Riassunto esame Inglese II, Prof. Rossi Mario, libro consigliato Introducing translation studies, Jeremy Munday

Chapter 1 – Main issues of translation studies

The concept of translation

The main aim of this book is to introduce the reader to major concepts and models of translation studies. The focus is on written translation rather than oral translation (the latter is commonly known as interpreting or interpretation). The English term translation, first attested in around 1340, derives either from Old French translation or more directly from the Latin translatio, itself coming from the principle of the verb transferre (to carry over). In the field of languages, translation today has several meanings:

• The general subject field or phenomenon (‘I studied translation at university’)
• The product – that is, the text that has been translated (‘they published the Arabic translation of the report’)
• The process of producing the translation, otherwise known as translating (‘translation service’)

The process of translation between two different written languages involves the changing of an original written text (the source text or ST) in the original verbal language (the source language or SL) into a written text (the target text or TT) in a different verbal language (the target language or TL). Thus, when translating a product manual from Chinese into English, the ST is Chinese and the TT is English.

What is translation studies?

Throughout history, written and spoken translations have played a crucial role in interhuman communication. As world trade has grown, so has the importance of translation. By 2008, in the European Union alone the turnover of the translation and interpreting industry was estimated at 5.7 billion euros. Yet the study of translation as an academic subject only really began in the second half of the twentieth century. In the English-speaking world, this discipline is now generally known as ‘translation studies’, thanks to James S. Holmes. In his key paper delivered in 1972, Holmes describes the then nascent discipline as being concerned with ‘the complex of problems clustered round the phenomenon of translating and translations’.

There are four very visible ways in which translation studies has become more prominent. Unsurprisingly, these reflect a basic tension between the practical side of professional translating and the often more abstract research activity of the field.

• 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 level. These programmes are mainly oriented towards training future professional commercial translators and interpreters and serve as highly valued entry-level qualifications for the professions. Take the example of the UK. The study of modern languages at school and university has been in decline but the story of postgraduate programmes in interpreting and translating is very different. 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. There is a whole host of journals devoted to single languages, modern languages, applied linguistics, comparative literature, and others where articles on translation are often published. There are also various professional publications dedicated to the practice of translation.
• 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. The Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs was established in 1953 by the Société française des traducteurs. It brought together national associations of translators. International conferences on a wide variety of themes are held in an increasing number of countries. From being a relatively quiet backwater in the early 1980s, translation studies has now become one of the most active and dynamic new areas of research encompassing an exciting mix of approaches.

An early history of the discipline

The practice of translation was crucial for the early dissemination of key cultural and religious texts and concepts. In the west, the different ways of translating were discussed by, among others, Cicero and Horace and St Jerome. While the practice of translation is long established, the study of the field developed into an academic discipline only in the latter part of the twentieth century. Before that, translation had often been relegated to an element of language learning. In fact, from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s and beyond, language learning in secondary schools in many countries had come to be dominated by what was known as grammar-translation. Applied to Classical Latin and Greek and then to modern foreign languages, this centered on the rote study of the grammatical rules and structures of the foreign language.

Grammar-translation therefore fell into increasing disrepute, particularly in many English-language countries, with the rise of alternative forms of language teaching such as the direct method and communicative approach from the 1960s and 1970s. The communicative approach stressed students’ natural capacity to learn language and attempts to replicate ‘authentic’ language-learning conditions in the classroom. This led to the abandoning of translation in language learning. As far as teaching was concerned, translation then tended to become restricted to higher-level and university language courses and professional translator training. It is only relatively recently that there has been a move to restore translation to language teaching.

In 1960s USA, literary translation was promoted by the translation workshop concept. The translation workshops were intended as a platform for the introduction of new translation into the target culture and for the discussion of the finer principles of the translation process and of understanding a text. Running parallel to this approach was that of comparative literature, where literature is studied and compared transnationally and transculturally, necessitating the reading of some works in translation. 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. This more systematic approach began to mark out the territory of the ‘scientific’ investigation of translation. The word science was used by Nida in the title of his 1964 book.

