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Routledge Companions
The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies
The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies brings together clear, detailed essays from leading international scholars on major areas in Translation Studies today.
This accessible and authoritative guide offers fresh perspectives on linguistics, context, culture, politics and ethics and contains a range of contributions on emerging areas such as cognitive theories, technology, interpreting and audiovisual translation.
Supported by an extensive glossary of key concepts and a substantial bibliography, this Companion is an essential resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and professionals working in this exciting field of study.
Jeremy Munday is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Translation Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Introducing Translation Studies, An Advanced Resource Book (with Basil Hatim) and Style and Ideology in Translation, all published by Routledge.
"An excellent all-round guide to translation studies taking in the more traditional genres and those on the cutting edge. All the contributors are known experts in their chosen areas and this gives the volume the air of authority required when dealing with a subject that is being increasingly studied in higher education institutions all over the world"
- Christopher Taylor, University of Trieste, Italy
This accessible and authoritative guide offers fresh perspectives on linguistics, context, culture, politics and ethics and contains a range of contributions on emerging areas such as cognitive theories, technology, interpreting and audiovisual translation.
Supported by an extensive glossary of key concepts and a substantial bibliography, this Companion is an essential resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and professionals working in this exciting field of study.
Jeremy Munday is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Translation Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Introducing Translation Studies, An Advanced Resource Book (with Basil Hatim) and Style and Ideology in Translation, all published by Routledge.
"An excellent all-round guide to translation studies taking in the more traditional genres and those on the cutting edge. All the contributors are known experts in their chosen areas and this gives the volume the air of authority required when dealing with a subject that is being increasingly studied in higher education institutions all over the world"
- Christopher Taylor, University of Trieste, Italy
- GenresNonfictionLanguage
306 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 15, 2008
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About the author
Jeremy Munday
53 books17 followersJeremy Munday is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. His specialisms are: linguistic translation theories, discourse analysis, ideology and translation, and Latin American literature in translation. He is author of Introducing Translation Studies (Routledge, 4th edition, 2016) and Evaluation in Translatio (Routledge, 2012).
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December 3, 2022
About two months after reading this collection of essays, what sticks most in my mind is the plethora of leads it has given me into the main traditions, ideas and works on translation issues, i.e. starting points for further research. Contributors include Jeremy Munday himself, Peter Newmark, David Katam and Basil Hatim, the latter in particular having probably been told to keep the style fairly untechnical and clear.
Here are some of my notes and quotes:
Check out
Norman Fairclough
Critical discourse analysis
Check out
Context of situation and context of culture, coined by Malinowski
Toury’s early work came out of the context of polysystem theory, developed by his colleague Itamar Even-Zohar, which studied translated literature as a system that interrelated dynamically with the source system. The focus moved away from the prescriptive (‘X must be translated as Y’) and firmly towards the descriptive (‘in text A, produced under conditions and constraints B, X is translated as Y’).
Norms are linked to regularities of behaviour – probabilistic laws.
Peter Newmark: I would argue that translation theory is not indispensable, since there are good translators who have had no theoretical training, but it is an essential component of any translator training syllabus.
In my view, translation theory works best when continuously accompanied by defining and
illustrative bilingual translation examples which have been met in the teacher’s professional experience or appear in standard textbooks on the subject.
Tytler’s criticism of Voltaire’s
translation of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, where the original and the translation are quoted in full:
The Hamlet references are not indicated in detail, but it is not difficult to spot them:
How wonderfully has he [Voltaire] metamorphosed, how miserably disfigured him [Shakespeare]! In the original we have the perfect picture of a mind deeply agitated, giving vent to its feelings in broken starts of utterance, and in language which plainly indicates that the speaker is reasoning solely with his own mind, and not with any auditor. In the translation, we have a formal and connected harangue, in which it would appear, that the author [Voltaire], offended with
the abrupt manner of the original ... has corrected, as he thought, those defects of the original,
In his Componential Analysis of Meaning (1975), Nida usefully discriminates between the gen-
eral and the distinguishing components of lexical items. The technique can be of use to a translator, and may become intuitive and instinctive in the many cases when a descriptive word in the source language (e.g. German stürzen) is not adequately translated by a single word in the
target language (a fact often overlooked in the dictionaries), and is better split into an idiom or two or three words (fall + suddenly / heavily / dramatically).
