Exploring Translation Techniques and Levels
Lecture Four
Exploration: Procedures
•
There are a large number of other techniques exemplified by Vinay and D
arbelnet. Among those that have maintained currency in translation theor
y are the following:
•
Q
Amplification:
The TL uses more words, often because of syntactic exp
an-
sion, e.g.
the charge against him > the charge brought against him
. T
he opposite of amplification is
economy
.
•
Q
False friend:
A structurally similar term in SL and TL which deceives the
user into thinking the meaning is the same, e.g. French
librarie
means
not English
library
but
bookstore
.
•
Q
Loss, gain
and
compensation:
‘Lost in translation’ has become a popul
ar cliché, partly thanks to the film. Translation does inevitably involve so
me loss, since it is impossible to preserve all the ST nuances of meaning a
nd structure in the TL. However, importantly a TT may make up for (‘comp
ensate’) this by introducing a gain at the same or another point in the tex
t.
•
Q
Explicitation:
Implicit information in the ST is rendered exp
licit in the TT. This
may occur on the level of grammar (e.g. English ST
the doctor
explicated as masculine or feminine in a TL where indication
of gender is essential), semantics (e.g. the explanation of a S
T cultural item or event, such as US
Thanksgiving
or UK
April
Fool’s joke
), pragmatics (e.g. the opaque and culturally locate
d US English idiom
it’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterb
ack
) or discourse. Non-
obligatory explicitation has often been suggested as a cha
racteristic of translated language.
•
Q
Generalization
: The use of a more general word in the TT. E
xamples would be ST
computer
> TT
machine
, or ST
ecstatic
>
TT
happy
. Again, generalization has been suggested as anoth
er characteristic of translation.
•
Levels of translation
•
The seven main translation procedures are described (1995: 27–
30) as operating on three levels. These three levels reflect the main structural elements of the book. They are:
•
(1) the
lexicon
;
•
(2)
syntactic structures
;
•
(3) the
message
; in this case, ‘message’ is used to mean approximately the
utterance and its metalinguistic situation or context.
•
Two further terms are introduced which look above word level. These are:
•
(1)
word order and thematic structure
•
(2)
connectors:
These are cohesive links
(
also, and, but
, and parallel structures), discourse markers (
however, first
. . .), deixis (pronouns and demonstrative pron
ouns such as
she, it, this, that
) and punctuation marks.
•
Such levels of analysis begin to point to the text-based and discourse-
based analysis considered this book, so we shall not consider them further here. However, one further important paramet
er described by Vinay and Darbelnet does need to be stressed. This is the difference between servitude and option:
•
Q
Servitude
refers to obligatory transpositions and modulati
ons due to a differ-
ence between the two language systems.
•
Q
Option
refers to non-
obligatory changes that may be due to the translator’s own s
tyle and preferences, or to a change in
emphasis. This could be the decision to amplify or explicate
a general term (e.g.
this
>
this problem/ question/issue
) o
r to change word order when translating between languages
that permit flexibility.
•
Clearly,
this is a crucial difference. Vinay and Darbelnet stress that it
is option, the realm of stylistics, that should be the translator
’s main concern. The role of the translator is then ‘to choos
e from among the available options to express the nuances
of the message’.
•
Catford and translation ‘shifts’
•
Translation shifts
are linguistic changes occurring in translation
of ST to TT.
Although Vinay and Darbelnet do not use the term, that is in eff
ect what they are describing. The term itself seems to originate
in Catford’s
A Linguistic Theory of Translation
(1965), where he
devotes a chapter to the subject.
•
Catford follows the Firthian and Hallidayan linguistic model, w
hich analyses language as communication, operating functiona
lly in context and on a range of different levels (e.g. phonology,
graphology, grammar, lexis) and ranks (sentence, clause, group,
word, morpheme, etc.).5
•
As far as translation is concerned, Catford makes an importan
t distinction between formal correspondence and textual equiv
alence, which was later to be developed by Koller.
•
Q A
formal correspondent
is ‘any TL category (unit, class,
element of struc-
ture, etc.) which can be said to occupy, as nearly as pos
sible, the “same” place in the “economy” of the TL as the
given SL category occupies in the SL’ .
•
Q A
textual equivalent
is ‘any TL text or portion of text whi
ch is observed on a particular occasion . . . to be the equiv
alent of a given SL text or portion of text’ (ibid.).
•
Thus, formal correspondence is a more general syst
em-based concept between a pair of languages while
textual equivalence is tied to a particular ST–
TT pair. When the two concepts diverge, a
translation sh
ift
is deemed to have occurred. In Catford’s own words , t
ranslation shifts are thus
•
‘departures from formal correspondence in the process of
going from the SL to the TL’.
