Translated and non-translated English: similar or different?

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translated and non-translated English: similar or different?

T. V. Aksyutina

Oles Honchar Dnepropetrovsk National University

Розглянуто поняття «англійська мова як мова перекладу» на відміну від «англійська мова як мова оригіналу». Розбіжності між двома варіантами розглянуто у розумінні властивостей, притаманних мові оригінала та культурних традицій перекладу, характерних для цієї країни.

Ключові слова: «англійська мова як мова перекладу», «англійська мова як мова оригіналу», експліцитність, спрощення, мовна стандартизація, одиниця перекладу).

Рассмотрено понятие «английский как язык перевода» в отличие от «английский как язык оригинала». Различие между двумя вариантами рассмотрено в контексте особенностей языка оригинала и культурных традиций перевода, свойственных данной стране.

Ключевые слова: «английский как язык перевода», «английский как язык оригинала», эксплицитность, упрощение, языковая стандартизация, единица перевода).

The article deals with the notion of `translated English' in contrast to `non-translated English'. This type of English has been shown to be different from comparable non-translated texts in English, in the sense that they have specific properties that cannot be found in the latter, and being different from each other due to the source languages and culture-specific translation traditions.

Key words: translated English, non-translated English, exploitation, simplification, normalization, the unit of translation).

english language translation original

The article considers the notion of `translated English', in contrast to `non-translated English'. Its focal point is that translated English texts differ from comparable non-translated texts in English, the target language (TL), in the sense that they have specific properties that cannot be found in the latter. Translated English, therefore, is a distinct variety of English. What makes it distinct is that, on the one hand, translated English texts, regardless of the source language, have been found to share significant lexical, syntactic, and textual features and, on the other hand, they are inevitably source language - specific, exhibiting unique characteristics due to, among other factors, features of the source language and the translation tradition involved.

Actually, Baker is said to have developed some `hypotheses on the universal features of English translations' [2, с.288], which have been verified by evidence from English translations from a number languages including German, Finnish, Spanish, Norwegian, Italian, Chinese, Catalan and French. Although the investigations of universals in translated text are mainly limited to Romance languages and the degree following global patterns of translated English have been increasingly shown to be beyond debate by studies in various linguistic and cultural contexts:

Explicitation. This means that translators tend to render explicit in their translations implicit information in the source language text. That is to say, the translated text tends to contain fewer ambiguous items than the original. Evidence of explicitation has been found in terms of sentence and text length, explanatory vocabulary, optional words and subordinators.

Olohan and Baker's empirical analysis, for example, indicated a substantially heavier use of the reporting that with verbs say and tell in the TEC (The Translation English Corpus held at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester) than in a BNC (British National Corpus) sub-corpus. Olohan pursued the same line of research further, focusing on a less common verb, promise, which can also take an optional that, and found the same pattern between translated English and non-translated.

It has to be noted here that researchers have also attempted to see whether the tendency to keep the optional is the result of conscious or unconscious process. In an investigation of translation explicitation in the imaginary domain, for example, Olohan has shown that the translated English in the TEC displays a higher incidence of a range of optional syntactic features than is observed in a comparable sub-corpus of BNC and , more importantly, that “this tendency not to omit optional syntactic elements may be considered subliminal or subconscious rather than a result of deliberate decision-making of which the translator is aware - most translators do not have a conscious strategy for dealing with optional that, for example. It can be argued that it is the nature of the process of translation and the cognitive processing which it requires which produces the kind of patterning seen here” [2, с. 245].

Simplification. This refers to the tendency of translators to simplify texts - consciously or unconsciously - in order to improve the readability of their translations. Simplification, more often than not, goes hand in hand with explicitation. Linguistic features indicating explicitation (e.g. sentence length and the ratio of lexical vs. grammatical words) may, at the same time, make the texts easier to comprehend. The mean sentence length of translated texts tends to be lower, as translators are found to break up long, complex sentences into more, shorter sentences in their translations. “The translations contain more function words, fewer lexical words and more commonly used words than originals and are thus easier to read” [2, с. 132].

Vocabulary richness or variety is also believed to be a good indicator of simplification in translated English. Al-Shabab investigated the ratio of `types' (the number of lemmata) to `tokens' (the total number of words), in three corpora of radio news broadcasts in English [1, с.87]. The texts include English broadcasts based on Arabic originals for Damascus English Service; original English broadcasts for BBC Radio Four (for native speakers); and original English broadcasts from the BBC World Service (for non-native speakers). The results revealed that the translational group had a lower type-token ratio than the two original target-language corpora. Furthermore, Al-Shabab found that there were fewer cases of hapax legomena, a type occurring just once in the entire text, and greater repetition of frequent words. Al-Shabab argued that these three characteristics were related aspects of simplification in the language of translation.

Normalization. Normalization means that translations have a tendency to conform to, even to exaggerate, the typical features of the target language. As a test for normalization, Scott analyzed the Portuguese novel A Hora da Estrela, by Charles Lispec- tor, and its English translation The Hour of the Star, to see, in particular, how the negative word nao, which is dispersed throughout the original, is rendered in the English translation. The result showed that the word nao had been translated into 72 different English words and, more importantly, it had been omitted 50 times. By grouping the translator's choices, Scott found two poles of normalization: that resulting from the systematic constraints of the target language and that from the translator's own preferences. Consequently, Scott concluded that, as cited in Laviosa, “the nothingness conjured up in the source text has been weakened and dispersed” [5, с. 79]. Another linguistic feature which represents normalization is the tendency to normalize marked and ungrammatical structures. This is often found to occur in interpreting, where “interpreters tend to finish unfinished sentences and to grammarticalize ungrammatical structures” [2, с. 129].

