Thinking French Translation

Sándor Hervey, Ian Higgins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134522798
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The new edition of this popular course in translation from French into English offers a challenging practical approach to the acquisition of translation skills, with clear explanations of the theoretical issues involved. A variety of translation issues are considered including: *cultural differences*register and dialect*genre*revision and editing.The course now covers texts from a wide range of sources, including: *journalism and literature*commercial, legal and technical texts*songs and recorded interviews.This is essential reading for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students of French on translation courses. The book will also appeal to wide range of language students and tutors.

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 course:

Text Any given stretch of speech or writing assumed to make a coherent whole. A minimal text may consist of a single word preceded and followed by a silence or a blank, e.g. ‘Zut!’, or the road sign ‘Stop’. A maximal text, such as Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, may run into volumes.

Source text (ST) The text to be translated.

Target text (TT) The text which 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 translation brief, i.e. what are the purpose and intended audience of my translation? What is the purpose of this ST? What genre does it belong to, and what audience is it aimed at? What is its message content? What are its salient linguistic features? What are its principal effects? What are the implications of all these factors? If a choice has to be made among them, which ones should be given priority in ensuring that the TT is fit for its purpose?’

Decisions of detail Reasoned decisions concerning the specific problems of syntax, vocabulary, etc. encountered in translating particular expressions or stretches of text 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 realize 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, separate processes.

The processes of translation are no different from familiar things that everyone 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 accumulated experience – 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 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 things as returning a greeting correctly, 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’ (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 (ibid.) calls ‘intralingual translation’. A brief look at the two extremes of intralingual translation will show what its major implications are. Take the following scenario. Jill is driving Jack through the narrow streets of a small town. A policeman steps out and stops them. As he leans in to speak to Jill, she can see over his shoulder that, further on, a trailer has tipped over and blocked the street. At one extreme of intralingual translation lies the kind of response typified in this exchange:

POLICEMAN	There's been an accident ahead, Madam – I'm afraid you'll have to turn left down St Mary's Lane here, the road's blocked.
JILL	Oh, OK. Thanks.
JACK	What did he say?
JILL	We've got to turn left.

The policeman's essential message is ‘Turn left’. But he does not want to sound brusque. So he mollifies the driver with a partial explanation, ‘There's been an accident’, and then cushions his instruction with ‘I'm afraid you'll have to’. ‘Down St Mary's Lane’ gives a hint of local colour and fellow-citizenship; but he does add ‘here’, just in case the driver is a stranger. Finally, he completes his explanation.

When Jack asks what he said, however, Jill separates the gist of the policeman's 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 which intralingual translation shares with translation proper. First, Jill's is not the only gist translation possible. For instance, she might have said ‘We've got to go down here.’ Among other things, this implies that at least one of them does not know the town: the street name has no significance. A third possibility is ‘We've got to go down St Mary's Lane’: if Jack and Jill do know the town, the policeman'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 how it is expressed and received. By ‘situation’ here we mean a combination of three 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, etc.), 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 Jack's question is the exchange between Jill and the policeman and her reply to Jack; the context of the policeman's words is everything that follows them; the context of Jill's reply to Jack is everything that precedes ‘We've got to turn left’. 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, Jill might simply have said ‘Turn left’, a highly 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 Jack receives it, it could give the impression that the policeman was brusque.

Another reason why ‘Turn left’ could sound brusque is that, grammatically, it looks like direct speech (an imperative), whereas all the other gist translations we have given are clearly indirect speech (or ‘reported speech’). Now all translation may be said to be indirect speech, inasmuch as it does not repeat the ST, but reformulates it in the translator's words. Yet most TTs, like ‘Turn left’, mask this fact by omitting the typical markers of indirect speech, e.g. ‘The author says that . . .’, or change in point of view (as in changing ‘I'm afraid you'll have to turn left’ into ‘he's afraid we'll have to turn left’). 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. Jill might just as easily have interpreted the policeman's words by expanding them. For example, she could build on an initial gist translation as follows:

We've got to go down St Mary's Lane – some fool's tipped a trailer over and blocked the High Street.

This puts two sorts of gloss on the policeman's message: she adds details that he did not give (the tipping over, the name of the street ahead) and her own judgement of the 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 accumulated experience becomes obvious in exegetic translation, for any exegesis by definition involves explicitly bringing considerations from outside the text into one's reading of it – here, the overturned trailer, Jill's 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. Knowing the town as she does, Jill might easily have gone on like this:

The street's just too narrow for a thing that size.

This explanation is admissible as exegesis, but it probably goes beyond the limit of exegetic translation.

Finally, gist translation and exegetic translation often occur in close association with one another. Sometimes, they seem to be inseparable, especially in the rewording of metaphor (see the Macbeth examples on p. 11). But this is not confined to intralingual translation or to literary texts. Here is an example from the statement of accounts of a big firm. In France, the accounts must be accompanied by a rapport général des commissaires aux comptes (statutory auditors’ report), and by a rapport spécial des commissaires aux comptes sur les conventions réglementées. This ST and TT refer to the latter (the ST report is addressed to the shareholders):

ST En application de l'article 103 de la loi du 24 juillet 1966, nous vous informons que le Président de votre conseil d'administration ne nous a donné avis d'aucune convention visée à l'article 101 de cette loi. (Aerospatiale 1994a: 86)

TT In accordance with corporate legislation, we are required to submit a report to the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders with respect to certain agreements entered into by the Company with managers or directors of the Company, or with companies in which such persons exercise similar functions. Agreements of this nature require prior approval of the Board of Directors. No such agreements or transactions arising therefrom have been brought to our attention. (Aerospatiale 1994b: 86)

Clearly, the ST reader is expected to know what this law requires. The TT may have been produced, as such texts often are, in accordance with standard translations issued by the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC). However it was arrived at, the strategy has clearly been to assume that the TL reader will not understand an unglossed reference to the law of 24 July 1966. The TT is...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• 1 Preliminaries to translation as a process
• 2 Preliminaries to translation as a product
• 3 Cultural issues in translation
• 4 Compensation
• 5 Textual genre and translation issues
• The formal properties of texts: Introduction
• 6 The formal properties of texts: Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues in translation
• 7 The formal properties of texts: Grammatical and sentential issues in translation
• 8 The formal properties of texts: Discourse and intertextual issues in translation
• 9 Literal meaning and translation issues
• 10 Connotative meaning and translation issues
• 11 Language variety: Translation issues in register, sociolect and dialect
• 12 Scientific and technical translation
• 13 Legal and financial translation
• 14 Translating consumer-oriented texts
• 15 Revising and editing TTs
• Contrastive topics and practicals: Introduction
• 16 Contrastive topic and practical: Nominalization
• 17 Contrastive topic and practical: Adverbials
• 18 Contrastive topic and practical: ‘Absolute’ constructions
• 19 Contrastive topic and practical: Prepositions
• 20 Summary and conclusion
• Postscript: A career in translation?
• Glossary of terms used
• References
• Index