'Translation' is the
interpretation of the
meaning of a text in one
language (the "
source text") and the production, in another language, of an
equivalent text (the "target text," or "translation") that communicates the same
message.
Translation must take into account a number of constraints, including , the rules of
grammar of the two languages, their writing
conventions, and their
idioms.
Traditionally translation has been a
human activity, though attempts have been made to
computerize or otherwise
automate the translation of
natural-language texts (
machine translation) or to use computers as an ''aid'' to translation (
computer-assisted translation).
Perhaps the most common
misconception about translation is that there exists a simple "
word-for-word" correspondence between any two
languages, and that translation is therefore a straightforward
mechanical process. On the contrary, every language is a
historically-evolved self-contained
system, and historically-determined differences between languages may dictate differences of expression.
Translation is fraught with
uncertainties as well as the potential for inadvertent "
spilling over" of
idioms and
usages from one language into the other, producing
linguistic hybrids, for example, "
Franglais" (
French-
English), "
Spanglish" (
Spanish-
English), "
Poglish" (
Polish-
English) and "
Portunhol" (
Portuguese-
Spanish).
The term
Etymologically, "translation" is a "carrying across" or "bringing across." The
Latin "''translatio''" derives from the
perfect passive participle, "''translatus''," of "''transferre''" ("to transfer" — from "''trans''," "across" + "''ferre''," "to carry" or "to bring"). The modern
Romance,
Germanic and
Slavic European languages have generally formed their own
equivalent terms for this concept after the Latin model — after "''transferre''" or after the kindred "''traducere''" ("to bring across" or "to lead across").
[1]
Additionally, the
Greek term for "translation," "''metaphrasis''" ("a speaking across"), has supplied
English with "" — a "
literal translation," or "word-for-word" translation — as contrasted with "
paraphrase" ("a saying in other words," from the Greek "''paraphrasis''").
[2]
Misconceptions
Newcomers to translation sometimes proceed as if it were an
exact science — as if consistent one-to-one
correlations existed between words and phrases in different languages, rendering translations fixed and identically-reproducible, much as in
cryptography. Such
novices may assume that all that is needed to translate a text is to "
encode" and "
decode" between languages, using a
translation dictionary as the "
codebook."
[3]
On the contrary, such a fixed relationship would only exist, were a new language
synthesized and at the same time synchronized with a pre-existing language in such a way that each word would forever carry exactly the same scope and shades of meaning, with careful attention given to the preservation of
etymological roots and
lexical "
ecological niches," assuming that these were known with certainty.
[4]
If the new language were subsequently to take on a life apart from such cryptographic use, each word would spontaneously begin to assume new shades of meaning and cast off previous
associations, thereby vitiating any such artificial synchronization. Henceforth translation would require the disciplines described in this article.
There has been debate as to whether translation is an
art or a
craft. Literary translators, such as
Gregory Rabassa in ''If This Be Treason'', argue that translation is an
art, though one that is teachable. Other translators, mostly those who work on technical, business or legal documents, regard their ''métier'' as a
craft — one that can not only be taught, but that is subject to
linguistic analysis and that benefits from
academic study.
Whether translation is an art or craft may depend on the nature of the text being translated. A relatively simple document, e.g. a product
brochure, may sometimes be translated quickly, using techniques familiar to advanced language-students. By contrast, a newspaper editorial, a political speech, or a book on almost any subject will ordinarily require not only the
craft of good language skills and research technique, but a substantial
knowledge of the pertinent subject matter, a
cultural sensitivity, and a mastery of the
art of good writing.
Translation has, indeed, served as a
writing school for many recognized
writers. And translators, including the early
modern European translators of the ''
Bible'', helped shape the very
languages they translated into. Along with
ideas, they imported into their languages,
calques of
grammatical structures and of
vocabulary from the
source languages.
Interpreting
Main articles: Interpreting
Interpreting, or "interpretation," is the intellectual activity that consists of facilitating
oral or
sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two or among three or more speakers who are not speaking, or signing, the same language.
