Dichotomies in Translation Studies and Translator Training / Дихотомии в теории перевода и обучении переводу

Куралева Татьяна Владимировна ORCID: 0000-0003-3738-9198 кандидат филологических наук старший преподаватель; кафедра английской филологии и перевода; Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет 199034, Россия, г. Санкт-Петербург, Университетская наб., 11 Kuraleva Tatiana Vladimirovna PhD in Philology Senior Lecturer; Department of English Philology and Translation; St. Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Universitetskaya nab., 11 t.kuraleva@spbu.ru Другие публикации этого автора

Лекомцева Ирина Алексеевна ORCID: 0000-0002-9793-914X кандидат филологических наук доцент, кафедра английской филологии и перевода, Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет 199034, Россия, г. Санкт-Петербург, наб. Университетская, 11 Lekomtseva Irina Alekseevna PhD in Philology Assistant professor, Department of English philology and translation studies, St. Petersburg University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, nab. 11 Universitetskaya Street i.lekomtseva@spbu.ru

INTRODUTORY REMARKS

Translation theory is a relatively young branch of science dating back just a few decades. However, the first attempts to systematize translation practice were made centuries ago. The main dichotomy in translation studies is the opposition between literal (word-for-word) and free (sense-for-sense) translation, which can be traced as far back as St. Jerome who held the view that sacred texts should be translated more literally, reproducing the very order of the words, while non-sacred texts should be rendered sense-for-sense ^{[6, p. 21]}. However, this opposition of free and literal translation is not exclusive for the western tradition. For example, medieval Chinese monk-translators used one of the two methods of translation: “refined translation” and “unhewn translation”. The former was characterized by laconic and refined phrases while the latter was more straightforward and literal ^{[5, p. 82]}. Turkish writers and translators (Necib Asim, Semseddin Sami) shared similar views. They believed that the translated texts should be either “the same as the original texts (aynen) or the translator should produce a free translation (serbest). Free translation was used for rendering academic texts written by European scholars, whereas literal translation was thought to be appropriate for fiction texts ^{[7, p. 230-231]}.

Through centuries the opposition of free and literal translation has been reviewed numerous times, with one type of translation being favored over the other in different time periods. Nevertheless, the basic dichotomy has preserved its relevance and plausibility. The purpose of the paper is to look into how the basic translational dichotomy has been transformed in different theoretical concepts and to gain an insight into whether the functional equivalence can be achieved in practice in student English-Russian translations.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Since the dichotomy of “free vs literal translation” allows for various interpretation, different scholars have proposed different terms and different approaches to clarifying this concept. Strictly speaking, the two basic translation methods (types) boil down to F. Schleiermacher’s famous statement: “Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him, or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him “ ^[19] In other words, either the translator focuses on the source text, reproducing it as faithfully as possible, or the translator focuses on the target text, rendering the original as natural as possible.

From this perspective, Nida’s two basic orientations of translation are in line with this way of thinking. In his seminal work Towards a Science of Translating (1964), Nida distinguishes between two types of translation: formal equivalence (referred to as formal correspondence in other works) and dynamic equivalence. Formal equivalence focuses attention on the form and content of the original text; therefore, the elements of the source texts should match as closely as possible the elements of the target text. Dynamic equivalence is defined as a type of translation which aims at complete naturalness of expression ^{[11, 15]}. Nida emphasizes that “dynamic equivalence has priority over formal correspondence” ^{[16, p. 14]}.

A similar approach to the basic dichotomy is found in Newmark’s theoretical works. He makes a distinction between semantic and communicative translation. Communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers an effect that is similar to that produced on the readers of the original. Semantic translation attempts to render, as faithfully possible, the semantic and syntactic structures of the original, although it is more flexible than word-for-word translation ^{[13, p. 88; 11]}. That said, it should be noted that Newmark departs from Nida’s receptor-oriented approach since the equivalent effect is not always achievable ^{[14, p. 48-49]}. Moreover, according to Nemark, the conflict between word-for-word and sense-for-sense translation should be resolved in favor of the former. Newmark holds an opinion that literal translation is the best approach provided an equivalent effect is achieved. Therefore, translation should be free of any unnecessary changes ^{[13, p. 39]}.

The dichotomic approach to translation is further developed and supplemented due to the “cultural turn” in translation studies. This paradigm challenges the notion of translation as a purely linguistic process and places translation in a cultural domain. Thus, Venuti distinguishes between two opposing translation strategies, foreignization and domestication, which, as he rightly points out, go back to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s methods of translation. Foreignization involves maintaining foreign elements in the target text and emphasizing cultural uniqueness. For Venuti, a theory and practice of translation should resist dominant target-language cultural values so as to emphasize the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text. In contrast, domestication seeks to assimilate foreign content seamlessly into the target culture, making it feel familiar and readable. A domesticating translation serves as an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas; it integrates smoothly foreign elements into the target culture. In general, domestication prioritizes naturalness and fluency ^[21].

