, and that translation is a straightforward mechanical process; such a word-for-word translation, however, cannot take into account context, grammar, conventions, and idioms. Translation is fraught with the potential for “spilling over” of idioms and usages from one language into the other, since both languages coexist within the translator's mind. Such spilling over easily produce linguistic hybrids such as “Franglais” (French-English), “Spanglish” (Spanish-English), “Poglish” (Polish-English). On the other hand, inter-linguistic spillages have also served the useful purpose of importing calques and loanwords from a source language into a target language that had previously lacked a concept or a convenient expression for the concept. Translators and interpreters have thus played an important role in the evolution of cultures. The art of translation is as old as written literature. Parts of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, among the oldest known literary works, have been found in translations into several Asiatic languages of the second millennium BCE. The Epic of Gilgamesh may have been read, in their own languages, by early authors of the Bible and of the Iliad. With the advent of computers, attempts have been made to computerize or otherwise automate the translation of natural language texts (machine translation) or to use computers as an aid to translation (computer-assisted translation). The latin “translatio” derives from the perfect passive participle, “translatum”, of “transferre” The modern Romance, Germanic and Slavic European languages have generally formed their own equivalent terms for this concept after the Latin model - after “transferre” or after the kindred “traducere” (“to bring across” or “to lead across”). Additionally, the Greek term for “translation”, “metaphrasis” (“a speaking across”), has supplied English with “metaphrase” (a “literal translation”, or “word-for-word” translation) - as contrasted with “paraphrase” (“a saying in other words”, from the Greek “paraphrasis”). “Metaphrase” corresponds, in one of the more recent terminologies, to “formal equivalence”, and “paraphrase”, to “dynamic equivalence”. Newcomers to translation sometimes proceed as if translation were an exact science - as if consistent, one to one correlations existed between the words and phrases of different languages, rendering translations fixed and identically reproducible, much as in cryptography. Such novices may assume that all that is needed to translate a text is to “encode” and “decode” equivalents between the two languages, using a translation dictionary as the “codebook”. On the contrary, such a fixed relationship would only exist were a new language synthesized and simultaneously matched to a pre-existing language's scopes of meaning, etymologies, and lexical ecological niches. If the new language were subsequently to take on a life apart from such cryptographic use, each word would spontaneously begin to assume new shades of meaning and cast off previous associations, thereby vitiating any such artificial synchronization. Henceforth translation would require the disciplines in this article. Another common misconception is that anyone who can speak a second language will make a good translator. In the translation community, it ie generally accepted that the best translations are produced by persons who are translating into their own native languages, as it is rare for someone who has learned a second language to have total fluency in that language. A good translator understands the source language well, has specific experience in the subject matter of the text, and is a good writer in the target language. Moreover, he is not only bilingual but bicultural. It has been debated whether translation is art or craft. Literary translators, such as Gregory Rabassa in “If this be treason”, argue that translation is an art - a teachable one. Other translators, mostly technical, commercial, and legal, regard their “metier” as a craft - again, a teachable one, subject to linguistic analysis, that benefits from academic study. As with other human activities, the distinction between art and craft may be largely a matter of degree. Even a document which appears simple, e.g. a product brochure, requires a certain level of linguistic skill that goes beyond mere technical terminology. Any material used for marketing purposes reflects on the company that produces the product and the brochure. The best translations are obtained through the combined application of good technical-terminology skills and good writing skills. Translation has served as a writing school for many prominent writers. Translators, including the early modern European translators of the Bible, in the course of their work have shaped the very languages into which they have translated. They have acted as bridges for conveying knowledge and ideas between cultures and civilizations. Along with ideas, they have imported, into their own languages, loanwords and calques of grammatical structures, idioms and vocabulary from the source language. Interpreting, or “interpretation”, is the intellectual activity that consists of facilitating oral or sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two or among three or more speakers who are not speaking, or signing, the same language. The words “interpreting” and “interpretation” both can be used to refer to this activity; the word “interpreting” is commonly used in the profession and in the translation-studies field to avoid confusion with other meanings of the word “interpretation”. Not all languages employ, as English does, two separate words to denote the activities of written and live-communication (oral or sign-language) translators. Even English does not always make the distinction, frequently using “translation” as a synonym of “interpretation”, especially in nontechnical usage. Interpreting has been in exsistence ever since man has used the spoken word. It has therefore always played a vital role in the relationships between people of different origins since the beginning of mankind. However, there is a lack of hard evidence pinpointing the time of the creation of interpreting due to the fact that interpreting, unlike written translations, leaves behind no written proof. The first written proof of interpreting dates back to 3000 BC, at which time the Ancient Egyptians had a hieroglyphic signifying “interpreter”. The next widely known use of interpreting occurred in Ancient Greece and Rome. For both the Ancient Greeks and Romans, learning the language of the people that they conquered was considered very undignified. Therefore, slaves, prisoners and ethnic hybrids were forced to learn multiple languages and interpret for the nobility. Futhermore, during this era and up until the 17th century. Latin was the lingua franca, or the language of diplomacy, in Europe, and therefore all nations had to have some citizens who spoken latin in order to carry on diplomatic relations. Throughout the centuries, interpreting became more and more widely spread due to number of factors. One such factor is religion. The people of many different religions throughout history have journeyed into international territories in order to share and teach their beliefs. For example, 17th and 18th centuries AD, many Arabs were in West Africa in order to trade. Along with commerce, however, the Arabs introduced Islam to the Africans, and Arabic, the language of the Koran, became ever more important. Interpreters assisted in spreading the word of the Koran to the local villages. Another religion that has always yearned to explaned its borders is Christianity. In 1253, William of Rubruck was sent by Louis IX on an