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Translator Doing?
Brian Mossop
Government of Canada Translation Bureau and
York University School of Translation
1.
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inquiring about the diverse economic, cultural or political functions which the
translator is serving: extending a literary tradition by retranslating a novel;
censoring information from foreign sources; enlarging a company's market by
translating product information; allowing people to avoid learning the lan
guage of a neighbouring community.
The title question is asking for a defintion of the object of translation
production theory, as suggested by Anthony Pym's (1993) nice phrase "trans
lating translator" the translator at work alternately reading or listening to a
bit of the source text and producing a bit of text in the second language. A
translation reception theory answers the very different question: what do
translations do? It is concerned with the moment(s) when completed transla
tions affect readers and listeners, and through them, the target culture, includ
ing its language and system of texts. Reception theory needs its own definition
of translation, perhaps one involving the venerable concept of equivalence: as
Pym points out (1992: 37ff, 64), equivalence defines translation in the sense
that when people are persuaded to receive a text as a translation, they believe
they are somehow receiving the original message directly from the ST author;
the meaning-producing activity of the translator is overlooked.
According to Levy (1967), what the translator is doing is deciding which
of many possible wordings in the second language to select. This answer to the
title question opens the door to a search for the social and psychological
factors impinging on the translator's decision. However it assumes we have
already answered another question: when is a person being a translator? In this
article I will define translation production in a way that makes it possible to
say that people called translators are sometimes translating, sometimes not.
Their language production work may be entirely, mainly, partly or not at all
translational.
I suggest that a useful answer to the title question will meet five require
ments. The definition should be (i) non-normative, (ii) general, (iii) narrow,
(iv) multidimensional, and (v) neither psychological nor sociological:
(i) Non-normative. The definition will not be a disguised restatement of
some translational ideal,1 such as Nida's famous "translating consists
in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent
of the SL message, first in terms of meaning and second in terms of
style" (1969: 12). Such ideals reflect the habits of a particular group
of translators translating a certain type of text. The aim rather should
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situation. The question is: what is the particular way in which translation
"repeats"?
(b) Separating literary from technical translation (fails criteria ii and v)
The classic statement of this approach is Schleiermacher's (1813) distinction
of Ubersetzen from Dolmetschen. The distinction is not one of written versus
oral translation, as the German words suggest, but rather scholarly versus
commercial translation, or literary/humanistic versus scientific/technical. The
Ubersetzer works with texts that reflect one person's unique thought, while
the Dolmetscher works with texts that reflect the extralinguistic world. Much
writing about translation implies the need for two theories a psychological
theory of Ubersetzen (seen as the translator's mental struggle to shape the
target language in order to convey what is culture-specific or author-specific
in the source text), and a sociological theory of Dolmetschen (seen as the
circulation of international, authorless concepts).
Once the Ubersetzen/Dolmetschen division is allowed, the resulting frag
mentation cannot be halted in any principled way. There will have to be a
definition for every use of language: for poetry, where rhythmic and phonetic
effects are especially important; for court decisions, where real events are
interpreted by reference to a world created by the wording of laws. And so on,
and on and on.
One can certainly relate language production to the various larger spheres
of human activity in which it is embedded, but the effect of such a move is to
focus on the social functions of translation rather than its text-linguistic nature.
Some translation {Dolmetschen) is then seen as an aspect of international
commerce or politics, some (Ubersetzen) as an aspect of cultural history.
More generally, the focus shifts to regional or global communication circuits
and away from the individual communicative act of language production.
(c) Using a situation-based definition (fails criteria iii and v)
Could we start from a primal situation in which interlingual communicating
activity (ICA) occurs? Two human groups come into contact, cannot under
stand each other's speech but must have or wish to have dealings. Unless a
lingua franca is available or a pidgin is developed and suffices for their
purposes, some members of one or both groups must learn the language of the
other and serve as intergroup communicators in one or both directions until
such time as bilingualism becomes generalized or one of the languages ceases
to be used.
