Translation today trends and perspectives

Chapter 1 Introduction GUNILLA ANDERMAN and MARGARET ROGERS On the afternoon of Friday 1 October 1999, the day immediately following St Jeromes day, scholars of Translation Studies from around the world assembled at the University of Surrey to participate in a symposium to pay tribute to Professor Peter Newmark and his work. Following the presentation of Peter Newmarks keynote paper entitled No global communication without translation, the proceedings continued with an at times very lively Round Table discussion, as Peter Newmark jostled with translation theorists and scholars, answering their questions related to the paper, and in turn challenging their responses. The event concluded with a dinner and the presentation of a Liber Amicorum Word, Text, Translation including contributions from scholars and friends engaged in the field of Translation Studies. The present volume, Translation Today: Trends and Perspectives, owes its origins to this event. It consists of the keynote paper, a record of the Round Table discussion, and contributions to the discussion on the eight topics chosen by Peter Newmark for consideration as translation issues in the new millennium and of particular interest to him. The topics selected and discussed in this volume are: The nature of translation; Types and kinds of translation; Valid and deficient texts; English as the lingua franca of translation; Social translation and interpreting; Later modes of translation; The assessment of translation; and The university and the market. The book is divided into two main parts. The first part contains the kick-off summary by Peter Newmark of his keynote paper, as well as a record of the ensuing Round-table discussion. Participating in the discussion were the following contributors to the Liber Amicorum as well as two colleagues from Multilingual Matters, Mike Grover and Tommi Grover: Gunilla Anderman, University of Surrey , UK (Chair) Reiner Arntz, University of Hildesheim, Germany Simon Chau, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong David Connolly, translator and translation consultant, European Educational Organization, Athens, Greece 1 2 Translation Today: Trends and Perspectives John Dodds, University of Trieste, Italy Piotr Kuhiwczak, University of Warwick, UK Hans Lindquist, Vọxjử University, Sweden Sylfest Lomheim, Agder College, Norway Gerard McAlester, Tampere University Finland Albrecht Neubert, Emeritus Professor, Leipzig University, Germany Peter Newmark, University of Surrey, UK Monica Pedrola, postgraduate student at the University of Trieste, Italy Margaret Rogers, University of Surrey, UK Mike Shields, The Translators Association Gideon Toury, Tel Aviv University, Israel Contributors to the volume absent on the day were Patrick Chaffey, University of Oslo, Norway; Jan Firbas, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic; Viggo Hjứrnager-Pedersen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Eugene Nida, University of Michigan, USA; Eithne OConnell, Dublin City University, Ireland; and Mary Snell-Hornby, University of Vienna, Austria. Janet Fraser, University of Westminster, UK was able to attend in the evening. Members of professional organisations attending included Graham Cross of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) and Eyvor Fogarty, ITI and Fộdộration Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT), with Henry Pavlovich, Institute of Linguists, joining after the Round Table discussion. The second part of the book starts with Peter Newmarks full-length keynote paper, followed by contributions on each selected topic by participants attending the symposium as well as scholars and practitioners invited to contribute. We are grateful for this further opportunity to include papers from Peters many friends and colleagues previously unable to contribute to Word, Text, Translation. In addition, in order to extend the discussion of English as the lingua franca of translation, a chapter by David Graddol has also been included, reproduced by kind permission of AILA and the author.1 It is our hope that the present volume will have retained some of the liveliness of the discussion on the day, and that the views expressed by the participants and assembled authors will in years to come provide an interesting record of a cross-section of views on trends and issues of concern in Translation Studies at the beginning of the new millennium. The nature of translation, the first topic ambitiously tackled in Peter Newmarks paper, is a heading under which most writing on translation could be accommodated. The papers in this section tackle broad issues, ranging from a reassessment of semantic/communicative translation, Peter Newmarks well-known concepts, through an intriguing view of the source text-target text (ST-TT) relationship, and an experiential view Introduction 3 of literary translation informed by a number of other disciplines, to the reception of texts as translations or original works. A common theme is the creative aspect of translation, seen from different perspectives. Engaging with Peter Newmarks widely-acknowledged distinction between semantic and communicative approaches to translation, Albrecht Neubert views the translator (cf. also Kuhiwczak (this volume)) as both interpreter/critic and creator; he argues that, rather than being two types of translation, semantic and communicative translation (for which he prefers to use the semiotic label pragmatic) constitute two complementary methods within one type, although operating at different levels. Semantic translation is concerned with procedures, communicative with intentions, the latter acting as a filter for the former. Neubert also challenges Newmarks claims about the untranslatability of certain English words on the basis of his work in corpus studies, pointing to the importance of context and meaning potential for words. Referring to an English word such as privacy, considered by Newmark as untranslatable in some languages, Neubert shows how the translator might make expert use of the context in the TT, just as the ST contextualised its meanings; this in turn enables Neubert to render privacy in German in a number of different ways. Newmarks point, however, is that in certain situations context may not always be readily available to allow easy transfer of individual lexical items from ST to TT. Evidence supporting this claim may be gleaned from the fact that privacy has now been borrowed into Italian as la privacy (cf. John Dodds comment in the Round Table discussion). Attempts to define translation are legion and various, often reflecting specific aspects of the social and ideological contexts of their provenance. In describing translation as a dynamic reflection of human activities, Peter Newmark allows us a tantalising glimpse of a more universal world. In