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Translation Studies
Translation As Text
The basic tenet here is that we do not translate words, but texts, and that these competing models can be integrated into a more global theory of translation by viewing the translation process as a primarily textual process. The authors examine in detail the characteristics that make a good translation a text, focusing particularly on the empirical relationship between the theory of translation and it’s practice.
184 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1992
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December 22, 2018
It is easy to be sceptical about the value to the working translator of analysing deep textual structures and subtle cohesive patterns in textuality, using such conceptual tools as synonymy, hyponymy, metonymy, metaphor, antonymy, complementarity, converseness, homonymy, gradation, thematic progression, lexical fields, word families, and word systems, not to mention schemes, scripts and macrostructures. Does this kind of overview really help?
The authors themselves articulate my concerns:
“Translation reality is rarely studied. Instead, we have studied armchair conceptualizations of translation. What translation scholars need to do, and have started to do over the past decade, is focus on the varieties of translation that actually exist.”
I will grudgingly concede that in literary and appellative texts this approach can help the translator to maintain an overview of the text-analysis options available, but I find these concepts often make bad masters in comparison with healthy intuition and gut-feeling informed by experience. In any case I would always bear in mind what Mona Baker says in In Other Words (A Coursebook on Translation) (p. 172): “What matters at the end of the day is that the target text has some thematic organization of its own [...] and maintains a coherent point of view as a text in its own right.”
This is echoed in a way by the conclusion of this book: “The translation result evaluated by the critic is not a random concatenation of decoded and re-encoded linguistic items. It is, or should be, a text in its own right.”
The concepts and terms brought up in this book do usually make sense when examples are given, but I find it is hard to digest them when they are only defined in terms of each other. A much more digestible and usable approach can be found IMO in the context of classroom activities and TESL procedures, e.g. in Beyond the Sentence by Scott Thornbury. Like they say, the best way to learn is to teach.
These are ideas that I may occasionally come back to.
A few notes and quotes primarily for my own use:
“Prototypes function in the context of social goals; therefore, they cannot be considered prescriptions. They are a discursive means to reach specific ends, and they are subordinated to those ends. Prototypes are what Marx called soziale Verkehrsformen.”
(Don’t find this kind of approach very helpful, and sample texts from the Morning Star are not always going to convincingly represent journalistic style IMO).
The translator is really translating textually realized associative structures, not words.
Translations "straddle" the two language communities. They project communicative activities from one interaction locus to another. They are, as we have said, displaced interaction structures.
Translators must act as knowledge brokers between the members of two disjunct communities.
Translation is an intersection of situation, translator competence, source text, and target text-to-be.
A scholar may focus on the source text in its sociocultural setting. This source-centered perspective will focus on the domestication of the source text by the target language. The translator plays the role of linguistic lion tamer. From this perspective, resistive translation makes sense. The utility of resistive translation dissipates when the perspective shifts. Resistant translation cannot be proposed as a universal strategy, but there are translation situations
and translation needs which call for it. The utility of resistive translation rests primarily on text-ideological
considerations, not pragmatic ones. The use of the technique is situation dependent. It requires a translation situation which places social concerns (gender, class, ethnicity) and awareness of the other (opacity of the text) above other concerns (readability, acceptability, informativity).
Specific variables that influence the translation process include.
1. the systemics of the language pairs involved
2. the textual characteristics of the source and target texts
3. the situation, intentions, purposes, and needs of the target reader
4. differences in cultural, social, and communicative practices
5. cultural differences in knowledge organization
6. the extent and organization of shared knowledge
7. the textual expectations of the text reader
8. the information contents of the source text
9. the acceptability constraints on the target text
Research parameters in translation studies might include the following:
1. the application domain (practice, pedagogy, criticism, automation)
2. the point of textual reference (source-centered, translation-centered, target-centered)
3. the systemic focus (linguistic system, value system, knowledge system, text system, cognitive system, political system)
4. the object focus (source text, translation, parallel text)
5. the activity focus (text comprehension, text production, translation strategy, cognition)
6. the research method (case study, experiment, textual analysis, participant observation)
We shall address seven parameters that determine the textual character of the virtual translation as it evolves in translation practice: intentionality, acceptability, situationality, informativity, coherence, cohesion, and intertextuality.
