UNIDAD 1: Historia de la traducción literaria

ROBINSON – “POWER DIFFERENTIALS”

Translation plays three sequential but overlapping roles in postcolonial studies:

- as a channel of colonization, parallel to and connected with education and the overt or covert control of markets and
institutions; (harmful)

- as a lightning-rod for cultural inequalities continuing after the collapse of colonialism; (complex and conflicted present)

- as a channel of decolonization. (future)

The three roles mark separate stages in a utopian narrative that informs much of postcolonial studies: from a colonial
past taken as harmful; through a complex and conflicted present in which nothing seems easy or clear-cut; to a
decolonized future taken as beneficial.

Translating across power differentials

A dominated culture will be represented in a hegemonic culture by translations that are: (1) far fewer in number than
their counterparts in the opposite direction, (2) perceived as difficult and only of interest to specialists, (3) chosen for
their conformity to hegemonic stereotypes, and (4) often written specifically with an eye to conforming to those
stereotypes and thus getting translated and read in the hegemonic culture. A hegemonic culture, on the other hand, will
be represented in a dominant culture by translations that are (1) far greater in number than their counterparts in the
opposite direction, (2) perceived as intrinsically interesting to a broad reading public, (3) chosen because they come
from the hegemonic culture, and (4) typically written in utter ignorance of the dominated culture.

1. Disproportionate translations

Venuti is interested specifically in disproportionate volumes of translation to and from English, given the hegemonic role
English has assumed as the international language after a century of British global rule and nearly a century of American
(indirect or neocolonial) global rule.

While “the consequences of such translation patterns are wide-ranging and insidious, resisting neat formulation”, as
Venuti writes, they do provide a neat illustration of the imbalances of cultural power in today’s world: British and
American publishing “has reaped the financial benefits of successfully imposing Anglo-American cultural values on a vast
foreign readership, while producing cultures in the United Kingdom and the United States that are aggressively
monolingual, unreceptive to the foreign, accustomed to fluent translations that invisibly inscribe foreign texts with
English-language values and provide readers with the narcissistic experience of recognizing their own culture in a
cultural other”.

2. ‘Inscrutable’ texts

When texts from a dominated culture are translated by a hegemonic culture, they are typically seen as (a) mysterious,
strange, alien, hence (b) esoteric, of interest only to a small group of specialists in the field, whose translations of the
works are (c) painfully and pedantically literal and rebarbatively difficult, or (d) loaded down with a critical apparatus
(introduction and annotation) that imposes an academic or specialist interpretation on the reader.

3. Stereotypes
In addition to controlling interpretive access to the works translated from a dominated culture, Richard Jacquemond
argues, hegemonic cultures will typically only select for translation works from that culture that fit prevailing stereotypes
(simplistic images) of it – stereotypes prevailing, needless to say, primarily in the hegemonic culture and often
internalized from it by the dominated culture.

4. Writing for translation

It is commonplace that the only way to get read in today’s world is to write in, or be translated into, English – or,
secondarily, French or Spanish or German. ‘Everybody’ reads English – everybody, that is, who is ‘anybody’, which is to
say everybody who was apparently fortunate enough to have been born and raised in an English-speaking country by
English-speaking parents or apparently intelligent enough, sufficiently aware of the world-wide importance of English, to
have studied it in school and traveled in English-speaking countries.

These cultural realities and the often unconscious assumptions attendant upon them have obviously been shaped by
colonial and postcolonial relations. English is today the lingua franca because of a century and a half of first British and
then American political, economic, military and cultural world dominance. The language of the imperial centre,
disseminated to the peripheries of the empire as the language of power, culture and knowledge, will not only be spoken
by more people than the indigenous languages of the peripheries; it will also carry an unconscious power-charge, an
almost universal sense that those who speak and write in this language know more and control more than those who
don’t.

Theorizing across power differentials

Jacquemond closes his essay with a schematic presentation of the hegemonic/dominated opposition he has been
exploring. He offers, in fact, a dual schematization of those power differentials, the first reflecting what he calls the
‘colonial moment’, or what other postcolonial scholars might call the submissive postcolonial moment; the second
reflecting what he calls the ‘postcolonial moment’ or what might be called the resistant postcolonial or decolonizing
moment.

In the colonial moment, says Jacquemond, translators working into the dominated language-culture are servile
mediators who integrate foreign objects without question; translators working in the other direction, into the
hegemonic language-culture, appear authoritative figures who keep the other culture at a non-contaminating distance
at the same time as they make it acceptably comprehensible.

The move to the postcolonial moment questions both sides of this paradigm. Resistance to Western values allows
translation into the dominated culture to be seen as part of a knowledge-controlling apparatus that imposes Western
ideologies. On the other hand, the development of cultural minorities within Western culture raises similar questions
from within whose cultures, allowing a critique of both the exoticization-naturalization of non-Western cultures and the
apparent exportability of Western knowledge in commodity form.

José Lambert, in his article, traces his ‘basic import/export rules’ to work done by Even-Zohar as well as his own recent
articles. These ‘rules’ may be summarized as follows:

- Exporting (active) systems are in a power position from the point of view of the importing (passive) systems.

- Important differences in power relationships are normally correlated with major differences in stages of development
(periodization); they favour dominance in several areas rather than in isolated ones; and import is likely to be offered in
large and undifferentiated packages rather than in precise and well-focused selections.

- The more a given society imports texts, the more it tends to be unstable.
- The more a given society exports texts, the more stable it will be, at least in its relationship with the receiving systems.

- The more an exporting neighbor is also a neighbor in space and time, the stronger the possibility of a (partial/global)
absorption of the importing systems by the exporting ones.

- The more the receiving system is in a unidirectional relationship in matters of import/export, the more it depends on
its ‘big brother’.

- The more the receiving system is part of a group of receiving systems that borrow their cultural products from one and
the same exporting system, the more it is subordinated to a coherent network and to (a hierarchy of) other weaker
target systems.

- As a kind of mobility by necessity rather than by option, migration does not favour stability but can favour passivity or
importation.

- Active biculturalism or multiculturalism, on the other hand, implies the physical and mental possibility of options in
favour of more than one tradition and hence the conservation of at least a relative autonomy; importation in this case is
selected rather than imposed.

- The distinction between active exile (by a free decision) and passive exile (by necessity).

- Exile can be merely physical, it can be both physical and mental, predominantly political or cultural or linguistic, but it
cannot be conceived of as ‘total’; our modern technology has loosened the ties between physical and mental forms of
exile, but only rich groups have access to this kind of technology; hence the degree and the extent of biculturalism are
more or less linked with a certain level of comfort, just like importation.

- Flexibility and mobility in space and time being instruments of avoiding subordination, the active/passive selection of
value scales and especially the part of import in people’s value scales are symptomatic of their autonomy/colonization.

-Any kind of explicit discourse on the importation (translation) phenomenon is likely to be produced on the side of the
exporter rather than on the receiving end, at least as long as the moment of decolonization has not started.

Decolonization is already under way; the voice of the subaltern is being heard more than ever before; but the legacy of
colonialism survives (among other places) in the uneasy fact that much postcolonial translation theory is written by first-
world scholars.

The foundational drive for translation in ethnography, Niranjana notes, is the desire to know the other. It is a short step
from this desire to the assumption that ‘primitive thought’ can only be known by Western ethnographers and their
Western readers – that ‘primitives’, lacking ‘the logical constructs we have been brought up to use’, never really know
themselves at all. From this assumption it is another short step to the belief that ‘primitives’ can really only speak
through the ethnographer’s mouth – that ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ speech is a form of silence that must be translated into
European speech before it can be heard.

For Niranjana, translated knowledge seems transparent but is not; it masks the inequalities between cultures, feeding
into assumptions of a universal human history leading us all in the same direction, from childhood to adulthood. This
Eurocentric view can be seen in anthropological terms like ‘the feudal system’ or ‘the hunting stage’, which suppress the
asymmetrical relations between cultures by making certain cultures into symbolic representatives of humanity’s
childhood. A ‘weaker’ or ‘dominated’ culture or language thus comes to seem distant in both time and space. They are
not merely different; they are more primitive. The anthropological solution, Niranjana notes, is to envision a significant
difference between the experience of fieldwork and the reporting of fieldwork. The solution is to insist on ‘coevalness’,
on the fact that the two cultures really do share the same time.

This “solution” does not really solve the problem. Talal Asad was the first to draw critical attention to the importance of
cultural inequalities in translation. Ethnographers tend to assume they understand the ‘natives’ better than the ‘natives’
do themselves, and so tend “to read the implicit in alien cultures”.

‘Cultural translation’ in ethnography is the process, in other words, not of translating specific cultural texts but of
consolidating a wide variety of cultural discourses into a target text that in some sense has no ‘original’, no source text –
at least no single source text – and the relationship between the source-cultural discourses that ethnographers study
and the target texts they produce is far more problematic than that between the traditional source text and target text
in translation studies.

As Asad remarks, “if the anthropological translator, like the analyst, has final authority in determining the subject’s
meaning – it is then the former who becomes the real author of the latter”. So much for collaboration and intimate
understanding between friends.

BASSNETT – “THE MEEK OR THE MIGHTY: REAPPRAISING THE ROLE OF THE TRANSLATOR

The Earl of Roscommon acknowledges that the task of the translator is to improve on the source text, and suggests that
the faculty which comes into play here is judgement rather than invention. The translator ceases to be an interpreter
and becomes the source writer for the target reader.

Derrida argues that translation serves to remind us that there is no absolute meaning, no uncontested original. The act
of translating is dynamic, bringing texts together in a play of multiple meanings: “Difference is never pure, no more so is
translation, and for the notion of translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a regulated
transformation of one language by another, of one text by another. We will never have, and in fact never had, to do with
some ‘transport’ of pure signifieds from one language to another, or within one and the same language, that the
signifying instrument would leave virgin and untouched.”

Translation becomes the act that ensures the life of the text and guarantees its survival. The translation injects new life
blood into a text by bringing it to the attention of a new world of readers in a different language. Octavio Paz: “On the
one hand, the world is presented to us as a collection of similarities; on the other, as a growing heap of texts, each
slightly different from the one that came before it: translations of translations of translations. Each text is unique, yet at
the same time it is the translation of another text. No text can be completely original because language itself, in its very
essence, is already a translation – first from the nonverbal world, and then, because each sign and each phrase is a
translation of another sign, another phrase.

Resistance to the notion of translation as a secondary, second class activity has accelerated in recent years, parallel to
the development of the discipline of Translation Studies and to the theoretical work that has reconsidered the power
relationship between writer and reader.

Polysystems theory in the 1970s: recognition of the role played by translation in shaping the literary polysystem.
Translation was perceived as having played a fundamental part in literary and cultural history. Translation could be
documented as having been at various moments subversive, innovatory or radical.

Etienne Dolet’s “The way to translate well from one language to another” is the earlies treatise on translation in a
modern European language. In 1540, he stated five basic rules for the translator follow: firstly, the translator must
‘understand perfectly the meaning and the subject matter of the author he translates’; secondly, the translator must
have perfect knowledge of the source language and have ‘achieved the same excellence in the language he wants to
translate into’; thirdly, the translator must ‘not enter into slavery’ by translating word for word; fourth, concerns the
development of vernacular languages, a crucially important issue of Renaissance Humanist Europe. What Dolet proposes
is for the translator to be bold enough to use the language of common currency and to avoid archaisms or excessive
latinisms; finally, the translator should ‘observe the figures of speech’ and arrange words ‘with such sweetness that the
soul is satisfied and the ears are pleased’.

Dolet was advocating not only a set of practical guidelines for translators but also a radical cultural policy.

Dolet’s English humanist counterpart, Sir Thomas More (1477-1535) was equally aware of the power of translation as a
shaping force in culture. In his polemic against the Bible translator William Tyndale (1494-1536), More shows how the
subtle use of language could alter the interpretation of the Scriptures.

For More, the use of the vernacular by Tyndale offered a means of making doctrinal changes to the Bible by subtle use of
the language, and this he found an unacceptable heresy.

Dolet’s La manière de bien traduire… was also a statement that acknowledged the ideological dimension of translation
practice, recognizing that far more happens when we translate than merely the transference of a text across a language
boundary.

The invention of printing had given the author a new status as owner or proprietor of the book. Concept of the ‘original’:
the text that had a clear point of origin, a clear proprietor and a clearly demarcated frontier. As the notion of the original
expanded, so the notion of the translation as a not-original, a sort of derivative or copy also grew.

The gradual development of an idea of an original, something inherently superior to any versions of it, established the
starting point as the dominant partner, and meant also that any variation to the source text by the translator could be
classified as a betrayal. Significantly, for translation and other forms of textual practice, the dominance was frequently
depicted in gender terms.

In her lucid essay examining the recurrence of metaphors describing translation that compare it to a sexual act with a
dominant (male) partner and a subservient (female) one, Lori Chamberlain shows how the ideal of fidelity on the part of
the translator came to be depicted in gendered terms. The translation, like a woman, is bound to be unfaithful if it/she is
beautiful. This metaphor has the double effect of both reducing woman to an inferior position vis-à-vis her male partner,
and reducing translation to an inferior position vis-à-vis the source text.

For Dryden, the translator should ‘possess himself’ of the author, reversing the slave-master relationship and should
effectively become the original. Dryden seemingly advocates two opposite translation strategies. On the one hand, he
depicts the translator as bound in a servile relationship to the source text, whilst on the other hand he urges the
translator to go beyond words and possess himself of the source completely.

Third type of literary activity: the rendering of a text is one language into another at high speed and for specific
commercial purposes. The expansion of mass publishing aimed at the emergent middle classes in the late seventeenth
century led to a demand for material to supply the needs of the customers. Likewise, the proliferation of theatres for the
new middle classes meant a demand for new plays or for translated plays to fill up a programme.

In this high speed world of mass publishing, the role of translator was simply to supply basic material regardless of
quality. The translator as hack writer emerged on the scene, often contrasted negatively with ‘real’ writers.

The difference between the poetic and the commercial is that whilst some translators were primarily concerned with
aesthetic effect and took pains to think through their relationship with the source, the pressures placed on translators
by the market place meant that the aesthetic was low on a list of priorities.
The idea of translation as a lowlier kind of writing persisted for centuries, and to some extent is still with us today.

As we come to the end of the twentieth century, however, it is clear that this attitude has changed, and for several
different reasons. Globally, this is the age of mass communications, of multi-media experiences and a world where
audiences demand to share the latest text, be it film, song or book, simultaneously across cultures. Nor has the
development of English as a world language slowed down the process of translation; it has, on the contrary, served to
emphasize the significance of translation, as questions of cultural politics appear on the agenda.

Post-colonial translation theorists insist that the study and practice of translation is inevitably and exploration of power
relationship within textual practice that reflect power structures within the wider cultural context.

For Niranjana, this is the moment of a post-colonial analysis of translation practice, that exposes the fallacy of the
translator as an unbiased, transparent medium through which a text may pass purportedly along a horizontal axis.

Translation can therefore be seen as reflecting the colonial experience; the source/original holds the power, the
colony/copy is disempowered but placated through the myth of transparency and objectivity of the translation. The
colony, in short, is perceived as a translation, never as an original, but this is concealed by a promise of equitable textual
relations.

Derrida and de Campos, by rereading Benjamin, formulated the concept of translation that becomes the original by
virtue of its coming into existence after the source. Benjamin argues that because it comes later than its source, and
since a text never finds its chosen translator at the time of origin the translation marks the continued life of the text at
another moment in time.

In the 1990s, the keyword is ‘visibility’. The role of the translator can be reassessed in terms of analyzing the
intervention of the translator in the process of linguistic transfer.

AIXELÁ – CHAPTER 4: CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS IN TRANSLATION

On the Cultural Aspects of Translation

In principle, a translation offered to the reader as such tries by definition to satisfy two basic prerequisites that Gideon
Toury defines in the following way:

(1) Being a worthwhile literary work (text) in TL;

(2) Being a translation (that is, constituting a representation in TL of another pre-existing text in some other
language, SL, belonging to another literary polysystem, that of the source, and occupying a certain position within it).

This demand of double ‘loyalty’ is expressed in four basic fields:

Linguistic diversity: linguistic codes in themselves are arbitrary systems in which the function and meaning of each sign
depend mainly on the sign’s opposition to other signs, and not on a supposed objective relation of equivalence with the
continuum we call reality. The notion of arbitrariness does not allow the possibility of two linguistic codes placing each
and every sign on the same point of their respective scales.

Interpretive diversity: derived from the act of reading which any translation involves and which appears to be one of the
most polemical factors in translation theory, to the extent that in some cases, within the equation ‘translation = art’, it
has solidified into a defensive position for those who question the possibility of a scientific approach to translation.

Pragmatic or intertextual diversity: based on the expressive conventions for each type of speech, which differ in each
society.
Cultural diversity: Plus its variant, historical distance. Each linguistic or national-linguistic community has at its disposal a
series of habits, value judgements, classification systems, etc. which sometimes are clearly different and sometimes
overlap. This way, cultures create a variability factor the translator will have to take into account.

Cultural asymmetry between two linguistic communities is necessarily reflected in the discourses of their members, with
the potential opacity and unacceptability this may involve for the target cultural system. Thus, faced with the difference
implied by the other, with a whole series of cultural signs capable of denying and/or questioning our own way of life,
translation provides the receiving society with a wide range of strategies, ranging from conservation (acceptance of the
difference by means of the reproduction of the cultural signs in the source text), to naturalization (transformation of the
other into a cultural replica). The choice between these strategies will shoe, among other factors, the degree of
tolerance of the receiving society and its own solidity.

The constant importation of consumer items (cultural and other) from English-speaking America does not just imply a
growing familiarity of many societies with the Anglo-Saxon world view, but also a clear process of gradual acceptability
of its values and specific cultural reality, apart from establishing a series of translation strategies which are later
mimetically applied to texts from other cultural areas.

Translators are of course affected by this process, which among other things increases the number of socio-cultural
realities whose transference requires less and less manipulation to make them acceptable in the target culture.

Holmes: “marked tendency towards modernization and naturalization of the linguistic context, paired with a similar but
less clear tendency in the same direction in regard to the literary intertext, but an opposing tendency towards
exoticizing and historicizing in the socio-cultural situation.”

Holmes and other authors also state that the treatment of cultural items was almost the opposite in previous centuries.
This change is usually explained as a development of the collective notion of language towards the idea of its essential
non-universality. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that this leaves us with no explanation for the apparent
contradiction of such a difference of treatment between the linguistic and pragmatic planes on the one hand, and the
cultural plane on the other, i.e. the contradiction by which current translations tend to be read like an original on the
stylistic level and as the original on the socio-cultural one.

Culture-specific items are usually expressed in a text by means of objects and of systems of classification and
measurement whose use is restricted to the source culture, or by means of the transcription of opinions and the
description of habits equally alien to the receiving culture.

Culture-specific Items

The main difficulty with the definition lies in the fact that in a language everything is culturally produced, beginning with
language itself.

In general, when speaking about ‘cultural references’, ‘socio-cultural terms’, and the like, authors avoid any definition,
attributing the meaning of the notion to a sort of collective intuition. Two main pitfalls: its excessive arbitrariness and,
more importantly, its static character, parallel with the idea that there are permanent CSIs, no matter which pair of
cultures is involved and no matter what the textual function of the item under study is.

In translation a CSI does not exist of itself, but as the result of a conflict arising from any linguistically represented
reference in a source text which, when transferred to a target language, poses a translation problem due to the
nonexistence or to the different value (whether determined by ideology, usage, frequency, etc.) of the given item in the
language culture.
We might try to develop our attempt to define culture-specific items in terms of the above mentioned double tension
any translation is subjected to: those textually actualized items whose function and connotations in a source text involve
a translation problem in their transference to a target text, whenever this problem is a product of the nonexistence of
the referred item or of its different intertextual status in the cultural system of the readers of the target text.

A third component in the nature of a CSI is the course of time and the obvious possibility that objects, habits or values
once restricted to one community come to be shared by others.

If it is true that a CSI is only such in its textual materialization, and always from the point of view of the group that
receives the message, it is also a fact that most linguistic items that appear to be CSIs in a concrete text are so nearly
always, simple because their cultural differential tends to be synchronically stable between two given peoples, whatever
their textual position.

Following T. Hermans, proper nouns can be divided in two categories: conventional and loaded. Conventional proper
nouns are those ‘seen as “unmotivated” and thus as having no meaning of themselves’, i.e. those that fall under the
collective perception we have of ‘meaningless’ proper nouns, apart from the possible textual or intertextual analogies
authors – unfortunately for the translator – tend to activate. Loaded proper names are ‘those literary names that are
somehow seen as “motivates”; they range from faintly “suggestive” to overtly “expensive” names and nicknames, and
include those fictional as well as non-fictional names around which certain historical or cultural associations have
accrued in the context of a particular culture’. In the case of conventional names, there is nowadays a clear tendency to
repeat, transcribe or transliterate them in primary genres, except when there is pre-established translation based on
tradition. Loaded names have a much greater margin of indeterminacy, but they do seem to display a tendency toward
the linguistic (denotative or non-cultural) translation of their components, a trend which increases with their
expressivity.

CSIs and Their Possible Manipulation

These translation procedures can be combined – and in fact are combined.

A. Conservation

1. Repetition: the translators keep as much as they can of the original reference. The obvious example here is the
treatment of most toponyms. Paradoxically, this ‘respectful’ strategy involves in many cases an increase in the exotic or
archaic character of the CSI, which is felt to be more alien by the target language reader. This reminds us of one of the
paradoxes of translation and one of the great pitfalls of the traditional notion of equivalence: the fact that something
absolutely identical, even in its graphic component, might be absolutely different in its collective reception.

2. Orthographic adaptation: includes procedures like transcription and transliteration, which are mainly used when the
original reference is expressed in a different alphabet from the one target readers use.

3. Linguistic (non-cultural) translation: with the support of pre-established translations within the intertextual corpus of
the target language, or making use of the linguistic transparency of the CSI, the translator chooses in many cases a
denotatively very close reference to the original, but increases its comprehensibility by offering a target language
version which can still be recognized as belonging to the cultural system of the source text.

Units of measure and currencies are very frequent instances of this strategy. In the same way, objects and institutions
which are alien to the receiving culture but understandable because analogous and even homologous to the native ones,
usually come into the same category.
4. Extratextual gloss: the translator uses one of the above-mentioned procedures, but considers it necessary to offer
some explanation of the meaning or implications of the CSI. At the same time, it does not seem legitimate or convenient
to mix this explanation with the text. The decision, then, is to distinguish the gloss by marking it as such (footnote,
endnote, glossary, commentary/translation in brackets, in italics, etc.)

5. Intratextual gloss: this is the same as the previous case, but the translators feel they can or should include their gloss
as an indistinct part of the text, usually so as not to disturb the reader’s attention.

B. Substitution

1. Synonymy: this strategy is usually based on the stylistic grounds linked with recurrence. The translator resorts to
some kind of synonym or parallel reference to avoid repeating the CSI.

2. Limited universalization: in principle, the translators feel that the CSI is too obscure for their readers or that there is
another, more usual possibility and decide to replace it. Usually for the sake of credibility, they seek another reference,
also belonging to the source language culture but closer to their readers another CSI, but less specific, so to speak.

