From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation
Translators always risk inappropriate
spill-over of source-language
idiom and
usage into the target-language translation. On the other hand, spill-overs have imported useful source-language
calques and
loanwords that have enriched the target languages. Indeed, translators have helped substantially to shape the languages into which they have translated.
[3]Due to the demands of
business documentation consequent to the
Industrial Revolution that began in the mid-18th century, some translation specialties have become formalized, with dedicated schools and professional associations.
[4][edit]Etymology
The word
translation derives from the Latin
translatio (which itself comes from
trans- and
fero, together meaning “to carry across” or “to bring across”). The modern
Romance languages use words for
translation derived from that source and from the alternative Latin
traduco (“to lead across”). The
Germanic (except
Dutch) and
Slavic languages likewise use
calques based on these Latin sources.
[7]The
Ancient Greek term for
translation, μετάφρασις (
metaphrasis, “a speaking across”), has supplied
English with
metaphrase (a “
literal,” or “word-for-word,” translation) — as contrasted with
paraphrase (“a saying in other words”, fromπαράφρασις,
paraphrasis).
[7] Metaphrase corresponds, in one of the more recent terminologies, to “
formal equivalence“; and
paraphrase, to “
dynamic equivalence.”
[8]Strictly speaking, the concept of metaphrase — of “word-for-word translation” — is an
imperfect concept, because a given word in a given language often carries more than one meaning; and because a similar given meaning may often be represented in a given language by more than one word. Nevertheless, “metaphrase” and “paraphrase” may be useful as
ideal concepts that mark the extremes in the spectrum of possible approaches to translation.
[9][edit]Western theory
Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into
antiquity and show remarkable continuities. The
ancient Greeks distinguished between
metaphrase (
literal translation) and
paraphrase. This distinction was adopted by English
poet and
translatorJohn Dryden (1631–1700), who described translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in the target language, “counterparts,” or
equivalents, for the expressions used in the source language:
When [words] appear . . . literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since… what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author’s words: ’tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense.
[7]
Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of “imitation”, i.e., of adapted translation: “When a painter copies from the life… he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments…”
[8]This general formulation of the central concept of translation —
equivalence — is as adequate as any that has been proposed since
Cicero and
Horace, who, in 1st-century-BCE
Rome, famously and literally cautioned against translating “word for word” (
verbum pro verbo).
[8]Despite occasional theoretical diversity, the actual
practice of translation has hardly changed since
antiquity. Except for some extreme
metaphrasers in the early
Christian period and the
Middle Ages, and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking
equivalents — “
literal” where possible,
paraphrastic where necessary — for the original
meaning and other crucial “values” (e.g.,
style,
verse form, concordance with
musical accompaniment or, in
films, with speech
articulatory movements) as determined from context.
[8]When a target language has lacked
terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed those terms, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of
calques and
loanwords between languages, and to their importation from other languages, there are few
concepts that are “
untranslatable” among the modern European languages.
[8][13]Generally, the greater the contact and exchange that have existed between two languages, or between those languages and a third one, the greater is the ratio of
metaphrase to
paraphrase that may be used in translating among them. However, due to shifts in
ecological niches of words, a common
etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. For example, the English
actual should not be confused with the
cognate French
actuel (“present”, “current”), the Polish
aktualny (“present”, “current”),
[14] or the Russian
актуальный (“urgent”, “topical”).
The translator’s role as a bridge for “carrying across” values between cultures has been discussed at least since
Terence, the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. The translator’s role is, however, by no means a passive, mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an
artist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics such as
Cicero.
Dryden observed that “Translation is a type of drawing after life…” Comparison of the translator with a
musician or
actor goes back at least to
Samuel Johnson’s remark about
Alexander Pope playing
Homer on a
flageolet, while Homer himself used a
bassoon.
[14]If translation be an art, it is no easy one. In the 13th century,
Roger Bacon wrote that if a translation is to be true, the translator must know both
languages, as well as the
science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether.