--->
The authors themselves articulate my concerns:
“Translation reality is rarely studied. Instead, we have studied armchair conceptualizations of translation. What translation scholars need to do, and have started to do over the past decade, is focus on the varieties of translation that actually exist.”
I will grudgingly concede that in literary and appellative texts this approach can help the translator to maintain an overview of the text-analysis options available, but I find these concepts often make bad masters in comparison with healthy intuition and gut-feeling informed by experience. In any case I would always bear in mind what Mona Baker says in In Other Words (A Coursebook on Translation) (p. 172): “What matters at the end of the day is that the target text has some thematic organization of its own [...] and maintains a coherent point of view as a text in its own right.”
This is echoed in a way by the conclusion of this book: “The translation result evaluated by the critic is not a random concatenation of decoded and re-encoded linguistic items. It is, or should be, a text in its own right.”
The concepts and terms brought up in this book do usually make sense when examples are given, but I find it is hard to digest them when they are only defined in terms of each other. A much more digestible and usable approach can be found IMO in the context of classroom activities and TESL procedures, e.g. in Beyond the Sentence by Scott Thornbury. Like they say, the best way to learn is to teach.
These are ideas that I may occasionally come back to.
A few notes and quotes primarily for my own use:
“Prototypes function in the context of social goals; therefore, they cannot be considered prescriptions. They are a discursive means to reach specific ends, and they are subordinated to those ends. Prototypes are what Marx called soziale Verkehrsformen.”
(Don’t find this kind of approach very helpful, and sample texts from the Morning Star are not always going to convincingly represent journalistic style IMO).
The translator is really translating textually realized associative structures, not words.
Translations "straddle" the two language communities. They project communicative activities from one interaction locus to another. They are, as we have said, displaced interaction structures.
Translators must act as knowledge brokers between the members of two disjunct communities.
Translation is an intersection of situation, translator competence, source text, and target text-to-be.
A scholar may focus on the source text in its sociocultural setting. This source-centered perspective will focus on the domestication of the source text by the target language. The translator plays the role of linguistic lion tamer. From this perspective, resistive translation makes sense. The utility of resistive translation dissipates when the perspective shifts. Resistant translation cannot be proposed as a universal strategy, but there are translation situations
and translation needs which call for it. The utility of resistive translation rests primarily on text-ideological
considerations, not pragmatic ones. The use of the technique is situation dependent. It requires a translation situation which places social concerns (gender, class, ethnicity) and awareness of the other (opacity of the text) above other concerns (readability, acceptability, informativity).
Specific variables that influence the translation process include.
1. the systemics of the language pairs involved
2. the textual characteristics of the source and target texts
3. the situation, intentions, purposes, and needs of the target reader
4. differences in cultural, social, and communicative practices
5. cultural differences in knowledge organization
6. the extent and organization of shared knowledge
7. the textual expectations of the text reader
8. the information contents of the source text
9. the acceptability constraints on the target text
Research parameters in translation studies might include the following:
1. the application domain (practice, pedagogy, criticism, automation)
2. the point of textual reference (source-centered, translation-centered, target-centered)
3. the systemic focus (linguistic system, value system, knowledge system, text system, cognitive system, political system)
4. the object focus (source text, translation, parallel text)
5. the activity focus (text comprehension, text production, translation strategy, cognition)
6. the research method (case study, experiment, textual analysis, participant observation)
We shall address seven parameters that determine the textual character of the virtual translation as it evolves in translation practice: intentionality, acceptability, situationality, informativity, coherence, cohesion, and intertextuality.
--->
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