The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture

Sue-Ann Harding, Ovidi Carbonell Cortés, Sue-Ann Harding, Ovidi Carbonell Cortés

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317368496
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture collects into a single volume thirty-two state-of-the-art chapters written by international specialists, overviewing the ways in which translation studies has both informed, and been informed by, interdisciplinary approaches to culture. The book's five sections provide a wealth of resources, covering both core issues and topics in the first part. The second part considers the relationship between translation and cultural narratives, drawing on both historical and religious case studies. The third part covers translation and social contexts, including the issues of cultural resistance, indigenous cultures and cultural representation. The fourth part addresses translation and cultural creativity, citing both popular fiction and graphic novels as examples. The final part covers translation and culture in professional settings, including cultures of science, legal settings and intercultural businesses.

This handbook offers a wealth of information for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working in translation and interpreting studies.

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Part I

Core issues and topics

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1

Defining culture, defining translation

David Katan

Introduction

Any discussion of definitions requires a number of provisos. They are, by their very nature, essentialist and positivist in that they distil what is the ‘essentialis . . . the nature of a thing . . . and what sets it apart’ (Rener 1989, 266; see also Hebenstreit 2007, 11–12). They are also often a descriptione in that they enumerate ‘the various features proper to the thing’ (Rener 1989, 266). Who or what is included (and excluded) from a definition easily becomes the object of heated contention, as this affects the size of the discipline, the growth or otherwise of academic departments, the professional status of those who are included in ‘the thing’ (e.g. Marco 2007, 65; Melby et al. 2014; Pym 2014, 49) and much more. Consequently, the task of defining culture and translation can move from difficult to extremely political.

That said, the human race has long been categorising and defining things. Defining dictionaries with commentary and glosses have been around since the third century bce (Considine 2015, 605). Today the world’s ‘best-selling regularly updated book’ with 400 million sales is Xinhua Zidian [The New Chinese Character Dictionary] (Press Centre 2016). In 2014, Merriam Webster (whose Collegiate Dictionary ranks as the next best-selling dictionary with sales of 55 million) announced ‘culture’ as its ‘Word of the Year’ because it had ‘the biggest spike in look-ups’ (Steinmetz 2014) on its website. ‘People were desperate to know what “culture” meant’ (Rothman 2014), a strong indication of what Tymoczko (2007) calls the ‘definitional impulse’: the human need for closure, and the need to put things in boxes, or at least, as Wittgenstein (1958) would have it, to organise according to ‘family resemblance’ (Familienähnlichkeit) (32–33). In short, there is an innate human need to classify and organise ‘what is what’ (and to distinguish it from what is not what).

Categorisation has traditionally been conceived in terms of horizontal co-hyponymic and vertical hypernymic levels. Here we will loosely follow Bateson (1972) and Goffman (1986) and their understanding of categorisation of experience, in terms of ‘framing’ (see also Katan 2004, 49–56). At the horizontal level, we frame ‘types of’ translation (such as literal, free or audio-visual) or ‘types of’ culture (ethnic, political and national). Clearly there are problems in deciding where the horizontal frame boundaries are and, indeed, even if ‘the type’ itself is valid within the wider frame. A perfect case in point is Hatim and Munday’s (2004, 6) question: ‘Where do we draw the line between “translation” and “adaptation?”’

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However, it is with the vertical, or wider, frames that the major issues come into view, as the widening of context or perspective brings to the fore previously unquestioned boundaries, which focus not only on ‘what’ is to be included, but also ‘in which historical period/geographical/linguistic domain’, ‘according to which discipline’, and finally even ‘according to which underlying motivations’. In short, there is a hierarchy of ever-widening frames, each of which contextualises the frame it encloses. This in itself is problematic when it comes to definitions, which themselves presume—in enclosing the essentialisness—to be the ultimate frame.

Post-positivism brings to the fore these hidden assumptions. Clearly, this includes questioning the validity of the definition frame itself. Post-positivists suggest that although phenomena may (possibly) be observed, it is the observer’s subjectivity that will bias what is perceived towards a particular construction of ‘reality’ and towards a particular way of defining ‘the thing’. As we can see, terms at the post-positivist chunk-level come with inverted commas, suggesting that the ‘objective’ terms themselves are to be reflected on and ‘problematised’. To be fair, positivists also accept that definitions and norms are socially constructed, and are not impervious to change over time (e.g. Chesterman 1997).