While Venuti has undoubtedly made significant contributions to translation studies, his theory, however, is not without a share of its criticism. One major point of contention revolves around the concepts themselves, which, as his critics contend, are poorly defined. Moreover, his critics argue that such approach oversimplifies the translation process. Furthermore, Venuti’s strong advocacy of the foreignizing translation has drawn criticism for producing awkward and unreadable translations. ^[12]

Another proponent of the cultural approach to translation studies is Juliane House, who distinguished between overt and covert translation. Her distinction between the two types of translation also goes back to Schleiermacher’s dichotomy, however, House’s concept is part of a translation quality assessment model. In an overt translation, the receptors of the translation are not addressed, therefore, an overt translation does not attempt to recreate a “second original” as it; “must overtly be a translation”. House contends that “source texts that call for an overt translation have an established worth in the source language community”. A covert translation, on the other hand, is a “translation which enjoys the status of an original source text in the target culture”. Texts that should be translated covertly do not specifically address a particular source culture audience. A source text and its covert translation are pragmatically of comparable; therefore, a source text and its covert translation have equivalent purposes. House also argues that an overt-covert translation distinction is a cline rather than a binary opposition, consequently, a translation may be more or less covert and overt. Furthermore, she points out that in case of a covert translation the boarders between translations and versions become blurred. In view of this confusion, functional equivalence should be posited as a prerequisite in translation ^{[10, p. 89 – 108]}.

House’s ideas underlie Nord’s translation typology, which is based on a functional approach. She distinguishes between a documentary and an instrumental translation. A documentary translation process results in a text whose main function is metatextual. In fact, an instrumental translation is an umbrella term for various forms of translation (interlinear, literal, philological, exoticizing). In general, a documentary translation is intended to reproduce specific features of the source text (lexical, morphological, syntactic, idiomatic use of vocabulary, etc.). “The translation is documentary in that it changes the communicative function of the source text”. Conversely, the result of an instrumental translation is a text which may achieve the same range of functions as an original text. Readers of an instrumental translation are not supposed to be aware they are reading a translation at all as the text is adapted to target-culture norms and conventions of text type, genre and register. ^{[17, p. 46 – 50]}.

Finally, the opposition of sense-for-sense and literal translation may be explained in terms of translation norms. As pointed out by Toury, norms of translation correspond to a good practice of translation and are tacitly accepted by the community ^[20]. Unlike the functionalists, Toury does not underestimate the significance of the source text. He holds that translation involves recreation of sameness and it also involves differences and transformation. The degree of variance and invariance depends on the norms that the translator chooses to abide by. Therefore, Toury distinguishes between adequate and acceptable translation. To this end, the translator may choose to focus on the norms of the source text, language and culture and produce and adequate translation. On the contrary, the translator may choose to orient a translation towards the norms of the target language and culture and produce an acceptable translation.

Summarizing all the above, it stands to reason that the traditional translation dichotomy may be described from different angles, but the fundamental distinction is invariable since the theoretical assumptions are deeply rooted in the translation practice. Thus, it seems expedient to use this opposition as a guideline in translator training.

METHODS AND MATERIALS

Clearly, the quest for translation dichotomy ‘word-for-word’ and ‘sense-for-sense’ is meaningful only if this concept is adequate for the practical purposes. In this regard, we have analyzed student translations of a scientific text in translation studies from English into Russian. The point of departure was Julian Houses’s definition of a covert translation, i.e. to produce a “translation which enjoys the status of an original source text in the target culture”.

The material for this paper is an abstract from Susan Basnett’s Translation Studies ^[2] and student English-Russian translations. The projects involved 1st-year master’s degree students majoring in translation studies (15 students). The students were asked to produce a translation using the strategy of covert translation.

The methods employed in the paper are the following: a componential analysis; a translation analysis, a corpus-based analysis; literature review, and retrospection and interviews.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Achieving a covert translation in practice is a hard nut to crack in a classroom setting. More often than not, student translations have features which typically occur in translated texts rather than original utterances.

Among the properties that differ from those of texts that have been originally produced in the Russian language, the most recurrent is untypical collocational patterning, i.e. lexical patterning which differs from that which is found in original, non-translated target language texts.

Traditionally, the term “collocations” is defined as combinatory restrictions which are neither grammatical nor semantic but which reflect “the habitual or customary places of words”, or “the company words keep”, to use Firth’s expression ^{[8, p. 12]}. Our focus is, then, on co-occurrence relations, word-combinations or multi-word units that can vary in fixedness and idiomaticity.

As our analysis show, the most recurrent untypical lexical patterning in translations is manifested in the use of inanimate nouns as a subject with a predicate denoting an active action, i.e. 90 % of all translation errors.

Source text: With the second, which explores the question of equivalence of literary texts, the work of the Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguists, together with more recent developments in discourse analysis, have broadened the problem of equivalence in its application to the translation of such texts.