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237
ties. First, people may present their work as translation even though in fact it
was produced in some other way. Sometimes the texts so presented are
derived or co-produced. Sometimes they are TL originals which are presented
as translations because that is thought to confer prestige on them or, under
other circumstances, shield the authors from responsibility for their content. A
self-proclaimed translation may also be simply a reworking of older transla
tions. This is the case with the King James Bible of 1611. Comparison of a
passage with the original Hebrew or Greek might well lead one to receive it as
a translation, and indeed this is how the front page presents it ("Newly
Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations
diligently compared and revised"). Actually, the production process consisted
in selecting the best 16th century translation of a passage, only retranslating if
no previous translation was suitable (which was not often), and then putting
the result through the English style editing which gives this version its
distinctive rhythms and flavour (Opfell 1982). Thus most of the language
production work was not Translating at all.
The second difficulty with requesting labels is that we will get not one
term but a lengthy list: not just 'translating' but also 'rewriting', 'interpreting',
'adapting', and so on. We would have to decide whether someone who claims
to be 'adapting' or 'rewriting' is Translating or doing something else. We
could ask third parties, but they might disagree: one might insist that the
activity is adapting rather than translating, another that it is translating, an
other that adapting is a kind of translating. If the Koran is put into English,
anglophone Muslims will call that activity adapting or interpreting and deny
that it is translating; they will see the English as a guide to the original Arabic,
which alone constitutes the word of God. Non-Muslims will call the activity
translation. And what of a francophone journalist in Quebec who describes her
activity as rdiger les nouvelles, 'writing the news', even though an outside
observer would describe it as translating an international press agency item
from English into French?
This brings us to the problem of other languages. Is an activity labelled
'traduire' or 'perevodit" or 'ubersetzen' an instance of Translating? There are
several complications. Some languages refer to ICA with a word whose
meaning is general enough for that purpose but does not actually include ICA
as a meaning component (think of English 'convert' or 'transform'). Other
languages have no general word like 'translate' but only specific words, like
'subtitle', which refer to the translation of texts in a particular medium, genre
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or source language. And of course in all languages, words can change their
meaning or their reference over time: an activity described in one era as
'translating' might be denied that label a hundred years later.
Let us use the expression 't-words' for the full set of words, in all
languages, which people use, or have in the past used, to describe their own
activity or the activity of others as ICA. For the observable activities referred
to by t-words, let us use the notation 'translating...'. It seems clear that
translating... cannot be a fruitful object for translation production theory
because the t-words cover such a disparate group of activities: if we know only
that someone is translating..., we do not know whether that person is engaged
in the same activity as someone else who is also translating..., that is, we do
not know whether one, both or neither of them is Translating in a universal
sense.
Thus the object of Translating theory should not be defined by reference
to social labels. In the approach to be taken here, the producer of any text can
be engaging in several language production activities at once, or switching
from one activity to another as the text is created. The point will be to decide
which activity or combination of activities should be called Translating for
theoretical purposes. Passages in an observable text may arise from purely
non-translational activity, from Translating plus non-translational activity, or
from Translating alone. This points to another aspect of the title phrase
"translating translator": I am interested in people called translators only inso
far as they are Translating.
In the next three sections, I will build up a definition of Translating that
meets the five criteria. The defining features are quoting (Section 2), sequen
tial rewording (Section 3) and imitative purpose (Section 4).
2.
Translating Is Quoting
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xc
X is reporting to C what A said/wrote/signed to B
Figure 1. Translating as Reporting (from Mossop 1983: 246)
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Nothing more is said about reported speech, and it is hard to see any connec
tion between Jakobson's mention of it and the main line of his discussion,
where a 'translation' is an elaborated statement of meaning.
The past tense in the caption of Figure 1 (A said to B) refers to the order
of creation, not the order of presentation. Film subtitles in L2 are presented
simultaneously with the on-screen dialogue in L1 but were of course created
after it. No Translating can occur until at least some of A-B has already been
produced. Thus if a language producer is thinking in one language and then
speaking in another, no Translating is occurring because no source text in the
first language has been produced. Similarly, the process by which thought is
expressed as text is not (contrary to Mel'chuk 1978) Translating, since the
thought is not a prior text A-B. Thought, while perhaps executed in language,
is not text publicly available language. So when Bandia (1993) finds
evidence that West African novelists writing in their second (European)
language were thinking of expressions in their native languages, he has not
found a case of self-translation.
The caption of Figure 1 does not imply interlinguality. The diagram
therefore covers such intralingual activities as paraphrasing medical talk in lay
language. This is not a defect that could be repaired by amending the caption
to read: "reporting to C in L2 what A said to B in L1". Reporting is reporting;
it does not come in an intralingual and an interlingual version. The
interlinguality of Translating is discussed in Section 5.
