Basic Notions of Translation Theory E-Book

Bruno Osimo

• Herausgeber: Bruno Osimo
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

This book reflects my experience as a translation scholar, and a translation teacher, and a translator from Russian. The knowledge of the Russian language allowed me to read (and translate into Italian) crucial authors like Popovič, Lyudskanov, Torop, Revzin and Rozentsveyg. Since not many Western translation scholars know them, we get as a consequence a translation theory which is split between West and East according to a sort of 'cultural Berlin wall'.
In this book I tried to synthesize both Western and Eastern point of views about the translation process.
The terms that are used belong to both worlds.
For an explanation of a more professional character, you can use my other book, "Handbook of Translation Studies", available both in paper and in ebook form.
I have been teaching translation at the Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori «Altiero Spinelli» in Milan, Italy, for 30 years, and translation theory for 20 years. My students made an important contribution to this book, through their feedback during lectures and exams. Year after year I had the opportunity to edit my text accordingly.
For an explanation of the terms used in this book, I refer students to my Dictionary of Translation Studies.
Bruno Osimo
Milano, 7 July 2019

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Indice dei contenuti

Bruno Osimo

Introduction

1 Communicating always means translating

1.1 What is translation?

1.2 Theoretical backup

1.3 Translating everything

1.4 Intralingual translation

1.5 Intersemiotic translation

1.6 Intertextual translation

1.7 Cultural translation

1.8 Metatextual translation

​1.9 Mental translation

1.10 Deverbalizing translation

1.11 Dream and psychotherapy as multiple intersemiotic translation processes

2 What is the sense of meaning?

2.1 Deduction

2.2 Induction

2.3 Abduction

2.4 Semiosis

2.5 Hermeneutic circle

2.6 Interlingual translation and the process of interpreting meaning

2.7 Textual cooperation

3 Equivalents and synonyms

​3.1 Denotation and connotation

3.2 Connotation circle

3.3. Open and closed texts

3.4 Semantic spectrum and interlingual translation

3.5 Semantic field: cultural differences

3.6 Synonyms

​4 Translatability and translationality

4.1 Culture and chronotope

4.2 The dominant

4.3 Dominant and interlingual translation

4.4 Translation-oriented analysis

4.5 Recoding and transposition

4.6 Communication loss

4.7 Communication loss in interlingual communication

4.8 Intercultural translatability: loss and redundancy

4.9 High Translationality (adequacy)

4.10 Low Translationality (acceptability)

5 Prototext-metatext comparative analysis

5.1 Proofreading and self-criticism

6 From theory to practice

6.1 Translating everything: textual and metatextual translation

6.2 Reading and writing as translation processes

6.3 Implicit and explicit intertext

6.4 Abductive reading

6.5 Reading and interpreting

6.6 Interlingual translation of a word

6.7 Equivalence and synonyms in translation

6.8 Model readers and dominants

6.9 Recoding and transposition

6.10 Communication loss

6.11 Loss and redundancy: factors of translatability

6.12 High and low translationality (adequacy and acceptability)

Glossary

References

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Bruno Osimo

Basic Notions of Translation Theory

Semiotics - linguistics - psychology

for B. A. students

Copyright © Bruno Osimo 2020

Bruno Osimo is an author translator who publishes himself

ISBN 9788898467099 per l’edizione elettronica

ISBN 9788831462860 per l’edizione hardcover

To contact the author translator publisher: [email protected]

Introduction

This book reflects my experience as a translation scholar, and a translation teacher, and a translator from Russian. The knowledge of the Russian language allowed me to read (and translate into Italian) crucial authors like Popovič, Lyudskanov, Torop, Revzin and Rozentsveyg. Since not many Western translation scholars know them, we get as a consequence a translation theory which is split between West and East according to a sort of 'cultural Berlin wall'.

In this book I tried to synthesize both Western and Eastern points of view about the translation process.

The terms that are used belong to both worlds.

For an explanation of a more professional character, you can use my other book, “Handbook of Translation Studies”, available both in paper and in ebook form.

I have been teaching translation at the Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori «Altiero Spinelli» in Milan, Italy, for 30 years, and translation theory for 20 years. My students made an important contribution to this book, through their feedback during lectures and exams. Year after year I had the opportunity to edit my text accordingly.