•
Catford considers two kinds of shift: (1) shift of level and (2
) shift of category.
•
(1) A
level shift
would be something which is expressed by grammar in one language and lexis in another.
•
Q cases where the French conditional corresponds to a lexical item in English.
•
(2) Most of Catford’s analysis is given over to
category shifts
. These are subdivided into four kinds:
•
(a)
Structural shifts:
These are said by Catford to be the most common and to involve mostly a shift in gram
matical structure. e
•
(b)
Class shifts:
These comprise shifts from one part of speech to another
•
(c)
Unit shifts
or
rank shifts:
These are shifts where the translation equiva-
lent in the TL is at a different rank to the SL. ‘Rank’ here refers to the hierarchical linguistic units of sentence
, clause, group, word and morpheme.
•
(d)
Intrasystem shifts:
These are shifts that take place when the SL and TL possess approximately correspondi
ng systems but where ‘the translation involves selection of a non-
corresponding term in the TL system’. Examples given between French and English are number and article sy
stems – although similar systems operate in the two languages, they do not always correspond.
•
Catford’s book is an important attempt to systematically apply advanc
es in linguis- tics to translation. However, his analysis of intra-
system shifts betrays some of
the weaknesses of his approach. From his comparison of the use of F
rench and English article systems in short parallel texts, Catford concl
udes:
•
that French
le/la/les
‘will have English
the
as its translation equivalent with probability,
supporting his statement that ‘translation equivalence does not entirely
match formal correspondence’. This kind of statement of probability, which char-
acterizes Catford’s whole approach and was linked to the growing interest in
machine translation at the time, was later heavily criticized by, among others, Delis
le for its static contrastive linguistic basis. Revisiting Catford’s book twenty years after
publication, Henry considers the work to be ‘by
and large of historical academic interest’ only. He does, however, point out the usef
ulness of Catford’s final chapter, on the limits of translatability.
Of particular interest is Catford’s assertion that translation equivalence depends on c
ommunicative features such as function, relevance, situation and culture rather th
an just on formal linguistic criteria. However, as Catford himself notes, deciding what
is ‘functionally relevant’ in a given situation is inevitably ‘a matter of opinion’.
•
Despite the steps taken by Catford to consider the communicative function of the SL i
tem and despite the basis of his terminology being founded on a functional approach t
o language, the main criticism of Catford’s book is that his examples are almost all idea
lized (i.e. invented and not taken from actual translations) and decontextualized. He d
oes not look at whole texts, nor even above the level of the sentence.
Option, markedness and stylistic shifts in translation
•
Other writing on translation shifts in the 1960s and 1970s from the then Czechoslovakia introduced a lit
erary aspect, that of the ‘
expressive function
’ or style of a text. Among these, Jirˇí Levý (1926–
1967)’s groundbreaking work on literary translation links into the tradition of the Prague School of structur
al linguistics. It was mainly known in western Europe through its German translation
: Theorie einer Kunstga
ttung
(Levý 1969) and its continuing relevance can be gauged by its more recent translation into English (Le
vý 2011). Levý looks closely at the translation of the surface structure of the ST and TT, with particular att
ention to poetry translation, and sees literary translation as both a reproductive and a creative labour with
the goal of
equivalent aesthetic effect
.
•
he question of
stylistic shifts
in translation has received greater attention in more recent translation theor
y. This has to do with: (1) interest in the intervention of the translator and his/her relationship to the ST
author as exemplified through linguistic choices; and (2) the development of
more sophisticated computerized tools to assist analysis. The first point is typified by two papers, by Giulia
na Schiavi and Theo Hermans, that appeared together in
Target
in the mid-
1990s. Schiavi borrows a schema from narratology to discuss an inherent paradox of translation:
•
[A] reader of translation will receive a sort of split message c
oming from two different addressers, both original although
in two different senses: one origi-
nating from the author which is elaborated and mediated b
y the translator, and one (the language of the translation its
elf) originating directly from the translator.
•
The mix of authorial and translatorial message is the result
of conscious and unconscious decision-
making from the translator. This mix, and the translator’s
•
‘
discursive presence
’, as Hermans (1996) puts it, is conveye
d in the linguistic
choices that appear in the TT. Of course, for many TT read
ers the TT words not only represent but are the words of
the ST author.
