Contemporary Translation Theories

Edwin Gentzler

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781847695628
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Traduction et interprétation

During the last thirty years, the field of translation has exploded with multiple new theories. Contemporary Translation Theories examines five of new approaches – the translation workshop, the science of translation, translation studies, polysystem theory, and deconstruction – all of which began in the mid -1960s and continue to be influential today.

Chapter 1

Introduction

“Translation Theory” is and is not a new field; though it has existed only since 1983 as a separate entry in the Modern Language Association International Bibliography, it is as old as the tower of Babel. Some literary scholars claim never to have heard of it as a subject in and of itself; others, who may themselves translate, claim to know all that they need to know. Anyone working “monolinguistically” may purport no need for translation theory; yet translation inheres in every language by its relationships to other signifying systems both past and present. Although considered a marginal discipline in academia, translation theory is central to anyone interpreting literature; in an historical period characterized by the proliferation of literary theories, translation theory is becoming increasingly relevant to them all.

What is “contemporary translation theory”? Roman Jakobson breaks the field down into three areas: intralingual translation, a rewording of signs in one language with signs from the same language; interlingual translation, or the interpretation of signs in one language with signs from another language (translation “proper”); and intersemiotic translation, or the transfer (“transmutation”) of the signs in one language to non-verbal sign systems (from language into art or music). All of Jakobson’s fields mutually reinforce each other, and, accepting this definition, one can easily see how translation theory can quickly enmesh the student in the entire intersemiotic network of language and culture, one touching on all disciplines and discourses. I will be concerned mostly with the second aspect of Jakobson’s definition – interlingual translation – but I hope to demonstrate as well that such isolation is impossible, and that even translation “proper” entails multiple linguistic, literary, and cultural aspects.

In recent years, translation theory has exploded with new developments. George Steiner characterized the history of translation theory until Jakobson as a continual rehashing of the same formal (consistent with the form of the original) versus free (using innovative forms to simulate the original’s intent) theoretical distinction. “Modern” translation theory, like current literary theory, begins with structuralism and reflects the proliferation of the age. The following chapters focus on just five different approaches to translation that began in the mid-sixties and continue to be influential today: (1) the North American translation workshop; (2) the “science” of translation; (3) early translation studies; (4) polysystem theory; and (5) deconstruction.

Given the marginal status of translation theory within literary studies, I have assumed that the reader has had little previous exposure to the theories presented here. The investigations themselves differ greatly, a fact reflected in the terminology specific to each field as well as in the ideas themselves. Literary translators, for example, distance themselves from the “jargon” of linguistic approaches; deconstructionists subvert the very “scientific” terminology demanded by semioticians; and the aggressive rhetoric of the deconstructionists alienates scholars from many of the other fields. Of necessity, each of the following chapters conforms in a gradual way to the preferred terminology within the branch of study, for certain ideas are dependent upon the terms used to describe them.

In addition to terminological differences, however, other barriers have impeded the exchange of ideas among scholars of various approaches. Despite the fact that proponents of “new” approaches such as translation studies have been developing their ideas and publishing their data for over two decades, their ideas remain foreign to more traditionally based approaches. Euro-American translators, for example, generally resist the suggestion that institutional manipulation influences translation. Translation studies scholars do not relish the idea that their meticulously collected data may be interpreted by deconstructionists to reveal multiple gaps and literary repression rather than systematic literary evolution. Interdisciplinary translation conferences have been held, but many incompatabilities remain; one of the purposes of this study is to show how such problems in communication and exchange are grounded in the differing theoretical assumptions of each approach.

An attempt has also been made to read symptomatically, to look at the “discourse” of the given text, and to point out what can and cannot be said given the philosophical premises of the scholar. For example, after reviewing Eugene Nida’s religious presuppositions and missionary goals, I find that his adoption of a deep structure/surface structure model derived from “modern” linguistics as a base upon which to found his “science” highly suspect. What he means by “deep” structure – something vague and related to the Word of God – and what Noam Chomsky intended – again, something vague, but related to innate structures of the human brain – are two different concepts. Often the theoretical assumptions are less overt than those of Nida, but still can be discerned by the terminology, rhetoric, and style chosen by a particular scholar. Thus when early translation studies scholars adopt concepts such as “literariness,” “estrangement,” “primary,” and “secondary,” I find the terms themselves reveal assumptions about the hierarchical nature of a culture. While such terms may help the translation scholar articulate the way translations function in a society, they may also serve to inhibit the nature of the investigation.

Given this methodology, original sources have proven more valuable than the secondary literature, most of which comes from “outside” a translation-oriented or even a comparative discipline, or, in other words, from within the particular discipline – be it literary theory, linguistics, or philosophy. Instead, by returning to the “original” source, I can analyze not just what the text explicitly says, but also what it does not say or says only by implication. For example, when Jonas Zdanys, Translation Workshop Director at Yale, says that he avoids “predetermined aesthetic theories” and then later talks about his commitment to “creative solitude,” or, even more revealingly, talks about his hoping to convert a linguistics student to his beliefs, I suggest that he has his own predetermined yet unspoken agenda. Or when I. A. Richards first argues in Practical Criticism that he is looking for a new theory allowing individuals to discover themselves and to discover new methods, and then turns around, dismisses the varied responses of his students as errors, and argues that the goal also is to achieve “perfect understanding” and a unified and correct response, I suggest his argument is less than consistent.

