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Routledge Applied Linguistics
Translation: An advanced resource book for students
Translation, Second Edition introduces the theory and practice of translation from a variety of linguistic and cultural angles, and has been revised and updated to feature:
Additional resources for the book can be found at www.routledge.com/9780415536141.
Written by two experienced teachers, translators and researchers, Translation remains an essential resource for students and researchers of translation studies and Applied Linguistics.
394 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 12, 2004
17 people are currently reading
247 people want to read
About the author
Basil Hatim
12 books13 followersBasil Hatim is a theorist in English/Arabic translation and a translator/interpreter. He has worked and lectured at universities worldwide and has published extensively on applied linguistics, text linguistics translation/interpreting and TESOL. He has authored or co-authored several books. He has served on the editorial boards of several major journals and has published some 50 papers in a diverse range of international refereed journals.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 15, 2020
I skipped all the exercises, so I may not be able to provide a fair review given its purpose as a practice textbook. The structure was very peculiar: the chapters of the book are duplicated 3 times over three different sections, each corresponding to their respective level of detail: A. Introduction, B. Extension and C. Exploration. The three-fold system didn't prove quite practical for me, as the materials in sections B and C added new topics rather than new, expanded details on the same topics of the section A. It's very informative and well-written if read in a single section, but a little confusing in its current format..
July 20, 2016
A good basis for theory of methods and translation approaches. Additionally, examples from different texts and explanations are useful easier to understand what is and how it words practically.
July 21, 2022
On the whole I found this book to be a fairly lucid summary of the current trends, approaches and ideas in translation studies, though the format is perhaps not ideal for e-books, as you keep having to leaf back and forth between sections, and I found the exercises were often a bit too open-ended and vague to be of much use to the individual reader. Still, I got a lot out of it.
As is my wont, I have put together not so much a review of this book as a perhaps idiosyncratic listing of some of its ideas, insights and avenues that I personally have found useful to explore (with my occasional commentary). An aide-memoire for myself and perhaps incidentally an aid for some other translators:
Form and content
In the published translations, many of the Harry Potter translators have resorted to altering the original name in order to create the required pun: in French, the name becomes ‘Tom Elvis Jedusor’ which gives ‘Je suis Voldemort’ as well as suggesting an enigmatic fate with the use of the name Elvis and the play on words ‘jeudusor’ or
‘jeu du sort’, meaning ‘game of fate’. In this way the French translator, Jean-François Ménard, has preserved the content by altering the form.
Compensation
A translation technique used to compensate for translation loss. The translator offsets an inevitable loss at one point in the text by adding a suitable element at another point, achieving a compensatory translation gain.
For example, an informal text in French using the second person pronoun tu might be rendered in English by informal lexis or use of the first name or nickname.
– informal language might also include syntax and grammar. Informal lexis might include more phrasal verbs.
Γυνή
on various occasions in St John’s gospel, the Greek word gunai is translated as woman in the old King James Version but as mother in
the New English Bible. The justification for this change is the positive connotation of the Greek which, the translators felt, merited a similarly positive translation
equivalent.
Pragmatic glosses
To render “isn’t it?” into Arabic we need to gloss it by something like ‘I am sure you will agree’. Similarly, we need to complement “you couldn’t make it up” by something like “even if you wanted”. These pragmatic glosses are indispensable in any meaningful rendering of the above utterances into Arabic.
Minimax principle - Jiří Levý
the Minimax Principle:during the decision-making process, the translator opts for that solution which yields maximum effect for minimum effort.
Minimax suggests that writers tend to ensure, and readers expect, that any extra effort is justified and
commensurately rewarded, and that such textual manifestations as opaque word order, repetition, the use of metaphorical language or any other form of implicitness are not gratuitously used.
Minimax and relevance theory
From the perspective of relevance theory, the effect of these structures is seen in terms of ‘the cost–benefit correlation between the effort needed to process a stimulus and the contextual effects to be expected as reward’ (Gutt 1991:140). With repetition or parallelism being ‘fashions of speaking’ used frequently almost by default in a range of Eastern languages, will such a structure be as ‘noteworthy’ in these languages compared, say, to English?