[15]The translator of the Bible into German,
Martin Luther, is credited with being the first European to posit that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language. L.G. Kelly states that since
Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, “it has been axiomatic” that one translates only toward his own language.
[16]
| “ | [T]ranslation . . . is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor and portion of common minds; [it] should be [practiced] by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than in their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they render their country.[18] | ” |
[edit]Religious texts
One of the first recorded instances of translation in the West was the rendering of the
Old Testament into
Greek in the 3rd century BCE. The translation is known as the “
Septuagint“, a name that refers to the seventy translators (seventy-two, in some versions) who were commissioned to translate the
Bible at
Alexandria,
Egypt. Each translator worked in solitary confinement in his own cell, and according to legend all seventy versions proved identical. The
Septuagint became the
source text for later translations into many languages, including
Latin,
Coptic,
Armenian and
Georgian.
A famous mistranslation of the
Bible is the rendering of the
Hebrew word קֶרֶן (
keren), which has several meanings, as “horn” in a context where it actually means “beam of light”. As a result, for centuries artists have depicted
Moses the Lawgiver with horns growing out of his forehead; an example is
Michelangelo‘s famous sculpture. Some
Christians with
anti-Semitic feelings have used such depictions to spread hatred of the
Jews, claiming that they were
devils with horns.
[edit]Asian theory
There is a separate tradition of translation in South Asia and East Asia (primarily modern India and China), especially connected with the rendering of religious texts — particularly Buddhist texts — and with the governance of the Chinese empire. Classical Indian translation is characterized by loose adaptation, rather than the closer translation more commonly found in Europe, and
Chinese translation theory identifies various criteria and limitations in translation.
In the East Asia
Sinosphere (sphere of Chinese cultural influence), more important than translation
per se has been the use and reading of Chinese texts, which also had substantial influence on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, with substantial borrowings of vocabulary and writing system. Notable is Japanese
Kanbun, which is a system of
glossing Chinese texts for Japanese speakers.
[edit]Fidelity vs. transparency
Fidelity (or
faithfulness) and
transparency, dual ideals in translation, are often at odds. A 17th-century French critic coined the phrase “
les belles infidèles” to suggest that translations, like women, can be
either faithful
or beautiful, but not both.
[19] Faithfulness is the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the
source text, without distortion.
Transparency is the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to its grammar, syntax and idiom.
A translation that meets the first criterion is said to be “faithful”; a translation that meets the second, “
idiomatic“. The two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The criteria for judging the
fidelity of a translation vary according to the subject, type and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, etc.
Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously seek to produce a
literal translation. Translators of
literary,
religious or
historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source text, stretching the limits of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. A translator may adopt expressions from the source language in order to provide “local color”.
In recent decades, prominent advocates of such “non-transparent” translation have included the French scholar
Antoine Berman, who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations,
[20] and the American theorist
Lawrence Venuti, who has called upon translators to apply “foreignizing” translation strategies instead of domesticating ones.
[21]Many non-transparent-translation theories draw on concepts from
German Romanticism, the most obvious influence being the German theologian and philosopher
Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture “On the Different Methods of Translation” (1813) he distinguished between translation methods that move “the writer toward [the reader]“, i.e.,
transparency, and those that move the “reader toward [the author]“, i.e., an extreme
fidelity to the foreignness of the
source text. Schleiermacher favored the latter approach; he was motivated, however, not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign, as by a nationalist desire to oppose France’s cultural domination and to promote
German literature.
Current Western translation practice is dominated by the dual concepts of “fidelity” and “transparency”. This has not always been the case, however; there have been periods, especially in pre-Classical Rome and in the 18th century, when many translators stepped beyond the bounds of translation proper into the realm of
adaptation.
[edit]Equivalence
The question of
fidelity vs.
transparency has also been formulated in terms of, respectively, “
formal equivalence” and “
dynamic equivalence”. The latter two expressions are associated with the translator
Eugene Nida and were originally coined to describe ways of translating the
Bible, but the two approaches are applicable to any translation.
