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INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES:
Translation is “rendering the meaning of a text into another language in the way that the
author intended the text.” (Newmark 1988).
CHAPTER 2: History of translation.
The Central Debate: Word-for-Word or Sense-for-Sense
There’s a debate(called by Newmark the pre-linguistics period of translation)that has dominated the translation theory before the 20th century: the contrast between literal (word-for-word) and free (sense-for-sense) translation. This debate dates back to Cicero and St Jerome.
Cicero explains his approach to translation in De optimo genere oratum. He wrote that he did not translate as an interpreter but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and forms, so the figures of thought. So he did not translate word for word but sense for sense.
This practice went against the Roman tradition where the translation was word for word.Also Horace criticized the word for word translation and this influenced St Jerome, the most famous western translator and protector of the translators. He cites Cicero to justify his own translation of the Christian Bible.Jerome translated the New Testament correcting the earlier Latin translations from Greek. For the Old Testament he returned to the Septuagint: it is a translation of the Hebrew bible and it has been described as the first major translation in western culture. Jerome compared the Greek Septuagint translation with the Hebrew original and note where the two versions differed. So he formulated his theory in De optimo genere interpretandi, a letter addressed to his friend. For him, literal translation was useless, because it was often incomprehensible and failed to convey the true meaning of the text.
Chinese and Arab Traditions
China and the Arab world also developed similar reflections. In China, during the translation of Buddhist sutras from Sanskrit, there was a debate over whether to adapt the style to Chinese taste or maintain fidelity to the original. Translators such as Dào’ān highlighted the risks of altering the meaning in translation and adopted strategies to balance elegance and accuracy.
In the Arab world, during the Abbasid era, Greek texts were translated into Arabic, often via Syriac. Here too, two methods emerged: a literal one, which proved less effective, and a freer, more fluent one, which achieved greater success.
Humanism and the Protestant Reformation.
Before the invention of the printing press, texts were copied by hand, leading to errors and variations. The Church maintained linguistic and interpretive control over sacred texts, and Latin was the language of knowledge.
European Humanism (14th–15th centuries) want to free language from ecclesiastical influence, to recover the classical Latin and Greek and the restoration of linguistic purity.
During the Protestant Reformation, translating the Bible into vernacular languages became a revolutionary and potentially heretical act. The Catholic Church, for example, through the Spanish Inquisition's Index of 1551, prohibited Bible translations into the vernacular.
Some translators paid with their lives:
● William Tyndale , He wrote an English version of the Bible during his exile, that has been used as the basis of the Geneva Bible. But this version was banned and confiscated and Tyndale was hanged and burned.
● Étienne Dolet , a French humanist, was executed for heresy for the addiction of the phrase “rien de tout” in a passage about what existed after Death.
● Martin Luther , following Saint Jerome's approach, translated both the Old and New Testaments into Central German, His use of a regional Language led to a revolution of translation fostering the birth of Standard German. He wanted "the people to understand" and rejected literal translation, which he considered obscure and unintelligible. He added the word allein ("alone") to the Letter to the Romans to clarify the meaning of the text, even though it was not present in the original Greek.
"Fidelity, Spirit and Truth"
Louis Kelly and Flora Amos identify three words that are linked with translation (these 3 elements are interconnected in translation):
Horace , "faithful" meant literal , whereas by the 17th century it had become synonymous with faithful to the meaning.
The term spirit has two meanings: the creative energy or inspiration, or for St Augustine the Holy spirit of God.
TRUTH: for St Augustine is related to the spirit, for St Jerome means the authentic Hebrew Bible. For Kelly means the content of the text.
Flora Amos argued that the history of translation theory was discontinuous and based on isolated statements. In contrast, Rener identified a theoretical continuity beginning with Cicero and Quintilian , grounded in rhetoric and the balance between clarity and elegance.
Dryden, Dolet, Tytler
A) John Dryden (1680), an English poet and translator, classified translation into three categories:
- Metaphrase : literal, word-for-word translation.
- Paraphrase : it’s the faithful sense for sense translation ( his preferred method ).
- Imitation : it’s the free translation, also called “creative adaptation”, in which the translator becomes too visible.
Dryden rejected metaphrase , and also criticized imitation for overshadowing the author. He stressed the importance of fully understanding the original.
B) Étienne Dolet , a French humanist, formulated five key principles for good translation:
CHAPTER 3: Equivalence.
In the 50s and 60s began a new debate concerning the concept of equivalence. It was explored in a series of works by important authors such as Jakobson, Nida, Newmark and Koller.
JAKOBSON:
In his paper “On linguistic aspects of translation” he distinguished 3 types of translation:
- intralingual translation: consists in a process of rephrasing an expression in the same language or when a kind of text, is rewritten in the same language for younger readers.
- interlingual translation: It is when you produce a target text from a source text → the traditional focus of translation studies.