In cases, particularly in imaginative texts, where emphasis or ellipsis appears to distort the word order, theorists such as Tesnière (e.g. 1959), Helbig (e.g. Helbig and Schenckel 1969) and Newmark (1988) have shown that the sense can be sourced when the grammatical terms are ‘semanticized’. An example from Heinrich Mann’s great Der Untertan [Man of Straw]:
Und gefällig schrie das Häuflein mit. Diederich aber, ein Sprung in den Einspanner und los, hinterdrein.
[And obligingly shouted the little crowd at the same time. Diederich however, a jump into the one-horse carriage and away, behind there]
The little crowd obligingly echoed Diederich’s cry, but he, jumping into the one-horse carriage, started off in pursuit.
Nida’s, House’s and my dualistic theories covered literary and non-literary texts. In their choice of appropriate examples, they were influenced, as was Katharina Reiss, an important figure for popular text translation, and Christiane Nord (1991/2005) (documentary and instrumental translation), by the psychologist Karl Bühler, who distinguished the three functions of language as the expressive, the descriptive and the appellative. Reiss (1971/2000) links these functions to ‘expressive’, ‘informative’ and ‘appellative’ text types.
The more important/serious the language (keywords, collocations,
emphases) of the original, the more closely it should be translated.
The double negative is always semantically weaker than the positive, unless the emphasis of speech shines through it.
Situational appropriateness established by registers, together with textual well-formedness, generic integrity and a discourse perspective, may more helpfully be seen as layer upon layer of ‘socio-textual practice’, in which language users constantly engage in their attempt to create or make sense of texts.
Covert and overt translations
Discussing Czech writer Milan Kundera’s The Joke, Kuhiwczak points out that the English translation of the novel is both inadequate and distorted, ‘an appropriation of the original, resulting from the translator’s and publisher’s untested assumptions about Eastern Europe, East European writing, and the ability of the Western reader to decode complex cultural messages’.
Specifically, The Joke’s plot is not particularly complex; it reflects the writer’s belief that novels should be about ‘themes’ served by narratives which are ‘polyphonic, full of seemingly insignificant digressions and carefully crafted repetitions’ (ibid.: 125). These are textual manifestations which only a form of discourse analysis relying on a richer cultural dimension would adequately uncover.
The translator into English saw in this mosaic of features a bewildering array of irrelevancies which had to be ‘tidied’ for the prospective reader to make sense and discover a reasonably structured chronological order. For example, an important ‘theme’ – the folk music cultural festivity – is jettisoned, sweeping away with it the very thing which Kundera intended by this particularly long digression: ‘to illustrate the fragility of culture’
Interpreting Theory of Translation qv
Deverbalization
For the ITT, sense is the non-verbal synthesis resulting fro the process of understanding. Therefore, ITT postulates the existence of an intermediate phase of deverbalization resulting from the phase of understanding and the beginning of the phase of re-expression. This phase plays a fundamental role in the scope of ITT since it considers that re-expression is achieved through deverbalized meaning and not on the basis of linguistic form.
For RT, human communication is a case of ostensive-inferential communication in which ‘inferential communication and ostension are one and the same process, but seen from two different points of view:
Thick translation qv
Scholars since Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1995) have offered a plethora of strategies to compensate for the lack of cultureme equivalence. Kwiecinski has summarized these into four groups: ‘exoticising procedures’, ‘rich explicatory procedures’, ‘recognised exoticisation’ and ‘assimilative procedures’.
Exoticizing procedures allow the foreign term into the target language (falafel, macho, Weltanschauung, burka). For Newmark this procedure offers local colour and atmosphere, though this approach has been criticized by Berman, who claims that making a text ‘more
authentic’ (the inverted commas are his) insidiously emphasizes and exoticizes a certain stereotype. Clearly, we need to be aware of the difference between the utility of the resources available for a translator and the slavish use of any one irrespective of context or translation purpose.
The second grouping is ‘rich explicatory procedures’. The aim is to slide in an extra term or two which will cue readers to enough of the context, often through a local analogy, to guide them towards a more equivalent cognition.
Two of the many possible procedures are the use of explanatory brackets, such as ‘Knesset (the Israeli Parliament)’, or through adjectivizing the source term, as in ‘hot cotechino sausage’.
The following text from Italo Calvino’s L’avventura di una moglie / The Adventure of a Wife (1993: 116) provides a good example (see Katan 2002). Stefania, the well-mannered wife, has just walked into ‘a bar’ for the very first time and goes up to the counter. Her very first move is to make the following bold request (highlighted):
Un ristretto, doppio, caldissimo, – disse al cameriere.
