Riassunto esame Letteratura Inglese, prof. Morbiducci, libro consigliato Translation studies

Chapter 1

Main issues of translation studies

Translation studies is a new academic research area that has expanded in recent years, especially the last fifty. Roman Jakobson, in his opera “On linguistic aspects of translation,” divided translation into three categories:

• Intralingual (an interpretation of verbal signs by other signs in the same language)
• Interlingual (classic translation)
• Intersemiotic (or transmutation, because it translates into non-verbal signs like music and paint)

There are two very important ways in which this area has developed:

• Proliferation of specialized translating
• Interpreting courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels

In the USA, in the 1960s, the concept of the translation workshop about literary translation was promoted as a platform for the introduction of new translation into the target culture. In a parallel plane, we also have comparative literature, where literature is studied and compared transnationally and transculturally, necessitating the reading of some literature in translation.

James Holmes

One of the first people that studied this area was James Holmes with his map of translation studies. Holmes drew attention to the limitations of the old studies about translation studies and created a sort of “other communication channel.”

He described the area of translation studies and divided it into two different ways: Pure and Applied. He described the objectives of this framework (PURE) that are:

• Description of the phenomena of translation (descriptive translation theory), general and descriptive.
• The establishment of general principles to explain and predict such phenomena (translation theory), product-oriented, process-oriented, and function-oriented.

... and APPLIED in translation:

• Translator training
• Translation aids
• Translation criticism

Mr. Holmes’ theory gives the chance to all studies to increase this particular and important linguistic area, the translation.

Chapter 2

Translation theory before the twentieth century

This is the pre-linguistic period of translation (about Newmark). In this period, there was an important debate about the translation between:

• Word for word (literal translation)
• Sense for sense (free translation)

This distinction between literal and free goes back to Cicero and St. Jerome. In Roman times, the word-for-word translation was exactly what it indicated, the replacement of each individual word of the source text (Greek) with its equivalent in Latin. St. Jerome, one of the most important translators, disparaged the word-for-word translation because it cloaked the sense of the original. The sense-for-sense translation allowed the sense or content of the source language to be translated.

We have the same translation type problems in the Arab world, where in Baghdad, a great center of translation was created. It translated from Arabic to Greek. They preferred sense-for-sense translation.

Martin Luther

With Luther, we enter into a very important area of translation because in this period, the Church was concerned with adding the correct sense to the words of the Bible or Testaments (new and old). St. Jerome and Martin Luther were the translators for these very hard assignments. M. Luther was criticized by the Church for adding the word “allein” (alone/only) because there was no equivalent Latin word.

Luther followed St. Jerome in rejecting the word-for-word translation strategy. In religious texts, we have the problem of the paramount concept.

Flora Amos

She notes that early translators often differed considerably in the meaning they gave to terms such as “faithfulness,” “accuracy,” and even the word “translation” itself. She introduced the concept of “truth” and “spirit” in the area of translation.

Dryden

He reduces all translation into three categories:

• Metaphrase (word by word)
• Paraphrase (the word has not strictly followed by the sense)
• Imitation (forsaking word and sense)

Schleiermacher

We have two different types of text:

• Commercial text
• Scholarly and artistic text

Chapter 3

Equivalence and equivalent effect

After the period of “fight” between free vs. literal, we can talk about the meaning of a particular issue like “equivalence.” Roman Jakobson was, maybe, the first to talk about equivalence in his opera “The nature of linguistic meaning and equivalence.” We could say that translation is a game to equivalence because a word in the source language corresponds to a word (with the same sense) in the target language. But translation is more complicated.

Jakobson follows the idea (Saussure) that the signifier and the signified, together, form the linguistic sign, but the sign is arbitrary. For the message to be “equivalent” in source and target language, the code units will be different since they belong to two different sign systems (languages) which partition reality differently.

Ex. house: is feminine in Romance languages and neuter in German. Only in poetry Jakobson talks about “untranslatable” and requires a creative transposition.

Nida

He is linked to the theory of “generative transformational grammar” by Chomsky. The most important idea of Nida is that a word hasn’t meaning without the context. Nida: The old terms such as “literal or free translation” or “faithful translation” are discarded by Nida, in favor of two basic orientations or types of equivalence (formal and dynamic equivalence).

Formal equivalence: Focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content.

Dynamic equivalence: Is based on what Nida calls “the principle of equivalent effect,” where the relationship between receptor and message should be the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message. The message has to be tailored to the receptor’s linguistic needs and cultural expectations and aims at complete naturalness (the closest natural equivalent to the source language message) of expression.

For Nida, the success of the translation depends on:

• Making sense
• Conveying the spirit and manner of the original
• Having a natural and easy form of expression
• Producing a similar response

Chomsky

The most basic of such structures are Kernel sentences, which are simple, active, declarative sentences that require the minimum of transformation. Kernels are to be obtained from the source language surface by a reductive process of back-transformation (Nida). This involves analysis using generative-transformational grammar’s four types of functional class:

• Events
• Objects
• Abstract
• Relational

Kernels are the level at which the message is transferred into the receptor language before being transformed into the surface structure in three stages: literal transfer, minimal transfer, and literary transfer.

Newmark

He provides the definition of “semantic and communication translation.”