To the question of translation theory approaches

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To the question of translation theory approaches

Olesia Skliarenko

Ph.D in Philology, Associate Professor at the Chair for Foreign Philology, Translation and Methods of Education SHEI "Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi Hryhorii Skkovoroda State Pedagogica University"

Анотація

У статті розглянуто різні підходи до трактування поняття "переклад" у теорії перекладу. Подана студія трактує переклад як результат лінгво-текстуальної операції, у якій текст однієї мови контекстуалізується ще раз у іншій мові. Як лінгвістично-текстуальна операція переклад є предметом на який має вплив ланка екстралінгвістичних факторів та умов. Це співпраця між внутрішніми лінгво-текстуальними та екстра-лінгвістичними контекстуальними факторами, що роблять переклад таким комплексним явищем. Також у статті розглянуто питання "еквівалентності", як одного з ключових понять у теорії перекладу та різні підходи до його інтерпретації.

Ключові слова: переклад, підхід, теорія перекладу, внутрішні лінгво-тектсуальні фактори, зовнішні екстра-лінгвістичні фактори, лінгвістично-текстуальна операція, еквівалентність.

Аннотация

Статья анализирует различные подходы к интерпретации понятия "перевод" в теории перевода. Рассматриваемая статья трактирует перевод как результат лингво-текстуальной операции, в которой текст одного языка контекстуализируеться в другом языке еще раз. Как лингвистически-текстуальная операция перевод является предметом, на который большое влияние имеет ряд экстралингвистических факторов и условий. Это сотрудничество между внутренними лингво-текстуальными и экстра-лингвистическими контекстуальными факторами, которые делают перевод таким комплексным явлением. Также статья рассматривает вопрос "эквивалентности" как одного из ключевых понятий в теории перевода, а также показывает разные подходы к ее интерпретации.

Ключевые слова: перевод, подход, теория перевода, внутренние лингво-текстуальные факторы, внешние экстра-лингвистические факторы, лингвистико-текстуальная операция, эквивалентность.

Abstract

The proposed article reveals different approaches to the interpretation of the term "translation"from the point of view of the translation theory. Here translation is seen as the result of a linguistic-textual operation in which a text in one language is re-contextualized in another language. As a linguistic- textual operation, translation is, however, subject to, and substantially influenced by, a variety of extra-linguistic factors and conditions. It is this interaction between "inner" linguistic-textual and "outer" extra-linguistic, contextual factors that makes translation such a complex phenomenon. So this article accepted the point of view that despite the multiple conditioning of translation and the resulting complexity, one may still, as a common core, retain the minimal definition of translation as a replacement of an original text in one language with a text in another language. When using the term "replacement", one may assume, rather negatively, that any translated text is in principle "second-best", i.e. a substitute for the "real thing". Viewed this way, translation is by definition a secondary act of communication.

Different approaches to the formation of translation theory as unique study have been revealed and analyzed as well. One of the most important terms in the field of translation theory "equivalence" has been analyzed as well. Equivalence is a core concept in translation theory, and the conceptual basis of translation quality assessment. However, strange as this may seem, equivalence has also been one of the most controversial issues in recent decades. Thus we find scholars, who see equivalence as an important concept, but there are very vocal others who consider equivalence rather unnecessary. It has been seen, that most approaches of mentalist view to translation emphasize the belief that the quality of translation depends largely on the translator's subjective decisions, which in turn are based on this experience. But it was mentioned as well, that the original text, the relation between original and translation and the expectations of target text readers are not given the attention they deserve, and the problem of distinguishing between a translation and various types of versions and adaptations is also ignored. As a conclusion we see, that a theory of translation is reach on approaches, which make it to the scientific field that requires a lot of methodologies and depends on target the scientist is looking for. translation linguistic textual

Key words: translation, translation theory, "inner" linguistic-textual factors, "outer" extra-linguistic factors, linguistic and textual operation, equivalence.

Translation as a subject of research has become very popular nowadays. There are a lot of related questions to what exactly translation and translation assessment are as well as various approaches to their definitions. But there is no state definition what these terms exactly are and which approaches may confirm them. That is why the proposed article sees its task in uncovering different approaches to the terms of translation theory.

