Translation. TYPES OF translation. Translation as an act of communication
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Lecture 1-6
- Bu sahifa navigatsiya:
- The device is resorted to in the following cases
- the speech of foreigners, dialect forms and illiterate speech
- The individual peculiarities of speech
- Diminutives
- Metaphoric transformations
- To denote
- Questions for self control 1. When do we use lexical transformation –addition
- Sources: a) Basic 7.
orientation towards the reader is another serious reason why a translator resorts to generalization; it is often stylistically predetermined. Examples to illustrate generalization 1. …on his daily adventure from the bow window (вікно з виступом; еркер) at the Haversnake to the billiard room at the Red Rottle (Galsworthy) But hardly had he opened his mouth as they gave him a heavy punch in the belly. 3. He boasted that his weight had not changed since he was twenty, and for years, wet or fine, he had got up early morning at eight to put on shorts and a sweater and have a run round Regent's Park (Maugham). 4. Margery gave him his black Homburg hat and opened the door for Julia and Michael to go out (Maugham). 5. She was jealous of his friends at the Green Room Club (Maugham).
language unit which is not its dictionary equivalent but the meaning of which can be logically inferred from it. It is just another way of referring to the same object or an aspect of the same situation. The relationship of the substitute with the original may be of different types: the substitute has often a cause-and-effect or effect-and-cause relationship with the original; Other types may be: cause and process; process and cause; a part and the whole; an object and the container; the container and the thing contained; the material and the thing made of it; the agent and the action; the action and the agent etc. The list is in no way complete. A great many of such substitutions are based on metonymic relations. Such transformations cannot always be treated as deliberate or subjective, more often than not they are objectively required. In most cases they are conditioned by differences in lexical valency and are often used for stylistic reasons. Examples to illustrate modulation He is in jail in Valencia now. I hope he likes it (Hemingway). 2. The room in which she sat was connected by three archways with the big dining-room where they supped and danced; amid the crowd doubtless were a certain number who had been to the play. (Maugham). 3. Soames has stopped to look in at a picture shop (Galsworthy 4. Hindley and Cathy contented themselves with looking and listening till peace was restored (Emily Bronte). d) Antonymic (antonymous) translation Antonymic (antonymous) translation is substitution of an affirmative in sense and structure source language unit for a semantically corresponding negative in structure sense unit of the TL and vice versa (Korunets'). E.g.: mind your own business - not infrequently - часто; stay away from me - (It represents a way of rendering when an affirmative in structure language unit (word, word- combination, sentence) is conveyed via a negative in sense or structure but identical in content language unit or vice versa Antonymic translation describes the situation, as it were, from the opposite point of view and renders an affirmative source language structure by a negative target language one or vice versa (Komissarov, Koralova). The device is resorted to in the following cases: when there is no other way of expressing the sense of the source language sense unit: E.g.: take it easy - Mind your own business - At close quarters - Do you mind this? when there are two negations in the SL sense units: E.g.: not uncommon - ; not infrequently - - I feel/ am perfectly well. to achieve a fuller expressiveness: E.g.: “I hope you'll stay”, he said in a tired voice. when stylistically required: E.g.: keep your head - не падай духом; The transformation in this case may be sometimes avoided. It may have another version: Вище голову! The choice of the form of expression/ transformation rests with the translator only. it may be conditioned by differences in the lexical valency: E.g.: snowdrifts three feet deep - Examples to illustrate antonymic translation 1. Don't move I beg you Watson! (C.Doyle) I don't think I'll find them (Hemingway) I'll stay with you until I am dead (Hemingway). She would show him that she did not care (Galsworthy). I am a strange old man (Hemingway). “Five and you nearly were killed when I brought the fish…” (Hemingway) “You can't be sick,” said Mildred (R.Bradbury) I didn't say anything (Hemingway). 9. Keep out of trouble, Ettore (Hemingway). 10. I watched her face (Hemingway). 11. You must know, Gatsby (Fitzgerald) 12. I wonder if Michael remembered to have sent tea along to the queues (Maugham) 13. I want to be out before it is light (Hemingway). 14. Helen's finding it hard to get work these days… 15. But still the apprehension that filled her was not unpleasant (Maugham). Antonymic translation is employed for the sake of achieving faithfulness in conveying content or the necessary expressiveness of sense units. e) Compensation technique One more specific transformation which may come handy to the translator when he is baffled by an apparently unsolvable translation is called the compensation technique.
