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662 Functional and Skopos Oriented Approaches to Translation
Functional and Skopos Oriented Approaches to TranslationC Nord, Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal, Magdeburg,Germany
© 2006 E lsev ie r Ltd. A ll righ ts reserved.
Functional translation theories are gaining ground in many parts of the world, especially where translation needs are pressing and equivalence theories are out of the question because of (1) different stages of (lexicological, terminological etc.) development in source and target languages, (2) discrepant levels of knowledge and experience in source and target audiences, or (3) large gaps between source and target cultures, value systems, perspectives, world views, and so on.
Nevertheless, criticisms have been leveled at the theoretical foundations and applicability of functionalist approaches in general and of skopos theory in particular. Although, as Toury pointed out with reference to both skopos theory and his own target-oriented approach, ‘‘target-orientedness as such no longer arouses the same antagonism it used to less than 20 years ago ’’ (Toury, 1995: 25), quite a number of criticisms are still, explicitly or implicitly, present in debates on translation theory today. Some scholars keep maintaining the view that equivalence is the only valid yardstick of translation quality, as well as being a constitutive characteristic of translation proper (cf. Koller, 1995).
Is equivalence a safeguard against manipulation? Post-colonial translation studies show that the (theoretical) notion of equivalence has never stopped any translator (or commissioner of translations) from m anipulating source texts consciously or unconsciously. A corrective is needed for both equivalence-based and function-oriented translation theories. For this purpose, I have suggested the concept of ‘loyalty’ (cf. N ord, 1997a) to account for the culture-specificity of translation concepts, setting an ethical limitation on the otherwise unlimited range of possible skopoi for the translation of one particular source text.
Historical OverviewFunctional approaches to translation developed in Germany in the beginning of the 1980s. At that time, university programs for translation and interpreting could look back on quite a long tradition, since the first interpreter training had been established at Humboldt University in Berlin as early as 1894. During and shortly after World War II, translator training departments were founded at several universities in both East and West Germany to meet the increasing demand for well-trained translators and interpreters.
The training was mainly practical; theoretical foundations were borrowed from linguistics. Equivalence between source and target language was the quality yardstick that was never questioned, although the definitions of the concept were far from satisfactory. The material used in the classroom comprised mostly essays or literary texts used to train the students’ linguistic and stylistic proficiency in both the source and the target language. Trainers were often language teachers with little or no experience in professional translation.
Employers, however, kept complaining about the poor competence of graduated translators with regard to the variety of text genres and tasks that had to be tackled in professional practice, where ‘equivalence’ of whatever kind is often neither possible nor desirable. For example, resume translations need not give more than the gist of the source-text information, specialist research reports sometimes must be translated for a broader nonspecialist audience, and poorly written operating instructions have to be adapted to the needs of a target culture where technical or cultural conditions are completely different from those of the source culture. Teachers needed a new yardstick to explain why different contexts call for different translation solutions, and the pragm atic turn in linguistics seemed to point in the right direction.
The publication of H ans J. Vermeer’s ‘Framework for a general translation theory’ (1978) seemed to offer a theoretical foundation for translator training. The theory was later explained in more detail in a book co-authored with Katharina Reiss, who had prepared the ground for a functional approach in her work on translation criticism as early as 1971 (cf. Reiss, 1971; Reiss & Vermeer, 1984). Using the Greek word skopos, meaning ‘purpose’ or ‘aim ’, Vermeer called his theory skopos theory because he considered translation to be a type of human action. ‘Action,’ in turn, was defined as a behavior intended to change a state of affairs. In accordance with action theory (for example, von Wright, 1968), Vermeer defined translation as a purposeful behavior that takes place in a given situation; it is part of the situation at the same time as it modifies the situation. Further, because situations are embedded in cultures, any evaluation of a particular situation, of its verbalized and nonverbalized elements, depends on the status it has in a particular culture system (cf. Vermeer, 1989).
According to this line of thought, translation cannot be considered a one-to-one transfer between languages, and a translation theory cannot draw on a linguistic theory alone, however complex it may be.