A further method to test this universal feature of translation is to see how punctuations are used in translations, since “the translators are believed to use punctuations less creatively” [4, с. 213]. For example, they often use a stronger mark to render a weaker one in the original: semicolons or periods for commas and periods for semicolons. This can also be considered an attempt to simplify the text.

Leveling. Compared to a corpus of texts originally produced in the target language, texts in a comparable corpus of translated texts are more similar to each other in terms of lexical density, type-token ratio and average sentence length. This means that translators tend to use common-core linguistic features, preventing their translations from becoming extreme [2, с. 123].

To sum up, features like the above contribute to the commonality of translated English. With the expansion of translational corpora and the software for processing them, translation researchers will undoubtedly have a better understanding about both macro- and micro-structural and stylistic features that occur exclusively or with unusually high or low frequency in translated English texts as opposed to original ones and that cannot be traced back to the influence of any particular source language. While this is a promising field of study for both translation and world English scholars, SL influence upon translated texts can never be ignored and it is, as a matter of fact, an important factor that makes translated English different from non-translated English.

The source language always makes itself felt in the translated English. First of all, translators seldom, if ever, change the way information is arranged in the SL text: the sentence order in a paragraph and the paragraph order in the text. Nor do they remove parts of a text that may be considered unnecessary by TL readers. This is obvious when one considers what is called “the unit of translation”, “the stretch of source text on which the translator focuses attention in order to represent it as a whole in the target language” [5, с. 286]. Using the method of videotaping, Seguinot has shown that the sentence is the typical unit in translation. When perceiving and translating a manageable stretch of the text, translators seldom go beyond the sentence to the paragraph, not to say to the whole text. This means that the sentence order in a translated text remains, by and large, the same as it is in the original text; it is words and sentences, rather than the rhetoric, that are `translated' from one language into another. In most cases, the dis- coursal and rhetorical arrangement remains intact. The result is that a translated English text is lexically and grammatically English, but rhetorically it is actually localized since the information is packed in almost the same way as it is in the original.

Another reason that instances of translated English are different from one another and from the non-translated English lies in the fact that translators from different cultural backgrounds are found to have different views as to what is `good translation' and this bears upon the result of their product. For example, as early as 1980, Alder has found, during his work in China in editing the translation of Mao's Volume V, that “naturally the translators want it to read as smooth as possible. I suggest this temptation is greater for foreign comrades than for Chinese comrades. They will sometimes sacrifice precise meaning for the sake of neatness. This, in my opinion, Chinese comrades rightly fight against. They insist on accuracy of meaning first even if the result is a little clumsier than an alternative which reads rather easily” [6, с. 31]. Alder uses the term `Chinglish' to refer to this kind of `clumsier' expression, which he thinks is `more difficult, perhaps, most difficult of all, to eliminate [6, с. 32].

Many Chinglish expressions are due to cross-linguistic different uses of words (verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, etc.) and different uses with regard to duplication and emphasis. For example, Alder has discovered that Chinese often uses strong adverbs with strong verbs, and this may result in Chinglish such as “smash completely”, which is “over-emphasis and has the opposite effect” [6, с. 32]. Another type of Chinglish is the frequent over-use of phrases like in the world or in this world.

Another area in which different ways of information flow can be seen is English for Academic Purposes. One of the approaches to rhetorical strategies used in research genres is what called “genre analysis”, initiated by Swales and Bhatia. The analysis of the `Swale's four moves' demonstrated that Chinese writer did not seem to start their articles in an indirect way. The Chinese scientists were less likely to elaborate the moves, wrote at less length, and cited fewer references. The difference was in the second move: the Chinese scientists paid less attention to summarizing the literature in their fields of study. Translations of Chinese academic texts, therefore, are necessarily different, in information structure and information, from those composed by native speakers of English.

References

1. Al-Shabab O. S. Interpretation and the 4. Language of Translation: Creativity and Convention in Translation / O. S. Al- Shabab. - Edinburg : Janus, 1996. - 123 p.

2. Baker M. Corpus linguistics and transla- 5. tion studies : implications and applications / M. Baker // Text and Technology : in Honour of John Sinclair. - Amsterdam : Benjamins, 1993. - P. 256-298.

3. Frawley W. Prolegomenon to a theory of translation / W. Frawley // Translation: 6. Literary, Linguistic and Philosophical perspectives. Edited by W. Frawley. - Newmark : University of Delaware Press, 1984. - P. 134-178.

4. Malmkjer K. Unit of Translation / К. Malmkjer // Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. - London : Routledge, - P. 286.

5. Seguinot C. Translation theory, translating theory, and the sentence / С. Seguinot // Word, text, translation : Liber amicorum for Peter Newmark. Edited by G. Anderman and M. Rogers. - Sydney : Multilingual Matters, - P. 91.

6. Yajun Jian. Translated English and Universals of Translation / Jian Yajun, Ren Zaixin // English today. - December, 2008. - № 96. - P. 31-32.

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