Some of the “precursors”’ work may or may not have been intended for translation. Richards, for example, was clearly teaching students techniques for learning the English canon, yet translation workshops in the United States use New Critical methods to interpret and evaluate translations. Richards’s approach – whether consciously or unconsciously – remains at the heart of classroom. Chomsky did not intend his model to be used for translation, but Nida and Wolfram Wilss – director of a translation institute in Saarbrücken – incorporated, correctly or incorrectly, aspects of Chomsky’s model in their work, and thus the translation scholar must ask those hard questions regarding the suitability of a particular model for translation theory. Others have spoken directly to issues of translation. Late Russian Formalists such as Jurij Tynjanov and Roman Jakobson allowed for translation as well as other cultural phenomena in their theory of art, but infrequently expanded upon specifics. Questions regarding the nature of translation are always underlying the movement of the thought driving Heidegger’s and Derrida’s work, and thus color a subsequent generation of “scholars.” Yet in many ways some of Derrida’s terminology seems dated in light of recent translation theory – such as his reference to the “impossibility” of translation – and the translation studies scholar must point out the progress which has been made.

In general, I am greatly encouraged by developments in the field of “modern” translation theory. The focus in translation investigation is shifting from the abstract to the specific, from the deep underlying hypothetical forms to the surface of texts with all their gaps, errors, ambiguities, multiple referents, and “foreign” disorder. These are being analyzed – and not by standards of equivalent/inequivalent, right/wrong, good/bad, and correct/incorrect. Such standards imply notions of substantialism that limit other possibilities of translation practice, marginalize unorthodox translation, and impinge upon real intercultural exchange. As is true in literary theory in general, a revaluation of our standards is well underway, and within the field of translation theory substantialist notions are already beginning to dissipate (though no doubt they will die slowly). For literary history, translation case studies are already proving a valuable resource showing how cultural ideology directly influences specific literary decisions. For literary theory, this may very well be an exciting time of renewed study of actual texts from a new discipline, which can only help us gain increased insight into not only the nature of translation, but the nature of language and (international) communication as well. Yet, my optimism is tempered by the feeling that all the translation theories discussed in this text reflect certain values and aesthetic assumptions about literature as understood by Western critics. As the translation theories outlined in this book become more and more complex, they seem to gain more and more support from academia, which, in turn, also enhances their power to exclude.

Chapter 2

The North American Translation Workshop

In many academic circles in North America, literary translation is still considered secondary activity, mechanical rather than creative, neither worthy of serious critical attention nor of general interest to the public. Translators, too, frequently lament the fact that there is no market for their work and that what does get published is immediately relegated to the margins of academic investigation. Yet a closer analysis of the developments over the last four decades reveals that in some circles literary translation has been drawing increasing public and academic interest.

In the early sixties, there were no translation workshops at institutions of higher learning in the United States. Translation was a marginal activity at best, not considered by academia as a proper field of study in the university system. In his essay “The State of Translation,” Edmund Keeley, director of translation workshops first at Iowa and later at Princeton, wrote, “In 1963 there was no established and continuing public forum for the purpose: no translation centres, no associations of literary translators as far as I know, no publications devoted primarily to translations, translators, and their continuing problems” (Keeley, 1981:11; qtd. by Weissbort, 1983: 7). In this environment, Paul Engle, Director of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, gave the first heave; arguing that creative writing knows no national boundaries, he expanded the Creative Writing Program to include international writers. In 1964 Engle hired a full-time director for what was the first translation workshop in the United States and began offering academic credit for literary translations. The following year the Ford Foundation conferred a $150,000 grant on the University of Texas at Austin toward the establishment of the National Translation Center. Also in 1965, the first issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, edited by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, was published, providing literary translators a place for their creative work. In 1968, the National Translation Center published the first issue of Delos, a journal devoted to the history as well as the aesthetics of translation. Literary translation had established a place, albeit a small one, in the production of American culture.

The process of growth and acceptance continued in the seventies. Soon translation courses and workshops were being offered at several universities – Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Iowa, Texas, and State University of New York, Binghamton among them. Advanced degrees were conferred upon students for creative, historical, and theoretical work in the field of literary translation. This, in turn, led to the establishment of the professional organization American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in the late seventies as well as the founding of the journal Translation for that organization. By 1977, the United States government lent its authority to this process with the establishment of the National Endowment of the Humanities grants specifically for literary translations. For a while in the late seventies and early eighties, it looked as if the translation workshop would follow the path of creative writing, also considered at one time a non-academic field, and soon be offered at as many schools as had writing workshops.