•
For the analyst, the question is how far
the style and intentions of the trans-
lator, rather than the ST author, are recoverable from anal
ysis of the TT choices. Such analysis has been termed ‘
tra
nslational stylistics
’ by Kirsten Malmkjær (2003). It has als
o been advanced by the use of corpus-
based methods. These have attempted to identify the ‘ling
uistic fingerprint’ of the translator by comparing ST and TT
choices against large representative collections of electro
nic texts in
the SL and TL. So, for example, Baker (2000) compares th
e frequency of the lemma (forms of the verb)
SAY
in literar
y translations from Spanish and Portuguese (by Peter Bush
) and Arabic (by Peter Clark), and uses the British National
Corpus of texts6 as a reference to judge their relative imp
ortance. So, she finds that
SAY
occurs twice as often in the
Clark TTs, and that the collocation
SAY that
is most comm
on. But this could simply be because of the influence of th
e SL; the Arabic
qaal
is generally more frequent in the lang
uage than is English
SAY
because the repetition of
the same reporting verb in English is frowned upon.
•
The difficulty in distinguishing between those shifts that a
re effects of the SL and those that are the result of transla
tor’s linguistic preferences relates to the difference betwe
en Vinay and Darbelnet’s
servitude
and
option
. Despite th
ese problems, there are some important features that
can be investigated by such studies. Most important, pe
rhaps, is the analysis of the relative markedness of
stylistic choices in TT and ST.
Markedness
relates to a ch
oice or patterns of
choices that stand out as unusual and may come to t
he reader’s attention. So, in English a sequence such as
Challenging it is. Boring it isn’t
is marked because of the
unusual word order with the adjectives in first position. T
he key is to look for the reason behind the markedness. I
n this case, the wording is from a job advert (to recruit po
lice in London), so the markedness functions to draw the
reader’s attention to the advert and to illustrate that it
is an unusual and challenging job.
•
In translation, it may usually be expected that a marked ite
m in the ST would be translated by a similarly marked ite
m in the TT but this is not always so. Some work
has investigated the possibility that translation may be less
marked: Kenny (2001), for instance, looks at the translatio
n of creative lexical items and neologisms from
German literary texts, similar to Tirkkonen-
Condit’s (2004) ‘unique items hypoth-
esis’. On the other hand, Saldanha (2011) investigates fe
atures such as italicized
borrowings that make a particular translation distinctive. S
ome of my own work (e.g. Munday 2008) has also examine
d the distinctiveness of a specific translator’s work.
So, comparing patterns in the work of the translator Harrie
t de Onís, I identify:
•
Q the manipulation of paratextual features (prefaces, fo
otnotes, glossaries);
•
Q a standardization of dialectal choices in dialogue (m
any different Latin
American dialects standardized into a less dynamic early t
wentieth-century American English);
•
Q the choice of a rich literary lexicon (e.g.
night was sifti
ng through the jungle
); and Q certain syntactic patterns
typical of condensed English style (e.g. the use of compou
nd pre-modifiers such as the unusual
tree-
dense night
and
branch-arched passage
).
•
The interesting point is to hypothesize the
motivation
be
hind the selections. Most crucially, the question is how fa
r the unconscious (as well as conscious) choices may in fac
t be due to factors in the translator’s environment, includi
ng education and the sociocultural and political context in
which they operate. May
a translator’s choice reveal a personal ideological orienta
tion? Or one that is promoted by the society in
which they live?
Delve into various translation techniques such as amplification, false friends, explicitation, and generalization, as exemplified by Vinay and Darbelnet. Discover the concept of loss, gain, and compensation in translation, along with the different levels of translation, including lexicon, syntactic structures, and message utterance. Learn about the difference between servitude and option in translation procedures and the importance of option for stylistic changes.
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Presentation Transcript
Lecture Four Lecture Four
Exploration: Procedures There are a large number of other techniques exemplified by Vinay and D arbelnet. Among those that have maintained currency in translation theor y are the following: Q Amplification: The TL uses more words, often because of syntactic exp an- sion, e.g. the charge against him > the charge brought against him. T he opposite of amplification is economy. Q False friend: A structurally similar term in SL and TL which deceives the user into thinking the meaning is the same, e.g. French librarie means not English library but bookstore. Q Loss, gain and compensation: Lost in translation has become a popul ar clich , partly thanks to the film. Translation does inevitably involve so me loss, since it is impossible to preserve all the ST nuances of meaning a nd structure in the TL. However, importantly a TT may make up for ( comp ensate ) this by introducing a gain at the same or another point in the tex t.
