Chapter 1 Main issues of translation studies

1 1.1 The concept of translation

In the field of languages, translation today has several meanings as a discipline, a product, and
a process.
The process of translation between two different written languages involves the source text or
ST and the target language or TL.
The source text is the original text from which a translation is done into another language.
The target text is the finished product of a translated text.
Three categories of translation described by the Russo-American structuralist Roman Jakobson
categories are as follows:
(1) Intralingual translation, or ‘rewording’ – ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of
other signs of the same language’.
(2) interlingual translation, or ‘translation proper’ – ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means
of some other language’.
(3) intersemiotic translation, or ‘transmutation’ – ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means
of signs of non-verbal sign systems’.
Intersemiotic translation, for example, occurs when a written text is translated into a different
mode, such as music, film or painting.
Intralingual translation occurs when we produce a summary or otherwise rewrite a text in the
same language, say a children’s version of an encyclopedia. It also occurs when we rephrase an
expression in the same language.
Interlingual translation is between two different verbal sign systems, which has been the
traditional focus of translation studies.
Semiotics- the general science of communication through signs and sign systems, of which
language is but one.
2 1.2 What is translation studies?
Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the
theory, description, and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an
interdiscipline, translation studies borrows much from the various fields of study that support
translation.
There are four very visible ways in which translation studies have become more prominent.
First, just as the demand for translation has soared, so has there been a vast expansion in
specialized translating and interpreting programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate
levels. These may include MAs in applied translation studies, scientific and technical
translation, conference and bilateral interpreting, audiovisual translation, specialized Sign
Language, and audio description. A smaller number of programmes focus on the practice of
literary translation.
Second, the past decades have also seen a proliferation of conferences, books, and journals on
translation in many languages.
Third, as the number of publications has increased so has the demand for general and
analytical instruments such as anthologies, databases, encyclopedias, handbooks, and
introductory texts. Their number is ever-growing.
Fourth, international organizations have also prospered. International conferences on a wide
variety of themes are held in an increasing number of countries.
3 1.3 An early history of the discipline
 The practice of translation was crucial to the early dissemination of important cultural and
religious texts and concepts. Cicero and Horace and St. Jerome had an important influence
through the 20th century.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of alternative language education, such as the direct method
and the communicative approach.
In the 1960s, literary translation was promoted in the United States through the concept of
translation workshops, beginning at Iowa State and Princeton University. This was based on
the reading and practical criticism workshops of Cambridge critic I.A. Richards.Parallel to this
approach was the comparative literature approach,which studied and compared literature
transnationally and transcultural.
Another area in which translation became the subject of research was contrastive linguistics.
This is the study of two languages in contrast in an attempt to identify general and specific
differences between them.
The more systematic, linguistic-oriented, approach to the study of translation began to emerge
in the 1950s and 1960s. There are a number of now classic examples:
• Andrei Fedorov’s Osnovy obshchey teorii perevoda [Foundations of a General Theory of
Translation] (1953/1968), described by Mossop (2013) and shown by Pym (2016) to have
heavily influenced Vinay and Darbelnet and Loh (below);
• Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet produced their Stylistique comparée du français et de
l’anglais (1958), a contrastive study of French and English which introduced key terminology
for describing translation. It was not translated into English until 1995;
• Alfred Malblanc (1944/1963) did the same for translation between French and German and
Loh Dian-yang for Chinese and English (Zhang and Pan Li 2009; Pym 2016);
• Georges Mounin’s Les problèmes théoriques de la traduction (1963) examined linguistic
issues of translation;
• Eugene Nida (1964a) incorporated elements of Chomsky’s then fashionable generative
grammar as a theoretical underpinning of his books, which were initially designed to be
practical manuals for Bible translators.
The word science was used by Nida in the title of his 1964 book. At that time, even the name
of the emerging discipline remained to be determined.
4 1.4 The Holmes/Toury ‘map’
It explains which are the areas that fall under translation studies according to Holmes.
The two main divisions of the discipline are the pure and applied branches. The pure branch is
subdivided into theoretical and descriptive branches.
The theoretical branch is further subdivided into general and partial theories, the latter being
categorized according to various kinds of “restrictions” or focus: medium (machine translation,
interpreting, written translation), area (language and culture restrictions), rank (linguistic rank
or level), text-type (eg. Bible translation), time (contemporary or older texts), and problem (eg.
the nature of translation equivalence, the translation of metaphor). The descriptive branch is
further divided into product-oriented, process-oriented, and function-oriented studies.
