Luise Von Flotow brings in her paper ‘Dis-Unity and Diversity.Feminist Approaches to Translation' a short but succinct update on the diversification of feminist discourse in Translation Studies. She accounts this increasing phenomenon of the last fifteen years on the focus on the notion of difference that cross-cultural work has created. The main factors which seem to boost the proliferation of feminist approaches are dis-unity, diversity and complexity.
When it comes to diversity, the author believes that one must maintain a survival strategy which should cluster around two poles: ‘response-ability’ and ‘desire-ability’ (1998:3). Given the fact that feminist discourse criticism is rarely neutral – a thing which is utterly undesirable, for a general consensus wouldn’t then encourage development within the field - Von Flotow believes it achieved the required strategic complexity. Nonetheless, she feels the necessity to pinpoint the main factors which bring disunity in feminist approaches and which may not be as constructive as wished to be.
One of the factors Von Flotow chooses to examine more closely is maintaining a ‘mainstream “translatese” of third world material’, which not only perpetuates stereotypes and misrepresentations in the Anglophone world, but also ‘deprives the texts of their original style’(1998;5). To illustrate this issue Gayatri Spivak argues that, by writing in an ‘available English’, Western feminists end up erasing the cultural particularities of the original, making ‘the literature of a woman in Palestine (…) resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan’ (ibid.).
The Canadian scholar also brings into question the issue of elitist translation. By deliberately translating from a feminist perspective, the resulting texts, full of complex wordplay, become very difficult to comprehend by the general public, except for a small academic, bilingual elite. One good example would be Barbara Godard’s translation of L’Amer (These Our Mothers). Thus, by supplementing the wordplay from the title, the original L’Amer (a reference to mere –mother, mer –sea, and amer – bitter) becomes These Our Mothers (The Sea Our Mother + Sea (S)mothers + (S)our Mothers) (1991;75).
Another issue that Von Flotow raises in this paper is the hypocrisy of some feminist translators, who criticize the use of ‘male violence’ in translation (1998:7) but who approach the same type of aggressive methods in their own work, like ‘hijacking’, a term defined as a deliberate act of feminizing, appropriating the target text(1991;75). To use as an example the same translator, it seems that Godard’s translations involve as ‘dis-unifying’ strategies both the use of elitist and the theoretically non-coherent – that is, hypocrite – translation approaches(1998;5); in other words, she makes use of sophisticated and inaccessible word games along with the violent appropriation of the source text (a perfect example is the famous translation of "Ce soir j'entre dans l'histoire sans relever ma jupe” with “ Tonight I shall step into history without opening my legs”(1991;69)).
Further on Von Flotow presents three factors which she believes to play a role in feminist dis-unity(1998;10). The first one, 'identity politics', refers to that certain consciously identifiable cultural/political characteristics that will determine one’s opinions and prejudices. She mentions Gayatri Spivak as an example, her multicultural heritage and how this might have influenced her political views and consequently the way she translates.
The second factor, 'positionality', accounts for the way personal values are reinterpreted and constructed in time and space according to different economic, political and cultural backgrounds. A good example for this case would be the feminist approach of Suzanne Levine’s translations.
Lastly, the ‘historical dimension’ of scholarly discourse refers to the way gendered subjectivity changes with the time and with the political and institutional contexts. As such, where Theo Hermans saw in Earl of Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse a sense of affinity between the author and the translator, Lori Chamberlain sees with her feminist approach a ‘form of struggle for the right of paternity’ (1998;11).
Taking a broad picture of the field of feminist translation as it has developed so far, I would argue that the proliferation of various ‘dis-unifying’ approaches is constructive, for it increasingly incorporates traditions and perspectives of women from very different social backgrounds, which is helpful for a better understanding of their needs and expectations; moreover, it may have positive repercussions not only in the world of translation studies, but in their social and economic environments as well.
