Translation

The Interpretive Model

Marianne Lederer, Ninon Larche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317641797
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book, the English version of La traduction aujourd'hui (Hachette 1994), describes the interpretive theory of translation developed at the Paris Ecole Supérieure d'Interprètes et de Traducteurs (ESIT) over the last 35 years.

The theory identifies the mental and cognitive processes involved in both oral and written translation: understanding the text, deverbalizing its language, re-expressing sense. For the purposes of translation, languages are a means of transmitting sense, they are not to be translated as such. Although translation involves the use of correspondences, translators generally set up equivalence between text segments. The synecdochic nature of both languages and texts, a phenomenon discussed in the book, explains why translation is possible across language differences.

The many practical problems faced by translators, the difference between translation exercises used as a language teaching tool and professional translation, translating into a foreign language, and machine translation as compared to human translation are also discussed.

PART I THE THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF TRANSLATION

What is translation? That is the question we will try to answer in Part I. The reasoning developed in these chapters is entirely based on the Interpretive Theory which has established that translation consists of understanding an original text, deverbalizing its linguistic form and then expressing, in another language, the ideas grasped and emotions felt. The observation was initially made through a study of oral translation, or conference interpretation, but it also applies to written translation. It is indeed not possible to translate directly from one language to another without running the risk of producing a translated text so full of unwieldy language that it is almost unreadable.

In the first chapter of this study I shall go through the oral beginnings of the Interpretive Theory advocated at ESIT as well as challenge a number of claims based on problems encountered by machine translation and then incorrectly applied to human translation.

I agree with the definition of translation put forward by Edmond Cary (1985: 85):

translation is a process which attempts to establish equivalents between two texts expressed in two different languages. These equivalents are, by definition, always dependent on the nature of the two texts, on their objective, on the relationship between the two cultures involved and their moral, intellectual and emotional condition which, in turn, is determined by all the factors specific to the time and place of both the original and translated text…¹ (translated)

¹ ‘la traduction est une opération qui cherche à établir des équivalences entre deux textes exprimés en des langues différentes, ces équivalences étant toujours et nécessairement fonction de la nature des deux textes, de leur destination, des rapports existant entre la culture des deux peuples, leur climat moral, intellectuel, affectif, fonction de toutes les contingences propres à l’époque et au lieu de départ et d’arrivée…’

That is why I introduce more concrete issues in the second chapter, and numerous examples showing the dual nature of translation: equivalence and correspondence.

In the third chapter I attempt to clarify the position of translation with respect to Linguistics and languages.

1 Translation through Interpretation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315760315-2

In brief, the first phase of translation is to ‘understand’ a ‘text’ then, in a second phase, to ‘re-express’ this ‘text’ in another language. Of course, each of these complex phases needs to be studied individually: before ‘understanding’ is achieved there must be input from both linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge; the quality of the ‘re-expression’ depends on the translator’s writing skills and knowledge of the target language; much, too, depends on the translator’s knowledge of the subject. However it is the third term – ‘text’ – which needs to be examined first since the value given to the ‘text’ determines both its ‘understanding’ and ‘re-expression’.

Foreign language teaching courses at University level often take the text to be the language in which it is written. That is why the teaching of language often eclipses the teaching of translation and linguistic theories are taught rather than translation theory.

A text basically consists of linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge elicited by the printed signs and it is both the object and the cause of translation, in the current sense of the word and in the sense I am using here. Our starting point is therefore to differentiate the terms ‘language’, ‘sentences’ and ‘text’ because although it is possible to ‘translate’ at each one of these levels, the translation process for each is not the same.

1.1 The three levels of translation

A very simple example taken from a text by Art Buchwald (which will be taken up again in Part 2, Chapter 4), You pay her?, will serve to illustrate these different levels and their effect on translation.