Compensation technique is a deliberate introduction of some additional elements in translation to make up for the loss of similar elements at the same or an earlier stage. It's resorted to when a translator deals with equivalent lacking elements. What are the elements having no precise equivalent in the TL and which can't be rendered by the same means? They are: 1) The speech of foreigners and dialects; 2) Individual peculiarities of speech; 3) Diminutive and augmentative usages; 4) Equivalent-lacking grammatical categories; 5) Different stylistic figures (play upon words, metaphors, periphrases, irony etc.). A translator must be ready to render the speech of foreigners, dialect forms and illiterate
using the Western Ukrainian dialect forms. There is no universal recipe for this translation problem and each such case requires an individual approach. In some cases contaminated forms (the distortions in the target grammar and phonetics) are used to imitate the speech of foreigners. Sometimes both SL and TL have developed accepted forms of representing the contaminated speech by persons of foreign origin. For example, the speech of a Chinese can be represented in English and in Ukrainian in a conventional way, which facilitates the translator's task: E.g.: Me blingee beer. Now you pay. If no such tradition exists, the translator has to select some possible contaminated Ukrainian forms to produce the desired effect: E.g.: When you see him quid' then you quick see him `perm whale' - (the speech of a Kanaka) It is not always necessary to give the contaminated forms of each word in a TL utterance. It may be sufficient to indicate the speech of a foreigner with the help of a few deliberate distortions of grammatical or phonetic norms. Much depends here on the pragmatic intent of the original utterance. The individual peculiarities of speech The woman character of the story “Arrangement in Black and White” by D. Parker often speaks incorrect English. Her highly emotional speech abounds in wrong forms of some words. E.g.: “Oh, I'm finely”, she said. “Just simply finely. Listen. I want you to do me the most terrible favor. Will you? Will you please? Pretty please?” The wrong use of “finely” instead of the correct form “fine” is not easy to translate where there is no corresponding corrupted form of this word. Hence, the stylistically wrong employment of the adverb “красненько” with the aim of compensating the corruption in Ukrainian translation. Diminutives have a very poor representation in English (only some nouns) but there is a very large quantity of them , where they exist practically among all parts of speech. Cf: English: dear - dearie; stream - streamlet; In English they may be used only as diminutives or they may express diminutive evaluation as well, which is identified in context. It is difficult to say, for example, whether booklet, manikin or hillock are diminutives only or diminutives and evaluatives at the same time. As diminutives they mean брошюра, карлик and горбок respectively, and as diminutive evaluatives they may express the meanings of книжечка/ брошурка, чоловічок (small and handsome), горбочок (not high and pleasant hillock). This distinction is almost always clearly identified and expressed in Uzbek where diminutive suffixes may also point to an escalating gradation of a diminutive quality of a noun: qizcha, qizaloq, qizgina. Similar meanings have to be expressed in English with the help of lexico-syntactic means, i.e. by means of some additional adjectives containing the seme of smallness: голівка - (small) little head; дівчинонька - dear/ lovely girl; рученята - tiny hands or in some other way: Lordy, in with you quick. Neither has the English language any morphological means to express explicitly the augmentative and evaluative meanings of Ukrainian lexemes (mostly nouns). As a result, they acquire in English an objectively predetermined form of explicit expression by means of word- groups or sentences. For example, the pejorative (mostly contemptuous) meanings of a number of Ukrainian augmentative nouns will have the following English outer form expression: Bo’ri - a big formidable wolf/ a big monster of a wolf; Dub - a very thick and tall/ ramous oak-tree; polvon - a healthy/ robust fellow; a regular/ robust maypole; piyanista, alkash - a miserable heavy drunkard; a disgusting inebriate; a three-bottle man Types of lexemes According to Retsger the types of lexical transformation are as follows: • Generalization; • Differentiation; • Descriptive translation; • antonymic translation; • Omission; • Compensation of looses. Generalisation – is a subset of a word of narrower meaning for target language units of a broader meaning. e.g. Charles was found guilty of high treason and beheaded (його старатили)
Differentiation is the substitution of a lexical unit of broader meaning for a unit of narrower meaning: e.g. the book was made into a successful film. The need for differentiation is often called forth by the very abstract nature of many English words that have no adequate counterpart parts in Ukrainian and must be rendered by more concrete renomination. Descriptive translation. In most cases it is the replacement of an equivalent lacking word or phrase of the source language text for its description employing the language units familiar to the target language speaker. E.g. friendly fire – вогонь по своїм Descriptive translation doesn’t always involve equivalent lacking words sometimes it may be done for sociologic reasons as in the following: e.g. Edward is surprised by what he hears from Mr. Smith Antonymic translation is the substitution of lexical unit for it target language antonym with the corresponding changes in the lexic-grammatical structures of the target language sentence to preserve the original meaning of the message. Sometimes it’s the only possible way of rendering the target language phrase. e.g. take your time – Anything is better than treason – But: the war is certain to come;
