Lesson 1 (February 18, 2014)

ON TRANSLATING:INTRODUCTION

A.F. TYTLER

• Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790): “a good translation is one in which the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another language as to be as distinctly apprehended and as strongly felt by a native of the country to which that language belongs as it is by those who speak the language of the original work”

Three “general laws” :• 1) translations should give a complete

“transcription” of the ideas of the original text• 2) style and tone of the translation should be

analogous to those of the original text• 3) the translation shoud have the same “ease”

and fluency of the original text

NIDA & NEWMARK

• Eugene Nida: “similar or equivalent response or effect” / “functional or dynamic equivalence,” as opposed to“formal equivalence”

• Peter Newmark: “communicative translation,” as opposed to “semantic translation”

WERNER KOLLER• Correspondence (field of contrastive linguistics,

comparison between two different linguistic systems) vs. equivalence (field of translation science, individuation of parallelisms between two specific texts in two different languages)

• 1) denotative equivalence (as regards the extralinguistic content)

• 2) connotative (as regards the choice of words)• 3) normative (as regards text typology)• 4) pragmatic or communicative (as regards the receiver of

the text)• 5) formal (as regards the style and aesthetics of the text)

EUROPEAN TRANSLATION PLATFORM (19.10.1998)

• Translation: transposition of a message written in a source language into a message written in the target language• Translating: transformation of a

prototext into a metatext

FIELDS OF TRANSLATION(NEWMARK)

• Semantics = branch of linguistics dealing with how meanings are constructed

• Sociolinguistics = deals with the social registers of language and with the problems of different languages coming into contact in a country or in nearby countries

• Sociosemantics = theoretical study of parole – language in context – as opposed to langue – the code or system of a language

• Semiotics = deals with the processes involved in the transmission and interpretation of signs

PEIRCE & SAPIR

• C.S. Peirce: “The meaning of a sign consists of all the effects that may conceivably have particular bearings on a particular interpretant, and which will vary in accordance with the interpretant”

• Edward Sapir: language = cultural system that builds models representing not reality as a whole, but one specific social and cultural reality; translation = communication between two different worlds

LOTMAN & TOROP

• Jurij M. Lotman: language = primary system → literature = secondary system• Peeter Torop = every act of

comprehension is an act of translation → cultural system = total translatability

CHARLES W. MORRIS

Three disciplines: study of syntax (relations of signs with other signs), semantics (relations of signs with real objects), pragmatics (relations of signs with their interpreters)

ROMAN JAKOBSON

Three typologies:1) intralinguistic (reformulation)2) interlinguistic (translation from one language

to another)3) intersemiotic (transmutation; from a semiotic

system to another) Torop: metatextual (notes, critical apparatus)

and intertextual (authors’, translators’ and readers’ textual memory)

RAFFAELLA BERTAZZOLI• Literal translation• Metatextual translation: the original text with a critical apparatus in

another language• Authorial translation: re-creation of the text by a writer• Cultural transposition: attempt to find formal solutions or cultural

references that may substitute the ones in the original text• Phonemic translation: attempt to reproduce the sounds of the source

language• Metric translation: attempt to preserve rhyme and meter of the source

text• Prose translation: translation of the main meaning of a poem into prose

form• Interpretation: attempt to preserve and delve into the substantial

meaning of a text, without reproducing its form• Interlineal translation: translation line by line, alternating a line in the

source language and a line with its translation in the target language

JEAN-PAUL VINAY& JEAN DARBELNET

DIRECT TRANSLATION:1) borrowing (adoption of a word of

the source language)2) calque (adoption of a saying in the

source language literally translated into the target language)

3) literal translation

“OBLIQUE” TRANSLATION1) transposition (change in the word order, without

changing the meaning of the phrase or sentence)2) modulation (modification of semantics, syntax

structure, or perspective)3) equivalence or reformulation (substitution of a part

of discourse with another with a different literal meaning but a similar metaphorical meaning)

4) adaptation (substitution of cultural references and therefore of literal references)

5) compensation (when something cannot be translated, and the meaning that is lost is expressed somewhere else in the translated text)

ANTOINE BERMAN:THE “DEFORMING” TENDENCIES OF TRANSALTION

• Rationalization: it recomposes sentences and the sequence of sentences, and substitutes the abstract for the concrete, the general for the particular