The words "interpreting" and "interpretation" both can be used to refer to this activity; the word "interpreting" is commonly used in the profession and in the translation-studies field in avoiding the other meanings of the word "interpretation."
Fidelity vs. transparency
Fidelity (otherwise "faithfulness") and
transparency are two often-competing qualities that have been regarded for millennia as ideals for translation, particularly
literary translation. A critic of the 17th-century French translator Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt coined the phrase, "''les belles infidèles''," to suggest that translations, like women, could be ''either'' faithful ''or'' beautiful, but not both at the same time.
Fidelity is the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the
source text, without adding to or subtracting from it, and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning.
Transparency is the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.
A translation meeting the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation meeting the second criterion — an "
idiomatic translation." The two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth.
The criteria for judging the
transparency of a translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds wrong," and in the extreme case of
word-for-word translations generated by many
machine-translation systems, often results in patent nonsense with only a
humorous value (see "
round-trip translation").
Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously ''strive'' to produce a literal translation.
Literary translators and translators of
religious or
historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source. In order to do this, they deliberately stretch the boundaries of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Likewise, a literary translator may wish to adopt words or expressions from the
source language in order to provide "local color" in the translation.
The concepts of fidelity and transparency are viewed differently in some recent translation theories. In some quarters, the idea is gaining momentum that acceptable translations can be as creative and original as their
source texts.
In recent decades, the most prominent advocates of non-transparent translation modes have included the French translation scholar
Antoine Berman, who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations (''L'épreuve de l'étranger'', 1984), and the American theorist
Lawrence Venuti, who has called upon translators to apply "foreignizing" translation strategies instead of domesticating ones (see, for example, his "Call to Action" in ''The Translator's Invisibility'', 1994).
Many non-transparent-translation theories draw on concepts of
German Romanticism, the most obvious influence on latter-day theories of "foreignization" being the German theologian and philosopher
Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture "On the Different Methods of Translation" (1813) he distinguished between translation methods that move "the writer toward [the reader]," i.e.,
transparency, and those that move the "reader toward [the author]," i.e., an extreme
fidelity to the foreignness of the
source text. Schleiermacher clearly favored the latter approach. His preference was motivated, however, not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign, as by a nationalist desire to oppose France's cultural domination and to promote
German literature.
For the most part, the concepts of "fidelity" and "transparency" remain strong in Western traditions. They are, however, not as prevalent in some non-Western ones. Thus the
Indian epic, the ''
Ramayana'', has numerous versions in the many
Indian languages, and the stories are different in each. If one considers the words used for translating into the Indian languages, whether those be
Aryan or
Dravidian languages, he is struck by the freedom that is granted to the translators. This may relate to a devotion to
prophetic passages that strike a deep religious chord, or to a vocation to instruct
unbelievers. Similar examples are to be found in
medieval Christian literature, which adjusted the text to the customs and values of the audience.
Equivalence
Main articles: Dynamic and formal equivalence
The question of
fidelity vs.
transparency has also been formulated in terms of, respectively, "''formal'' equivalence" and "''dynamic'' equivalence."
"Dynamic equivalence" (or "''functional'' equivalence") conveys the essential ''
thought'' expressed in a source text — if necessary, at the expense of
literality, original
sememe and
word order, the source text's active vs. passive
voice, etc.
By contrast, "formal equivalence" (sought via
"literal" translation) attempts to render the text "
literally," or "word for word" (the latter expression being itself a word-for-word rendering of the
classical Latin "''verbum pro verbo''") — if necessary, at the expense of features natural to the
target language.
There is, however, ''no sharp boundary'' between dynamic and formal equivalence. On the contrary, they represent a spectrum of translation approaches. Each is used at various times and in various contexts by the same translator, and at various points within the same text — sometimes simultaneously.
Competent translation, indeed, entails the judicious ''blending'' of dynamic ''and'' formal
equivalents. And, in some cases, a translation may be both dynamically ''and'' formally equivalent to the original text.
