Linguistic-semiotic analysis method for literary source texts

and its application in translator education in Innsbruck

Ass.-Prof. Dr. phil. Alena Petrova

(University of Innsbruck)

VIIIth Symposium on Translation,

Interpretation and Terminology (Cuba - Canada)

12.12.2012, Havana

1. Introduction: what is literary text?

Versunken in die Nacht. So wie man manchmal den Kopf senkt, umnachzudenken, so ganzversunkenseinin die Nacht. Ringsumschlafendie Menschen. Eine kleine Schauspielerei, eine unschuldigeSelbsttäuschung, dass sie in Häusernschlafen, in festenBetten, unterfestemDach, ausgestreckt oder geduckt auf Matratzen, in Tüchern,unter Decken, in Wirklichkeit haben sie sich zusammengefunden wiedamals einmal und wie später in wüster Gegend, ein Lager im Freien,eine unübersehbare Zahl Menschen, ein Heer, ein Volk,unter kaltemHimmel aufkalter Erde, hingeworfen wo man früher Stand, die Stirnauf den Arm gedrückt, das Gesicht gegen Boden hin, ruhig atmend.Und du wachst, bist einer der Wächter, findest den nächsten durchSchwenken des brennenden Holzes aus dem Reisighaufen nebendir.Warumwachstdu?Einer muss wachen, heißt es.Einer mussda sein.

At Night

Deeply lost in the night. Just as one sometimes lowers one‘s head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night. All around people are asleep. It‘s just play acting, an innocent self-deception, that they sleep in houses, in safe beds, under a safe roof, stretched out or curled up on mattresses, in sheets, under blankets; in reality they have flocked togetheras they had once upon a time and again later in a deserted region, a camp in the open, a countless number of men, an army, a people, under a cold sky on cold earth, collapsedwhere once they had stood, forehead pressed on the arm, face to the ground, breathing quietly. And you are watching, are one of the watchmen, you find the next one by brandishing a burning stick from the brushwood pile beside you. Why are you watching? Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there (The Penguin Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, 1983, S. 436).

De noche

¡Hundirseen la noche! Así como a veces se sumerge la cabeza en elpecho para reflexionar,sumergirse por completo en la noche.Alrededor duermen, los hombres.

Un pequeño espectáculo, un autoengaño inocente, es el de dormir en casas, en camas sólidas, bajo techo seguro, estirados o encogidos, sobre colchones, entre sábanas, bajo mantas; en realidad se han encontrado reunidos como antes una vez y como después en una comarca desierta: Un campamento al raso, una inabarcable cantidad de personas, un ejército, un pueblo bajo un cielo frío, sobre una tierra fría, arrojados al suelo allí donde antes se estuvo de pie, con la frente contra el brazo, y la cara contra el suelo, respirandoo pausadamente. Y tú

velas, eres uno de los vigías, hallas al prójimo agitando el leñoencendido quecogiste del montón de astillas, junto a ti. ¿Por qué velas? Alguien tiene que velar, se ha dicho. Alguien tiene que estar ahí (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/9505/denoche.htm).

What can we learn from the “normal” stylistics about this

text?

• Semantics: ordinary language with many explicit repetitions:„versunken (sein) in die Nacht“ (2x), „schlafen“ (2x), „fest“ (2x),„kalt“ (2x), „wachen“ (3x)

• Morphology: nominal style (strange way of speaking: „durchSchwenken des brennenden Holzes aus dem Reisighaufen nebendir“)+ many participles („versunken in die Nacht“, „ausgestreckt odergeduckt“, „hingeworfen“, „die Stirn auf den Arm gedrückt“,„ruhigatmend“)

• Syntax: 7 short sentences + 1 long sentence (it takes 60% of the wholetext); elliptical syntax of the spoken language with many lists; absentconjunctions and punctuation; at the end of the text syntacticparallelism („einer muss wachen“, „einer muss da sein“)

• → So we cann’t say that it is a stylistically perfect text: it is grammatically incorrect, strange way of speaking, not easy to

comprehend

What features make this text a literary one?

• It’s not poetic language (no metaphers, no poetic epitheta…) It’s not variety of linguistic expression (no synonymes, repetited

syntactical constructions)

• It’s not the “story”, there are no actants

• Narrator: first person narrator without pronouns in the first person (→ man, du, einer): stream of consciousness of a watchman who is really an artist

→ We as readers of this text are dealing with deviations of our expecta-tions or (in other words) with violations of the linguistic norm in four aspects (= “secondary structure” according to Jacobson). We can call Kafkas specific style “ascetic poetics” or “undecorated prosa” (with such main features as laconic mode of speech and repetitions as method of distribution of the expressiv accents / climaxes as figures of speech). And we can suppose that other literary texts wouldn’t have the same features. It’s important for translator to know that there are no stylistic “rules” that are valid to all literary texts; so each literary text

has it’s own secondary structure!

What kind of transformations do we see in three translations?