Functional and Skopos Oriented Approaches to Translation 663
Skopos theory is, therefore, a culture-oriented approach. One of the most important factors determining the purpose of a translation is the intended audience of the target text, specifically its culture- specific world knowledge, expectations, and communicative needs. Every translation is directed at an intended audience, because to translate means ‘‘to produce a text in a target setting for a target purpose and target addressees in target circumstances’’ (Vermeer, 1987: 29).
In the phrase just cited, the source text is not even mentioned. Its status is clearly much lower in skopos theory than in equivalence-based theories. Vermeer regarded a text as an ‘offer of information,’ from which any receiver picks precisely the items he or she wants, and is able, to process. Therefore, a translation is an offer of information produced in the target language and culture for target-culture addressees about another offer of information that was produced in a source language and culture for source-culture addressees. This means that, in the translation process, the translator’s decisions are no longer guided by the linguistic and stylistic characteristics of the source text but by the constellation of participants and conditions of the communicative situation for which it is produced. Instead of equivalence between source and target texts, the aim is adequacy for the translation purpose.
Right from the outset, skopos theory had a considerable impact on the methodology of translator training. Hans G. Ho nig and Paul KuSm aul (1982), both engaged in translator training, gave the starting signal with their book on translation strategy. They showed how functional strategies lead to appropriate solutions to translation problems. Although their exam ples are taken from German-English translating, the problems they discussed are clearly not language- specific, but may occur, with slight variations caused by language structures and culture conventions, in any translation situation. Other scholars followed suit, developing models for a functional approach to translation error analysis (Kupsch-Losereit, 1985), functional text analysis (Nord, 1988), functional text typology (Gopferich, 1995), translator training (KuSmaul, 1995), a functional typology of translations (Nord, 1997b), and a functional redefinition of the translation unit (Nord, 1997c). Applications of functionalist methodology dealt with the descriptions of nonverbal behaviour in the Odyssey (Vermeer, 1992), titles and headings (Nord, 1993, 1995), culture-references in literary texts (Nord, 1994), the cultural transfer in simultaneous interpreting (Pochhacker, 1995), text-type conventions (KuSmaul, 1997), and the translation of paralanguage in literary texts (Nord, 1997a), to name only a few contributions available in English.
It is a feature common to the functionalist scholars engaged in translator training that they try to focus on the language-independent pragmatic and cultural aspects of translation, emphasizing the specific nature of translation competence, rather than language proficiency. Obviously, they want to distance themselves from the first phase of German translator training, which evolved from the philologies and from language teaching.
Fundamental Principles of Functional Translation
The main hypotheses of a functional approach to translation may be summarized in the following principles:
• The purpose of the translation determines the choice of translation method and strategy. This means that any choice among two or more available solutions to a translation problem must be guided by an intersubjective criterion that, in the functionalist framework, is provided by the communicative function or functions for which the target text is needed.
• The purpose is defined, either explicitly or implicitly, in the translation brief provided by the client or commissioner. The translator interprets the translation brief in order to find out what kind of translation is needed and which translation strategy to choose.
• A translation may be called functional if it ‘w orks’ for its receivers in a particular communicative situation precisely in the way the client wants it to work. The translator has, therefore, to evaluate the audience’s capacities for comprehension and cooperation, especially with regard to previous knowledge about the topic, and anticipate the possible effects that certain forms of expression may have on the readership.
• Function is not an inherent quality of a text. It is attributed to the text by the receiver, at the moment of reception. It is the receiver who decides whether (and how) a text ‘functions’ (for him or her, in a specific situation). If, as we know, the same receiver at different moments of his or her life may react in different ways to the ‘sam e’ text (e.g., to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), it is most improbable that different readers, at different moments, will react to the same text in the same way, let alone readers belonging to different cultural environments.
• Yet, if this is true, how can we be sure that a text achieves the function we want it to achieve? We cannot. Usually, we rely on the audience’s
664 Functional and Skopos Oriented Approaches to Translation
willingness to cooperate in a given situation; otherwise, communication would be impossible. Any text producer, therefore, consciously or unconsciously uses some kind of verbal and/or nonverbal ‘function m arkers,’ which indicate the intended communicative function(s). Thus, printing the text in tiny letters on a slip of paper that comes with a box of pills indicates patient information; imposing a title, such as ‘Instructions for use,’ is a most explicit function marker. Other types of markers might be a particular text format or layout, such as a newspaper headline; certain sentence structures, such as imperatives in a recipe; a particular register, like that of an editorial; certain forms of address for the readership, for example in a student’s manual, and the like. If the receivers recognize the function markers, they may accept the text as serving the intended function. However, markers can only be interpreted correctly by a receiver who is familiar with the marker code used.