‘A concentrated, double, very hot’, she said to the barman.
Initially, this foreignized translation will leave the Anglophone reader bewildered, as none of the words directly cue ‘coffee’. More serious is the fact that we have a projected directive, which the English language and cultural filters are likely to distort into a flouting of negative politeness norms; and Stefania’s unassuming behaviour (for an Italian addressee) is likely to be ‘typed’ as ‘brazen’ or ‘rude’.
Katan (2002) suggests a number of mediating strategies, including couching the projecting directive within an explicit request frame, thus leaving the politeness to the context so that there is no distortion of the target text within the projection. This will allow the readers (and, in reality, the barman too) to add the politeness from their own expectancy frame:
She asked the barman for an espresso, ‘thick, double and really hot’.
Emic and etic qv
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_an...
In an attempt to sidestep the crude binaries of national versus global and provincial versus cosmopolitan, Michael Cronin (2003, 2006) advocates micro-cosmopolitanism, which seeks to develop an eye for the myriad fractal complexities of the local while remaining aware of larger contexts. Attention to detail, he argues, will confront us with the
limits of our understanding.
Here are some of my notes and quotes:
Check out
Norman Fairclough
Critical discourse analysis
Check out
Context of situation and context of culture, coined by Malinowski
Toury’s early work came out of the context of polysystem theory, developed by his colleague Itamar Even-Zohar, which studied translated literature as a system that interrelated dynamically with the source system. The focus moved away from the prescriptive (‘X must be translated as Y’) and firmly towards the descriptive (‘in text A, produced under conditions and constraints B, X is translated as Y’).
Norms are linked to regularities of behaviour – probabilistic laws.
Peter Newmark: I would argue that translation theory is not indispensable, since there are good translators who have had no theoretical training, but it is an essential component of any translator training syllabus.
In my view, translation theory works best when continuously accompanied by defining and
illustrative bilingual translation examples which have been met in the teacher’s professional experience or appear in standard textbooks on the subject.
Tytler’s criticism of Voltaire’s
translation of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, where the original and the translation are quoted in full:
The Hamlet references are not indicated in detail, but it is not difficult to spot them:
How wonderfully has he [Voltaire] metamorphosed, how miserably disfigured him [Shakespeare]! In the original we have the perfect picture of a mind deeply agitated, giving vent to its feelings in broken starts of utterance, and in language which plainly indicates that the speaker is reasoning solely with his own mind, and not with any auditor. In the translation, we have a formal and connected harangue, in which it would appear, that the author [Voltaire], offended with
the abrupt manner of the original ... has corrected, as he thought, those defects of the original,
In his Componential Analysis of Meaning (1975), Nida usefully discriminates between the gen-
eral and the distinguishing components of lexical items. The technique can be of use to a translator, and may become intuitive and instinctive in the many cases when a descriptive word in the source language (e.g. German stürzen) is not adequately translated by a single word in the
target language (a fact often overlooked in the dictionaries), and is better split into an idiom or two or three words (fall + suddenly / heavily / dramatically).
In cases, particularly in imaginative texts, where emphasis or ellipsis appears to distort the word order, theorists such as Tesnière (e.g. 1959), Helbig (e.g. Helbig and Schenckel 1969) and Newmark (1988) have shown that the sense can be sourced when the grammatical terms are ‘semanticized’. An example from Heinrich Mann’s great Der Untertan [Man of Straw]:
Und gefällig schrie das Häuflein mit. Diederich aber, ein Sprung in den Einspanner und los, hinterdrein.
[And obligingly shouted the little crowd at the same time. Diederich however, a jump into the one-horse carriage and away, behind there]
The little crowd obligingly echoed Diederich’s cry, but he, jumping into the one-horse carriage, started off in pursuit.
Nida’s, House’s and my dualistic theories covered literary and non-literary texts. In their choice of appropriate examples, they were influenced, as was Katharina Reiss, an important figure for popular text translation, and Christiane Nord (1991/2005) (documentary and instrumental translation), by the psychologist Karl Bühler, who distinguished the three functions of language as the expressive, the descriptive and the appellative. Reiss (1971/2000) links these functions to ‘expressive’, ‘informative’ and ‘appellative’ text types.
The more important/serious the language (keywords, collocations,
emphases) of the original, the more closely it should be translated.
