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
Monday, 12 April 2010
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
Sunday, 28 February 2010
Response Paper on 'Chinese and Western Thinking on Translation', by Andre Lefevere
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
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
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