The diagram also covers both Translating and deriving. Deriving, as
described in Section 1, involves a source text A-B, but X does not process it
sequentially, in chunks ranging in size from a phrase to a couple of sentences,
and does not necessarily aim to imitate it. These two defining features of
Translating sequentiality and imitation are discussed in Sections 3 and 4
respectively.
241
In these cases, X is still reporting to C what A said to B, but knows that C is not
the final addressee. Cases in which an editor intervenes between X and C
without X's knowledge are not covered, since the diagram represents the
situation from the translator's point of view.
Figure 1 is further restricted to the translator's activity qua reporter. Of
course, he or she may also be doing things as a consequence or goal of re
porting. For example, a book translator's work may have the consequence of
enriching the target language, or it may have the goal of introducing a new
genre. In one peculiar class of cases, where C is already familiar with the
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source text, the goal is not even to convey the meaning of the source:
translations prepared by second-language students (or translation students!)
for their teachers; translations of Greek and Latin texts into European vernacu
lars for readerships already familiar with the source (Bassnett 1980: 69, 44).
These cases are marginally translational since one does not normally report
that which is believed to be already known. When Chapman and Pope trans
lated the Iliad into English in the 17th and 18th centuries respectively, they
knew that many of their readers would not want to know what Homer said;
like the language teacher, they would be interested in the translations as
translations of a source text they already knew.
Translators may also be doing things in addition to reporting. For ex
ample, a community interpreter may be serving as an advocate or as an
independent source of information. Consider the following passage and its
translation by an interpreter in a hospital in Winnipeg, Canada. The patient, a
Cree Indian, is anemic and the doctor thinks she may be losing blood during
bowel movements because of a benign polyp that has been discovered by
colonoscopy:
Doctor: I can take the polyp out without an operation, by putting a tube inside
the bowel, and putting a wire around it and burning the polyp off. That stops
the bleeding, no need for an operation.
Interpreter (backtranslation from Cree): He says they can put in a tube and
burn off the growth. If it's not removed, you may end up with cancer. And
you won't need an operation. This procedure will get it in time. Before it
begins to bleed or starts to grow, (adapted from Kaufert and O'Neil 1990: 4950)
The part about cancer is not reporting, in that it does not relate anything said or
implied by the doctor. Instead, the interpreter is acting as an independent
source of medical information: she knows that polyps can become cancerous
and says so. Some practitioners of community interpreting might respond by
saying that the interpreter is not in fact interpreting (the normative cut-off
point approach discussed in Section 1 above). Some theoreticians, on the
contrary, might respond by saying that if community interpreters do indeed
work like this, then Translating must be defined to include it. In my view, the
proper theoretical response is to say that the interpreter is engaging in two
different activities simultaneously: she is Translating (reporting) and she is
also providing independent information. This approach is elaborated in Sec
tion 6.
243
Figure 1 accounts for all media and modes of translation: written, oral and
signed texts; book translating, dialogue interpreting, film dubbing and so on.
One source of its generality is that the letters A, B, X and C represent not four
particular individuals but four roles. Individuals can take two roles at once, or
switch roles. Thus in self-translation, A=X. In oral or signed dialogue inter
preting, B=C and the individuals playing roles A and C switch as do the
source and target languages with every turn in the dialogue.
Dialogue interpreting is unusual: in typical written as well as much oral
and signed translation, the original communication A-B is independent of the
translational communication X-C; A is not addressing C. But in dialogue
interpreting, the source text is specifically addressed to someone who does not
speak the source language: an English-speaking doctor addresses a Creespeaking patient. Nevertheless it remains the case that X is telling C what A
said to B(=C). More seriously, dialogue interpreting may lead us to question
the theoretical separation of production from reception. In all other modes of
translation book translation, simultaneous interpretation and so on
reception is irrelevant to production: the actual (as opposed to anticipated)
verbal reactions of receivers have no effect on the translator's production
work. In dialogue interpreting, however, receivers produce the next bit of
source text in response to the translation of the previous turn in the dialogue.
To maintain the production/reception distinction, it may be necessary to take
each turn in the dialogue as a separate text. I leave this matter unresolved.