Target text 1: В его рамках работы российских формалистов и пражских лингвистов, а также более поздние разработки в области дискурс-анализа расширили данную проблему применительно к переводу таких текстов.

Target text 2: Относительно второго направления, в котором исследуется вопрос эквивалентности художественных текстов, исследования российских формалистов и пражских лингвистов, наряду с более поздними работами в области дискурсивного анализа, расширили проблему эквивалентности в ее применении к переводу текстов.

Target text 3: Второе направление, которое изучает вопрос эквивалентности в художественных текстах и представлено работами русской формальной школы и пражского лингвистического кружка, а также некоторыми новыми направлениями дискурсивного анализа, расширяет проблему эквивалентности в применении к переводу художественных текстов.

The analysis of the underlined translation correspondences in the examples above shows that on the level of semantic content, the translation solutions, i.e. developments / разработки / исследования; to broaden / расширить; problem / проблема, are regular systemic cross-linguistic correspondences, which can be evidenced by the data provided by the explanatory dictionaries ^{[3, 24]} and bilingual dictionaries ^[22]. Yet the task to achieve a functional translation must shift our focus away from preoccupation with abstract language system to language use. In this regard, corpora provide just such an emphasis and can serve as a testing ground for lexical choices in translation.

Evidence in the Russian National Corpus shows that, although the translation solutions are regular cross-linguistic correspondences, the accessibility of developments have broadened the problem in English and relative inaccessibility of разработки расширили проблему (1) / исследования расширили проблему (2) / направление расширяет проблему (3) in Russian demonstrate the existence of restrictions which depend on language-specific syntagmatic relations into which words entre. The corpus data confirm that the language choices in the target texts are not natural in the Russian language. The results of the search for exact forms in the Russian National Corpus just support our assumption, as the search results are: ‘nothing was found for this query’. We used the lexico-grammatical search for these words in all possible grammatical forms. For example, in the field ‘Word’ we type the word разработки, while in the field ‘Word 2’ расширили and set the distance 1 – 1; 1- 2; 1-3. The results are: nothing was found for this query ^[23]. To sum it up, this linguistic units are not natural for the target language and therefore are untypical lexical frequencies in the Russian language.

In English, a subject-agent accompanied by a verb denoting an active action causing a state can be represented by nouns with the meaning of process, states, events, places, times, while the predicative core of the sentence can express temporal, spatial or other relationships. In this regard, preserving the original structure does not result in covert, or functional translation. One of the possible translation solutions may be to translate such statements by other linguistic means of expressing subject-object relations in the Russian language.

Supposedly, if we proceed from viewing translation as “an act of replacing linguistic units from the source language into target language” ^[4], i.e. produce the target text mostly through manipulations/transformations with the units of the source text, the target text will trace the features of the source language, and translating may result in untypical lexical pattern associations. This approach to translating is an obstacle on the way to achieving a covert translation. According to Newmark, the main difficulty of translating collocations is “the continual struggle to find the appropriate collocations” ^{[14, p. 213]}. Finding the exact equivalence of the level of collocation in the target language is one of the major problems that the translators face ^[9].

Among the possible reasons behind the translation problems on the level of colocations are, according to Baker’s model of collocational errors, are the following: the engrossing effect of source text patterning; misinterpreting the meaning of collocations in the source text; the tension between accuracy and naturalness; cultural-specific collocation and marked collocation in the source text ^[1]. After discussing the results of translation with the students by means of retrospection and interviews, we came to the conclusion that the primary reasons behind collocational errors in English-Russian student translations of scientific texts are the engrossing effect of source text patterning (62 % of the respondents), which can be accounted by a tendency to viewing translating as a replacement of words, and, surprisingly, a neglect to make a revision and self-editing of the target text (38% of the respondents), largely due to a lack of knowledge of revising principles and procedures, particularly on the level of textual norms. Students unconsciously tend to follow the source language patterning, placing special emphasis on replacing words from the source language into the target language to ensure accuracy in translation, which ultimately leads to a failure to produce a covert translation. Hence, greater emphasis should be placed on training students to focusing on collocational patterning in the source language and the target language from the discourse, or functional, perspective.

CONCLUSION

In translating, a text in one language should be replaced by an equivalent text in another language. Whether and how functional equivalence can be achieved critically depends on two empirically derived types of translation, or dichotomies of translation. Yet, in practice, even when students are confronted with the task to produce a functional, covert translation, our empirical data provide support for a source language dependent tendency. The problem of dichotomy of translation is tied to a theory of translation, rather than to a practice of translation and little serves practical pedagogical purposes in translation. Apparently, some methodological points must be studied in the further analyses. Further research should focus on developing a methodology underpinned by the discourse analysis to avoid the impact of the source language on translating. Additionally, further research should spin such topics as revising and editing in translation. These questions cannot be answered in the current paper, but could be analyzed in future research.