Sign concept. Errors of understanding at the level of

Lecture 6. Mistakes and Shortcomings in Interpreting

Plan:

1. 
   Errors of understanding at the level of "sign – concept.
   
2. 
   Errors of understanding at the level of “sign - a complex concept.
   

Key words: cognitive, interference, inability, inadequate mastery

A few centuries ago, it was rightly noted that the causes of translation errors should be sought primarily in the lack of education of the translator. Therefore, the study of the nature of understanding errors can be built on the basis of the analysis of the cognitive experience of the translator, i.e. his individual experience in cognition of the surrounding reality, both linguistic and extra linguistic.

The lack of education of the translator is manifested, firstly, in poor knowledge of the original language and, secondly, in insufficient knowledge of the "subject of the author’s thought", i.e. of what is referred to in the original text. Moreover, and this makes up the main aspect of evaluating the translator’s hermeneutic activity: the translator must understand not only what the author writes about, but also what he says about the subject, because the subject of thought and the thought of the subject are different things . Inattentive reading of the text of the original may also be associated with a lack of philological education. As a result of the fact that the translator does not have “linguistic sensitivity”, he is unable to understand the style features of the translated work.

In its most general form, the typology of the causes of translation errors when decoding the system of meanings of the source text can be represented as follows:

1. Inadequate mastery of the original language.

2. Lack of cognitive experience. Lack of knowledge about the environment described in the source text.

3. Inattentive attitude to the system of meanings contained in the source text. Misunderstanding that the author is talking about the subject.

4. Inability to distinguish features of the individual style of the author of the original speech work.

Of course, all the causes of errors presented in this typology are interrelated, as they relate to one linguistic personality - the translator, his knowledge and competence, his mental state and the conditions in which he has to perceive the original message, his ideas about ethics ¬recovery work. But such a dissected presentation of translation errors seems to be productive as for translation criticism, i.e. objective, as far as possible, assessment of translation work, and for teaching translation, when it is necessary to find the cause of each translation error. Their reasons are well known: lack of knowledge of the original language and the language of translation, lack of knowledge of the translator about those subject situations referred to in the original message, inattentive or neglectful attitude to the text of the original, to the ideas and individual style of the author, and also much more.

The analysis of translator errors is a special section of translation criticism. It not only allows us to once again make sure that ignorance, illiteracy and mediocrity are incompatible with translation activity, but in some cases it is also able to reveal some aspects of legitimate translation interference. The interference can be due to the influence of the original text on the thinking of the translator, as well as the dominance of the system of one language over the system of another in the mind of the translator.

Translation errors occur at the stage when the translator decides to translate a particular orientation unit. They can be caused both by an incorrect decoding of the meaning of the signs that make up the unit of orientation, and by an incorrect choice of signs in the translating language for the design of the translation unit. It can be quite difficult to distinguish the nature of translation errors, since the most common way to identify errors is to compare the text of the translation with the text of the original. But this comparison is not always able to show why there was a discrepancy - either because the translator incorrectly understood the meaning of any character in the original text, or because he chose a character in the target language that does not correspond to the concept. In other words, in the act of verbal communication, the translator can make mistakes as a recipient of the original message, i.e. listener, reader of the original text, and as the sender of the translated message. Under the conditions of asymmetric bilingualism, which is usually characterized by the translator’s linguistic competence, errors of the first kind more often occur when translating from a foreign language into a native one, when the translator is faced not only with a language system that is dominated by another, but also with a different culture, a different worldview. Errors of the second kind more often occur when translating from a native language into a foreign language, when the translator lacks knowledge of the entire system of expressive means of the translating language. However, this division is far from absolute, and errors of both kinds can occur in all cases of translation.

1. Errors due to misunderstanding of the meanings of the source text

For several decades, the theory of translation was developed mainly by the translators themselves, relying on their own practical experience and to a lesser degree on a critical analysis of other translations. Translators a priori proceed from the fact that the text of the original is fully understood, therefore the hermeneutic aspect of the translation turned out to be less developed than the transformational one. The question “how to convert the original text to a text in the target language?” Almost crowded out the question “how to better understand the original text?”

At the same time, an analysis of some translations made in recent years (we are talking about translations of works of art) shows that a large proportion of translation errors occur precisely because of an incomplete or distorted understanding of the original text.

Errors at the stage of deciphering the meanings contained in the characters of the original message can affect all aspects of the text as a sign entity: pragmatic, semantic and syntactic.