References:
Von Flotow, Luise (1998) “Dis-Unity and Diversity. Feminist Approaches to Translation', Unity in Diversity? Current Trends in Translation Studies, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing
------------------(1997) Translation and Gender. Translating in the Era of Feminism. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing (http://www.litere.usv.ro/pagini/Volume_manifestari_studentesti/CONSENSUS%20lucrari/11.pdf)
------------------(1991). “Feminist translation: Context, Practices and Theories”. TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, vol.4, no.2, (p.69-84) (http://www.erudit.org/revue/ttr/1991/v4/n2/037094ar.pdf)
Friday, 28 May 2010
Monday, 12 April 2010
Translation as a Mode: Response Paper on Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator
It is difficult to assess Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ without taking into account the reason it was written for, that is, as an introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableux Parisiens. For the first concept that strikes the reader from the very beginning is that art is not intended for its viewers/listeners, and that any form of it, including literature, has an essential substance which cannot be expressed trough words, and above all, it is just ‘for the sake of art’, with no designated, dedicated or even ideal reader. This was exactly the kind of attitude that considered the Functionalist approaches to translation as superfluous and to which scholars like Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiss responded with very solid arguments that any type of writing, even pure aesthetical, has an intended, though granted unconscious sometimes, reader.
But Walter Benjamin was a man of his time and we must not forget that the comparative linguistic approach to translation was the mainstream thinking and it mainly regarded what would Even-Zohar call ‘high literature’.
I would suspect Benjamin constructed this discourse around the prestige of Baudelaire, and perhaps sometimes as a form of excuse if he couldn’t – or thought he wasn’t able to - manage to fully render the multitude of shapes, meanings and artistical expressions the poetry embeds in its form and structure. Such a source-oriented approach holds the case for Antoine Berman as well, who had very strict opinions about what is good and what is bad translation, an approach which would seem somewhat outdated nowadays, when we contextualize translation and take into account a series of sociocultural aspects along with the micro level of the process per se.
Going back to Les fleurs du mal (and it is interesting to see that internet references in English keep the French title almost all the time), Benjamin argues that translation, as a mode, reveals itself to only those worthy of understanding the translability of a work of art, and this translability comes as a natural connection with the original by transcending the boundaries of languages into an ideal, pure form:
I believe the author is mainly concerned with the semiotic aspect of Baudelaire’s discourse, and he stresses on the importance of distinguishing between various signifiers of the same signified across languages, which carry out infinite and barely perceptible nuances according to every emotional and historical utterance a word may bear. He wants to make sure that the reader fully understands the frisson nouveau, as Victor Hugo put it, of the poems, their sheer expression of the aesthetics of the ugly, and doesn’t fall into the category of those who are shocked by the eroticism and decadence themes, but manage to see beyond the syntactic surface. Benjamin therefore puts a lot of effort in trying to explain how an iconic effect must be achieved when rendering such a high expression of art form, how fidelity can never reproduce the original meaning but carries it on in the afterlife through its image, just like the pieces of a vessel glued together, so that the translation would thus ‘incorporate the original’s mode of signification’ while ‘refraining from wanting to communicate something’ (2000:21).
I would argue that nowadays we would take a more sociological approach when translating Baudelaire, that we would tediously seek every intimate connection between his work and his life, we would want to see how much of his past and personality was embedded in his poems, and therefore search for alternative meanings in connection with his persona and sociocultural background, while striving to reflect all these into translation. No one is to say however that we would be able to do a better job than Benjamin Walter.
References:
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)
But Walter Benjamin was a man of his time and we must not forget that the comparative linguistic approach to translation was the mainstream thinking and it mainly regarded what would Even-Zohar call ‘high literature’.
I would suspect Benjamin constructed this discourse around the prestige of Baudelaire, and perhaps sometimes as a form of excuse if he couldn’t – or thought he wasn’t able to - manage to fully render the multitude of shapes, meanings and artistical expressions the poetry embeds in its form and structure. Such a source-oriented approach holds the case for Antoine Berman as well, who had very strict opinions about what is good and what is bad translation, an approach which would seem somewhat outdated nowadays, when we contextualize translation and take into account a series of sociocultural aspects along with the micro level of the process per se.
