Thinking Italian Translation

A course in translation method: Italian to English

Stella Cragie, Ian Higgins, Sándor Hervey, Patrizia Gambarotta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317628477
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Lingue

Thinking Italian Translation is an indispensable course for students who want to develop their Italian to English translation skills.

This new edition includes:

• up-to-date examples and new source texts from a variety of genres, from journalistic to technical.

• a brand new section on professionalism and the translation market

The course is practical, addressing key issues for translators such as cultural differences, genre, and revision and editing. At the same time, it clearly defines translation theories.

Thinking Italian Translation is key reading for advanced students wishing to perfect their language skills or considering a career in translation. An Tutor's Handbook is available online at https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/instructor_downloads/

Section 1
Process and product

1
Preliminaries to translation as a process

This chapter examines translation as a process – what it is the translator actually does. But first, we must note a few basic terms that will be used throughout the book:

Text: Any given stretch of speech or writing assumed to make a coherent whole. A minimal text may consist of a single word – for example ‘Stupendo!’ – preceded and followed by a silence (however short). A maximal text may run into thousands of pages.

Source text (ST): The text requiring translation.

Target text (TT): The text that is a translation of the ST.

Source language (SL): The language in which the ST is spoken or written.

Target language (TL): The language into which the ST is to be translated.

Strategy The translator’s overall ‘game plan’, consisting of a set of strategic decisions taken after an initial reading of the ST, but before starting detailed translation of it.

Strategic decisions: The first set of reasoned decisions taken by the translator. These are taken before starting the translation in detail, in response to the following questions: What is the message content of this particular ST? What are its salient linguistic features? What are its principal effects? What genre does it belong to and what audience is it aimed at? What are the functions and intended audience of my translation? What are the implications of these factors? If a choice has to be made among them, which ones should be given priority?

Decisions of detail: Reasoned decisions concerning the specific problems of syntax, vocabulary and so on, encountered in translating particular expressions in their particular context. Decisions of detail are made in the light of the strategy. However, problems of detail may well arise during translating, which raise unforeseen strategic issues and oblige the translator to refine the original strategy somewhat.

With these terms in mind, the translation process can be broken down into two types of activity: understanding an ST and formulating a TT. These do not occur successively, but simultaneously; indeed, it is often only when coming up against a problem in formulating the TT that translators realise they have not fully understood something in the ST. When this happens, the ST may need to be reinterpreted in the light of the translator’s new understanding of it. This reinterpretation sometimes entails revising the original strategy, the revision in turn necessitating changes to some of the decisions of detail already taken. Nevertheless, it is useful to discuss ST interpretation and TT formulation as different, separable processes.

The processes of translation are not different from familiar things that every-one does every day. Comprehension and interpretation are processes that we all perform whenever we listen to or read a piece of linguistically imparted information. Understanding even the simplest message potentially involves all our experiential baggage – the knowledge, beliefs, suppositions, inferences and expectations that are the stuff of personal, social and cultural life. Understanding everyday messages is therefore not all that different from what a translator does when first confronting an ST – and it is certainly no less complicated.

In everyday communication, evidence that a message has been understood may come from appropriate practical response – for example, if your mother asks you for a spoon, and you give her a spoon and not a fork. Or it may come from appropriate linguistic response – such as returning a greeting appropriately, answering a question satisfactorily or filling in a form. None of these are translation-like processes, but they do show that the comprehension and interpretation stage of translation involves an ordinary, everyday activity that simply requires an average command of the language used.

However, one everyday activity that does resemble translation proper is what Roman Jakobson actually calls inter-semiotic translation (Jakobson 1971: 260–6), that is, translation between two semiotic systems (systems for communication). ‘The green light means go’ is an act of inter-semiotic translation, as is ‘The big hand’s pointing to twelve and the little hand’s pointing to four, so it’s four o’clock’. In each case, there is translation from a non-linguistic communication system to a linguistic one. To this extent, everyone is a translator of a sort.

Still more common are various sorts of linguistic response to linguistic stimuli, which are also very like translation proper, even though they actually take place within a single language. These sorts of process are what Jakobson (1971) calls intralingual translation. A brief look at the two extremes of intralingual translation will show what its major implications are. Take the following scenario. Signora Roberti is driving her husband through the centre of a small town. A police officer steps out and stops them. As he leans in to speak to her, she can see over his shoulder that, further on, a lorry has jackknifed and blocked the street. At one extreme of intralingual translation lies the kind of response typified in this exchange:

UFFICIALE DI POLIZIA:	C’è stato un incidente più avanti, Signora, e la strada è bloccata. Lei deve girare a sinistra e proseguire per Via S.Maria.
SIG.RA ROBERTI:	Va bene, ho capito.
SIG. ROBERTI:	Cosa ha detto?
SIG.RA ROBERTI:	Che dobbiamo girare a sinistra.

The police officer’s essential message is ‘Giri a sinistra’, but he does not want to sound too brusque by ordering the driver to turn, so he mollifies her with a partial explanation, ‘C’è stato un incidente’, then indicates what she should do, by saying ‘Lei deve girare’; though this is phrased as an obligation, it is more polite in tone than using the imperative. The use of ‘proseguire’ rather than ‘prendere’ or ‘scendere’ is more ‘technical’ in tone and reflects the kind of register that a police officer might use with the public in Italy, marking his or her authority and reinforcing the superiority/inferiority relationship in the communication flow.