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Direct reporting
In a television documentary prepared by the Canadian Broadcasting Corpora
tion, a dancer at the Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg was being interviewed.
Viewers could see and hear her speaking in Russian, with voiceover by the
Canadian journalist in English:
(2)
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does not make oral quoting defective, for the dramatic purpose of quoting is in
no way enhanced by the use of exact words. For clarity, I shall refer to such
dramatized (first-person) reporting of others' words as "free direct" quoting
when it is necessary to distinguish it from the exact-words variety or from
indirect reporting.
Herbert Clark and Richard Gerrig (1990) propose a theory of quoting that
seems able to account for free direct quoting, including its translational variety.6
The theory defines quoting in terms of its nature as a language act, not in terms
of its functions. To simplify, Clark and Gerrig argue that an act of quoting is one
in which the speaker purports to demonstrate rather than describe selected
aspects of something that has been said or written. Consider:
(4)
(5)
(6)
The speaker of (4) describes the fact that Gwendolyn spoke slowly whereas
the speaker of (5) demonstrates it (not very successfully in the above written
version; in the oral equivalent, the quoter would speak slowly). The speakers
of both (4) and (5) demonstrate the illocutionary force (promising) of what
Gwendolyn said, whereas the speaker of (6) describes it.
Clark and Gerrig provide a partial list of the things a quoter can decide to
demonstrate, including voice pitch, speech defects, level of formality, propositional content, illocutionary force, exact words uttered (just one option
among others) and, of course, the language used by the original speaker:
(7)
(8)
(9)
The speaker of (7) demonstrates the fact that Gwendolyn spoke in French. The
speaker of (8) describes this fact, as well as the illocutionary force and
propositional content of what she said. Interlingual indirect reports like (8) do
not demonstrate anything. Even if, on the model of sentence (la) above, we
consider the utterance She 'll have it translated by Friday, this too is descrip
tive rather than demonstrative in relation to Je le ferai traduire pour demain. It
is thus non-quotational and if quoting is a defining feature of Translating
non-translational. However, since such sentences are used in interlingual
communicating situations, by people called translators, we might alternatively
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247
ally say anything at all. Or the rapporteur is speculating about what someone
was thinking, and presents the thought as a quote, as in the colloquial "Peter
was like: why are you doing that?", meaning that Peter reacted in such a way
that one could speculate that he was thinking "why are you doing that?".
These kinds of fictive quoting work reporting of imagined thought or
speech are not included in the concept of free direct quoting. In Translating
there is always a real textual source, and, as we will now see, the translator
follows its detailed wording.
translating text
A into L2
text B
text A
stock of thoughts
(themes, beliefs, etc.)
deriving text
in L2 or L1 from
text A plus stock
of thoughts
re-expressing thoughts
in L1 or in L2
(if both: co-production)
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An English translation made a few years earlier had not been well received,
presumably because the themes of the French did not correspond to the
English-Canadian outlook at the time.
Now there are certainly cases where it is hard to distinguish the product of
sequential rewording from the product of thematic re-expression. On a recent
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plane trip, the flight attendant announced in English that we have received our
landing plans and then in French that nous sommes autoriss atterrir 'we are
authorized to land'. Judging from her delivery, I do not think she was reading
from a script. The question is whether she was re-expressing a stocked thought
(i.e. co-producing, once in English and once in French) or using the English as
a source text. And if the latter, was she Translating or deriving? It's hard to say
with so brief a text, because we cannot really ask whether she was sequentially
processing chunks. And what of those West African novelists writing in their
second language (cf. Section 2.1)? If the writer was working from a passage in
a particular story taken from the oral tradition of his native language, then the
activity would qualify as Translating provided the resulting English or French
can be connected not merely to a theme of the SL story but to its detailed
wording. Of course the distinction between theme and wording could be
difficult to make here, since each telling of a story will have a somewhat
different wording.
Such difficulties should not however lead us to conflate rewording and
thematic re-expression, as is commonly done under the rubric 'rewriting'.
These are two very different modes of language production. It is irrelevant
whether we, as observers of a resulting text, are able to decide whether it was
produced by rewording, re-expressing, or a combination of the two. Neubert's
useful definition of translation as "text-induced text production" (1985: 18) is
thus insufficient because it does not distinguish the wording of an inducing
text from its meaning. Translating starts from words, not ideas.