Going back to Les fleurs du mal (and it is interesting to see that internet references in English keep the French title almost all the time), Benjamin argues that translation, as a mode, reveals itself to only those worthy of understanding the translability of a work of art, and this translability comes as a natural connection with the original by transcending the boundaries of languages into an ideal, pure form:
While all individual elements of foreign languages – words, sentences, structure – are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions. Without distinguishing the intended object from the mode of intention, no firm grasp of this basic law of a philosophy of language can be achieved. The words Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same. (2000:18)
I believe the author is mainly concerned with the semiotic aspect of Baudelaire’s discourse, and he stresses on the importance of distinguishing between various signifiers of the same signified across languages, which carry out infinite and barely perceptible nuances according to every emotional and historical utterance a word may bear. He wants to make sure that the reader fully understands the frisson nouveau, as Victor Hugo put it, of the poems, their sheer expression of the aesthetics of the ugly, and doesn’t fall into the category of those who are shocked by the eroticism and decadence themes, but manage to see beyond the syntactic surface. Benjamin therefore puts a lot of effort in trying to explain how an iconic effect must be achieved when rendering such a high expression of art form, how fidelity can never reproduce the original meaning but carries it on in the afterlife through its image, just like the pieces of a vessel glued together, so that the translation would thus ‘incorporate the original’s mode of signification’ while ‘refraining from wanting to communicate something’ (2000:21).
I would argue that nowadays we would take a more sociological approach when translating Baudelaire, that we would tediously seek every intimate connection between his work and his life, we would want to see how much of his past and personality was embedded in his poems, and therefore search for alternative meanings in connection with his persona and sociocultural background, while striving to reflect all these into translation. No one is to say however that we would be able to do a better job than Benjamin Walter.
References:
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)
Translation as a Violent Act: Response Paper on Antoine Berman's Translation and the Trials of the Foreign
Antoine Berman argues in his paper, Translation and the Trials of the Foreign, that a shift has occurred throughout time in translation approaches, from foreignization towards naturalization, and that the properly ethical aim of translation is receiving the Foreign as a ‘foreign’ (2000:285). He takes a rather radical attitude on translation practices and views the methods used as ‘textual deformations’ (2000:286), deviations from the ‘essential aim’, doomed to produce ethnocentric and annexationist target texts, unable to reflect the original’s spirit.
It seems to me that for Berman translation is a ‘second-hand’ activity; he is determined to prove that the readers’ perception of translation ‘not being a true text’ (2000:294), but a poor imitation is based on solid grounds. The examples he gives as ‘deforming tendencies’ when rendering from a source-text, they all show how the original text is inevitably damaged, and how rationalization destroys the ‘polylogism of language’, or how expansion increases the mass of text without adding value to it. Thinks may not be that clear-cut however. As Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier argue, the assumption that ‘the act of translation is by nature less creative than the act of writing an original work’ (1999:1) is not doing anyone any favor. The translator is in a sense bond to the source-text, he has a duty to write in relation with it, but in the same time he has a duty towards the target audience as well, and he must find a middle way out between the constraints of the original and those of the language he renders into, in order to produce a text that would lay out the originality and beauty of the source text while not distracting the reader with too much syntactic and semantic peculiarity. Moreover, where Berman sees ‘deformation’ in translation, procedures which irreversibly alter the original thought like expansion, explicitation, and clarification, other scholars see strategies, tools used - whether consciously or not - to help the translator to best represent the source-text. Lefevere (1992:107) for example, refers to concepts like allusion (use of cultural allusion to establish cultural color even if it doesn’t exist in the original), explicitation (smuggling explanations into the target text because the translators ‘take very seriously their task as mediators between the original and its new readership’), or compensation (adding features that do not match in the original to establish a balance). While he depicts and analyses these strategies in various translations of Catullus’s thirty-second poem he shows how throughout time the translators have used different solutions which, among others, reflected the poetics and the ideology of the time. So these translations may not have accurately represented Catullus in all its expressiveness, stylistic features and spirit of the time, but this is most of the times an inevitable result of the linguistic structure of every language and of the change in social behavior and mentality in time. Who is to say these translations are not standing out as equally valuable works as their originals?
