The Authentication of the Equivalence

Every once in a while every translation studies apprentice gets stuck with the thorny concept of equivalence. How to approach the problem? If some scholars believe it to be an obstacle to progress in translation studies, irrelevant or even damaging (Kenny 1995:77), should we completely dismiss it and pretend it didn’t exist? How do we establish any relation between the semantic meaning of the source and the target text, or better said, how do we assess the reconstruction of the original message in its translation?

We know now, after decades of debating over the issue in numerous scholar papers that a translation is not a mere replication of a text into another language, and it is impossible to asses it in terms of either similar associations in the minds of the native speakers of the two languages or in producing the same effect. But we still need something, a sort of general agreement to allow us to recognize and determine what makes a text the translation of another.

Perhaps the main reason equivalence is regarded as problematic is because of its previous interlingual approach and focus on the equivalent meaning disregarding the context. Toury however suggests viewing equivalence as an intertextual phenomenon, a relationship between two texts in different languages rather than between the languages themselves. Moreover, he postulates to consider the existence of equivalence as given, and to identify the norms which determine it in order to assess to what degree a text is equivalent with another (2001:86).

Theo Hermans finds another way to approach equivalence, and I see it is a sort of reversed interpretation of the ‘classic’ definition: rather than establishing equivalence through comparison of the source text with the target text, the status of those texts decides the equivalence instead. He gives examples from religion and international law to argue that by authentication the translations become perfect equivalents of the originals:

Authentication creates the ‘Fiction of total equivalence and correspondence’. The imposition of equivalence has as a consequence the presumption that the various authentic versions convey the same meaning. (2007:9)

Thus, the presence of an authoritative figure (God, UN convention) together with declaring the texts as interchangeable versions of the same utterance and the act of verbalizing this declaration creates the perfect equivalence between the original and its translation, but in the same time erases the ST/TT boundaries, positioning the translation in the place of the original.

This approach puts translation in a whole different perspective, and saying that a translation is translation as long as is not equivalent with the original shakes the grounds of our traditional perception over this subject a little bit. While his argument makes perfect sense when it comes to legal translations, where the utterances must be unequivocal in meaning, we cannot view any past or present translation like a binding contract or the Book of Mormon. In a way, his approach is similar with that of Toury’s postulate, if we consider the status of the text as an equivalence norm, and since we have to determine criteria for what equivalence should define, then the word of God or that of the treaty-makers is a valid measurement yardstick, but what about the rest? From this point of view Herman does bring to question the ‘authentication in a minor key’, issues like self-translation and pseudo-translation, but these are all isolated drops in a sea of countless instances of rendering from a language to another, and once again, we must not fall into the temptation of generalizing. When discrepancies occur, we don’t doubt the divine word who states a translation is perfectly equivalent with its original, but we doubt the work of a mere mortal translator, and here we find ourselves back where we left.

So will we dismiss Herman’s concept of equivalence? Not at all, we will add it to the other approaches of the subject matter, and in the meantime we will be in search of the perfect tool able to decipher the ‘black box’ that is the human mind in determining the decisions and choices it makes in a translation process..


References:
Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 1995
Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, by Gideon Toury, 2001
The Conference of the Tongues, by Theo Hermans, 2007

Beyond Toury's Concept of Norms: the Haskalah Case

Taking a panoramic look to Gideon Toury’s work, regardless the moments in time when he developed various approaches to translation, we can see why he refered to translation as being a decision making progress, or to the translator as playing a social role. As we all know, he presumably bears in mind the concept of norms seen as socio-cultural constraints, which govern a given society at a given time and to which most of the times the translator has to conform in order to receive the acceptance of the target audience. By taking these into account together with using cognitive tools, like cultural repertoires seen as pre-organized set of options, and acts of planning regarded as interventions in a current state of affairs, we can have a picture of what decisions a translator would make and how these would influence the receiving culture. The picture would be incomplete however, for, as Theo Hermans states, translation does not occur in a vacuum, and even if Toury brings in question the social context, he fails to acknowledge the intricacies between various entities involved in the translation process:

Translation needs to be seen in conjuction with other fields of discourse, and with questions of power

. (Hermans, p.89)

Hermans also believes that the terms 'adequate' and 'acceptable' are confusing, especially because no one had established yet a yardstick which could measure what would acceptable be and what not. The binary opposition itself is problematic, for the translation proccess cannot be narrowed down to one of these poles nor can ignore the multiple factors which exist outside these concepts. One more observation he makes is that Toury ignores to see norms as ‘templates in offering ready-made solutions to particular types of problem’(p.79).

Going back to Toury’s use of planning in translation, it seems that the term implies a certain interconnection with power, in means that certain agents may use translation by making certain choices and deliberate changes in order to influence certain behaviours in a certain way. He gives as example the Jewish Enlightenment movement, known as Haskalah. A group of self-appointed agents decided to modernize ‘the mid-European’ style by using translation, among others, as a way to gradually accomodate the Jewish society with some new literary genre.