Literary translation
If the translation of non-literary works is regarded as a skill, the translation of
literary works (
novels,
short stories,
plays,
poems, etc.) is much more of an art. In
multilingual countries such as
Canada, translation is often considered a literary pursuit in its own right. Figures such as
Sheila Fischman,
Robert Dickson and
Linda Gaboriau are notable in
Canadian literature ''specifically'' as translators, and the
Governor General's Awards present prizes for the year's best English-to-French and French-to-English literary translations.
Writers such as
Vladimir Nabokov,
Jorge Luis Borges and
Vasily Zhukovsky have also made a name for themselves as literary translators.
Poetry is considered by many the most difficult
genre to translate, given the difficulty in rendering both the form and the content in the target language. In his influential 1959 paper "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," the
Russian-born
linguist and
semiotician Roman Jakobson went so far as to declare that "poetry by definition [was] untranslatable." In 1974 the American poet
James Merrill wrote a poem, "
Lost in Translation," which in part explores this. The question was also considered in
Douglas Hofstadter's 1997 book, ''
Le Ton beau de Marot''.
Translation of sung texts — sometimes called "singing translation" — is closely linked to translation of poetry because most
vocal music, at least in the Western tradition, is set to
verse, especially verse in regular patterns with
rhyme. (Since the late 19th century, musical setting of
prose and
free verse has also been practiced in some
art music, though
popular music tends to remain conservative in its retention of
stanzaic forms with or without
refrains.) A rudimentary example of translating poetry for singing is church
hymns, such as the German
chorales translated into English by
Catherine Winkworth.
Translation of sung texts is generally much more restrictive than translation of poetry, because in the former there is little or no freedom to choose between a versified translation and a translation that dispenses with verse structure. One might modify or omit rhyme in a singing translation, but the assignment of syllables to specific notes in the original musical setting places great challenges on the translator. There is the option in prose, less so in verse, of adding or deleting a syllable here and there by subdividing or combining notes, respectively, but even with prose the process is nevertheless almost like strict verse translation because of the need to stick as closely as possible to the original prosody.
Other considerations in writing a singing translation include repetition of words and phrases, the placement of rests and/or punctuation, the quality of vowels sung on high notes, and rhythmic features of the vocal line that may be more natural to the original language than to the target language.
Whereas the singing of translated texts has been common for centuries, it is less necessary when a written translation is provided in some form to the listener, for instance, as an insert in a concert program or as projected titles in a performance hall or visual medium.
History
Discussions — in modern times, copious — of the theory and practice of translation reach back into
antiquity and show remarkable . The distinction that had been drawn by the
ancient Greeks between "" ("literal" translation) and "
paraphrase" would be adopted by the English
poet and
translator John Dryden (1631-1700), who represented translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in the target language, "counterparts," or
equivalents, for the expressions used in the source language:
"When [words] appear... literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since... what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words: 'tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense."
[1]
Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of "imitation," i.e. of adapted translation: "When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments..."
This general formulation of the central concept of translation —
equivalence — is probably as adequate as any that has been proposed ever since
Cicero and
Horace, in first-century-BCE
Rome, famously and literally cautioned against translating "word for word" ("''verbum pro verbo''").
[6]
Despite occasional theoretical diversities, the actual ''practice'' of translators has hardly changed since
antiquity. Except for some extreme in the early
Christian period and the
Middle Ages, and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the
18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking
equivalents — "literal" where possible,
paraphrastic where necessary — for the original
meaning and other crucial "values" (e.g., style,
verse form, concordance with
musical accompaniment or, in
films, with speech
articulatory movements) as determined from context.
In general, translators have sought, where possible, maximally to preserve the context itself by reproducing the original order of
sememes, and hence
word order — when necessary, reinterpreting the actual
grammatical structure. The grammatical differences between fixed-word-order
languages (e.g.,
English,
French,
German) and free-word-order languages (e.g.,
Greek,
Latin,
Polish,
Russian) have been no impediment in this regard.