Horizontal and vertical intertextuality
Allusions (also called ‘vertical intertextuality’) are more subtle than the essentially static quotative or ‘horizontal’ form of intertextuality. They represent an ‘echo’ effect involving reference, not chapter and verse to the Bible or Shakespeare,
for example, but to an entire ‘mode of expression’ (biblical style, Shakespearean tone).
Markedness
or what we have so far referred to variously under such labels as textual salience and dynamism.
The arrangement of words and sentences may take a ‘preferred’ or ‘expected’ form (i.e. unmarked), or a somewhat unfamiliar and unexpected form (i.e. marked,
salient, dynamic)
The theoretical thinking on this issue in Translation Studies runs something like this: if contextually motivated (that is, if used ungratuitously), marked grammar and lexis must be accounted for in the processing of text and preserved in translation. Practice tells a different story
Hermeneutic circle
The translator tends to move backwards and forwards between what may be called ‘reader-supplied’ information at one end, and information ‘supplied by the text’ at the other.
Metaphors
Metaphors in predominantly expressive texts are best rendered metaphorically, while those in predominantly informative texts may if necessary be modified or altogether jettisoned.
Genre awareness
A cursory glance at a sample of translated news reports into English would immediately reveal that the root cause of the bulk of errors is essentially flawed genre awareness rather than incompetence in grammar or lexis.
Contextual focus
Texts are now classified on the basis of a ‘predominant contextual focus’ (e.g. expository, argumentative or instructional texts)
Rhetorical purpose
Predominance of a given rhetorical purpose in a given text is an important yardstick for assessing text-type ‘identity.
To counter-argue is a rhetorical purpose which is realized in English through a Concessive – Adversative format (Of course . . . However . . .). This is a text structure which is particularly difficult for foreign users of English to appreciate.
Myth of the single register
Register mediates between language and situation (i.e. we use language registers to access
situations).
Text authority
Newmark introduces the concept of
text authority, considering that ‘the more authoritative the text, the smaller the unit of translation’.
Mills & Boon
One stylistic feature of popular fiction such as Mills & Boon is the use of inanimates in subject position when a proposition relates to activity by women. Thus, Mills & Boon’s women do not ‘cry’; rather, ‘tears course down their cheeks’
Mills & Boon tends to be heavy on the suppression of human agency, deliberately letting actors other than the human take over. There is also a clear tendency to use what Carter and Nash (1990) call ‘core’ verbs, strikingly colourful adjectives, and so on
When soldier Sam is in a spot, his stomach tightens; when
nurse Nancy is alone in the fog-bound clinic, fear grips her with an icy claw
Equivalence
A translation which attempts to produce a dynamic rather than a formal equivalence is based upon ‘the principle of equivalent effect’
Formal and dynamic equivalence
Unmotivated formal equivalence is a form of blind literalism,
while unmotivated dynamic equivalence is a form of blatant re-writing.
Dynamic equivalence
There is a tendency, often resorted to by translators whose command of the TL is superior to that of the source, to use dynamic equivalence as carte blanche in a kind of anything-goes attitude. Although the
translations normally sound excellent, closer scrutiny immediately reveals that they
relate to the ST only tangentially.
Bühler’s three functions
Bühler (1934/1965) distinguished three functions of a linguistic sign: informative (Darstellung), expressive (Ausdruck) and vocative (Appell).
Coseriu sees the three functions in terms of their relative dominance.
Idiolect in Shakespeare
Many of Shakespeare’s greatest characters are strongly marked linguistically as individuals: Richard III, Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Juliet’s Nurse, Beatrice, Cleopatra, to
mention but a few: and the work of Dickens is full of linguistic curiosities. In such instances I suggest that in the search for ‘equivalence’ the translator has a responsibility to try to distinguish them linguistically as being individual in the Target Language: of course, the markers of individuality will not be ‘the same’ or probably
even parallel in the two languages
French Cockney
in translating Cockney dialogue into French, most translators would quite rightly select Parigot
Selecting the canon
Within the Anglo-American
translation tradition, careful selection has ensured that only those texts which lend
themselves to a domesticating strategy are included, while other texts which resist such a strategy are all but totally excluded.