At the level of word semantics, the level of ‘langue’, of language out of context, the French correspondences for each word in the sentence are:

• You = vous, tu, te, toi…
• pay = payer, rétribuer, rémunérer
• her = la, l’, lui, elle

At the level of the sentence, a simplified version of Saussure’s ‘parole’, the verbal context limits the number of correspondences possible. Any good bilingual dictionary provides correspondences resulting from micro-contexts: in the Harrap’s Shorter Dictionary, for example, the options under pay (verb) are:

• to pay a bill = régler
• to pay one’s respects = présenter
• to pay tribute = rendre
• to pay money into an account = verser
• etc.

At this level our example: You pay her? gives the following translations: Vous la payez? (rétribuez, rémunérez), and Tu la paies? The meaning of each word is determined by the words which surround it and this meaning in turn determines the meaning of the other words, but words are the only context taken into account.

At the level of the text, the semantics of utterances is enhanced by general and contextual knowledge (contextual and world knowledge, see 1.7.3.) which allow translators to translate authors and not only language. We will see further on that the translator’s body of knowledge, which not only pre-exists but which is acquired during the reading of the text, allows for You pay her? to have as its equivalent: C’est vous qui la payez? (Is it you who pays her?)

No-one (except perhaps early inventors of machine translation) has ever actually promoted the word-for-word method, except perhaps for inter-linear translations which aim to explain language function by means of concrete examples. Yet many publications clearly treat translation as the finding of correspondences between words, although this is only possible when words are isolated long enough for their verbal and contextual knowledge to be forgotten.

This decontextualisation produces a type of literal translation which everyone condemns but which many practise, wondering for example if the German word ‘Geist’ should be translated by ‘spirit’, ‘genius’, ‘mentality’, ‘ghost’, ‘incarnation’, etc., without taking into account the indications given by the text in which the word is found. The temptation to translate the word is then wrongly taken to be the translation of the text.

I include under the label of linguistic translation the translation of words as well as sentences out of context, and I call interpretive translation or more simply, translation, the translation of texts. I discovered this distinction while doing research on conference interpreting where it is obvious that the translation of speeches calls on knowledge which goes beyond the alignment of linguistic signs and imposes on the translator an interpretive method. (In Part 1, chapter 2 and Part 2, chapter 4, I will give practical examples showing these phenomena at work in written translation.)

1.2 Interpreting

The interpretive theory of translation is founded on observations made during conference interpreting and our main contention in this section will be that there cannot be effective translation without ‘interpretation’. I will therefore consciously play on both meanings of the term ‘to interpret’, including not only the way in which conference interpreters operate but also how a foreign text is fully understood and then re-expressed.

In one of the richest books on translation, Steiner (1975: 251–252) notes the ‘ambiguity’ of the word ‘interpreter’ when comparing the usage of the term in French, English and German. In German, Steiner writes, the Dolmetscher is:

the intermediary who translates commercial documents, the traveller’s questions, the exchanges of diplomats and hoteliers. He is trained in Dolmetscherschulen whose linguistic demands may be rigorous, but which are not concerned with ‘high’ translation.

In French and English, however,

the interprète is the Dolmetscher or ‘interpreter’ in the common garden variety sense. But in a different context the name will refer precisely to the man who ‘interprets’, who elucidates and recreates the poem or metaphysical passage […]. The traducteur, on the other hand, like the ‘translator’ or the traduttore, is fairly obviously Amyot rendering Plutarch or Christopher Logue meta-phrasing the Iliad.

Steiner notes that:

The mystery of meaningful transfer is, in essence, the same when we translate the next bill of lading or the Paradiso.

He feels nevertheless that:

It is the upper range of semantic events which makes problems of translation theory and practice most visible, most incident to general questions of language and mind. It is the literary speech forms, in the wide sense, which ask and promise most.

Steiner may not be wrong. However, the most immediately visible illustration of the process of translation can be observed during conference interpreting. This process contains all the parameters of discourse, it allows for direct examination and leads to clear conclusions on the overall phenomenon of ‘translation’. In fact, conference interpreting is the purest representation of how the concrete manifestation from a speech or a text passes through a translator’s mind and becomes another concrete manifestation, thereby transferring sense.

