Translation Studies Unit 1

Introduction:
Translation studies is an academic inter discipline dealing with the systematic study of the
theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an inter
discipline, Translation Studies borrows much from the various fields of study that support
translation.

These include comparative literature, computer science, history, linguistics, philology,

philosophy, semiotics, and terminology.
The term translation studies was coined by the Amsterdam-based American
scholar James S. Holmes in his paper "The name and nature of translation studies", [1] which is
considered a foundational statement for the discipline. In English, writers occasionally use the
term translatology (and less commonly traductology) to refer to translation studies, and the
corresponding French term for the discipline is usually traductologie (as in the Société Françoise
de Traductologie). In the United States there is a preference for the term Translation and
Interpreting Studies
Generally, translation is regarded as the rendering (or reproducing) of a Source Language
(SL) text into the Target Language (TL) so as to ensure that:
1. The surface meaning of the two will be approximately similar
2. The structure of the SL will be preserved as closely as possible but not so closely that
the TL structure will be seriously distorted. We can however measure the student’s
Linguistic competence by means of the TL product. But then, the matter ends there.
3. The stress throughout is on understanding the syntax of the language being studied
and on using translation as a means of demonstrating that understanding.

Early studies
Historically, translation studies has long been prescriptive (telling translators how to
translate), to the point that discussions of translation that were not prescriptive were generally
not considered to be about translation at all. When historians of translation studies trace early
Western thought about translation, for example, they most often set the beginning at Cicero's
remarks on how he used translation from Greek to Latin to improve his oratorical abilities—an
early description of what Jerome ended up calling sense-for-sense translation. The descriptive
history of interpreters in Egypt provided by Herodotus several centuries earlier is typically not
thought of as translation studies—presumably because it does not tell translators how to
translate. In China, the discussion on how to translate originated with the translation of Buddhist
sutras during the Han Dynasty.

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1.1 Central Issues
The first step towards an examination of the processes of translation must be to
accept that although translation has a central core of linguistic activity, it belongs most
properly to semiotics, the science that studies sign systems or structures, sign processes and
sign functions (Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, London 1977). Beyond the notion
stressed by the narrowly linguistic approach, that translation involves the transfer of
‘meaning’ contained in one set of language signs into another set of language signs through
competent use of the dictionary and grammar, the process involves a whole set of extra-
linguistic criteria also.
Rules for English Translation:
1. Accept the untranslatability of the SL phrase in the TL on the linguistic level
2. Accept the lack of a similar cultural convention in the TL
3. Consider the range of TL Phrases available, having regard to the presentation of classes,
status, age, Sex of the speaker his relationship to the listeners and the context of their
meeting in the SL
4. iv Consider the significance of the phrases in its particular context i.e., as a moment of
high tension in the dramatic text
5. Replace in the TL the invariant core of the SL phrase in its two referential systems.

1.2 Language

There are lots of definitions on language which are included here shortly. Language is used
to maintain and convey culture and cultural ties. Different ideas stem from differing language
use within one's culture and the whole intertwining of these relationships start at one's birth.

 Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using
complex system of communication or to a specific instance of such a system of complex
communication. The human language faculty is thought to be fundamentally different
from and of much higher complexity than those of other species. Human language is
highly complex in that it is based on a set of rules relating symbols to their meanings,
thereby forming an infinite number of possible innovative utterances from a finite
number of elements.
 Culture Newmark defined culture as "the way of life and its manifestations that are
peculiar to a community that uses a particular language as its means of expression".
 He clearly stated that operationally he does not regard language as a component or
feature of culture in direct opposition to the view taken by Vermeer who stated that
"language is part of a culture."

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  The term culture originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind; culture includes
behavior such as courtship or child rearing practices material things such as tools,
clothing and shelter, institutions and beliefs.
 Culture is the sum total of the ways of living built up by a group and passed on from one
generation to another.
 Culture is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs
and many other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

Translation The communication of the meaning of the source-language text is by means of an

equivalent target-language text

 Translation consists of language and culture. Jerome said that two things are necessary
for a good translation - an adequate understanding of the original language (source
language) and an adequate command of the language into which one is translating
(receptor language). Larson claimed that "Translation is a complicated process."
 However, a translator who is concerned with transferring the meaning will find that the
receptor language has a way in which the desired meaning can be expressed, even though
it may be very different from the source language form. Translation is no longer
considered to be a mere cross-linguistic activity but it significantly is cross-cultural
communication.

1.3 Culture through the Languages

We came to agree on the existence of the so-called "cultural universals" that enhance
communication, change of ideas in order to achieve progress in all life domains. Change of ideas,
concentration of mutual efforts in different directions, communication among different peoples
in different ways, all these are a constant necessity of spiritual and material life. Not only cultural
acts are achieved by means of continuity process alone, but also being discontinuous can be as
creative at certain times. Yet, this breach is to be performed to existent models and not to a state
of nothingness.