Contrastive Rhetoric
Translators neglect the TOP-DOWN
direction of the information processing at their peril. It is not enough for the translator
to take care of the words and phrases in a BOTTOM-UP manner, hoping that the larger discourse units, and ultimately the genre-fidelity will thereby automatically take care
of themselves: this will not happen, and the result will be genre-infelicities which
read like weak parodies. We already have sufficient compelling evidence from the fast developing field of Contrastive Rhetoric (e.g. Connor and Kaplan,
Aelfric
Aelfric tells us: ‘You must know that we have abbreviated the more
prolix martyrdoms, for the refined and delicate reader would be overcome with boredom if there were as much prolixity in our own language as in Latin’.
Semantic prosody
Semantic prosody refers to the positive or negative connotative meaning which is transferred to the focus word by the semantic fields of its common collocates.
Stubbs (1995, 1996:173–4) examines collocates of causal verbs and finds in his corpus that the vast majority of collocates of cause are negative, e.g. accident, cancer,
commotion, crisis and delay. On the other hand, the verb provide has a positive semantic prosody with collocates care, food, help, jobs, relief and support. This is an
area which is beginning to be investigated between languages and in translation, the hypothesis being that in some cases the translator may not intuitively be aware of the prosody or may choose an equivalent which has a different prosody from the original.
Modulation
The type of modulation which turns a negative SL expression into a
positive TL expression is more often than not optional, even though this is closely linked with the structure of each language, e.g.:
It is not difficult to show . . .
: Il est facile de démontrer . .
Situational equivalence.
Particularly frequent in the translation of book and film titles, e.g.:
Trois hommes et un couffin
[Three men and a Moses basket]
: Three Men and a Baby
Le grand Meaune
[The Big Meaulne – a character’s name]
: The Wanderer
Paratext
There will always in my experience be a fair number who will insist on a literal translation, with no paratext of any kind, saying that the reader who does not understand should go and look it up.
Think-Aloud Protocols
(TAPs), where the researcher generally presents a translator (novice or professional) with a ST and records the translator as he or she ‘thinks aloud’ (see Krings 1986; Lörscher 1991; Tirkonnen-Condit and Jääskeläinen 2000)
Tourist brochures
English tourist brochures tend to ‘objectify’ experience, while those of other languages ‘subjectify’ experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_An...
Ideologema
doxa
.
As is my wont, I have put together not so much a review of this book as a perhaps idiosyncratic listing of some of its ideas, insights and avenues that I personally have found useful to explore (with my occasional commentary). An aide-memoire for myself and perhaps incidentally an aid for some other translators:
Form and content
In the published translations, many of the Harry Potter translators have resorted to altering the original name in order to create the required pun: in French, the name becomes ‘Tom Elvis Jedusor’ which gives ‘Je suis Voldemort’ as well as suggesting an enigmatic fate with the use of the name Elvis and the play on words ‘jeudusor’ or
‘jeu du sort’, meaning ‘game of fate’. In this way the French translator, Jean-François Ménard, has preserved the content by altering the form.
Compensation
A translation technique used to compensate for translation loss. The translator offsets an inevitable loss at one point in the text by adding a suitable element at another point, achieving a compensatory translation gain.
For example, an informal text in French using the second person pronoun tu might be rendered in English by informal lexis or use of the first name or nickname.
– informal language might also include syntax and grammar. Informal lexis might include more phrasal verbs.
Γυνή
on various occasions in St John’s gospel, the Greek word gunai is translated as woman in the old King James Version but as mother in
the New English Bible. The justification for this change is the positive connotation of the Greek which, the translators felt, merited a similarly positive translation
equivalent.
Pragmatic glosses
To render “isn’t it?” into Arabic we need to gloss it by something like ‘I am sure you will agree’. Similarly, we need to complement “you couldn’t make it up” by something like “even if you wanted”. These pragmatic glosses are indispensable in any meaningful rendering of the above utterances into Arabic.
Minimax principle - Jiří Levý
the Minimax Principle:during the decision-making process, the translator opts for that solution which yields maximum effect for minimum effort.
Minimax suggests that writers tend to ensure, and readers expect, that any extra effort is justified and
commensurately rewarded, and that such textual manifestations as opaque word order, repetition, the use of metaphorical language or any other form of implicitness are not gratuitously used.
