Encyclopedia
Translation is an activity comprising the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one
language — the
source text — and the production, in another language, of a new, equivalent text — the
target text, or
translation.
Traditionally, translation has been a human activity, although attempts have been made to automate and computerize the translation of natural-language texts —
machine translation — or to use computers as an aid to translation — computer-assisted translation.
The goal of translation is generally to establish a relation of equivalence of intent between the source and target texts , while taking into account a number of constraints. These constraints include context, the rules of grammar of both languages, their writing conventions, their idioms, and the like.
The term and the concept of "translation"
"Translation" is, etymologically, a "carrying across" or "bringing across": the
Latin translatio derives from the past participle,
translatus, of
transferre . The modern
European languages,
Romance,
Germanic and
Slavic, have generally formed their own equivalent terms for this concept after the Latin model—after
transferre or after the kindred
traducere .
Additionally, the Greek term for "translation,"
metaphrasis , has supplied
English with "metaphrase," meaning a literal, or word-for-word, translation, as contrasted with "paraphrase" .
Common misconceptions
Many newcomers to translation wrongly believe it is an exact science, and mistakenly assume a firmly defined one-to-one correlation exists between the words and phrases in different languages which make translations fixed, much like
cryptography. In that vein, many assume all one needs to translate a given passage is to decipher between the languages using a translation dictionary. On the contrary, such a fixed relationship would only exist were a new language synthesized and continually synchronized alongside an existing language in such a way that each word carried exactly the same scope and shades of meaning as the original, with careful attention to preserve the etymological roots, assuming they were even known with certainty. In addition, if the new language were ever to take on a life of its own apart from such a strict cryptographic use, each word would begin to take on new shades of meaning and cast off previous associations, making any such synthetic synchronization impossible. As such, translation from that point on would require the disciplines described in this article. Suffice it to say, while
equivalence is sought by the translators, less rigid and more analytical methods are required to arrive at a true translation.
There is also debate as to whether translation is an art or a craft. Literary translators, such as Gregory Rabassa in "If This Be Treason" argue convincingly that translation is an art, though he acknowledges that it is teachable. Other translators, mostly professionals working on technical, business, or legal documents, approach their task as a craft, one that can not only be taught but is subject to linguistic analysis and benefits from academic study. Most translators will agree that the truth lies somewhere between and depends on the text. A simple document, for instance a product brochure, can be quickly translated in many cases using simple techniques familiar to advanced language students. By contrast, a newspaper editorial, text of a speech by a politician, or book on almost any subject will require not only the craft of good language skills and research technique but also the art of good writing, cultural sensitivity, and communication.
Translation vs. interpreting
A distinction is made between
translation, which consists of transferring from one language to another ideas expressed in
writing, and
interpreting, which consists of transferring ideas expressed
orally or by the use of
gestures .
Although interpreting can be considered a subcategory of translation in regard to the analysis of the processes involved , in practice the skills required for these two activities are quite different. Translators and interpreters are trained in entirely different manners. Translators receive extensive practice with representative texts in various subject areas, learn to compile and manage glossaries of relevant terminology, and master the use of both current document-related software and computer-assisted translation software tools.
Interpreters, by contrast, are trained in precise listening skills under taxing conditions, memory and note-taking techniques for consecutive interpreting , and split-attention for simultaneous interpreting .
The industry expects interpreters to be about 70% accurate; that is to say that interpretation is an approximate version of the original. Translations should be over 99% accurate, by contrast.
Translation process
The translation process, whether it be for translation or interpreting, can be described as:
- Decoding the meaning of the source text; and
- Re-encoding this meaning in the target language.
To decode the meaning of a text, the translator must first identify its component "translation units," that is to say, the segments of the text to be treated as a cognitive unit. A translation unit may be a
word, a phrase or even one or more sentences. Behind this seemingly simple procedure lies a complex cognitive operation. To decode the complete meaning of the source text, the translator must consciously and methodically interpret and analyze all its features. This process requires thorough knowledge of the grammar, semantics, syntax, idioms, and the like, of the
source language, as well as the
culture of its speakers.