An incorrect interpretation of the pragmatic aspect of the original utterance may arise if the translator encounters the so-called indirect speech acts, i.e. statements, the external form of which hides the true intentions of the author to cause a recipient of a speech product of a particular reaction. It is also possible in encounters with various allegories, “Aesopian language” and other forms of figurative speech. Phraseological turns, metaphors and other paths often fulfill a certain pragmatic function and also present difficulties for understanding. The decoding of their pragmatics requires in-depth knowledge of a foreign culture and exceptional attention to the speech situation, to the conditions of communication.

Semantic distortions are the most common type of translation errors at the hermeneutic stage. They can relate to both concepts, simple and complex, and the meanings of whole statements. At the same time, distortions are possible not only at the significatory, but also at the denotative level, when the translator incorrectly understands which class of objects corresponds to one or another concept.

Syntactic distortions are due to a lack of understanding of the nature of the logical connections between the elements of a statement, its communicative division. They can also arise if the translator could not understand the mutual conditionality of the individual elements of the statements, especially in those cases when they are not in direct, but in a distant connection, i.e. the fact that each element is part of a single whole.

Translation errors resulting from a misunderstanding of the meanings of the original text arise at different levels of the speech chain, i.e. when the orientation unit is different in its length and structure of the signs. The translator may not be able to figure out which concept is inherent in a particular word or phrase, which idea dominates the phraselogical phrase, what are the signs of the described subject situations turn out to be the most necessary; finally, what objective situation is described in the original text.

In other words, a completely structural typology of logical-semantic structure levels is built up at which typical translation errors arise, namely:

- the level of a simple concept;

- the level of a complex concept;

- level of judgment;

- the level of understanding of the subject situation.

2. Errors of understanding at the level of "sign - concept"

Semantic translation errors result from incorrect transformations. They are based on the erroneous idea of the translator about the correspondence of the signs of the source language to the concepts, i.e. not the concepts that they actually embody are attributed to signs. Consider a passage from a text by M.A. Bulgakova "The Master and Margarita" and his translations into some languages, paying particular attention to the selected fragments.

“At the time of a hot spring sunset, two citizens appeared on the Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them - about forty years old, dressed in a gray summer pair - was small, dark-haired, well-fed, bald, he carried his decent hat with a pie in his hand, and his neatly shaven face was decorated with supernaturally sized glasses in black horny frame. The second - a shoulder-length, reddish, swirling young man in a checkered cap tucked to the back of his head - was in a cowboy shirt, chewed white trousers, and black slippers.

The first was none other than Mikhail Aleksandrovich Berlioz, editor of a thick art magazine and chairman of the board of one of the largest Moscow literary associations, abbreviated as Massolit, and his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, who writes under the pseudonym езд Homeless.

Caught in the shade of a slightly greening linden, the writers first rushed to the colorful painted booth with the inscription "Beer and water."

Yes, the first strangeness of this terrible May evening should be noted. Not only at the booth, but in the entire alley parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street, there was not a single person. At that hour, when it seemed that there was no strength to breathe, when the sun, burning Moscow, was falling somewhere behind the Garden Ring in a dry fog, no one came under the linden trees, no one sat on the bench, the alley was empty .

“Give the narzan,” Berlioz asked.

“There’s no Narzan,” the woman in the booth answered, and for some reason

offended.

- Do you have beer? - the Homeless asked in a hoarse voice.

“Beer will be brought in by evening,” the woman replied.

- What is there? Asked Berlioz.

“Apricot, only warm,” the woman said.

- Well, let's, let's, let's! ..

Apricot yielded plentiful yellow foam, and the air smelled of a hairdresser. Having drunk, the writers immediately began to hiccup, paid off and sat down on a bench facing the pond and back to Bronnaya. ”

Let us first turn to the fragment where Bulgakov talks about the drink that his heroes had to drink — apricot. The grammatical form of this word itself indicates that we are talking about water, i.e. apricot is a folded form of the word-combination apricot water, the name of a drink that has been very common in the Soviet Union for many decades, namely sparkling water with various fruit syrups. Carbon dioxide gave these drinks an effervescent and frothy appearance when they were poured into a glass.

In the French translation, we find an interesting substitution: sparkling water turns into apricot juice - le jus d'abricot. But juice, let alone apricot juice, which is usually quite thick, dense, cannot produce foam, unless it is sour. Therefore, the following phrase of the text, translated quite accurately, turns out to be absurd: En coulant dans les verres, le jus d'abricot fournit une abondante mousse jaune. The reader begins to think that the devilry is already beginning, although the author is still nothing supernaturally happening. The question arises: maybe the French do not know what carbonated drinks are? Turning to the dictionary, we see that in the French language there is the word soda - carbonated flavored drink. Soda au citron (= limo¬nade), à l'orange amère. According to this model, it was possible to construct an apricot: soda à l'abricot.