Moreover, as far as the process of translation is concerned, differences between types of text matter little: the down-to-earth text in which ‘linguistic demands may be rigorous’ and the ‘literary speech forms, in the broadest sense, which ask and promise most’ are derived from the same phenomena of language and the mind.

To explain translation, it is far more important to make the distinction between good translations (and interpretations) based on a reasoned methodology and bad translations (and interpretations) which, through a lack of conceptualisation, remain at the level of the language of the text to be translated (see Part 1, chapter 2).

1.3 The oral and the written

During my more than twenty years experience as a practising conference interpreter I was lucky enough to also teach and study the process. The knowledge I obtained from such a vantage point allowed me, both independently and in collaboration with Danica Seleskovitch, to draw conclusions, discussed in previous publications, which go far beyond the practice of conference interpreting and prove daily to be valid for written translation as well. Cary, who was an interpreter and a translator, preceded us on this path and was one of the first translation theorists to base himself on conference interpreting to explain written translation. His experience in both fields allowed Cary (1962: 4) to feel the difference between the ‘petrified words’ in a text and the living and complete nature of oral discourse:

Only the spoken word contains the fullness of human language and it is a mutilation to focus one’s interest only on what the printed page can hold […] The interpreter is faced with someone who lives, who thinks and who speaks. That is what he is called upon to render.¹(translated)

² ‘Seule la parole parlée possède la plénitude du langage humain et c’est mutiler l’homme que de ne s’intéresser qu’à ce qu’en peut capter la feuille imprimée […] L’interprète se trouve en présence d’un homme qui vit , qui pense et qui parle. C’est cela qu’il est appelé à rendre.’

By being present at both the emission and reception of utterances, interpreters witness how speakers are aware of their audience and how they formulate their thoughts accordingly. Interpreters therefore constantly come across the link between thoughts and their expression.

From the oral, Cary goes on to describe the written:

Should we not always keep in mind that the written text – the only one we have access to – is but a mummy, a faulty and fragmented copy of the author’s living thoughts? A ‘cadaverous’ discourse and a ‘paralytic’ expression to quote Plato. Should we not always feel ‘la tristeza espectral de la palabra escrita’, to quote José Ortega y Gasset?

When we translate, do we not sometimes wonder: ‘What does he really mean, this author from whom I am only getting a partial message […]²(translated)

³ ‘Ne devons-nous pas toujours nous rappeler que le texte écrit – le seul que nous prétendons connaître – n’est qu’une momie , une copie fautive et fragmentaire du propos vivant de l’auteur? Un discours ‘cadavérique’ et une expression ‘paralytique’, pour parler avec Platon. Ne devons-nous pas sentir toujours ‘la tristeza espectral de la palabra escrita’, pour parler avec José Ortega y Gasset? De fait, en traduisant, ne nous arrive-t-il pas, plus d’une fois, de nous demander: ‘Qu’a-t-il voulu dire au juste, cet auteur dont je ne reçois ici qu’un message tronqué […]’.

Cary translated both speeches and texts – interpreting at international conferences and doing written translations of the highest philosophical and literary standard – and was therefore unavoidably struck by the fact that written texts surrender their sense far less easily than speeches. Written texts are cut off from their conditions of production; author and reader are only linked by the form which remains, making multiple interpretations possible.

And yet written texts also aim at being instances of communication: they are written by an author and aimed at readers. But the link which exists at the outset between the text and the reality it designates gradually disappears. As awareness of the text’s conditions of production gradually fades and the precise sense which corresponded with the author’s intended meaning is lost over time, only the graphic signs remain, conveying their language meanings or at least a portion thereof, and sometimes nothing else. Moreover, there are numero...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to English Translation
• Foreword
• Part I – The Theoretical Aspects of Translation
• 1. Translation through Interpretation
• 2. Equivalence and Correspondence
• 3. Language and Translation
• Part II The Practice of Translation
• 4. The Practical Problems of Translation
• 5. Translation and the Teaching of Languages
• 6. Translation into the Foreign Language
• 7. Machine Translation versus Human Translation
• Afterword
• Appendix 1 Cannery Row
• Appendix 2 The Woman behind the Woman
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Name Index