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Translation Studies

ISSN: 1478-1700 (Print) 1751-2921 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrs20

Response by Katan to Invariance Orientation:


Identifying an Object for Translation Studies

David Katan

To cite this article: David Katan (2016): Response by Katan to Invariance


Orientation: Identifying an Object for Translation Studies, Translation Studies, DOI:
10.1080/14781700.2016.1234972

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2016.1234972

Published online: 19 Oct 2016.

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Download by: [David Katan] Date: 19 October 2016, At: 09:19


TRANSLATION STUDIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2016.1234972

Response by Katan to Invariance Orientation: Identifying an


Object for Translation Studies
David Katan
Department of Humanities, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

Brian Mossops position paper is certainly provocative, and indeed even after repeated
readings I am not sure that I have understood how much of what he suggests can be any-
thing more than just that. If his position is a reaction to what he sees happening in the
volatile world of translation studies (TS), then there is a great deal I agree with. Mossop
is absolutely right that there is no agreement over what TS is, which I believe is partly
to do with the fact that translation competence is still understood only in terms of
other non-translation competences. This automatically makes the discipline open (or vul-
nerable) to other disciplines.
Mossop offers a fully understandable reaction to the more esoteric areas of the acade-
micization of translation, particularly in scholarly journals, which has moved away from
the practice of interlingual translation of words, sentences and texts towards reflection on
ever wider issues, many outside the control of individual practising translators. A recent
example is Michael Cronins Eco-Translation, which argues that translation in the age
of the Anthropocene can play a vital role in the future survival of the planet (2016,
cover) good news since others have claimed that every act of translation is an act of vio-
lence (e.g. Venuti 1996). These fascinating themes, as Mossop hints, attract attention and
funding for academics but not for professionals. Like many of us, he is only too aware that
the cultural turn also brought in cultural studies, which sees translation as primarily a
political act, and consequently focuses on professional practice as a prime agent in sup-
porting the dominant political system. I fully support Mossops plea to have academics
addressing the needs of practising translators, and focusing their theories on the kinds
of texts translators work with.
Mossop is not alone here. Vandeweghe, Vandepitte, and Van de Velde (2007) suggest
that since the early 2000s there has been a general linguistic re-turn, and I agree that
there remains much work to be done in understanding how interlingual translation is
(and should be) performed. But Mossop goes well beyond cultural studies as the
culprit, and points to what he sees as an obsession with difference. While not mention-
ing Skopos theory or the Functional approach, he does single out the 1980s, when the
focus shifted to how translations differ from their sources in order to communicate
with future users in target-language cultures, a shift that, according to Edwin Gentzler,
finally broke the two thousand year old chain of theory revolving around the faithful
vs. free axis (2001, 71). Mossop is completely at odds with this line of thinking,
however, claiming that translators do not want to be rescued from the tyranny of the

CONTACT David Katan david.katan@unisalento.it


2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 D. KATAN

source text, as their natural stance is to invariance of meaning, to produce wordings


which they hope will be taken by readers to mean more or less whatever they think
the source means. Thus Mossops proposal is not only anti-Skopos but also pro-faithful,
while nonetheless suggesting that there can still be invariance of meaning whether the
translation is domesticated or foreignized.
What do we mean by meaning? Mossop offers various conceptions, suggesting that
the invariant approach can account for all. Yet, according to The Routledge Companion
to Translation Studies, meaning is seen as the meaning a word takes on within a particular
context and that meaning is culture-dependent (Bajaj 2009, 206). This is clearly not what
Mossop has in mind, as his object of study specifically excludes anything culture-depen-
dent, along with anything to do with the context of reception. He argues that the study of
invariance is the study of sameness at all levels, and that meaning for practising trans-
lators is immanent in the text. The fact that various third parties may disagree over the
outcome seems irrelevant. As for scope, Mossop is open to any operation oriented to
invariance, mentioning machine translation, which does indeed operate in a context-
free environment, with the results we would expect from a technologically advanced
but mindless robot.
Problems mount (for me at least) when we enquire into the how and why of invar-
iance as a primary object of study. How are interested researchers to analyse, gauge and
evaluate the quality or success of an individual translators stance? What are the criteria
for potential guidelines on best practice? In all cases, the only answer I can see is to use
Mossops own proverbial proof of the pudding. In this case the eating must surely
be the reception, the reading, what he terms incoming.
Now we come to the really difficult part for me. Mossop insists that incoming (the
reception) and outgoing (the process of preparing a translation) are not only two different
areas of study, but that reception should not be used to consider the invariance stance.
Simultaneously, he notes that it is, once again, these various third parties who evaluate
translations (not the translators themselves); his section entitled investigating the object
lists six areas, five of which contain references to the reviser or reader. He then makes three
hypotheses regarding research into invariance, two of which require a study of the
incoming. This makes it difficult to accept that a central object of TS must end
with the translators mental stance. Unfortunately, I can only investigate Mossops
stance or point of view (which I hope he has translated invariantly) through my reception
and I must admit I am struggling.
Moving on to the why, the motivation for studying invariance, we are on firmer
ground: it is what translators do. But when we try to reason out why this is a good
thing, Mossop has little to say to support invariance, and there are glimpses of what
could be construed as the opposite (i.e. contexts and difference are part of a translators
point of view). First, he agrees that exact transfer is a red herring, and that nobody
really believes this is possible. Second, Mossop himself is obliged to accept that social cir-
cumstances of production matter, such as the fact that translation strategy must differ if
the context is a High Court decision rather than a literary classic for children.
Mossop suggests that translators orientation to invariance goes with the job, and he
specifically refutes my hypothesis that if translators had more status or autonomy, they
might be more inclined to variance. This particular hypothesis was based not on personal
experience, but on 1081 self-selected T/I replies to the following two-part question: If the
TRANSLATION STUDIES 3