Minimax and relevance theory
From the perspective of relevance theory, the effect of these structures is seen in terms of ‘the cost–benefit correlation between the effort needed to process a stimulus and the contextual effects to be expected as reward’ (Gutt 1991:140). With repetition or parallelism being ‘fashions of speaking’ used frequently almost by default in a range of Eastern languages, will such a structure be as ‘noteworthy’ in these languages compared, say, to English?
Horizontal and vertical intertextuality
Allusions (also called ‘vertical intertextuality’) are more subtle than the essentially static quotative or ‘horizontal’ form of intertextuality. They represent an ‘echo’ effect involving reference, not chapter and verse to the Bible or Shakespeare,
for example, but to an entire ‘mode of expression’ (biblical style, Shakespearean tone).
Markedness
or what we have so far referred to variously under such labels as textual salience and dynamism.
The arrangement of words and sentences may take a ‘preferred’ or ‘expected’ form (i.e. unmarked), or a somewhat unfamiliar and unexpected form (i.e. marked,
salient, dynamic)
The theoretical thinking on this issue in Translation Studies runs something like this: if contextually motivated (that is, if used ungratuitously), marked grammar and lexis must be accounted for in the processing of text and preserved in translation. Practice tells a different story
Hermeneutic circle
The translator tends to move backwards and forwards between what may be called ‘reader-supplied’ information at one end, and information ‘supplied by the text’ at the other.
Metaphors
Metaphors in predominantly expressive texts are best rendered metaphorically, while those in predominantly informative texts may if necessary be modified or altogether jettisoned.
Genre awareness
A cursory glance at a sample of translated news reports into English would immediately reveal that the root cause of the bulk of errors is essentially flawed genre awareness rather than incompetence in grammar or lexis.
Contextual focus
Texts are now classified on the basis of a ‘predominant contextual focus’ (e.g. expository, argumentative or instructional texts)
Rhetorical purpose
Predominance of a given rhetorical purpose in a given text is an important yardstick for assessing text-type ‘identity.
To counter-argue is a rhetorical purpose which is realized in English through a Concessive – Adversative format (Of course . . . However . . .). This is a text structure which is particularly difficult for foreign users of English to appreciate.
Myth of the single register
Register mediates between language and situation (i.e. we use language registers to access
situations).
Text authority
Newmark introduces the concept of
text authority, considering that ‘the more authoritative the text, the smaller the unit of translation’.
Mills & Boon
One stylistic feature of popular fiction such as Mills & Boon is the use of inanimates in subject position when a proposition relates to activity by women. Thus, Mills & Boon’s women do not ‘cry’; rather, ‘tears course down their cheeks’
Mills & Boon tends to be heavy on the suppression of human agency, deliberately letting actors other than the human take over. There is also a clear tendency to use what Carter and Nash (1990) call ‘core’ verbs, strikingly colourful adjectives, and so on
When soldier Sam is in a spot, his stomach tightens; when
nurse Nancy is alone in the fog-bound clinic, fear grips her with an icy claw
Equivalence
A translation which attempts to produce a dynamic rather than a formal equivalence is based upon ‘the principle of equivalent effect’
Formal and dynamic equivalence
Unmotivated formal equivalence is a form of blind literalism,
while unmotivated dynamic equivalence is a form of blatant re-writing.
Dynamic equivalence
There is a tendency, often resorted to by translators whose command of the TL is superior to that of the source, to use dynamic equivalence as carte blanche in a kind of anything-goes attitude. Although the
translations normally sound excellent, closer scrutiny immediately reveals that they
relate to the ST only tangentially.
Bühler’s three functions
Bühler (1934/1965) distinguished three functions of a linguistic sign: informative (Darstellung), expressive (Ausdruck) and vocative (Appell).
Coseriu sees the three functions in terms of their relative dominance.