The translator needs the same in-depth knowledge to re-encode the meaning in the target language. In fact, in general, translators' knowledge of the target language is more important, and needs to be deeper, than their knowledge of the
source language. For this reason, most translators translate into a language of which they are native speakers.
In addition, knowledge of the subject matter under discussion is essential.
In recent years, studies in cognitive linguistics have provided valuable insights into the
cognitive process of translation.
Measuring success in translation
As the goal of translation is to ensure that the source and the target texts communicate the same message while taking into account the various constraints placed on the translator, a successful translation can be judged by two criteria:
- Faithfulness, also called fidelity, which is the extent to which the translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to it or subtracting from it, and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning; and
- Transparency, which is the extent to which the translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.
A translation meeting the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation meeting the second criterion is said to be an "idiomatic translation". The two are not necessarily exclusive.
The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth.
The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds" wrong, and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many
machine translation systems, often result in patent nonsense with only a
humorous value .
Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may knowingly strive to produce a literal translation. For example, literary translators and translators of religious works often adhere to the source text as much as possible. To do this they deliberately "stretch" the boundaries of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Likewise, a literary translator may wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language to provide "local colour" in the translation.
The concepts of
fidelity and
transparency are looked at differently in recent translation theories. The idea that acceptable translations can be as creative and original as their source text is gaining momentum in some quarters.
In recent decades, the most prominent advocates of
non-transparent translation modes include the Franco-Canadian translation scholar Antoine Berman who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations , and the American theorist Lawrence Venuti who called upon translators to apply "foreignizing" translation strategies instead of domesticating ones .
Many
non-transparent translation theories draw on concepts of German Romanticism, with the most obvious influence on latter-day theories of
foreignization being the German theologian and philosopher
Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture "On the Different Methods of Translation" he distinguished between translation methods that move "the writer toward [the reader]", i.e. transparency, and those that move the "reader toward [the author] ", i.e. respecting the foreignness of the source text. Schleiermacher clearly favored the latter. It is worth pointing out, however, that his preference was motivated not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign but was rather intended as a nationalist practice to oppose France's cultural domination and to promote German literature.
The concepts of
fidelity and
transparency remain strong in Western traditions, however. They are not necessarily as prevalent in non-Western traditions. For example, the
Indian epic
Ramayana has numerous versions in many Indian languages and the stories in each are different from one another. If one looks into the words used for translation in Indian languages, the freedom given to the translators is evident.
Translation problems
General problems
Translation is inherently a difficult activity. Translators can face additional problems which make the process even more difficult, such as:
- Problems with the source text:
- Changes made to the text during the translation process
- Illegible or difficult-to-read text
- Misspelled or misprinted text
- Incomplete text
- Poorly written text
- Missing references in the text
- The source text contains a translation of a quotation that was originally made in the target language, and the original text is unavailable, making word-for-word quoting nearly impossible
- Obvious inaccuracies in the source text
- Language problems
- Dialect terms and neologisms
- Unexplained acronyms and abbreviations
- Proper names of people, organizations, places, etc. - often there are already official target-language translations for such, but if not supplied by the client they can be difficult to find out
- Obscure jargon
- Obscure idioms
- Slang
- Stylistic differences, such as redundant phrases in a source language, when redundancy is frowned upon in the target language
- Differences between languages with respect to punctuation conventions
- Other
- Rhymes, puns and poetic meters
- Highly specific cultural references
- Humour
- Insider information
- Words that are commonly known in one culture but generally unknown by the layperson in another culture, such as Chinese ??? meaning phytoncide: these generally require the addition of an explanation
- Subtle but important properties of language such as euphony or dissonance
The problem of "untranslatability"
The question of whether particular words are untranslatable is often debated, with lists of "untranslatable" words being produced from time to time. These lists often include words such as
saudade, a
Portuguese word as an example of an "untranslatable". It translates quite neatly however as "sorrowful longing", but does have some nuances that are hard to include in a translation; for instance, it is a positive-valued concept, a subtlety which is not clear in this basic translation.
Some words are hard to translate only if one wishes to remain in the same grammatical category. For example, it is hard to find a noun corresponding to the
Russian ????????? or the Yiddish ?????? , but the
English adjectives "inquisitive" and "jinxed" correspond just fine.