It is worth to mention, that there have been and are a variety of researchers that revealed this problem in linguistics: P. Backhaus, M. Baker, J. Catford, M. Ehrensberger-Dow, J. House and other.

So, moving further, the proposed article sees translation as the result of a linguistic-textual operation in which a text in one language is re-contextualized in another language. As a linguistic-textual operation, translation is, however, subject to, and substantially influenced by, a variety of extra-linguistic factors and conditions. It is this interaction between "inner" linguistic-textual and "outer" extra-linguistic, contextual factors that makes translation such a complex phenomenon.

Some of the interacting factors we need to consider when looking at translation theory are: - the structural characteristics, the expressive potential and the constraints of the two languages involved in translation; - the extra- linguistic world which is "cut up" in different ways by source and target languages; - the source text with its linguistic-stylistic-aesthetic features that belong to the norms of usage holding in the source lingua-cultural community; - the linguistic-stylistic-aesthetic norms of the target lingua- cultural community; - the target language norms internalized by the translator; - intertextuality governing the totality of the text in the target culture; - traditions, principles, histories and ideologies of translation holding in the target lingua-cultural community; - the translation "brief" given to the translator by the person(s) or institution commissioning the translation; - the translator's workplace conditions; - the translator's knowledge, expertise, ethical stance and attitudinal profiles as well as his/her subjective theory of translation; - the translator's knowledge, expertise, ethical stance and attitudinal profile's of the translator as well as their subjective theories of translation.

So while translation is, as stated above, at its core a linguistic-textual operation, a multitude of other conditioning and constraining factors also routinely impinge on its process, performance and of course on translation quality. However, it is impossible for any practicable model of translation quality assessment to take into account all of these factors, much less so in an essentially text-based model such as of many translators. So this article would maintain that despite the multiple conditioning of translation and the resulting complexity, one may still, as a common core, retain the minimal definition of translation as a replacement of an original text in one language with a text in another language. When using the term "replacement", one may assume, rather negatively, that any translated text is in principle "second-best", i.e. a substitute for the "real thing". Viewed this way, translation is by definition a secondary act of communication. Normally, a communicative event happens only once. In translation, this communicative event is reduplicated for persons otherwise prevented from appreciating the original communicative event. More positively, however, translation can be seen as enabling - often for the first time-original access to a different world of knowledge, to different traditions and ideas that would otherwise have been locked away behind a language barrier. From this perspective, translation has often been described as a builder of bridges, an extender of horizons, providing recipients with an important service and enabling them to move beyond the borders of the world staked out by their own language.

So let us have a look at some important approaches to the theory of translation and translation assessment. The first one will be an approach of intercultural communication and social action. As mentioned above, translation is not only a linguistic act, it is also an act of communication across cultures. This was recognized in the sixties by one of the grand figures of translation theory (Hatim, 1990: 78). These researches saw translation as one of the major means of constructing representations of other cultures. He clearly recognized that translation always involves both different languages and different cultures simply because the two cannot be neatly separated. Language is culturally embedded: it serves to express and shape cultural reality, and the meaning of linguistic units can only be understood when considered together with the cultural contexts in which they arise, and in which they are used. In translation, therefore, not only two languages but also two cultures invariably come into contact. In this sense, then, translation is a form of intercultural communication. Over and above recognizing the importance of the two larger macro-cultural frameworks, however, the translator must of course also consider the more immediate "context of situation". This more local situational context has to do with questions about who wrote the text, when, why, for whom, and who is now reading it and for what purpose, etc. These questions, in turn, are reflected in how a text is written, interpreted, read and used. The context of situation is itself embedded in the larger socio-cultural world as it is depicted in the text and the real world.