When a target language has lacked
terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed them, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of "''
calques''" (French for "
tracings") between languages, and to their importation from Greek, Latin,
Hebrew,
Arabic and other languages, there are few
concepts that are "
untranslatable" among the modern European languages.
[6]
In general, the greater the contact and exchange that has existed between two languages, or between both and a third one, the greater is the ratio of to
paraphrase that may be used in translating between them. However, due to shifts in "
ecological niches" of words, a common
etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. The
English "actual," for example, should not be confused with the
cognate French "''actuel''" (meaning "present," "current") or the
Polish "''aktualny''" ("present," "current").
[8]
The translator's role as a
bridge for "carrying across" values between
cultures has been discussed at least since
Terence, Roman adapter of Greek comedies, in the second century BCE. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive and mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an
artist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics as early as
Cicero.
Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a
musician or
actor goes back at least to
Samuel Johnson's remark about
Alexander Pope playing
Homer on a
flageolet, while Homer himself used a
bassoon.
[8]
If translation be an art, it is no easy one. In the
13th century,
Roger Bacon wrote that if a translation is to be true, the translator must know both
languages, as well as the
science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether.
[10]
The first
European to assume that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language may have been
Martin Luther, translator of the ''
Bible'' into
German. Certainly since
Johann Gottfried Herder, in the
18th century, it has been axiomatic that one works only toward his own language.
Further compounding all these demands upon the translator is the fact that not even the most complete
dictionary or
thesaurus can ever be a fully adequate guide in translation.
Alexander Tytler, in his ''Essay on the Principles of Translation'' (1790), emphasized that assiduous
reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including
listening to the
spoken language, had earlier been made in 1783 by
Onufry Andrzej Kopczyński, member of
Poland's Society for Elementary Books, who was called "the last Latin poet."
[11]
The special role of the translator in society was well described in an essay, published posthumously in 1803, by
Ignacy Krasicki — Poland's
La Fontaine,
Primate of Poland, poet, encyclopedist, author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French and Greek:
"[T]ranslation... is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor and portion of common minds; [it] should be [practiced] by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than in their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they render to their country."
[12]
Religious texts
Translation of religious works has played an important role in history. Buddhist monks who translated the
Indian
sutras into
Chinese often skewed their translations to better reflect
China's very different
culture, emphasizing notions such as
filial piety.
A famous mistranslation of the ''
Bible'' is the rendering of the
Hebrew word "''keren''," which has several meanings, as "horn" in a context where it actually means "beam of light." As a result, artists have for centuries depicted
Moses the Lawgiver with horns growing out of his forehead. An example is
Michelangelo's famous sculpture.
Christian anti-Semites used such depictions to spread hatred of the
Jews, claiming that they were
devils with horns.
One of the first recorded instances of translation in the West was the rendering of the
Old Testament into
Greek in the third century B.C.E. The resulting translation is known as the ''
Septuagint'', a name that alludes to the "seventy" translators (seventy-two in some versions) who were commissioned to translate the ''
Bible'' on the island of
Paphos. Each translator worked in solitary confinement in a separate cell, and legend has it that all seventy versions were identical. The ''Septuagint'' became the
source text for later translations into many languages, including
Latin,
Coptic,
Armenian and
Georgian.
Saint Jerome, the
patron saint of translation, is still considered one of the greatest translators in history for rendering the ''
Bible'' into
Latin. The
Roman Catholic Church used his translation (known as the
Vulgate) for centuries, but even this translation at first stirred much controversy.
The period preceding and contemporary with the
Protestant Reformation saw the translation of the ''
Bible'' into local European languages, a development that greatly affected
Christianity's split into
Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism, due to disparities between Catholic and Protestant versions of crucial words and passages.
Martin Luther's ''
Bible'' in
German,
Jakub Wujek's in
Polish, and the ''
King James Bible'' in
English had lasting effects on the religions, cultures and languages of those countries.
Machine translation
Main articles: Machine translation
Machine translation (MT) is a procedure whereby, in principle, a computer program, once activated, analyses a
source text and produces a target text, without further human intervention.