• English: insignificant meaning shifts („it‘s just play acting“,„flocked together“, „deserted region“, „collapsed“)

• Spain: changed syntax and text design (two paragraphs,appositions, punctuation, relative clause), two missingrepetitions („hundirse“ / „sumergirse“ + „solidas“ /„seguro“)

• Russian: meaning shifts («комедия», «спят», «быть настраже»), additions («тебя», «взятой»), another wordorder («ничком», «быть на страже»), changed syntax(punctuation, final clause, no syntactic parallelism)

How we can explain these differences between the

translations?

May be translators have comprehended the source text or intentions of the author in different ways? Or perhaps translators have diverse opinions about what literary translation should be (e.g. composing a target text that is equivalent to the source text or creating a new original text)? Both is possible because we obviously have no theory of literary translation at our disposal which would fit out translators with scientific categories to discover and to analyse the specific features of a given literary source text before translating. The specific nature of literary texts in general seem not to be a subject of modern theories on literary translation. I cannot speak here about all the theories, but I give you some examples. The focus of the so-called “skopos theorie” was the purpose of translation; it doesn’t explain the specific mechanisms of literary translation. The Manipulation School is also interested only

in target text and its reception in target culture(s).

How can we achieve an adequate theory of literary

translation?

„The development of an adequate, reality-related theory depends on the answers to the three following questions [...]:

1. How does the translator / interpreter comprehend the source text?

2. How does she / he translate / interprete the text from source language into the target language? What knowledge systems are engaged by this activity? [...]

3. How does the translator / interpreter produce the target text?“

(Zybatow 2008: 327)

→ I would like to propose an answer to the question “how does the translator comprehend the literary source text, especially its

aesthetic or poetic form” later in my presentation

2. Linguistic-semiotic analysis method

for literary source texts

As a starting-point for my lingustic-semiotic approach I take the fact that literary texts possess both primary linguistic and secondary poetic structure. That’s why translators need on the one hand the knowledge of literary stylistics (Brandes 2004) to analyse linguistic structures of literary texts and on the other hand the knowledge of semiotics (works of Lotman, Jacobson, Propp and Greimas, summarized in Keller / Hafner 1986/1995) to analyse poetic structures of such texts. On this basis I have developed the method to analyse source texts that allows to create the translating norm for each literary text by finding out intended violations of the linguistic norm and by determining all the “dominants” (main systematic repetitions) on each macro- and microstructure level of the text. This linguistic-semiotic analysis method can be presented as follows:

I. Macrostructures (level of the composition of the text)

1. Reading of the text and comprehension of the “story”, dividing the textin parts (parts / chapters in narratives or acts / scenes in drama) andfinding out the function / main meaning of each part (e.g. first act asexposition, second act as rising action, third act as turning point, fourthact as falling action and fifth act as catastrophe in classical drama)

2. Compositional arts of speech(description, report or discourse),architectonic arts of speech(monolog and dialog) andgenre dominant

3. Constelation of actants(literary figures in narrative texts or personaedramatis in drama), specific art of speech for each person, literaryspace as text constituent (Textträger)

4. Narrator (number, type, mode of speech)

II. Microstructures (level of the sentence)

1. Phonetics / “sound” (onomatopoeia, rhythm, phonetic figures of speech and so on)

2. Semantics(stylistic synonymes, fraseologic words groups, words withhistorical colorit, realia and foreign words, different levels of style orlanguage varieties, termini or words from another functional styles,emotionally coloured speech, figures and so on)

3. Morphology (e.g. nominal style, praesens historicum, number asgrammatical category, archaical forms as means of stylistic expression,grammatical figures and so on)

4. Syntax (volume and structure of sentence, hypotaxis or parataxis,ellipses, transposition of sentence types, permutations of words andunits, prosodics, rhetoric figures and so on)

5. Graphics(punctuation marks, paragraphs subdivision, text design,

font types, orthoepics and so on)

III. Other relevant categories to create the translating norm:

1. Dominantisotopies(including explicite repetitions) andtheir distribution among text constituents (actants, plot,space and time continuum, narrator)

2. Systematically used elementsin the composition of the text (the principle of the repetition)

3. The secondary structure(the principle of the norm “violation”)

4. Additionalintended poetic transformationsof the whole text or its parts (irony, stilization, aesthetic alienation and

so on).

The model and ist components

Not all listed components appear in each literary text. It’san importantdifference between text types (Textsorten) and literary texts: All thetexts of one particular text type (e.g. newspaper articles or specialisedlegal texts) have to follow the same stylistic rules. On the contrarythere are no common stylistic rules which are valid for all literarytexts. The style of Chechovs and Kafkas novels wouldn’t be the same.That’s why LSA-model represents a compilation of text components orpoetic transformations within diverse text levels in whichyou can findsystematic norm deviations. These text components are universal (theyexist in all national literatures). But the combination of components or(in another words) the secondary structure of each text is unique.