The double negative is always semantically weaker than the positive, unless the emphasis of speech shines through it.
Situational appropriateness established by registers, together with textual well-formedness, generic integrity and a discourse perspective, may more helpfully be seen as layer upon layer of ‘socio-textual practice’, in which language users constantly engage in their attempt to create or make sense of texts.
Covert and overt translations
Discussing Czech writer Milan Kundera’s The Joke, Kuhiwczak points out that the English translation of the novel is both inadequate and distorted, ‘an appropriation of the original, resulting from the translator’s and publisher’s untested assumptions about Eastern Europe, East European writing, and the ability of the Western reader to decode complex cultural messages’.
Specifically, The Joke’s plot is not particularly complex; it reflects the writer’s belief that novels should be about ‘themes’ served by narratives which are ‘polyphonic, full of seemingly insignificant digressions and carefully crafted repetitions’ (ibid.: 125). These are textual manifestations which only a form of discourse analysis relying on a richer cultural dimension would adequately uncover.
The translator into English saw in this mosaic of features a bewildering array of irrelevancies which had to be ‘tidied’ for the prospective reader to make sense and discover a reasonably structured chronological order. For example, an important ‘theme’ – the folk music cultural festivity – is jettisoned, sweeping away with it the very thing which Kundera intended by this particularly long digression: ‘to illustrate the fragility of culture’
Interpreting Theory of Translation qv
Deverbalization
For the ITT, sense is the non-verbal synthesis resulting fro the process of understanding. Therefore, ITT postulates the existence of an intermediate phase of deverbalization resulting from the phase of understanding and the beginning of the phase of re-expression. This phase plays a fundamental role in the scope of ITT since it considers that re-expression is achieved through deverbalized meaning and not on the basis of linguistic form.
For RT, human communication is a case of ostensive-inferential communication in which ‘inferential communication and ostension are one and the same process, but seen from two different points of view:
Thick translation qv
Scholars since Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1995) have offered a plethora of strategies to compensate for the lack of cultureme equivalence. Kwiecinski has summarized these into four groups: ‘exoticising procedures’, ‘rich explicatory procedures’, ‘recognised exoticisation’ and ‘assimilative procedures’.
Exoticizing procedures allow the foreign term into the target language (falafel, macho, Weltanschauung, burka). For Newmark this procedure offers local colour and atmosphere, though this approach has been criticized by Berman, who claims that making a text ‘more
authentic’ (the inverted commas are his) insidiously emphasizes and exoticizes a certain stereotype. Clearly, we need to be aware of the difference between the utility of the resources available for a translator and the slavish use of any one irrespective of context or translation purpose.
The second grouping is ‘rich explicatory procedures’. The aim is to slide in an extra term or two which will cue readers to enough of the context, often through a local analogy, to guide them towards a more equivalent cognition.
Two of the many possible procedures are the use of explanatory brackets, such as ‘Knesset (the Israeli Parliament)’, or through adjectivizing the source term, as in ‘hot cotechino sausage’.
The following text from Italo Calvino’s L’avventura di una moglie / The Adventure of a Wife (1993: 116) provides a good example (see Katan 2002). Stefania, the well-mannered wife, has just walked into ‘a bar’ for the very first time and goes up to the counter. Her very first move is to make the following bold request (highlighted):
Un ristretto, doppio, caldissimo, – disse al cameriere.
‘A concentrated, double, very hot’, she said to the barman.
Initially, this foreignized translation will leave the Anglophone reader bewildered, as none of the words directly cue ‘coffee’. More serious is the fact that we have a projected directive, which the English language and cultural filters are likely to distort into a flouting of negative politeness norms; and Stefania’s unassuming behaviour (for an Italian addressee) is likely to be ‘typed’ as ‘brazen’ or ‘rude’.
Katan (2002) suggests a number of mediating strategies, including couching the projecting directive within an explicit request frame, thus leaving the politeness to the context so that there is no distortion of the target text within the projection. This will allow the readers (and, in reality, the barman too) to add the politeness from their own expectancy frame:
She asked the barman for an espresso, ‘thick, double and really hot’.
Emic and etic qv
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_an...
In an attempt to sidestep the crude binaries of national versus global and provincial versus cosmopolitan, Michael Cronin (2003, 2006) advocates micro-cosmopolitanism, which seeks to develop an eye for the myriad fractal complexities of the local while remaining aware of larger contexts. Attention to detail, he argues, will confront us with the
limits of our understanding.
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