The inherently reflective nature of translation action reveals itself in a translator's focus on the situation of a text, and his or her recognition of the intimate interconnectedness of text and context. As texts travel across time, space and different orders of indexicality in translation, they must be re-contextualized. While exploring the text in context we explore the text for purposes of translation and re-contextualization (House, 2006: 38). Recently, such recontextualization in translation has involved contexts characterized by radically unequal power relations between individuals, groups, languages and literatures. In these cases, translators are asked to play an important role in analyzing, questioning or resisting existing power structures (Baker, Maier, 2011: 44). In these contexts, translators do not only function as conflict mediating and resolving actions but rather as spaces where tensions are signaled and power struggles are played out. An extreme case of such tensions is the positioning of translators in zones of war. In such a context, translators scholars have recently looked at the impact the performance of translators has had on the different parties in war zones, whether and how translators align themselves with their employers or openly refuse to do so, and how personally involved they become in situations of conflict and violence (Baker, Maier, 2011: 46).

Another recent development of looking at translation as a socio-cultural phenomenon is the concern with questions of ethics in translation (Baker, Maier, 2011: 47). This concern goes hand in hand with the increased visibility of translation through their involvement in violent conflicts and various activists' translator groups, activists centers and sites and the concomitant broader awareness of the role of translators in making transparent human rights issues and the suppression of minorities.

Cognitive approaches to the theory of translation. Apart from the social contextual approach to translation, there is another important new trend which looks at translation as a cognitive process. Cognitive aspects of translation and in particular the process of translation in the translator's mind have been investigated for over 30 years, with a recent upsurge of interest in issues relating to translation as a cognitive process (Eherensberg-Dow, 2013: 80). This increase in interest in "what goes on translators' heads" owes much to the availability of modern technology, to continuously improving instruments and methods for the empirical investigation of particular aspects of a translator's performance such as keystroke logging, eye-tracking or screen recording as well as various neuro-psychological techniques. As O'Brien (see Eherensberg-Dow, 2013: 81) has rightly pointed out, translation process research has heavily "borrowed" from a number of disciplines: linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, reading and writing research and language technology. The influence on these disciplines and their particular research directions and methodologies on translation studies is at the present time something of a one-way affair, but given time, a reciprocal interdisciplinarity may well come into being, with the result that translation studies will be not only a borrower but also a lender.

Over and above a concern with new technological and experimental means of tapping the cognitive process of translation, a new combination of a theory of translation and of a neuro-functional theory of bilingualism has also recently been suggested (House, 2013: 46). This new linguistic-cognitive orientation in translation studies emerges from a critical assessment of the validity and reliability of introspective and retrospective thinking aloud studies and of various behavioural experiments and the usefulness and relevance of recent bilingual neuro-imaging studies.

Taken together, translation needs to be looked at from two perspectives: a social perspective, which takes account of the macro- and micro-contextual constrains that impinge on translation and the translator, and a cognitive perspective, which focuses on the "internal" way a translator goes about his or her task of translating. Both are complementary, and both can be split up into different domains and fields of inquiry.

An approach of translation and equivalence. As stated above, equivalence is both a core concept in translation theory, and the conceptual basis of translation quality assessment. However, strange as this may seem, equivalence has also been one of the most controversial issues in recent decades. Thus we find scholars who see equivalence as an important concept, for instance (Jakobson, 1966: 32), who earlier pronounced the importance of "equivalence in difference" and Nida (see House, 2013: 46), with his suggestion of "different kinds of equivalence"; Catford (House, 2013: 47) and Koller (House, 2013: 47). But there are very vocal others who consider equivalence rather unnecessary, for instance Hatim and Mason (House, 2013: 47) and Reiss and Vermeer (House, 2013: 47) and others. More recently, equivalence has been denied any value in translation theory (Munday, 2008: 77), or even denied any legitimate status (Baker, Maier, 2011: 47). Further, and rather oddly, equivalence is sometimes linked to subjectivity in evaluation by the analyst, e.g. by Munday (Munday, 2008: 68). According to J. House (Munday, 2006: 339) it happens due to many authors' conscious or unconscious misunderstanding what the concept implies. If we consider its Latin origin, we can clearly see that equivalence means "of equal value" and that it is not at all about sameness or, worse still, identity, bur about approximately equal value despite some unavoidable difference - a difference, we might add, that stems from the (banal) fact that languages are different.