3. Absolute universalization: the basic situation is identical to the previous one, but the translators do not find a better
known CSI or prefer any foreign connotations and choose a neutral reference for their readers.

4. Naturalization: the translator decides to bring the CSI into the intertextual corpus felt as specific by the target
language culture.

Historical persons with pre-established translations into Spanish are not cases of naturalization but of linguistic (non-
cultural) translation, as no Spanish reader would feel that these versions involve any sort of cultural substitution,
because the name is still considered part of the source language culture.

5. Deletion: the translators consider the CSI unacceptable on ideological or stylistic grounds, or they think that it is not
relevant enough for the effort of comprehension required of their readers, or that it is too obscure and they are not
allowed or do not want to use procedures such as the gloss, etc. They therefore decide to omit it in the target text.

6. Autonomous creation: translators decide that it could be interesting for their readers to put in some nonexistent
cultural reference in the source text. The translation of film titles in Spain seems to be one of the fields where most
instances of this type of translation are to be found.

Explanatory Variables: this section will try to establish a series of supratextual, textual, intertextual and ‘inherent’
variables the combination of which should help to explain the choice made by translators.

Translators are usually the people who carry full responsibility for the product, but by no means the only ones who in
fact control the results. There are people in authority like publishers, editors, proofreaders, directors, producers, other
sorts of initiators, etc. who may change anything, usually to conform with what they feel to be social expectations.

A. Supratextual parameter

Degree of linguistic prescriptivism: is there any important group or institution devoted to the preservation or linguistic
or stylistic conventions in the target language? The answer to this question will give us new clues about the attitude
towards interference or towards conventions like the naturalistic transcription of dialogues.

Nature and expectations of potential readers: is it possible to define a group of addressees for the target text? Is the
version planned for any special group? If it is, we could understand the possible difference of treatment of one source
text so as to meet the expectations, for example, of either teenagers or literature students. This same parameter, among
others, could also help us to explain the reason for the special translation norms (very source-oriented) in English-
Spanish of some technical text types, given the expectations and jargon of the specialists who are being addressed.

Nature and aims of the initiators: are their aims in conflict with those of the translator or with those which are socially
accepted? Is there a publisher’s policy that lays down special conditions for the genre or collection?

Working conditions, training and social status of the translator: the more unfavourable they are, the more likely it is
that we will have to consider the factor of unintentional behavior or of bilingual and bicultural (in)competence.

B. Textual parameter

Material textual constraints: the existence of some sort of image accompanying a text can have a decisive influence on
the leeway allowed to a translator, as becomes clear if one compares dubbing with theatre translation. In the same way,
the treatment of CSIs in photograph captions has different sorts of constraints.

Previous translations: previous translations of the same genre, author, or source text place constraints on the target
text insofar as they have become a recognized part of the target language culture.

Canonization: to what extent does the consideration of a work as a classic or simply as good literature increase the
constraints the translator is subject to? The non-canonized status of a text may cause, especially in very popular
literature, a tendency to condensation (deletion of large portions of the source text) due to constraints of the target
language system. On the contrary, the ‘literary promotion’ of the same text will automatically require a much more
‘respectful’ (source-oriented) retranslation.

C. The nature of the CSI: I have chosen the term ‘culture-specific item’ to stress the fact that a potential translation
problem always exists in a concrete situation between two languages and two texts. When I speak of the nature of the
CSI, I mean the type and breadth of the intercultural gap, before the concrete contextualization of the CSI takes place,
given both intertextual traditions and possible linguistic coincidences.

Pre-established translations: the previous existence of a socially accepted translation of any CSI (as often happens in the
case of important institutions and toponyms in the target language culture) will usually force a concrete translation (e.g.
UNO  ONU, but UNICEFUNICEF)

Transparency of the CSI: this is a factor which can explain many supposedly incoherent instances of translation.
Translators who have chosen greatly to modify the CSIs may change their mind when a linguistic translation will be
stylistically acceptable and easily understandable for their readers in target language.

Conversely, the extreme opacity of the CSI offers a range of possibilities that goes from deletion, due to lack of
understanding by translators themselves, to repetition, with the subsequent ‘exoticization’.

Ideological status: a CSI may be shared by both cultural systems as to its existence, but bot as its use or social value. This
can be an important factor when trying to explain shifts and deletions in which the translators change their chosen
strategies to avoid inconveniences or redundancies which they feel their readers will not easily accept.

References to third parties: the references to CSIs belonging to third cultures are a special case in themselves and
should be treated as such. Transnational CSIs (like institutions shared by several countries) are particularly interesting
and usually have very strongly pre-established translations, as in the case of some abbreviations we have already
mentioned.

D. Intratextual parameter: the treatment of a CSI also depends on the textual function it plays in the source text, as well
as of its situation within it. The function of the translated item in the target text need not, obviously, be the same as in
the original, but there is a tendency that way, and the margin of freedom enjoyed by the translator will no doubt be
influenced by it, mostly due to reasons involving the credibility and internal coherence of the translation.

Cultural consideration within the source text: in some cases, CSIs are also specific in the source text, as happens with
many technical, minority or transnational references. It is therefore not too unusual to find intratextual glosses in the
source text.

Relevance: a factor that tends to influence the treatment of a CSI is its importance for the understanding and credibility
of the text or of one of its passages.

Recurrence: this textual factor is linked with relevance. The more frequent a CSI, the greater its chances of appearing
with the highest degree of conservation in the target text.

Coherence of the target text: when the translator has decided to apply a particular strategy to a CSI, its next appearance
will usually receive an analogous treatment. Thus, we will often have to seek our explanation not in the present case but
in the previous one(s).

Venuti – Rethinking translation. Introduction

Translation continues to be an invisible practice, everywhere around us, inescapably present, but rarely acknowledged,
almost never figured into discussions of the translations we all inevitably read. This eclipse of the translator’s labor, of
the very act of translation and its decisive mediation of foreign writing, is the site of multiple determinations and effects
– linguistic, cultural, institutional, political. But it must first be noted that translators themselves are among the agents of
their shadowy existence. The contemporary translator is a paradoxical hybrid, at once dilettante and artisan.

It is unfortunate that this is a prevalent representation, and more unfortunate still that many translators choose to live
it out, since it will not help to make their activity more visible to readers: not only does it perpetuate the dubious idea
that translation is foremost a practical activity, distinct from theorization, from reflection on the cultural and social
implications of methodology, but it also participants in the cultural elitism fostered by class divisions in advanced
capitalist societies, stigmatizing translation by likening it to manual as opposed to intellectual labor. This representation
is maintained in copyright law and translators’ contracts with publishers, particularly in the United States. Both British
and American law define translation as a second-order product.

What contemporary translators write about their work tends more often than not to collude with the image of
dilettante/artisan: their discourse remains casual, belletristic, limited to sporadic prefaces, interviews, invited lectures.

Translation is marginalized today by an essentially romantic conception of authorship.

The ‘original’ is eternal, the translation dates. The ‘original’ is an unchanging monument of the human imagination
(‘genius’), transcending the linguistic, cultural, and social changes of which the translation is a determinate effect. ‘The
choices made in translation are never as secure as those made by the author’, writes Gregory Rabassa, because ‘we are
not writing our own material’. The ‘original’ is a form of self-expression appropriate to the author, a copy true to his
personality or intention, an image endowed with resemblance, whereas the translation can be no more than a copy of a
copy, derivative, simulacral, false, an image without resemblance. With translation construed in romantic terms, that
deviation, whatever in the translated text does not resemble the author, is sometimes given an equally individualistic
construction: it resembles the translator. Today the translator remains subordinate to the author of the original work,
whether in the translator’s own acts of self-presentation or in academic institutions, publishing companies, and legal
codes. The originality of translation rather lies in self-effacement, a vanishing act, and it is on this basis that translators
prefer to be praised.
Insofar as this vanishing act must be performed in language, it coincides with the dominance of a specific discursive
strategy in contemporary translation. A translated text is judged successful – by most editors, publishers, reviewers,
readers, by translators themselves – when it reads fluently, when it gives the appearance that it is not translated, that it
is the original, transparently reflecting the foreign author’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the
foreign text.

The valorization of transparency conceals the manifold conditions under which a translation is produced and consumed
– starting with the translator and the fact of translation. A fluent strategy aims to efface the translator’s crucial
intervention in the foreign text: he or she actively rewrites it in a different language to circulate in a different culture, but
this very process results in a self-annihilation, ultimately contributing to the cultural marginality and economic
exploitation which translators suffer today. At the same time, a fluent strategy effaces the linguistic and cultural
difference of the foreign text: this gets rewritten in the transparent discourse dominating the target-language culture
and is inevitably coded with other target-language values, beliefs, and social representations, implicating the translation
in ideologies that figure social differences and may well arrange them in hierarchical relations. In this rewriting, a fluent
strategy performs a labor of acculturation which domesticates the foreign text, making it intelligible and even familiar to
the target-language reader, providing him or her with the narcissistic experience of recognizing his or her own culture in
a cultural other, enacting an imperialism that extends the dominion of transparency with other ideological discourses
over a different culture.

When the target language is contemporary English, transparent discourse sustains the grossly unequal cultural
exchanges between the hegemonic English-language nations, particularly the United States, and their others in Europe,
Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

What makes the foreign text original is not so much that it is considered the coherent expression of authorial meaning,
but that it is deemed worthy of translation, that it is destined to live what Benjamin calls an ‘afterlife’ in a derivative
form like translation. A translation canonizes the foreign text, validating its fame by enabling its survival. Yet the afterlife
made possible by translation simultaneously cancels the originality of the foreign text by revealing its dependence on a
derivative form: translation does not so much validate literary fame as create it.

The ‘mobility’ or ‘fault’ in the original is what Derrida has described as différance, the signifying movement in language
whereby the signified is an effect of relations and differences along a potentially endless chain of signifiers and therefore
is always differential and deferred, never present as a unity. This means that the original is itself a translation, an
incomplete process of translating a signifying chain into a univocal signified, and this process is both displayed an further
complicated when it is translated by another signifying chain in a different language.

The originality of the foreign text is this compromised by the poststructuralist concept is textuality. Neither the foreign
text nor the translation is an original semantic unity; both are derivative and heterogeneous, consisting of diverse
linguistic and cultural materials which destabilize the work of signification, making meaning plural and differential,
exceeding and possibly conflicting with the intentions of the foreign writer and the translator. Poststructuralist textuality
redefines the notion of equivalence in translation by assuming from the outset that the differential plurality in every text
precludes a simple correspondence of meaning, that a ratio of loss and gain inevitably occurs during the translation
process and situates the translation in an equivocal, asymptotic relationship to the foreign text. Even though most
translators regard this relationship as mimetic, striving to create a reproduction based on their estimation of the
meaning of the foreign text, the heterogeneous textual work insures that the translation is transformative and
interrogative as well: it sets going a deconstruction of the foreign text. A translation is never quite ‘faithful’, always
somewhat ‘free’, it never establishes an identity, always a lack and a supplement, and it can never be a transparent
representation, only an interpretive transformation that exposes multiple and divided meanings in the foreign text and
displaces it with another set of meanings, equally multiple and divided.
This point releases translation from its subordination to the foreign text and makes possible the development of a
hermeneutic that reads the translation as a text in its own right.

Any attempt to make translation visible today is necessarily a political gesture: it at once discloses and contexts the
nationalist ideology implicit in the marginal status of translation in universities, forcing a revaluation of pedagogical
practices and disciplinary divisions which depend on translated texts.

Poststructuralist translation theory lays the groundwork for an incisive method of reading translations. A translation
emerges as an active reconstitution of the foreign text mediated by the irreducible linguistic, discursive, and ideological
differences of the target-language culture. These differences can be articulated in two kinds of close analysis:
comparisons of the source- and target-language texts which explore the ratio of loss and gain between them and reveal
the translator’s discursive strategy as well as any unforeseen effects; and examinations of discontinuities in the
translation itself, the heterogeneous textual work of assimilating target-language cultural materials that are intended to
reproduce the source-language text, but that inevitably supplement it.

The translator is the agent of a cultural practice that is conducted under continuous self-monitoring and often with
active consultation of cultural rules and resources, ranging from dictionaries and grammars to other texts, discursive
strategies, and translations, both canonical and marginal. But insofar as these rules and resources are specific to the
target-language culture and operative in social institutions, the translation is located in an intertextual and ideological
configuration that may escape the translator’s consciousness to some extent and result in unanticipated consequences,
like social reproduction or change. This is necessarily a political unconscious as well, sedimented with ideological
contradictions, shaped by institutional constraints, involving translation in larger, social conflicts. Most importantly,
these material determinations and effects need not remain entirely unconscious: a socially aware and politically engaged
translator can reckon them in the choice of a foreign text and the development of a discursive strategy, taking the target
language on a ‘line of escape’ from the cultural and social hierarchies which that language supports, using translation to
‘deterritorialize’ it.

Abusive fidelity clearly entails a rejection of the fluency that dominates contemporary translation in favor of an opposing
strategy that can aptly be called resistancy. An extremely discontinuous textuality in which the translator inventively
joins in the production of meaning, undermining conventional representational representations that not only
subordinate translator to author, but also metaphorize authorship as male and translation as female. Because resistant
translation strategies preclude the illusionistic effect of transparency in the translated text, their implementation carries
other, equally political consequences. On the other hand, such strategies can help to make the translator’s work visible,
inviting a critical appreciation of its cultural political function and a re-examination of the inferior status it is currently
assigned in the law, in publishing, in education. On the other hand, resistant strategies can help to preserve the linguistic
and cultural difference of the foreign text by producing translations which are strange and estranging, which mark the
limits of dominant values in the target-language culture and hinder those values from enacting an imperialistic
domestication of a cultural other.

Translation is a cultural practice that occupies a tactical position today, privileged by recent international developments;
it wields enormous power in the construction of national identities and hence can play an important geopolitical role.
The most useful form this recognition can take is the elaboration of the theoretical, critical, and textual means by which
translation can be studied and practiced as the locus of difference.

Niranjana – Chapter 2: Representing Texts and Cultures: Translation Studies and Ethnography
Translation, that is, interlingual translation, has traditionally been viewed by literary critics in the West (at least since the
Renaissance) as the noble task of bridging the gap between peoples. It is a task that anthropologists themselves would
define as intercultural translation, or the translating of one culture into terms intelligible to another.

Translation studies is a rubric for traditional theories of translation and their contemporary formulations; ethnography
refers to the writings of cultural/social anthropologists, who, until recently, in a more or less unproblematic fashion, saw
the object of their study as “man” and their mission as one of translation. Translation studies seems to be by and large
unaware that an attempt should be made to account for the relationship between “unequal” languages.

Translation studies and humanism

Although the same concepts of adequacy and fidelity preside over both translation studies and literary criticism in the
traditional sense, the former does not bear the same relationship to the practice of translation as the latter does to
“literature”. Writers on translation have always been concerned with how to translate, and their evaluations and
assessments belong properly to the question of “method”. Nearly all speculation on translation exists in the form of
translator’s prefaces to specific texts, and the tone they adopt ranges from the apologetic to the aggressively
prescriptive. This positioning of translators in what Derrida would call the “exergue”, or “outwork”, of their offerings
may suggest that they are aware of their marginality. But it is they who have drawn the margins, demarcated the text.

Only in the present century – coinciding with, but largely unmarked by, the rise of post-structuralism in literary studies –
have there been efforts to give an institutional character to translation through the publication of journals devoted to
translation and the formation of professional organizations. The liberal-humanist conceptual framework of the new field
of translation studies, however, differs very little from the ideas that have informed debates on translation over the
centuries.

The most important obsession is, of course, manifested in the opposition between the faithful and the unfaithful,
freedom and slavery, loyalty and betrayal. It points to a notion of “text” and “interpretation” that comes out of the
classical concept of the mimetic relationship between “reality” and “knowledge”.

Translation/ethnography’s humanistic enterprise was based on a naively representational theory of language and that
there could be a connection between the conception of this enterprise and the “civilizing” ideology of liberal humanism.

The premises of humanism, explicitly problematized by post-structuralism, give rise to notions of reading and translation
based on what Belsey calls the theory of expressive realism, which suggests “that literature reflects the reality of
experience as it is perceived by one (especially gifted) individual, who expresses it in a discourse which enables other
individuals to recognize it as true”. Here is a notion of representation based on classical conceptions of author, meaning,
and art as mimesis. It is a notion we find widely adopted, implicitly or explicitly, in the debates on translation.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translation theory, according to Steiner, insisted on the true translator’s
identification with the original author, on his imaginative taking on of the author’s consciousness.

Cowley and Denham’s concept of translation is based on the notion that languages have clearly defined boundaries or
identities, that works in these languages have authors who control their meaning, and that translation deals with these
works, whose boundaries are controlled and regulated. The term translation in this context obviously shores up the
entire tissue of basic presuppositions about “work”, “author”, and “meaning” that, in spite of repeated changes in
models of interpretation, has existed virtually unquestioned until recently.

As Barbara Johnson points out, translation ‘has always been the translation of meaning’. The idea that signified and
signifier can be separated informs the classical conception of philosophy as well as translation. Derrida has long
contended that translatability as transfer of meaning is the very thesis of philosophy. The notion of the transcendental
signified that for him is a founding concept of Western metaphysics “[takes] shape within the horizon of an absolutely
pure, transparent, and unequivocal translatability”. The concept of translation that grounds Western metaphysics is the
same one that presides over the beginnings of the discourse of Orientalism. Neither is prepared to acknowledge, in its
humanism and universalism, the heterogeneity that contaminates “pure meaning” from the start, occluding also the
project of translation.

In “On Linguistic Aspects if Translation”, Roman Jakobson declares that “the meaning of any linguistic sign is its
translation into some further, alternative sign”.

The significance of Jakobson’s remark has by and large gone unnoticed in subsequent writing in translation studies,
however, perhaps because his classification of kinds of translation into intralingual, intersemiotic, and interlingual (or
“translation proper”) is what Derrida calls a “reassuring tripartition” that presupposes our ability “to determine
rigorously the unity and identity of a language, the decidable form of its limits”.

The language of fidelity is accompanied, not surprisingly, by the idea of “equivalence”.

The vocabulary of truth and falsehood, adequacy and inadequacy, shows that current theory of translation still operates
under the aegis of the transcendental signified. Even if prepared to admit that definitive translations do not exist, the
theorist returns repeatedly to the theme of fidelity.

The notion of fidelity to the “original” holds back translation theory from thinking the force of a translation. The intimate
links between, for example, translations from non-Western languages into English and the colonial hegemony they
helped create are seldom examined.

In spite of a recognition on the part of some writers of the colonial beginnings of modern translation studies, there has
not as yet been any serious attempt to explore the relationship between the kind of debates generated by translation
studies (and the assumptions underlying them) and the complicity with the liberal humanist rhetoric of colonialism. One
of the ways in which colonial discourse functions is by setting up and “naturalizing” or dehistoricizing this series of
oppositions. This has the effect also of naturalizing the historical asymmetry between languages, to the point where
theorists of translation can speak blithely of “general principles” that “can be determined and categorized, and,
ultimately, utilized in the cycle of text-theory-text regardless of the languages involved”. Statements like this one seem
oblivious to the relations of power implicit in translation.

Translation studies seem to ignore not just the power relations informing translation but also the historicity or effective
history of translated texts. The “empirical science” of translation comes into being through the repression of the
asymmetrical relations of power that inform the relations between languages.

Translation theory’s obsession with the humanistic nature of translation seems to blind writers to their own insights into
the complicitous relationship of translation and the imperialistic vision.

Translation in ethnography

Derrida accurately indicates the questioning of European ethnocentrism as the necessary condition for the “birth” or
self-conscious formulation of ethnology in the 1920s. This very critique of ethnocentrism is seen by him as
“contemporaneous” with the critique of Western “metaphysics”. Just as philosophy finds it extremely difficult to take a
step “outside” its boundaries, ethnology too is confined by the concepts it inherits.

The discursive legacy of anthropology ties it firmly to a concept of representation that, for Derrida, presumes the
existence of a “reality” or an originary presence that it “befalls” and re-presents. The striving for meaning or truth and
the concept of the episteme (the discursive structures that organize cognition in a given age) belong to a metaphysics
that is logocentric and nostalgic. The birth of anthropology has for its precondition the shaking or “soliciting” of the
foundations of metaphysics.

It is commonly assumed, and not least by anthropologists themselves, that anthropology studies “societies without
writing”. This idea depends on what Derrida calls a vulgar or ethnocentric misconception: that writing refers only to
phonetic and linear notation, whereas any society capable of producing proper names, of “bringing classificatory
difference into play”, can be said to practice writing.

The moment of dislocation of European culture is also the moment when anthropology as a science is born. Bronislaw
Malinowski, commonly regarded as one of the “founding fathers” of the discipline, was himself a “dis-located” European
who celebrated professional, scientific ethnography as being free of the ethnocentrism of earlier discursive genres like
travel-writing and accounts by missionaries or colonial officials. But, as Malinowski’s writing show, and as Derrida
himself points out, the ethnographer accepts the premises of ethnocentrism “at the very moment when he denounces
them”.

Implicitly or explicitly, ethnography always conceived of its project as one of translation.

Translation for Steiner is an “act of double-entry” where “the books must balance”. The “exchange without loss” posited
by Steiner’s structural model seems to lapse into the classic ahistoricism that Derrida warns against for it does not
account for the inequality of languages perpetuated by the colonial encounter.

That the task of anthropology is one of translation is proposed explicitly by Godfrey Lienhardt: “The problem of
describing to others how members of a remote tribe think… begins to appear largely as one of translation, of making the
coherence primitive thought has in the language it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own.”

In stressing the unity of human consciousness, however, he makes a now familiar move: the language that “primitive
thought…really lives in” has to be translated, transformed, clarified, in “our own” (here, English). The “primitive”
becomes the anthropologist’s civilizational other. Because it does not depend on logic or consistency, the primitive
society’s science is “defective compared with ours”. The unity of human consciousness foes not preclude – in fact, it
helps construct – an inner hierarchy: primitive thought needs to be translated into modern, for it is that which is not yet
modern. The hierarchy also indicates to us the operation of a teleological model of history.

It was often emphasized that the anthropologist need not be absolutely fluent in the language. One could always
depend on native interpreters. The idea of translation in such a context is a metonymy for the desire to achieve
transparent knowledge and provide for a Western audience immediacy of access to “primitive thought”. The desire to
translate is a desire to construct the primitive world, to represent it and to speak on its behalf. What the discourse of
ethnography traditionally represses, however, is any awareness of the assymetrical relations between colonizer and
colonized that enabled the growth of the discipline and provided the context for translation.

The language of “observing” and “recording” presupposes a conception of reality as something “out there” that is re-
presented by the anthropologist.

The “knowledge” produced by anthropology has only recently been questioned, in particular by those who have for a
long time been the objects of its gaze. The transparency of the knowledge and its univocity serve to mask the
inequalities between cultures and languages that the knowledge has actually helped create. The notions of reality and
representation that are the premises of the translation project allow not only anthropologists but also historians and
translators to assume the totalizing, teleological concept of a universal history.
A post-colonial practice of translation must necessarily be aware of how the problematic of the asymmetrical relations
between languages has been addressed in a discourse (that of ethnography) to which it is so central – a discourse,
moreover, with historical ties to the relations of power that constituted colonialism.