expedition into Asia accompained by interpreters. This was one of the very first large-scale pure mission trips: William's sole purpose was to spread the word of God. Another factor that played a large role in the advancement of interpreting was the Age of Exploration. With so many expeditions to explore new lands, people were bound to come across others who spoke a different language. One of the most famous interpreters in history came out of the Age of Exploration, specifically the early 16th century. This interpreter was of Mexican descent, and served Cortes on his crusades. Her name was Dona Marina, also known as “La Malinche”. La Malinche serves as good example of the feelings held toward interpreters in the Age of Exploration. Because the interpreters that helped the conquerors were often of native descent, their own people often felt that they were traitors, regardless of the circumstance and whether or not they were interpreting voluntarily. On the other hand, however, these people served as a connection between the native population and the explorers. The explorers therefore treasured these go-betweens. Furthermore, interpreters enabled many pacts and treaties to occur that otherwise would not have been possible; they have played a large role in the formation of the world that we know today. History of translation The first important translation in the West was that of the Septuagint, a collection of Jewish Scriptures translated into Koine Greek in Alexandria between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. The dispersed Jws had forgotten their ancestral language and needed Greek versions of their Scriptures. Throughout the Middle Ages, Latin was the “lingua franca” of the western learned world. The 9th century Alfred the Great, king of Wessex in England, was far ahead of his time in commissioning vernacular Anglo-Saxon translations of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Meanwhile the Christian Church frowned on even partial adaptations of the standard Latin Bible, St.Jerome's Vulgate. In Asia, the spread of Buddhism led to large-scale ongoing translation efforts spanning well over a thousand years. The Tangut Empire was especially efficient in such efforts; exploiting the then newly-invented block printing, and with the full support of the government (contemporary sources describe the Emperor and his mother personally contributing to the translation effort, alongside sages of various nationalities), the Tanguts took mere decades to translate volumes that had taken the Chinese centuries to render. Large-scale efforts at translation were undertaken by the Arabs. Having conquered the Greek world, they made Arabic versions of its philosophical and scientific works. During the Middle Ages, some translations of these Arabic versions were made into Latin, chiefly at Cordoba in Spain. Such Latin translations of Greek and original Arab works of scholarship and science would help advance the development of European Scholasticism. The broad historic trends in Western translation practice may be illustrated on the example of translation into the English language. The first fine translation into English were made by England's first great poet, the 14th century Geoffrey Chaucer, who adapted from Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio in his own Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde; began a translation of the French language Roman de la Rose; and completed a translation of Boethius from the Latin. Chaucer founded an English poetic tradition on adaptations and translations from those earlier-established literary languages. The first great English translation was the Wycliffe Bible, which showed the weaknesses of an underdeveloped English prose. Only at the end of the 15th century would the great age of English prose translation begin with Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur - an adaptation of Arthurian ramances so free that it can, in fact, hardly be called a true translation. The first great Tudor translations are, accordingly, the Tyndale New Testament (1525), which would influence the Authorized Version (1611), and Lord Berners' version of Jean Froissart's Chronicles (1523-25). Meanwhile, in Renaissance Italy, a new period in the history of translation had opened in Florence with the arrival, at the court of Cosimo de' Medici, of the Byzantine scholar Georgius Gemistus Pletho shortly before the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453). A Latin translation of Plato's works was undertaken by Marsilio Ficino. This and Erasmus' Latin edition of the New Testament led to a new attitude to translation. For the first time, readers demanded rigor of rendering, as philosophical and religious beliefs depended on the exact words of Plato, Aristotle and Jesus. The Elizabethan period of translation saw considerable progress beyond mere paraphrase toward an ideal of stylistic equivalence, but even to the end of this period - which actually reached to the middle of the 17th century - there was no concern for verbal accuracy. In the second half of the 17th century, the poet John Dryden sought to make Virgil speak “in words such as he would probably have written if he were living and an Englishman”. Dryden, however, discerned no need to emulate the Roman port's subtlety and concision. Similarly, Homer suffered from Alexander Pope's endeavor to reduce the greek poet's “wild paradise” to order. Throughout the 18th century, the watchword of translators was ease of reading. Whatever they did not understand in a text, or thought might bore readers, they omitted. They cheerfully assumed that their own style of expression was the best, and that text should be made to conform to it in translation. For scholarship they cared no more than had their predecessors, and they did not shrink from making translations from translations in third languages, or from languages that they hardly knew, or - as in the case of James Macpherson's “translations” of Ossian - from texts that were actually of the “translator's” own composition. The 19th century brought new standards of accuracy and style. In regard to accuracy, observes J.M.Cohen, the policy became “the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text”, except for any bawdy passages and the addition of copious explanotory footnotes. In regard to style, the Victorians' aim, achieved through far-reaching metaphrase or pseudo-metaphrase, was to constantly remind readers that they were reading a foreign classic. An exception was the outstanding translation in this period. Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), which achieved its Oriental Flavor largely by using Persian names and discreet Biblical echoes and actually drew little of its material from the Persian original. In advance of the 20th century, a new pattern was set in 1871 by Benjamin Jowett, who translated Plato into simple, straightforward language. Jowett's example was not followed, however, until well into the new century, when accuracy rather than style became the principal criterion. History of theory Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show remarkable continuities. The distinction that had been drawn by the ancient Greeks between "metaphrase" ("literal" translation) and "paraphrase" would be adopted by the English poet and translator John Dryden (1631-1700), who represented translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in the target language, "counterparts," or equivalents, for the expressions used in the source language: When [words] appear... literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since... what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words: 'tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense. Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of "imitation," i.e. of adapted translation: "When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments..." This general formulation of the central concept of translation -- equivalence -- is probably as adequate as any that has been proposed ever since Cicero and Horace, in first-century-BCE Rome, famously and literally cautioned against translating "word for word" ("verbum pro verbo"). Despite occasional theoretical diversities, the actual practice of translators has hardly changed since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and the Middle Ages, and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents -- "literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary -- for the original meaning and other crucial "values" (e.g., style, verse form, concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with speech articulatory movements) as determined from context. In general, translators have sought to preserve the context itself by reproducing the original order of sememes, and hence word order -- when necessary, reinterpreting the actual grammatical structure. The grammatical differences between "fixed-word-order" languages (e.g., English, French, German) and "free-word-order" languages (e.g., Greek, Latin, Polish, Russian) have been no impediment in this regard. When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed them, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of calques and loanwords between languages, and to their importation from other languages, there are few concepts that are "untranslatable" among the modern European languages. In general, the greater the contact and exchange that has existed between two languages, or between both and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating between them. However, due to shifts in "ecological niches" of words, a common etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. The English "actual," for example, should not be confused with the cognate French "actuel" (meaning "present," "current") or the Polish "aktualny" ("present," "current"). The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, Roman adapter of Greek comedies, in the second century BCE. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive and mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an artist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics as early as Cicero. Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least to Samuel Johnson's remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a flageolet, while Homer himself used a bassoon. If translation be an art, it is no easy one. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon wrote that if a translation is to be true, the translator must know both languages, as well as the science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether. The first European to assume that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language may have been Martin Luther, translator of the Bible into German. According to L.G. Kelly, since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, "it has been axiomatic" that one works only toward his own language.Compounding these demands upon the translator is the fact that not even the most complete dictionary or thesaurus can ever be a fully adequate guide in translation. Alexander Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including listening to the spoken language, had earlier been made in 1783 by Onufry Andrzej Kopczyсski, member of Poland's Society for Elementary Books, who was called "the last Latin poet." The special role of the translator in society was well described in an essay, published posthumously in 1803, by Ignacy Krasicki - “Poland's La Fontaine”, Primate of Poland, poet, encyclopedist, author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French and Greek: Translation… is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor and portion of common minds; It should be practiced by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than in their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they render to their country. Development of the theory of translation in the twentieth century Modern Western Schools of translation theory and translation After World War II, science and technology, linguistics and translation undertakings flourish, machine translation is quietly rising. People's views on translation also will be changed. Translation is not only an art or skill, but also a science, and literature and art, sociology, psychology, information theory and the theory NC, and other related disciplines but their own systems science. Translation theory studies, is no longer confined to philosophers, writers and translators, language and translation to become an expert in the study of systems of the serious issue. Therefore, the translation of Western theory further development. Modern Western translation theory in the development of two major characteristics: (1) theoretical research into linguistics areas, the modern linguistics and the impact of information theory, and thus the obvious color of linguistics, and the traditional theory of literary translation in stark contrast; (2) In the past theorists behind closed doors, not contact with the situation be broken. On the theorists through, magazines, essays, etc., fully express their views. In addition, as means of transportation, publishing industry and the progress of the emergence of international academic organizations, countries translation theorists keep close contacts between the academic exchanges have been strengthened. Modern Western translation theory there are four main schools: Prague faction, London faction, the United States sent structure and Communication Theory camp. The founder of the School for Mahi Hughes (Vilem Mathesius), the Kuwaiti and Iraqi Telubeishi (Nikolay S. Trubetskoy) and Accor may Dobson (Roman Jakobson). AGB could be key members of Dobson, Levy, Victoria, such as the translation of important theorist. The school's main arguments: (1) must be taken into account language translation of a variety of functions, including cognitive function, the expression of features and tools, such as functional (2) must attach importance to language translation of comparison, including the semantics, grammar, voice, language, style as well as literary genre comparisons. Prague School of the most influential theorists are Luomanya can translate Dobson. He origin Russia, the Czech Republic after resettlement; moved to the United States during World War II, joining American. As one of the founders of the school, his main contribution to the theory of translation reflected in the "On the translation of Linguistics" (On Linguistic Aspects of Translation) are. Articles from the perspective of linguistics, translation of the importance of the relationship between language and translation, as well as the existing problems are brilliant expositions. Since 1959 after the publication of this article has been Western theoretical circles as a translation of the classic. Accor Dobson can be discussed five major points: (1) Translation divided into three categories: language, translation (intralingual translation), the Inter-translation (interlingual translation), and at the occasion of translation (intersemiotic translation). Within the so-called language translation, refers to the same language used in some language other symbols to explain the language symbols, which are usually "change that" (rewording). The so-called inter-language translation refers to two languages in one language that is the sign to explain the symbols in another