Let us now turn to the final defining feature of Translating. When
language producers use source texts only as thematic inspiration or when they
work from a stock of thoughts, they may or may not aim to be loyal to their
sources. In Translating, however, loyalty is always an aim.
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activities in which the source text is not important in itself.7 A person called a
translator who at a particular moment in the production of the L2 text is
writing, speaking or signing without an essentially imitative intent is not at
that moment Translating. A substantive proposal concerning the nature of
imitation is outlined in Section 6.1. As will be seen in 6.2, however, Translat
ing is by no means purely imitative.
For the purpose of defining Translating, there is no need to quantify the
degree of imitation sought, or to give a positive definition of imitation. It is
sufficient to describe it negatively, as the absence of an intention to add,
subtract, parody etc. The degree of imitation actually achieved is of course not
relevant to a production theory.
Rewording within a language does not, generally speaking, aim at imita
tion. For example, when plain-language versions of legal and bureaucratic
texts are created by rewording an original text that uses "legalese" or
"bureaucratese", the purpose is to clarify. Elsewhere (Mossop, unpublished), I
argue that, precisely because of their clarifying purpose, paraphrasing activi
ties should not be conceived as "intralingual translation". If a nurse para
phrases for a patient a doctor's medicalese, and herself uses medicalese, her
effort would serve no purpose, and that is why such non-clarifying rewordings, though theoretically possible, do not occur. A nurse who is clarifying for
a patient is engaged in derived language production, in the sense previously
discussed. Other instances of paraphrasing are parodies of the original, or in
some other way fail to aim at meaning preservation. Of course interlingual
writers and speakers may clarify or parody as well, but this is not essential: a
translation of a French medical text into an English medical text, both equally
difficult for the lay reader, serves a very clear purpose.
I want to emphasize that I am making a theoretical point here, not a
practical prescription. I am not saying that it is desirable for people called
translators to have an imitative goal; indeed this may be highly undesirable in
some circumstances. Nor am I making any judgment about which activities
can rightly have the English t-word 'translate' applied to them. That is a social
issue, of no concern here. In this article, I am concerned solely to identify a
viable object of study, and that object, I am specifying, is amongst other things
a rewording process that has an imitative purpose.
Having said that intralingual rewording is not generally imitative, I now
come to the exceptions. Our nurse could of course repeat, in medicalese but
with different wording, what the doctor had said in order to check whether she
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had heard the doctor correctly. Or she could repeat her own lay-language
statement to the patient if she thought she had not been heard, or wanted to
emphasize a point. Repeating is certainly imitative, but it is not quoting. Our
repeating nurse is not purporting to demonstrate anything about the doctor's
discourse. Her repeating work is thus not translational; she is simply express
ing a thought more than once.
A second exception is quoting during oral narration, as in example (3)
above. Such non-fictive quoting does indeed often aim to imitate the original.
However the intralingual quoter cannot process the source in sequential
chunks, for the simple reason that the work is almost always done from longterm memory of the conversation being quoted. Typically, the gap between
source and rewording is hours or days, so that capturing the detailed meaning
in anything like its original compositional form is not a feasible goal. In
Translating, the gap is a few seconds in simultaneous oral or signed interpreta
tion, somewhat longer with dialogue interpreting, up to a minute or so with
consecutive (and memory is here aided by note-taking). A much higher level
of imitation can thus be targetted than in intralingual quoting,8 though of
course never as high as when the source text is recorded.
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another more formal, a third more current, a fourth more literary, and so on. If
an editor replaces a word with a synonym, there will be a small change in
meaning. But in a second language, it will very often be possible to find a
word at the same level of technicality, formality, etc.
Second, interlinguality means that two different linguas are involved, a
lingua being some person's native language. A standard language is a lingua,
but so is a geographical, temporal or social-class dialect. If two linguas are
sufficiently different that speakers find a need for linguistic assistance, then
the assistant's activity is interlingual, and if it satisfies the three defining
criteria translational. Thus creating subtitles in standard French for a film
spoken in the dialect of the Gasp region of Quebec counts as Translating.
Perhaps a distinction might be made between full lexico-syntactic Translating
where the problem lies in the completely different vocabulary and syntax
of SL and TL and the marginal Translating which occurs when the
translator's work is just a matter of pronouncing the text in a standard dialect
or substituting a few items of local vocabulary (e.g. British versus American
English).