Malinowsky “believed that an important task of anthropology was to provide scientific recipes for facilitating colonial
control”.

Malinowsky suggested that anthropology should study “culture contact” and the “changing native” in the colonial
situation. But he allied the emerging discipline with the colonial administration, so that it could facilitate greater
European control, based not only on the “unquestionable military superiority” of the Europeans, with which “the natives
have to be impressed, even cowed”, but also on scientific policies to stabilize and maintain the colonial system.

The attempt to turn “history” into “nature” is linked to anthropology’s use of the notion of time. The “primitive” or the
“traditional” become, in the discourse of ethnology, not objects of study but temporal categories of Western thought.
This leads to a denial of coevalness, a use of time to distance the observed from the observer; the denial functions
schizophrenically to create a different time for anthropological writing than that of fieldwork (which implies some kind
of living together in the same time for ethnographer and subjects). The denial of coevalness removes the other from
“the dialogic situation” and contributes to an intellectual justification of colonialism.

The rise of anthropology in the colonial era helped establish fieldwork as an important methodology, for imperial rule
and its “products” helped make the “primitive” world safe for ethnographers. The privileging of fieldwork suggests the
significance given to techniques of observation and the recording of “facts”. This epistemological model, based on
classical concepts of reality and representation, seems to align fieldwork with the systematic effort to establish an
unequal relationship between the “West” and its “Other”. Fabian suggests that while the maintenance and renewal of
this relationship requires a “coeval recognition of the Other as object of power/knowledge” the justification and
rationalization of the relationship “needs schemes of allochronic distancing” or denial of coevalness. The project of
translation, whether literary or ethnographic, is caught up in this double movement.

Whereas some writers have offered critiques of the conditions and the context of ethnographic translation, others have
drawn attention to the tropes of translation that structure ethnographies. Compared to the earlier critics of
ethnography, these theorists are post-Saussurean (even post-structuralist) in their orientation. They see how it is not
sufficient to criticize the conditions of the formation of anthropology as a discipline; they recognize the importance of
putting in question the status of the ethnographic text by problematizing classical notions of text, author, and meaning.
Such a problematization, they seem to suggest, will help us understand the enduring force of colonial discourse and
open up ways of undermining it. Drawing inspiration from post-structuralist literary theory, the new ethnographers
emphasize that writing is “central to what anthropologists do” and that language is not a transparent medium, for
ethnographers invent rather than represent cultures. Some of these writers suggest that works of cultural translation
use literary procedures, and that literary processes influence not only the writing but also the reading of ethnographies.
Revealing the constructed nature of cultural translations shows how translation is always producing rather than merely
reflecting or imitating an “original”.

The translation of field notes into ethnography is marked, of course, by what Fabien has called allochronic distancing, or
the denial of coevalness. “Writing-up” as an established practice uses metaphoric or stylistic conventions that may
assimilate too easily, “exclude, or diminish in significance” many facets of the “unequal cultures” translated by
ethnographers.

The hierarchical relationship between the two worlds places the ethnographer and his readers at the top.
Talal Asad: An ethnographer’s translation of a culture occupies a privileged position as a “scientific text”, and is not only
more powerful than folk memory, but also constructs folk memory.

Cultural translation for Asad implies translation not merely into English but into the established discursive game of
academia. By the same token, interlingual translation also implies translation into an entire discourse on the Orient, with
its own sets of conventions. Although Asad’s notion of translation draws attention to the asymmetries between
languages, he seems to assume that the only translators are Euro-American ones re-presenting a non-Western other.
Asad’s conception of cultural translation leaves too little room for the use of translation as an act of resistance.

The “identity” of the translator is left unproblematized even in attempts to theorize a post-modern ethnography.

The new critique of anthropology accepts that neither culture nor text is unified. Both are enmeshed in relations of
power and both have more than one subject. To see the split nature of subject/author is to take into account the role of
language in constructing both “subject” and “reality” and to challenge the notion of language as transparent. One of the
accomplishments of the critique of anthropology is the scrupulous attention it pays to power relations and historicity in
discussing the colonial construction of the discipline. The critics are aware of the hegemonic strength of classic
ethnographic texts and the need to problematize the conditions of their creation. They help us see that the discipline’s
refusal of history and historicity and its willful blindness to the workings of power go hand in hand with its self-
declarated enterprise of translation. The critique of anthropology acknowledges the importance of rehistoricizing non-
Western cultures and of developing a post-colonial perspective on the ethnographic project of translation.

Tymoczko – Translation and Power: Introduction

In the 1950s and 1960s, practicing translators began consciously to calibrate their translation techniques to achieve
effects they wished to produce in their audiences. Translators began to realize how translated texts could manipulate
readers to achieve desired effects. Such functionalist techniques soon led, in turn, to early descriptive approaches to
translation. It was obvious that practicing translators and the profession would be better served by becoming flexible
and proficient in a number of translation techniques and approaches that could be deployed in context-specific
situations.

The changes in translation studies and the field’s interest in power take their place within the larger political trajectories
since the 1960s.

A new stage was reached in 1985 with the essays in the anthology The Manipulation of Literature, edited by Theo
Hermans. The group of scholars who participated demonstrated that translations, rather than being secondary and
derivative, were instead one of the primary literary tools that larger social institutions – educational systems, arts
councils, publishing firms, and even governments – had at their disposal to “manipulate” a given society in order to
“construct” the kind of “culture” desired. To do so, however, the source text itself was manipulated to create a desired
representation.

The manipulation theses posited in 1985 evolved into the “cultural turn” in translation studies in the next decade, a
movement that had ramifications in every branch of the discipline. Within descriptive approaches, it coalesced in 1990
with the publication of Bassnett and Lefevere’s anthology Translation, History and Culture. That collection of essays
redefined the object of inquiry in descriptive translation studies as a text within the networks of literary and extraliterary
signs, in both the source and target cultures. Bassnett and Lefevere wanted to explain the shifts that occur in translation,
not just by poetic devices but by ideological forces as well.

An explosion of scholarship ensued in every branch of translation studies in the 1990s.

In many studies of translation since 1990, translation scholars have made their comparisons less to unified meanings in
individual source texts and more to the long chains of multiple meanings and the pluralities of language that lie behind
any textual construct.

More important, whole schools of translation and translation scholarship can be connected with this turn in translation
studies. The translators and translation scholars who work on the literature of Quebec form such a group, translating
and theorizing translation with postructuralist and postmodernist techniques. They have become involved in the
negotiation of meanings in Canada, challenging both implicit and explicit structures of power in their culture. Similarly, a
“postmodern translational aesthetics” has arisen since the 1960s in Brazil, where a group of translators has developed
assertive translational methods based on the modernist principles of the movimiento antropófago (‘cannibalist
movement’) initiated in 1928 by Oswald de Andrade.

Perhaps the most significant of these movements is the diverse group of translators and scholars who have
independently yet simultaneously applied postcolonial theory and practices to translation.

Meanwhile, outside the realm of translation studies, scholars from many fields have articulated the central importance
of translation in establishing, maintaining, and resisting imperialist power structures. Postcolonial scholars have turned
to translation studies for new ideas, terminology, and metaphors with which to express their views. Homi Bhabha has
gone so far as to coin the term translational culture to refer to all those migrants and hybridized identities he finds
characteristic of the postmodern world; translation, according to Bhabha, has become the site for cultural production,
the space where “newness” enters the world.

The key topic that has provided the impetus for the new directions that translation studies have taken since the cultural
turn is power. In poststucturalist and postcolonial fields, discussions have increasingly focused on the question of
agency. Although in translation studies all now agree that translations are never fully homologous to the original –
always containing shifts, errors, and subjective interpretations – it is also agreed that translations do nevertheless
import aspects of the Other to the receiving culture. What sort of impact does translation have on cultural change?
Under what circumstances do translations have the most impact? What forms of translation are most successful? And
how does all this relate to cultural dominance, cultural assertion and cultural resistance – in short power? In a sense
such questions as these have meant that the “cultural turn” in translation studies has become the “power turn”, with
questions of power brought to the fore in discussions of both translation history and strategies for translation.

Translations are inevitably partial; meaning in a text is always overdetermined, and the information in a source text is
therefore always more extensive than a translation can convey. Conversely, the receptor language and culture entail
obligatory features that shape the possible interpretations of the translation, as well as extending the meanings of the
translation in directions other than those inherent in the source text. As a result, translators must make choices,
selecting aspects or parts of a text to transpose and emphasize. Such choices in turn serve to create representations of
their source texts, representations that are also partial. This partiality is a necessary condition of the act. It is also an
aspect that makes the act of translation partisan: engaged and committed, either implicitly or explicitly. Indeed partiality
is what differentiates translations, enabling them to participate in the dialectic of power, the ongoing process of political
discourse, and strategies for social change.

The concept of power as used by early studies of translation in some cases needs to be critically analyzed. One of the
weaknesses of the early stages of the cultural turn in translation studies was at times an uncritical application of power
dichotomies. Scholars were inclined to see an either/or situation with regard to translation: either the translator would
collude with the status quo and produce fluent, self-effacing translations, or oppose a particular hegemony and use
foreignizing strategies to import new and unfamiliar terms to the receiving culture.
The workings of power are not simply “top down”, a matter of inexorable repression and constraint; instead, translation,
like other cultural activities, can be mobilized for counterdiscourses and subversion, or for any number of mediating
positions in between. Moreover, having power or not having power is not necessarily good or bad in and of itself.
Whereas institutions of power historically have marginalized many groups, translators, as it is the case with many
community leaders, often find themselves simultaneously caught in both camps, representing both the institutions in
power and those seeking empowerment. Often with divided allegiances, representing the status quo while
simultaneously introducing new forms of representation, the translator acts as a kind of double agent in the process of
cultural negotiation.

Rather than see this as a necessarily compromised position, we see the translator’s double role as a strength, one
perhaps indicative of the complex communications found in the hybridized conditions characteristic of many cultures
today. No single translation strategy can be associated with the exercise of oppression or the struggle for resistance; no
single strategy is the strategy of power.

This multiplicity in the interpretation of translated texts is related to a view of discourse interactions as being
fragmentary and incomplete, an approach that is particularly compatible with an understanding of translation as
metonymic and partisan. As with other discursive practices, texts to be translated must be seen as embodying a range of
discourses, all of which impinge on the choices of the translators, thus contributing to the gaps, inconsistencies, and
fragments that can be found in translations.

For translation scholars, the analysis of translation is made increasingly difficult by the acknowledgement of the
fragmentary nature of discourses and the configuration of the power that they exert. One must analyze not only the
parts of the source text and source culture that are present in translated texts, but also the parts that are left out.
Silences, whether the silence of zero translation or the silencing of the remainder, are often critical in understanding the
workings of power in translation and in culture.

In traditional models for the analysis of translation, scholars assumed that the translator had knowledge of both the
languages and cultures in question and that the translator translated in a linear fashion from the source to the target
text. Scholars who have taken the power turn, however, have come to realize that in polyvalent and multicultural
environments, knowledge does not necessarily precede the translation activity, and that the act of translation is itself
very much involved in the creation of knowledge. Colonialism and imperialism were and are made possible not just by
military might or economic advantage but by knowledge as well; knowledge and the representations thus configured are
coming to be understood as a central aspect of power. Translation has been a key tool in the production of such
knowledge and representations. Yet this cultural domain is not uncontested: though translation can be used by
colonizers as a kind of domain is not uncontested: through translation can be used by colonizers as a kind of intelligence
operation to interrogate subjects and maintain control, it can also be used by opponents of oppression as
counterespionage, to conspire and rebel, for the ultimate goals of self-definition and self-determination in both the
political and epistemological senses. Translation thus is not simply an act of faithful reproduction but, rather, a
deliberate and conscious act of selection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication – and even, in some cases, of
falsification, refusal of information, counterfeiting, and the creation of secret codes. In these ways translators, as much
as creative writers and politicians, participate in the powerful acts that create knowledge and shape culture.

UNIDAD 2: Proceso y producto de la traducción

ROBINSON – BECOMING A TRANSLATOR - Chapter 4: The Process of Translation. The shuttle: experience and habit

The model imagines the translator shuttling between two very different mental states and processes: (1) a subliminal
“flow” state in which it seems as if the translator isn’t even thinking, as if the translator’s fingers or interpreter’s mouth
in doing the work, so that the translator can daydream while the body translates; and (2) a highly conscious analytical
state in which the translator mentally reviews lists of synonyms, looks words up in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other
reference works, checks grammar books, analyzes sentence structures, semantic fields, cultural pragmatics, and so on.

The subliminal state is the one that allows translators to earn a living at the work: in the experienced professional it is
very fast, enhanced speed means enhanced income. It works best when there are no problems in the source text, or
when the problems are familiar enough to be solved without conscious analysis. The analytical state is the one that gives
the translator a reputation for probity and acumen: it is very slow, and may in some cases diminish a freelancer’s
income, but without this ability the translator would never be able to finish difficult jobs and would make many mistakes
even in easy jobs, so that sooner or later his or her income would dry up anyway.

The shuttle metaphor is taken from weaving. The two states are different, but not perfectly or totally so. In fact, they are
made up of very much the same experiential and analytical materials: experiences of languages, cultures, people,
translations; textual, psychological, social, and cultural analyses. The difference between them is largely in the way that
experiential/analytical material is stored and retrieved for use: in the subliminal state, it has been transformed into
habit, “second nature”, procedural memory; in the analytical state, it is brought back out of habit into representational
memory and painstakingly conscious analysis.

Experience, especially fresh, novel, even shocking experience, also tough-minded analytical experience, the experience
of taking something familiar apart and seeing how it was put together, is in most ways the opposite of habit – even
though in another form, processed, repeated, and sublimated, it is the very stuff of habit, the material that habit is made
from. Fresh experiences that startle us out of our habitual routines are the goad to learning.

Translators need habit in order to speed up the translation process and make it more enjoyable; but they also need new
experiences to enrich it and complicate it, slow it down, and, again, to make it more enjoyable.

This back-and-forth movement between habit and fresh experience is one of the most important keys to successful,
effective, and enjoyable translation.

Charles Sanders Peirce on instinct, experience and habit

One useful way of mapping the connections between experience and habit onto the process of translation is through the
work if Charles Sanders Peirce, the American philosopher and founder of semiotics. He proposes a triad, or three-step
process, moving from instinct through experience to habit. Peirce understood everything in terms of these triadic or
three-step movements: instinct, in this triad, is a First, or a general unfocused readiness; experience is a Second,
grounded in real-world activities and events that work on the individual from the outside; and habit is a Third,
transcending the opposition between general readiness and external experience by incorporating both into a
“promptitude of action”, “a person’s tendencies toward action”, a “readiness to act”.

The process of translation in Peirce’s three terms might be summarized simply like this: the translator begins with a
blind, intuitive, instinctive sense in a language, source or target, of what a word or phrase means, how a syntactic
structure works (instinct); proceeds by translating those words and phrases, moving back and forth between the two
languages, feeling the similarities and dissimilarities between words and phrases and structures (experience); and
gradually, over time, sublimates specific solutions to specific experiential problems into more or less unconscious
behavior patterns (habit), which help her or him to translate more rapidly and effectively. The translator notices the
problem-solving process less and less, feels mire competent and at ease with a greater variety of source texts, and
eventually comes to think of herself or himself as a professional. Still, part of that professional competence remains the
ability to slip out of habitual processes whenever necessary and experience the text, and the world, as fully and
consciously and analytically as needed to solve difficult problems.
Abduction, induction, deduction

Another triad from Peirce: abduction, induction and deduction. Induction begins with specifics and moves toward
generalities, deduction begins with general principles and deduces individual details from them. “Abduction” is Peirce’s
coinage, born out of his sense that induction and deduction are not enough. They are limited not only by the either/or
dualism in which they were conceived, always a bad thing for Peirce; but also by the fact that on its own neither
induction nor deduction is capable of generating new ideas.

Abduction: the act of making an intuitive leap from unexplained data to a hypothesis. The thinker entertains a
hypothesis that intuitively or instinctively (a First) seems right; it then remains to test that hypothesis inductively (a
Second) and finally to generalize from it deductively (a Third).

The translator’s experience begins “abductively” at two places: in (1) a first approach to the foreign language, leaping
from incomprehensible sounds (in speech) or marks on the page (in writing) to meaning, or at least to a wild guess at
what the words mean; and (2) a first approach to the source text, leaping from an expression that makes sense but
seems to resist translation (seems untranslatable) to a target-language equivalent. The abductive experience is one of
not knowing how to proceed, being confused, feeling intimidated by the magnitude of the task – but somehow making
the leap, making the blind stab at understanding or reformulating an utterance.

As s/he proceeds with the translation, or indeed with successive translation jobs, the translator tests the “abductive”
solution “inductively” in a variety of contexts.

Deduction begins when the translator has discovered enough “patterns” or “regularities” in the material to feel
confident about making generalizations. Deduction is the source of translation methods, principles, and rules – the
leading edge of translation theory.

Karl Weick on enactment, selection and retention

Another formulation of much this same process is Karl Weick’s: he begins with Darwin’s model of natural selection,
which moves through stages of variation, selection, retention: a variation or mutation in an individual organism is
“selected” to be passed on the next generation, and thus genetically encoded or “retained” for the species as a whole. In
social life, these are enactment, selection and retention.

Enactment: you simply do something, it is similar to abduction. The move from enactment to selection is governed by a
principle of “respond now, plan later”. Chaotic action is better than orderly inaction.

Two approaches to selection: rules and cycles. Rules (or what Peirce would call deductions) are often taken to be the key
to principled action, but Weick is skeptical. Rules are really only useful in reasonably simple situations. Because rules are
formalized for general and usually highly idealized cases, they most often fail to account for the complexity of real cases.
Sometimes, in fact, two conflicting rules seem to apply simultaneously to a single situation, which only complicates the
“selection” process.

Many different cycles; all of them deal in trial and error, or what Peirce calls induction. Weick draws attention to the
cyclical nature of induction: you cycle out away from the problem in search of a solution, picking up possible courses of
action as you go, then cycle back in to the problem to try out what have learned.

Perhaps the most important cycle for the translator is what Weick calls the act-response-adjustment cycle, involving
feedback (“response”) from the people on whom your trial-and-error actions have an impact, and a resulting shift
(“adjustment”) in your actions. The cycle is often called collaborative decision-making. Each interactive “cycle” not only
generates new solutions. It also eliminates old and unworkable ones.
Third stage: retention: Peirce’s notion of habit. Weick refuses to see retention as the stable goal of the whole process. In
order for the individual or the group to respond flexibly to new situations, the enactment-selection-retention process
must itself constantly work in a cycle. Memory, Weick says, should be treated like a pest; while old solutions retained in
memory provide stability and some degree of predictability in an uncertain world, that stability – often called “tradition”
or “the way things have always been” – can also stifle flexibility.

The process of translation

In Weick’s terms, the enact-select-retain cycle might be reformulated as translate, edit, sublimate:

1. Translate: act; jump into the text feet first; translate intuitively.

2. Edit: think about what you’ve done; but edit intuitively too, allowing an intuitive first translation to challenge (even
successfully) a well-reasoned principle that you believe in deeply.

3. Sublimate: internalize what you’ve learned through this give-and-take process for later use; but sublimate it flexibly,
as a directionality that can be redirected in conflictual circumstances.

The model assumes that the translator is at once:

(a) A professional, for whom many highly advanced problem-solving processes and techniques have become second
nature.

(b) A learner, who not only confronts and must solve new problems on a daily basis but actually thrives on such
problems.

As Peirce conceives the movement from instinct through experience to habit, habit is the end. In fact Peirce’s model
must be bent around into a cycle, specifically an act-response-adjustment cycle.

This diagram can be imagined as the wheel of a car. The translator approaches new texts, new jobs, new situations with
an intuitive or instinctive readiness, a sense of her or his own knack for languages and translation that is increasingly,
with experience, steeped in the automatisms of habit. Instinct and habit for Peirce were both a readiness to act; the only
difference between them is that habit directed by experience.

Experience begins with general knowledge of the world, experience of how various people talk and act, experience of
professions, experience of the vast complexity of languages, experience of social networks, and experience of the
differences among cultures, norms, values, assumptions. This knowledge or experience will often need to be actively
sought, constructed, consolidated, especially but not exclusively at the beginning of the translator’s career.

On the cutting edge of contact with an actual text or job or situation, the translator has an intuition or image of her or
his ability to solve whatever problems come up, to leap abductively over obstacles to new solutions. Gradually the
“problems” or “difficulties” will begin to recur, and to fall into patterns. This is induction. As the translator begins to
notice and articulate, or read about, or take classes on, these patterns and regularities, deductions begins, and with it
the theorizing of translation.

Each translator will eventually develop a more or less coherent theory of translation, even if s/he isn’t quite able to
articulate it. (It will probably be mostly subliminal).

This is the “perfected” model of the translation process, the process as we would all like it to operate all the time.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t. There are numerous hitches in the process, from bad memory and inadequate dictionaries all
the virtually unsolvable problems of translating across enormous power differential, between, say, English and various
Third World languages.

The next step after abduction, moving back around the circle counterclockwise, is once again the subliminal translation
autopilot: the solution to this particular problem, whether generated deductively, inductively, or abductively (or through
some combination of the three), is incorporated into your habitual repertoire, where it may be used again in future
translations, perhaps tested inductively, generalized into a deductive principle, even made the basis of a new theoretical
approach to translation.

Chapter 5: Experience - What experience?

Experience of the world is of course essential for all humans. Experience of the world is an integral and ongoing part of
our being in the world. What kind of experience of the world is indispensable for the translator’s work? Is extensive
experience of a certain subject matter enough, if the translator has a rudimentary working knowledge of at least one
foreign language?

One answer to all of these questions is: “Yes, in certain cases”. A solid experiential grounding in a language can get you
through even a difficult specialized text when you have little or no experience of the subject matter; and a good solid
experiential grounding in a subject matter can sometimes get you through a difficult text in that field written in a foreign
language with which you have little experience. Sometimes knowledge of similar languages and a dictionary can get you
through a fairly simple text that you can hardly read at all.

While the ability to compensate for failings in some areas with strengths in others is an important professional skill,
however, asking the questions this way is ultimately misleading. The translator’s key to accumulating experience of the
world is not so much what may be “enough” or “essential” for specific translation jobs as it is simply experiencing as
much of everything as possible. The more experience of the world, the better; also, the more of the world one
experiences, the better.

Experience of the world sometimes confirms the translator’s habits. There are regularities to social life that make some
aspects of our existence predictable. But experience holds constant surprises for us as well.

If nothing ever stayed the same, obviously, we would find it impossible to function. Communication would be
impossible. But if nothing ever changed, our habits would become straitjackets.

Intuitive leaps (abduction): What role should intuition play in translation?

Intuitive leaps are an essential part of the translation process: essential, both only a part; only a part but essential.

In the first place, it is often difficult to distinguish intuitive leaps from calm certainty. Your procedural memory has taken
over. Your trust your intuition (or your experience) and proceed.