I would argue that Berman’s approach to literature, and therefore, translation, is somewhat elitist and source-oriented. The novel may be perhaps considered a lower form of literature in some cultures, but this is definitely not the case in many others (e.g. USA). Moreover, it is very subjective to argue that a translation of Hölderlin, for example, ‘has been massacred’. While I completely subscribe to the idea that foreignization enriches the target culture with insights from the source, a complete alienation of the target text would lose touch with the readers, for a sort of mediator must still exist in order to ‘move’ the audience towards the author. Especially in our era, whether we like it or not, there is a general tendency toward the so-called ‘fluent reading’, which I believe exists not only in English, but in other languages as well. I’ve noticed how difficult is to follow an English translation from Turkish full of cultural markers like ‘kısmet’, ‘inşallah’, ‘meyhane’, ‘rakı’, and so on and so forth. It is, as I said before, enriching to keep some of them in the text and give a glimpse of the ‘Turkish world’ to the foreign reader. But, as I’ve seen it with the translations of Orhan Pamuk, I would argue it is a shame that the translator sacrificed the fluency of the text that would keep a reader’s interest high for the sake of the ‘foreignness’. And there is another issue that concerns me with respect to foreignness. Apparently this is a desired feature when it comes to Turkish into English translations, but what about the other way around? Is it common to ‘foreignize’ in literary translations, do Turkish readers want to see unusual sentence constructions and calques, with their following explanation as a footnote or in a glossary? Or in non-literary renderings, do they perceive the use of borrowings as threatening to the integrity of the language and therefore dismiss them and call for a ‘naturalizing’ translation? These things should be carefully analyzed and only then a rough conclusion should be drawn, not necessarily on what the translation theories corpora (sometimes unintentionally) prescribe, but on what the readers of the target culture feel it suits best their preferences and needs. Together with, I might add, a certain cohesion on the strategies and attitudes used both for incoming and outcoming translations for the same language.
References:
Antoine Berman, ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)
Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier, The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1999)
Andre Lefevere, Translation Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (NY:MLA, 1992)
It seems to me that for Berman translation is a ‘second-hand’ activity; he is determined to prove that the readers’ perception of translation ‘not being a true text’ (2000:294), but a poor imitation is based on solid grounds. The examples he gives as ‘deforming tendencies’ when rendering from a source-text, they all show how the original text is inevitably damaged, and how rationalization destroys the ‘polylogism of language’, or how expansion increases the mass of text without adding value to it. Thinks may not be that clear-cut however. As Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier argue, the assumption that ‘the act of translation is by nature less creative than the act of writing an original work’ (1999:1) is not doing anyone any favor. The translator is in a sense bond to the source-text, he has a duty to write in relation with it, but in the same time he has a duty towards the target audience as well, and he must find a middle way out between the constraints of the original and those of the language he renders into, in order to produce a text that would lay out the originality and beauty of the source text while not distracting the reader with too much syntactic and semantic peculiarity. Moreover, where Berman sees ‘deformation’ in translation, procedures which irreversibly alter the original thought like expansion, explicitation, and clarification, other scholars see strategies, tools used - whether consciously or not - to help the translator to best represent the source-text. Lefevere (1992:107) for example, refers to concepts like allusion (use of cultural allusion to establish cultural color even if it doesn’t exist in the original), explicitation (smuggling explanations into the target text because the translators ‘take very seriously their task as mediators between the original and its new readership’), or compensation (adding features that do not match in the original to establish a balance). While he depicts and analyses these strategies in various translations of Catullus’s thirty-second poem he shows how throughout time the translators have used different solutions which, among others, reflected the poetics and the ideology of the time. So these translations may not have accurately represented Catullus in all its expressiveness, stylistic features and spirit of the time, but this is most of the times an inevitable result of the linguistic structure of every language and of the change in social behavior and mentality in time. Who is to say these translations are not standing out as equally valuable works as their originals?