Journalists are naturally enthusiastic when linguists document obscure words with local flavor, and are wont to declare them "untranslatable", but in reality these incredibly culture-laden terms are the easiest of all to translate, even more so than universal concepts such as "mother". This is because it is standard practice to translate these words by the same word in the other language, borrowing it for the first time if necessary. For example, an English version of a menu in a French restaurant would rarely translate
pâté de foie gras as "fat liver paste", although this is a good description. Instead, the accepted translation is simply
pâté de foie gras, or, at most,
foie gras pâté. In some cases, only transcription is required: Japanese ?? translates into English as
wasabi. A short description or parallel with a familiar concept is also often acceptable: ??? may also be translated as "Japanese
horseradish" or "Japanese mustard".
The more obscure and specific to a culture the term is, the simpler it is to translate. For example, the name of an insignificant settlement such as Euroa in
Australia is automatically just "Euroa" in every language in the world that uses the
Roman alphabet, whilst it takes some knowledge to be aware that
Saragossa is
Zaragoza,
Saragosse, etc. or that
China is ??,
Cina,
Chine, and so forth.
The problem of common words
The words that are truly difficult to translate are often the small, common words. For example, in all its various uses the verb "to get" covers nearly seven columns of the most recent version of the
Robert-Collins French-English dictionary. The same is true for most apparently simple, common words, such as "go" , "come" , and so forth.
Cultural aspects can complicate translation, as people from
England,
France or
China would likely describe or draw "bread",
du pain or ?? as their culturally common bread - an idea best expressed by their word for bread, rather than another language's word which comes pre-loaded with its cultural referrent.
Differing levels of precision inherent in a language also play a role. For example, of one is discussing a location that is nearer to the listener than the speaker in Spanish, one would say
ahí; if it is away from both interlocutors one would say
allí; and if there are connotations or directions involved such as "near there", "over yonder" or "on that side", it would be best to say
allá. Conversely, in colloquial French, all three of these concepts of different "theres" as well as the concept of "here" will likely be expressed with the word
là.
A language may contain expressions which refer to concepts that do not exist in another language. For example, the
French "tutoyer"' and "vouvoyer" would both be translated into English as "to address as 'you'", since the singular informal second person pronoun is archaic in English. Yet this simplistic translation completely destroys the meaning of the verbs: "vouvoyer" means to address using the formal "you" form , whereas "tutoyer" means to use the informal form . Indeed, when English was using the "thou" pronoun, "thou" as a verb would have been a translation for "tutoyer"; today, it is difficult to give a concise translation that captures the nuances of "tu" vs. "vous."
The second-person "you" is used in certain regions of the United States, however. Though not a precise transaction, "y'all" is a familiarized version of "you" and adequately conveys the sense of the second-person plural. This is used mostly in the southern and southeastern United States. In some regions , y'all is often used as a second-person singular as well.
The problem often lies in failure to distinguish between
translation and
glossing.
Glossing gives a short equivalent for each term.
Translation decodes the meaning and intent at the text level and then re-encoding them in a target language. Words like
saudade and ?????? are hard to "gloss" into a single other word, but given two or more words they can be perfectly adequately "translated". Similarly, depending on the context, the
meaning of the French word "tutoyer", or Spanish "tutear", could be translated as "to be on first name terms with". "Bread" has perhaps a better claim to being untranslatable, since even if we resort to saying "French bread", "Chinese bread", "Algerian bread", etc. we are relying on our audience knowing what these are like.
Specialized types of translation
Any type of written text can be a candidate for translation, however, the translation industry is often categorized by a number of areas of specialization. Each specialization has its own challenges and difficulties. An incomplete list of these specialized types of translation includes:
Administrative translation
The translation of administrative texts.
Commercial translation
The translation of commercial texts. This category may include marketing and promotional materials directed to consumers.
Computer translation
The translation of computer programs and related documents
The notion of localization, that is the adaptation of the translation to the target language and culture, is gaining prevalence in this area of specialization.
General translation
The translation of "general" texts. In practice, few texts are really "general"; most fall into a specialization but are not seen as such.
Legal translation
The translation of legal documents .
A skilled legal translator is normally as adept at the law as with translation, since inaccuracies in legal translations can have serious results.