Sometimes, of course, your “intuition” or “experience” (and which is it?) tells you that there are serious problems with
the word or phrase you’ve come up with; so you check your dictionaries, and they all confirm your choice, but still you
go on doubting. It feels right, but not quite. Finally the word you’ve been looking for jumps into your head, and you
rejoice, and rush to write it down – that’s the word!

Or you rush to write it down, only to discover that the word you finally remembered has some other connotation or
association that makes it potentially inappropriate for this context.

The process of remembering and vetting words and phrases, then – the semantic core of the job – is steeped in intuitive
leaps. Some of those leaps are solidly grounded in long experience, others in dim memories of overheard snatches of
conversation; and it is not always possible to tell the two apart. A good translator will develop a rough sense of when
s/he can trust these intuitive leaps and when they need to be subjected to close scrutiny and/or independent testing;
but that sense is never more than a rough one, always just a little fuzzy at the crucial boundaries.

Intuitive leaps may be unavoidable, even essential, at the leading edge of the translation process; but once a rough draft
has been completed, the translator steps back from her or his work, and edits it with a careful and suspicious eye.

But even editing is heavily grounded in intuitive leaps.

While it is usually considered desirable for a translator to solve all the problems in a text before submitting a finished
translation, this isn’t always possible.

Some large translation projects are done by teams: translator A translates; translator B edits; the translation is checked
by an in-house person at the agency; another in-house person searches databases in the World Wide Web and other
Internet sources for useful terminology.

Intuitive leaps are a necessary part of invention, subject to later editing; and they are a necessary part of editing as well,
subject to discussion or negotiation among two or more translators, editors, or managers of a project.

Not all translation is scientific or technical; not all translation revolves around the one and only “correct” or “accurate”
translation for a given word or phrase. In “free imitations” or “rough adaptations”, such as television or film versions of
novels or plays, “retellings” of literary classics for children, and international advertising campaigns, intuitive leaps are
important not in order to recall the “correct” word but come up with an interesting or striking or effective word or
image or turn of phrase that may well deviate sharply from the original.

In some cases, also, the “correct” word or phrase is desired, but proves highly problematic.

Pattern-building (induction): It is generally recognized that induction is how translators most typically proceed with any
given translation task or series of translation tasks, and thus also how translators are most effectively “trained” (or train
themselves). Practice may not make perfect, but it certainly helps; the more words, phrases, and whole texts a person
has translated, the better a translator that person is likely to be.

Comments: One: “experience” or “practice” conceived as induction is more than sheer mindless exposure to masses of
material. It is a process of sifting mindfully through that material, constantly looking for regularities, patterns,
generalities that can bring some degree of order and thus predictability and even control to the swirl of experience.

The “mindfulness” that raises experience to an inductive process is an attentiveness, a readiness to notice and reflect
upon words and phrases and register shifts and all the other linguistic and nonlinguistic material to which a translator is
constantly being exposed. Working inductively, translators are always “collecting” words and phrases that might
someday be useful, some on note cards or in computer files, others only in their heads; and that sort of collection
process requires that the translator have her or his “feelers” out most or all of the time, sorting out the really interesting
and potentially useful and important words and phrases from the flood of language that we hear around us every day.

While the inductive process of finding patterns in large quantities of experience has the power to transform our
subliminal habits, it is ultimately only effective once it is incorporated into those subliminal habits. In fact, the process of
sublimating inductive discoveries can help explain why inductive experience is so much more useful for the practicing
translator than deduction, the learning and application of general rules and theories.

Rules and theories (deduction): Ideally, deductive principles – rules, models, laws, theories – of translation should arise
out of the translator’s own experience, the inductive testing of abductive hypotheses through a series of individual
cases. In deduction the translator begins to impose those regularities on new materials by way of predicting or
controlling what they will entail. Deduction must constantly be fed “from below”, remaining flexible in response to
pressures from new abductions and inductions to rethink what s/he thought was understood.

This ideal model is not always practicable, however. Above all it is often inefficient. Learning general principles through
one’s own abductive and inductive experience is enormously time-consuming and labor-intensive, and frequently
narrow – precisely as narrow as the translator’s own experience.

Is it really necessary for individual translators to relearn principles with so much effort? Yes and no. The effort is never
really wasted, since we always learn things more fully; integrate them more coherently into our working habits, when
we learn them in rich experiential contexts, through our own efforts.

But at the same time, “being told” can mean immense savings in time an effort over “figuring out on your own”.

This is, of course, the rationale behind translator training: given a few general principles and plenty of chances to test
those principles in practice, novice translators will progress much more rapidly toward professional competence than
they would out in the working world.

In addition, exposure to other people’s deductions about translation can help broaden a translator’s sense of the field.

No one ever knows what kinds of experience will prove useful in the future.

The translator should be a lifelong learner, always eager to push into new territories, and at least occasionally, in
accordance with his or her own learning styles, willing to let other people chart the way into those territories. We have
to rely on other people’s experiences in order to continue broadening our world.

GUTT – CHAPTER 4: TRANSLATING THE MEANING OF THE ORIGINAL

Since the 1960s, there has been a strong trend in translation theory and practice to pay special attention to how well the
translation communicates to the target audience.

Conveying the ‘Message’ of the Original

The first approach along these lines that developed into a comprehensive theory is that of ‘dynamic equivalence’
developed by Nida. Its primary concern is “with the dynamic relationship… that the relationship between receptor and
message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors of and the message”.

Nida and Taber define dynamic equivalence as follows: “Dynamic equivalence is therefore to be defined in terms of the
degree to which the receptors of the message in the receptor language respond to it in substantially the same manner
as the receptors in the source language. This response can never be identical, for the cultural and historical settings are
too different, but there should be a high degree of equivalence of response, or the translation will have failed to
accomplish its purpose.”

One important aspect of ‘audience response’ lies in correct understanding of meaning.

Thus the main objective of translation is concerned with conveying the meaning of the original text.

The idiomatic translation approach developed by Beekman and Callow resembles the dynamic equivalence approach in
its rejection of form-oriented translation, and its emphasis that a translation should convey the meaning of the original.
It also demands that the translation should be faithful to the ‘dynamics’ of the original, but it looks at these dynamics in
terms of ‘naturalness’ of language use and ease of comprehension rather than receptor response.
Larson presents an extension of the idiomatic approach to translation in general. In substance her model is very similar
to that of Beekman and Callow, though she does include the aspect of audience response in her definition of ‘dynamics’.

These approaches share the following two basic objectives: 1) a translation must convey to the receptor language
audience the meaning or message of the original; and 2) it must do so in a way that is faithful, viz. equivalent to the
dynamics of the original.

‘Meaning’ or ‘message’ in these approaches: Nida and Taber define: “Message: the total meaning or content of a
discourse; the concepts and feelings which the author intends the reader to understand and perceive.”

Beekam and Callow: their definition of what it means to ‘transfer the meaning’ suggests that the ‘meaning’ of the
original refers to “the information that the original conveyed to its readers or hearers”

Larson states clearly that the meaning of the original is to be viewed as “the meaning intended by the original
communicator”.

Expressed in terms of relevance theory, what these approaches suggest is that a translation should convey to the
receptor language audience a literal interpretation of the original or one closely resembling it.

France assumes a “distinction between the ‘surface meaning’, which any reasonably intelligent reader might be
expected to grasp, and what we may call a ‘bonus’ meaning accessible to those who are more ‘sharp-eyed’”.

This view of the intender ‘message’ of a text being layered, perhaps even open-ended, is quite consistent with relevance
theory, and, as France has pointed out, agrees with our everyday use of language as well.

The Problem of Secondary Communication Situations

One of the central claims of relevance theory of that human communication works by inference: the audience infers
from the stimulus what the communicator intends to convey. In verbal communication the derivation of speaker-
intended interpretation depends not only on correct decoding, but just as much on the use of the right, that is, speaker-
intended, contextual information.

It follows that for communication to be successful the text or utterance produced must be inferentially combined with
the right, that is, speaker-envisaged, contextual assumptions. Let us call communication situations where this condition
is fulfilled primary communication situations. However, it can happen – for various reasons – that in interpreting a text
an audience may fail to use the contextual assumptions intended by the communicator and perhaps use others instead.
Such situations we shall refer to as secondary communication situations, and in most cases they will lead to
misinterpretations.

What is important at this point is the reason for these misinterpretations. In all the cases considered, they arise from a
mismatch in context.

It comes as no surprise that translation too, can find itself in secondary communication situations, and where it does, it
follows naturally that misinterpretations may arise, just as they do in other situations of secondary communication.

Secondary communication problems and ‘dynamic equivalence’

In the dynamic equivalence approach, there is a certain amount of ambivalence as to how problems arising from
secondary communication should be handled. This approach aims at the comprehension of the ‘message’ of the original.
It certainly seems necessary for the translator to seek to overcome obstacles to comprehension arising from the
differences in background knowledge between the old and the new audience, and one would expect the theory of
dynamic equivalence to provide and spell out the measures needed to achieve this.

Nida and Taber’s conception of translation is a linguistic one: “linguistic translation: a translation in which only
information which is linguistically implicit in the original is made explicit and in which all changes of form follow the
rules of back transformation and transformation and of componential analysis: opposed to CULTURAL TRANSLATION.
Only a linguistic translation can be considered FAITHFUL.”

Contextual assumptions and implications are not a matter of linguistics, but of inferences that have to do with people’s
beliefs – cultural, religious and so forth; consequently their explication is not warranted under linguistic translation.

Both from the point of view of relevance theory and from common experience, it is difficult to see how such a notion of
‘linguistic translation’ can as a matter of general principle aim at achieving dynamic equivalence in terms of conveying
the message of the original, especially in view of the fact that the translation situations that Nida and Taber in mind span
wide cultural gaps.

In view of the discrepancies between the two audiences it is difficult to see how one can seriously uphold the idea that
dynamic equivalence translation can achieve if not identity, at least “a high degree of equivalence of response” as a
general claim: it may be achievable in primary or near-primary communication situations, but it seems unrealistic for
secondary communication situations with significant differences in cognitive environment.

At the same time, it must be recognized that dynamic equivalence translations do tend to be more easily understood
than formal equivalence translations. One reason for this is that the orientation toward the receptor’s response helps
the translator to avoid awkwardness in expression that creeps in easily due to source language interference. However,
another reason seems to be that the dynamic equivalence approach does, in fact, allow for a number of context-
conditioned adaptations, though these are presented as linguistic changes.

One area in which this happens is that of figurative language. In the framework of componential analysis adopted by
Nida and Taber, “figurative extensions are based upon some supplementary component in the primary meaning which
becomes essential in the extended meaning”.

Since such figurative extensions are “often arbitrary and conventional, they are almost always specific to a particular
culture and language” and, accordingly, they can give rise to communication problems in translation. To avoid such
problems, the translator may need to use a different figurative expression. The legitimacy of such a substitution would
rest in the assumption that this is a purely linguistic change: the expression in the translation is chosen on the basis of
the meaning component it shares with that found in the figurative extension in the original.

However, as Sperber and Wilson have argued, there is a good reason to believe that such ‘extended meanings’ arise not
from linguistic meanings or components of meaning, but rather from information stored in the encyclopedic entry. As
such it is not linguistic or semantic, but contextual information.

If this view is correct, then such adaptations should not be acceptable in a theory of linguistic translation, and this would
make the goal of dynamic equivalence still more difficult to achieve.

Secondary communication problems and idiomatic translation

Of the various problems that arise from secondary communication, in the idiomatic approaches special attention is paid
to the fact that not all the meaning of the text is expressed.
On the grounds that such information is already part of the original message, the idiomatic approaches not only allow,
but call for the explication of such information in the translated text, if it cannot be conveyed implicitly in a given
instance.

The idiomatic translator is not free to explicate just any information; the general rule is that implicit information “is
made explicit because the grammar, or the meanings, or the dynamics of the RL [receptor language] require it in order
that the information conveyed will be the same as that conveyed to the original readers”

On the face of it, it might seem that with these guidelines the idiomatic approaches provide all that is theoretically
necessary for the translator to achieve his aim of conveying the same message as the original: he is led to explicate all
and only the information needed to that end.

However, there are significant problems here because the concepts of meaning and communication on which the
idiomatic approaches rest are inadequate in some important respects.

According to the idiomatic approaches, a text has ‘surface structures’, which are grammatical, lexical and phonological
structures, and it also has a ‘deep structure’ which consists of propositions and other elements that give, for example,
indications about speech acts and about interpropositional relations. The ‘surface structures’ constitute the ‘form’ of the
text, and the ‘deep structure’ its meaning, which is what the translator is to convey.

However, the relationship between ‘surface’ and ‘deep structure’ is not as straightforward as one might have thought,
and it is largely these complications that make translation so difficult. One problem is that typically language allows for
‘skewing’ between ‘surface’ and ‘deep structure’: for example, there can be ‘skewing’ between the grammatical form of
a language and its illocutionary force, a typical case in point being ‘rhetorical questions’ that have the grammatical form
of questions, but can have rather different illocutionary force.

Perhaps the best point from which to examine the notion of meaning used in the idiomatic approaches is that of implicit
information, because here the problems can be seen most clearly. Implicit information is defined as that “for which
there is no form”, but which is nevertheless “part of the total communication intended or assumed by the writer”. First
important question: if implicit meaning is not in the ‘form’ of the text – how is it conveyed? It is obviously assumed to be
in the ‘deep structure’, but how does it get there?

The crucial point that distinguishes implicit information from ‘information which is simply absent’ is the communicator’s
intention: only unexpressed information which the communicator intended to convey qualifies as implicit information.

This view is certainly right from the communicator’s point of view. However, what it does not explain is how the
audience can possibly tell the two kinds of information apart, given that it has no direct access to the communicator’s
intention but, in fact, has to discover that intention from what he says.

This gap in the approach is significant from two perspectives: from the practical point of view it leaves the translator
without needed guidance when it comes to identifying what information is or is not implied in a text; this is one of the
reasons why among translators following the idiomatic approaches the matter of implicit information has been
perennial topic of debate. From the theoretical perspective the lack of an explicit account of the nature of implicit
information has given rise to a number of misconceptions have in turn given rise to practices that seem questionable.

One of these misconceptions concerns implicit information involved in the metaphorical uses of language. According to
Larson “Metaphors and similes are grammatical forms which represent two propositions in the semantic structure” that
are related to each other by way of comparison, where “the comparison is always that of some likeness”. Often that
likeness or ‘point of similarity’ is left implicit.
Larson suggests: “Often the context in which a metaphor is used will give clues which will help in the interpretation”.

Apart from the lack of explicitness already noted, this view of similes and metaphors is quite mistaken in the two related
assumptions that these figurative expressions always represent two propositions, and that there is always one ‘point of
similarity’. Sperber and Wilson not only offer an explicit account of how the implicatures of figurative uses of language is
that they convey a wider range of propositions, even in the case of highly standardized metaphors.

One of the consequences of the failure to come to grips with implicit information in the idiomatic approaches is that it is
prone to mislead the translator concerning the meaning of metaphorical expressions.

However, these problems with implicit information in metaphorical language reveal another, more general
misconception of implicit information, and that is the assumption that it is determinate. Thus, the translator is
admonished to distinguish clearly between information that is ‘implicit’ and other information that is ‘absent’ – which
would seem to presuppose a clear distinction between the two. There is good reason to believe that this is not the case.

Two kinds of practical problems: One is that the translator could comply with another requirement of the idiomatic
approaches made specifically with regard to the explication of implicit information: “it is very important that the
translator who is introducing information new to the receptor audience, but not new to the original audience, does not
use forms that will make it seem like mainline or thematic material. The discourse could become distorted, or too much
emphasis given to something which is not that important to the original author. Such information should be presented
in such a subtle or natural way that the intended prominence of the source text is not distorted.

The other practical problem has to do with acceptability: it seems more than likely that such a degree of explication
would be found unacceptable by many audiences, especially when applied to biblical texts.

Let us turn to the claim that idiomatic translations should resemble the original in its ‘dynamics’.

This statement reveals a significant lack of appreciation of the crucial role that context plays in communication: it seems
to strongly imply that there is a way of ‘writing to be understood’ that is independent of differences in contextual
assumptions, such as arise from historical, cultural and other differences.

We have already looked at the problem of supplying all the needed ‘new information’ in a translation. Yet there is
another factor that is crucial for communication situations, and allow for its explication, the solutions offered are
impaired by an inadequate understanding of communication in general and of implicature in particular.

Relevance theory predicts that the more similar the two audiences are with regard to contextual assumptions needed
for the understanding of the text, that is, the closer the situation is to one of primary communication, the fewer the
problems will be.

Translating the Same ‘Message’ by Interpretive Use?

Relevance theory: can it show how the translator can succeed in communicating to the receptor language audience the
set of assumptions the original communicator intended to communicate to his original audience?

Within relevance theory, such an endeavor might seem to be analyzable as a variety of interpretive use: the translator
produces a receptor language text, the translation, with the intention of communicating to the receptors the same
assumptions that the original communicator intended to convey to the original audience. The intended interpretation of
an utterance consists of its explicatures and/or implicatures. Thus to say that a translation should communicate the
same interpretation as that intended in the original means that it should convey to the receptors all and only those
explicatures and implicatures that the original was intended to convey.
On closer examination this demand can be taken in two distinct ways: first: “The explicatures of the translation should
be the same as the explicatures of the original, and the implicatures of the translation should be the same as the
implicatures of the original”. The preservation of a given explicature may give rise to an unintended implicature because
of the different cognitive environment of the receptors.

Weaker reading of the requirement: “The sum of the explicatures and implicatures of the translation must equal the
sum of the total of the explicatures and implicatures of the original”.

This reading reduces the danger of a clash between explicatures and implicatures in the translation because the
translator is not a priori committed to maintaining all explicatures as explicatures, and it is imaginable that in some cases
at least he can ‘reshuffle’ the explicit and implicit assumptions in a way that will avoid conflict. Such ‘reshuffling’ of
information is, in fact, considered a legitimate part of ‘communicative’ approaches to translation.

The meaning of each utterance is influenced by the meaning of its predecessors. With such intricate interrelations it
seems rather arbitrary to assume that these assumptions can be rearranged without significant loss.

It would have to deal with the indeterminacy of implicature, which raises the problem of how open-ended sets of
implicatures with varying degrees of strength can be turned into explicatures. There seems to be no principle way of
doing this that does not involve arbitrariness and distortion.

Much more important is the basic assumption on which this approach is based – that it should be possible, at least in
principle, to communicate a particular ‘message’ or interpretation to any audience, no matter what their cognitive
environment is like.

One of the essential conditions for successful communication is that the set of assumptions to be communicated must
yield adequate contextual effects. Whether or not a given set of assumptions fulfils this condition is, of course,
dependent on the context in which it is processed: a set of assumptions that yielded a large number of contextual effects
in one context may yield very few such effects in another context. If the amount of contextual effects in that other
context is less than adequate, the audience will not be able to recover the intended interpretation, and may even lose
interest in the communication. Thus the view that a ‘message’ can be communicated to any audience regardless of their
cognitive environment is simply false.

When addressing different audiences, we tend to change what we want to convey to them, not only how we say it.

The interpretation of a stimulus is always relevance-determined, and hence context-dependent. It is therefore not
always possible to take some given ‘meaning’ or ‘message’ to some particular audience. Whether or not this is possible
will depend on whether the ‘message’ in question in communicable to that audience in terms of consistency with the
principle of relevance. The view that the main problem in translation is that of finding the right way of expressing the
content in the receptor language has tended to obscure the problem of the communicability of the content itself.

Bell – Chapter 2: Translating; modelling the process

2. The translator: knowledge and skills

The translator must, as a communicator, possess the knowledge and skills that are common to all communicators,
but in two languages, at least. What does the translator’s knowledge base contain? “Five distinct kinds of knowledge:
target language (TL) knowledge; text-type knowledge; source language (SL) knowledge; subject area (‘real-world’)
knowledge; and contrastive knowledge.
Add to this the decoding skills of reading and encoding skills of writing and we have a plausible initial listing of areas
which need to be included in any specification of the translator’s competence.
 It seems indisputable that the translator must know (a) how propositions are structured (semantic knowledge), (b)
how clauses can be synthesized to carry propositional content and analysed to retrieve the content embedded as
information-bearing text and the text decomposed into the clause (pragmatic knowledge). Lack of knowledge or control
in any of the three cases would mean that the translator could not translate.

2.1.1 Ideal bilingual competence

An ‘ideal translator’ or ‘ideal bilingual’ would be “an abstraction from actual bilinguals engages in imperfectly
performing tasks of translation … but (unlike them) operating under none of the performance limitations that underlie
the imperfections of actual translation.”
“Translation theory is primarily concerned with an ideal bilingual reader-writer, who knows both languages perfectly
and is unaffected by such theoretically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention or
interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying this knowledge in actual performance.”
In methodological terms, such a view of the goals of translation theory would lead us to adopt a deductive rather
than an inductive approach to the discovery of translator competence: introspection, by the translator, into his or her
own mind in search of the knowledge (and, perhaps, the process) by means of which the product is created.

2.1.2 Expertise

An alternative, less abstract approach describes translation competence in terms of generalizations based on
inferences drawn from the observation of translator performance.
Inductive approach: finding features in the data of the product which suggest the existence of particular elements
and systematic relations in the process. It would have the effect of operationalizing the otherwise merely anecdotal
discussion of the ‘craft’ of translating.
The expert system is a specialized software which is ‘intended to allow users to benefit from the knowledge of an
expert human consultant. This knowledge is typically built into the system as a collection of rules, held as data, which
may be updated with use’.
An expert system contains, in essence, two basic components:

- A knowledge base which contains the combined knowledge and expertise of the domain.

- An inference mechanism (also known as an ‘inference engine’); software which can use the knowledge base to reason
or make inferences about the information contained there.

In addition, an expert system would need (a) a user interface which would allow a dialogue to be held between the
system and the user, (b) a monitor which would keep track of this dialogue, and (c) a knowledge acquisition system
which allows the knowledge base to be up-dated.
The translator expert system contains minimally the following knowledge:

(1) a knowledge base consisting of: source language knowledge, target language knowledge, text-type knowledge,
domain knowledge and contrastive knowledge.
(2) An inference mechanism which permits: the decoding of texts (SL texts) and the encoding of texts (TL texts.
2.1.3 Communicative competence

Final alternative: ‘communicative competence’ which would consist, minimally, of: “four areas of knowledge and
skills: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence”.

1. Grammatical competence: rules of the code; the knowledge and skills required to understand and express the
literal meaning of utterances.
 2. Sociolinguistic competence: knowledge of an ability to produce and understand utterances appropriately in
context.
3. Discourse competence: the ability to combine form and genres. This unity depends on cohesion in form and
coherence in meaning.
4. Strategic competence: the mastery of communication strategies which may be used to improve communication
or to compensate for breakdowns.
‘Translator communicative competence’: “the knowledge and ability possessed by the translator which permits
him/her to create communicative acts – discourse – which are not only (and not necessarily) grammatical but… socially
appropriate”.
A commitment to this position would make us assert that the translator must possess linguistic competence in both
languages and communicative competence in both cultures consisting of: (1) knowledge of the rules of the code which
govern usage and knowledge of and ability to utilize the conventions which constrain use; (2) knowledge of the options
available for the expression of all three macrofunctions of language and knowledge of and ability to use the options
available for making clauses count as speech acts in conformity with the community ground-rules for the production and
interpretation of a range of communicative acts (i.e. discourse); in order to “create, comprehend and use context-free
TEXTS as the means of participation in context-sensitive (situated) DISCOURSE”.