Rephrasing between registers of a language (e.g. from medical to lay
language) is not interlingual because medicalese is not a lingua: no one speaks
English medicalese as a native language. It is a sublingua a selection from
the lexico-syntactic resources of English. Clarification of sublingua talk or
writing has mainly to do with ideas, not vocabulary or grammar per se. If you
cannot understand a Russian paper in advanced particle physics because you
never got past high school science, a translator cannot help you at least not
insofar as his or her activity is limited to Translating. What you need instead is
a science popularizer who reads Russian. Science popularizers fall into a class
of mediators (dispute mediators, cultural mediators) who are not in the first
instance dealing with linguistic problems. The need for Translating, on the
contrary, arises from the fact that some people do not know the lexico-syntax
used by other text producers.
Third, the interlinguality of Translating distinguishes it from transcribing,
a further type of language production which we can add to Translating,
deriving and re-expressing. Examples of transcribing are fingerspelling, trans
literating, reading aloud, turning oral tradition into written literature, and
preparing a written transcript of recorded oral proceedings. Machine transla
tion, though apparently interlingual, is perhaps better understood as an ex
tremely elaborate form of transcribing. A transcriber reproduces a text in a
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1 semantic rendering
2 lexico-syntactic rendering
3 phonetic rendering
of receiving society)
4 ADJUSTING (for multimedia integration)
5 SUMMARIZING (e.g. dialogue in subtitles)
6 EXPLAINING (e.g. unrenderable expres
sions)
7 COMMENTING (metatextual & metalinguis
tic notes)
8 CO-ORDINATING (the participants in dia
logue interpreting)
9 COPY + PASTING (original TL material)
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6.1. Rendering
Rendering is the work of representing the source text in another language.
Rendering is not representing presenting the text again to new readers in
another language but rather representing, depicting the source text without
regard to future users or uses. It is through rendering that the imitative goal of
Translating is realized.
What is rendered depends on what the translational imitator decides to
demonstrate (in the sense of Section 2.2). We can distinguish three broad
categories: imitation of meaning, of lexico-syntactic form and of phonetics. If
an intralingual rendering were of any theoretical interest, it would be very easy
to construct. A complete English rendering (of meaning, form and sound) for
hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock would be hickory, dickory
dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The interlingual case, on the contrary, is
extremely complex.
The imitated meaning is whatever meaning is attributed to the source text
by the translator. Thus the semantic rendering may contain errors; it may
concentrate on one type of meaning (e.g. propositional) and ignore others
(expressive); it may be deep (taking maximal account of co-text and context)
or it may be superficial.
What notation can be used to display semantic rendering? Consider the
following passage from an advertisement in French and the two lines of
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English that follow (neither of which would be very useful for an actual
advertising campaign, but that is a pragmatic matter):
(12) C'est parce qu'il rsiste au temps qu'il fait qu'il rsiste au temps qui
passe.11
(R1) It's durable because it's weatherproof.
(R2) Withstands the ravages of weather and thus the ravages of
time.
R1 captures the propositional content of (12) but misses its expressive content;
R2 captures some of the expressive content but the propositional content is not
quite right: the word ravage is too strong, and there are no ravages of time as
such, just ravages of weather extending over time. Translators may sacrifice
some aspect of meaning because the commissioner is not interested in it, or
because it cannot be expressed at the same time as some other aspect. But such
decisions are pragmatic matters. When rendering, no such selection is made.
This is most easily conceived in graphic terms, as (Rl) and (R2) written one
on top of the other, perhaps in different colours and fonts so that both are still
visible, in the manner of certain kinds of wall art a sort of palimpsest
without erasure.
Semantic rendering is akin to the process of stating in L2 the meaning of
an L1 expression, as discussed in Section 2.1. I have written the renderings
(Rl) and (R2) in English, but if the translator had used another language, or
language combination, to think about the meaning of (12), the semantic
rendering would be in that language perhaps Hungarian if the translator of
(12) into English were a native speaker of Hungarian. Lexico-syntactic and
phonetic renderings, to which I now turn, are of course always written in the
target language.
