Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

 
Semantic and Communicative Translation 
Communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as 
possible to that obtained on the readers of the original. Semantic translation attempts to 
render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow, the 
exact contextual meaning of the original. 
In theory, there are wide differences between the two methods. Communicative 
translation addresses itself solely to the second reader, who does not anticipate difficulties or 
obscurities, and would expect a generous transfer of foreign elements into his own culture as 
well as his language where necessary. Semantic translation remains within the original 
culture and assists the reader only in its connotations if they constitute the essential human 
(non-ethnic) message of the text. One basic difference between the two methods is that where 
there is a conflict, the communicator must emphasize the ‘force’ rather than the content of the 
message. Generally, a communicative translation is likely to be smoother, simpler, clearer, 
more direct more conventional, conforming to a particular register of language, tending to 
undertranslate, i.e. to use more generic, hold-all terms in difficult passages. A semantic 
translation tends to be more complex, more awkward, more detailed, more concentrated, and 
pursues the thought-processes rather than the intention of the transmitter. It tends to 
overtranslate, to be more specific than the original, to include more meanings in its search for 
one nuance of meaning. 
However, in communicative as in semantic translation, provided that equivalent-effect 
is secured, the literal word-for-word translation is not only the best, it is the only valid 
method of translation. Conversely, both semantic and communicative translation complies 
with the usually accepted syntactic equivalents for the two languages in question. In 
semantic, but not communicative translation, any deviation from SL stylistic norms would be 
reflected in an equally wide deviation from the TL norms, but where such norms clash, the 
deviations are not easy to formulate, and the translator has to show a certain tension between 

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the writer’s manner and the compulsions of the target language. Thus when the writer uses 
long complex sentences in a language where the sentence in a ‘literary’ (carefully worked) 
style is usually complex and longer than in the TL, the translator may reduce the sentences 
somewhat, compromising between the norms of the two languages and the writer. If in doubt, 
however, he should trust the writer, not the ‘language’, which is a sum of abstractions. A 
semantic translation is concrete. 
Communicative and semantic translation may well coincide – in particular, where the 
text conveys a general rather than a culturally (temporally and spatially) bound message and 
where the matter is as important as the manner-notably then in the translation of the most 
important religious, philosophical, artistic and scientific texts, assuming second readers as 
informed and interested as the first. Further, there are often sections in one text that must be 
translated communicatively (e.g. non-leiu-‘nonsuit’), and others semantically (e.g a quotation 
from a speech). There is no one communicative nor one semantic method of translating a text 
– these are in fact widely overlapping bands of methods. A translation can be more, or less, 
semantic – more, or less, communicative – even a particular section or sentence can be 
treated more communicatively or less semantically. Each method has a common basis in 
analytical or cognitive translation which is built up both proposition by proposition and word 
by word, denoting the empirical factual knowledge of the text, but finally respecting the 
convention of the target language provided that the through content of the text has been 
reproduced. The translation emerges in such a way that the exact meaning or function of the 
words only becomes apparent as they are used. The translator may have to make interim 
decisions without being able at the time to visualize the relation of the words with the end 
product. Communicative and semantic translation bifurcate at a later stage of analytical or 
cognitive translation, which is a pre-translation procedure which may be performed on the 
source-language text to convert it into the source or the target language – the resultant 
versions will be closer to each other than the original text and the final translation. 

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