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
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