I would argue that Berman’s approach to literature, and therefore, translation, is somewhat elitist and source-oriented. The novel may be perhaps considered a lower form of literature in some cultures, but this is definitely not the case in many others (e.g. USA). Moreover, it is very subjective to argue that a translation of Hölderlin, for example, ‘has been massacred’. While I completely subscribe to the idea that foreignization enriches the target culture with insights from the source, a complete alienation of the target text would lose touch with the readers, for a sort of mediator must still exist in order to ‘move’ the audience towards the author. Especially in our era, whether we like it or not, there is a general tendency toward the so-called ‘fluent reading’, which I believe exists not only in English, but in other languages as well. I’ve noticed how difficult is to follow an English translation from Turkish full of cultural markers like ‘kısmet’, ‘inşallah’, ‘meyhane’, ‘rakı’, and so on and so forth. It is, as I said before, enriching to keep some of them in the text and give a glimpse of the ‘Turkish world’ to the foreign reader. But, as I’ve seen it with the translations of Orhan Pamuk, I would argue it is a shame that the translator sacrificed the fluency of the text that would keep a reader’s interest high for the sake of the ‘foreignness’. And there is another issue that concerns me with respect to foreignness. Apparently this is a desired feature when it comes to Turkish into English translations, but what about the other way around? Is it common to ‘foreignize’ in literary translations, do Turkish readers want to see unusual sentence constructions and calques, with their following explanation as a footnote or in a glossary? Or in non-literary renderings, do they perceive the use of borrowings as threatening to the integrity of the language and therefore dismiss them and call for a ‘naturalizing’ translation? These things should be carefully analyzed and only then a rough conclusion should be drawn, not necessarily on what the translation theories corpora (sometimes unintentionally) prescribe, but on what the readers of the target culture feel it suits best their preferences and needs. Together with, I might add, a certain cohesion on the strategies and attitudes used both for incoming and outcoming translations for the same language.
References:
Antoine Berman, ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)
Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier, The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1999)
Andre Lefevere, Translation Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (NY:MLA, 1992)
Andre Lefevere and the Concept of Rewriting
Andre Lefevere’s systemic approach to translation introduces the concept of rewriting as a form of reproducing a text, be it in the same language or not, in a written or oral form. He addresses his paper to ‘those in the middle’, who are responsible for shaping the reception of literature by the non-professional readers (1992:1). In this process several social actors like translators, reviewers, patrons or publishing houses are involved in the re-creation – rewriting - of a source-text into a target-text which thus becomes a refraction of the original.
What does ‘rewriting’ exactly mean for Lefevere? It appears to be that ‘final product’ which, during the process of translation is passed through the filter of the poetics and the ideology of the time in a certain sociocultural space. As he argues, ‘rewriters create images of a writer, a work, a period, a genre, sometimes even a whole literature’ (1992:5), that is, by manipulating textual or cultural aspects of a literary work they project it differently, refracted, into the target culture. Rewriting does not necessarily happen only between two languages, it can take place within the same literary system, and he gives many examples, one of them being the case of Heinrich Heine, whose work, ‘Loreley’, was published as anonymous in an German anthology from the first half of the 20th century, because he ‘betrayed’ his country by showing his affiliation towards France.
It is true that the status of 'Loreley' changed, or, to put it in Lefevere’s words, was refracted, and had therefore different angles of reception throughout time, but in the end, once Heine’s genius was understood and acknowledged, it received the deserved consideration, which I suppose it will remain unchanged from now on. What I want to point out is that, even if in a certain period of time certain social agents ‘play’ with the texts and use them as power or manipulation tools, or just as mediums to reflect the poetics of the time, eventually history will expose them and restore them to their real – or what it is believed to be their real, original – meaning. After all, all the examples given by Lefevere in his papers, from Catullus’s poems to Heine’s 'Loreley' are set to prove these types of exposures.
One could argue that it is impossible to determine what the original meaning of a work is, and that history is not a type of ultimate authority which holds the incontestable truth. Nevertheless, since we are bond to judge thing only retrospectively and we can only make presuppositions about the future, we generally tend to agree or accept whatever is proved to be real or original the way we understand it in our own time. So if, let’s say, the Bible was ‘rewritten’ in a certain way, so that it would fit with the dogma of the first Christians, today’s society maybe wouldn’t be able or willing to accept this fact, but perhaps 500 years from now people will have the tools and the mentality necessary to reveal the ‘refractions’ and how they influenced the Christian world throughout time.