The nature of the flavors is given in the definitions introduced by the preposition à. "Converts" water into juice and an English translator. In his version, apricot is apricot juice, which also then gives a plentiful yellow foam: The apricot juice generated an abundance of yellow foam.

The most accurate is the German translator, who conveys the concept of interest to us with the complex word Aprikosen¬limonade.

This example shows that translators do not always strive to understand the essence of the phenomenon that is indicated by the word to be translated. But if the apricot tree presents some difficulties for translation, since it can be classified as realities, albeit very transparent, then the meaning of the word curve in the following example, it would seem, could be deciphered quite accurately: portraits of some generals in triangular hats, with crooked noses (from the short story “Port оля” by N.V. Gogol). The Italian translator translates this phrase as follows: ritratti di certi generali in tricorno col naso aquilino. As you can see, the crooked noses of Gogol turn into aquiline noses of the translator. It must be assumed that the translator understands the meaning of the Russian word curve, i.e. irregular, curved shape. The aquiline nose is also irregular, curved, but the curvature is completely different. In Russian, a crooked nose is a nose curled to one side. Gogol speaks of portraits of rather poor quality, made by inexperienced artists regarding the transfer of volume. On such “flat” portraits, the noses really look crooked. But the translator did not go into the decoding of the adjective curve, the phrases of the curve of the nose and its relationship with the phrase ¬ eagle nose. He followed the path of the punch: an eagle nose - a nose of an irregular (not straight, i.e. curved) shape; such a nose is considered a sign of masculinity; masculinity is the property of the generals, so crooked nose = naso aquilino.

A special group of words that are difficult to understand are words belonging to dialects and regional dialects. Even if the original language is native, the reader cannot always understand the meanings of dialectisms and regionalisms. It’s even harder to do this for the translator. But “hard” and “impossible” are not the same thing. The translator should use everything to decrypt the original text. Sometimes answers to questions arising from a translator are given by literary sources. Let us turn to a fragment of the chapter “Forest Army” from B. Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago”. The chapter begins like this: "In the fall, the partisan camp stood in the Fox otok, a small forest on a high mound, under which ... a foamy river was rushing."

The main question of this proposal: what is an outflow? Comments to the novel, compiled by V. Borisov and E. Pasternak, say that the otok is a river peninsula. The translator, having failed to find the meaning of this word, builds a clichéd logical series: “Fox otok” is the place where foxes apparently live; foxes do not like open space and build their holes in the thickets, therefore, the outflow is thickets. And in the translation into English appears Fox's thicket - Fox thickets. The translator does not think about the form of the word otok, but it is quite transparent: otok - cf .: duct, inflow, flow; in all cases we are talking about the flow of water. But edema - swell, flow around. Obviously, we are talking about an object that is bypassed, washed by a stream of water, in this case, a river. And the river peninsula turns into a thicket.

Another riddle: Election gathering on a buffalo. Absolutely clear the word pre-election. The word gathering is defined by dictionaries: 1) a meeting of members of a rural community in a pre-revolutionary community; 2) a revolutionary meeting of workers, students, etc. in pre-revolutionary Russia 1. But the buffalo remains completely incomprehensible. A comment helps, which clarifies that a buoy is an open place, a cleft, usually on a hill. I immediately recall the word exuberant, going back to the disused adjective buoy - a strong, bold, primary meaning of which was "tall, big." The considered example also shows that the meanings of regionalisms and dialectisms are often deciphered by an appeal to the history of words. The translator, who failed to decipher the meaning of the given word, uses the simplest translation “technique” - he simply does not translate it. And then the pre-election gathering on the waterfront turns into a clichéd English form of pre-election meeting, devoid of any color.

Translation errors can also occur when the translator encounters a multi-valued word in the text of the translation, i.e. a sign containing several concepts. Sometimes these concepts can be so far removed from each other that ¬ polysemy grows into homonymy. Often signs contain secondary concepts that have arisen as a result of imaginative rethinking of primary ones. The translator needs to carefully analyze the context, i.e. environment of the sign in order to determine which of the concepts is actualized in a particular case.

3. Errors of understanding at the level of “sign - a complex concept”

Now let us analyze examples of translation errors in deciphering the meanings of not individual words, but phrases.