For an explanation of the terms used in this book, I refer students to my Dictionary of Translation Studies.

Bruno Osimo

Milano, 7 July 2019

P.S. Since I hate the hypocrisy of political correctness, to make up for male dominance I have simply used the feminine for all examples.

1 Communicating always means translating

In the past, according to the Western tradition translation studies have often been considered as part of literary studies. Since 1959, with Jakobson's famous article “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, a new era for translation has started. From then on, researchers realized that translation theory belonged to communication studies. Not only that, but it was also clear that any kind of communication implies a translation process.

1.1 What is translation?

When speaking about translation, people usually think of the transposition of a text from a language (a natural code) to another, different from the one in which the text was originally conceived and written. As a matter of fact, that is just a peculiar subprocess within the boundless universe of translation. One of the first steps towards a more scientific and complete approach to translation as it is generally thought of consists in acknowledging all its potential aspects.

The translation process is often described with metaphors relating to space and movement. In some languages the terms referring to “source text” and “target text” are undoubtedly linked to the notion of “space”. In Italian, for instance, “testo di partenza” and “testo d’arrivo” (word for word, “starting text” and “arrival text”) refer to the semantic field of running races. The same is true, for example, for the French “texte de départ” and “texte d’arrivée”.

To some extent, it seems that translation is a sort of transportation of something (apparently words) from one place to another. And this might be due to the fact that even the Latin word from which “translation” derives, “translatus”, comes from the verb trans-fero meaning “to bring on the opposite side of”. But even though it is true that translation has a spatial dimension, it also has a temporal and cultural one, all three made up of a number of other interrelated elements.

To avoid all the words that are too explicitly linked to the semantic field of departures and arrivals, or that remind of military targets (“target text”) or that imply the misleading idea that there were no previous influences on the first text (“source text”), one may call “original” the text from which the translation process stems, and “translation” the text resulting from it. However, the word “translation” does not allow to make a distinction between the process and the outcome.

That is why the ideal terms would be “prototext” (i.e. “first text”, the original text) and “metatext” (i.e. the subsequent text, deriving from the first one). Such terms were coined by the Slovak semiotician Anton Popovič (1933-1984), who gave a substantial boost to translation studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, his ideas spread to the Western countries – after a short tentative connection through James H. Holmes – only after he had prematurely died.

It is also necessary to define the notion of “text”. The first definition that comes to mind when speaking of a text is a consistent group of written words with a unified structure that makes it a whole. But according to semiotics, the notion of “text” needs to be extended to nonverbal languages, such as music, figurative arts, cinema, advertisement, natural environment, street signals, fashion, and so on.

The consequences of such a widening of horizons are clear: if by “translation” we mean any process transforming a prototext into a metatext, with the text belonging to any verbal or nonverbal language or code (and by the way, prototext and metatext can even belong in the same code!), then the notion of “translation process” embraces a very wide range of processes, related to all possible transformations of texts.

That is why the translation process includes apparently different phenomena, such as film translation (often called “movie version”, a definition which does not stress its belonging to the sphere of translation) and intertextual translation (quotations, references, allusions, and so on). Already in 1683 the French churchman and scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet wrote in his De interpretatione:

the term “translation” also refers to the clarification of abstruse doctrines, to the interpretation of enigmas and dreams, to the interpretation of oracles, to the solution of complex issues, and, finally, to the spreading of all that is unknown. (Huet 1683:18)

Communication act

Prototext code

Text form

Transfer type

Metatext code

interlingual translation

naturale code A

verbal

interlingual

natural code B

paraphrase

natural code A

verbal

intralingual

natural code A

quote, reference, allusion

natural code

intertextual

interlingual or intralingual

natural code

filmization

natural code

deverbalizing

intersemiotic

film text

encyclopedic entry

natural code

metatextual

interlingual or intralingual

natural code

reading

natural code

intersemiotic

deverbalizing

mental text

writing

mental text

intersemiotic

verbalizing

natural code

talking to a psychotherapist

mental text

intersemiotic

verbalizing

natural code

psychotherapist’s feedback

intersemioticdeverbalizingmental text

Communication act

In the previous table, each row contains a communicative act which belongs to the translation process. Let us see some examples of translation processes. The first row shows the standard interlingual translation process. The prototext is expressed in a natural code (i.e. in a language – English for instance – that differs from artificial codes such as, say, mathematics), and its transformation into a metatext is verbal (both metatext and prototext are verbal texts) and interlingual (the prototext language is different from the metatext language).