Q Explicitation: Implicit information in the ST is rendered exp licit in the may occur on the level of grammar (e.g. English ST the doctor explicated as masculine or feminine in a TL where indication of gender is essential), semantics (e.g. the explanation of a S T cultural item or event, such as US Thanksgiving or UK April Fool s joke), pragmatics (e.g. the opaque and culturally locate d US English idiom it s easy to be a Monday morning quarterb ack) or discourse. obligatory explicitation has often been suggested as a cha racteristic of translated language. Q Generalization: The use of a more general word in the TT. E xamples would be ST computer > TT machine, or ST ecstatic > TT happy. Again, generalization has been suggested as anoth er characteristic of translation. TT. This Non-
Levels of translation The seven 30) as operating on three levels. These three levels reflect the main structural elements of the book. They are: (1) the lexicon; (2) syntactic structures; (3) the message; in this case, message utterance and its metalinguistic situation or context. Two further terms are introduced which look above word level. These are: (1) word order and thematic structure (2) connectors: These (also, and, but, and parallel structures), discourse markers (however, first . . .), deixis (pronouns and demonstrative pron ouns such as she, it, this, that) and punctuation marks. Such levels of analysis begin to based analysis considered this book, so we shall not consider them further here. However, one further important paramet er described by Vinay and Darbelnet does need to be stressed. This is the difference between servitude and option: main translation procedures are described (1995: 27 is used to mean approximately the are cohesive links point to the text-based and discourse-
ons ence between the two language systems. Q Option obligatory changes that may be due to the translator s own s tyle and preferences, emphasis. This could be the decision to amplify or explicate a general term (e.g. this > this problem/ question/issue) o r to change word order when translating between languages that permit flexibility. Clearly, this is a crucial difference. Vinay and Darbelnet stress that it is option, the realm of stylistics, that should be the translator s main concern. The role of the translator is then to choos e from among the available options to express the nuances of the message . due to a differ- refers to non- or to a change in
Catford and translation shifts Translation shifts are linguistic changes occurring in translation of ST Although Vinay and Darbelnet do not use the term, that is in eff ect what they are describing. The term itself seems to originate in Catford s A Linguistic Theory of Translation (1965), where he devotes a chapter to the subject. Catford follows the Firthian and Hallidayan linguistic model, w hich analyses language as communication, operating functiona lly in context and on a range of different levels (e.g. phonology, graphology, grammar, lexis) and ranks (sentence, clause, group, word, morpheme, etc.).5 As far as translation is concerned, Catford makes an importan t distinction between formal correspondence and textual equiv alence, which was later to be developed by Koller. to TT.
ture, etc.) which can be said to occupy, as nearly as pos sible, the same place in the economy of the TL as the given SL category occupies in the SL . Q A textual equivalent is any TL text or portion of text whi ch is observed on a particular occasion . . . to be the equiv alent of a given SL text or portion of text (ibid.). Thus, formal correspondence is a more general syst em-based concept between a pair of languages while textual equivalence is TT pair. When the two concepts diverge, a translation sh ift is deemed to have occurred. In Catford s own words , t ranslation shifts are thus departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the SL to the TL . tied to a particular ST
(1) A level shift would be something which is expressed by grammar in one language and lexis in another. Q cases where the French conditional corresponds to a lexical item in English. (2) Most of Catford s analysis is given over to category shifts. These are subdivided into four kinds: (a) Structural shifts: These are said by Catford to be the most common and to involve mostly a shift in gram matical structure. e (b) Class shifts: These comprise shifts from one part of speech to another (c) Unit shifts or rank shifts: These lent in the TL is at a different rank to the SL. Rank here refers to the hierarchical linguistic units of sentence , clause, group, word and morpheme. (d)Intrasystem shifts: These are shifts that take place when the SL and TL possess approximately correspondi ng systems but where the translation corresponding term in the TL system . Examples given between French and English are number and article sy stems although similar systems operate in the two languages, they do not always correspond. are shifts where the translation equiva- involves selection of a non-
Catfords book is an important attempt to systematically apply advanc es in linguis- tics to translation. system shifts betrays the weaknesses of his approach. From his comparison of the use of F rench and English article systems in short parallel texts, Catford concl udes: However, his analysis of intra- some of
that French le/la/les will have English the as its translation equivalent with probability, supporting his statement that translation equivalence does not entirely match formal correspondence . This kind of statement of probability, which char- acterizes Catford s whole approach and was linked to the growing interest in machine translation at the time, was later heavily criticized by, among others, Delis le for its static contrastive linguistic basis. Revisiting Catford s book twenty years after publication, Henry considers and large of historical academic interest only. He does, however, point out the usef ulness of Catford s final chapter, Of particular interest is Catford s assertion that translation equivalence depends on c ommunicative features such as function, relevance, situation and culture rather th an just on formal linguistic criteria. However, as Catford himself notes, deciding what is functionally relevant in a given situation is inevitably a matter of opinion . Despite the steps taken by Catford to consider the communicative function of the SL i tem and despite the basis of his terminology being founded on a functional approach t o language, the main criticism of Catford s book is that his examples are almost all idea lized (i.e. invented and not taken from actual translations) and decontextualized. He d oes not look at whole texts, nor even above the level of the sentence. the work to be by on the limits of translatability.