I would have to admit that to a certain extent the idea of having such a holistic concept of time and history is abstract and unrealistic; we can still, however, regard the concept of translation as ‘rewriting’ to various literary or social contexts in relation with smaller time slots. I believe the translations of 'Dracula' within the Turkish literary system (Tahir Gürçağlar, 2009) are a good example of rewriting in Lefevere’s view: the first translation, 1928, had the author concealed and it reflected (or better said, refracted into) the intention ‘to evoke nationalist feelings in the readership’ ; the last one, from 1998, ‘restored’ the text to its original writer, Bram Stoker, and had the nationalist parts removed. We can assess these decisions both from the ideological and the public reception perspective. So we may agree that the patrons and the professional readers sometimes seek to impose or insinuate their own ideas on the society, but ultimately the society is the one which decides, even a posteriori, to reject what is considered to be deviated from an original text and to erase or correct the refractions.
References:
Andre Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, Routledge , 1992
Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Scouting the Borders of Translation: Pseudotranslation, Concealed Translations and Authorship in Twentieth Century Turkey, 2009
What does ‘rewriting’ exactly mean for Lefevere? It appears to be that ‘final product’ which, during the process of translation is passed through the filter of the poetics and the ideology of the time in a certain sociocultural space. As he argues, ‘rewriters create images of a writer, a work, a period, a genre, sometimes even a whole literature’ (1992:5), that is, by manipulating textual or cultural aspects of a literary work they project it differently, refracted, into the target culture. Rewriting does not necessarily happen only between two languages, it can take place within the same literary system, and he gives many examples, one of them being the case of Heinrich Heine, whose work, ‘Loreley’, was published as anonymous in an German anthology from the first half of the 20th century, because he ‘betrayed’ his country by showing his affiliation towards France.
It is true that the status of 'Loreley' changed, or, to put it in Lefevere’s words, was refracted, and had therefore different angles of reception throughout time, but in the end, once Heine’s genius was understood and acknowledged, it received the deserved consideration, which I suppose it will remain unchanged from now on. What I want to point out is that, even if in a certain period of time certain social agents ‘play’ with the texts and use them as power or manipulation tools, or just as mediums to reflect the poetics of the time, eventually history will expose them and restore them to their real – or what it is believed to be their real, original – meaning. After all, all the examples given by Lefevere in his papers, from Catullus’s poems to Heine’s 'Loreley' are set to prove these types of exposures.
One could argue that it is impossible to determine what the original meaning of a work is, and that history is not a type of ultimate authority which holds the incontestable truth. Nevertheless, since we are bond to judge thing only retrospectively and we can only make presuppositions about the future, we generally tend to agree or accept whatever is proved to be real or original the way we understand it in our own time. So if, let’s say, the Bible was ‘rewritten’ in a certain way, so that it would fit with the dogma of the first Christians, today’s society maybe wouldn’t be able or willing to accept this fact, but perhaps 500 years from now people will have the tools and the mentality necessary to reveal the ‘refractions’ and how they influenced the Christian world throughout time.
I would have to admit that to a certain extent the idea of having such a holistic concept of time and history is abstract and unrealistic; we can still, however, regard the concept of translation as ‘rewriting’ to various literary or social contexts in relation with smaller time slots. I believe the translations of 'Dracula' within the Turkish literary system (Tahir Gürçağlar, 2009) are a good example of rewriting in Lefevere’s view: the first translation, 1928, had the author concealed and it reflected (or better said, refracted into) the intention ‘to evoke nationalist feelings in the readership’ ; the last one, from 1998, ‘restored’ the text to its original writer, Bram Stoker, and had the nationalist parts removed. We can assess these decisions both from the ideological and the public reception perspective. So we may agree that the patrons and the professional readers sometimes seek to impose or insinuate their own ideas on the society, but ultimately the society is the one which decides, even a posteriori, to reject what is considered to be deviated from an original text and to erase or correct the refractions.
References:
Andre Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, Routledge , 1992
Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Scouting the Borders of Translation: Pseudotranslation, Concealed Translations and Authorship in Twentieth Century Turkey, 2009
Sunday, 21 March 2010
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:
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
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
Sunday, 14 March 2010
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:
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
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
Sunday, 7 March 2010
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
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
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