An eminent Leipzig school translation scholar Neubert (see Jakobson, 1966: 23) suggested that translation equivalence is a "semiotic category" that comprises a syntactic, asemantic and a pragmatic component. He believed that these components are hierarchically related, with semantic equivalence taking priority over syntactic equivalence, and pragmatic equivalence governing and modifying both syntactic and semantic equivalence. The importance of the pragmatic component for translation equivalence is later also reflected in the fact that Neubert (see Jakobson, 1966: 23) attributes prime importance to the text as the level at which equivalence relations can be best diagnosed.

In discussing the fate of the concept of equivalence, mention must also be made of Leipzig school translation scholar Kade. Kade (see Jakobson, 1966: 23) set up a simple translation equivalence typology between source text and target text. He distinguished between four different equivalence types: total equivalence (e.g. proper names); facultative equivalence, where there are many correspondences at the level of expression but a 1:1 correspondence at the level of content (example: German schreien; English shout, scream); approximative equivalence, where we find 1:1 correspondence on the content level (example: English turtle, tortoise; German Schildkrцte); and zero equivalence, where there is a 1:0 correspondence at both the level of expression and the level of content (example: Sashimi).

According to Kade, the selection of potential equivalence depends not only on the (situational and cultural) context but also on a host of different factors, such as text type (genre), purpose of function of the translation and the nature of the envisaged addressees. Many translation scholars today agree that equivalence is to be understood as an approximative concept (House, 2013: 48) - necessarily so because of the enormous complexity of any translation act. As mentioned above, translation is always subject to grammatical, lexical-semantic, terminological-phraseological and genre- and register-related constraints as well as extra-textual, contextual and situational constraints.

A recent consideration of equivalence stems from Pym (Pym, 2010: 54). Pym suggested the existence of two basic types of equivalence: natural equivalence, existing independently of the translator's actions, and directional equivalence, i.e. equivalence from the source language to the target language. Pym believes that directional equivalence emerges from a translator's personal textual decisions. How the existence of these two types of equivalence and indeed the difference between the two can be empirically tested remains however an open question. As stated above, equivalence has to do with the extent to which the translator manages to negotiate the linguistic and contextual conditions and constraints which underlie and complicate any fact of translation.

The most important and comprehensive account of equivalence stems from Koller (see House, 2013: 48). He distinguishes five frames of reference to define translation equivalence: denotative equivalence, connotative equivalence, text-normative equivalence, pragmatic equivalence and formal- aesthetic equivalence. Koller suggests that translators need to set up a hierarchy of those equivalences and they must make a choice for each individual translational case, taking due account of the complex enveloping context. This is a daunting task, but it is also an eminently important one, because as Krein- Kuhle has recently argued, any "theoretical contextualized account of the nature, conditions and constraints defining equivalence remains a central task of our discipline in order to make our research results more robust, comparable, and amenable to generalization and intersubjective verification" (Krein-Kuhle, 2010: 17).

One step in this direction can be seen in J. House's work, which encapsulates an approach linking the developing context accessed through a multidimensional grid of parameters with the lexical and structural choices represented in the textual materials (House, 2013: 51).

Psycho-social approaches. Mentalist views are reflected in the century- old subjective, intuitive and anecdotal judgements of mostly lay persons who talk about "hoe good or how bad one finds a translation". In the majority of cases, these judgments are based on simple impressions and feelings, and such they are prone to lead to global, undifferentiated valuations like the following: "The translation doesn't capture the spirit of the original", "The tone of the original is somehow lost in the translation", or, more positively "This translation is as good as or even better than the original". Often such vague and common-place statements about the quality of a translation are linked to the person of the translator, whose personality is supposed to be similar to that of the author and the potential reader. Thus Savory writes: "The most satisfying translations are made by those whose personalities are in tune with hose of the writers and those of the readers" (see House, 2013: 55). Examples of vague principles which a translation of optimal quality should heed are also listed by Savory (see House, 2013: 58). Among pairs of contradictory statements are the following: "a translation must give the ideas of the original", "a translation should be read like an original work", and "a translation should reflect the style of the original", "a translation should reflect the style of the translator" and so on.

