The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies

Jeremy Munday

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134155439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies brings together clear, detailed essays from leading international scholars on major areas in Translation Studies today.

This accessible and authoritative guide offers fresh perspectives on linguistics, context, culture, politics and ethics and contains a range of contributions on emerging areas such as cognitive theories, technology, interpreting and audiovisual translation.

Supported by an extensive glossary of key concepts and a substantial bibliography, this Companion is an essential resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and professionals working in this exciting field of study.

Jeremy Munday is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Translation Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Introducing Translation Studies, Translation: An Advanced Resource Book (with Basil Hatim) and Style and Ideology in Translation, all published by Routledge.

"An excellent all-round guide to translation studies taking in the more traditional genres and those on the cutting edge. All the contributors are known experts in their chosen areas and this gives the volume the air of authority required when dealing with a subject that is being increasingly studied in higher education institutions all over the world"

- Christopher Taylor, University of Trieste, Italy

1 ISSUES IN TRANSLATION STUDIES

JEREMY MUNDAY

1.0 INTRODUCTION

This volume sets out to bring together contributions on key issues in translation studies, providing an overview, a definition of key concepts, a description of major theoretical work and an indication of possible avenues of development. This first chapter serves both as an introduction to the volume as a whole and as a discussion of how the field itself has evolved, especially since the middle of the twentieth century.

1.1 THE HISTORY OF TRANSLATION PRACTICE AND EARLY ‘THEORY’

One of the characteristics of the study of translation is that, certainly initially, it was based on the practice of translating; much early writing was by individual translators and directed at explaining, justifying or discussing their choice of a particular translation strategy. In Western translation theory, which has exerted a dominance over a subject that has evolved until recently mainly in the West, these writings are traditionally felt to begin with the Roman rhetorician and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BCE) and the Bible translator St Jerome (c.347–c.420 CE). In his essay, ‘De optimo genere oratorum’ (‘The best kind of orator’, 46 BCE), Cicero describes the strategy he adopted for translating models of classical Greek oratory:

[S]ince there was a complete misapprehension as to the nature of their style of oratory, I thought it my duty to undertake a task which will be useful to students, though not necessarily for myself. That is to say I translated the most famous orations of the two most eloquent Attic orators, Aeschines and Demostenes, orations which they delivered against each other. And I did not translate them as an interpreter but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and the forms or as one might say, the ‘figures’ of thought, but in language which conforms to our usage. And in so doing, I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the general style and force of the language.

(Cicero 46 BCE, trans. H.M. Hubbell, in Robinson 1997a: 9,
emphasis added)

Noteworthy is Cicero’s assertion that translation here was for the benefit of his students and not for himself. It was a training and instruction exercise, rather than having any other intrinsic value of its own, and this concept of translation as furthering other ends has persisted through the centuries. But Cicero also considered a translation necessary in order to overcome misunderstandings arising from a growing cultural and linguistic divide between the Greek and Roman worlds. The italicized part of the quotation corresponds to the original Latin non converti ut interpres sed ut orator; here, interpres is to be understood as a literal, word-for-word translator (a common form of translation at the time, when the readers could generally be expected to have some competence in the source language) and orator as the speech maker who attempts to influence the audience by his persuasive use of language. As Robinson points out (1997a: 9, footnote 6), this distinction, novel at the time and hugely influential since, in some ways resembles that between formal and dynamic equivalence proposed by the modern-day translation theorist and Bible translator Eugene Nida (see Chapter 2).

While the Classical authors of ancient Greece and Rome exerted authority over much European thought and literature (and translation), an even more important phenomenon was the translation of the Bible itself. Translation was a means of disseminating the word of God. In this respect, the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament) in the third–first centuries BCE was crucial. The claim, made later by Philo Judaeus (20 BCE, in Robinson 1997a: 13), that the team of seventy-two scholarly translators each independently arrived at exactly the same wording in their translations, thus confirming their fidelity to the source) illustrates most clearly the perceived need to allay potential dangers associated with altering a sensitive text and the possible charges of misinterpretation or manipulation. The claim was repeated by St Augustine in his On Christian Doctrine (428 CE, in Robinson 1997a: 34) as proof that the translators were divinely guided (‘inspired by the Holy Spirit’) into reproducing a translation that, even if challenged by those who compared it with the Hebrew, should now be considered to have authority.