language, that is, the translation of the strict sense. At the occasion of the so-called translation, refers to non-verbal symbol system explained linguistic symbols, or using symbols to explain non-verbal language symbols, such as the Qiyu words or gestures become. (2) Meaning depends on the understanding of translation. He said that in language learning and linguistic understanding of the process of translation played a decisive role. (3) Accurate information on the translation symmetry. Translation is involved in two different languages on the website, and other information. (4) All languages have the same ability. If the language in vocabulary insufficient, it will be adopted by the word coinage or interpretation of the language, and other methods for processing. (5) Translation Grammar area is the most complex issue. This is the presence of state, and a few, such as changes in the form of the language syntax, especially complex. United Kingdom London School is a school with the language, language that is the significance of the use of language from the social environment (the social context of situation) decision. In the field of translation studies, translation and the original wording of the same depends on whether they used the same language environment. London School of the founder of the Fox (JR Firth). Two articles focus reflects the translation of theory, a "Linguistics and Translation" (Linguistics and Translation) and the other one as "linguistic analysis and translation" (Linguistic Analysis and Translation). Falls focused on the following three areas: (1) language analysis is the basis of translation (2) translation does not mean completely perfect translation; (3) in any two languages in the translation, a certain sense of language means of expression, such as it is impossible to totally another language. Catford (John Catford) is the school system in comparison to the theory of translation scholars. Teaches at the University of Edinburgh Catford 1965 published "translation Linguistic Theory" (A Linguistic Theory of Translation) a book for translation theory developing new channels, caused a huge reaction. Catford theory called "descriptive" of translation theory. He translated from the nature, type, and so on, conversion, such as limits explain "what is the translation of the" The central issue. (1) The nature of translation. Translation is "a language of the (former) that the text materials into another language (target language), such as the text of the material." (2) Translation category. On its extent, can be divided into "translation of the full text of" (full translation) and "partially translated" (partial translation); level on the terms of their language, can be divided into "complete translation" (total translation) and "limited Translation" ( restricted translation); on the registration of language structure, can be divided into "restricted class" of translation and the "unlimited class" translation, namely the traditional sense, "a verbatim translation" and the "translation" and "literal translation" between the two between. (3) The translation of the problems. On the one hand, and so is a translation of the experience as the basis to the phenomenon is based on a comparison of the two languages and discovered the other hand, such as the translation of a text and asked to see whether the same or part of the same substantive characteristics. (4) Translation conversion refers to the original form of a deviation from the corresponding asked. Translation conversion level conversion and are divided into areas of conversion, which conversion can be divided into areas of structural transformation, parts of speech conversion, unit conversion and four within the system conversion. (5) Translation of the limits is that Untranslatability issues. There are two types of translation in the untranslatability. First, the language of Untranslatability phenomenon Puns, superoxide Italy grammatical structure; Second, the cultural untranslatability is due to the different social customs, different era background, and other non-language factors. Structure of the United States is the language school representative cloth dragon Rumsfeld. He made an act of semantic analysis, that means that the stimulus and response between the existence of language relations. In the 1950s, cloth-Rumsfeld Chomsky's theory of the transformation of production replaced by the theory. Jiaozhi theory has three viewpoints: (1) human language ability is innate; (2) Language is unencumbered by the rules; (3) surface structure and language, including deep structure. The theory of translation studies in the major impact on the surface structure and its deep structure on. Mainly lies in the different languages of the respective different surface structures, and deep structure is a common feature. Linguistic theory in the above under the influence, creating Wozhelin (CF Voegelin), Bo Ling grid (D. Bolinger), Katz (JJ Katz), Kuien (WV Quine) and Nida (EU Nida), represented Translation Theory sector of the United States of the school structure, and to Nida's most outstanding. Nida Communication is the representative of translation theory. His translation theory can be summarized as the following six aspects: (1) the theoretical principles. All languages have the same ability, and the primary task is to translate that readers can be asked at a glance. (2) The nature of translation. According to Nida's the definition of "so-called translation, refers to the style from the semantic (style) in the target language using the most natural reproduction of the original language, such as the phrase information." Three of them are the key: First, "in accord with the natural," I can not have translation cavity; second is the "natural" choice on the basis of the closest to the original meaning and asked the third is a "reciprocal", this is the core. Therefore, the translation must meet four criteria: (a) to express (b) and vivid; (c) natural language English and (d) similar to the reader responses. (3) Translation function. From the social linguistics and language communication function standpoint, Nida that must be translated for readers service targets. (4) The correct translation. Translation: correct depends on to what extent the readers can understand correctly asked. (5) Semantic analysis. One of the important process of translation of the original is a semantic analysis. Semantics can be divided into three types: grammatical meaning, the meaning and significance of connotations. (6) The procedures and methods of translation. In his view, the entire translation process is divided into four steps: analysis, interpretation, Reorganization (language translation by the rules of re-organization asked) and examined. Since the 1980s, the translation of theory Nida a larger change. The main new viewpoints: (1) Translation is not science, but technology; (2) Translation can be born; (3) translation is not only a language communicative activities, but also a symbol of social interaction (sociosemiotic interaction) activities. In addition, there are more representative of Germany's Leipzig School and the former Soviet Union, such as schools. In short, the 20th century theory of the development of the West's largest translation feature is included in translation studies linguistics, comparative linguistics and applied linguistics and semantics, and other established intrinsically linked. Although the western translation theory has achieved tremendous successes, but they are in the tradition of succession on the basis of, and did not form a complete, universal theoretical system. Models and types of interpreting Interpretation is rendered in one mode: simultaneous. In simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter immediately speaks the message in the target-language whilst listening to it in the source language. Consecutive interpretation is rendered as “short consecutive interpretation” and “long consecutive interpretation”. In short consecutive interpretation, the interpreter relies on memory; each message segment being brief enough to memories. In long consecutive interpretation, the interpreter takes notes of the message to aid rendering long passages. These informal divisions are established with the client before the interpretation is effected, depending upon the subject, its complexity, and the purpose of the interpretation. On occasion, document sight translation is required of the interpreter, usually in consecutive interpretation work. Sight translation combines interpretation and translation; the interpreter must read aloud the source-language document to the target - language as if it were written in the target language. Sight translation occurs usually, but not exclusively, in judicial and medical work. Relay interpretation occurs when several languages are the target - language. A source - language interpreter renders the message to a language common to every interpreter, who then renders the message to his or her specific target - language. For example, a Japanese source message first is rendered to English to a group of interpreters, then it is rendered to Arabic, French, and Russian, the other target - languages. In simultaneous interpretation, the interpreter renders the message in the target-language as quickly as he or she can formulate it from the source language, while the source-language speaker continuously speaks: sitting in a sound-proof booth, the SI interpreter speaks into a microphone, while clearly seeing and hearing the source-language speaker via earphones. The simultaneous interpretation is rendered to the target-language listeners via their earphones. Moreover, SI is the common mode used by sign language interpreters. Note: Laymen often incorrectly describe SI and the SI interpreter as “simultaneous translation” and as the “simultaneous translator”, ignoring the definite distinction between interpretation and translation. In whispering interpreting, the interpreter sits or stands next to the small target-language audience whilst whispering a simultaneous interpretation of the matter to hand; this method requires no equipment. Chuchotage is used in circumstances where the majority of a group speaks the source language, and a minority (ideally no more than three persons) do not speak it. In consecutive interpreting, the interpreter speaks after the source-language speaker has finished speaking. The speech is divided into segments, and CI interpreter sits or stands beside the source-language speaker, listening and taking notes as the speaker progresses through the message. When the speaker pauses or finishes speaking, the interpreter then renders the entire message in the target-language. Consecutively-interpreted speeches, or segments of them, tend to be short. Fifty years ago, the CI interpreter would render speeches of 20 or 30 minutes, today, 10 or 15 minutes is considered long, particularly since audiences don't like to sit through 20 minutes of speech they cannot understand. Often, the source-language speaker is unaware that he or she may speak at length before the CI interpretation is rendered, and might stop after each sentence to await its target-language rendering. Sometimes, the inexperienced or poorly trained interpreter asks the speaker to pause after each sentence; sentence-by-sentence interpreting requires less memorization, yet its disadvantage is in the interpreter's not having heard the entire speech or its gist, and the overall message is harder to render both because of lack of context and because of interrupted delivery (e.g., imagine a joke told in bits and pieces, with breaks for translation in between). This method is often used in rendering speeches, depositions, recorded statements, court witness testimony, and medical and job interviews, but it is always best to complete a whole idea before it is translated. Full consecutive interpreting allows for the source-language message's full meaning to be understood before the interpreter renders it to the target language. This affords a truer, accurate, and accessible interpretation than does simultaneous interpretation. Liaison interpreting involves relaying what is spoken to one, between two, or among many people. This can be done after a short speech, or consecutively, sentence-by-sentence, or as chuchotage (whispering); aside from note taken then, no equipment is used. Conference interpreting is the interpretation of a conference, either simultaneously or consecutively, although the advent of multi-lingual meetings has consequently reduced the consecutive interpretation in the last 20 years. Conference interpretation is divided between two markets: the institutional and private. International institutions, holding multi-lingual meetings, often favour interpreting several foreign languages to the interpreters' mother tongues. Local private markets tend to bi-lingual meetings (the local language plus another) and the interpreters work both into and out of their mother tongues; the markets are not mutually exclusive. The International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) is the only world-wide association of conference interpreters. Founded in 1953, it assembles more than 2.800 professional conference interpreters in more than 90 countries. Legal, court, or judicial interpreting, occurs in courts of justice, administrative tribunals, and wherever a legal proceeding is held (i.e. a conference room for a deposition or the locale for taking a sworn statement). Legal interpreting can be the consecutive interpretation of witnesses' testimony for example, or the simultaneous interpretation of entire proceedings, by electronic means, for one person, or all of the people attending. The right to a component interpreter for anyone who does not understand the language of the court (especially for the accused in a criminal trial) is usually considered a fundamental rule of justice. Therefore, this right is often guaranteed in national constitutions, declarations of rights, fundamental laws establishing the justice system or by precedents set by the highest courts. Depending upon the regulations and standards adhered to per state and venue, court interpreters usually work alone when interpreting consecutively, or as a team, when interpreting simultaneously. In addition to practical mastery of the source and target languages, through knowledge of law and legal and court procedures is required of court interpreters. They often are required to have formal authorization from the State to work in the Courts - and then are called sworn interpreters. In many jurisdictions, the interpretation is considered an essential part of the evidence. Incompetent interpretation, or simply to swear in the interpreter, can lead to a mistrial. In focus group interpreting, an interpreter sits in a sound proof booth or in on observer's room with the clients. There is usually a one way mirror between the interpreter and the focus group participants, wherein the interpreter can observe the participants, but they only see their own reflection. The interpreter hears the conversation in the original language through headphones and simultaneously interpreters into the target language for the clients. Since there are usually anywhere between 2 to 12 (or more) participants in any given focus group, experienced interpreters will not only interpret the phrases and meaning