Alexandra Burt Language Pairs: English (US) - German / German - English (US)
What exactly is "Translation"?
Translation is
the interpretation of the meaning of a
text in one language — the
source text — and the production, in another
language, of a new, equivalent text — the
target text.
Although attempts have been made to automate and
computerize the translation process or to use computers as an aid,
translation is still a human activity.
The goal of translation is generally to establish a
relation of equivalence between the source and target texts and the
same message must be communicated while taking into account a number
of constraints.
Contrary to common belief translation is not an exact
science, no firmly defined one-to-one correlation exists between the
words and phrases in different languages. While
equivalence is sought by the translator, less rigid
and more analytical methods are required to arrive at a true
translation.
There is also debate as to whether translation is an art or a craft. Literary translators, such as Gregory Rabassa in "If This Be Treason" argue convincingly that translation is an art, though he acknowledges that it is teachable. Other translators, mostly professionals working on technical, business, or legal documents, approach their task as a craft, one that can not only be taught but is subject to linguistic analysis and benefits from academic study. Most translators will agree that the truth lies somewhere between and depends on the text. A simple document, for instance a product brochure, can be quickly translated in many cases using simple techniques familiar to advanced language students. By contrast, a newspaper editorial, text of a speech by a politician, or book on almost any subject will require not only the craft of good language skills and research technique but also the art of good writing, cultural sensitivity, and communication.
Measuring success in Translation
As the goal of translation is to
ensure that the source and the target texts communicate the same
message while taking into account the various constraints placed on
the translator, a successful translation can be judged by two
criteria:
1. Faithfulness, also called
fidelity, which is the extent to which the translation accurately renders the
meaning of the source text, without adding to it or subtracting from
it, and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning;
and
2. Transparency, which is the extent to
which the translation appears to a native speaker of the target
language to have originally been written in that language, and
conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic
conventions.
A translation meeting the first criterion is
said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation meeting the
second criterion is said to be an "idiomatic translation". The two
are not necessarily exclusive.
The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of
a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the
original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its
literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth.
The criteria for judging the transparency of a
translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic
translation "sounds" wrong, and in the extreme case of word-for-word
translations generated by many machine translation systems,
often result in patent nonsense with only a humorous value (see
round-trip translation).
Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator
may knowingly strive to produce a literal translation. For example,
literary translators and translators of religious works often adhere
to the source text as much as possible.
In recent decades, the most prominent
advocates of
non-transparent translation modes include the Franco-Canadian translation scholar Antoine Berman who
identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose
translations (L’épreuve de l’étranger, 1984), and the American theorist Lawrence Venuti who called upon
translators to apply "foreignizing" translation strategies instead
of domesticating ones (see, for example, his 'Call to Action' in
The Translator’s Invisibility, 1994).
Many
non-transparent translation theories draw
on concepts of German Romanticism, with the most obvious influence
on latter-day theories of
foreignization being the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture "On
the Different Methods of Translation" (1813) he distinguished
between translation methods that move "the writer toward [the
reader]", i.e. transparency, and those that move the "reader toward
[the author] ", i.e. respecting the foreignness of the source text.
Schleiermacher clearly favored the latter. It is worth pointing out,
however, that his preference was motivated not so much by a desire
to embrace the foreign but was rather intended as a nationalist
practice to oppose France's cultural domination and to promote
German literature.
The concepts of fidelity and transparency remain strong in Western traditions, however. They are not necessarily as prevalent in non-Western traditions. For example, the Indian epic Ramayana has numerous versions in many Indian languages and the stories in each are different from one another. If one looks into the words used for translation in Indian (either Aryan or Dravidian) languages, the freedom given to the translators is evident.
Specialized types of Translation
Any type of written text can be
a candidate for translation; however, the translation industry is
often categorized by a number of areas of specialization. Each
specialization has its own challenges and difficulties. An
incomplete list of these specialized types of translation includes:
Administrative translation
Commercial translation
Computer translation
General translation
Scientific translation
Scholarly translation
Technical translation
Translation for dubbing and film subtitles
Legal translation
Pedagogical translation
Medical translation
Literary translation
If the translation of non-literary
works is regarded as a skill, the translation of fiction and poetry
is much more of an art. In multilingual countries such as Canada,
translation is often considered a literary pursuit in its own right
and the Governor General's Awards present prizes for the year's best
English-to-French and French-to-English literary translations with
the same standing as more conventional literary awards.
Writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Vasily
Zhukovsky have also made a name for themselves as literary
translators.
Many consider poetry the most difficult genre to translate, given
the difficulty in rendering both the form and the content in the
target language. In 1959 in his influential paper "On Linguistic
Aspects of Translation", the Russian-born linguist and semiotician
Roman Jakobson even went as far as to declare that "poetry by
definition [was] untranslatable". In 1974 the American poet James
Merrill wrote a poem, "Lost in Translation," which in part explores
this subject. This question was also explored in Douglas
Hofstadter's 1997 book,
Le Ton beau de Marot.
Translation of sung texts — sometimes referred
to as a "singing translation" — is closely linked to translation of
poetry, simply because most vocal music, at least in the Western
tradition, is set to verse, especially verse in regular patterns
with rhyme. (Since the late 19th century musical setting of prose
and free verse has also come about in some art music, although
popular music tends to remain conservative in its retention of
stanzaic forms with or without refrains.) A rudimentary example of
translating poetry for singing is church hymns, such as German chorales translated into
English by Catherine Winkworth.
Mark Twain