Idiolect in Shakespeare
Many of Shakespeare’s greatest characters are strongly marked linguistically as individuals: Richard III, Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Juliet’s Nurse, Beatrice, Cleopatra, to
mention but a few: and the work of Dickens is full of linguistic curiosities. In such instances I suggest that in the search for ‘equivalence’ the translator has a responsibility to try to distinguish them linguistically as being individual in the Target Language: of course, the markers of individuality will not be ‘the same’ or probably
even parallel in the two languages
French Cockney
in translating Cockney dialogue into French, most translators would quite rightly select Parigot
Selecting the canon
Within the Anglo-American
translation tradition, careful selection has ensured that only those texts which lend
themselves to a domesticating strategy are included, while other texts which resist such a strategy are all but totally excluded.
Contrastive Rhetoric
Translators neglect the TOP-DOWN
direction of the information processing at their peril. It is not enough for the translator
to take care of the words and phrases in a BOTTOM-UP manner, hoping that the larger discourse units, and ultimately the genre-fidelity will thereby automatically take care
of themselves: this will not happen, and the result will be genre-infelicities which
read like weak parodies. We already have sufficient compelling evidence from the fast developing field of Contrastive Rhetoric (e.g. Connor and Kaplan,
Aelfric
Aelfric tells us: ‘You must know that we have abbreviated the more
prolix martyrdoms, for the refined and delicate reader would be overcome with boredom if there were as much prolixity in our own language as in Latin’.
Semantic prosody
Semantic prosody refers to the positive or negative connotative meaning which is transferred to the focus word by the semantic fields of its common collocates.
Stubbs (1995, 1996:173–4) examines collocates of causal verbs and finds in his corpus that the vast majority of collocates of cause are negative, e.g. accident, cancer,
commotion, crisis and delay. On the other hand, the verb provide has a positive semantic prosody with collocates care, food, help, jobs, relief and support. This is an
area which is beginning to be investigated between languages and in translation, the hypothesis being that in some cases the translator may not intuitively be aware of the prosody or may choose an equivalent which has a different prosody from the original.
Modulation
The type of modulation which turns a negative SL expression into a
positive TL expression is more often than not optional, even though this is closely linked with the structure of each language, e.g.:
It is not difficult to show . . .
: Il est facile de démontrer . .
Situational equivalence.
Particularly frequent in the translation of book and film titles, e.g.:
Trois hommes et un couffin
[Three men and a Moses basket]
: Three Men and a Baby
Le grand Meaune
[The Big Meaulne – a character’s name]
: The Wanderer
Paratext
There will always in my experience be a fair number who will insist on a literal translation, with no paratext of any kind, saying that the reader who does not understand should go and look it up.
Think-Aloud Protocols
(TAPs), where the researcher generally presents a translator (novice or professional) with a ST and records the translator as he or she ‘thinks aloud’ (see Krings 1986; Lörscher 1991; Tirkonnen-Condit and Jääskeläinen 2000)
Tourist brochures
English tourist brochures tend to ‘objectify’ experience, while those of other languages ‘subjectify’ experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_An...
Ideologema
doxa
.
November 1, 2020
Ho studiato questo libro, in lingua inglese, come parte del programma di un corso universitario in merito alla lingua e alla linguistica inglese. Sicuramente è un testo molto interessante, in grado di coniugare tutte le principali teorie dei Translation Studies ad esempi molto intuitivi ed efficaci. Non ho particolarmente apprezzato la struttura del libro, a mio parere un po’ dispersiva, essendo questo suddiviso in tre macro-sezioni che affrontano i medesimi argomenti da diversi punti di vista e con approcci differenti. Si tratta indubbiamente di una lettura abbastanza complessa e, in alcuni momenti, poco scorrevole ma la consiglio a chi vuole acquisire una conoscenza approfondita delle più importanti teorie in ambito traduttologico.
March 25, 2022
كتاب فخم ، بسيط ورائع
كانت الأمثلة التي تضمنها الكتاب مفهومة وفي متناول الجميع
سررت بكون من شارك في تأليف الكتاب من اصل عراقي
على رغم من ان الكتاب قديم نوع ما الا أنه قد أوفى على الغاية
بارككم الرحمان
كانت الأمثلة التي تضمنها الكتاب مفهومة وفي متناول الجميع
سررت بكون من شارك في تأليف الكتاب من اصل عراقي
على رغم من ان الكتاب قديم نوع ما الا أنه قد أوفى على الغاية
بارككم الرحمان
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