In his essay ‘Chinese and Western Thinking on Translation’, the translation theorist Andre Lefereve makes a succint comparison between two translation traditions that have started in a similar manner but have reached in time to very different, even opposed approaches, pointing out what might had been the causes which lead to such different ideologies in translation.
It is important to mention from the begining that Lefevere’s approach on translation is culturally oriented, a movement that began to take shape during ’70, as Mona Baker notes in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, by introducing theoretical perspectives from social sciences like communication theories, psychology and cultural study, a movemenet which shifted away from the linguistic approaches that translation had been traditionally included.
Having this (inter)cultural perspective, Lefevere is mainly concerned in his paper with what he calls ‘translational practice’, that is, one of the strategies a culture devises for dealing with what we have learned to call ‘The Other’. In other words, he wants to identify possible explanations to why, for example, the concept of faithfulnes was dominant in the Western thinking on translation throughout the history, what were the dynamics and the intricacies within the ideology of the dominant classes of a given culture that could have determined such approaches, and he is seeking these explanations by looking not solely to the activity of translation and their products, but to the context and the characteristics of a society at a given time and how their leaders received or manipulated these ‘finite products’, these mirrors reflecting ‘The Other’, the foreign culture.
He argues that both Western and Chinese traditions started in a similar way, mainly from commercial necessities which implied oral communication between different civilizations, and therefore, an interpreter who had to translate in a rhetorical manner in order to persuade the client to make the deal. His work could only be assessed based on the success of the transaction, and not on his translational performance. The Chinese tradition seems to have followed this interpretative approach, for the Chinese translators rendered the texts having a certain audience in mind. Moreover, they used as technique a method which implied a group of translators which made an oral interpretation, then an oral instruction and recitation and at the end they were inscribing the text in Chinese. Also, they perceived the translation as a valid replacement of the original, a text which stood on its own in the receiving culture.
Western culture on the other hand, was multilingual and therefore conscious of the importance of the Lingua Franca of a given period. Having always as source a certain language spoken by the elite classes of the society (like Sumerian, Latin, and later French and English), which was considered prestigious and superior to the vernaculars, translation came to be viewed as a supplement of the original, and thus perceived as having an inferior status in the target culture.
The theological implications also have shaped the practices of translation in West, giving to the word Logos a sacred meaning and inoculating in the minds of the translators the duty of not altering the holy texts and therefore a permanent guilt of not being able to carry this task.
There are many aspects that Lefevere mentions in his paper, and all of them of great interests for a translation scholar. He believes that the main factors which shape the activity of translation are not bound to the language, but to the cultural environment of the receiving society, factors which include power, self-image and contingency. It is only natural for him to think so, given his cultural oriented background and his affinity towards other cultural based approaches like functionalism and the polysystem theory. But I believe that language must always be taken into account when dealing with translations, for the language itself is and always has been a cultural instrument in human communication, always alive, always changing, always carrying another meaning behind the words. Maybe the language shouldn’t be approached in a ‘classical’, linguistic way, as the prescriptive methods like rendering word-for-word or being ‘faithful’ recommend, but put in a related context and analyzed from that perspective. For example, why did the Chinese translation keep its rhetorical particularity? Couldn’t it be because of the nature of the Chinese characters and their order on the paper, from up to down? Maybe because of this there is a need of a discussion and an oral interpretation before the writing of the text per se. Social and psychological approaches may also be able to give a suitable explanation as why the translation practices are collective in a culture, and individual in another, for some scholars nowadays believe that the Eastern civilizations tend to have a ‘collective’ identity, which gives them a strong sense of belonging to a social group and sharing its activities, behaviour which reflects itself in the language they speak.
References:
Constructing Cultures,Essays on Literary Translation, by Susan Basnett and Andre Lefevere
Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_identity
Sunday 28 February 2010
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