The second row shows paraphrase: the process is the same as interlingual translation, but paraphrase usually occurs within the same language, as the content of the message is simply re-expressed in other words.

Quotations may take on the form of references or allusions especially if their ‘delimiters’ (such as inverted commas) are missing: sometimes it is a very hard task for the reader to recognize them as alien texts which were originally part of another, far different text. Even quotations are forms of translation because a word or a sentence uttered by someone in a given context and co-text (→ section 3.1 ) is re-uttered in a new context and co-text. In this way, the original utterance is now part of a new text: it is ‘translated’. The Internet and all the other telecommunication media are exponentially increasing intertextuality in our everyday communication practice. It is extremely easy for people with access to the Internet to come into contact with the other’s words, and the most modern communicative acts are consequently intertexts, i.e. intertextual translations.

Among the different types of intersemiotic translation there are also reading and writing, all the stages of dream elaboration as both intra- and interpersonal phenomena (i.e. reporting the dream, transcribing it), and psychotherapy, consisting both in the repeated translation of affects, feelings, and drives into words, and in the decoding and recoding of such words, which finally act as a feedback for the patient.

With a scientific explanation for the translation process as its goal, contemporary translation science does not only deal with interlingual translation. The present course on the basic notions of translation theory does not aim at teaching how to translate – the translation practice represents a different asset in the education of translators –, but at sh ed ding light on an often taken for granted and unconsciously practiced activity, as well as at paving the way for the interlingual translation practice.

1.2 Theoretical backup

The previously mentioned terms, notions and ideas are supported by some of the theories developed since the 1950s by linguists, semioticians, translators and scholars of several other disciplines, which shows how translation is an interdisciplinary field. Here is a short summary of the most influential – and still valid – theories that marked the history of the translation science. For more detailed information, any book on the history of translation, including my book History of Translation, will give you more insight.

From 1959 to the 1990s translation science shifted from lexical linguistics to semiotics, gaining a new central position in the international debate after years of isolation. Up until the 1970s, the theory of translation was seen as a subfield of linguistics: translation was condescendingly regarded as an abstract phenomenon and therefore it was not studied from the point of view of translators, but from that of scientists of the language. According to the dominant idea of the time, which focused mainly on the lexical aspects of this process, translation was considered as the practice of establishing text ‘equivalents’ and ‘transporting’ them from a starting point to a given destination, i.e. from the text A to the text B. And the idea of translation as a displacement was encouraged and strengthened further by the fact that scholars used terms such as “source language” (also “departure language”) and “target language” (or even “arrival language”).

One of the most well-known representatives of the lexical approach to translation was the English researcher J. C. Catford, who defined “translation” as

the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent textual material in another language (TL)(Catford 1965:20).

As we notice from Catford’s definition, the cultural, extralingual aspects of translation are totally ignored; the possibility of finding equivalent material in the two languages involved is taken for granted; and the metaphor linking translation to a merely geographic movement is once again evoked by the terms “source and target language”. Approaching the problem by reducing the translation process to a substitution of equivalents was typical of the Soviet researchers as well. In 1953 Andrej Venediktovič Fëdorov stated that:

the total impossibility of finding any correspondence to the word of the original, the absence of equivalence in its purest form, is relatively seldom encountered (Fëdorov 1953:135).

In his isomorphic view of language, translation is a mere ‘substitution’ of ‘material’: a given unit of the language A corresponds to a well-defined unit – or group of units – in the language B, as if the text to be translated were a building made up of white Lego bricks, and the translated text an identical building made up of yellow bricks: the color changes, but not the shape. Nowadays we are perfectly aware that only artificial languages (like mathematics and road signals) are isomorphic, while all the languages (natural codes) that develop spontaneously within the different (originally oral) cultures are culture-specific and therefore anisomorphic (i.e. the Lego bricks are different in shape as well).