Let us return to the selected fragment of Bulgakov’s text and see what and how Berlioz carried: he carried his decent hat with a pie in his hand.

A hat with a pie is a complex concept, in the content of which a species attribute of the generic concept, a hat is transferred by comparison (like a pie), in Russian it is indicated by a stable phrase. Its meaning is that the hat resembles a pirozhok, that is, it has a rather deep elongated cavity on top. The French translator, apparently not understanding the point of comparison, but wishing to preserve the imagery, offers his reader a very lengthy and confusing statement that has nothing to do with the Russian original: Quant à son chapeau, de qualité fort convenable, il le tenait froissé dans sa main comme un de ces beignets qu'on achète au coin des rues, which literally means the following: as for his hat, very good quality, he carried it in his crumpled hand, like some kind of donut that they sell on corner of the street.

The Czech version also preserves the image of something edible: V nice zmoulal kvalitni klobouk smacknuty na plâcku ... Ho placka in Czech is a tortilla. The very internal form of the word suggests that we are talking about something flat. The meaning of the phrase used by the author is also distorted.

The English translator completely omits the comparison. A soft hat appears in the English translation: ... held his proper fedora in his hand.

The Berlioz hat example shows, among other things, that the French translator was unable to correctly decipher the meaning of the whole judgment, framed by the corresponding syntactic construction of the Russian utterance. Therefore, the hat with the pie that Berlioz carried in his hand, described in the Russian saying, turns in the French text into the hat that Berlioz crushed in his hand so that it looks like a donut.

4. Errors of understanding at the level of "sign - judgment"

As noted in the XVII century, errors in deciphering the meanings of the original speech product are not limited to misunderstanding only concepts contained in separate words or phrases. They may affect the meaning of whole judgments and more complex logical constructions. These errors often come from a lack of attention to the syntactic organization of the utterance. Such errors are most evident in the philosophical discourse of the author of the original text.

Let us turn to Tournier’s novel “The Forest Tsar” and its translation into Russian. The hero, thinking about whether he delivers satisfaction to a woman or not, writes in his diary figurative phrase: “C'était vrai. Et il est également vrai que l'homme qui mange son pain ne s'inquiète pas de la satisfaction qu'éprouve, ou n'éprouve pas, le pain à être ainsi mangé. " “And that was true.” But, the truth is also that a person who eats bread does not care, receives or does not receive satisfaction from the bread that he eats in this way (my translation. - N.G.). In this phrase, an allusion to male selfishness in love is obvious.

Apparently, the translator had no time to understand the wisdom of the philosophical thoughts of the author, dressed in a definite syntactic form of the French utterance, therefore he easily spreads the object complement satisfaction (la satisfaction), related to the word bread {le pain) - is subject To the relative clause, on the subject of the main sentence - the word man {l'homme). Thus, the meaning of the statement is completely distorted: "Again, the true truth, as well as the fact that, satisfying hunger with a loaf of bread, we equally do not care either about our own pleasure, or about delivering it to the absorbed food."

Philosophical reasoning is a difficult task for the translator. The next fragment of the text demonstrates yet another betrayal, this time due to a lack of understanding of the meaning of the statement as a whole. For greater accuracy, we note that the distortion of meaning arises in this case as a result of a complex misunderstanding of both the syntactic structure of the utterance and some of its constituent words.

At the very beginning of the novel, Tournier reflects on what a monster, a monster, is, what is the essence of this phenomenon.

Thus, the correct and complete decoding of the reference situation described in the original text presupposes that the translator has the necessary cognitive experience in exactly that sphere of life, a slice of which the author of the original offers in the described situation.

The modern translation theory, based on the data of cognitive linguistics, makes extensive use of the concept of frame as one of the ways to represent a stereotypical situation. A frame should be understood as a two-sided cognitive entity: on the one hand, it is a certain system of knowledge about one or another precedent or even typical one, i.e. a regularly recurring, reality situation that has developed in the individual’s mind on the basis of previous cognitive experience. On the other hand, a frame is a dynamic cognitive category. It arises in the consciousness of an individual cognizing reality under the influence of various stimuli that activate his existing knowledge system. A frame often arises in the consciousness of an individual as a result of exposure to a speech work, text, i.e. sign. But the text does not only signal a reference situation; it also describes the specific vision of this situation by the author of the speech work.