her contribution Looking forward to the translation: on a dynamic reflection of human activities, Kirsten Malmkjổr attempts to elaborate this view from the perspective of philosophical semantics, at the same time engaging with one of the most challenging ideas to emerge in Translation Studies in recent years, namely Tourys Source Text Postulate (1995: 334). What is challenging is the fact that a ST has to be postulated at all rather than presupposed. Malmkjổr concludes unsurprisingly but for novel reasons that one of the factors distinguishing translations from monolingual communications is indeed the influence of the ST on the TT, a view which she nevertheless argues is consistent with Tourys TT-oriented view of equivalence. Central to Malmkjổrs argument is the so-called forward-looking nature of human communication, according to which a translation can be seen as a future but, in some sense, still shaped response to the original text. In other words, 4 Translation Today: Trends and Perspectives translations can be understood as being at the confluence of two dimensions: temporal (past and future language use) and linguistic (source and target languages). Translations are therefore distinguished from monolingual communications not only by the obvious bilingual factor, but also by the realisation of the less predictable, temporal perspective in an instance of language use which cannot be fully anticipated. It is in this interaction between the ST, an aspect of the past, and the TT, a text (to be) created in the future, that Malmkjổr sees a truly dynamic reflection of human activity, as envisaged in Newmarks paper. As readers of The Linguist and Peter Newmarks books will know, the style of writing which he uses often manifests itself in concise to-thepoint observations on aspects of translation, frequently wide-ranging and, often, stimulating and highly personal. Similarly, in his equally very personal contribution, Marshall Morris seeks to stimulate the thoughts of fellow literary translators by pointing to different sources of inspiration which, he argues, can support and enlighten the translation process. In presenting his thoughts With translation in mind, Morris refers to sources in linguistics, psychology, history, philosophy, sociology and social anthropology. The emphasis throughout is on the experiential aspects of translating, a perspective which may often be lost in more rationally-based analyses. At times throughout history the dividing line between translation and adaptation has been difficult to draw, as for instance in the United Kingdom during the Victorian Age (cf. Hale, 2001). In her analysis of a number of Spanish translations of Washington Irvings The Alhambra, Raquel Merino illustrates how the boundary between translation and adaptation becomes hard to identify in the context of a popular text which is reproduced in both the source language (SL) and the target language (TL) in a number of versions. Tracing back (in awe) a hundred-year history of Spanish translations: Washington Irvings The Alhambra describes an ongoing study to (i) compile a bibliographical catalogue of Spanish versions of the Alhambra text, and (ii) trace the texts themselves. Based on the texts so far identified, Merino chooses a number of characteristics which she then uses as a basis of comparison between STs and TTs; in addition she also compares individual STs and TTs. A study of these characteristics, including the sequence of the tales, the number of tales, and the text of selected opening paragraphs, leads to the provisional conclusion that some texts presented as translations are more likely to be adaptations. Questions raised in relation to the second topic, Types and kinds of translation, move us along the continuum of questions about translation from the general to the more specific, on the one hand to consider the hermeneutic and creative aspects of translation in the context of literary Introduction 5 translation, and on the other to consider the relative importance of typological and stylistic factors in translation. Piotr Kuhiwczaks pithy and coolly-evaluative chapter sets literary translation in the context of literary criticism and creative writing rather than that of Applied Linguistics. Literary translation, he points out (like the study of English literature), has a relatively recent provenance in the early twentieth century; it further develops, he argues, the characteristic features of both creative writing and literary criticism. Having raised some consequent questions about the teaching of literary translation, in which a case-by-case approach is the norm and a now unfashionably evaluative framework based on text typology is recommended, Kuhiwczak goes on to discuss the translation of one of the types identified, namely highly-conventionalised texts. In so doing, he illustrates that a translation can sometimes improve stylistic aspects of the original, at the same time missing its poignancy and allusions. His conclusion invites us to consider whether the technical details of translation analysis enable us as readers to understand the nature of translation. The second chapter in this section adopts a linguistic perspective. A recurrent issue in the assessment of contrastive phenomena is the relative weight of establishing, on the one hand, typological factors, and, on the other, stylistic ideals. Using Mark Twains views as a starting point, Gunnar Magnussons paper discusses typological differences and their effects on style and discourse in English and German. The contrastive topics selected for discussion are: gender, case, compounds, and separable verbs. Magnussons discussion extends beyond formal comparisons to the use to which available structures are put in discourse, that is texts, the milieu of translators. The relative complexity of German is compared with English, both formally and stylistically, using numerous examples from Mark Twains well-known essays on the German language. Magnusson ends with a radical proposal of his own, to which, he surmises, Mark Twain would not have been unsympathetic. If the capitalisation of nouns were abolished, as happened in 1948 in the case of the Danish language, the additional difficulties experienced in processing structures such as nominal embeddings would lead to formal as well as stylistic changes. In his contribution on Meaning, truth, and morality in translation, Martin Weston, like Peter Newmark, adopts a view of translating and interpreting which prioritises language use over more abstract models. He does, however, disagree with Newmark about the translators duty with respect to texts which are ethically deficient. Which brings us to the third topic: Valid and deficient texts. Weston sets out by reexamining the triadic model of interpreting and translating in which an intermediate stage of disembodied meaning is interposed between