Sometimes, to prevent such problems, one language will be declared authoritative, with the translations not being considered legally binding, although in many cases this is not possible, as one party does not want to be seen as subservient to the other.
Literary translation
The translation of
literary worksIf the translation of non-literary works is regarded as a skill, the translation of fiction and poetry is much more of an art. In multilingual countries such as
Canada, translation is often considered a literary pursuit in its own right. Figures such as Sheila Fischman, Robert Dickson and Linda Gaboriau are notable in
Canadian literature specifically as translators, and the Governor General's Awards present prizes for the year's best English-to-French and French-to-English literary translations with the same standing as more conventional literary awards.
Writers such as
Vladimir Nabokov,
Jorge Luis Borges and
Vasily Zhukovsky have also made a name for themselves as literary translators.
Many consider poetry the most difficult
genre to translate, given the difficulty in rendering both the form and the content in the target language. In 1959 in his influential paper "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation", the
Russian-born linguist and semiotician
Roman Jakobson even went as far as to declare that "poetry by definition [was] untranslatable". In 1974 the American poet
James Merrill wrote a poem, "Lost in Translation," which in part explores this subject. This question was also explored in
Douglas Hofstadter's 1997 book,
Le Ton beau de Marot, published by Basic Books in 1997, is a boo...
.
Translation of sung texts — sometimes referred to as a "singing translation" — is closely linked to translation of poetry, simply because most vocal music, at least in the Western tradition, is set to verse, especially verse in regular patterns with rhyme. A rudimentary example of translating poetry for singing is church hymns, such as German chorales translated into English by Catherine Winkworth.
Translation of sung texts is generally much more restrictive than translation of poetry, because in the former there is little or no freedom to choose between a versified translation and a translation that dispenses with verse structure. One might modify or omit rhyme in a singing translation, but the assignment of syllables to specific notes in the original musical setting places great challenges on the translator. There is the option in prose, less so in verse, of adding or deleting a syllable here and there by subdividing or combining notes, respectively, but even with prose the process is nevertheless almost like strict verse translation because of the need to stick as close as possible to the original prosody. Other considerations in writing a singing translation include repetition of words and phrases, the placement of rests and/or punctuation, the quality of vowels sung on high notes, and rhythmic features of the vocal line that may be more natural to the original language than to the target language.
Whereas the singing of translated texts has been common for centuries, it is less necessary when a written translation is provided in some form to the listener, for instance, as inserts in concert programs or as projected titles in performance halls or visual media.
Medical translation
The translation of works of a
medical nature.
Like pharmaceutical translation, medical translation is specialization where a mistranslation can have grave consequences.
Pedagogical translation
Translation practiced as a means of learning a second language.
Pedagogical translation is used to enrich the student's vocabulary in the second language, to help assimilate new syntactic structures and to verify the student's understanding. Unlike other types of translation, pedagogical translation takes place in the student's native language as well as the second language. That is to say that the student will translate both to and from the second language. Another difference between this mode of translation and other modes is that the goal is often literal translation of phrases taken out of context, and of text fragments, which may be completely fabricated for the purposes of the exercise.
Pedagogical translation should not be confused with scholarly translation.
Scientific translation
The translation of scientific texts.
Scholarly translation
The translation of specialized texts written in an academic environment.
Scholarly translation should not be confused with pedagogical translation.
Technical translation
The translation of technical texts .
More specifically, texts that contain a high amount of terminology, that is, words or expressions that are used only within a specific field, or that describe that field in a great deal of detail.
Translation for dubbing and film subtitles
Dialogs and narrations of feature movies and foreign TV programs need
to be translated for the local viewers. In this case, translation for dubbing and translation for film subtitles demand different versions for the best effect.
History
Translation of religious texts
The translation of religious works has played an important role in world history. For instance the Buddhist monks who translated the
Indian sutras into the
Chinese language would often skew the translation to better adapt to
China's very different culture. Thus notions such as
filial piety were stressed.