I could argue that in this example we may find some contra-arguments to Hermans objections. First, I believe that the question of power is ackowledged from the planning perspective, as I mentioned before. The initiators of Haskalah used tactics to implement innovative elements in the closed, archaic system, and they must have been authoritative, prestigious figures, ‘patrons’ to which the society would have related with respect. So that should respond to a certain extent to Herman’s objection that norms fail to account linguistic, social, politic and ideological aspects of a culture at once by merely resuming to a linear relation between the source text and the target culture, with only the translator as a mediator. This would be valid of course if we put the notions of norms, planning and repertoire together.

Secondly, even though Toury doesn’t mention it in the paper, it is known that Haskalah had repercussions on other levels as well, not only literary. Now the concept of norms as Toury set them out may seem in this case irrelevant, but perhaps we can establish a correlation between repertoire as a sum of ways in which people use a set of pre-organized options (models) and norms as, in Herman’s view, ready-made templates which people use in particular problems. If that is the case, we can look further on the Haskalah movement and argue that the options made by the social agents to use translation (sometimes maybe even pseudo-translation) for modernizing the literary system may be seen as a way to use ready-made norms. We can give an example the disguise mechanism like using fables, a literary genre considered safe in the target culture.

Returning to the argument that Haskalah had repercussions beyond the literary context, we are forced to observe this phenomenon outside the boundaries of norms. We know for a fact that this movement had an ideological substrate, in which the initiators aimed at the possibility of integration and acceptance of Jews among non-Jews. So we can see that it interferes with other domains of culture as well, as Herman wanted to pinpoint. However, I find it unrealistic to judge a cultural phenomenon from a single perspective, as in this case that of norms, and it is perhaps better to relate to various concepts from translation studies to make an assessment as realistic and objective as possible.

References:
'Translations as a Means of Planning and the Planning of Translation', Gideon Toury, from Translation and (re)shaping of culture, edited by Saliha Paker;

Translation in Systems, Theo Hermans;


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah

The Functionalist Approaches: The Concept of Translational Action

The Functionalist approaches in translation, and especially the Skopos Theory, have made a notable switch from a linguistic oriented to a more sociocultural concept of translation. They have put ‘translation’ on the map and have made a respectable profession out of it. The translator is now regarded as an expert within his area of expertise, just like a doctor or a historian are in their respective fields. They take into account not only literary or religious, but a broad variety of text types, from legal and scientific to commercial and touristic. Moreover, the reign of the source-text itself has come to an end, and sometimes a translation process can even happen in its absence (Nord; 2005, p.18). The ‘dethronement’ (Vermeer) of the source-text lead the translation theories towards a prospective atitude, which focuses now on the needs and expectations of the target audience, and puts at rest the tensions caused by equivalence. For Vermeer, the source-text is not a touchstone anymore in translation, but just a criterion in a series of others, like the background of the source-culture or the target reader’s expected level of comprehending. It is indeed very useful to have the liberty to mold a product text according to the needs of a certain audience, let’s say, conveying a world’s classic like ‘Crime and Punishment’ into a book for 8th graders.

The functionalist approaches are mainly developed on the concept of translational action. This is not viewed as a mere act of transcoding from one language to another, but as an intercultural process in which the mediator accounts multiple aspects of the communication involved, like behaviour or non-verbal signs. It is obvious the affiliation of this approach with the communication theory, but I wonder how far it should extrapolate it.

According to Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer, a text is viewed as an offer of information made by a producer to a recipient, and subsequently, a translation is a secondary offer of information which imitates the former, to a member of a target culture. This is more or less the basic deffinition of the communication, as it results from the following, well-known, linear model:

Sender______encoding___________Channel/Message_______decoding________Receiver

Producer of a text_____primary offer of information____________Translator______secondary offer of information___Text Reader


I feel that what they are practically saying is that everything can be a translational action. Even the example with the baby that couldn’t speak but the mother ‘translated’ his gurgles makes me think that maybe some boundaries should be set as in how should translation be defined. Is translational action a translation? Not necessarily (Christiane Nord refers sometimes to a so called 'translation in a narrower form', as in separating the ‘real’ translation from the rest), but is translation a translational action? It is, according to functionalism. Communication theory postulates that every process which carrries information from a sender to a receiver is a communication process. Even the act of being thirsty can be accounted as a communication process in anatomy. When the level of water from the body cells gets lower they send a message to the nerve system, which alerts the brain, which puts the locomotory system in motion to go get some water. So I could argue then, that this is a translational process, for the chemical indicators from the body cells convert into a stimulus and then into an impulse which runs through the nerve system and so on. Or I could say that a widow who wants to contact her dead husband is the target reader for what a psychic should ‘translate’ to her from the world beyond. These are, after all, some primary offers of information rendered in secondary ones by a medium.

I may be exaggerating a little bit, but I feel that translation has become so derivative, that it is no more than a fuzzy concept nowadays. There must be a limit to what we may legitimately call a translation, as oppose to any other form of product text which encounters a translation process, as, let’s say, an adaptation.

References:
Translating as a Purposeful Activity, by Christiane Nord, St Jerome Publishing, UK 2005