but will also mimic intonation, speech patterns, tone, laughs, and emotions. In escort interpreting, an interpreter accompanies a person or a delegation on a tour, on a visit, or to a meeting or interview. An interpreter in this role is called an escort interpreter or an escorting interpreter. This is liaison interpreting. Also known as community interpreting is the type of interpreting occurring in fields such as legal, health, and local government, social, housing, environmental health, education, and welfare services. In community interpreting, factors exist which determine and affect language and communication production, such as speech's emotional content, hostile or polarized social surroundings, its created stress, the power relationship among participants, and the interpreter's degree of responsibility - in many cases more than extreme; in some cases, even the life of the other person depends upon the interpreter's work. Medical interpreting is a subset of public service interpreting, consisting of communication, among medical personnel and the patient and his or her family, facilitated by an interpreter, usually formally certified and qualified to provide such interpretation services. In some situations medical employees who are multilingual may participate part-time as members of internal language banks. The medical interpreter must have a strong knowledge of medicine, common medical procedures, the patient interview, the medical examination processes, and the daily workings of the hospital or clinic were he or she works, in order to effectively serve both the patient and the medical personnel. Moreover, and very important, medical interpreters often are cultural liaisons for people (regardless of language) who are unfamiliar with or uncomfortable in hospital, clinical, or medical settings. When a hearing person speaks, an interpreter will render the speaker's meaning into the sign language used by the deaf party. When a deaf person signs, an interpreter will render the meaning expressed in the signs into the spoken language for the hearing party, which is sometimes referred to as voice interpreting or voicing. This may be performed either as simultaneous or consecutive interpreting, Skilled sign language interpreters will position themselves in a room or space that allows them both to be seen by deaf participants and heard by hearing participants clearly and to see and hear participants clearly. In some circumstances, an interpreter may interpret from one sign language into an alternate sign language. Deaf people also work as interpreters. They team with hearing counterparts to provide interpretation for deaf individuals who may not share the standard sign language used in that country. In other cases the hearing interpreted sign may be too pidgin to be understood clearly and the Deaf interpreter might interpret it into a more clear translation. They also relay information from one form of language to another - for example, when a person is signing visually, the deaf interpreter could be hired to copy those signs into a deaf-blind person's hand plus include visual information. By its very nature, media interpreting has to be conducted in the simultaneous mode. It is provided particularly for live television coverages such as press conferences, live or taped interviews with political figures, musicians, artists, sportsmen or people from the business circle. In this type of interpreting, the interpreter has to sit in a sound-proof booth where ideally he/she can see the speakers on a monitor ant the set. All equipment should be checked before recording begins. In particular, satellite connections have to be double-checked to ensure that the interpreter's voice is not sent back and the interpreter gets to hear only one channel at a time. In the case of interviews recorded outside the studio and some current affairs programme, the interpreter interprets what he or she hears on a TV monitor. Background noise can be a serious problem. The interpreter working for the media has to sound as slick and confident as a television presenter. Media interpreting has gained more visibility and presence especially after the Gulf War. Television channels have begun to hire staff simultaneous interpreters. The interpreter renders the press conference, telephone beepers, interviews and similar live coverage for the viewers. It is more stressful than other types of interpreting as the interpreter has to deal with a wide range of technical problems coupled with the control room's hassle and wrangling during live coverage. Simultaneous and machine translation Up to the end of the twentieth at the international congresses, conferences and meetings consecutive translation was practiced: the speech of orator was translated in other working languages after its performance. “Depending on the amount of working languages accepted at the assembly of the delegates, each performance was consistently repeated from a tribune several times, that resulted a large loss of time. Only at the end of the 20th incidentally was practiced translation of speeches simultaneously with their listening, which has received its name of simultaneous translation. “It is often argued that the first War Crimes trial (Nuremberg Trial) could not have possible simultaneous interpretation. The highlights of the early postwar period included the active participation of Soviet interpreters in the Nuremberg Trial and the Tokyo Trial of major Japanese war criminals. The real baptism of fire for a large group of Russian conference interpreters was the International Economic Conference held in Moscow in 1952. Since the 19th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, simultaneous translation has been more widely used on such occasions. The technique and hardware of simultaneous interpretation, at first somewhat crude and primitive, were gradually upgraded approaching international standards including a speaker's microphone, system of posting, headphones and microphones of the interpreters (mounted in special cabins) and headphones for the participants”. Each participant, being connected to the appropriate translation cabin, received an opportunity to listen to translation of speech simultaneously with the performance. The simultaneous translation gave significant economy of time, especially on the international meetings, where several working languages were used. Simultaneous translation gradually pressed consecutive translation and up to the present time became the basic kind of translation at all multilateral international forums. Being the top of the interpreting mastery, it drew my interest towards writing the project on this topic. Besides, as it appeared to be, there is not so much written about exact advices of interpreters or especially for teaching simultaneous translation. Besides, even the best methodology will not create a super-professional interpreter, but using these techniques it is possible to upgrade the level of interpretation skills. The difficulty is that there are only theoretical works concerning this topic and not so many practical advices and exercises for the future interpreters training. Simultaneous translation is one of the most complicated kinds of translation. The main feature of simultaneous translation consists of parallel perception of speech of the orator and giving out the speech in language of translation. This feature of simultaneous translation defines other features of this kind and first of all the rigid limit of time: the interpreter has only the period of pronouncing the speech by the speaker for translation. This time is twice less than what the interpreter has at consecutive translation, and in 20-30 times