The translator, perceiving the original text, finds himself in a difficult psycholinguistic situation: having deciphered the meanings of the individual language forms that make up the text, he draws all his cognitive experience to understand the meaning of the described situation. In other words, he compares his idea of situations of this type with what he deduces from the contents of the original text. If the cognitive experience of the translator is equal to or greater than the cognitive experience of the author of the original, the hermeneutic stage of the translation will be successfully overcome, since the static, latent, frame will absorb the dynamic frame caused by the text of the original.

If the cognitive experience of the translator is less than the experience of the author of the original, then three types of errors are possible in translation already at the hermeneutic stage. The first, very common, is omissions, also called translation gaps. They are similar to omissions, which are one of the types of translation transformations. But omissions, as a rule, have a purely linguistic basis. They are due to interlanguage asymmetry in the choice of more or less extensive means of expression to denote the same concept. The omissions are of a different nature and are caused by insufficient knowledge of the translator. It is hardly interesting to cite particular examples of omissions in translation admitted by poorly educated translators. On the contrary, it is very interesting and important for the theory of translation to analyze the typical omissions that arise in translations of different people working in a certain pair of languages.

The second type of error is blindly following the text of the original without understanding its meaning. Such errors are already rarely seen. The whole history of translation thought suggests that sensible translators did not undertake the translation without understanding the meaning of the original, even when the text was a mystery.

The third type of error consists in the fact that the translator replaces the dynamic frame that arose in the mind of the author of the original and deduced by him in the text with his own, which arose on the basis of insufficient cognitive experience.

6. Translation errors at the stage of re-expression of the system of meanings

At the re-expression stage, errors are primarily caused by insufficient mastery of the target language, inability to find forms in the target language equivalent to the corresponding original forms.

Let us turn to another example. The heroine of Max Frisch’s novel “I Will Call myself Gantenbein” (Mein Name dei Gantenbein) is going to the light and cannot find her chain: Sie findet ihre Halskette nicht. Translated, this situation is as follows: She can not find her necklace. As we can see, the German neck chain is converted into a necklace in translation. At first glance, a replacement is acceptable. Both the chain and the necklace are female jewelry and are worn around the neck. However, if you look at the dictionary of the target language, i.e. Russian language, you can find out that ogrerel is only an adornment of precious stones, pearls, etc. In other words, a necklace and a chain are not the same thing. A necklace is more intricate and more expensive than a chain. Detail of the toilet serves as an indirect characteristic of the character, so the replacement of one item by another seems unjustified.

7. Stylistic mistakes

And finally, the last thing I wanted to dwell on in the analysis of translation inaccuracies in the conversion of the text, based on an inattentive attitude to the original work, was the style of the author of the original. Let us turn to the Tournier novel and its translation. The narrative style is the first thing that catches your eye when reading a translation: a somewhat cheeky, playful-ironic manner of speaking, a claim to simplicity and freedom of speech communication with the reader. Calm and thoughtful Tournier with a stylistically sustained, processed speech, carefully choosing every word, spoke in Russian as the hosts of entertainment programs on the air say, calling themselves “DJs”, etc .: simple, -posts, without complexes, not shy in expressions.

The category of translation errors leads us to look at the translation of the text on the other hand, namely, from the standpoint of some extraneous “critic”, external to the translation process, but able to evaluate its result by comparing the original text with the translated one.

In this case, transformation and deformation appear to a greater degree as evaluative categories and constitute the opposition in which the first term is the antipode of the second. From the point of view of this “extraneous observer,” the result of the same operations, sometimes called translation techniques, can be regarded either as a transformation, i.e. with a plus sign, or as a deformation, i.e. conversion with a minus sign.

The only difference is their validity. The validity of certain translator’s actions that transform the text of the original is the main criterion that allows the critic to judge the correctness of the translation decisions and evaluate the quality of the translation work. Reasonable actions, no matter how far they sometimes taketranslator from the text of the original, its form, the reality reflected in it, the expected effect,

appear in the form of a justified transformation consistent with the concept of criticism.

In other words, the translation transformation of the original text appears to the critic as a transformation if the concept of translation decoded by him is consistent with the concept of translator. And on the contrary, if the concept of the translator, which determines his strategy, and the concept of criticism, which grew out of the analysis of the text of the translation in its comparison with the text of the original, do not coincide, then the latter will strive to present the translation of the text as its deformation.

Thus, in translation criticism, deformation can be called any distortion of the original, which is evaluated negatively. Moreover, it is not always as a deformation, i.e. distortion, It is precisely the conscious deforming actions of the translator that qualify. Translation errors also fall into this category.