2.2 Translating; the model

2.2.1 Components and processes

We assume that the process of translating:

(1) Is a special case of the more general phenomenon of human information processing;
(2) Should be modelled in a way which reflects its position within the psychological domain of information
processing;
(3) Tales place in both short-term and long-term memory through devices for decoding text in the source language
(SL) and encoding text into the target language (TL), via a non-language-specific semantic representation;
(4) Operates at the linguistic level of clause, irrespective of whether the process is one of the analysis of incoming
signals or the synthesis of outgoing ones (monolingual, reading and/or writing, or bilingual, i.e. translation);
(5) Proceeds in both a bottom-up and a top-down manner in processing text and integrates both approaches by
means of a style of operation which is both cascaded and interactive, i.e. analysis or synthesis at one stage need
not be completed before the next stage is activated and revision is expected and permitted;
(6) Requires there to be, for both languages, (i) a visual word-recognition system and a writing system; (ii) a
syntactic processor which handles the options of the MOOD system and contains a (iii) frequent lexis store (FLS),
a lexical speech mechanism (LSM), a frequent structure store (FSS) and a parser, through which information
passes to (or from) a (iv) semantic processor which handles the options available in the TRANSITIVITY system
and exchanges information with a (v) pragmatic processor which handles the options available in the THEME
system, and there is also an (vi) idea organizer which follows and organizes the progression of the speech acts in
the text (and, if the text-type is not known, males inferences on the basis of the information available) as part of
the strategy for carrying out plans for attaining goals, devised and stored in the (vii) planner which is concerned
with creating plans for reaching goals of all kinds. Some of these plans may involve uses of language such as text-
processing. This might include translating a text and this decision might well have been made even before its
first clause had been processed.
The process is not a linear one in which stage follows stage in a strict order. It is an integrated process in which,
although every stage must be passed through, the order is not fixed and back-tracking, revision and cancellation of
previous decisions are the norm rather than the exception.
 We shall divide the process into analysis and synthesis and, within them, three distinguishable areas of operation: (1)
syntactic, (2) semantic and (3) pragmatic, which co-occur, roughly with the five stages which will be presented during the
discussion of writing: (1) parsing, (2) expression and (3) development, ideation and planning.

2.2.2 Analysis

2.2.2.1 Syntactic analysis

The first major stage in translating is, of necessity, reading the text. This requires there to be a visual word
recognition system which can distinguish words from non-words in the source language text (SLT). We envisage
processing as beginning with such recognition concentrated on the clause and converting the physical stimuli into a
‘whole’ which is perceived as a linear string of discrete symbols.
This initial processing supplies the input for the syntactic processing of the clause.
The default track through the processor would be for the clause (still in the form of a string of symbols) to pass
through both the frequent lexis store (FLS) and the frequent structure store (FSS) without recourse to either the lexical
search mechanism or the parser.
The FLS and FSS both have the function of relieving the short-term memory (STM) of unnecessary storage by allowing
large amount of data to by-pass the parser, in the case of structure, and the lexical search mechanism, in the case of
lexis, and be directed immediately to the semantic level during analysis or the writing system during synthesis.

(a) Frequent lexis store

This is the mental (psycholinguistic) correlate of the physical glossary or terminology database. The contents of such a
store would include terms of first and second order of informativity.

(b) Frequent structure store

A set of operations … that involves the exploitation of frequently occurring structures [which] undoubtedly are stored
in memory in their entirety as in a lexical item [with] direct access to phrases and sentences … nearly as rapid as it is for
individual words.
We imagine there to be one FLS and one FSS for each language the translator knows. It is to be expected that, for any
language, the contents of the FSS will contain a majority of entries which are the shared common property of the speech
community, but it is equally to be expected that each language user will have a different configuration of items which
can change over time.
The incoming string is passed initially to the FSS and then to the FLS. The ordering is important, since it is not unusual
for a reader to be able to parse a clause without understanding the meanings of the words in it.

(c) Parser
This has the task of analyzing any clause for which analysis appears necessary. Once this has been done, the clause
can continue through the process to the next step of the syntactic processing stage; accessing the FLS.
If the lexical items in the clause can be matched with items already stored in the FLS, it exits the syntactic stage and
enters the semantic for further processing. This, as we pointed out earlier, is the default route; the clause – now
analysed into its syntactic structure – passing through the FLS without delay. What could hold it up would be, at its most
extreme, comprehension of the structure but not the content.

(d) Lexical search mechanism

This has the task of probing and attempting to ‘make sense’ of any lexical item which cannot be matched with items
already stored in the FLS.
Unless the reader knows the dictionary definition, the lexical item cannot pass through the FLS and must be
processed by the LSM.
 Faced by this difficulty, the reader can adopt one of a number of strategies: (a) attempt to assign a meaning to the
item on the basis of its surrounding co-text; (b) ignore the item and hope that increasing information of a contextual
kind will provide a meaning or (c) search in memory for similar items; making use, that is, of some kind of internal
thesaurus. This third approach may lead to a tentative meaning.
It is clear that readers (and translators) deal with many of the stages of text-processing – both reading and writing –
through established routines; favourite ways of tackling a particular task. These routines have to be structured
(otherwise they would not work) and stored in memory in a manner which permits access to them (otherwise they could
not be re-used). The cognitive scientist would suggest that these routines form schemas (or schemata), scripts and
preferential strategies.
We imagine the FLS and FSS as themselves constituting schemas of a type which is specialized for dealing with
linguistic problems.
What entered the syntactic analyser as a string of symbols now leaves it as syntactic (MOOD) structure.
The clause is one and the same time representation of experience, and interactive exchange, and a message and now
enters the semantic analyser with information of this second kind (MOOD).

2.2.2.2 Semantic analysis

The semantic analyser has the task of ‘concept recovery’; retrieving the TRANSITIVITY relations which underlie the
syntactic structure of the clause.
The semantic processor serves to derive content from the syntactic structure supplied by the previous stage of
analysis.
In content terms, what must be discovered is what the process is which is being carried out, who the participants are
and how they relate to each other as participants in the process.
In speech act terms, we now have the propositional content but not the illocutionary force – the content but not the
purpose – and both are needed before we can assign the clause to a particular speech act.

2.2.2.3 Pragmatic analysis

The pragmatic processor has two tasks in relation to the information it receives from the previous stages of analysis:
(1) to isolate its thematic structure; (2) to provide a register analysis of it. The first is concerned with THEME (with the
distribution of information and whether this is in a marked or unmarked order). The second is concerned with register
(with stylistic characteristics including purpose), taking into account the three stylistic parameters of (a) tenor of
discourse: the relationship with the receiver which the sender indicates through the choices made in the text; (b) mode
of discourse: the medium selected for realizing the text; and (c) domain of discourse: the ‘field’ covered by the text; the
role it is playing in the communicative activity; what the clause is for; what the sender intended to convey; its
communicative value.
Simultaneously, the clause is assigned: (1) thematic structure and (2) register features: we can apply three stylistic
parameters to the clause: (a) in terms of tenor; (b) in terms of mode; (c) in terms of domain.
The domain provides an indication of purpose (the illocutionary force) which, when combined with the existing
information on content suggests a speech act and this label plus the rest of the information is passed on to the next
stage for further processing.
Two things now happen:

1- The information on the clause moves on with the stylistic specification and the tentative label to form a
completely language-free semantic representation. This constitutes the whole of the meaning of the thought
expressed in the clause as apprehended by the reader.
2- The analysis is fed the two remaining stages of analysis: the idea organizer and the planner.
 It is crucially important to recognize the difference between the language-free semantic representation (a set of
abstract concepts and relationships, which represent the whole of the thought expressed in the clause) and the
language-specific clause itself
The semantic representation is the result of the three-way analysis of the clause (and the basis of the three-way
synthesis of a new clause as we translate) and if we are even to begin to understand the process of translation, we must
recognize that we do not translate a clause from language A into a clause from language B. We break down the A clause
into its semantic representation and use that as the basis for the building of an alternative clause in another language
(i.e. translation) or in the same language (i.e. paraphrase).
For most language users, one would expect that, once the meaning has been extracted from the clause and
converted into its semantic representation, its syntactic form would be deleted from the working memory (the STM) and
its meaning alone stored (in the LTM). Translators, however, knowing that they will need to be aware of the thematic
markedness when they come to write the TLT, have presumably to retain some of the syntactic information, if only to be
able to avoid the parser at the synthesis stage.
Simultaneously, the whole analysis is fed into the idea organizer. This has the function of (a) integrating the analysis
with the developing overall layout of the text as one of a growing series as the reader works through, (b) returning from
time to time to monitor the accumulating information and (c) revising some semantic representations as necessary on
the basis of new information; a procedure which is well-attested by those translators who report that they read a text
right through before attempting to translate any of it.
Up to this point, the translator is a monolingual reader.
The decision to translate takes the idea – now stored as the semantic representation of the clause – through the
reverse process.

2.2.3 Synthesis

2.2.3.1 Pragmatic synthesis

The TL pragmatic processor receives all the information available in the semantic representation and is required to
cope with three key problems: (a) how to deal with the purpose of the original (preserve or alter); (b) how to deal with
the thematic structure of the original (preservation or alteration); and (c) how to deal with the style of the original
(replicate or not).

2.2.3.2 Semantic synthesis

The TL semantic processor receives an indication of the illocutionary force (the purpose) and works to create
structures to carry the propositional content and produce a satisfactory proposition to pass on to the next stage of
synthesis.

2.2.3.3 Syntactic synthesis

The TL syntactic processor accepts the input from the semantic stage, scans its FLS for suitable lexical items and
checks in the FSS for an appropriate clause-type which will represent the proposition. If there is no available clause
structure in the FSS to convey the particular meanings, the proposition is passed through the parser (which is now
functioning as a syntactic synthesizer) and, finally, the writing system is activated to realize the clause as a string of
symbols which constitute the target language text.
Finally, the process concludes in the same way as it did with the monolingual reader; the return to the original text
and the next clause.

2.3 Using the process to translate

2.3.2 Preparing to translate

Let us suppose (1) that we decide to translate and (2) that we intend to produce a poem; there are plenty of other
alternatives and the strategic options available to the literary translator in particular are considerable. They can be
presented as the extremes of five continua:

(1) To reproduce either forms (syntax and lexis) or the ideas (the semantic content) of the original;
(2) To retain the style of the original or adopt a different style; retain or abandon the source language text-form; for
example, to translate a poem as a poem or as prose;
(3) To retain the historical stylistic dimension of the original or to render it in contemporary form;
(4) To produce a text which reads like an original or one which reads like a translation;
(5) To add or omit words, phrases, clauses… or to attempt to transfer everything from source to target text.
The list does give us some indication of the kind of decision-making that is involved even at the beginning of the
translation of a text.
The first three techniques below are subdivisions of (1) literal and the remaining four of (2) free translation:

1. Borrowing: the carry-over of lexical items from the source language to the target language, normally without
formal or semantic modification;
2. Loan translation: the linear substitution of elements of one language by elements or the other (normally noun
phrases);
3. Literal translation: the replacement of source language syntactic structure by target language structure
(normally at clause level) which is isomorphic (or near isomorphic) in terms of number and type of lexical item
and synonymous in terms of content;
4. Transposition: the rendering of a source language element by target language elements which are semantically,
but not formally equivalent (because of, for example, word-class changes);
5. Modulation: shifting the point of view of the speaker;
6. Equivalence: the replacement of a stretch of source language (particularly idioms, clichés, proverbs and the like)
by its functional equivalent (greeting, etc.);
7. Adaptation: compensation for cultural differences between the two languages.

CAMPBELL – CHAPTER 8: TOWARDS A MODEL OF TRANSLATION COMPETENCE

Components of the model and their implications

A model of translation competence ought to do at least the following:

(a) Show whether translation competence is divisible into components, and if so describe those components and their
interrelationships.

(b) Be able to describe the developmental pathway taken in learning how to translate.

(c) Include means for describing the differences between the performances of different translators.

With regard to requirement (a), I have identified three components of a model of translation competence: target
language textual competence, disposition and monitoring competence. A key element in translation competence into
the second language was textual competence, or the ability to manipulate the genre potential of the target language by
deploying grammar and lexis above the level of the sentence.

Linguistic features in translation: these features had known distributional norms across authentic English texts. Among
the translators there was systematic stylistic variation ranging from language more typical of informal spoken English to
language more typical of formal written English. In this process, however, it began to appear that some variation was
due to a more general individual factor which I called disposition.

The third component – monitoring competence – is not theoretically underpinned. This component is based purely on
the empirical study of a practical problem.

The very act of proposing that a competence can be divided into separate underlying components implies the relative
independence of those components. With regard to requirement (b), it also implies the potential for the development of
the components through time.

Target language textual competence: substandard; pretextual; textual.

Disposition: risk-taking vs. prudent; persistent vs. capitulating.

Monitoring competence: low awareness of quality output and ineffective editing strategies; high awareness of quality of
output and effective editing strategies.

Relative independence of the components: The textual competence component is a facet of target language
competence – in fact, the ability to deploy the resources of the target language in a highly specializes way. The
disposition component reflects individual characteristics of the translator unrelated to language competence, and the
way in which these characteristics impact on the job of translating. The monitoring component has to do with both
target language competence and individual approach. While the components are relatively independent, there is,
however, the question of optimum combinations. The optimum combination appears to be high textual competence
and risk-taking but persistent disposition.

The developmental dimension: I believe that only the textual competence component can be considered
developmentally, and that it should be properly considered an aspect of second language acquisition.

Describing the differences between the performance of different translators: The problem with error-deduction
translation testing is that there appears to be no explicit learning theory on which it is based. Implicitly, there seems to
be an idea that a global competence can be assessed but no real consideration is given to any notion of learning or
underlying competence. There is no reason why the marking of a translation test should not include an analysis of
textual competence, disposition and monitoring competence.

Relationship of the model to other trends in translation research: Research in translation studies often lacks the element
of empirical validation. There is a dichotomy of standpoints in the linguistic theories from which models of translation
may be derived – the functional standpoint that concerns the relationship among the writer, the text and the real world
– and the neo-Cartesian standpoint that is concerned with mental processes. This work nods in both directions. On the
one hand, the notion of textual competence owes something to a functional standpoint by examining the details of how
translators can deploy language to meet the expectations of a particular readership. On the other hand, the notion of
disposition and monitoring competence belong more in the psycholinguistic or psychological domain: disposition
concerns how individuals’ translation performance is mediated by their overall individual approach; monitoring concerns
how and to what extent translation output is checked.

A model of the process ought to provide a coherent set of explanations for observed data, and, given the rift between
the functional and the neo-Cartesian views of language, should be grounded in one or the other in order to be coherent.
A model of translation competence need not meet this rigorous criterion because its aims are more modest; in the end it
asks why and how the abilities of translators differ and develop.
Wider applicability of the model: The model could be tested further by examining (a) different language pairs, (b)
different subjects, (c) different genres, and (d) translation into the first language.

Different language pairs: Replicating the model with different language pairs ought not to compromise the central point
that textual competence is a key facet of translation competence. It ought, however, to reveal differences of emphasis
from one language to another that could be useful for the implementation of the model.

Different genres: Genre is not socially neutral. One of the gateways for immigrants is to use the asset of language to
become an accredited translator, and the key to the gate is the ability to write in the language of power. This, then, is
why the genres studied here are significant.

Translation into the first language: Disposition reflect the individual’s approach to the task. If disposition is a non-
linguistic phenomenon, then it ought to be more or less common whether one is translating into the first language or
the second language. However, disposition may manifest itself slightly differently between the first language and the
second language.

Translation competence, pedagogy and assessment

There are four fundamental principles that follow from the idea of modelling translation competence:

1. Translation competence can be separated into relatively independence components, and those components can be
used as building blocks in curriculum design.

2. Translation education is a matter of intervention in the development of various components of translation

competence.

3. Students are likely to attain different levels of achievement in the various components of translation competence
given the imbalance in their bilingual skills.

4. The assessment of translation quality is best seen as a matter of profiling the competence of learners, rather than
simply measuring the quality of their output.

Students and translation competence

For student, a model of translation competence can be used to provide a source of knowledge about their level of
achievement. Without a model of translation competence student feedback is conventionally obtained through:

(a) Ephemeral reactions of teachers during discussion of translations generated around the class.

(b) Marked translations done as homework or individual class assignments.

(c) Ordinary academic grading of work done in supporting subjects such as language improvement work and contextual
studies.

A marked translation is characterized by:

Rapid feedback: A translation can be marked and returned within hours.

Feedback into teaching: The results of marking can be used as the basis of a following class.

Focus on specific teaching points: Where there are common errors in a batch of marked translations, the teacher can
focus on these in a following class.
Low reliability: The inability of the text to sample widely gives an inbuilt low reliability.

Face validity: The test has face validity in that it has the appearance of testing the skill that is being taught.

A translation competence profile has these characteristics:

Slow feedback: Profiling competence is slow and incremental.

Feedback into learning: The information given in a translation competence profile is likely to shape the way the student
learns, rather than the way the teacher teaches.

Focus on underlying competences: The profile addresses individual components of competence.

Potentially high reliability: The profile is likely to be more reliable in the sense that it is obtained systematically over
time.

Construct validity: The fact that it is based on a theory of learning means that the profile will have a high construct
validity.

The complementarity of the marked translation and the translation competence profile means that the student is best
served by both kinds of feedback: marked translations shape teaching, a profile shapes learning.

Teachers and translation competence

Our model of translation competence impinges on the teacher in at least four ways:

1. In the diagnosis of student problems.

2. In the design of individualized teaching and learning strategies.

3. In the evaluation of teaching.

4. In student assessment.

Diagnosis of student problems

Diagnosis of student problems in translation can only be effective if based on the idea of separable underlying
competences.

Design of individualized teaching and learning strategies

While actual translation will be a central teaching and learning strategy in any programme of translator education, the
notion of separable translation competences allows for the design of other strategies which may not involve actual
translation.

Using translation competence as the focus allows much of the responsibility to shift to the student through accurately
focused individualized work.

The evaluation of teaching

The use of a translation competence profile is likely to provide information that will contribute to the evaluation of
teaching. The key to the process is that the profile will provide comparative data more effectively than other methods.
The evaluation of teaching ought to be made, in part at least, on the basis of progress in the development of the
competences. The question that a longitudinal translation competence profile can ask on the teacher’s behalf is, then,
‘To what extent did by teaching cause progress in class X this year as opposed to last year?’

Student assessment: assessment can, then, be based on ‘objective’ data from the translation competence profile, and
more ‘subjective’ professional judgement applied to tests and examinations.

Accrediting authorities and translation competence

Accrediting testing and reliability: Test reliability is of crucial importance to accrediting bodies, who are charged with
providing a guarantee to the public that a translator’s work is to be relied on. Educational measurement and evaluation
theory offers a number of ways of assessing test reliability.

To return to the central problem: can we find a way to judge whether a translation test will give a consistent result, so
that the clients of accredited translators can have confidence in the test? Given the difficulties outlined above, the only
recourse is to judgements of inter-marker reliability. In this case, one marker’s set of scores for a group of subjects is
correlated with another marker’s scores for the same subjects on the same test.

Accreditation tests and validity

Several types of validity: concurrent validity; predictive validity; ecological validity; construct validity; face validity.

Concurrent validity is a good correlation between it and anther test intended to measure the same thing. Unfortunately,
there is no accepted alternative to translation testing, and concurrent validity cannot easily be judged. A model of
translation competence can, however, solve this problem by specifying the separate components of competence, so
that they can be tested independently.

Predictive validity concerns whether the results of a test correlate with some behavior that the test predicts. Here we
are concerned with whether a translation test provides the grounds for an accrediting authority to predict confidently
that a candidate is fit to practice professionally, and it seems that the matter is tied up with the test conditions and the
nature of the texts involved.

Ecological validity: a valid test is one that includes all the language situations that will be relevant to the candidate. For
translation, ecological validity presents a serious worry unless we are confident that a couple of texts will provide a good
enough global view for us to be sure that the candidates can handle anything thrust on them in real life.

Construct validity: Do the tests concur with the theory on which they are based?

Face validity: the extent to which the test looks like a test of what it professes to test. Here translation tests score both
high and low. The high score derives from the fact that the candidate sits, pen in hand, doing something very much like
what they hope to do professionally. Translation accreditation tests score low, however, when they present texts that
are unlike those that candidates are likely to meet in real life. Use extracts rather than full texts. One way to avoid this
problem (and increase the face validity of the tests) is by including long sections of texts before and after the section to
be translated.

STEINER - CHAPTER 2

Any thorough reading of a text out of the past of one’s own language and literature is a manifold act of interpretation. In
the great majority of cases, this act is hardly performed or even consciously recognized. At best, the common reader will
rely on what instant crutches footnotes or a glossary provide.
So far as we experience and ‘realize’ them in linear progression, time and language are intimately related: they move
and the arrow is never in the same place.

Certain sacred and magical tongues can be preserved in a condition of artificial stasis. But ordinary language is, literally
at every moment, subject to mutation. At a deeper level, the relative dimensions and intensities of the spoken and the
unspoken alter. Different civilizations, different epochs do not necessarily produce the same ‘speech mass’; certain
cultures speak less than others; some modes of sensibility prize taciturnity and elision, others reward proxility and
semantic ornamentation. So far as language is mirror or counterstatement to the world, or most plausibly an
interpretation of the reflective with the creative along an ‘interface’ of which we have no adequate formal model, it
changes as rapidly and in as many ways as human experience itself.

Do languages wane, do their powers of shaping response atrophy? Are there linguistic reflexes which have slowed and
lost vital exactitude? The danger in putting the question this way is obvious: to think of the life and death of language in
organic, temporal terms may be an animist fiction. Languages are wholly arbitrary sets of signals and conventionalized
counters. We do not ascribe feelings or some mystery of autonomous being to chess pieces. Yet the intimation of life-
force and the concomitant notion of linguistic decay are difficult to discard.

Every language-act has a temporal determinant. No semantic form is timeless. When using a word we wake into
resonance, as it were, its entire previous history. A text is embedded in specific historical time; it has what linguists call a
diachronic structure. To read fully is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech
actually occurs.

The complete penetrative grasp of a text, the complete discovery and recreative apprehension of its life-forms, is an act
whose realization can be precisely felt but is nearly impossible to paraphrase or systematize. An informed, avid
awareness of the history of the relevant language, of the transforming energies of feeling which make of syntax a record
of social being, is indispensable. One must master the temporal and local setting of one’s text, the moorings which
attach even the most idiosyncratic of poetic expressions to the surrounding idiom. Familiarity with an author, the kind of
restive intimacy which demands knowledge of all his work, will facilitate understanding at any given point. But neither
erudition nor industry make up the sum of insight, the intuitive thrust to the centre.