job is considered to be a good linguistic transfer of the original, to what extent is the
translator or interpreter concerned with reader or listener reaction?: always, very
much, it depends, not usually, or never? Ideally and in practice.
Regarding the ideal world, the vast majority felt that the T/I should be concerned
(30% replied very much and 56% always). What was significant was the gap
between this concern and reality: Only just over half of those [86%] who believe in the
ideal of focussing on the listener/reader also believe that this is or can be a reality
(Katan 2009, 2728). In a further paper, I reported on an even wider ideal/reality gap:
of the 56% of T/Is who believed that they should [always] be concerned or responsible
for their end-user reaction, only 20% said that this happened in practice a clear sign
of further [low professional] autonomy (Katan 2011, 76). These results strongly
suggest that translators are constrained to follow an invariant stance. In an ideal world,
the majority would like to have the autonomy to mediate between incoming and outgoing.
In any profession, what the majority of professionals actually do is rarely taken as the
best-practice benchmark for what should be done. In an unregulated one like translation,
it would seem even more bizarre to constrain the object of study to what is done, when
we know that there are many translators who would prefer a wider remit.
Mossop has evident distaste for this wider remit, which he sees as an obsessive focus on
variance. He suggests that variant approaches actually have as their aim deliberate
changes or some agenda which makes him or her indifferent to whether most of the
sources meaning is being preserved. The first objection to be made here is that, as
Mossop himself writes, the primary aim of a Functionalist approach is not to look for var-
iance but to communicate with future users in target-language cultures. Hence the
primary focus of a variance approach is likely to be acceptance of variance as a possible
or likely by-product of effective communication rather than the result of a wilful decision
to look for how to change the meaning. Secondly, if we look at Skopos theory, in any of its
versions (see Chesterman 2010), we note an ever-present intratextual fidelity rule, albeit
subordinate to an intertextual rule. Consequently indifference to the source text can
hardly be a prime factor.
Finally, as I understand it, Mossop rejects linking intention with outcome because it is
too complex, and there is a danger of becoming hopelessly vague or trivial. I can under-
stand his frustration with gods-eye all-encompassing abstract diagrams, but that should
not mean that we stop trying to understand to use Goffmans (1974, 8) well-known
aphorism what it is that is going on. This is what one does at university.
On university training, Mossop rightly points to the problem of professionalizing
degrees which are in danger of turning our institutions into vocational centres; the differ-
ence has to do with what Barnett (2016, 122) calls a real universitys focus on discursive
openness and criticality. This is a problem for Mossop, and many of us: how to balance
cognitive skills with the metacognitive. The conviction that intention rather than
outcome should be a central tenet of TS makes it difficult to imagine any form of critical
discourse. Also, it is difficult to imagine any other discipline, as part of an industry, that
gives more importance to intent than outcome.
On a purely practical note, if we take up invariance as our object of study then the
future will not be the bleak one he outlines, that of vocational training, but rather the
signing over of the profession to Google Translate, which follows the invariance principle
to the letter.
4 D. KATAN

Mossop believes in an either/or world: the orientation is either to invariance or var-


iance. Deborah Tannen (1998) highlights this in her Argument Culture as the dominant
Western way of thinking, which fits the position paper genre; and to a large extent I
too have argued for or against Mossops position. This argument, though, by its
very nature, does not allow for degrees: translators are in the business of sameness
and there is no scale ranging from a high degree of invariance to a high degree of var-
iance. The point Mossop makes is that difference should not be a translators primary
business. I agree. But the fact that difference may be secondary should not automatically
mean that degrees of difference are not to be contemplated in TS. Given that he accepts
that in the real world there is variation and degrees of variation seeking, why is it so diffi-
cult to consider a mindset that accepts variation, or one that can conceive of both variance
and invariance simultaneously? Fitzgerald (in Fitzgerald and Wilson ([1945] 1993, 57)) is
famously quoted as saying that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function; all trans-
lators have this intelligence because they can hold two different languages in their mind.
Argument cultures, however, are based on entrenched positions, which cannot accept
the validity of more than one position. An alternative meta-orientation is interest based,
which can link the two positions. I have already looked for Mossops reasoning (the moti-
vation, the why) behind invariance, but have not discussed a key point that he almost
hides away under his explanation as to why deliberate changes in meaning are sometimes
necessary: to make the output usable. I think we can presume this is also the reason why
the translators commissioner and customers would be looking for invariance.
If we return to his main point, that TS should focus on the translation industry (which
can only be concerned with usable output) and with translators intent, arguments for
either invariance or variance become secondary. There is a mutual interest in translators
providing usable output. How they do so may well be through invariance, though Mossop
tells us that the outcome will never be 100% invariance.
I have to conclude (though without box-and-arrow diagrams) by not choosing invar-
iance over variance, but instead by linking the intent to the outcome and suggest (follow-
ing Levy 1967, 1179) the following mental stance as an object for TS: maximize usable
content minimizing variance, because I believe this is what happens when people
translate.

Note on contributor
David Katan is professor of English and translation at the University of Salento (Lecce). His recent
research interests concern the status of the translator, translating for tourism and the use of pop-up
glosses in AVT (audiovisual translation). He has published over 70 articles on translation and inter-
cultural communication, including contributions to the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation
Studies, the Benjamins Handbook of Translation Studies and the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of
Applied Linguistics. His book Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters
and Mediators, is now in its second edition. He is senior editor of Cultus: The Journal of Intercul-
tural Mediation and Communication.

ORCiD
David Katan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7990-8841
TRANSLATION STUDIES 5

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