Paving the way to the text: Forms and Functions of Book Titles in Translation

Examples:

Each corpus part included similar numbers of fictional, nonfictional, and children's book titles retrieved from the catalogues of publishing houses in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Germany. Cultural differences between the various countries where these languages are spoken, which may be considerable for other text types, could be neglected since books are rarely published for one country only.

The total number of titles is 13,868: 4,232 titles in English (30.5%), 3,561 (25.7%) in French, 2,868 (20.7%) in Spanish, and 3,207 (23.1%) in German. The proportion of translated titles is highest in the Spanish part (52.2%), and lowest in the English part (10.1%), with the French (22.9%) and the German part (31.8%) in the middle.

Titles as texts

General considerations

In ancient libraries, the scrolls stood in stands side by side, a parchment strip on the upper margin indicating the author and the contents. This strip was called "sillybos" in Greek, in Latin first "index" and then mostly "titulus". Later the indication of author and content was shifted to the end of the text, and then, by and by, also to the beginning of the text (for the history of the title cf. Schnitzler 1983, 4ff., Rothe 1986, 11ff., and Wulff 1979). In modern language use, a title in the sense that matters here is "the name of a book, musical composition, or other artistic work" (COED 2011). In order to prevent unauthorised use, misuse, imitation or confusable determinations (cf. Wilpert 1961), titles are protected by copyright law in some countries (e.g. Switzerland) or by the Law Against Unfair Competition (e.g. Germany, Austria) if they have a clearly distinctive form (so-called "soft titles" like Collected Works are not protected). In other countries, like the United States, for example, copyright protection is not available for titles (see https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ34.pdf, 17/06/2017: "The U.S. Copyright Office cannot register claims to exclusive rights in brief combinations of words such as: ... Titles of works"). However, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states that a trademark protects words, phrases, symbols or designs identifying the source of the goods or services of one party and distinguishing them from those of others. When a book title becomes successful enough to be considered a recognizable brand, it may be eligible for trademark protection.

Since many titles are rather vague (e.g. Collected Works) and do not allow an unequivocal identification of a work, it seems reasonable to include the author's (or, in the case of films, the director's) name in the "title unit". In this context, Rothe (1986: 13) mentions the meaning of the French word titre, which can include the author's name. Speaking about a book, the name of the author is often not mentioned explicitly, at least if the work is well known, whereas sometimes the author's name even forms part of the title, like in The Best of H. C. Artmann. On the spine of a book we usually find both author's name and title. This is how the examples will be quoted in this paper.

Title pages of books show that the functional unit "author's name + title" forms part of a larger unit which usually includes the name of the publishing house, year and place of publication, number of the edition, an indication of the genre (e.g., in 28.3% of the subtitles in German fiction, 75.3% of the subtitles of English fiction, 28.3% of the subtitles of French fiction, and 75.0% of the subtitles of Spanish fiction, according to the 1987 corpus, apart from many other books where it does not form part of the title but only of the front matter), sometimes the name of the translator, etc. This information is often subsumed under the term "front matter". Since the front matter does not normally belong to the responsibilities of a translator, it can be left out of consideration in this study.

The unit "author's name + title" can be regarded as an abbreviation of a "hyper sentence" (cf. Gulich/Heger/Raible 1979: 103), which for the present article might read as follows.

(5) I, Christiane Nord, as author, am presenting to you, esteemed readers, my considerations about titles as functional units under the title "Paving the way to the text".

This sentence, which is usually quoted in its abbreviated form, is an explicit signal that an offer of information is directed at a potential reader or listener (who will not necessarily accept it). This means that the title is located at a metalevel above that of the text, which is relevant for the question whether this metacommunicative unit is part of the text that it announces (the so-called co-text) or whether its status is that of an independent textual entity. I will try to briefly answer this question using De Beau- grande/Dressler's seven standards of textuality (1981: 7ff.), namely cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality.