But how cultures transfer through the languages? For answering this question we should
consider the relationship between culture and language which is deeply rooted. Translation is the
only way which does it. The fact that there is only one human species is explained by the
possibility to transfer sense, meaning from one language to the other, by means of the word, thus,
by translation.

Jacobson on Translation:

In his article On Linguistic Aspects of Translation, Roman Jacobson distinguishes three

types of translation, and these are:

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 a. Intralingual translation or rewording. (an interpretation of verbal signs by means
of other signs in the same language)
b. Interlingual translation or translation proper (an interpretation of verbal signs by
means of some other language)
c. Intersemiotic translation or transmutation (an interpretation of verbal signs by
means of signs of nonverbal sign system)

Having established these three types of which interlingual or translation proper, describes
the process of transfer from SL to TL Jacobson points out that there may be interpretations of
code units (message) but there may not be full equivalence through translation.

1.4 Types of Translation

Translation studies is based on dramatic evolution of the professional translation industry,

there are currently new terms and words being used to describe translation service specializations
that don't fall under general categories like human translation or machine translation. This article
intends to serve as a brief guide of sorts to some of the more common and basic of these recently
coined expressions. Here are just some of them:

 General Translation: The simplest of translation types, a general translation allows a

translator quite a lot of leeway because its source material mostly uses layman terms and
ordinary, everyday speech. There's no need to understand special terminologies, and most
translation work fall into this particular type.

 Legal Translation: As one of the more complex and complicated professional

translation types out there, legal translation is best described as the translation of treaties,
contracts, and many other legal documents. A translation service is responsible for both
understanding politico-legal and socio-cultural context behind a legal text and translating
it in such a way that a target audience with a different cultural/political/societal
background could readily understand. Only a human translation agency that knows both
source and target cultures could pull a decent legal translation job off. Nevertheless, even
specialists like those tend to use professional legal assistance as well, because one simple
slipup or mistranslation of a contract's passage could lead to disastrous consequences.

 Commercial Translation: Just like its legal counterpart, a commercial translation

or business translation (not to be confused with advertising translation) requires a
translator to have specialist translation skills and business jargon knowledge in order to
translate a business's every report, tender document, company account, and
correspondence. There's a bit of overlap between commercial translation and legal
translation as well, in the sense that companies tend to handle legal paperwork alongside
business paperwork.

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  Administrative Translation: "Administrative" can mean many things, but in the context
of translation, it merely refers to translating managerial texts used in different
corporations, businesses, and organizations. This translation type also overlaps with
commercial translation, but only in the sense that the vast majority of administrative
translation can be considered commercial translation as well, but not all commercial
translation is administrative in nature.

 Literary Translation: As its name suggests, literary translation refers to translation done
for literature such as poems, plays, short stories, and novels. Just as general translation is
the simplest form and legal translation is the most difficult form, many people in the
industry consider literary translation as the highest form of translation. The reason behind
this is because literary translation goes beyond mere translation of context; a literary
translator must be proficient in translating humor, cultural nuances, feelings, emotions,
and other subtle elements of a given work. Conversely, there are those who allege that
literary translation is impossible, as with the case of translating poetry.

1.5 Decoding and Recoding

Decoding and Recoding Nida, considered the process of translation as a system of decoding and
recoding: "Essentially the translation process is one in which a person who knows both the
source and receptor language, decodes the message of the source language and encodes it into an
appropriate equivalent from the receptor language" (1964, 93-94). Decoding consists of
comprehension and analysis while recoding consists of reformulation and restructuring. The
transfer from decoding to recoding takes place in the subconscious part of the mind. The
translator first understands the cultural aspects, the linguistic aspects and the idiolect aspects of
the text. He understands the contexts in the text. He should understand the words, neologisms,
figures of speech, acronyms and ambiguities.

Contemporary semioticians refer to the creation and interpretation of text as ‘encoding’ and
‘recoding’ respectively. The translator goes beyond purely linguistic 37 criteria and he is actually
a semiotician who is involved in a process of decoding and recoding. Nida advocates that the
source language text should be analyzed and then the thought should be transferred. The
transferred thought would be restructured in the target language. For that the translator takes care
of the essential principles of translation namely fidelity, economy and readability. The following
diagram shows the process:

SL Text TL Text

Decoding Recoding

Comprehension & Analysis Reformation & Restructuring

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 Transformation Figure

1.6 Loss and Gain

Eugene Nida is a rich source of information about the problems of loss in translation, in
particular about the difficulties encountered by the translator when faced with terms or concepts
in the SL that do not exist in the TL. He cites the case of Guaica, a language of southern
Venezuela, where there is little trouble in finding satisfactory terms for the English murder,
stealing, lying, etc., but where the terms for good, bad, ugly and beautiful cover a very different
area of meaning. As an example, he points out that Guaica does not follow a dichotomous
classification of good and bad, but a trichotomous one as follows:

Good includes desirable food, killing enemies, chewing dope in moderation, putting fire to one’s
wife to teach her to obey, and stealing from anyone not belonging to the same band.