Where the most thorough possible interpretation occurs, where our sensibility appropriates its object while, in this
appropriation, guarding, quickening that object’s autonomous life, the process is one of ‘original repetition’. We re-
enact, in the bounds of our own secondary but momentarily heightened, educated consciousness, the creation by the
artist. Ultimate connoisseurship is a kind of finite mimesis: through it the painting or the literary text is made new –
though obviously in that reflected, dependent sense which Plato gave to the concept of ‘imitation’. The degree of re-
creative immediacy varies.

In their use of ‘speculative instruments’, critic, editor, actor, and reader are on common ground. Through their diversely
accentuated but cognate needs, written language achieves a continuation of life. It is they who see to it that literature is
news that stays news.

‘Interpretation’ is that which gives language life beyond the moment and place of immediate utterance or transcription.
Interpreter is commonly used to mean translator.

This, I believe, is the vital starting point.

When we read or hear language-statement from the past, we translate. Reader, actor, editor are translators of language
out of time. The schematic model of translation is one in which a message from a source-language passes into a
receptor-language via transformational process. The barrier is the obvious fact that one language differs from the other,
that an interpretative transfer, sometimes, albeit misleadingly, described as encoding and decoding, must occur so that
the message ‘gets through’. Exactly the same model is operative within a single language. But here the barrier or
distance between source and receptor is time. Certain elements will elude complete comprehension or revival. The
time-barrier may be more intractable than that of linguistic difference. Any bilingual translator is acquainted with the
phenomenon of ‘false friends’ or mutually untranslatable cognates. The ‘translator within’ has to cope with subtler
treasons. Words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully
established context. Where a passage is historically remote, the business of internal translation tends towards being a
bilingual process: The more seemingly standardized the language, the more covert are indices of semantic dating. We
read as if time has had a stop. Thus a good deal of our theatre and the mass of our current literacy are founded on lazy
translation. The received message is thinned and distorted.

The existence of art and literature, the reality of felt history in a community, depend on a never-ending, though very
often unconscious, act of internal translation. It is no overstatement to say that we possess civilization because we have
learnt to translate out of time.

CHAPTER 3

Since Saussure, linguists distinguish between a diachronic (vertical) and synchronic (horizontal) structure of language.
This distinction applies also to internal translation. If culture depends on the transmission of meaning across time it
depends also on the transfer of meaning in space.

There is a centrifugal impulse in language. Languages that extend over a large physical terrain will engender regional
modes and dialects. In many important languages, differences of dialect have polarized to the degree that we are almost
dealing with distinct tongues.

Regional, dialectal disparities are the easiest to identify. Any body of language, spoken at the same time in a complex
community, is in fact rifted by much subtler differentiations. These relate to social status, ideology, profession, age and
sex.

Far more important and diffuse are the uses of inflection, grammatical structure, and word-choice by different social
classes and ethnic groups to affirm their respective identities and to affront one another. Languages conceal and
internalize more, perhaps, than convey outwardly.

Polysemy, the capacity of the same word to mean different things, such difference ranging from nuance to antithesis,
characterizes the language of ideology. Competing ideologies rarely create new terminologies. When antithetical
meanings are forced upon the same word, when the conceptual reach and valuation of a word can be altered by political
decree, language loses credibility. Translation in the ordinary sense becomes impossible.

At any given time a community and in the history of the language, speech modulates across generations. Or as psycho-
linguists put it, there are ‘phenomena of age grading’ in all known languages.

In most societies and throughout history, the status of women has been akin to that of children. Both groups are
maintained in a condition of privileged inferiority. Both suffer obvious modes of exploitation – sexual, legal, economic –
while benefiting from a mythology of special regard. Under sociological and psychological pressure, both minorities have
developed internal codes of communication and defense. There is a language-world of women as there is of children.

Sex is a profoundly semantic act. Like language, it is subject to the shaping force of social convention, rules of
proceeding, and accumulated precedent. To speak and make love is to enact a distinctive twofold universality: both
forms of communication are universals of human physiology as well as of social evolution. Together they generate the
history of self-consciousness. The seminal and the semantic functions determine the genetic and social structure of
human experience. Together they construe the grammar of being.

Any model of communication is at the same time a model of translation, of a vertical or horizontal transfer of
significance. No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the
same things, to send identical signals of valuation and inference. Neither do two human beings. Each living person
draws, deliberately or in immediate habit, on two sources of linguistic supply: the current vulgate corresponding to his
level of literacy, and a private thesaurus. Part of the answer to the notorious logical conundrum as to whether or not
there can be ‘private language’ is that aspects of every language-act are unique and individual. They form what linguists
call an ‘idiolect’. The element of privacy in language makes possible a crucial, though little understood, linguistic
function. Its importance relates a study of translation to a theory of language as such. Obviously, we speak to
communicate. But also to conceal, to leave unspoken.

A human being performs an act of translation, in the full sense of the world, when receiving a speech-message from any
other human being. Time, distance, disparities in outlook or assumed reference, make this act more or less difficult.
Intimacy, be it of hatred or of love, can be defined as confident, quasi-immediate translation. With intimacy, the external
vulgate and the private mass of language grow more and more concordant.

‘Translation’, properly understood, is a special case of the arc of communication which every successful speech-act
closes within a given language. The model ‘sender to receiver’ which represents any semiological and semantic process
is ontologically equivalent to the model ‘source-language to receptor-language’ used in the theory of translation. In both
schemes there is ‘in the middle’ an operation of interpretive decipherment, an encoding-decoding function or synapse.
Inside or between languages, human communication equals translation. A study of translation is a study of language.

The affair at Babel confirmed and externalized the never-ending task of the translator – it did not initiate it.

ROSEMARY MACKENZIE – THE PLACE OF LANGUAGE TEACHING IN A QUALITY ORIENTED TRANSLATOR’S TRAINING
PROGRAMME

I define translating as the action of transferring a message across linguistic and cultural boundaries in such a way as to
produce the effect desired by the sender of the message on its recipient in the target culture and professional
translation as this activity when carried out by trained translators. For translation to be successful, knowledge of at least
two languages and cultures is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition.

What translators need more than anything else is the ability, firstly to recognize where their knowledge or skills are
lacking, and secondly to supplement these inadequacies through information search and cooperative activities.

Language is a tool for the translator rather than the object of study. The translator must be taught to use the tool
skillfully and appropriately, which implies that teaching should concentrate on the use of the language in communication
rather than on the language itself.

The translator also needs knowledge of text types and communication strategies in the languages and cultures
concerned, and must be able to make decisions about what is needed in a particular situation and how to produce it.
That is, translators need to be able to make use of certain translation strategies. In addition, translators require broad
general knowledge and often specialized knowledge of the subject matter in question.

A basic knowledge of linguistics is necessary in order to be able to talk about language, and history of the language is
important because it helps to explain why the language is as it is, but the main emphasis should be on the use of the
language for communication – on reading and producing texts of different types. At the same time equal importance
should be given to the mother tongue, or language of habitual use.
Translators also need to master methods of working: translators must know how to translate, and more than that, how
to translate as professionals providing a professional service, which involves providing the requester of a translation
with the text they need for their particular purpose and in their particular situation.

As no human being can possibly have a mastery of all the styles and registers of language, even their own mother
tongue, far less have expert knowledge of all the subjects that may be encountered in the everyday work of a translator,
would-be professional translators have to learn the strategies for solving the problems that arise from these facts. This
third component is the methodological and professional component.

The fourth component is the study of translation theory. Knowledge of the history and theory of translation increases
the translator’s self-awareness, commitment and professionalism.

Cooperative model of translation, based on the way that translators work in quality-oriented translation company.
Quality in this sense is understood as providing a product or service that meets the client’s needs, delivered at the
agreed time and at the agreed price. Quality in translation company environment involves teamwork at every stage of
the production and delivery chain, including cooperation with the client. Quality thus means team work at the pre-
translation (specification, preparation), translation and post-translation (evaluation, revision) phases.

UNIDAD 3: La traducción de textos sensibles

Rose – Translation as Literary Criticism

Chapter 2: The Compatibility of Translation and Literary Criticism

Translation and literary criticism: in this coupling, translation studies leads, follows and supports. Literary criticism is
dependent on translation, which, in turn, gains from the scrutiny of the latter. In tandem, translation and criticism
enhance the understanding and appreciation of literature. For the serious study of literature they should be considered
an indispensable combination.

Without translation, literatures could not be experienced outside their usual areas of language use. Without criticism,
literatures could not build up the traditions that help preserve and disseminate them. When a literature loses the active
users of its first language of expression, it is lost in substance as well, unless translations have survived as records.

Translators and thus translations are mediators. Mediators may be inherently incapable of complete neutrality. And yet,
they are indispensable links. It will be argued here that they not only cross boundaries, they also simultaneously set
them and break them.

What both translation and literary criticism can be in certain circumstances is a distillation or expansion of the text in
question, but neither necessarily results in a finer product or higher mental process.

Both translation and literary criticism are, as copyright law attests, derivative, deriving from a prior text.

Literary translation is a transfer of distinctive features of a literary work into a language other than that of the work’s
first composition. But literary translation is also a form of literary criticism.

What translating does is to help us get inside literature. We can do this both as translators, professional or amateur, and
as literary critics, provided we make use of translating.

Chapter 3: Illustrated Historical Overview Where literary criticism is concerned, the history of translation studies is
essentially a record of successive guides to pleasing literary taste. Translation theory should usually be punctuated with
quotation marks, i.e. translation ‘theory’. It is frequently a set of recommendations for adhering to accepted rhetorical
practices as the recommender understands them. ‘Accepted rhetorical practices’ should be put in quotation marks also,
for they are always a function of the taste of the rhetoricians issuing the pronouncement, and they are influenced in
turn by the norms of the era.

A dominant style affects translation and, as translation receives criticism, it calls forth re-translation, by then due for
changes anyway because of the ensuing changes in usage. Such changes include the expected shifts in grammar and
lexicon in a dynamic language. They include also trends in literary rhetoric, the degree of literary involvement with social
history, and the oscillations in prestige of translation in target literature.

In terms of the relationship between translation and literary criticism, the primary integrity of a text is its first-language
textuality. The ensuing socio-political scene (its contentextuality) and the relations with other literary works and
traditions (its intertextuality) continually subject it to apparent changes. Indeed, in time, the changes may become just
as real as the originary ‘meanings’, which may require exegetical recall.

DE BEAUGRANDE – CHAPTER 3: THE ROLE OF READING IN POETIC TRANSLATING

One would be hard put to discover a translation of poetry that is entirely free from what appear to be errors. It is more
probable that the errors derive from inaccurate reading than from inaccurate writing.

When errors are noticed, they tend to be attributed to the translator’s writing strategies rather than his or her reading
strategies.

The basis of the act of translation is not the original text, but rather the representation of the text that is eventually
generated in the translator’s mind. We are dealing with ta text type whose comprehension cannot be taken for granted,
or “eliminated” as a chance factor. Kade argues that one can translate without fully understanding the material, but by
proceeding on the basis of “other criteria”. Of course, much translating in actual practice is in fact done by those who
have not fully understood the material. If we examine a representative sample of translated poetry, we might even find
this the rule rather than the exception. All the same, it cannot be the function of theory to eliminate from consideration
troublesome aspects of common practice: theory must rather account for the sources of troubles in a systematic way.

The mental representation of the text that finally is registered in the translator’s mind is not identical with the original
text in a number of ways. The translator has subjected the text to a process of rearrangement. The translator-reader has
possibly added some components out of his or her set of knowledge, beliefs, and expectations. Even these few
considerations begin to indicate why two translators seldom arrive at the same translation of a given text. At least some
errors or non-equivalences between original and translation derive from discrepancies between the original text and its
representation in the mind of the translator. Even if the original text is used as a reference, the mental version may
interfere with an impartial evaluation.

Reading and writing strategies are closely related. I assume that a writer first generates a stretch of discourse and then
(whether this stretch is actually written down or not) evaluates it with regard to its effectiveness in conveying the
mental representation that motivated the discourse in the first place.

The translator cannot produce an equivalent text – I have defined equivalence as the property of being able to represent
the original text to a foreign reader – unless he or she is able to estimate accurately the response of potential readers to
the translation.

The reader perspective is the most conductive avenue to approach the issue of translatability. It has been maintained
that whatever can be meaningfully formulated can also be translated. To put it more exactly: a thematic base of
information should, with the appropriate mediation, be expressible in any language. But there are pragmatic constraints
to be noted. If there are no humans that still know and understand a given language, there is no reason to translate a
text into that language. Motivation is also questionable if there are still humans that know the language, but who would
be unable to process a particular text because the latter lies wholly outside their expectations about discourse. The
introduction of a foreign literary work has often contributed to new developments in the literary conventions of a
culture. But this cannot occur if that foreign work does not share at least some features identifiable within the context
of the culture. We conclude that a text can be classed as translatable into a given language only if the resulting
translated text fulfills at least some of the reader expectations in that language concerning the constitution and
transmission of discourse.

In many instances, the competence of the translator is inadequate: a) the translator is lacking in knowledge and
experience in one of the languages involved, perhaps even both; b) the translator’s structuration competence in reading,
writing , or both, is not sufficiently developed; c) the translator’s poetic competence with respect to one of the cultures,
or both, is faulty. Each of these three flaws, or any mixture of them, is likely to result in the production of texts that do
not elicit even a reasonable degree of similar reader responses to those elicited by the original.

We might say that poetic translating consists of several phases: (1) translating the written text into a mental
representation; (2) collating instances of non-expected usage with possible expected equivalents; (3) rearranging smaller
or larger sequences according to their communicative content; (4) collecting and transferring information contained in
the context and co-text to the interpretation of problematic elements; (5) finding goal-language exponents of the overall
mental representation obtained in phases through 4; (6) collating the original text against both the translation under
production and the multi-level mental representation; (7) determining reader responses to the final translation,
consulting informants if possible. It does matter whether a translator is aware of these various forms. But if any are
wholly omitted, the entire process becomes fragmentary and the total act of communication may be unsuccessful.

As a means of communication, literary texts represent a relatively incomplete medium. Readers must reconstruct the
relationships between a sequence of conventional symbols (though not necessarily conventionally used) and some
perspective of whatever the readers take to be the real world, or a possible world sharing at least some features of the
real world.

Fictional texts present at least some elements of the real world, but potentially rearranged or altered, together with at
least some elements (notably people) that have no direct basis in the real world. This combination creates its own world,
its own alternate version of reality; the communicative aspect of this alternate version is not just its innovative nature
but, more important, its relationship to the readers’ conventional version of reality: the tension between the two and
the significance of the differences. The dynamics of the act of reading can be found in the demands that a text makes
upon the readers’ awareness and experience. First, that a text makes upon the reads must themselves supply some of
the perceptions not presented in the text. Secondly, readers reduce in this way the overall “undefinedness” of the text
as compared with actual experience. Thirdly, in order to accomplish the first two tasks, readers must actualize the
potential of language elements to refer to things in the real world. Fourthly, obstacles in a text which impede mental
processing must be overcome. The meaning potential of a text remains constant, but the possibilities for actualizing that
potential change along with the “horizons” of readers.

The above considerations are relevant to the theory and practice of poetic translating in several ways. First, it is
essential to preserve the meaning potential of a text during translation. As a reader the translator naturally tends to
complete the text, filling in gaps or supplying details and responses at appropriate points. There will be a constant
danger that the translator will render into the goal language not just the meaning potential of the text, but the
translator’s own additions and responses.
Recent experimentation has shown that poetry communicates large quantities of information in a relatively small
number of signs, that is, poetry has a low level of redundancy. Low redundancy levels in texts are likely to cause a wider
spread of interpretations than would apply to texts with high redundancy.

A text appears as a linear sequence of components.

It is clear that morphemes cannot be read and comprehended by themselves, but only in co-ordination with the
components containing the information to which the morphemes point. Furthermore, many components of texts are
included for other reasons than to convey new information to readers. In a technical sense, components which prepare
for or reinforce the transmission of new information might be called redundant, but they are nonetheless indispensable
for comprehension. Redundancy allows readers to process texts fairly rapidly, because attention can be distributed
according to whether components contain, or are likely to contain, new information.

This is no way to represent variations in informational prominence of we adhere to the convention of the linear
sequence. It would be more accurate to assume that the mind retains not a level sequence, but a topography with some
information stored higher, that is, perceptually more prominent, than other.

It is by no means improbable that poetic texts will fail to conform to the reader’s expectations. The integration of reader
components into the text be much more complex and may entail a number of attempts and exchanges.

Reading skills must require the development of rearrangement and evaluation strategies that make the transition from
the written medium to the mental representation possible.

Even the processed version of the text that is represented in the mind is not stored in any but short-term memory. For
long-term storage, the initial mental version must be subjected to a process of combining, reducing, rearranging, or
deleting certain information. Priorities are established concerning what is considered dispensable in accordance with
general expectations, priorities, and interests of the readers. The mechanisms involved resemble those strategies which
are applied to language in another activity, namely, the production of non-ordinary texts, because here, also, elements
are supplied, removed, replaced, or altered.

The task of the translator as reader differs from that of the other readers. An informative contrast can be found in the
task of the literary critic. The critic not only reads and responds to the text, but tries to investigate whether his or her
own response can claim general validity. Not infrequently, the evidence used to make this decision is one-sided and
accepted all too readily. A third contributor to the problem lies in the emotional and ideological predispositions of the
individual critics.

Poetic texts, by virtue of their non-ordinariness and non-expectedness, place limitations upon the extent to which
author and reader share a common code. An additional stipulation must be added: a common code or an interpretable
modification of that code. A communicative gap results from the modification of the code, and if the reader has strong
ideological commitments, the gap naturally tends to be filled with information extrinsically controlled by those
commitments.

This is not to imply that literary criticism is wholly or even predominantly a process of ideological interpreting, but only
that ideologically unbalanced interpreting is possible when the methodology of criticism is inexplicit and unclear.

Of course, the translator/reader will respond to the text by supplying information at the appropriate points, just as the
author intended. But the translator must further respect the author’s intention by leaving the text undefined and
producing a translation with which a foreign reader can interact in a corresponding way. This entails particular
awareness of the positioning and constitution of text signals, especially non-ordinary and non-expected ones. Rather
than relying only on intuition or memory, the translator should gather data about usage systematically.
CHAPTER 4: WORDS, CO-TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

From the point of view of transformational grammar, meaning has been defined as an interpretation performed upon
syntactic structures. The marker was postulated to be a component of meaning, such as the classifiers (animate) vs.
(inanimate), or (concrete) vs. (abstract), similar to the way in which syntactic categories were postulated as entities that
“underlie” various elements.

The meanings of a given word can be classed as a set of markers normally assignable to that word. When the word
occurs in a text, not all of those markers are necessarily activated, because the potential meaning often exceeds in range
the actual meaning in a particular context. In terms of semantic logic, the intension exceeds the extension. Therefore, if
we choose to accept the marker in the sense intended by structural semantics, we need an explanation of how contexts
affect markers. At first sight, it is clear that at least some markers must be deleted by the context in order to reduce the
range of meaning. It implies that every word carries about a cargo of markers that are partially deleted in each
occurrence. That fails to take into consideration the interaction of texts with situations of use and expectations about
those situations. It is more probable that the meaning potential of words is automatically reduced somewhat as soon as
a context and a topic are established in a particular situation, and that this reduction controls the expectations of both
the sender and the recipient of a message within the situation. But more must occur than simple reduction. Figurative
use of language such as metaphoring must entail alteration or replacement of markers. Markers are stored potential
meanings subject to information-processing strategies that respond to co-text and context. When words are used by the
sender of a message and understood by the recipient, the strategies are activated as soon as the topic and context are
indicated.

The strategies and expectations activated by a context do not solve all problems or overcome all obstacles. There are
still a number of possible ambiguities. In some instances, there are no immediately evident indicators of which of two or
more possible readings is the intended one.

The context of poetic communication entails a set of general expectations about what will appear in the text and a set of
appropriate processing strategies.

Polyvalence: by this term I do not mean the simple fact that one word has more than one meaning, but rather the
situation in which a communicative context does not provide the information needed to decide upon a single possible
meaning. Polyvalence prevails also in the second occurrence when neither of two possible meanings agrees with the
information in the context. But by a close evaluation of the available information, polyvalence can be eliminated. Of
course, polyvalence may occur intentionally when an author intends more than one meaning to be activated for a single
item or set of items. But most readers feel some need to proceed on the basis of single readings rather than multiple. If
a word-index is available, the reader can follow up a doubtful item to determine how the author customarily uses it.

Other ways in which the text compels the readers in a certain direction, chiefly by failing to conform to reader strategies
and expectations, and the author apparently intends to fill that vacuum by creating expectations that accord with his
own particular logic and language.

HOLMES – Translated!

Holmes – Rebuilding the Bridge at Bommel: Notes on the Limits of Translatability

Is poetry translatable? At one extreme are those who consider that every text, hence all poetry, can he transferred from
one language to another without substantial loss. Let us call them the radical left. At the opposite extreme are those
who contend that no text in one language is ever completely equivalent to any text in another language, and
consequently that all translation is impossible. Let us call them the radical right. In translation as in politics, most people
take their stance in between the two extremes, believing that translation, of poetry at any rate, is sometimes possible,
sometimes impossible.

The problems would seem to group themselves into three planes or levels, reflective of the three backgrounds against
which any poem manifests itself. First of all, as a message stated in words, a poem is set in a linguistic context: the poet
draws upon a part of the expressive means of the specific language he is using, in order to communicate something, and
the words of the poem take on significance for the reader only when interpreted within that context. In the second
place, a poem is written in interaction with a whole body of poetry existing within a given literary tradition, and the
rhythm, metre, rhyme and assonances of the poem, but also its imagery, themes, and tropio, are intimately linked with
those in that whole array of other texts; in other words, the poem is set in what may be called a literary intertext.
Finally, the poem exists within a socio-cultural situation, in which objects, symbols, and abstract concepts function in a
way that is never exactly the same in any other society or culture.

The basic problem facing the translator of a poem is that he must somehow “shift” the original poem not only to
another linguistic context but almost without exception also to another literary intertext and socio-cultural situation. On
each of these three planes, the choices confronting him range primarily on the axis “exoticizing” vs. “naturalizing”.

In the case of all but the most contemporary of poems, moreover, choices of this kind may be complicated by series of
choices on another axis, that of “historicizing” vs. “modernizing”.

What kinds of choices do translators actually make? Theorists have often argued that choices should be all of a piece: all
exoticizing and historicizing, with an emphasis on retention, or all naturalizing and modernizing, with an emphasis on re-
creation.

Such “pure culture” translations are rarely if ever actually made. In practice, translators perform a series of pragmatic
choices, here retentive, there re-creative, at this point historicizing or exoticizing, at that point modernizing or
naturalizing, and emphasizing now this plane now that, at the cost of the other two.

Among contemporary translators, there would seem to be a marked tendency towards modernization and naturalization
of the linguistic context, paired with a similar but less clear tendency in the same direction in regard to the literary
intertext, but an opposing tendency towards historicizing and exoticizing in the socio-cultural situation.