(Rl) and (R2) tell us virtually nothing about the vocabulary and syntactic
structure of the source text. When recorded texts are being translated, the
wording choices of the ST author are present to the translator's mind and
clearly influence the production process. Every rendering must therefore
include a representation of the lexico-syntactic structure of the source text, but
it is only in close written translation and "bad literal translation" that much
evidence of this rendering work remains in the final output. If the translator's
lexico-syntactic analysis is erroneous, that will be reflected in the rendering.
A lexico-syntactic rendering could be given in either one or two lines.
When TL and SL are structurally similar languages, it will often be possible to
257
258
BRIAN MOSSOP
It should now be clear that the different lines of a rendering are not to be
conceived as alternative translations. Rather they are imitative demonstrations
of various aspects of the source text. The lexico-syntactic lines of a rendering
come closest to one sense of "literal" translation: TL items selected with little
regard for TL idiom or rhetoric. But neither these lines, nor all the lines taken
together, constitute a translation; translation results when rendering is com
bined with pragmatic work, as described in the next section.
259
act: the actor speaks the memorized lines during a performance; the scholar
inserts a copied passage into an article. Consider the title of the ScottMoncrieff translation of Proust's mega-novel A la recherche du temps perdu.
Terence Kilmartin, in his recent revision of Scott-Moncrieff, translates the
title as in search of lost time, but Scott-Moncrieff himself did not translate at
all; instead he pasted in a copy of part of the second line of Shakespeare's 30th
sonnet: "[when to the sessions of sweet silent thought / 1 summon up] remembrance of things past ".
The pragmatic work of PICTURING is commonplace in technical transla
tion. The translator comes across a complex or poorly written description of a
technical object, stops Translating, and simply describes the object, working
from a diagram or photograph, or from the object itself.
In film dubbing, EXPLAINING and ADJUSTING are often necessary. A char
acter with face turned away from the camera, who is saying nothing in the
source language, may be made to explain verbally something that was con
veyed by a certain hand gesture which TL viewers would not understand
(Whitman-Linsen 1992: 35). What a character says may also have to be
adjusted to achieve a fit between language and gesture (ibid: 33ff).
Cecilia Wadensjo has pointed out that a dialogue interpreter is not only
relaying content but also COORDINATING the people engaged in two-language
dialogue, for example by smoothing over a comment which the other party
may find insulting (1995: 308-309). Susan Berk-Seligson (1990: 70) gives the
following courtroom example, in which the final line replaces rendering with
a COORDINATING metalinguistic COMMENT addressed to the prosecutor:
PROSECUTING ATTORNEY: Had you expected that you would have to pay
260
BRIAN MOSSOP
7.
261
Philosophical Conclusion
262
BRIAN MOSSOP
263
Author's address:
Brian Mossop 14 Monteith Street TORONTO, Ontario M4Y 1K7 Canada;
e-mail: Brian.Mossop@PWGSC.GC.CA
Notes
1.
Toury (1995: 31) fears that any deductive approach to theory one that starts from a
definition will be normative. He proposes instead to define not translation itself but a
body of texts to be used as a methodological starting point for descriptive work, and
ultimately for determining laws of translational behaviour. This body of texts consists of
all those which are received as 'translational' in the target culture. A text is translational
if people in a culture assume there is a source text in another language from which it was
derived and with which it shares some features. In this article, I am not delimiting a class
of texts for study, but identifying non-normatively I think the features of a writing
or speaking act which make that act translational.
2.
A few theorists have attempted to relate translations to other metatexts (van Gorp 1978:
106; Popovic 1976: 232). Such proposals are not directly relevant to this present article,
where the concern is not to classify completed metatexts, but to enumerate the defining
features of the production process leading to them.
3.
Since the diagram has received some attention in the literature (Folkart 1991), I should
mention that the idea of using cartoon bubbles (rather than embedded rectangles) is due to
Ken Popert, who is listed in the acknowledgments of Mossop 1983 but not specifically
credited with the diagram.
4.
Pym (1995: 19ff) says that translators are by definition in an in-between location, but the
location he describes is more mental than geographical. I have tried to capture an aspect
of the translator's mental in-betweenness in Section 6. Geographically, some translators
are in an in-between zone (a French-to-English translator working in Montreal, a city
with two large language cultures) and some are not (a French-to-English translator
working in Boston).
5.
