Persian Linguistics in Cultural Contexts

Alireza Korangy, Farzad Sharifian, Alireza Korangy, Farzad Sharifian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429892905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Psycholinguistik

Korangy and Sharifian's groundbreaking book offers the first in-depth study into cultural linguistics for the Persian language. The book highlights a multitude of angles through which the intricacies of Persian and its many dialects and accents, wherever spoken, can be examined. Linguistics with cultural studies as its backdrop is not a new phenomenon; however, with this text we are afforded an insight into the complex relationship that exists between human cognizance and human expression in this ancient civilization. This study helps develop an innovative understanding of history, intent, and meaning as understood by a culture and by a people, in this case the Persian-speaking folk of Iran. The chapters are insightful resources for analyzing and augmenting our knowledge of linguistics under the rubric of Persian culture but also for proposing and foregrounding new ideas in this field of study.

1
A cultural linguistic survey of nuances in translation

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi

Introduction

This paper examines linguistic and metalinguistic factors, including culture, that influence translation. First, it discusses the linguistic approaches to translation and their respective prevailing theories, including the Saussurean approach, the systemic functional approach, the generative dynamic approach, the psycholinguistic approach, the cognitive linguistic approach, and the relevance theoretic approach. Then translational universals are explained as an offshoot of linguistic universals. Thereafter, the issue of culture in translation is discussed as per the translator becoming lost not only in translation but also in culture. This essay focuses on the translation of poetry, in particular, because the issues faced by translators of poetry are reflective of universal issues in translation, although not so easily recognized. The essay culminates with a section on untranslatability of both linguistic and cultural kinds, as illustrated in particular in Persian-to-English translation.

Linguistic approaches to translation

Examining linguistic approaches to translation, we encounter the work of two groups of scholars: (1) linguists who consider the translation process as a branch of applied linguistics, and (2) translation scholars who consider language as the raw material of translation. Examined next are different linguistic approaches to translation based on the works of these two types of scholars.

1. The Saussurean approach (based on Ferdinand de Saussure of the early twentieth century), proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1995)

According to this approach to translation, there are three levels of language: lexis, syntax, and message. Syntax is rigid and rule-governed, but for lexis and message, there are choices to be made between different forms (vernacular or literary and poetic) and functions (jargons and language uses, e.g., legal, scientific, etc.)

One concept (signified) can trigger one or more words (signifier) in two languages (e.g., eshq-o mohabbat ‘love’). Different concepts can be invoked by their signifiers in two different languages (e.g., sharaf vs. honor). A concept might exist in one language but be absent in another (e.g., gheirat in Persian, no equivalent in English).

A question is raised as the result of this signified/signifier dichotomy, and that is, what is the unit of translation? The answer is certainly not a word, but rather a group of words whose meanings are tightly related (e.g., compound verbs in Persian, like sar-be-sar-gozāshtan ‘to tease’). It can be said translation is on a continuum moving between direct and oblique translation based on the availability of Target Language (TL) equivalents for Source Language (SL) expressions (e.g., direct: be kasi del-dādan ‘to give your heart to someone’; in-between direct and oblique: bā yek tir do neshān zadan ‘to kill two birds with one stone’; oblique: riq-e rahmat rā sar-keshidan ‘to kick the bucket’).

Even harder to translate than oblique expressions are concepts that are absent in the TL. This problem in translation calls for adaptation. Adaptation is when TL does not have any signifier or signified (concept) for a SL signifier/signified (e.g., adam-e tamkin ‘not doing the wifely duties’/‘disobedience to the husband’). In most cases, such expressions are kept in the SL, written in transliterations, and explained in the footnote or endnote.

2. The systemic functional approach (based on Halliday 1961), proposed by Catford (1965)

Since translation is an operation performed on the language, any translation theory is based upon a more general linguistic theory. According to Halliday (1961), language encompasses basic categories of unit, structure, class, and system, applied on different levels of the language, i.e., phonology and graphology, grammar, and lexis. Each of these language levels undergoes a systematic rank-scale of the basic categories. For example, at the grammar level, the unit rank-scale goes from largest to smallest, i.e., from the sentence, to the clauses, to the groups of words, to words, to morphemes. This top-down approach to translation is contrary to the bottom-up approach to language processing, where first-language speakers of a language process the linguistic information incrementally from the bottom to the top. In case of idiomatic expressions where the bottom-up processing leads to errors, the top-down processing involving a reconfiguration is done to ensure the overall meaning (for more, Shabani-Jadidi 2014, 2016).

These levels and units of language are not to be taken in isolation, but rather in context. Therefore, above the sentence level, there is the discourse, text, and message, and below the morpheme, there is phonology and graphology. At the lexis level, there is the interaction between the lexemes and their neighboring collocates, all of which form a lexical company or collocation.