Other writing on translation shifts in the 1960s and 1970s from the then Czechoslovakia introduced a lit erary aspect, that of the expressive function or style of a text. Among these, Jir Lev (1926 Option, markedness and stylistic shifts in translation 1967) s groundbreaking work on literary translation links into the tradition of the Prague School of structur al linguistics. It was mainly known in western Europe through its German translation: Theorie einer Kunstga ttung (Lev 1969) and its continuing relevance can be gauged by its more recent translation into English (Le v 2011). Lev looks closely at the translation of the surface structure of the ST and TT, with particular att ention to poetry translation, and sees literary translation as both a reproductive and a creative labour with the goal of equivalent aestheticeffect . he question of stylistic shifts in translation has received greater attention in more recent translation theor y. This has to do with: (1) interest in the intervention of the translator and his/her relationship to the ST author as exemplified through linguistic more sophisticated computerized tools to assist analysis. The first point is typified by two papers, by Giulia na Schiavi and Theo Hermans, that appeared 1990s. Schiavi borrows a schema from narratology to discuss an inherent paradox of translation: choices; and (2) the development of together in Target in the mid-
[A] reader of translation will receive a sort of split message c oming from two different addressers, both original although in two different nating from the author which is elaborated and mediated b y the translator, and one (the language of the translation its elf) originating directly from the translator. The mix of authorial and translatorial message is the result of conscious and making from the translator. This mix, and the translator s discursive presence , as Hermans (1996) puts it, is conveye d in choices that appear in the TT. Of course, for many TT read ers the TT words not only represent but are the words of senses: one origi- unconscious decision- the linguistic
For the lator, rather than the ST author, are recoverable from anal ysis of the TT choices. Such analysis has been termed tra nslational stylistics by Kirsten Malmkj r (2003). It has als o been advanced by based methods. These have attempted to identify the ling uistic fingerprint of the translator by comparing ST and TT choices against large representative collections of electro nic texts the SL and TL. So, for example, Baker (2000) compares th e frequency of the lemma (forms of the verb) SAY in literar y translations from Spanish and Portuguese (by Peter Bush ) and Arabic (by Peter Clark), and uses the British National Corpus of texts6 as a reference to judge their relative imp the style analyst, the intentions question is how far and of the trans- the use of corpus- in
The difficulty in distinguishing between those shifts that a re effects of the SL and those that are the result of transla tor s linguistic preferences relates to the difference betwe en Vinay and Darbelnet s servitude and option. Despite th ese problems, there are some important features that can be investigated by such studies. Most important, pe rhaps, is the analysis of the stylistic choices in TT and ST. Markedness relates to a ch oice or choices that stand out as unusual and may come to t he reader s attention. So, in English a sequence such as Challenging it is. Boring it isn t is marked because of the unusual word order with the adjectives in first position. T he key is to look for the reason behind the markedness. I n this case, the wording is from a job advert (to recruit po lice in London), so the markedness functions to draw the relative markedness of patterns of
In translation, it may usually be expected that a marked ite m in the ST would be translated by a similarly marked ite m in the TT but this is not always so. Some work has investigated the possibility that translation may be less marked: Kenny (2001), for instance, looks at the translatio n of creative lexical items and neologisms German literary texts, Condit s (2004) esis . On the other hand, Saldanha (2011) investigates fe atures such borrowings that make a particular translation distinctive. S ome of my own work (e.g. Munday 2008) has also examine d the distinctiveness of a specific translator s work. So, comparing patterns in the work of the translator Harrie t de On s, I identify: from similar to Tirkkonen- hypoth- unique items as italicized
The interesting point is to hypothesize the motivation be hind the selections. Most crucially, the question is how fa r the unconscious (as well as conscious) choices may in fac t be due to factors in the translator s environment, includi ng education and the sociocultural and political context in which they operate. a translator s choice reveal a personal ideological orienta tion? Or one that is promoted which they live? May by the society in