Cohesion

In a unit as short as a title, explicit features of cohesion like recurrence or paraphrase will be difficult to find. However, all titles consisting of more than one word (and also some one-word titles, e.g. in languages which have nominal compounds, like German) present syntactic relations serving as cohesive devices.

(6) Gilbert K. Chesterton: The Man who was Thursday (F))

(7) Renй Fallet: Mozart assassinй (F)

(8) Octavio Paz: Juntacadвveres (F)

In Example 6, the relative pronoun who is an anaphoric element referring back to the man). In Example 7, the past participle assassinй ("murdered") is in grammatical agreement with Mozart, and in Example 8, the Spanish compound consists of a verb form in the third person singular, junta ("it collects") and a noun as an object to the verb, cadaveres ("corpses"). Moreover, all functional title units show a cohesive relationship between the author's name and the title as such. In former times, the author's name was often formulated in the possessive case (e.g. in Latin). Today, this relationship is indicated by a colon or a comma or by the conventional layout on the title page, where the author's name is usually placed above or below the title phrase.

(9) Title: Paving the way to the text: forms and functions of book titles in translation.

[Abstract]

Co-text: *They are the first thing that catches the eye when...

Normally, a new referent is introduced with the indefinite article and afterwards substituted with the definite article. The definite article used in many titles indicates a reverse relationship, in which the title noun substitutes the referent mentioned in the text (cf. Hoek 1981: 162). This may be due, among other things, to the fact that in earlier times, the title was placed at the inner end of the scroll, i.e. at the end of the text.

Coherence

Recipients establish coherence between the concepts and relations expressed in a text either on the basis of cohesion or, if there are no cohesive devices, using their previous knowledge about the objects and phenomena mentioned in the text. In the case of titles, where cohesion, as we have seen, is rather limited, the latter will usually be the case. Recipients need an experience of titles in order to be able to recognize an utterance as a title, i.e. as a signal for an offer of communication about a text, and to make sense of the information given in the title. This experience often includes some knowledge about the author.

(10) James Joyce: Ulysses (F) / German: Ulysses / French: Ulysse / Spanish: Ulises

(11) James Joyce: Finnegans Wake (F) / German: Finnegans Wake / French: La veillйe des Finnegan / Spanish: Finnegans Wake

As far as Example 10 is concerned, English, French and Spanish readers will recall the Greek Myth, but German readers will find it difficult to make sense of the title because Ulysses is called Odysseus in German. In Example 11, the English formulation will trigger certain expectations as to the content of the novel, which also applies to the French translation, whereas German and Spanish readers will probably not find the non-translated title coherent with what they know about the world.

The "coherence" between the title and the co-text is of a different kind. Usually, we would expect that the title contains some indication of the topic or contents of the co-text, but this is not necessarily so.

(12) Eugиne Ionesco: La cantatrice chauve / English: The Bald Soprano / German: Die kahle Sдngerin / Spanish: La cantante calva.

From Ionesco's title (Example 12), we expect the bald soprano to be the protagonist of the play, but she does not even appear on the scene and is only mentioned in passing. The title with its lack of coherence with the co-text indicates that Ionesco's play belongs to the so-called Theatre of the Absurd.

Intentionality

Intentionality means that authors or senders who produce a text usually have some communicative intentions in mind. These intentions can refer to both the title and the co-text, but in different ways. The title is intended to identify the co-text, provide some information about it, attract the attention of potential recipients, and establish a channel for communication with any interested readership. The co-text, in contrast, is an offer of information, in the widest possible sense (cf. Reiss/Vermeer [1984]2013: 69--74), about some object belonging to a (real or fictitious) world of objects and phenomena. This means that the title is intended to pave the way towards the co-text without yet being a part of it.

Acceptability

Recipients must be willing to make sense of a text (cf. De Beaugrande/Dressler 1981: 6). Therefore, they will try to understand even texts lacking cohesion or coherence. For the title, this willingness to understand is particularly important if it is elliptic or if it contains an allusion (Example 14).