Once translation was allowed, the problem for the religious authorities was how to keep control over the different versions. This is a problem of ‘rewriting’ (cf. Lefevere 1992), not unique to translation, as is shown most evidently in the process of canonicity of the sacred books of the major monotheistic religions (the Torah, the Christian Bible and the Qur’ān); that is, decisions as to the material that was to be included and the exact form of the text that was authorized (see, e.g. Peters 2007). In the case of the Christian New Testament, the late fourth-century Pope Damasus commissioned St Jerome to produce a new Latin translation as a standardized version, replacing the many variants in existence and being partly a revision of the Veta Latina (Old Latin) version. Jerome unusually had knowledge of Hebrew as well as Greek, and so, in his later translation of the Old Testament, was able to refer to the source text (ST) itself. This also meant that he became aware of the many differences between the Hebrew and the Septuagint, realizing that the Septuagint was, indeed, a highly edited version. As far as general translation strategy was concerned, in his famous and lengthy letter to Pammachius (Jerome 395 CE, in Robinson 1997a: 23–30), Jerome defends himself against accusations of errors. Calling on the authority of Cicero, Horace and other Classical authors, and providing a judicious caveat for the sensitive area of religious texts, the letter includes the now-famous description of its author’s strategy:

Now I not only admit but freely announce that in translating from the Greek – except of course in the case of the Holy Scripture, where even the syntax is a mystery – I render, not word for word, but sense for sense.

(Jerome 395/1997: 25)

In Western Europe this word-for-word versus sense-for-sense debate continued in one form or another until the twentieth century (see Chapter 2). The centrality of the Bible to translation also explains the enduring theoretical questions about accuracy and fidelity to a fixed source.

Some 1100 years after St Jerome, in the religious Reformation of the sixteenth century, translation most clearly showed itself as a political weapon in Europe. Against the fierce opposition of the Church, the Bible was finally translated into vernacular languages and some of those translators set out clear translation strategies. Prominent among these was Martin Luther, in his Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen (‘Circular letter on translation’) of 1530, defending his Bible translation into a modern German that was clear and everyday rather than elitist (Luther 1530/1963).

Any attempted summary of historical writings on translation would inevitably be extremely selective and, given the space constraints of the volume and this chapter, overly brief. For this reason, the reader is directed to the following, which can be used as starting points for research: Robinson (1997a) for a compilation of extracts from prefaces and other writings of 90 major figures Kelly (1979) and Rener (1989), see below for a discussion on the practice and theory from Classical to pre-modern times; Baker and Malmkjær (1998) and Baker and Saldanha (2008) for a brief overview of many traditions; Lefevere (1977) for the German tradition from Luther; Berman (1992) for the German Romantic tradition; Amos (1920/73), T. Steiner (1975), Venuti (1995/2008), Classe (2000) and France (2000) for the English tradition; Ellis (2003), Braden et al. (2004), Gillespie and Hopkins (2005), France and Haynes (2006) and Venuti (forthcoming) for a five-volume history of literary translation in English; G. Steiner (1975/98) for an attempt at a general (European) theory of translation. It is important to remark, however, on the historical dominance of writings by men: in Robinson’s Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (1997), only nine of the 90 extracted authors are women, which is nevertheless more than in other anthologies. There is also a dominance of European writing and languages that has only recently begun to be addressed in the publication of, amongst others, volumes on the Chinese tradition of Yan Fu (Chan 2004), the very earliest writing on translation in China (Cheung 2006) and Asian translation traditions more generally (Hung and Wakabayashi 2005). Yet, somewhat ironically, in order to be heard internationally these publications on translation appear in English, a language that dominates international scholarship and imposes its own academic conventions (Bennett 2007).

Nevertheless, what can be said is that the practice of translation remained an enduring feature of writing on the subject. Early attempts at theoretical or abstract conceptualization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were based on the practice of the ancient Classics. As Frederick Rener (1989: 261) puts it in his Interpretatio: Language and translation from Cicero to Tytler,

these ideas were taken from the statements and the practice of important translators of the past. In Western Europe, Cicero and Jerome held the position of auctores principes in matters of translation and they were consulted on questions of theory as well as practice.

The writings most often noted in the European context are those of Martin Luther (1530), Etienne Dolet (1540) and the later John Dryden (1680) and Alexander Tytler (1797, see Chapter 2). For Rener (ibid: 7),

the many centuries between classical antiquity and the eighteenth century should be regarded as a unit which is cemented by a strong tradition. The binding element is a common theory of language and communication and an equally jointly shared idea of translation.

That theory of language was based on the Classical classifications of grammar and rhetoric and the (hierarchical) distinction and separation between res (thing), verba (sign) and style (Rener ibid: 35). Such a fixed nature of language was only really challenged from the time of the German Romantics of the early nineteenth century (Schlegel, Goethe, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, etc.) and, in the early twentieth century, in the work of Saussure in linguistics and Walter Benjamin in philosophy. Persistent revisitings of such writings have transfused translation studies in recent decades (see 1.5 below).