One may think that such pronouncements made quite a long time ago are outdated by now, with translation studies having come of age, serious scientific approaches now characterizing the discipline. However, in recent times, too, this type of vague comment has been replayed by scholars of the so-called neo-hermeneutic school of translation who believe in the legimacy of subjective interpretations of the worth of a translation (House, 2013: 49). Propagators of this expressly anti-positivist approach base their thinking of Fridrich Schleiermacher, Hans-Georg Gadamer and George Steiner, who all placed "understanding" of the text and the individuals doing the understanding in a central position. Gadamer (Gadamer, 1960: 289) talks about a "melting of horizons" in an individual understander, meaning that what one already knows merges with newly incoming knowledge to be understood in a text.

Translation in the hermeneutic paradigm looks at the relation between the translator and his texts, at what is his own and what is new and strange. This should enhance translators' reflexion on their understanding of the text and empower them to justify their own translational strategies. Subjectivity is a centrally important category, so the translator's personal life experiences and habits are given pride of place. Hermeneutic tradition pays much attention to the history that means that the meaning of texts cannot be described completely objectively, rather they undergo a dynamic development. Translational equivalence is rejected outright and is always to some degree a hermeneutical draft (see House, 2013: 56).

Those, who are followers of hermeneutic translation, are sure that the quality of a translated text is intimately linked to the translator, whose interpretation of the original text is a kind of optimal translation, which is seen as rooted in intuition, empathy and interactive experience and knowledge. Translating is here regarded as an individual creative act, in the process of which the "meaning" of the text is created anew. There is no meaning in the text itself, the meaning is "in the eye of the beholder" (House, 2013: 10).

Most approaches of mentalist view to translation emphasize the belief that the quality of translation depends largely on the translator's subjective decisions, which in turn are based on this experience. J. House emphasizes, that the subjective, neo-hermeneutic approach to translation can only shed light on what occurs between the translator and features of original text, as it represents a selective view of translation focusing on the translator's processes of interpretation. The original text, the relation between original and translation and the expectations of target text readers are not given the attention they deserve, and the problem of distinguishing between a translation and various types of versions and adaptations is also ignored (House, 2013: 10).

Functional approaches. One the above-mentioned approaches focuses on behavioristic views. Behavioristic approach was influenced by American behaviorism and is used with Nida's name (House, 2013: 48). He proposed several behavioristic tests to enable translation evaluators to formulate more objective statements about the quality of a translation. These tests used broad criteria such as "intelligibility" and "informativeness", and they were based on the belief that a good translation is one leading to equivalence of response, a criterion linked to Nida's famous principle of "dynamic equivalence" i.e. that the manner in which the receptors of a translation respond to the translation should be equivalent to the manner in which the source text's receptors respond to the source text. In the heyday of behaviorism several imaginative tests were suggested, such as reading aloud techniques, and various cloze and rating tasks, all of which took observable responses to a translation as measuring its quality. However in hindsight, it is safe to say that these tests ultimately failed because they were unable to capture something as intricate and complex as the "overall quality of a translation". But this approach in the theory of translation is seen as controversial one, because it is unclear how we should operate with terms "intelligibility" and "informativeness" and proceed to measure an "an equivalent response".

In the 1980s following the "pragmatic turn"in linguistics, the functionalists paradigm shifted the focus of translation towards a consideration of the extralinguistic setting of translation. As briefly mentioned above, functionalist or skopos-oriented approaches to translation, either downplayed "equivalence" to a special term "adequacy" (House, 2013: 50-54) or completely abandoned it. The skopos or purpose is the most important factor in translation, the original text being downgraded to a mere "offer of information" and the translator often seen as a type of "co-author". The assumption in the skopos-oriented approach to translation is that special kinds of translation such as those which J. House has called overt versions are the rule rather than an exception.

So as a conclusion we see, that a theory of translation is reach on approaches, which make it to the scientific field that requires a lot of methodologies and depends on target the scientist is looking for.

References