Catford (1965) classifies translation into three types: extent (full vs. partial, where some parts of SL are not translated, e.g., dar zemn ‘and’ or agarche… ammā… ‘although’), level (total vs. restricted, e.g., speaking the TL with an accent), and rank (sentence-sentence, group-group, word-word, or shifted or skewed, e.g., group-word).

3. The generative dynamic approach (based on Chomsky’s (1957) generative grammar and Katz and Fodor’s (1963a, 1963b) componential work on semantics), proposed by Nida (1964)

In addition to the field of linguistics, other fields including anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, philology, and biblical hermeneutics are instrumental in the field of translation. Nida (1964) believes that language is generated on the basis of kernel sentences through various techniques of transformation, i.e. permutation, replacement, addition, and deletion. He believes that the generative approach is important for the translator in the analysis of the Source Text (ST) as well as the generation of the Target Text (TT). To Chomsky (1957), kernel sentences (e.g., Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) or Subject-Verb-Object (SVO)) are language-independent universal constructions, and to Katz and Fodor (1963a, 1963b), semantic components (e.g., food) are language-independent universal components.

To Nida (1964), translation is a dynamic process of transforming a message in SL to an equivalent message in TL, while preserving the total dynamic character of communication. Nida follows Jakobson’s (1960) list of factors involved in a verbal communication: the subject matter, the participants, the linguistic act, the code used, and the message. Nida (1964) goes further to consider the three basic factors in translation to be the nature of the message, the purpose of the author and that of the translator, and the type of audience.

4. The psycholinguistic approach, proposed by Bell (1991)

In the psycholinguistic approach to translation, the translation process is studied through empirical investigations of mental activities involved in translation, such as self-reports during or after the translation (Shabani-Jadidi 2009). Bell (1991) considers translation a branch of applied linguistics and focuses on translation competence encompassing knowledge of the SL and TL, text types, subject domains, inference mechanism for decoding and encoding the message, as well as the linguistic and communicative competence in SL and TL, and their cultures. According to Bell (1991), a translator needs to have a knowledge of psycho-linguistics to model processes involved in encoding and decoding, as well as a knowledge of sociolinguistics to help him select from many options of lexis and message (see Section 1 earlier) available to him.

5. The cognitive linguistic approach, proposed by Halverson (2003, 2007, 2010)

Translation is a cognitive process that includes translation universals and translation shifts. Unlike generative translation proponents, cognitive translation supporters like Halverson believe that both grammar and lexis are meaningful, wherein (both) the same cognitive processes are involved. Cognitive translation scholars also hold that linguistic cognitive processes are integrated with other more general cognitive processes, such as perception, memory, and reasoning. Halverson (2003) stretches Talmy’s (1978, 1988) list of general human cognitive abilities of comparing, categorizing, abstracting, schematizing, focusing attention, and distinguishing figures from grounds (figure being the prominent coherent element, while ground being the rest of what is in the field of vision), to include processing of linguistic events (Halverson 2003: 200).

Interestingly, Halverson (2003) borrows a linguistic concept from the psycholinguistics literature used in bilingualism and applies it to translation. Most studies in bilingualism support the theory of integration of the L1 and L2 mental lexicons (e.g., Cook 1992 among others), based on some observations in experimental studies in psycholinguistics, including (1) frequency of cognate words in one language affecting their processing rate in another language; (2) improvement in translation performance when there are morphemic similarities between L1 and L2; and (3) homographs activating their corresponding meanings in both languages regardless of the stimulus language.

Halverson (2003) states that when a translator reads the ST, both SL and TL lexis are activated for the same concept upon reading the words in a given text. What determines the application of words or option to concepts is the frequency of the previous activations of a given word. This is called the ‘gravitational pull hypothesis’ by Halverson (2010: 4). She further adopts the three levels of language representations developed by Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008): lexeme or the word form, lemma or the lexical information, and concept or the knowledge about the world (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008: 82).

6. The relevance theoretic approach (based on Grice’s (1975) work on conversation), proposed by Gutt (1990)

The relevance theory of translation was influenced heavily by Grice’s maxims of conversation (Grice 1975: 41–58):

• I Maxim of quantity: Say neither too little nor too much.
  1. Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
  2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
• II Maxim of quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true.
  1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
  2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
• III Maxim of relation: Be relevant.
• IV Maxim of manner: Be perspicuous.
  1. Avoid obscurity.
  2. Avoid ambiguity.
  3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
  4. Be orderly.

Gutt (1990) also follows Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) in his assumption that for any communication to be successful, there has to be relevance. In other words, the hearer will interpret a message uttered by a speaker if it is relevant to him, and what is relevant to him is a set of assumptions that comprise what is coined a cognitive environment. According to Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), there are two kinds of language use, either descriptive (explicit, assertive or literal), or interpretive (implicit or nonliteral). Gutt (1990) holds that since the act of translation is based on two texts from two different languages, the ST and the TT can never be quite the same, hence its descriptive nature. Therefore, one can say that translation almost always triggers an interpretive use of the language.

Despite the differences between the two languages, Gutt (1990) believes that they share t...