1.2 THE RISE OF ‘TRANSLATION STUDIES’

In comparison with many other academic disciplines or interdisciplines,¹ translation studies is a relatively new area of inquiry, dating from the second half of the twentieth century and emerging out of other fields such as modern languages, comparative literature and linguistics. The very name translation studies was first proposed by James S. Holmes as late as 1972 as a better alternative to translatology and to translation science, or science of translating (cf. Nida 1964). Versions of translatology have become established in languages such as French (translatologie); the latter, translation science, was a calque of the German Übersetzungswissenschaft (e.g. Koller 1979), but, as Holmes (1988: 70) notes, ‘not all Wissenschaften can properly be called sciences’. Over time, just twenty years since the widespread dissemination of Holmes’s paper after his death, the name translation studies has become established within the English-speaking world even if there remain competing terms in other languages (cf. Stolze 1997: 10). This preference is increasingly supported by its use in institutional names (e.g. ‘Centre for Translation Studies’) and in the titles of widely-used volumes such as Translation Studies (Bassnett 1980/2002), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Baker and Malmkjær 1998; Baker and Saldanha 2008), Introducing Translation Studies (Munday 2001/2008), A Companion to Translation Studies (Kuhiwczak and Littau 2007) and the present volume. We may detect some influence of English over other languages, the calque estudios de la traducción in Spanish, for example.

The debate over the name of the field of study is in many ways a symbol of a more important phenomenon, what Holmes (1988: 71) saw as ‘the lack of any general consensus as to the scope and structure of the discipline. What constitutes the field of translation studies?’ The candidates he discusses from the 1970s include comparative/contrastive terminology and lexicography, comparative/contrastive linguistics, and ‘translation theory’. The answer to the question, however, presupposes that we agree what ‘translation’ is.

1.3 WHAT IS ‘TRANSLATION’?

There are two issues that need attention here: what we actually mean by translation (this section) and what disciplines or activities fall within the scope of translation studies (section 1.4). The understanding of these issues has been transformed since Holmes’s tentative, yet seminal, paper. As far as the former is concerned, central to the development of translation studies, indeed canonized within its writings, is the well-known, tripartite definition of translation advanced by the structural linguist Roman Jakobson:

• 1. Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language.
• 2. Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language.
• 3. Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.
• Jakobson (1959/2004: 139, emphasis in original)

‘Intralingual’ translation thus refers to a rewording or rephrasing in the same language (most explicitly introduced by phrases such as in other words or that is), and ‘intersemiotic’ to a change of medium, such as the translation that occurs when a composer puts words to music (see Chapter 2) or, even more notably, when the musical sound completely replaces the verbal code. For Jakobson, ‘interlingual’ translation, between two verbal languages (e.g. Chinese and Arabic, English and Spanish), is ‘translation proper’. Although that may be the most ‘prototypical’ form of translation (cf. Halverson 1999), it is by no means unproblematic. For instance, what constitutes ‘some other language’, or, for that matter, ‘the same language’? This may appear clear to us when we discuss, for instance, an intralingual subtitling service for the hard-of-hearing in the broadcaster’s own language as compared to the various interlingual subtitling options in other languages on a DVD, but where do we site dialect in this classification? When the film Trainspotting (directed by Danny Boyle, 1996, UK), with its urban Scottish dialects, is subtitled for an English-speaking US audience, is this to be considered a case of intralingual or interlingual translation? Or what about an Asturian speaker subtitled for Castilian-speaking viewers on Spanish TV? Spoken in the region of Asturias in northern Spain, Asturian is considered to be a distinct language by some but does not enjoy official language status nationally. Such questions relate to language policy and to our own linguistic and research perspective and may have political or ideological import.

The subtitling in the foregoing examples is another instance of phenomena which cross boundaries. As well as being either intralingual or interlingual, subtitling is also a form of intersemiotic translation, the replacement of an ST spoken verbal code by a target text (TT) written verbal code with due regard for the visual and other acoustic signs: thus, there may be a written indication of telephones ringing, dogs barking, characters shouting; or sometimes non-translation of visual elements such as nods and head-shakes that are obvious from the image, and so on. Interest in intersemiotic translation, in the interaction of the visual and written semiotic codes in particular, has grown over the years, especially in relatively new areas of research such as audiovisual translation (see Chapter 9), children’s literature (e.g. Lathey 2006), advertising translation (e.g. Adab and Valdés 2004) and in areas related to localization and multimedia translation which have revolutionized the translation profession (see Chapters 7 and 9).

Translation thus refers to far more than just the written text on the page, the product of the translation process. Defining what we mean by the word is notoriously slippery: in their Dictionary of Translation Studies, Shuttleworth and Cowie begin their entry for ‘translation’ by acknowledging this fact: ‘Translation An incredibly broad notion which can be understood in many different ways’ (1997: 181), while Baker and Malmkjær (1998) do without a specific entry for ‘translation’ in their longer Encyclopedia. Hatim and Munday prefer to talk of ‘the ambit of translation’, defined as:

• 1. The process of transferring a written text from SL to TL, conducted by a translator, or translators, in a specific socio-cultural context.
• 2. The written product, or TT, which results from that process and which functions in the socio-cultural context of the TL.
• 3. The cognitive, linguistic, visual, cultural and ideological phenomena which are an integral part of 1 and 2.
• Hatim and Munday (2004: 6)

As we shall see below, it is the phenomena in the third point of this definition that have attracted most attention in recent translation studies.

However, such definitions still do not answer the question of the limits...