some elements of the utterance are dimmed, communicatively redundant or irrelevant for the target language recipient. e.g. there are reports that (a number of) people were killed but we don’t know exactly how many e.g. (earlier) today I spoke to managers Some words of generalized meaning have a tendency of being omitted while their meaning is absorbed by the other target language lexical components: e.g. the last thing I felt doing was dancing. Good manner seemed to be a thing of the past. Compensation is used to make up for the loses either of lexical, grammatical of sociological origin, especially when rendering local or social dialect. Ungrammatical sentences are often used to show vernacular or highly colloquial variant of speech. In many cases they can’t be translated on the same level of language hierarchy. That’s why they’re substituted for lexical indicators of the functional variety of language: dialects, jargon, slang. Lexical transformations change the semantic core of a translated word. They can be classified into the following groups: 1.Lexical substitution, or putting one word in place of another. It often results from the different semantic structures of the source language and target language words. Thus the word молодой is not always translated as young; rather, it depends on its word combinability: молодой картофель is equal to new potatoes. This translation equivalent is predetermined by the word combination it is used in. This type of translation can hardly be called substitution, since it is a regular equivalent for this phrase. Deliberate substitution as a translation technique can be of several subtypes: · Specification, or substituting words with a wider meaning with words of a narrower meaning: Will you do the room? – Ты уберешься в комнате? I’ll get the papers on the way
of meaning than their Russian counterparts and their particular semantics is recognized from the context. · Generalization, or substituting words of a narrower meaning with those of a wider meaning: People don’t like to be stared at. – Людям не нравится, когда на них смотрят. If we compare the semantic structure of the English and Russian verbs, we can see that the English stare specifies the action of seeing expressed by the Russian verb. The Russian смотреть can imply staring, facing, eyeing, etc. The specific meaning in the Russian sentence can be expressed by the adverb пристально. Another reason for generalization in translating can be that the particular meaning expressed by the source language word might be irrelevant for the translation receptor: She bought the Oolong tea on her way home. – По
receptor this information is not important; therefore, the translator can generalize. · Differentiation is a rather rare technique of substitution. It takes place when we substitute a word by another one with parallel meaning, denoting a similar species: bamboo curtain – железный занавес. Both bamboo and железо (iron) are materials known for their hard nature. They are used figuratively to denote the barriers between the Western and Communist countries (bamboo curtain in reference to China, железный занавес in reference to other Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Aid) states. There are no hyponymic relations between the notions of bamboo and iron (though the referential area of железный занавес is of course much wider than that of bamboo curtain.) Modulation is a logical development of the notion expressed by the word: But outside it was raining. -– Но на улице шел дождь. The primary equivalent of the word outside is снаружи. But it is impossible to say in Russian *Но снаружи шел дождь. By means of unsophisticated logical operation the translator finds another equivalent: на улице. Thus he takes into consideration a tradition of the word combination and acceptability of collocation. He is aided in this by the metonymical closeness of word meanings based on contiguity of the two notions. 2.Compensation is a deliberate introduction of some additional element in the target text to make up for the loss of a similar element in the source text. The main reason for this transformation is a vocabulary lacuna in the target language. For example, one of the Galsworthy’s characters was called a leopardess. But there is no one-word equivalent of the same stylistic coloring in Russian. Therefore, the translator compensated the word by using the word тигрица to characterize the lady. 3.Metaphoric transformations are based on transferring the meaning due to the similarity of notions. The target language can re-metaphorize a word or a phrase by using the same image (Don’t dirty your hands with that money! – Не марай рук этими деньгами!) or a different one (Он вернет нам деньги, когда рак свистнет. – He will pay us our money back when hell freezes over). The source language metaphor can be destroyed if there is no similar idiom in the target language: Весна уже на пороге. – Spring is coming very soon. Or, on the contrary, the target text is metaphorized either to compensate a stylistically marked word or phrase whose coloring was lost for some reason, or merely to express a source language lacuna: Он решил начать жить по-новому. – He decided to turn over a new life. One and the same situation is denoted by the source and target language. But each language does it in its own way.