The hierarchy of model components

Do the components play the same role by constituting the secondary structure of the text? The answer is: no. We have to figure out, whether the component is poetic transformation which appears only one time in the text or is it used systematically. You have to make a difference between e.g. one animal metaphor and constantly recurring animal metaphors. In the second case the “status” of animal metaphor is more important and you have to keep this phenomena in the target text. So I would like to point out the fact that the components which are systematically used in the whole text or parts of the text play the role of “dominants”: so they are essential for secondary structure. And they should be listed before translating process in the translation norm of

the text.

3. Experiments with students of the University of Innsbruck

This method can be used in translators training, on the one hand, toanalyse source texts before translating and, on the other hand, tocompare and to value the quality of different former translations. Themain criterion in the second case or (in other words) by translationcriticism is the correspondence of the target text to its translating normwhat provides the equivalence between source and target text. Iunderstand the equivalence mainly as the adequate reproduction orrecreation of the whole secondary structure of the source text in thetarget text.

I would like to illustrate the application of this method in tanslatorseducation in the second part of my presentation by briefly rendering

the results of two experiments with my students in Innsbruck.

Experiment 1

Text: parallel texts in German / Russian without my comments on the margins of the side and without discussion of LSA-model before the experiment

Participants: 10 students who are native Russian speakers; answers in Russian

Question: Give an assessment of the following translation of a text excerpt from Stefan Zweigs novel „Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau“ into Russian and give your reasons therefore listing some free formulated criteria

Result of the translation criticism: this translation is good till outstanding performance of a professional and talented translator; the source and the target text are equivalent in their content and style

Criteria for the translation criticism

• I don’t have an impression that I read a translation, but a(new) literary text; the translator has created his ownliterary text

• target text is written in poetic language• target text doesn’t break norms of target language• the translator follows the source text not literally, not as a

„slave“, he finds better expressions in target language• target text not distort the content and the style of the source

text• target text has made the same effect on me as the source text

Differences between the source and the target text

and its reasons

• some expressions are missing; the target text is shorter as source textbecause Russian language is more laconic than German

• some inexact expressions or errors in target text perhaps because thetranslator doesn’t know what’s what in game of chance (the main partof the experiment text describes roulette)

• some intentional “wrong” word choice with the goal to adapt the target text to the target culture; because of these “wrong” word choices the target text sounds better

• some stylistic differences• there are better stylistic equivalents of some expressionsin the target

language („you cann’t say it in Russian”, “you can say it better inRussian”)

• some syntactic constructions are replaced with other• different order of words and punctuation marks in some sentences

→ Conclusion: the differences between source and target text are small

and caused by the difference between German and Russian language

Experiment 2

Text: parallel texts in German / Russian with my comments on themargins of the side (about the style of source and target text) and withdiscussion of LSA-model and the text of Stefan Zweig before theexperiment

Participants: 17 students who are native German speakers; answers inGerman

Question: Give an assessment of the following translation of an text excerpt from Stefan Zweigs novel „Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau“ into Russian, comparing the target text with the translating norm. Which expressions in itallics in the source text haven’t to be missing in the target text and why?

Result of the translation criticism: this translation isn’t completelyequivalent to the original

Criteria for the translation criticism: the secondary structure isn’t

completely reproduced

Differences between the source and the target text and its reasons

• another actantial structure

• main leitmotif (“outrageous hands” of gambler) is ignored

• relevant for the novel three love triangles aren’t reproduced to the fullextent

• translator doesn’t take account of narrative isotopies (10from 19 aren’tmaintained completely), of explicit repetitions (8 from 14are missingor substituted by another words) and of climaxes

• almost all of the „images“ are missing

→ Conclusion: the changes are considerable and caused by the translator

Conclusions

1) These two experiments and some others prove the practical benefit of LSA-model. On the one hand the model improves the poetic competence of translators, making them conscious of the interplay between the primary and secondary structures in literary source texts. On the other hand it helps to overcome typical errors which are related to the specific nature of literary texts. We can conclude that by the first experiment students have paid attention mainly to the target text and used subjective criteria (e.g. “readability” of the translation text, poetic language, the same effect by the reception of source and target text). They have “lost” the source text. On the contrary during the second experiment the attitude of the students changes fundamentally in the way that they focus on the source text. Their translation criticism is based on the reproduction of the secondary structure of the source text. And they use objective scientific terminology from stylistics, semiotics and narratology (e.g. actantial structure, narrative isotopies, explicit

repetitions, climaxes, images).

2) According to the feedback of the participants of the second experiment they realized what they have to do with literary texts. You should create the translating norm of the text putting together all systematic deviations of norm and repetitions on all the levels of the text. And than you have to try to reproduce this norm in your translation text.

3) I would like to emphasize that the text analysis using LSA can’t guarantee the perfect result (= translation text). Other conditions for a successful translation are very good language proficiency in both –mother tongue and foreign language – and well trained ability to produce a literary text in the target language. However, for translation relevant text analysis of literary text represent the first and necessary step on the way to the equivalent translation text („offene Übersetzung” /overt translation according to J. House 2007: 15). It allows the translator not to neglect the unique stylistic form of literary source texts, using the rules of common stylistics, but to preserve it in

its original form.