(13) John Cleland: Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure /

(14) Robert Rankin, The Fandom Of The Operator

This is the reason why acceptability standards are again different for titles and co-texts. On the one hand, certain linguistic "anomalies" are only acceptable in titles (cf. the duplex title in Example 13), and on the other hand, titles are only acceptable as "titles" if they are formulated in certain conventional ways.

Informativity

The standard of informativity refers to the expectedness or unexpectedness of the information given in an utterance. Titles are again a special case in this respect: the information about the co-text should be sufficient to characterize it and attract a reader's attention, but not too exhaustive because this would make reading superfluous. The particular informativity of the title should therefore spark the reader's interest in the co-text.

Situationality

It is obvious that title and co-text are located in different situations, although certain pragmatic factors may be the same (place, time, or medium of communication, particularly if the title serves as a "heading" above the co-text, cf. the list of extratextual factors in Nord [1991] 2005). They would be different if the title is listed in a publisher's programme or displayed over a theatre entrance. In any case, titles and co-texts are produced for different reasons: any event can serve as a motive for the production of the co-text, while the title is usually produced because there is a text that has to be made identifiable as intellectual property of its author (although there are quite few anecdotes about titles whose co-texts were never written).

Intertextuality

Intertextuality refers to any relationship between texts, both with regard to genre- specific features and concerning direct or indirect allusions to existing texts. Both forms of intertextuality are very frequent in titles. In spite of the apparent diversity of title forms, a thorough analysis of the corpus reveals that a small number of patterns is used again and again, often in correlation with co-text genres (Example 6). In contrast, title allusions and quotes are mainly used to enhance the appellative function of the title (Examples 7, 8, 14).

(15) Gilbert K. Chesterton: The Man Who was Thursday / John Le Carrй: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

(16) Julio Cortazar: La vuelta al dia en 80 mundos / Around the Day in Eighty Worlds cf. Jules Verne: Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours / Around the world in 80 days.

(17) John Milton: Paradise Lost / Paradise Regained.

Intertextuality among titles ("intertitularity", cf. Hoek 1981:183 ff.) can be compared to intertextuality among other texts, whereas the relationship between titles and their co-texts cannot be regarded as intertextuality in this sense since the two are located at different levels, as we have seen before. The relationship between title and co-text is one of complementarity, which is not normally observed between two texts.

As we have seen, titles fulfil all standards of textuality, that is, they are texts that are located at a hyper-level above that of the co-text and not part of it. Since it is a text "about" another text, it can be regarded as "metatext", thus belonging to the same category as reviews or text commentaries. However, titles are different from these other metatexts in that they have a specific relationship with its object text, without which they cannot fulfil their function as titles.

Certain newspaper headlines, particularly in the case of so-called "hard news", cf. Lьger 1977: 266), may serve, together with their sub-headlines, as independent news texts, but if they are read as such, they lose their status as titles and receive a situation- ality of their own.

Therefore, the simultaneous "autonomie" and "dйpendance" (Hoek 1981: 151) of the title vis-а-vis the co-text can be regarded as a specific characteristic of titles. The dependency does not seem to be unilateral. On the one hand, the form of the title is determined by certain features of the co-text (e.g., its affiliation to a genre), and on the other hand, the title itself guides the receivers in their reception and interpretation of the co-text. Moreover, this process is recursive: in some cases, having read the cotext may change the comprehension and interpretation of the title (cf. Schnitzler 1983: 2f. and Rothe 1986: 4--7).

A proper name is never totally arbitrary. Some names, which we call aptonyms or descriptive names, describe the object (e.g. "Holly Golightly" in Truman Capote's novel Breakfast at Tiffany's), others at least classify it (male vs. female personal names, geographical names like Mount Everest, Isle of Man, product names). The same applies to titles as names. They (implicitly or explicitly) describe or classify the co-text or inform about its topic (= referential function). Some titles express the sender's attitude towards the co-text (= expressive function). Titles establish a first contact with a potential receiver (= phatic function) and, if they are attractive enough, raise their interest and make them read, or listen to, the co-text and, in certain cases, even interpret it in a specific way (= appellative function).