“Dynamic equivalence” (or “
functional equivalence”) conveys the essential
thought expressed in a source text — if necessary, at the expense of
literality, original
sememe and
word order, the source text’s active vs. passive
voice, etc.
By contrast, “formal equivalence” (sought via
“literal” translation) attempts to render the text literally, or “word for word” (the latter expression being itself a word-for-word rendering of the
classical Latin verbum pro verbo) — if necessary, at the expense of features natural to the target language.
There is, however, no sharp boundary between dynamic and formal equivalence. On the contrary, they represent a spectrum of translation approaches. Each is used at various times and in various contexts by the same translator, and at various points within the same text — sometimes simultaneously. Competent translation entails the judicious blending of dynamic and formal
equivalents.
[22]Common pitfalls in translation, especially when practiced by inexperienced translators, involve false equivalents such as “
false friends” and
false cognates.
[edit]Back-translation
A “back-translation” is a translation of a translated text back into the language of the original text, made without reference to the original text.
In the context of a
machine translation, a back-translation is also called a “round-trip translation.”
Comparison of a back-translation with the original text is sometimes used as a
quality check on the original translation. But while useful as an approximate check, it is far from infallible.
[24]
Quality control: Mark Twain, back-translator
Mark Twain provided humorously telling evidence for this when he issued his own back-translation of a French translation of his
short story, “
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County“; he published his back-translation in a single 1903 volume together with his English-language original, the French translation, and a “Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story”, the latter including a synopsized adaptation that Twain said had appeared, unattributed to him, in a Professor Sidgwick’s
Greek Prose Composition (p. 116) under the title, “The Athenian and the Frog”, which for a time had been taken for an independent
ancient Greek precursor to Twain’s “Jumping Frog” story.
[25] When a historic document survives only in translation, the original having been lost, researchers sometimes undertake back-translation in an effort to reconstruct the original text. An example involves the novel
The Saragossa Manuscript by the Polish aristocrat
Jan Potocki(1761–1815), who wrote the novel in French and anonymously published fragments in 1804 and 1813–14. Portions of the original French-language manuscript were subsequently lost; however, the missing fragments survived in a Polish translation that was made by
Edmund Chojecki in 1847 from a complete French copy, now lost. French-language versions of the complete
Saragossa Manuscript have since been produced, based on extant French-language fragments and on French-language versions that have been back-translated from Chojecki’s Polish version.
[26]Similarly, when historians suspect that a document is actually a translation from another language, back-translation into that hypothetical original language can provide supporting evidence by showing that such characteristics as
idioms,
puns, peculiar
grammatical structures, etc., are in fact derived from the original language.
For example, the known text of the
Till Eulenspiegel folk tales is in
High German but contains puns that work only when back-translated to
Low German. This seems clear evidence that these tales (or at least large portions of them) were originally written in Low German and translated into High German by an over-metaphrastic translator.
Similarly, supporters of
Aramaic primacy — of the view that the
Christian New Testament or its sources were originally written in the
Aramaic language — seek to prove their case by showing that difficult passages in the existing
Greek text of the New Testament make much better sense when back-translated to
Aramaic: that, for example, some incomprehensible references are in fact Aramaic puns that do not work in Greek.
[edit]Literary translation
[edit]History
The first important translation in the West was that of the
Septuagint, a collection of
Jewish Scriptures translated into
Koine Greek in
Alexandria between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. The dispersed
Jews had forgotten their ancestral language and needed Greek versions (translations) of their Scriptures.
[27]In
Asia, the spread of
Buddhism led to large-scale ongoing translation efforts spanning well over a thousand years. The
Tangut Empire was especially efficient in such efforts; exploiting the then newly invented
block printing, and with the full support of the government (contemporary sources describe the Emperor and his mother personally contributing to the translation effort, alongside sages of various nationalities), the Tanguts took mere decades to translate volumes that had taken the
Chinese centuries to render.