Bad includes rotten fruit, any object with a blemish, murdering a person of the same band,
stealing from a member of the extended family and lying to anyone.

Violating taboo includes incest, being too close to one’s mother-in-law, a married woman’s
eating tapir before the birth of the first child, and a child’s eating rodents. Nor is it necessary to
look so far beyond Europe for examples of this kind of differentiation. The large number of
terms in Finnish for variations of snow, in Arabic for aspects of camel behavior, in English for
light and water, in French for types of bread, all present the translator with, on one level, an
untranslatable problem. Bible translators have documented the additional difficulties involved in,
for example, the concept of the Trinity or the social significance of the parables in certain
cultures. In addition to the lexical problems, there are of course languages that do not have tense
systems or concepts of time that in any way correspond to Indo-European systems. Whorf‘s
comparison (which may not be reliable, but is cited here as a theoretical example) between a
‘temporal language’ (English) and a ‘timeless language’ (Hopi) serves to illustrate this aspect.

1.7 Dynamic Equivalence:

In dynamic equivalence, the translator seeks to convey the same effect that the reading of the
source language text had on him, to the reader of the target language. A translation of dynamic
equivalence aims at complete naturalness of expression and tries to relate the receptor to modes
of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture; it does not insist that he understands
the cultural patterns of the source language context in order to comprehend the message. Formal
equivalence is source -oriented and it may contain unnatural, unclear and even misleading
expressions. Therefore Nida preferred the dynamic equivalence because it attempts to translate

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sense for sense and sentence boundaries are not respected. Idioms are so translated as to make
the readers understand the meaning. The TL reader is expected to receive the same effect as the
SL text reader receives. The message is clear and importance to message is given.

Formal Equivalence

Formal equivalence is basically source-oriented. It aims at revealing as much as possible

of the form and the content of the original. In the process, several formal elements will get
reproduced. The formal elements reproduced in this type of translation are given by Nida (165-
166) as follows:

1. Nouns will be translated only by nouns, verbs by verbs and so on.

2. Phrases and sentences will be kept intact: there will be no splitting up and readjusting the
units for the sake of clarity of meaning.
3. All formal indicators such as marks of punctuation, paragraph breaks etc., will be
preserved. Verbal consistency will have priority over contextual consistency.
4. A particular term in the source language irrespective of the different contexts it occurs in
will be rendered by a corresponding target language term in all the contexts.
5. Idioms are sought to be translated rather more or less literally on the ground that the
reader will understand how the source employed local cultural elements to convey
meanings.

Consequently, a translation which follows the formal equivalence method will not be so
intelligible to the average readers. Nida says that the translator will supply words in brackets or
through italicized letters and a marginal note on the meaning of the formal equivalents. Nida
views translation as involving analysis of the SL text, transfer of meaning and stylistic features
from the SL text to the TL text and restructuring of the TL text and then giving final touches to
it.

Popovic Equivalence:

In this definition of translation equivalence, Popovic distinguishes the following four types:

 Linguistic equivalence where there is homogeneity on the linguistic level of both SL and
TL texts i.e., Word for word translation.
 Paradigmatic equivalence where there is equivalence of ‘the elements of a paradigmatic
expressive axis’i.e., elements of grammar, which Popovic sees as being a higher category
than lexical equivalence
 Stylistic (translation) equivalence where there is ‘functional ‘equivalence of elements in
both original and translation aiming at an expressive identity with an invariant of
identical meaning

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  Textual (syntagmatic) equivalence where there is equivalence of the syntagmatic
structuring of a text i.e., equivalence of form and shape

1.8 Untranslatability

Another important contribution of Catford is his ideas on the limits of translatability. He

says that if the translation fails it could be called untranslatability. He categorized the
untranslatable item under two headings namely the linguistically untranslatable and the culturally
untranslatable. Linguistic untranslatability occurs when there is a non-availability of syntactic,
lexical substitute for an SL item in the TL. The translator may consult the SL item in the light of
the TL structure. Cultural untranslatability occurs because of the difference in the SL and TL
cultures. It happened when a situational feature in this SL does not find a relevant substitute in
the TL. Parallel to these two types of untranslatability of Catford, Popovic pointed out the types
of untranslatability namely linguistic untranslatability and cultural untranslatability. The situation
in which the linguistic elements of the original cannot be replaced adequately in structural,
linear, functional or semantic terms in consequence of a lack of denotation and connotation. This
is similar to Catford's linguistic untranslatability. The other is that the relation between the
creative subject and its linguistic expression in the original does not find an adequate linguistic
expression in the translation. This is similar to Catford's cultural untranslatability. It is noted that
Catford's theory has ignored the factors that influence the process of translation, the translator,
his social and cultural background, his audience and his aim in translation

Reference:

Bassnett, Susan. Translation studies. Routledge, 2013.

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