The ‘applied’ branch of Holmes’s framework concerns applications to the practice of
translation: Translator training: teaching methods, testing techniques, curriculum design;
Translation aids: such as dictionaries and grammars;
Translation criticism: the evaluation of translations, including the marking of student
translations and the reviews of published translations.
 Another area Holmes mentions is translation policy, where he sees the translation scholar
advising on the place of translation in society. This should include what place, if any, it should
occupy in the language teaching and learning curriculum.
5 1.5 Developments since Holmes
1. The surge in translation studies since the 1970s has seen different areas of Holmes’s map
come to the fore. Contrastive linguistics generally fell by the wayside, but has resurfaced
thanks to the advances in corpus-based studies.
2. The linguistics-oriented ‘science’ of translation has continued strongly in Germany, but the
concept of equivalence associated with it has been questioned and reconceived. Germany has
seen the rise of theories centered around text types and text purpose.
3. The Hallidayan influence of discourse analysis and systemic functional grammar, which
views language as a communicative act in a sociocultural context, came to prominence in the
early 1990s, especially in Australia and the UK. It was applied to translation in a series of works
by scholars such as Bell (1991), Baker (1992/2011), Hatim and Mason (1990, 1997), Calzada
Pérez (2007), Munday (2008).
4. The late 1970s and the 1980s also saw the rise of a descriptive approach that had its origins
in comparative literature and Russian Formalism.
A pioneering centre was Tel Aviv, where Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury pursued the idea
of the literary polysystem in which, among other things, different literatures and genres,
including translated and non-translated works, compete for dominance.
5. The polysystemists worked with a Belgium-based group including José Lambert and the late
André Lefevere (who subsequently moved to the University of Austin, Texas), and with the UK-
based scholars Susan Bassnett and Theo Hermans.
6. A key volume was the collection of essays edited by Hermans, The Manipulation of
Literature: Studies in Literary Translation (Hermans 1985a), which gave rise to the name of the
‘Manipulation School’.
Bassnett and Lefevere’s volume Translation, History and Culture (1990) then introduced the
term ‘cultural turn’. This dynamic, culturally oriented approach held sway for much of the
following decade.
7. The 1990s saw the incorporation of new approaches and concepts:
1. Canadianbased translation and gender research led by Sherry Simon,
2. the Brazilian Cannibalist School promoted by Else Vieira, and
3. postcolonial translation theory with the prominent figures of the Bengali scholars Tejaswini
Niranjana and Gayatri Spivak.
8. In the USA, the cultural studies-oriented analysis of Lawrence Venuti called for greater
visibility and recognition of the translator.
9. Developments continued at a fast pace in the new millennium, with special interest
devoted to translation, globalization and resistance, the sociology and historiography of
translation, translator training and process-oriented research. Research activity, as well as the
practice of translation, has also been revolutionized by new technologies.
10. These new areas include audiovisual translation, localization and corpus-based translation
studies. Furthermore, the international reach of the discipline has expanded with research in
or on China and the Arab world in particular.
6 1.6 The van Doorslaer ‘map’
‘Translation’ looks at the act of translating and, in the new map, is subdivided into:
 Q lingual mode (interlingual, intralingual);
 Q media (printed, audiovisual, electronic);
  Q mode (covert/overt translation, direct/indirect translation, mother tongue/ other
tongue translation, pseudo-translation, retranslation, self-translation,sight translation,
etc.);
 Q field (political, journalistic, technical, literary, religious, scientific, commercial).
 Q approaches (e.g. cultural approach, linguistic approach);
 Q theories (e.g. general translation theory, polysystem theory);
 Q research methods (e.g. descriptive, empirical);
 Q applied translation studies (criticism, didactics, institutional environment).
Alongside these is a ‘basic transfer map’ of terminology to describe the linguistic
maneuvers that, despite the cultural turn, remain central to the concrete translating
process. This consists of strategies, procedures/techniques, errors, rules, norms,
conventions, laws, universals, and translation tools.
7 1.7 Discipline, interdiscipline or multidiscipline?
Translation studies (TSs) have emerged as a new international and interdisciplinary academic
field
in the last three decades. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of TSs, many developments are
observed in this field concerning the translation process. TSs is a discipline characterized by
theories such as Skopos, poststructuralism, feminism, semiotics, and linguistics such as
pragmatics and critical discourse analysis.
While interdisciplinarity is generally defined as the cooperation between more than one
discipline, transdisciplinary is defined as the cooperation between more than one discipline by
crossing the boundaries of the disciplines, and multidisciplinary, on the other hand, is defined
as examining the same object of study by more than one discipline. From this point of view, in
order for TSs to preserve its character as a discipline, it interacts with other disciplines, such as
sociology, philosophy, linguistics, social sciences, and literature.