The Holmes/Toury 'map'

A seminal paper in the development of the field as a distinct discipline was James S. Holmes’s ‘the name and nature of translation studies’ (1988). Holmes draws attention to the limitations imposed at the time because translation research, lacking a home of its own, was dispersed across older disciplines (languages, linguistics, etc.). He also stresses the need to forge ‘other communication channels, cutting across the traditional disciplines to reach all scholars working in the field, from whatever background’.

Crucially, Holmes puts forward an overall framework, describing what translation studies covers. This framework was subsequently presented by the leading Israeli translation scholar Gideon Toury. In Holmes’ explanations of this framework, the objectives of the ‘pure’ areas of research are: the description of the phenomena of translation; and the establishment of general principles to explain and predict such phenomena (translation theory). The ‘theoretical’ branch is divided into general and partial theories.

The van Doorslaer 'map'

In the new maps, a distinction is drawn between ‘translation’ and ‘translation studies’, reflecting the different centers of interest of research. ‘Translation’ looks at the act of translating and, in the new map is divided into:

• Lingual mode (interlingual, intralingual);
• Media (printed, audiovisual, electronic);
• Mode (covert/overt translation, direct/indirect translation, mother tongue/other tongue translation, pseudo-translation, retranslation, self-translation, sight translation, etc.);
• Field (political, journalistic, technical, literary, religious, scientific, commercial).

Translation studies is subdivided into:

• Approaches (e.g., cultural approach, linguistic approach);
• Theories (e.g., general translation theory, polysystem theory);
• Research methods (e.g., descriptive, empirical);
• Applied translation studies (criticism, didactics, institutional environment).

Alongside this 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. The distinction is an important one, even if it is sometimes blurred in the literature: a strategy is the overall orientation of a translated text while a procedure is a specific linguistic technique used at a given point in a text.

Chapter 2: Translation theory before the twentieth century

‘Word-for-word’ or ‘sense-for-sense’?

The distinction between ‘word-for-word’ (i.e., ‘literal’) and ‘sense-for-sense’ (i.e., ‘free’) translation goes back to Cicero and St Jerome. In the west, where the status of the Classical authors of ancient Greece and Rome remained pre-eminent, it formed the basis of key writings on translation for nearly two thousand years. The Roman rhetorician and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero outlined his approach to translation in De optimo genere oratorum. Such creative imitation went against the common trend in Roman times, where ‘word-for-word’ translation was exactly what it said – it was the replacement of each individual word of the ST (invariably Greek) with its closest grammatical equivalent in Latin. This served as an aid to the reader, who would read the TT side by side with the Greek ST.

The disparagement of word-for-word translation came from others as well, such as the poet Horace, who, in a short but famous passage from his Ars Poetica, underlines the goal of producing an aesthetically pleasing and creative text in the TL. This attitude had great influence on the succeeding centuries. Thus, St Jerome, the most famous of all western translators, cites the authority of Cicero’s approach to justify his own Latin revision and translation of the Christian Bible, later to become known as the Latin Vulgate. Jerome revised and corrected earlier Latin translations of the Greek New Testament, the account of Jesus’s life. For the Old Testament, he decided to return to the original Hebrew. This was a decision that was controversial to those who maintained the divine inspiration of the Greek Septuagint, the commonly accepted translation of the older texts, in use among Christians.

The Septuagint was a translation of the Hebrew Bible, undertaken over a long period beginning in the third century BCE in what has been described as ‘the first major translation in western culture’. By comparing the Greek Septuagint translation with the Hebrew original, Jerome was the first to note where the two versions differed. Jerome’s statement is now usually taken to refer to what came to be known as ‘literal’ (word-for-word) and ‘free’ (sense-for-sense) translation. Jerome rejected the word-for-word approach because, by following so closely the form of the ST, it produced an absurd translation, cloaking the sense of the original. The sense-for-sense approach, on the other hand, allowed the sense or content of the ST to be translated.