[citation needed]Large-scale efforts at translation were undertaken by the
Arabs. Having conquered the Greek world, they made
Arabic versions of its philosophical and scientific works. During the
Middle Ages, some translations of these Arabic versions were made into Latin, chiefly at
Córdoba in
Spain.
[29] Such Latin translations of Greek and original Arab works of scholarship and science helped advance the development of European
Scholasticism.
The broad historic trends in Western translation practice may be illustrated on the example of translation into the
English language.
Non-scholarly literature, however, continued to rely on
adaptation.
France‘s
Pléiade,
England‘s
Tudor poets, and the
Elizabethan translators adapted themes by
Horace,
Ovid,
Petrarch and modern Latin writers, forming a new poetic style on those models. The English poets and translators sought to supply a new public, created by the rise of a
middle class and the development of
printing, with works such as the original authors
would have written, had they been writing in England in that day.
[29]The
Elizabethan period of translation saw considerable progress beyond mere
paraphrase toward an ideal of
stylistic equivalence, but even to the end of this period, which actually reached to the middle of the 17th century, there was no concern for
verbalaccuracy.
[30]In the second half of the 17th century, the poet
John Dryden sought to make
Virgil speak “in words such as he would probably have written if he were living and an Englishman”. Dryden, however, discerned no need to emulate the Roman poet’s subtlety and concision. Similarly,
Homer suffered from
Alexander Pope‘s endeavor to reduce the Greek poet’s “wild paradise” to order.
[30]Throughout the 18th century, the watchword of translators was ease of reading. Whatever they did not understand in a text, or thought might bore readers, they omitted. They cheerfully assumed that their own style of expression was the best, and that texts should be made to conform to it in translation. For scholarship they cared no more than had their predecessors, and they did not shrink from making translations from translations in third languages, or from languages that they hardly knew, or—as in the case of
James Macpherson‘s “translations” of
Ossian—from texts that were actually of the “translator’s” own composition.
[30]The 19th century brought new standards of accuracy and style. In regard to accuracy, observes J.M. Cohen, the policy became “the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text”, except for any
bawdy passages and the addition of copious explanatory
footnotes.
[31] In regard to style, the
Victorians‘ aim, achieved through far-reaching
metaphrase (literality) or
pseudo-metaphrase, was to constantly remind readers that they were reading a
foreign classic. An exception was the outstanding translation in this period,
Edward FitzGerald‘s
Rubaiyat of
Omar Khayyam (1859), which achieved its Oriental flavor largely by using Persian names and discreet Biblical echoes and actually drew little of its material from the Persian original.
[30]In advance of the 20th century, a new pattern was set in 1871 by
Benjamin Jowett, who translated
Plato into simple, straightforward language. Jowett’s example was not followed, however, until well into the new century, when accuracy rather than style became the principal criterion.
[30]In 1974 the American poet
James Merrill wrote a poem, “
Lost in Translation“, which in part explores this idea. The question was also discussed in
Douglas Hofstadter‘s 1997 book,
Le Ton beau de Marot; he argues that a good translation of a poem must convey as much as possible of not only its literal meaning but also its form and structure (meter, rhyme or alliteration scheme, etc.).
[32]In 2008, Taiwanese linguist Grace Hui Chin Lin suggests communication strategies can be applied by oral translators to translate poetry. Translators with cultural backgrounds can oral translate poetry of their nations. For example, poetry of Tung dynasty can be introduced to people outside of Chinese communities by oral translation strategies. Also, several communication strategies for facilitating communicative limitations are applicable as oral translation strategies for interpreting poetries.
[edit]Sung texts
Translation of a text that is sung in vocal music for the purpose of singing in another language — sometimes called “singing translation” — is closely linked to translation of poetry because most
vocal music, at least in the Western tradition, is set to
verse, especially verse in regular patterns with
rhyme. (Since the late 19th century, musical setting of
prose and
free verse has also been practiced in some
art music, though
popular music tends to remain conservative in its retention of
stanzaic forms with or without
refrains.) A rudimentary example of translating poetry for singing is church
hymns, such as the German
chorales translated into English by
Catherine Winkworth.