Hence is the term of denotative meaning, or referential meaning, i.e. the meaning relating a language unit to the external world; and the term of denotation, or a particular and explicit meaning of a symbol. To translate correctly, a translator has to comprehend the situation denoted by the source text - as P. Newmark stressed, one should translate ideas, not words55
and then find the proper means of the target language to express this situation (idea). If the translator does not understand the situation denoted by the source text, his or her translation will not be adequate, which sometimes happens when an inexperienced translator attempts to translate a technical text. The main requirement of translation is that the denotation of the source text be equal to the denotation of the target text. That is why a literary word-for-word translation sometimes results in a failure of communication. Возьми хлеба в булочной. is equivalent to the English Buy some bread in the bakery. only because the receptor of the Russian sentence knows that the situation of buying in Russian can be denoted by a more general word взять whose primary equivalent (not for this context) is to take which does not contain the seme of money-paying. Thus, this model of translation emphasizes identification of the situation as the principal phase of the translation process. This theory of translation is helpful in translating neologisms and realia: to give a proper equivalent to the phrase Red Guards, which is an English calque from Chinese, we should know what notion is implied by the phrase. On finding out that this phrase means ‘members of a Chinese Communist youth movement in the late 1960’s, committed to the militant support of Mao Zedong, we come to the Russian equivalent of this historic term – хунвэйбины. As a matter of fact, this model of translation is used for attaining the equivalent on the situation level. It is the situation that determines the translation equivalent among the variables: instant coffee is equivalent to растворимый кофе but not *мгновенный кофе. The situation helps to determine whether a translation is acceptable or not. For example, we have to translate the sentence Somebody was baited by the rights. Without knowing the situation, we might translate the sentence as Кто-то подвергался травле со стороны
will be inappropriate and we had better use the equivalent Президент Рузвельт подвергался резким нападкам со стороны правых. Questions for self control 1. When do we use lexical transformation –addition? 2. At what cases can lexical transformation – omission be used? 3. What do you know about the problem of lexical equivalence? 4. What do you know about the problem of stylistic equivalence? 5. What do you know about the problem of Pragmatic equivalence?
1. Бархударов Л.С. Язык и перевод. - М.,1975. 2. Бреус Е.В. Теория и практика перевода с английского языка на русский. - М., 2001. 3. Казакова Т.А. Практические основы перевода. – СПб, 2001. 4. Комиссаров В.Н. Теория перевода (лингвистические аспекты). - М., 1990. 5. Тюленев С.В. Теория перевода: Учебное пособие. – М., 2004 6. Швейцер А. Д. Перевод и лингвистика. М., 1973. 7. Bell R. N. Translation and translating (Theory and practice). London, New York, 1995. 8. Catford J.С. A Linguistic Theory of Translation. London., 1965. 9. Neubert A. Text and translation. - Leipzig, 1985. 10. Newmark P. Approaches to Translation. - Oxford, 1981. 11. Nida E. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden, 1964. 12. Nida E., Taber Ch. The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden, 1969.
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