One of the first instances of recorded translation activity in the West was the rendition of the Old Testament into Greek in the third century B.C.E.; this translation is known as the
Septuagint, alluding to the seventy translators that were commissioned to translate the
Bible on the island of
Paphos, with each translator working in solitary confinement in a separate cell. Legend has it that all seventy versions were exactly identical. The Septuagint became the source text for later translations into many other languages including
Latin,
Coptic,
Armenian, and Georgian.
Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translation, is still considered one of the greatest translators in history for his work on translating the Bible into
Latin. The
Catholic Church used this translation for centuries, but even his translation met much controversy when it was released.
The period prior to and contemporary with the
Protestant Reformation saw the translation of the Bible into the local languages of Europe, an act that had a great impact on the split between Protestantism and Catholicism, owing to the divergences between the Protestant and Catholic translations of particular words and passages of the Bible.
Martin Luther's Bible in
German, Jakub Wujek's Bible in Polish, and the
King James Bible in English had lasting effects on the religion, culture, and language of those countries.
Trends in translation
Machine translation
Machine translation is a form of translation where a computer program analyses the source text and produces a target text without human intervention.
In recent years machine translation, a major goal of natural language processing, has met with limited success. Most machine translation involves some sort of human intervention, as it requires a pre-editing and a post-editing phase. Note that in machine translation, the
translator supports the
machine.
Tools available on the Internet, such as
AltaVista's
Babel Fish, and low-cost translation programs like
Babylon, have brought machine translation technologies to a large public. These tools produce what is called a "gisting translation" — a rough translation that gives the "gist" of the source text, but is not otherwise usable.
However, in fields with highly limited ranges of vocabulary and simple sentence structure, for example
weather reports, machine translation can deliver useful results.
Engineer and futurist
Raymond Kurzweil has predicted that by 2012, machine translation will be powerful enough to dominate the translation field.
MIT's
Technology Review also listed universal translation and interpretation as likely "within a decade" in its 2004 list. Such claims, however, have been made since the first serious forays into machine translation in the
1950s.
Computer-assisted translation
Computer-assisted translation , also called computer-aided translation, is a form of translation where a human translator creates a target text with the assistance of a computer program. Note that in computer-assisted translation, the
machine supports an actual, human
translator. Computer-assisted translation can include standard dictionary and grammar software; however, the term is normally used to refer to a range of specialized programs available for the translator, including translation memory, terminology management and alignment programs.
Cultural translation
This is a new area of interest in the field of translation studies. Cultural translation is a concept used in cultural studies to denote the process of transformation, linguistic or otherwise, in a given
culture. The concept uses linguistic translation as a tool or metaphor in analyzing the nature of transformation in cultures. For example, ethnography is considered a translated narrative of an abstract living culture.
See also
General
Translation theory
Noted translators
- Translation and Beyond [www.arabictab.com]
- Osamah Abdallah
- Nancy Andrew
- Claude Bédard
- Paul Bowles
- Jacques Brault
- Richard Francis Burton
- Sheila Fischman
- Edward FitzGerald
- Linda Gaboriau
- Edith Grossman
- Felix Paul Greve aka Frederick Philip Grove
- Norbert Guterman
- Hsuan-tsang
...
- Michael Kandel
- Christopher Kasparek
- Kumarajiva
- Richmond Lattimore
- Rika Lesser
- Tiina Nunnally
- Sergio Pinheiro Lopes
- Mikhail Lozinsky
- Daniel Poliquin
- Gregory Rabassa
- Ebba Segerberg
- Joan Tate
- Laurie Thompson
- Arthur Waley
- William Weaver
- Barbara Wright
References
- Berman, Antoine . "L’épreuve de l’étranger". Excerpted in English in: Venuti, Lawrence, editor . The Translation Studies Reader.
- Darwish, Ali . "Towards a Theory of Constraints in Translation". .
- Rose, Marilyn Gaddis, guest editor . Translation: agent of communication.
- Schleiermacher, Friedrich . "Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens". Reprinted as "On the Different Methods of Translating" in: Venuti, Lawrence, editor . The Translation Studies Reader.
External links
Information for translators and about translation
Translation publications
|logo = |motto = Fide splendet et scientia
...
-
- , published at Boston University
- , quarterly edited by Gabe Bokor
- , published three times annually by the Center for Translation Studies
- , published by the Center for the Art of Translation
Translation associations