• Basically, the function (or set of functions) intended for, and/or achieved by, the target text may be different from that intended for, and/or achieved by, the source text.
Functionality and Loyalty
Looking at the basic principles presented above, we may wonder why there is no mention of such equivalence-based criteria as ‘faithfulness’ or ‘fidelity’ to the source text. This is the reason why some critics reproach functionalism for producing ‘‘mercenary experts, able to fight under the flag of any purpose able to pay them’’ (Pym, 1996: 338). This criticism refers to an ethical quality related to the status of the source text. If the linguistic and stylistic features of the source are no longer regarded as the yardstick for translation quality, does this mean that the translator is entitled to do whatever he or she likes?
Indeed, the first basic principle of functionalism could be paraphrased as ‘the translation purpose justifies the translation procedures,’ and this statement could easily be interpreted as ‘the end justifies the m eans.’ In this case, there would be no restrictions to the range of possible ends: The source text could be manipulated, as clients (or translators) saw fit. In a general theory, this doctrine might be acceptable enough, since one could always argue that general theories do not have to be directly applicable. Yet, translation practice does not take place in a void. It takes place in specific situations set in specific cultures, so any application of the general theory, either to practice or to training, has to take account of the specific cultural conditions under which a text is translated.
At different times and in different parts of the world, people have had and still have different concepts of the relationship that should hold between an original and the text that is called its translation. According to the prevailing concept of translation, readers might expect, for example, that the target text gives exactly the author’s words; other cultures might want it to express the author’s intention, even though this would mean changing the words. Still others could praise archaizing translations or ones that are comprehensible, readable texts. Taking account of all these different expectations, which may vary according to the text type in question or depend on the self-esteem of the receiving culture with regard to the source culture, the translator acts as a responsible mediator in the cooperation developing among the client, the target audience, and the source-text author. This does not mean that translators always have to do what the others expect - doing so may even be impossible if the three parties expect different translational behaviours. It just means that the translator has to anticipate any misunderstanding or communicative conflict that may occur due to discrepant translational concepts and has to find a way to avoid them.
This responsibility that translators have toward their partners can be called ‘loyalty.’ Loyalty is not the old fidelity in new clothes, because fidelity usually refers to an intertextual relationship holding between the source and the target texts as linguistic entities. However, loyalty is an interpersonal category referring to a social relationship between individuals. In a general model, loyalty would be an empty slot that, in a specific translation task, is filled by the demands of the translation concepts of the cultures in question, especially when the source-text author and the target- text audience hold discrepant views of what a translator should or should not do. It is the translator’s task to mediate between the two cultures, and mediation cannot mean the imposition of the concept of one culture on members of another.
The loyalty principle thus adds two important qualities to the functional approach. Because it obliges the translator to take account of the difference between culture-specific concepts of translation prevailing in the two cultures involved in the translation process, it turns skopos theory into an anti-universal- ist model, and because it induces the translator to respect the sender’s individual communicative intentions, as far as they can be elicited, it reduces the prescriptiveness of ‘radical’ functionalism.
The first basic principle of functional translation theory mentioned above should, therefore, be complemented by the following limitation: The acceptability of translation purposes is limited by the translator’s
Functional and Skopos Oriented Approaches to Translation 665
responsibility with regard to her or his partners in the cooperative activity of translation. Loyalty may oblige translators to lay open their translation purposes and justify their translational decisions.
As the only one in the communicative ‘gam e’ of translation who knows both the source and the target cultures, the translator plays a powerful role. She could easily deceive her partners without anybody noticing - sometimes even just by ‘faithfully’ translating ‘what the source text says.’ Seen in this way, loyalty may be a corrective in the power play among client, author, target receivers, and the translator.
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