When Signor Roberti asks his wife what the officer said, however, she separates the gist of the message from the circumstantial details and tonal subtleties, and reports it in her own words. This type of intralingual translation we shall call gist translation. The example also shows two other features that intralingual translation shares with translation ‘proper’. First, Signora Roberti’s gist translation is not the only possible one. For instance, she might have said ‘Dobbiamo prendere quella strada lì’. Among other things, this implies they may not know the street in question. A third possibility is ‘Dobbiamo scendere/salire per Via S.Maria’: if they do know the town, the officer’s gist is accurately conveyed.

The other feature shared by intralingual translation and translation ‘proper’ is that the situation in which a message is expressed and received affects both how it is expressed and how it is received. By ‘situation’ here, we mean a combination of elements: the circumstances in which speaker and addressee find themselves (such as being stopped in a car and having to take a diversion); the accumulated experience they carry with them, all the time (knowing or not knowing the town; familiarity or unfamiliarity with conventions for giving and receiving instructions; liking or disliking the police; and so on); and the linguistic context. ‘Context’ is often used metaphorically in the sense of ‘situation’ (and sometimes even in the sense of ‘meaning’). In this book, we shall use it specifically to denote the rest of a text in which a given expression or stretch of text occurs. For example, the context of Signor Roberti’s question is the exchange between Signora Roberti and the officer; the context of the officer’s words is everything that follows them; and the context of Signora Roberti’s reply to her husband is everything that precedes ‘Che dobbiamo girare a sinistra’. As will become clear, the whole context is an important consideration in translation; but the more immediate the context, the more crucial a factor it becomes in making decisions of detail.

There are always so many variables in the message situation that it is impossible to predict what the gist translation will be or how the addressee will take it. For example, Signora Roberti might simply have said ‘Qui si gira a sinistra’, an economical way of reporting the gist – no bad thing when she has to concentrate on driving. However, depending on how she says it and how her husband receives it, it could give the impression that the officer was brusque.

Another reason why ‘Qui si gira a sinistra’ could sound brusque is that the impersonal sounds ‘official’, whereas all the other gist translations we have given are clearly indirect speech (or ‘reported speech’). Compare this, for example, with the familiar form ‘Giriamo a sinistra’. Now all translation may be said to be indirect speech, as it does not repeat the ST, but reformulates it. Forms such as ‘Qui si gira a sinistra’ mask the fact that they are indirect speech. As a result, it is easy for reformulation consciously or unconsciously to become distortion, either because the translator misrepresents the ST or because the reader misreads the TT, or both.

In other words, gist translation, like any translation, is a process of interpretation. This is seen still more clearly if we take an example at the other extreme of intralingual translation. Signora Roberti might just as easily have interpreted the officer’s words by expanding them. For example, she could build on an initial gist translation as follows:

Dobbiamo scendere per Via S.Maria – un cretino di camionista ha sbandato e ha bloccato la strada.

This puts two sorts of gloss on the officer’s message: she adds details that he did not give (the jackknifing, and her own judgement of the lorry driver). We shall use the term exegetic translation to denote a translation that explains and elaborates on the ST in this way. The inevitable part played by the translator’s experiential baggage becomes obvious in exegetic translation, for any exegesis by definition involves explicitly invoking considerations from outside the text in one’s reading of it – here, the jackknifed lorry, her knowledge of the town, and her attitude towards other road-users.

An exegetic translation can be shorter than the ST, as in this example, but exegesis is usually longer, and can easily shade into general observations triggered by the ST but not really explaining it. If she knows the town, she might easily continue like this:

Questa è la seconda volta in un mese. I camion non dovrebbero proprio passare per il centro.

The explanation added in the second sentence may still just about be admissible as exegetic translation, but it does go much further than the officer’s. If she got a bit more carried away, however, her comment might still count as exegesis, but surely not as translation:

Ecco un’altra brillante idea della Giunta locale: permettere ai camion di circolare in centro.

As the above examples suggest, it is sometimes hard to keep gist translation and exegetic translation apart, or to see where translation shades into comment pure and simple. It certainly seems very hard to achieve an ideal rephrasing, a halfway point between gist and exegesis that would use terms radically different from those of the ST, but add nothing to, and omit nothing from, its message content. Nevertheless, with its constant movement between gist and exegesis, intralingual translation happens all the time in speech. It is also common in written texts. A good example is the use of a simpler register and style in producing specialist texts for the general public, for example, legal or medical ones, which – as laymen – they might find difficult to understand. A medical journal will contain articles written for professionals by professionals, who are well acquainted with the specialist medical concepts, style and conventions of such texts. But if we take a health website with material directed at the general public, such as advice and general information, the approach will need to be very different, namely to present the material so that it is clear and easy to understand by using simpler language, both in terms of lexis and structure.

If we look at the implications for translation, it is essential to understand not only the depth, density and specialisation of the linguistic register of the ST, but also to have a clear idea of what the purpose and use of the TT will be. A TT that is excessively specialised for a general public will not be fit for purpose; by the same token, a specialist ST written for professionals will not be well served by a simplistic translation.

In all the examples we have been discussing, the dividing lines between gist, exegesis, translation and comment are blurred. It could not be otherwise. If one thing has become clear in this chapter, it is the difficulty of controlling (and even of ...