Earlier I defined the verse translator’s goal as a dual one: producing a text which is a translation of the original poem and
is at the same time a poem in its own right within the target language. Translation lends itself to consideration in the
light of the theory of games. The translation of a text consists of a game set by the translator: the game of producing an
acceptable translation. It is a game with full rather than partial information, and a game against an imaginary opponent.
The two basic rules of the game of verse translation are that the final result (1) must match the original to a large
enough degree that it will be considered a translation (the criterion of minimum matching a minimum fit) and (2) must
be of such a nature that it will be considered a poem (the poetic criterion)

The poetic criterion entails a demand of unity or homogeneity: a poem can be defined as a coherent textual whole. Yet
the fact of translation, by its very nature, entails a basic dichotomy between source and target languages, literatures,
and cultures – a dichotomy with, moreover, a temporal as well as a spatial dimension. To harmonize the demand of
unity and the fact of dichotomy, the translator must resort to a game strategy of illusionism: accepting the dichotomy as
inevitable, he must map out a general strategy of selecting from his retentive and re-creative possibilities those which
will induce the illusion of unity.

We have arrived at a polyvalent situation: the verse translator, by virtue of the choices he is required to make in his
pursuit of the illusion of unity, presents one possible interpretation (out of many) of the original poem, re-emphasizing
certain aspects at the cost of others. It is for this reason that there will always be need of more than one translation of
any poem of importance, since several translations present more facets of the original than any one can do.

Some poems and parts of poems, however, by the clusters of problems they present, seem to defy the translator in his
attempts at achieving either an illusion or a minimum fit.

ON MATCHING AND MAKING MAPS: FROM A TRANSLATOR’S NOTEBOOK

No translation of a poem is ever “the same as” the poem itself. It can’t be, since everything about it is different: another
language, another tradition, another author, another audience.

Nor is a translation of a poem really “equivalent” to its original, at least in any strict sense.

“Equivalence”, like “sameness”, is asking too much. The languages and cultures to be bridged, however close they may
sometimes seem, are too far apart and too disparately structured for true equivalence to be possible. What the
translator strives for is “counterparts” or “matchings” – words, turns of phrase, and the rest, fulfilling functions in the
language of the translation and the culture of its reader that in many appropriate ways are closely akin (though never
truly equivalent) to those of the words etc. in the language and culture of the original and its reader.

In seeking “counterparts” or “matchings”, the translator is constantly faced by choices, choices he can make only on the
basis of his individual grasp (knowledge, sensibility, experience…) of the two languages and cultures involved, and with
the aid of his personal tastes and preferences. Two major levels or planes where choices are made: at the level of the
poem as an entity, that of the “macrostructure”, the translator finds that in selecting a specific counterpart for one
aspect of the original poem, he may have made it impossible to find a satisfactory counterpart for another aspect.

A poem that leans very close to prose, with no strict metre, no complex development of imagery, no highly connotative
use of language at various levels, may present few problems, and the translator will perhaps feel confident that he has
succeeded in finding satisfactory matchings for every major aspect of the poem. But if the original is a highly complex
structure exploiting a wide variety of possibilities in regard to metre, music, imagery, and idiom, together with a richness
in ambiguities and tonalities, the translator can hardly avoid concluding that somewhere something has to yield.

There are no “perfect” translations, few that even approach “perfection”. Some are better, some worse, but almost all
succeed in matching certain aspects of the original quite closely, and others only more remotely if at all. All translations
are maps, the territories are originals. And just as no single map of territory is suitable for every purpose, so is there no
“definitive” translation of a poem. What we need is a variety of inevitably less-than-definitive versions for a variety of
purposes.

However poor or rich the translation, the poem itself remains, a territory to be mapped by another translator (or the
same translator, discontent) another day.

Occasionally things work out differently. Two languages can chance to “interlock” at specific points, quite accidentally, in
such a fashion that the translation appears to come through more or less all of a piece. This happens all too rarely, but
when it does, the translation seems almost to write itself.

DESCRIBING LITERARY TRANSLATIONS: MODELS AND METHODS

It is very useful to make a distinction between the product-oriented study of translations and the process-oriented study
of translating. But this distinction cannot give the scholar leave to ignore the self-evident fact that the one is the result of
the other, and that the nature of the product cannot be understood without a comprehension of the nature of the
process.
The earliest explicit, more or less formalized models of the translation process were designed in the late forties and early
fifties as bases for programs of research into the feasibility of so-called automatic translation. These models started from
the notion that texts were strings of words (or “lexical items”) which could, in the main, be translated item by item, if
only a few allowances were made for the unfortunate tendency of languages to exhibit language-pair differences in
syntax and to create divergent exocentric (that is, “idiomatic”) phrases. Later this basically lexical-rank model was
replaced by a sentence-rank model, in which a source-language passage was converted into a receptor-language
passage via a tripartite process of analysis, kernel-level transfer, and restructuring.

A fundamental fact about texts is that they are both serial and structural. On these grounds, it has more recently been
suggested (though nowhere, as far as I know, clearly set out in model form) that the translation of texts takes place on
two planes: a serial plane, where one translates sentence by sentence, and a structural plane, on which one abstracts a
“mental conception” of the original text, then uses that mental conception as a kind of general criterion against which to
test each sentence during the formulation of the new, translated text.

The introduction of an abstract text-rank “mental conception” – or, as I propose to call it henceforward, “map” – would
seem to be further step forward.

I would question, however, whether one such map or mental conception is sufficient to model the actual translation
process adequately.

I have taken the further step of introducing three sets of rules by which specific phases of the translation process would
seem to be carried out. Of the three rule sets, the first, that of derivation rules (DR), determines the way in which the
translator abstracts his map of the source text from the text itself, and the third, that of projection rules (PR),
determines the way in which he makes use of his map of the prospective target text in order to formulate the text, while
the second, that of correspondence rules (CR) or matching rules (MR) – or, if one prefers, equivalence rules (ER) –
determines the way in which he develops his target-text map from his source-text map. That the first of the three
phases described here the translator shares with every reader of literary texts, the third with every writer; the second,
however, that of developing a target-text map from his source-text map by means of correspondence rules, is uniquely a
translational operation, and as such deserves our special attention.

This connection that the map of the source text, if the translator-to-be who abstracts it is a skilled and experienced
reader, will be a conglomerate of highly disparate bits of information. First, as a map of a linguistic artefact, it will
contain information, at a variety of ranks, regarding features of the text in its relation to the linguistic continuum within
which (or violating the rules of which) it is formulated, that is, contextual information. Secondly, as a map of a literary
artefact, it will contain information, at a variety of ranks, regarding features of the text in its relation to the literary
continuum within which (or rebelling against which) it is formulated, that is, intertextual information. Third, as a map of
socio-cultural artefact, it will contain information, at a variety of ranks, regarding features of the text in its relation to the
socio-cultural continuum within which (or transcending which) it is formulated, that is, situational information.

The translator, as soon as he sets about seeking correspondences with which to design his target-text map is confronted
by two dilemmas.

First, for each feature in his source-text map, at least two kinds of corresponding target-text map features will usually be
available. There will frequently be a feature which corresponds in form, but not in function: a homologue. There will
usually be a feature which also corresponds in function, but not in form – an analogue. And there may also be a feature
which corresponds in meaning, but in neither function nor form: a semantologue or semasiologue.

Second dilemma: the choice of a specific kind of correspondence in connection with one feature of the source-text map
determines the kind of correspondence available for another or others, indeed in some cases renders correspondence
for certain further features infeasible or even unattainable. The translator, whether or not he is conscious of it,
establishes a hierarchy of correspondences.

In the case of many less complex text types, of course, solutions to this problem of correspondence hierarchy are fairly
clear. The literary text, however, is a much more complex entity, which may at various points (or indeed simultaneously)
be informative, vocative, expressive, or for that matter meta-lingual or meta-literary. This makes the establishment of a
hierarchy of correspondence priorities a much less clear-cut problem, and various translators will choose various
solutions, none of which is demonstrably “right” or “wrong”, but usually “somewhere in between”.

The scholar who wishes to describe the relationship between the translated text and its original must attempt to
determine the features of the translator’s two maps and to discover his three systems of rules, those of derivation,
projection, and, above all, correspondence – in other words, the translator’s poetics.

RABASSA – CHAPTER 1: THE MANY FACES OF TREASON

The practice of translation is art. I say art and not craft because you can teach a craft but you cannot teach an art.

The most elemental of the facets of treason will be betrayal of the word, for the word is the very essence of language,
the metaphor for all things we see, feel, and imagine. Out of this we also have a betrayal of language. Languages are the
products of a culture, or perhaps the reverse. Treason against a culture will therefore be automatic as we betray its
words and speech as well as assorted other little items along the way.

Then we come to personal betrayals, those against the people involved in the act of translation. The first victim is the
author we are translating. As we betray the author the author we are automatically betraying our variegated readership
and at the same time we are passing on whatever bit of betrayal the author himself may have foisted on them in the
original. Lastly and most subtly we betray ourselves. We will sacrifice our best hunches in favor of some pedestrian norm
in fear of betraying the task we were set to do.

As is obvious, words are mere metaphors for things. There is more to it than this. If a word is a metaphor for a thing,
why does a single thing have so many metaphors in orbit about it? Here we have the dire consequences of Babel.

As it moves ahead (progresses?), a language will load a word down with all manner of cultural barnacles along the way,
bearing it off on a different tangent from a word in another tongue meant to describe the same thing. Among languages
there are ever so many terms used to denote the same object and by their very variety they beggar any possibility of
ascertaining the unique reality of said object. Even if a thing can be cloned the word that designates it cannot and any
attempt to reproduce it in another tongue is betrayal.

Some concepts seem to be exclusive property of one language and cannot be rightly conceived in another. As we borrow
from another language to enrich our own, more often than not there is treason afoot, if not in the meaning certainly in
the sound. A betrayal of language is many times the betrayal of words and at the same time it is a reflection of the
hurdles present in communicating between cultures. We tend to accumulate foreign sensitivities, sensibilities, and
reflexes into our own milieu with the requisite changes. This is a betrayal by the imposition of another culture.

Most of these matters merge to form an indirect betrayal of the author. He is a compendium of all these factors:
language, culture and individual words. These are, in fact, inseparable, and the author is their product, the same as what
he writes. His free will and originality only exist within the bounds of his culture. If he is to betray it, he betrays it from
within, which connotes intimate knowledge, while the translator betrays it from without, from an acquired reflective,
not reflexive awareness.
Within his cultural limits the author, as an individual, can, and indeed, must extend himself as far as he can to set himself
and his art apart from the commonplace, showing all the while whence he comes, doing this through language most of
all. With the translator we have quite the opposite situation. He cannot and must not set himself apart from the culture
laid out before him. To do so would indeed be treasonous. Nowhere is translation more dubious than here as we try to
translate into our own language and culture something that the author is translating into words within his culture and
still make it our own.

While all this is going on, there is a danger of the translator’s committing the saddest treason of all, betrayal of himself.
The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has
to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all the other essentials have already been provided, so he can just sit down
and write his ass off. But he is also a reader. He has to read the text closely to know what it’s all about.

Our translator must know that this is the best he can do in this place and at this time and must still recognize that his
work is, in a sense, unfinished. The translator must not betray his hunches. In translation as in writing, the proper word
is better than a less proper but standard one.

LEFEVERE – CHAPTER 4: THE FUNCTION OF TRANSLATION IN A CULTURE

From Text to Context: Categories for Further Analysis

Translation involves expertise. Translation also involves commission: a person in authority orders the translation to be
made. Translation fills, or is thought to fill, a need. Finally, translation involves trust: the intended reads who do not
know the original trust that the translation is a fair representation of that original. The readers trust the experts and, by
implication, those who check on the experts.

These are the categories for translation analysis that goes beyond individual texts: first, authority – not only the
authority of the patron, the person or institution commissioning or publishing the translation, but also the authority of a
culture viewed as the central culture in a given time or a geographical area and the authority of the text: second,
expertise, checked and guaranteed; and, third, trust, the king of trust that survives bad translations. Add two more: the
image of the source text a translator consciously or unconsciously sets out to develop and the readers, the intended
audience.

Audience: Different audiences need translations for different reasons. Children do not need the same translations as
adults. But different groups of adults also need different translations.

As soon as different translations had to be made for different groups, it became plainly impossible to formulate any but
the most trivial rules for the production of translation without taking into account the potential audience.

Authority - Patrons

Authority draws from the ideological parameters of the acceptable. It influences (sometimes outright dictates) the
selection of texts for translating as well as the ways in which those text are to be translated.

As publishers became more powerful in deciding what was going to be translated and how, the ideological parameters
set for translators began to widen, since publishers’ decisions were chiefly based on profit.

Whether an audience is reading the Bible or other works of literature, it often wants to see its own ideology and its own
universe of discourse mirrored in the translation. It likes to re-create the world in its own image, sometimes with
startling results.

Cultures
At certain times certain cultures are considered more prestigious, more “authoritative” than other, neighboring cultures
or successor cultures. A culture will be perceived as central by another if the perceiving culture believes it has much to
learn from the other. The central position a culture occupies is therefore a matter of comparative cultural prestige.

Members of “superior” cultures tend to look down on members of “inferior” cultures and to treat cavalierly the
literature of those cultures. The relation between superior and inferior cultures does not necessarily remain the same
over the centuries.

The attitude that uses one’s own culture as the yardstick by which to measure all other cultures is known as
ethnocentricity. I submit that all cultures have it but that only those who achieve some kind of superiority flaunt it.
Cultures that do not flaunt it would if they could, but since they cannot they pretend to be free of it. An ethnocentric
attitude allows members of a culture to remake the world in their image, without first having to realize how different
the reality of that world is. It produces translations that are tailored to the target culture exclusively and that screen out
whatever does not fit in with it.

Texts

Cultures that derive their ultimate authority from a text are likely to guard that text with special vigilance, since the
power of those empowered can be said to rest on it. Accordingly, translators of such texts are allowed little leeway.
Some sacred central texts are not allowed to be translated at all. Or, rather, true believers are not allowed to translate
it.

This kind of translation can be extended to works considered classics of world literature. It happens not infrequently that
a certain translation, the first translation of such a classic to be made into a certain language, remains an authoritative
text, even lives on as an authoritative text in its own right long after it has ceased to function as a translation.

Such authoritative texts/translations tend to acquire a timeless quality of their own, and readers do not easily part with
them. They come to trust the translator if for no reason than that the translation is the one they are familiar with.
Readers often feel reluctant to switch to another, newer translation, even if experts have pronounced it better. This
reflex is most pronounced regarding a culture’s central texts and explains the dogged survival of bad translations.

Authority Usurped

Translations share in the authority of the text they represent. One might say that translations usurp to some extent the
authority of their source texts. After all, it you have something to say, why not say it in your own right instead of
translating it. The answer may be not that you lack inspiration or artistic ability but that you believe what you have to
say may carry more weight if you say it in someone else’s name.

Perhaps the most glaring example is this cultural strategy is the so called pseudotranslation: a text that purports to be a
translation but is not.

Authority Bestowed

Translation usurps authority but it also bestows authority. It bestows authority on a language.

Translation forces a language to expand, and that expansion may be welcome as long as it is checked by the linguistic
community at large. Translation can also bestow the authority inherent in a language of authority on a text originally
written in another language lacking that authority.

The pervasive influence of translation is so great that these works written in other languages cease, after a while, to be
thought of as “foreign” to the language of authority.
Conversely, speakers of emerging languages tend to want to translate works of literature written in languages of
authority simply to prove that their languages are equally expressive.

Translation introduces new devices into the literatures by which it is received.

Image: Culture

Preserving the Self-Image of the Target Culture

Translations not only project an image of the work that is translated and, through it, of the world that work belongs to;
they also protect their own world against images that are too radically different, either by adapting them or by screening
them out.

Changing the Self-Image of the Target Culture

Some translations have significantly changed the image the target culture had of itself.

Some words that have gone on to play a significant part in the target culture “started out” as translations.

Acculturation

On the level of discourse the clash between two cultures can result in various forms of misunderstanding, of
acculturation, and all kinds of mixtures in between.

Good or ill fortune may therefore befall a translation as the result of a translator’s understanding or misunderstanding
of the original’s universe of discourse. Problems also arise, however, when the translator is fully aware of that universe
of discourse. Here one might ask how a translator’s strategy is affected by the extent to which the foreign culture is seen
as central to the development of the target culture. On the whole, translators more painstakingly retain universe-of-
discourse features belonging to a culture they consider central. Some may decide to retain the exotic flavor at all costs if
the exotic has a special flavor in their own universe of discourse.

In practice the problem of acculturation tends to solve itself as cultural environments grow closer together.

Challenging a Poetics

Cultures may resist translation because it is felt to threaten their self-image. Poetics may resist translation for the same
reason. In fact, translation provides probably the best way to gauge the influence of a poetics at a certain time in history
since it shows the degree to which translators have interiorized the poetics, the degree to which it has become “self-
evident” to them.

This attitude is fostered by the translator’s conviction of the central position, the superiority, of his own culture.

Translations play an important part in the struggle between rival poetics. The basic pattern is usually the same:
dissatisfaction with the dominant poetics takes the form of manifestos or declarations of intent drawn up by writers
subscribing to a new poetics and aimed at subverting the dominant poetics. The very fact that the new poetics is new is
likely to lead to the embarrassing situation in which “new” writers have little more than a blueprint to oppose to the
solid body of work produced (admittedly over a number of decades or centuries) in the established poetics.

The challengers begin to import their own “finished products”: Translations of writers who are as prestigious in their
own literature as the adherents of the established poetics in the target literature. These foreign writers “happen” to
have produced work that fits wonderfully well with the new poetics, or they can be shown to have done so, even if they
themselves were not aware of their role as “precursors”. That the products displayed by the adherents of the new
poetics are imported from prestigious foreign systems helps to brand the dominant poetics and its adherents as more or
less hopelessly provincial.

Imported products also tend to possess a certain immunity inside the target culture because they are situated on the
borderline between the “native” (and therefore subject to the full wrath of the dominant poetics) and the “foreign” (and
therefore relatively exempt from the rules of the dominant poetics). This ambiguous status allows translations to
embark on a course of subversion by infiltration.

Finally, poetics tends to be the level where the effective translatability or untranslatability of the source text is decided.

Expertise and Trust

Patrons commission translations and publish them. They do not check them. They leave that task to experts employed
to check one another’s expertise. The experts also delimit the poetological parameters of the translation: will the
finished product be acceptable as literature in the target culture? Will it conform to the poetics currently dominating
that culture?

Experts are supposed to guarantee that the trust readers place in various translations is not misplaced. But experts are
not always successful, not only because they do not always reach a consensus, but also because readers tend to place
less trust in the expert’s stamp of approval affixed to a translation in a translator’s reputation as a good translator.

CHAPTER 5: LITERARY TRANSLATION AND BEYOND

The study of translation has been eclipsed, and the status of the production of translations lowered, in the republic of
letters by a combination of at least four factors: The Romantic idea of literature as “secular scripture” and the
concomitant emphasis on originality, the Romantic equation of literature with language and the concomitant equation
of language with nation, the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century philologists’ insistence on reading texts in the
original only, and the enormous influence exerted by New Criticism with its almost exclusive emphasis on interpretation.

A view of literature that recognized the construction of the greatness of Great Books has to recognize the part played by
rewritings while not denying the intrinsic value of books themselves. Translations, monographs, extracts in anthologies,
and literary histories all have two features in common: they refer to books other than themselves and they claim to
represent these books. They have no reason to exist on their own. They are not “writing” as the texts they write about
are; they are “rewriting”. The paradox of literary evolution appears to be that writings (the writings of William Blake, for
example) hardly ever make it on their own. Rather, rewritings seem to be a vital factor in determining whether a writing
does or does not secure the label of greatness. Writings that are not rewritten in one way or another tend to sink
without a trace.

A view of literature that sees greatness as partly constructed will no longer be dominated by the production of
interpretations of what is given. The critic will no longer be the mediator, the priestlike figure. The canon will no longer
be accepted as self-evident or interpreted in its timeless given perfection. Instead, the critic will be the historian, the
sociologist, the technician, and the canon will be challenged, changed and analyzed in its historical evolution.

In such a view of literature the translator can become a technician among others, making texts available for study.

BASSNETT – CHAPTER 1: CENTRAL ISSUES

Language and culture

Although translation has a central core of linguistic activity, it belongs most properly to semiotics, the science that
studies sign systems or structures, sign processes and sign functions. Beyond the notion stressed by narrowly linguistic
approach, that translation involves the transfer of ‘meaning’ contained in one set of language signs into another set of
language signs through competent use of the dictionary and grammar, the process involved a whole set of extra-
linguistic criteria also.

Sapir: Experience is largely determined by the language habits of the community, and each separate structure
represents a separate reality.

Lotman: Language is a modelling system. Literature and art in general are secondary modelling systems, an indication of
the fact that they are derived from the primary modelling system of language. Language is the heart within the body of
culture, and it is the interaction between the two that results in the continuation of life-energy.

Types of translation

Jakobson distinguishes three types: Intralingual translation or rewording; interlingual translation or translation proper;
and intersemiotic translation or transmutation. Jakobson’s central problem in all types: while messages may serve as
adequate interpretations of code units or messages, there is ordinarily no full equivalence through translation. Because
complete equivalence cannot take place in any of his categories, Jakobson declares that all poetic art is therefore
technically untranslatable.

Mounin: translation as a series of operations of which the starting point and the end product are significations and
function within a given culture.

Decoding and recording

The translator operates criteria that transcend the purely linguistic, and a process of decoding and recording takes place.
Nida’s model of the translation process: source language text analysistransferrestructuringreceptor language
translation.

Ludskanov: Semiotic transformations are the replacements of the signs encoding a message by signs of another code,
preserving (so far as possible in the face of entropy) invariant information with respect to a given system of reference.

The question of semiotic transformation is further extended when considering the translation of simple noun. Sassure:
the structural relationship between the signified or concept and the signifier or the sound-image made by the word
constitutes the linguistic sign. Saussure also distinguished between the syntagmatic (or horizontal) relations that a word
has with the words that surround it in a sentence and the translator, like the specialist in advertising techniques, must
consider both the primary and secondary associative lines.

There is a distinction both between the objects signified and between the function and value of those objects in their
cultural context. The problem of equivalence here involves the utilization and perception of the object in a given
context.

Where there is such a rich set of semantic relationships, a word can be used in punning and word-play, a form of
humour that operates by confusing or mixing the various meanings.

Firth defines meaning as ‘a complex of relations of various kinds between the component terms of a context of
situation’.

The translator has to take the question of interpretation into account in addition to the problem of selecting a TL phrase
which will have a roughly similar meaning. Exact translation is impossible. In determining what to use in English, the
translator must:
(1) Accept the untranslatability of the SL phrase in the TL on the linguistic level.

(2) Accept the lack of a similar cultural convention in the TL.

(3) Consider the range of TL phrases available, having regard to the presentation of class, status, age, sex of the speaker,
his relationship to the listeners and the context of their meeting in the SL.

(4) Consider the significance of the phrase in its particular context.

(5) Replace in the TL the invariant core of the SL phrase in its two referential systems (the particular system of the text
and the system of culture out of which the text has sprung).