Pym (1992a: 54-56) argues that translation should be understood not as reported dis
course:
X to C: A said to B "t"
but as
X to C: s translates as t
Pym is looking at things from the reader's point of view. His schema answers the reader's
question "what is this text t?" (it's a translation of s), whereas mine is answering the
translator's question "what am I doing as I translate?" (I'm telling C what A said to B).
Nord too takes a reception point of view when, referring to Mossop 1983, she says that
only what she calls documentary translations are reports (1988: 12; 284 fn. 6). What she
calls instrumental translations are not reports, in her approach, because readers do not
experience them as being related to their sources.
BRIAN MOSSOP
Gutt (1991: 45-65) similarly suggests using a theory about a more general activity,
namely the use of language to interpret other language. He claims that an approach to
linguistic pragmatics known as relevance theory can explain all interpretive uses of
language, including translation. I too am invoking a more general language activity,
namely quoting, but I am not claiming that a theory of quoting in itself accounts for
translation. Quoting is just one of three proposed defining features, and the actual work of
explaining what happens during Translating does not begin until the theoretical object
has been defined.
The general process of resaying something in a new context was central to the work of
Mikhail Bakhtin, from whom I originally derived my idea that Translating is reporting
(cf. Voloshinov 1973 an extensive discussion of reported discourse in novels, though
with no mention of translation). This was part of Bakhtin's larger, interest in what he
called the dialogic nature of language: every text is to be seen as a mosaic of quotations in
the sense that it contains echoes of and responses to things previously read or heard. The
quotations, however, are not imitative. Foreshadowing skopos theory, Bakhtin saw them
as subject to "re-accentuation" to serve some purpose in the new context. Furthermore, he
made no distinction between the re-expression of thoughts drawn from a stock of prior
readings and the re-wording of one particular text. Ultimately, in this view, writing is
rewriting; even a direct description of reality is understood as a reaccentuated collage of
old descriptions. Bakhtin's approach is far too broad for the purposes of translation
production theory.
Folkart (1991: 263ff) discusses inter- vs. intralingual quoting at length, and concludes
that translations are a sui generis type of reported discourse; they are not direct quotations
(which she equates with exact-words quotations). Drawing on the approach of Danish
linguist Louis Hjelmslev, Folkart defines translation as the reporting of discursive form
(1991: 257ff). She distinguishes technical-administrative texts, in which the discursive
form is mainly the propositional content (impressionistically: the thought behind the
words), from literary texts, in which the discursive form is mainly the meaning connoted
by the author's idiosyncratic selection of language forms (the thought in the words). In
terms of Clark and Gerrig's quotation theory, these are two features of the source text
which can be demonstrated.
Section 6 is based on a paper read at the First Congress of the European Society for
Translation Studies, Prague, September 1995.
In a review of Mossop 1983, Witte (1986) suggests that my concept of Translating as
reporting is similar to Vermeer's notion that every translation "bietet einen Informationsangebot iiber einen A-Text" (1982: 99); that is, it offers information about a
source text. However Vermeer's development of the idea has been target-oriented: the
nature of the information the translator offers is determined not by the source text but by
the purpose (skopos) of the translational activity. Witte rightly notes that I do not
emphasize the skopos. As will be seen, I give theoretical pride of place to the translator's
rendering work.
Cruse (1992), from whom I have taken sentence (12), attempts to define prototypical
translation, that is, to identify features the possession of which will make a pair of texts a
better representative of the category 'X is a translation of Y' than a pair lacking them. For
this purpose, he uses three concepts he calls equivalence (of meaning), congruence (of
structure) and engagement (translating pertinent aspects of meaning) to define what he
265
calls maximal translation, minimal translation and plain translation. All of these he
contrasts with optimal translation translation which "maximizes not degree of corre
spondence with the original, but fitness for a particular purpose". Such fitness is achieved
through what I have called pragmatic work, whereas correspondence is achieved through
rendering.
12.
Schreiber (1993: 125) suggests something similar when he distinguishes translation from
adaptation by saying that the former is invariance-oriented (except for the language
change) while the latter is variance-oriented (in my terms: it is centrally a matter of
pragmatic and non-translational work). Unfortunately his approach is needlessly com
plex because he tries to distinguish texts (translations and adaptations) rather than acts
(translating and adapting). A text, whether labelled a translation or an adaptation, can
result from a combination of transltional and non-translational work.
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