less, than at written text translation of the same speech. The interpreter has not only less time for translation, but also is imposed to the rate of translation, which should correspond to the rate of pronouncing the speech. Besides simultaneous translation has such special feature as segmental character: the interpreter translates the text in segments in process of their receipt, whereas during consecutive translation (as well as at written translation of written materials) the interpreter listens to the whole text. These features make simultaneous translation very difficult for learning. To simultaneous translation, perhaps, the traditional formula is almost not applied: in order to translation one needs to know two languages and subject of conversation. It is known, that not every man freely speaking foreign language is capable to take possession translation. First, preparation of the oral interpreters included mass ideological preparation, which completely brought to nothing a professional etiquette of the oral interpreter. Ideological sense of translation in the Soviet spirit was put much above its accuracy. Some decent interpreters tried to avoid it. It is where the opinion about harm of training came from. Second, the thematic principle was frequently practiced in training the interpreters (and is practiced still now). This principle is seen in narrow specialization of the training books: “The Textbook of military translation”, “Translation of the chemical texts”. The thematic orientation of training is on the decline, not only because it educates the interpreters with a narrow professional outlook; its main disadvantage consists of mixing different things - knowledge on a theme and professional skills. In other words, knowledge about what to be spoken in the text and knowledge of what to be done with the text. And finally, the third feature, which is, perhaps, most essential for the Russian history of translation. Traditionally, to tell the truth, interpreters were considered as the interpreters of fiction. The theorists of translation focused their attention on fiction as deserving primary attention. Consequently, frequent answer to a question, whether it is possible to learn translation, is understood only in application to fiction. And the answer at once caused difficulties. The art of translation requires such huge volume of background erudition, additional knowledge and performance of complex texture of translation tasks that frequently the thesis about creativeness is put forward, where reigns inspiration. The skill of translating fiction is a specific skill, and though the possession of it is impossible without some rules working for translation of any text, but nevertheless it does not guarantee to the interpreter the skill to translate non-fiction. It is necessary to tell, that intuition and inspiration, which helps to feel and to transfer complex and fine stylistics, individual style and much of other things in translation, prevents the interpreter to take the higher level of wider generalizations, and he would not be able to distribute the personal experience to work with the non-fiction texts, what simply means that the interpreter of fiction frequently, simply speaking, is not able to translate the non-fiction. And nevertheless, definitely: it is possible to learn! The experience of many translation schools of the world shows it. Training there is constructed differently, but always contains a constant set of obligatory components and gives the result. And common sense tells us that to learn is not only possible, but also necessary: it is impossible in the modern world to start up development of this important trade without paying attention. It harms the quality of translation production and reduces prestige of a profession. Machine translation (MT) is a procedure whereby a computer program analyzes a source text and produces a target text without further human intervention. In reality, however, machine translation typically does involve human intervention, in the form of pre-editing and post-editing. An exception to that rule might be, e.g., the translation of technical specifications (strings of technical terms and adjectives), using a dictionary-based machine-translation system. To date, machine translation--a major goal of natural-language processing--has met with limited success. A November 6,2007, example illustrates the hazards of uncritical reliance on machine translation. Machine translation has been brought to a large public by tools available on the Internet, Such as Yahoo!'s Babel Fish, Babylon, and StarDict. This tools produce a “gisting translation” - a rough translation that, with luck, “gives the gist” of the source text. With proper terminology work, with preparation of the source text for machine translation (pre-editing), and with re-working of the machine translation by a professional human translator (post-editing), commercial machine-translation tools can produce useful results, especially if the machine-translation system is integrated with a translation - memory or globalization - management system. In regard to texts (e.g., weather reports) with limited ranges of vocabulary and simple sentence structure, machine translation can deliver results that do not require much human intervention to be useful. Also, the use of a controlled language, combined with a machine-translation tool, will typically generate largely comprehensible translations. Relying exclusively on unedited machine translation ignores the fact that communication in human language is context - embedded and that it takes a person to comprehend the context of the original text with a reasonable degree of probability. It is certainly true that even purely human-generated translations are prone to error. Therefore, to ensure that a machine-generated translation will be useful to a human being and that publishable-quality translation is achieved, such translations must be reviewed and edited by a human. The late Claude Piron wrote that machine translation, at its best, automates the easier part of a translator's job; the harder and more time-consuming part usually involves doing extensive research to resolve ambiguities in the source text, which the grammatical and lexical exigencies of the target language require to be resolved. Such research is a necessary prelude to the pre-editing necessary in order to provide input for machine-translation software such that the output will not be meaningless. The lessons of machine translations's first 50 years aren't the kind we are used to hearing from our best and brightest machines: Make peace with stubborn limitations, cut the hype, think in the scale of decades of gradual evolution, forget about breakthoughs. In our laptops, we already have memory capacity and processing apeed that would have been barely imaginable in the age of the tube-driven mainframes, but machine translation historian John Hutchins believes that even “infinite computer power is not a solution”. What is needed, he says, is deeper insight into the processes of language and cognition. “there is no such thing as `perfect' translation”, he adds. “There are only translations more or less suitable or successful for specific purposes and contexts”. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of Words and Rules, believes that with increased understanding of the structure of language to create more subtle linguistic maps, boosts in chip speed to accelerate the gathering of statistical data from texts, and refinements in the building of world models, machine translation will improve in small but significant increments in the next few years. “The better it works,” Pinker says, “the less it will be called machine translation. It will just be called software”. It's clear that to do their job as translators, computers will have to rely on what is most human in us: the capacity to negotiate meaning. Even when hair-tearing levels of innacuracy are introduced into chat room dialogue, Jennifer DeCamp, of Mitre Corporation, a federally funded IT think tank, points out that rapid back-and-forth exchanges can offer plenty of opportunities for what she calls “conversational repair”. Willingness to tolerate uncertainty and emrathetic leaps of understanding are what keep conversations on course in any medium. Research in machine translation has developed traditional patterns which wil clearly have to be broken if any real progress is to be made. The traditional view that the problem is principally a linguistic one is clearly not tenable but the alternative that require a translation system to have a substantial part of the general knowledge of restricted domains can facilitate the translaton of the texts in those domains. The most obvious gains will come from giving up, at least for the time being, the idea of machine translation as a fully automatic batch process in favor of one in which the task is apportioned between people and machines. The proposal made in according to which the translation machine would consult with a human speaker of the source language with detailed knowledge of the subject matter, has attracted more attention in recent times. A major objection to this approach, namely that the cost of operating such a system would come close to that of doing the whole job in the traditional way, will probably not hold up in the special, but widespread situation in which a single document has to be translated into a large number of languages. Conclusion It is impossible to imagine our modern society without translation and interpreting. People all over the world communicate with each other in different spheres: art, medicine, science, technology, politics, and music. Of course, a lot of people know foreign languages, but they also need the interpreters and translators service as well. Only in tandem they can achieve good success. If a person has chosen the profession of interpreter, all his life turns into study, with rare, casual breaks. First of all, any language develops, any society does it, any relations do it too. Of course any interpreter or translator must know the theory of translation which differs him from any person who knows foreign language. The theory of translation is his main tool which gives him knowledge and strength. In the first chapter of the work the attention was paid to the history of interpreting and establishing of the translation theory. The difference between translation and interpreting was shown. Models of interpreting, such as simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting, whispered interpreting, liaison interpreting were described. The attention was also paid to the types of interpreting. The second chapter of the work was devoted to the development of the theory of translation in the twentieth century. As the past century was famous for its communication boom, the theory of translation was also influenced. The communication among people made the theory develop in order to be more useful and helpful. In this vary chapter some modern western schools of translation were described. The strong and weak points of the basic were also shown there. In the second chapter attention was also paid to the main popular modern types of interpreting and translation. Simultaneous translation is of great importance nowadays. Comparing with other types of interpreting and translation it is the most complicated type of interpreting, and it is more perfect form of consecutive translation. To perform such kind of interpreting, a person must be good prepared and well-trained. Simultaneous translation is both art and talent. And as any art it requires a talent, which is impossible to learn. However any talent requires development and constant perfection. Machine translation is also very popular and useful nowadays. There are a lot of special computer programs which make the process of translation easier. But machine translation without final correction is always clumsy and awful, it needs the corrections of the translator. And if you know foreign language very well, such kind of translation will help you in your work, making it faster and easier. This work may be interesting for students of foreign language faculties, teachers and young translators as well. The information given there will be useful and helpful for them. It will be also interesting for those who are going to be interpreters or translators. Bibliography 1. Barron, John, “The final escape of Lieutenant Belenko”, New York, 1980, pp. 23-28. 2. Cohen, J.M., “Translation”, Encyclopedia Americana, 1986, pp.12-15. 3. Crystal, Scott. “Back Translation: Same questions - different continent”, pp.5-15. 4. Darwish, Ali, “Towards a Theory of Constraints in Translation”. 1999. 5. Delisle, Jean, “Translators through History”, 1995, p 87. 6. Gaiba, F, “Origins of simultaneous interpretation”, 1998, p 56. 7. Iser, W, “The range of Interpretation”, 2000, p 63. 8. Kasparek, Christopher, “The Translator's Endless Toil,” The Polish Review, 1983, pp. 83-87. 9. Kelly, L.G., `The True Interpreter: a History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West”, 1979, pp. 25-36. 10. Muegge, Uwe. “Translation Contract: A Standards-Based Model Solution”, 2005, pp. 30-45. 11. Piron, C, “The Language Challenge”, 1994, pp. 45-56. 12. Pusteblume, journal of translation at Boston University. 13. Rose, Marilyn Gaddins, “Translation: agent of communication”, 1980, pp. 87-98. 14. Ross, Flora “Early Theories of Translation”, 1920, pp.56-67. 15. Simms, Norman, editor (1983). Nimrod's Sin: Treason and Translation in a Multilingual World, pp. 12-20. 16. Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw, A History of Six Ideas: an Essay in Aesthetics, translated from the Polish by Christopher Kasparek, 1980, pp. 75-86. 17. Translation News, news about translations. 18. Venuti, Lawrence. “The Translator's Invisibility”, 1994, pp. 45-52. 19. Wilss, W, 1999, “Translation and Interpreting in the 20th Century”, pp. 89-110. 20. Гофман Е.А. К истории синхронного перевода. 1963, стр. 52-62. 21. Кочкина З.А. Некоторые особенности деятельности синхронного переводчика. 1963. 22. Миньяр-Белоручев Р.К. Методика обучения переводу на слух. 1959. 23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/translation 24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreting
|
Рекомендуем
ОБЪЯВЛЕНИЯ
|
|---|
© «Библиотека»
Wyszukiwarka
Podobne podstrony:
(Trading) Paul Counsel Towards An Understanding Of The Psychology Of Risk And Succes
Kuijpers Towards a deeper understanding of metalworking technology
The Name and Nature of Translation Studies In James S Holmes
Bowser B J Toward an Archaeology of Place
James S Holmes The Name and Nature of Translation Studies
Clive Grey TOWARDS AN OVERVIEW OF WORK ON GENDER AND LANGUAGE VARIATION htm(1)
Brief History of translation studies
Cooke Power and the Spirit of God Towards an Experience Based Pneumatology
An%20Analysis%20of%20the%20Data%20Obtained%20from%20Ventilat
Dispute settlement understanding on the use of BOTO
An Argument for the Legalization of Drugs
An introduction to the Analytical Writing Section of the GRE
pears an instance of the fingerpost
Hume An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
Ferguson An Essay on the History of Civil Society
An analysis of the European low Nieznany
Heathen Ethics and Values An overview of heathen ethics including the Nine Noble Virtues and the Th
więcej podobnych podstron