We can organise these paradigms in terms of broadness of view, context or abstraction. A useful starting point is Hall’s (1990) framing of culture into a ‘major triad’ (see Katan 2004, 44–48). Hall adapts Freud’s metaphor of an iceberg, originally used to explain that the most important workings of the mind operate unconsciously, out-of-awareness. This unconscious level guides judgement, which then guides visible behaviour. Hall organised culture into three systems acting at different levels of visibility: the visible (technical), the partially submerged (formal) and finally the invisible (informal) out-of-awareness level. The metaphor highlights the fact that the most important aspects of culture are hidden. At the same time, it is these aspects that evaluate what is normal or right, and consequently guide the visible behaviour. The same iceberg metaphor can also be used to discuss ‘translation’. The visible responds to ‘what’ is tangible: the product (the source and the target texts). The partially submerged refers to the ‘how’: the processes of translation; while the most hidden aspects explore the motivations (the ‘why’), the beliefs, values and ideologies that govern both processes and product.

Defining translation

Translation as product (what)

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines translation as ‘to turn’, ‘to change’, ‘to render’ or ‘to express in other words’, always in the sense of the Latin trans-latere, to transport across from the original. This Anglo-European sense of exact transfer has survived through the ages, but was certainly given further impulse during the industrial revolution as bridges and trains, plumbing and wiring, not to mention the sending of words by telegraphy, literally bridged and connected different spaces. This encouraged people to consider the idea that energy and information can travel effortlessly from place to place with no appreciable change or loss. As Reddy notes (1979, 299) ‘Practically speaking, if you try to avoid all obvious conduit metaphor expressions in your usage, you are nearly struck dumb when communication becomes the topic’. Translation theorists, even today, tend unconsciously to repeat the same metaphor (Katan, forthcoming). This direct transfer can be compared with the travel metaphor, such as Bassnett’s (2000) ‘Translation can be seen as a kind of journey’ (106), which implies change of view and, of course, challenges. However, it is the metaphor of conduit precision rather than travel, that also drives many professional translator and interpreter guidelines, even when ‘translation as mediation’ is involved (Katan 2016).

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Indeed, when Stecconi (2004) suggests that three ‘existential characters’ are necessary for translation to take place: similarity, difference and mediation (15), the mediation he is referring to is, according to Baker (2008, 5) a form of transfer, ‘reporting what someone else has said or written, in the same or another language, in speech or in writing’ (see also Wilss 1999, 149). While Baker uses the metaphor of indirect speech, Gutt (2000) defines translation in terms of direct speech, which carries an even stronger image of exact transfer: ‘translation consists in interlingual quotation’ (236). However, as Wilss points out, reproduction in reality ‘is not sufficient’ (1999, 149), though there is still spirited defence today for what Mossop (2017) calls ‘an invariance approach’ to translation.

Up to the end of the twentieth century, if it was not exact transfer it was ‘dire quasi la stessa cosa’ [saying almost the same thing], the title of Umberto Eco’s (2003) volume on the subject. The conduit metaphor remained, with the acceptance that ‘loss’ is inevitable. Hence the translator is unable to be totally ‘faithful’ to the source text and in some ways will betray the true meaning of the original (traduttore/traditore). So, rather than faithfulness, ‘equivalence’ was now key. Catford (1965, 43), for example, views translation as ‘the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by the equivalent text material in another language’. This still suggests a close, if not univocal replacement, due to the strong focus at this level of framing on the relationship between languages themselves.

It is only with Eugene Nida (Nida and Tabor 1969) that we have the important admission that there might be some form of change during reproduction in translation: ‘translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style’ (12). Nevertheless, Nida was convinced (as his arrowed transfer processes show) that, at a deep level, unilinear decoding/encoding transfer takes place.

Nida’s definition was a breakthrough in many senses. He moved the focus away from formal equivalence, where the two texts are (supposedly) linguistically the same, to dynamic equivalence whereby it is the receiver’s response to the text that is supposedly the same. Equivalence has been central in the definition of translation for most of the twentieth century, and is still prominent today (e.g. Hatim 2014, 31), though defining the term itself is extremely problematic (Hermans 1999). At the other end of the spectrum is Toury’s (1995a) stripped-down definition: ‘a translation is a fact of whatever target sector it is found to be a fact of’ (139). This certainly provocative ‘assumed translation’ (139) was heavily criticised by Hermans (1999, 49), suggesting that following Toury, we might define a zebra as what we call a zebra.