[33]Translation of sung texts is generally much more restrictive than translation of poetry, because in the former there is little or no freedom to choose between a versified translation and a translation that dispenses with verse structure. One might modify or omit rhyme in a singing translation, but the assignment of syllables to specific notes in the original musical setting places great challenges on the translator. There is the option in prose sung texts, less so in verse, of adding or deleting a syllable here and there by subdividing or combining notes, respectively, but even with prose the process is almost like strict verse translation because of the need to stick as closely as possible to the original prosody of the sung melodic line.
Other considerations in writing a singing translation include repetition of words and phrases, the placement of rests and/or punctuation, the quality of vowels sung on high notes, and rhythmic features of the vocal line that may be more natural to the original language than to the target language. A sung translation may be considerably or completely different from the original, thus resulting in a
contrafactum.
Translations of sung texts — whether of the above type meant to be sung or of a more or less literal type meant to be read — are also used as aids to audiences, singers and conductors, when a work is being sung in a language not known to them. The most familiar types are translations presented as subtitles or
surtitles projected during
opera performances, those inserted into concert programs, and those that accompany commercial audio CDs of vocal music. In addition, professional and amateur singers often sing works in languages they do not know (or do not know well), and translations are then used to enable them to understand the meaning of the words they are singing.
[edit]Translators
[edit]Attributes
A competent translator has the following qualities:
- a very good knowledge of the language, written and spoken, from which he is translating (the source language);
- an excellent command of the language into which he is translating (the target language);
- familiarity with the subject matter of the text being translated;
- a profound understanding of the etymological and idiomatic correlates between the two languages; and
- a finely tuned sense of when to metaphrase (“translate literally“) and when to paraphrase, so as to assure true rather than spurious equivalents between the source- and target-language texts.[34]
[edit]Misconception
It is commonly assumed that any
bilingual individual is able to produce satisfactory or even high-quality document translations simply because he is a fluent speaker of a second language. However, this is often not the case. Because of the very nature of the different skills that each possesses, bilinguals and translators are not equally prepared to perform document translations. The ability, skill and even the basic mental processes required for bilingualism are fundamentally different from those required for translation.Bilingual individuals are able to take their own thoughts and ideas and express them orally in two different languages, their
native language and a
second language, sometimes well enough to pass for native speakers in their second language.
Translators must be able to read, understand and retain somebody else’s ideas, then render them accurately, completely and without exclusion, in a way that conveys the original meaning effectively and without distortion in another language.
In other words, translators must be excellent readers in a source language, for example, in English as their second language, and excellent writers in a target language, for example, in Spanish as their native language.
[35]
Among translators, it is generally accepted that the best translations are produced by persons who are translating from their second language into their
native language,
[17] as it is rare for someone who has learned a second language to have total fluency in that language.
“In the translation industry, it is considered ‘standard procedure’ to translate only from an individual’s second language, into their native language; never the other way around. For example, a native Spanish speaker should always translate English documents into Spanish; however, this fundamental rule is often ignored by amateur translators, and surprisingly, is often accepted without question by translation buyers.”
[36]Translation has served as a writing school for many prominent writers. Translators, including monks who spread Buddhist texts in East Asia and the early modern European translators of the Bible, in the course of their work have shaped the very
languages into which they have translated. They have acted as bridges for conveying knowledge between
cultures. Along with ideas, they have imported from the source languages, into their own languages,
loanwords and
calques of
grammatical structures,
idioms and
vocabulary.
[edit]Accreditation
Such accreditation often has no
legal effect, its value lying in the esteem that the translation organization enjoys as an independent authority on competent translation. However, in many countries,
courts of law will not admit into evidence a translation by other than a certified translator.
[citation needed]
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