The emphasis always in translation is on the reader or listener, and the translator must tackle the SL text in such a way
that the TL correspondence may vary considerably but the principle remains constant. To attempt to impose the value
system of the SL culture onto the TL culture is dangerous ground, and the translator should not be tempted by the
school that pretends to determine the original intentions of an author on the basis of a self-contained text. The
translator cannot be the author of the SL text, but as the author of the TL text has a clear moral responsibility to the TL
readers.

Problems of equivalence

The translation of idioms takes us a stage further in considering the question of meaning and translation, for idioms, like
puns, are culture bound.

In the process of interlingual translation one idiom is substituted for another. That substitution is made on the basis of
the function of the idiom. The SL phrase is replaced by a TL phrase that serves the same purpose in the TL culture, and
the process here involves the substitution of SL sign for TL sign.

Popovic distinguishes four types:

(1) Linguistic equivalence, where there is homogeneity on the linguistic level of both SL and TL texts, i.e. word for word
translation.

(2) Paradigmatic equivalence, where there is equivalence of ‘the elements of a paradigmatic expressive axis’, i.e.
elements of grammar.

(3) Stylistic (translational) equivalence, where there is ‘functional equivalence of elements in both original and
translation aiming at an expensive identity with an invariant of identical meaning’

(4) Textual (syntagmatic) equivalence, where there is equivalence of the syntagmatic structuring of a text, i.e.
equivalence in form and shape.

Translation involves more than replacement of lexical and grammatical items between languages and, as can be seen in
the translation of idioms and metaphors, the process may involve discarding the basic linguistic elements of the SL text
so as to achieve Popovic’s goal of ‘expressive identity’ between the SL and the TL texts. But once the translator moves
away from close linguistic equivalence, the problems of determining the exact nature of the level of equivalence aimed
for begin to emerge.

Popovic: ‘invariant core’ of the original poem: in short, the invariant can be defined as that which exists in common
between all existing translations of a single work. So the invariant is part of a dynamic relationship and should not be
confuse with speculative arguments about the ‘nature’, the ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ of the text; the ‘indefinable quality’ that
translators are rarely supposed to be able to capture.
In trying to solve the problem of translation equivalence, Neubert postulates that from the point of view of a theory of
texts, translation equivalence must be considered a semiotic category, comprising a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic
component. Semantic equivalence takes priority over syntactic equivalence, and pragmatic equivalence conditions and
modifies both the other elements. Equivalence overall results from the relation between signs themselves, the
relationship between signs, what they stand for and those who use them. The interaction between all three components
determines the process of selection in the TL.

Lotman argues that a text is explicit (it is expressed in definite signs), limited (it begins and ends at a given point), and it
has structure as a result of internal organization. The signs of the text are in a relation of opposition to the signs and
structures outside the text. A translator must therefore bear in mind both its autonomous and its communicative
aspects and any theory of equivalence should take both elements into account.

Equivalence in translation, then, should not be approached as a search for sameness, since sameness cannot even exist
between two TL versions of the same text, let alone between the SL and the TL version.

Loss and gain

The translator can at times enrich or clarify the SL text as a direct result of the translation process. What is often seen as
‘lost’ from the SL context may be replaced in the TL context.

In addition to the lexical problems, there are of course languages that do not have tense systems or concepts of time
that in any way correspond to Indo-European systems.

Untranslatability

Catford distinguishes two types of untranslatability, which he terms linguistic and cultural. On the linguistic level,
untranslatability occurs when there is no lexical or syntactical substitute in the TL for an SL item.

His second category is more problematic. Linguistic untranslatability is due to differences in the SL and the TL, whereas
cultural untranslatability is due to the absence in the TL culture of a relevant situational feature of the SL text.

If culture is perceived as dynamic, then the terminology of social structuring must be dynamic also. Lotman points out
that the semiotic study of culture not only considers culture functioning as a system of signs, but emphasizes that ‘the
very relation of culture to the sign and to signification comprises one of its basic typological features. Catford starts from
different premises, and because he does not go far enough in considering the dynamic nature of language and culture,
he invalidates his own category of cultural untranslatability. In so far as language is the primary modelling system within
a culture, cultural untranslatability must be de facto implied in any process of translation.

Popovic has attempted to define untranslatability without a separation between the linguistic and the cultural. Popovic
also distinguishes two types. The first is: a situation in which the linguistic elements of the original cannot be replaced
adequately in structural, linear, functional or semantic terms in consequence of a lack of denotation or connotation.

The second type goes beyond the purely linguistic: a situation where the relation of expressing the meaning, i.e. the
relation between the creative subject and its linguistic expression in the original does not find an adequate linguistic
expression in the translation.

The first type may be seen as parallel to Catford’s category of linguistic untranslatability. Popovic’s second type, like
Catford’s secondary category, illustrates the difficulties of describing and defining the limits of translatability, but whilst
Catford starts from within linguistics, Popovic starts from a position that involves a theory of literary communication.

Science or ‘secondary activity’?

The purpose of translation theory is to reach an understanding of the processes undertaken in the act of translation and,
not, as is so commonly misunderstood, to provide a set of norms for effecting the perfect translation. Two issues: the
problem of whether there can be ‘a science of translation’ and whether translating is a ‘secondary activity’.

Any debate about the existence of a science of translation is out of date: there already exists, with Translation Studies, a
serious discipline investigating the process of translation, attempting to clarify the question of equivalence and to
examine what constitutes meaning within that process. But nowhere is there a theory that pretends to be normative,
and although Lefevere’s statement about the goal of the discipline suggests that a comprehensive theory might also be
used as a guideline that the purpose of translation theory is to be proscriptive.

The myth of translation as a secondary activity with all the associations of lower status implied in that assessment can be
dispelled once the extent of the relationship between author/translator/reader is outlined. The translator is receiver and
emitter, the end and the beginning of two separate but linked chains of communication.

UNIT 4: Traducción e identidad

MUELLER-VOLLMER – SCHULTE: TRANSLATION STUDIES: A DYNAMIC MODEL FOR THE REVITALIZATION OF THE
HUMANITIES

Research Methodologies Base in Translation Thinking

How can we best characterize the work we do in the humanities? We constantly interpret: we interpret literary and
artistic texts, we interpret ideas and concepts, and we interpret human situations. Almost all activities in the humanities
are built in one form or another on principles of interpretation.

George Steiner: All acts of communication are acts of translation. When we consider the act of interpretation, we can
say that we interact with the text, we establish a dialogue with the text, we communicate with the text.

All texts are foreign to us, and we have to decipher their foreignness in order to find entrance into them and interpret
them. That foreignness postulates the enactment of two mental processes: it must be identified as the foreign within
the parameters of its own context, juxtaposed with our own intellectual environment in comparison to which it becomes
foreign, and then translated into the possibilities of our own sensibility. Thus, we look at that which is familiar to us
through the eyes of the foreign in the other text and begin to experience ourselves as foreigners.

In the realm of language, a translator has to cope not only with the vision that an author wanted to create in a work but
also with the reality that each language in itself is a way of seeing. That dictum applies not only to foreign languages but
also to texts that were created at different times in the history of our culture.

When we translate a text from another language, we must first explore the connotations and associations that words
have in the context of the source language.

When we translate, we associate the word with its visual situation – we translate the word into its visual field of
meaning; we associate one word with another, one situation with another, one way of seeing with another way of
seeing. But more importantly, in the act of interpretation within the same text the reader/interpreter must continuously
link the directions of thinking inherent in the magnetic field of a word with those in the text that project similar
directions of thinking in other words.

Translation is not simply the translation of words, but rather the translation of situations. Meaningful interpretations are
the visualizations of words and the situations they project. The translator consistently considers the word as a sign
toward something, as a sign beyond itself toward a situation that is in the process of being built.
Interpretation and Reading

There is no such a thing as the definitive interpretation of a text.

Translators can learn a great deal from the practice of deconstructing a text. A translator constantly engages in de-
constructing words, in finding out what the magnetic field of a word might be, but the translator must at all times be
concerned about the reintegration of the parts into the wholeness of the text. The translator always sees the necessity
of moving inside a word in a constant relationship to other words within the context of a text. Therefore, the notion of
deconstruction can only be a means toward a “reconstruction” of the aesthetic totality of the text.

No single translation will ever match the full impact of the original version. The poet has created an environment of
directed ambiguity. Each translator, in turn, has brought his or her interpretive perspective to that moment of ambiguity
and has filled that space of ambiguity with a particular way of thinking through it, which is reflected in the different
choice of words materialized in the translations.

Expansion of International Perspectives

The practice of multiple translations shows us that even within the same language there are various – and often strongly
divergent – ways of interpreting situations in a text. When we look at texts through the eyes of another language by
taking into consideration the critical methodologies that have been developed by scholars in other languages, new and
often unexpected interpretive perspectives surface.

Translation and Interdisciplinary Studies

One of the outstanding characteristics of translation studies is the integrative power of translation thinking. The practice
of translation always links one word to another, and one should not forget that words are signposts not to themselves
but to situations that lie behind words. The translator constantly navigates between word and situation. Translation is a
problem-solving activity that considers the word not as an isolated phenomenon but always in association with
something else: the visualization of a situation. Translation and interdisciplinary activities are anchored in situational
thinking.

LEPPIHALME, Ritva – CULTURE BUMPS: CHAPTER 4: PROBLEM-SOLVING: THEORY AND PRACTICE

Potential Strategies for Allusions

Proper-name (PN) allusions and key-phrase (KP) allusions: Potential translation strategies for these two groups are
somewhat different. This is because it is often possible to retain a PN unchanged, while a KP as a rule requires a change
in wording. In the case of unfamiliar KP allusions, there is commonly no single standard translation for a KP.

The translation strategies for PNs are basically: (1) to keep the name unaltered; (2) to change it; (3) to omit it.

These basic strategies for the translation of allusive PNs have the following variations: (1) Retention of name (either
unchanged or in its conventional TL form) with three subcategories: (1a) use the name as such; (1b) use the name,
adding some guidance; (1c) use the name, adding a detailed explanation, for example a footnote. (2) Replacement of
name by another (beyond the changes required by convention); with two subcategories: (2a) replace the name by
another SL name; (2b) replace the name by a TL name; (3) Omission of name; with two subcategories: (3a) omit the
name but transfer the sense by other means, for example by a common noun; (3b) omit the name and the allusion
altogether.
Regarding the conventional TL forms or required changes of PNs, Newmark remarks that while personal names are
normally retained unaltered there are a number of well-known types of exceptions to this rule. Changes are required for
the names of rulers, many biblical, classical and literary persons, etc.

To the question why strategies other than (1a) should even need to be considered, we may answer that while in
intracultural communication (1a) would no doubt suffice, the demands of intercultural transfer are such that it is often
not an optimal strategy for every name. The translation of allusions involves not just names as such, but most
importantly, the problem of transferring connotations evoked buy a name in one language culture into another, where
these connotations are much weaker or non-existent. The familiarity or lack of it of a name in the target culture is
therefore a factor of vital importance in decision-making.

Translators need to assume that English-specific names in STs may well be unfamiliar to TT reads.

There is no criterion comparable to the treatment of a PN for the translation of KPs. The ‘retention’ (literally) of a KP
makes no sense as a criterion as KPs are extremely seldom retained untranslated. KPs can mostly be translated in a
variety of ways due to synonyms, variations of word order, etc. Standard translations for KPs exist only in the case of
transcultural allusions. These are, however, in a minority.

A retentive strategy with regard to KPs can mean either a standard translation or a minimum change; the first concerns
transcultural allusions, while in the second the allusiveness disappears, so that what is retained is the surface meaning
only. The effect of the latter is so different from that of a standard translation that the two cannot properly be seen as
one strategy. A distinction is made here between use of a standard translation, where recognition can be expected of a
competent reader and minimum change, where recognition is unlikely, and possible only through backtranslation into
the SL. In the latter case recognition can be achieved only by those TT readers who are both bilingual and bicultural,
while the effect for many general readers may well be a culture bump.

The potential strategies for KP allusions: (A) use of a standard translation; (B) minimum change, that is, a literal
translation, without regard to connotative or contextual meaning; (C) extra-allusive guidance added in the text, where
the translator follows his/her assessment of the needs of TT readers by adding information (on sources etc.) which the
author, with his/her SL viewpoint, did not think necessary; (D) the use of footnotes, endnotes, translator’s prefaces and
other explicit explanations not slipped into the text but overtly given as additional information; (E) simulated familiarity
or internal marking, that is, the addition of intra-allusive allusion-signalling features (marked wording or syntax) that
depart from the style of the context, thus signaling the presence of borrowed words; (F) replacement by a performed TL
item; (G) reduction of the allusion to sense by rephrasal, in other words, making its meaning overt and dispensing with
the allusive KP itself; (H) re-creation, using a fusion of techniques: creative construction of a passage which hints at the
connotations of the allusion or other special effects created by it; (I) omission of the allusion.

Additionally, there are two seldom used possibilities: one is the throwing up of one’s hands in desperation, stating that
there are allusive meanings involved which are beyond translation (with no attempt to explain what they are). This
strategy is omitted from the list because it can hardly be used in the translations of books or newspaper articles. The
second is leaving the allusion untranslated, that is, leaving SL words in the TT.

Strategies used for key-phrase allusions

Transcultural KP allusions have standard translations, that is, preformed TL wordings. The use of a standard translation
can be seen as a minimax strategy in Levy’s term, as it requires no new verbalization from the translator and, being
transcultural, helps to convey the full range of meaning, including connotations. Use of a standard translation (Strategy
A) can therefore be thought a sign of translatorial competence.
A literal/minimum change translation can of course on occasion be a standard translation; but more often the two are
different or there is no standard translation at all.

A minimum change translation can work well if (1) the allusion is transcultural, so that the literal translation is also the
standard translation, with the same connotations; or (2) a literal rendering is transparent enough on a metaphorical
level. The meaning can then be perceived without recourse to the original source. If neither of these conditions is met, a
minimum change translation will often mean a loss of culture-specific connotations so that the translation falls flat if
compared to the ST. Even if not compared, it may be impenetrable or inadequate, a culture bump. Monocultural readers
cannot grasp its full meaning on the basis of the translation offered, though as noted earlier, readers who are both
bilingual and bicultural can uncover the meaning by back-translation.

Re-creation (H) is not a definable strategy in the same sense as for instance replacement by preformed TL item (F) or
omission (I). Rather, it empowers the translator to be creative, freeing him/her from the limitations of the ST, and
emphasizes the necessity of considering the TT reader’s needs. Any strategy which leads to the crossing of a cultural
barrier is, in a sense, re-creation. No rules or guidelines on how to achieve this can be given, and re-creation can perhaps
best be thought of as a fusion of strategies which is realized in context.

Possible reasons for the predominant strategy

The problem with minimum change translations – sometimes avoidable, sometimes not – is not just that they do not
always do justice to the ST author’s skill. This aspect is somehow out of fashion at present. The true problem, from my
point of view, is that minimum change does not always enable the TT reader to participate in the creative process,
picking up associations and interpreting in his/her own way what was only half-said in the text at hand. The chance to do
this is denied the TT reader because s/he is not given the materials for such participation.

A minimum change translation will convey only the denotation. Conversely, a translator who recognizes the sources and
wants to allow readers to participate could re-create the passage with allusive overtones recognizable to TT readers.

Problem-Solving in Practice: Choosing from a Wide Range of Strategies

Re-creation (H)

Re-creation is (usually) a time-consuming strategy. In a wide sense, of course, all translation is re-creation: a change of
language means re-creating a situation. In a narrower sense, Holmes, when discussing verse translation, opposes re-
creation to retention, seeing these as two basic alternatives. My adoption of the term re-creation was, to some extent,
influenced by Levine. Describing her own close collaboration as translator with the author, she refers to inventions and
changes when translating into English problematic elements such as Cuban Spanish puns are invented words.

(Re-)creation means freedom from constraints, freedom to consider a hierarchy of factors and to construct a TL version
that may dispense with the allusion itself yet not just reduce it to sense but attempt to give it some Mehrwert.
Something no doubt is lost in the process, a lot may be changed, something (perhaps nothing lexical, but the meaning or
effect) needs to be retained. It has been suggested that one possible approach to translating wordplay, where re-
creation is often needed, would be to give more attention to ‘the imitation of the word-play as process’.

To sum up, if the translation of allusions is seen as a decision-making process where the translator makes a series of
‘moves, as in a game’, this suggests that the moves can be charted and put into a priority order. Such a priority ordering
be based simply on observations on how translators deal with allusions.

Assuming that a responsible translator will not want unnecessarily to impoverish or obscure the author’s text nor to
leave the reader puzzled or unable to follow it, it is clear that receivers must be taken into account. If TT readers (of
texts of the type and function under consideration in this study) are entitled to TTs which are coherent, offering
elements needed for responses and interpretations, just as ST reads can respond to and interpret implicit messages in
texts in their own language – a basic assumption in this study – translators need to consider what strategies will lead to
such a TT, as their goal. If they suspect that a given strategy is ineffective in a translation situation characterized by a
certain combination of factors, they would be well advised to look for more effective alternatives.

The present discussion concerns local strategies only, or ways of dealing with a ST allusion once it has been spotted.
(Clearly, the identification of an allusive problem, which sparks off the problem-solving and decision-making, is by no
means automatic: if a translator’s SL skills and/or cultural competence are insufficient s/he may well not diagnose the
problem when it occurs).

The acceptance of each strategy also depends in target cultural norms, which are not immutable.

EVEN-ZOHAR – THE POSITION OF TRANSLATED LITERATURE WITHIN THE LITERARY POLYSYSTEM

[Polysystems can be postulated to account for phenomena existing on various levels, so that the polysystem of a given national
literature is viewed as one element making up the larger socio-cultural polysystem, which itself comprises other polysystems besides
the literary, such as for example the artistic, the religious or the political. Furthermore, being placed in this way in a larger
sociocultural context, “literature” comes to be viewed not just a collection of texts, but more broadly as a set of factors governing
the production, promotion and reception of these texts.”

Even-Zohar’s redefinition of Polysystem as a “multiple system, a system of various systems which intersect with each other and
partly overlap, using concurrently different options, yet functioning as one structured whole, whose members are interdependent.”
In addition, he points out that, “these systems are not equal, but hierarchized within the polysystem”, therefore, “the various strata
and subdivisions which make up a given polysystem are constantly competing with each other for the dominant position.” In regard
to the literary polysystem, “there is a continuous state of tension between the center and the periphery, in which different literary
genres all vie for domination of the center.” This implies that the translated literature also exists as a part of the polysystem of a
given national literature because, “translation is no longer a phenomenon whose nature and borders are given once and for all, but
an activity dependent on the relation within a certain cultural system”]

In spite of the broad recognition among historians of culture of the major role translation has played in the
crystallization of national cultures, relatively little research has been carried out so far in this area. As a rule, histories of
literatures mention translations when there is no way to avoid them. One hardly gets any idea whatsoever of the
function of translated literature for a literature as a while or of its position within that literature. Moreover, there is no
awareness of the possible existence of translated literature as a particular literary system. The prevailing concept is
rather that of “translation” or just “translated works” treated on an individual basis.

My argument us that translated works do correlate in at least two ways: (a) in the way their source texts are selected by
the target literature, the principles of selection never being uncorrelatable with the home co-systems of the target
literature; and (b) in the way they adopt specific norms, behaviors, and policies – in short, in their use of the literary
repertoire – which results from their relations with the other home co-systems. These are not confined to the linguistic
level only, but are manifest on any selection level as well. Thus, translated literature may possess a repertoire of its own,
which to a certain extent could even be exclusive to it. I conceive of translated literature only as an integral system
within any literary polysystem, but as a most active system within it. Whether translated literature becomes central or
peripheral, and whether this position is connected with innovatory (“primary”) or conservatory (“secondary”)
repertoires, depends on the specific constellation of the polysystem under study.

2
To say that translated literature maintains a central position in the literary polysystem means that it participates actively
in shaping the center of the polysystem. In such a situation it is by and large an integral part of innovatory forces, and as
such likely to be identified with major events in literary history while these are taking place. This implies that in this
situation no clear-cut distinction is maintained between “original” and “translated” writings, and that often it is the
leading writers who produce the most conspicuous or appreciated translations. Moreover, in such a state when new
literary models are emerging, translation is likely to become one of the means of elaborating the new repertoire. It is
clear that the very principles of selecting the works to be translated are determined by the situation governing the
(home) polysystem: the texts are chosen according to their compatibility with the new approaches and the supposedly
innovatory role they may assume within the target literature.

Conditions which give rise to a situation of this kind: three major cases: (a) when a polysystem has not yet been
crystallized; (b) when a literature is either “peripheral” or “weak”, or both; and (c) when there are turning points, crises,
or literary vacuums in a literature.

In the first case translated literature simply fulfils the need of a younger literature to put into use its newly founded (or
renovated) tongue for as many literary types as possible in order to make it serviceable as a literary language as useful
for its emerging public. Second instance: such literatures often do not develop the same full range of literary activities
observable in adjacent larger literatures. This lack may then be filled, wholly or partly, by translated literature. The
ability of such “weak” literatures to initiate innovations is often less than that of the larger and central literatures, with
the result that a relation of dependency may be established not only in peripheral systems, but in the very center of
these “weak” literatures.

The dynamics within the polysystem create turning points, that is to say, historical moments where established models
are no longer tenable for a younger generation. At such moments, even in central literatures, translated literature may
assume a central position.

Contending that translated literature may maintain a peripheral position means that it constitutes a peripheral system
within the polysystem, generally employing secondary models. In such a situation it has no influence on major processes
and is modelled according to norms already conventionally established by an already dominant type of target literature.
Translated literature in this case becomes a major factor of conservatism. While the contemporary original literature
might go on developing new norms and models, translated literature adheres to norms which have been rejected either
recently or long before by the 8newly) established center. It no longer maintains positive correlations with original
writing.

A highly interesting paradox manifests itself here: translation, by which new ideas, items, characteristics can be
introduced into a literature, becomes a means to preserve traditional taste.

The hypothesis that translated literature may be either a central or peripheral system does not imply that it is always
wholly one or the other. As a system, translated literature is itself stratified, and from the point of view of polysystemic
analysis it is often from the vantage point of the central stratum of translated literature may assume a central position,
another may remain quite peripheral. When there is intense interference, it is the portion of translated literature
deriving from a major source literature which is likely to assume a central position.

The “normal” position assumed by translated literature tends to be the peripheral one.
5

The distinction between a translated work and an original work in terms of literary behavior is a function of the position
assumed by the translated literature at a given time. When it takes a central position the borderlines are diffuse, so that
the very category of “translated works” must be extended to semi- and quasi-translations as well. Under stable
conditions items lacking in a target literature may remain untransferable if the state of the polysystem does not allow
innovations. But the process of opening the system gradually brings certain literatures closer and in the longer run
enables a situation where the postulates of (translational) adequacy and the realities of equivalence may overlap to a
relatively high degree.

Not only is the socio-literary status of translation dependent upon its position within the polysystem, but the very
practice of translation is also strongly subordinated to that position. And even the question of what is a translated work
cannot be answered a priori in terms of an a-historical out-of-context idealized state; it must be determined on the
grounds of the operations governing the polysystem.