• Clarification: manifestation of something that is not apparent, but concealed or repressed, in the original

• Expansion: also called “overtranslation” – the use of too many words• Ennoblement: tendency to “improve” the language of the original text• Popularization: tendency to make the language of the original text more “colloquial”• Qualitative impoverishment: the replacement of terms, expressions and figures in the

original with terms, expressions and figures that lack their richness• Quantitative impoverishment: lexical loss, by way of translating with the same word a

number of synonyms (or the reverse: translation of the same word with different synonyms, thus losing the accumulation effect)

• Destruction of rhythms: the regularization of the typical rhythm of th original text• Destruction of underlying networks of signification: the elimination of the connections,

inside the original text, that link certain sets of words, expressions, or images• Destruction of linguistic patternings: elimination of typically recurring syntactical or

morphological patterns• Destruction of vernacular networks or their exoticization: elimination of dialects or their

transformation into foreign and far-away languages• Destruction of expressions and idioms: reduction of rhetorical figures, proverbs, and ways

of saying to standard, normalized expressions• Effacement of the superimposition of languages: elimination of multilingualism or of code

switching

LITERARY TRANSLATION

Peter Newmark: the fundamental difference lies in the difference between the representative purpose of literal translation and the allegorical and symbolical purpose of literary translation

LIMITS OF TRANSLATION (NEWMARK)

Overtranslation = more details than in the original text vs. understranslation = tendency to generalization

Causes: different social and cultural contexts, and different lexical, syntactical and phonetic systems

LEVELS OF TRANSLATION (NEWMARK)

1) formality (from “congealed” to “uninhibited”)2) feeling and affectivity (from impassioned to

emotionless)3) generality and abstraction (from popular to

obscurely technical)4) evaluation, with 4 sub-levels: morality (from good

to evil), pleasure (from pleasurable to distasteful), intensity (from strong to feeble), and dimension (from high to low, large to small, etc.)

ORIENTATION

Acceptable and target-oriented translation (one that aims at not looking as a translation at all, as if it were an original text written in the target language) vs. adequate and source-oriented translation (one that aims at being as loyal as possible to the original text, even at the risk of looking and sounding “foreign”)

Lawrence Venuti: domesticating vs. foreignizing translations

THE TRANSLATOR’S MAIN TASKS• To understand the intention of the text• To focus one’s own intentions as a translator• To individuate the reader the text is addressed to and the environment

of reception of the text• To define the quality and authoritativeness of the text• To decide which communicative tendencies are prevalent in the text,

among the three main functions – expressive (form of the first person, centered on the sender), decriptive/informative (form of the third person, centered on the extralinguistic context), and conative/vocative/persuasive (form of the second person, centered on the receiver) – and the three secondary functions: phatic (it tests the existence of the contact between sender and receiver; centered on the channel), metalinguistic (it explains how the language in the text is used and what it means; centered on the code), and poetic/aesthetic (use of peculiar formal and stylistic effects; centered on the message)

THE FUNCTIONS OF COMMUNICATION (JAKOBSON)

MAIN:• expressive (form of the first person)• descriptive/informative (third person)• vocative/directive/persuasive (second person) SECONDARY:• phatic (checking contact)• metalinguistic (explaining how language is used)• poetic/aesthetic (use of partcular effects)

JAKOBSON’S MODEL

• file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Computer/Documenti/Valerio/UniMC%20-%202013-14/UniMC%20-%202013-14%20-%20Letteratura%20e%20cultura%20angloamericana%201M/Materiali/Jakobson%27s%20Model.htm

TRANSLATING METAPHORS• reproduction of the same image• substitution of the image in the source language

with a correspondent image in the target language, preserving the metaphorical but not the literal meaning

• translation with a simile • reduction of the metaphor to its main meaning • elimination of an untranslatable or redundant

metaphor• explicative gloss (metatextual translations,

footnotes)

MULTILINGUAL TRANSLATION• Text multilingualism: presence of more than

one language in the same text• Code switching: passage from one language

to another in the same utterance• Semantic loan: the borrowing of semantic

meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language, by adding another meaning for an already existing word

• Syntactic loan: the borrowing of a syntactic structure from another language