But despite the increase in translation activity and its gaining of limited institutional support in the sixties and seventies, the process of growth plateaued. Many assumptions about the secondary status of the field remained. Today, while many universities offer advanced degrees in creative writing, comparatively few offer academic credit for literary translation. One reason is surely the monolinguistic nature of the culture. However, such typecasting is also due to socio-economic motives: labeling translations as derivative serves to reinforce an existing status quo, one that places primary emphasis not on the process but on the pursuit and consumption of “original” meaning. The activity of translation represents a process antithetical to certain reigning literary beliefs, hence its relegation to marginal status within educational and economic institutions and its position in this society as part of a counter-cultural movement.

Indeed, during the sixties and early seventies, the practice of literary translation became heavily involved in representations of alternate value systems and views of reality. While not taken seriously by academics, sales of translated literary texts enjoyed unprecedented highs on the open market. Perhaps no one articulated the political urgency and popular attraction of literary translations during this period better than Ted Hughes:

That boom in the popular sales of translated modern poetry was without precedent. Though it reflected only one aspect of the wave of mingled energies that galvanized those years with such extremes, it was fed by almost all of them – Buddhism, the mass craze of Hippie ideology, the revolt of the young, the Pop music of the Beatles and their generation … That historical moment might well be seen as … an unfolding from inwards, a millennial change in the Industrial West’s view of reality. (Hughes, 1983: 9)

For Hughes, the translation boom of the sixties was simply one aspect of a generational movement that articulated itself in a variety of media. While his view of translation as anti-establishment may not have been true of all translation during this period, it did hold true for a large and influential group of contemporary American poets actively translating at the time: Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Galway Kinnell, Elizabeth Bishop, W.D. Snodgrass, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among the most important. These poets not only rebelled against traditional literary institutions, but also against the national and international policies of their government and Western society in general. A decade later, in the Foreword to Writing from the World II (1985), an anthology of literary translations from the late seventies and early eighties, Paul Engle summed up the socially active, politically urgent cause of translation in the contemporary world as follows:

As this world shrinks together like an aging orange and all peoples in all cultures move closer together (however reluctantly and suspiciously) it may be that the crucial sentence for our remaining years on earth may be very simply:

TRANSLATE OR DIE.

The lives of every creature on the earth may one day depend on the instant and accurate translation of one word. (Engle & Engle, 1985: 2)

The translation workshop premise

Despite the surge of popular interest in literary translation and the raising of important questions regarding the theoretical nature of language by North American literary critics during the past several decades, few have paused to make connections between the two practices. One explanation for this lack of critical attention may be attributed to the “atheoretical” premises of those practicing and teaching translation as revealed in the numerous prefaces and introductions to texts containing translations. An essay by Jonas Zdanys of the Yale translation workshop illustrates the problem. In “Teaching Translation: Some Notes Toward a Course Structure” (1987), Zdanys talks about his initial ambivalence about teaching literary translation because he feels this creative process cannot be taught. He then overcomes his reluctance and agrees to do so, hoping to attract literature students interested in “exploring the theoretical and the practical aspects of poetic translation” (Zdanys, 1987: 10). Zdanys proceeds to review the course, the books taught, the structure of the seminar, and its successes, emphasizing especially the enjoyment of the poems and the students’ translations. The article concludes with Zdanys changing his mind about the inappropriateness of teaching translation, arguing instead that the art of translation not only can be taught, but also can make the student more aware of aspects of poetry, language, aesthetics, and interpretation.

Zdynas’s notes seem characteristic of prevailing assumptions regarding the teaching of translation in the United States. He shares the assumption that creative writing cannot be taught, that creative talent is something one is born with. Such a belief plagued creative writing for years before it was accepted as an university discipline. Secondly, Zdanys reveals a prejudice for teaching students how to enjoy the original poem, one that is in keeping with New Critical tenets. His conclusion is not altogether surprising – although he argues against conventional wisdom that translation can be taught at the university, he does it not for reasons Ted Hughes suggested – that it may lead to a change in the way the West views reality – but because it reinforces a fairly conservative humanistic ideology. This is nowhere better revealed than in a contradiction within the essay regarding the theoretical basis of the course. On the one hand, Zdynas hopes the course will attract students interested in theoretical questions; on the other hand, he argues that he himself opposes the restraints of “predetermined aesthetic theories.” In addition, without telling us why, Zdanys says that “this essay unfortunately cannot consider” the contribution of deconstruction to the field, although, ironically, Yale itself houses numerous such critics who are in fact part of the same department (a special interdepartmental program) in which the course was offered. Despite claims to the contrary, Zdanys reveals the aesthetic predispositions that underlie his approach:

Although I am not yet ready to surrender my commitment to creative solitude, I do believe that discussions of the various theoretical essays, the careful readings of original poems, first drafts, and finished translations, and the consideration of the various aspects of translation made workshop participants more fully aware of the dynamic process that is literature. By the end of the course, students certainly had a richer understanding of literary complexity. (Zdanys, 1987: 11)

Zdanys clearly finds translation a subjective activity, subsuming translation under the larger goal of interpreting literature. His argument that the study of translation can lead to a qualitative “richer” understanding reveals the humanistic agenda. His goal is more clearly disclosed in a section of the same essay in which he talks about ...