Early Chinese and Arabic discourse on translation

St Jerome’s statement is usually taken to be the clearest expression of the ‘literal’ and ‘free’ poles in translation. The same concerns have been represented in other rich and ancient translation traditions such as in China and the Arab world. Hung and Pollard use similar terms when describing the history of Chinese translation of Buddhist sutras from Sanskrit. The vocabulary of Hung and Pollard’s description shows the influence of modern western translation terminology, the general thrust of the argument being similar to the Cicero/St Jerome poles described above. This is especially so because there are alternative translations for the terms. Aesthetic and stylistic considerations are again noted, and there appear to be the first steps towards a rudimentary differentiation of text types, with non-literary STs being treated differently from literary TTs.

Some of the issues, such as transliteration, relate most clearly to the problem of translation of foreign elements and names into a non-phonetic language (Chinese). However, it should be stressed that Hung and Pollard later revised and extended their discussion, emphasizing the changing context in which these translations were made. For example, the third phase was marked by increased linguistic competence and theological expertise on the part of the monks and officials involved. Translation choices were expounded in the prefaces to these texts, perhaps the most influential being by the religious leader Dào’ān who directed an extensive translation ‘programme’ of Buddhist sutras.

Dào’ān lists five elements where meaning was subject to change in translation. These changes involve:

• Coping with the flexibility of Sanskrit syntax by reversing to a standard Chinese order;
• The enhancement of the literariness of the ST to adapt to an elegant Chinese style;
• The omission of repetitive exclamations;
• The reduction in the paratextual commentaries that accompany the TTs;
• Reduction or restructuring to ensure more logical and linear discourse.

Dào’ān also lists three factors that necessitated special care:

• The directing of the message to a new audience;
• The sanctity of the ST words;
• The special status of the STs themselves as the cumulative work of so many followers.

The ‘literal’ and ‘free’ poles surface once again in the rich translation tradition of the Arab world, which created the great centre of translation in Baghdad. There was intense translation activity in the ‘Abbasid period, encompassing a range of languages and topics but centered on the translation into Arabic of Greek scientific and philosophical material. Baker and Hanna describe the two translation methods that were adopted during that period: the first, was highly literal and consisted of translating each Greek word with an equivalent Arabic word and, where none existed, borrowing the Greek word into Arabic.

According to Baker and Hanna, this word-for-word method proved to be unsuccessful and was later revised using the second, sense-for-sense method: the second method consisted of translating sense-for-sense, creating fluent target texts which conveyed the meaning of the original without distorting the target language. The terminology of this description is strongly influenced by the Classical western European discourse on translation.

Humanism and the Protestant Reformation

Language and translation became the sites of a huge power struggle. Latin, controlled by the Church in Rome, had a monopoly over knowledge and religion until challenged by European Humanist movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Humanists sought liberation from the power of the Church by recovering the refinement of Classical Latin and Greek, and their secular writers, free from the changes wrought by the Middle Ages. Then, in the early fifteenth century, the Protestant Reformation of northern Europe, which was to lead to a huge schism within Christianity, began to challenge Latin through the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages.

In such conditions, the translation of any book which diverged from the Church’s interpretation ran the risk of being deemed heretical and of being censured or banned. The most famous examples are the English theologian-translator William Tyndale and the French humanist Etienne Dolet. Non-literal or non-accepted translation came to be seen and used as a weapon against the Church. The most notable example is Martin Luther’s crucially influential translation into East Central German of the New Testament and later the Old Testament.

Luther played a pivotal role in the Reformation while, linguistically, his use of a regional yet socially broad dialect went a long way to reinforcing that form of the German language as standard. In response to the accusations that he had altered the Holy Scriptures in his translations, Luther defended himself. Luther follows St Jerome in rejecting a word-for-word translation strategy since it would be unable to convey the same meaning as the ST and would sometimes be incomprehensible. While Luther’s treatment of the free and literal debate does not show great theoretical advance on what St Jerome had written over a thousand years before, his infusion of the Bible with the language of ordinary people and his consideration of translation in terms that focused on the TL and the TT reader were crucial.

Early attempts at systematic translation theory: Dryden, Dolet and Tyler

Such a very free approach to translation produced a reaction, notably from another English poet and translator, John Dryden, whose brief description of the translation process would have enormous impact on subsequent translation theory and practice. In the preface to his translation of Ovid’s Epistles in 1680, Dryden reduces all translation to three categories:

• ‘metaphrase’: ‘word by word and line by line’ translation, whi