In reality, Toury (1995b) modified his definition to three postulates, similar to Stecconi’s but now ‘only certain features are transferred’ (rather than full-scale direct quote mediation), and instead of ‘similarity’, there must be ‘accountable relationships which tie [the assumed translation] to its assumed original’ (35). So, translation, fully in line with Skopos theory, now only requires some form of ‘relationship’ with the original text, which effectively ignores the trans-latere conduit metaphor, but does little to define what is essentialis about translation itself.

Translation as process (how)

The term ‘translation’ is inherently complex, as it can relate to the product, to the activity and to the discipline (which also includes interpreting) (see Tymoczko 2007, 59). Here, we will focus on translation as a process, on the ‘how’ of translating. Once a particular process is accepted it becomes a norm, and so remains under the tip of the iceberg until brought into discussion. One of the first documented discussions on the process was Cicero’s (Robinson 1997, 25) first-century bce questioning of the verbum e verbo [word for word], opining for a sensum de sensu [sense for sense] approach. The sense for sense approach is still generally understood as operating within the confines of faithfulness to the source text. As Snell-Hornby (1995, 9–10) makes clear, translation in the West has been understood to mean faithfulness to the source text combined with idiomatic fluency, and has rarely been questioned. This is the area of what Toury (1995a) termed ‘translation norms’: the regularities of phenomena in the translated texts that serve as evidence of normative force (65).

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In 1831, Friedrich Schleiermacher (in Robinson 2013), the father of hermeneutics, famously questioned the idiomatic fluency of the Western norm during an address he gave on ‘The Different Methods of Translating’. Significantly, he did not question the conduit premise, focusing, as Robinson (2013) notes, on the translator as a tour guide (50): ‘either the translator disturbs the writer as little as possible and moves the reader in his direction, or disturbs the reader as little as possible and moves the writer in his direction’ (cit. and trans. Robinson 2013, 58). Schleiermacher believed that the essentialis in translation for what he called the ‘true translator’ (58) was a feeling and a ‘respect for the foreign’ (169) (i.e. an extremely close literal translation) so that the reader could ‘gaze upon the author’s inimitable patterns of thinking and meaning’ (52). He also limited the a descriptione to works of art and scholarship (58). He accepted that in other fields, such as in business, idiomatic fluency would be required, and a similar ‘impact of the original’ (56) would be the aim (which became Nida’s ‘dynamic equivalence’). However, this type of operation was not translation, but should be defined as interpretation and ‘imitation’ (58).

More recently, these arguments have been framed within ‘the cultural turn’, which widened the focus to the text’s interconnectedness with other texts and cultural systems. This interconnectedness also lies below the visible tip of the iceberg, in that the connections are not visibly connected to the text. The associations are, however, manifest to the reader, and form part of the knowledge brought to the reading. Bassnett’s popular Translation Studies, first published in 1980 (2014, 25), opens with the following:

Language, then, is the heart within the body of culture, and it is the interaction between the two that results in the continuation of life-energy. In the same way that the surgeon, operating on the heart, cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator treats the text in isolation from the culture at his or her peril.

The main difference between this approach and Nida’s is that there was no pretence that there would be any one-to-one equivalence at a deep level. Manipulation (Hermans 1985, 11) and refraction (Lefevere 1982) rather than the conduit metaphor are now powerful images helping to envisage translation as a phenomenon of interpretation between systems, very much as Jakobson (1959) had stated 30 years earlier: ‘Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language’ (233). Jakobson, though, had gone much further, defining two other less proper translation areas: intralingual (rewording) and intersemiotic, ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’ (233). Empirical evidence from think-aloud protocols (TAPs) also began to point to the fact that translation is also a ‘non-linear’ activity (Sèguinot 2000...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture
• Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Translation and Culture
• Part I Core Issues and Topics
• Part II Translation and Cultural Narratives
• Part III Translation and Social Contexts
• Part IV Translation and Cultural Creativity
• Part V Translation and Culture in Professional Settings
• Index