- intersemiotic translation: The last one c involves different codes and signs, It is the translation from a code to another, for example from verbal signs to non verbal signs. for example the realization of a film starting with a book.
JAKOBSON AND EQUIVALENCE.
Jakobson analyzed two key concepts that belong to the so-called interlingual translation: those of linguistic meaning and equivalence. Jakobson was influenced by the Swiss linguist Saussure. Saussure distinguished the concepts of:
→ Langue (= the linguistic system)
→ Parole (= specific individual utterance).
He also differentiated:
● The signifier (=the spoken and written signal) ● The signified (=the concept)
This two create together the SIGN. According to Saussure, the sign is arbitrary or unmotivated, it is the result of speakers’ decisions and there are not specific laws that unify a signifier to a signified. Then, Jakobson considers the problem of equivalence concerning the meaning of the words in different languages. Jakobson affirms that a full equivalence is impossible between different code-units. There are two general theories:
- Linguistic universalism considers that languages may differ in the way they convey the meaning but (that) there is a shared way of experiencing the world.
L’universalismo linguistico ritiene che le lingue possano differire nel modo in cui trasmettono il significato ma (che) esista un modo condiviso di vivere il mondo.
- Linguistic determinism affirms that different languages shape different visions of the world. For example, the Eskimos have more words for snow because they consider it in an unusual way.
For the message to be ‘equivalent’ in ST and TT, the code units will be different sine they belong to two different sign systems (languages). Jacobson said that the equivalence is the cardinal problem of language and the main concern of linguistics’. The main differences between languages occur at: 1. The level of gender 2. The level of aspect (verb morphology) 3. The level of semantic fields (Geschwister: brothers and sisters). Only ‘poetry’ is considered ‘untranslatable’ by Jakobson and
requires ‘creative transposition’. The question of meaning, equivalence and translability is a constant of translation studies
EUGENE NIDA:
Eugene Nida is one of the pioneers of the scientific approach to translation. Starting in the 1940s, with works such as Toward a Science of Translating (1964) and The Theory and Practice of Translation (1969) He tries to translate the Bible with a more scientific method by incorporating the recent works of linguistic.
Influenced by Noam Chomsky , Nida adopted the generative-transformational model, which distinguishes between:
● Deep structure : the abstract and universal idea of the message (the phrase-structure rules)
● Surface structure : the grammatical and phonological realization
Nida incorporates Chomsky’s theory into his science of translation and created the 3 stage system of translation:
- Analysis : the source text is studied in its surface form to find the deeper meaning.
- Transfer : this meaning is moved into the target language.
- Restructuring : the message is rebuilt in the target language in a clear and natural way, both in meaning and style.
For Nida, the basic structures of language are called Kernels (simple active sentences). They come from the source text through a reduction process. At this level, the meaning is transferred before it is rebuilt in the final text.
(Prima si “riduce” il testo di partenza a questi kernel → così il messaggio diventa più chiaro e semplice. Poi questo significato “pulito” viene trasferito nella lingua di arrivo. Infine si ricostruisce il testo finale con frasi più complesse e naturali, adatte allo stile della lingua di arrivo. Quindi il passaggio è: Testo di partenza → riduzione in kernel → trasferimento → ricostruzione del testo finale. )
Nida also explains different types of meaning:
● Linguistic : depends on grammar and sentence structure.
● Referential : corresponds to the denotative meaning that we find in the dictionary.
● Connotative : represents the associations or the feelings produced by words.
To find these meanings, he uses some techniques:
● Hierarchical structuring : ordering words by importance.
Peter Newmark was influenced by Nida’s theories, but he disagrees with the efficacy of the equivalent effect, because it cannot work if the target language is out of space and time, as for the translation of Homer’s works into modern English. Newmark suggested two new definitions of translation:
➢ Semantic translation: consists of keeping the same contextual meaning of the source text, preserving the original semantic and syntactic structure. It is like Nida’s formal equivalence, and it differs from literal translation because it gives explanations about the context. ➢ Communicative translation: has the characteristics of Nida’s dynamic equivalence. Its purpose is producing on the receptor readers the same effect of the original text.
KOLLER:
In Germany Werner Koller examined the concepts of equivalence and correspondence.
- Correspondence: refers to contrastive linguistics which compares two different linguistic systems and analyses their differences and similarities, as for false friends. It is like Saussure’s Langue.
- Equivalence: concerns equivalent terms in a specific source text and target text context. It is like Saussure’s parole. The central issue is about what should be considered equivalent.
Koller distinguishes between five equivalence relations:
➔ Denotative: it concerns the equivalence of the extralinguistic context of a text. ➔ Connotative: it is related to lexical choices, especially between synonyms. ➔ Text-normative: it refers to different text-types. ➔ Pragmatic: it is oriented towards the receiver of the text. ➔ Formal: it is about form and aesthetics