In the very long time dominated by the so-called “theory of translation”, most translators thought it wise to ignore the theoretical aspects of such a discipline and to focus only on its practice. The “theory of translation” did not actually aim at practical applications and, therefore, the gap between scholars of translation and translators became wider and wider. As a reaction, professional translators were inclined to embrace the Romantic views of translation, according to which translators should be inspired by common sense and experience. To a certain extent, this approach is still valid today: senior translators tend to reject any general methodological speculation. However, many ‘anti-theories’ have also been formulated, as Peter Newmark’s, for example:

Translation theory's main concern is to determine appropriate translation methods for the widest possible range of text-categories. Further, it provides a framework of principles, restricted rules and hints for translating texts and criticising translations, a background for problem-solving. [...] Lastly [it] attempts to give some insight into the relation between thought, meaning and language. [...] The translator's first task is to understand the text [...] so it is the business of translation theory to suggest some criteria and priorities for this analysis (Newmark 1981:19-20).

As a reaction to the lexical approach, scholars distanced themselves from theories and focused their attention entirely on method. Translation methods were developed leaving aside text types and the existence of a (very unlikely) universal translation method was also postulated.

In his pivotal 1959 essay On linguistic aspects of translation, the Russian-born scholar Roman Jakobson enunciated a semiotic theory of translation, identifying three types of translation processes:

not only does translation mean interlingual transfer (as in the past)

but also

intralingual transfer

and

intersemiotic transmutation (i.e. the interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs belonging to nonverbal sign systems).

But the time was not yet ripe and it was only in the 1990s that the importance of Jakobson’s semiotic theory was fully understood. His contemporaries must have thought it useless to further complicate an already complex field – as translation was at the time – even because including new processes in the notion of “translation”, such as intralingual paraphrases and the adaptation of films into novels, would have apparently caused major problems without giving any help. But Jakobson’s 1959 essay was the embryo of interesting future developments.

In his 1975 book, the Slovack scholar Anton Popovič extends Jakobson’s wide-ranging theories further: he calls “translation process” any transfer producing a metatext from a prototext, a notion that implies not only intralingual and intersemiotic translation but also other processes. With this approach it is easy to define the different phases of the translation process, independently of the codes and of the types of transfer involved:

analysis of the prototext and formulation of the most suitable translation strategy;

transposition of contents;

passage from the code of the prototext to the code of the metatext;

metatextual transposition of translation losses;

translation criticism.

The first researcher to use the expression “total translation”, yet with a far different meaning, was Firth, followed by Catford, but Torop (1995) gave the adjective “total” two new, specific meanings: Mathematical theory of communication

1) translation is “total” because, thanks to a focused strategy, communication loss is conveyed in a metatextual (i.e. paratextual) form which accompanies the main text. Any translation process implies a loss and interlingual translations are no different; the mathematical model of communication by Shannon and Weaver implies the existenceof semiotic “noise” in a message exchange: in telephone communication, for example, this noise is represented by line disturbances and cross-talks. As for translation, things are more complex than that, because translation processes involve the needto translate cultures and worldviews;

2) translation is “total” because it is not only interlingual, intersemiotic, and intralingual (according to Jakobson’s theories), but also metatextual, intertextual, intratextual, and deverbalizing.

Torop uses a new terminology referring to the two texts involved in the process. They are namely labeled “prototext” and “metatext”, terms borrowed from Popovič’s famous book about translation science, Problemy hudožestvennogo perevoda. In this way the spatial metaphor is at last abandoned once and, hopefully, for all.

Since there is no longer a distinction between proper and “improper” translation processes, it is extremely important to classify them according to the different relations existing between prototext and metatext, and through categories which are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The name of the discipline changed as well: the linguistic discipline studying translation was called “theory of translation”, whereas the semiotic discipline about translation was named differently according to the countries where it developed:

in Russia perevodovedenie;

in France traductologie(whence the Italian traduttologiaand the Spanish traductología);

in English-speaking countries Translation Studies(also exported in other languages without being translated; its inventor was the Dutch-American James S Holmes);

in GermanyÜbersetzungswissenschaft (whence the Italian scienza della traduzione and the Spanish ciencia de la traducción).

The fact that such a discipline has been given a name of its own is highly symbolic: it can be seen as the proof of its emancipation from linguistics, marking the beginning of its existence as an autonomous discipline (or interdiscipline) mainly focused on the translation process.