In reality, however, machine translation typically ''does'' involve human intervention, in the form of 'pre-editing' and 'post-editing'. An exception to that rule might be, e.g., the translation of technical specifications (strings of
technical terms and adjectives), using a
dictionary-based machine-translation system.
To date, machine translation — a major goal of
natural-language processing — has met with limited success.
Machine translation has been brought to a large public by tools available on the Internet, such as
AltaVista's
Babel Fish, and by low-cost programs such as
Babylon, and freeware such as
Lingoes and
StarDict. These tools produce a "gisting translation" — a rough translation that "gives the gist" of the source text.
With proper
terminology work, with preparation of the source text for machine translation (pre-editing), and with re-working of the machine translation by a professional human translator (post-editing), commercial machine-translation tools can produce useful results, especially if the machine translation system is integrated with a
translation memory or
globalization management system.
[13]
In regard to texts (e.g.,
weather reports) with limited ranges of
vocabulary and simple
sentence structure, machine translation can deliver results that do not require much human intervention to be useful. Also, the use of a
controlled language, combined with a machine-translation tool, will typically generate largely comprehensible translations, as demonstrated at
Uwe Muegge's
website.
Engineer and
futurist Raymond Kurzweil has predicted that, by 2012, machine translation will be powerful enough to dominate the field of translation. Likewise, in 2004,
MIT's ''
Technology Review'' listed universal translation and
interpretation as likely to become available "within a decade." Such claims have, however, been made since the first serious forays into
machine translation, in the
1950s.
Relying on machine translation exclusively ignores the fact that communication in
human language is -embedded and that it takes a person to comprehend the context of the original text with a reasonable degree of probability. It is certainly true that even purely human-generated translations are prone to error. Therefore, to ensure that a machine-generated translation will be useful to a human being and that publishable-quality translation is achieved, such translations must be reviewed and edited by a human.
Uwe Muegge, however, has asserted that in certain applications, e.g. product descriptions written in a
controlled language, a
dictionary-based machine translation system has been demonstrated in a production environment to produce perfect translation results that do not require any human intervention.
[14]
Computer-assisted translation
Main articles: Computer-assisted translation
Computer-assisted translation (CAT), also called computer-''aided'' translation, is a form of translation wherein a human translator creates a target text with the assistance of a computer program. In computer-assisted translation, the 'machine' supports a human 'translator'.
Computer-assisted translation can include standard
dictionary and grammar software. The term, however, normally refers to a range of specialized programs available to the translator, including
translation-memory,
terminology-management,
concordance, and alignment programs.
Notes
1. Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 83.
2. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 83.
3. This approach was recounted in Lt. Viktor Belenko's 1974 Soviet defection, and his scrawled "English" translation of his desire to deliver the MIG-25. Though he understood that there would be a few limitations in his translation, he confused the authorities because it read more like a threat than an invitation. ''MIG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko'', 1980 ISBN .
4. Samuel Johnson in his preface to ''A Dictionary of the English Language'', 1755 and Jonathon Green's ''Chasing the Sun'', 1996 ISBN , speak at length of the trials, in-depth and inconclusive investigations, disagreements, and finally the expedient solutions that lexicographers must undertake in the name of practicality.
5. Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 83.
6. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 84.
7. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 84.
8. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 85.
9. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 85.
10. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," pp. 85-86.
11. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 86.
12. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 87.
13. Statistical machine translation and translation memory: An integration made in heaven!, , Kirti, Vashee, ClientSide News Magazine,
14. Muegge (2006), "Fully automatic high quality machine translation of restricted text: A case study", in "Translating and the computer 28. Proceedings of the twenty-eighth international conference on translating and the computer, 16-17 November 2006, London", London: Aslib. ISBN .
References
★ Balcerzan, Edward, ed., ''Pisarze polscy o sztuce przekładu, 1440-1974: Antologia'' (Polish Writers on the Art of Translation, 1440-1974: an Anthology), Poznań, Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1977.
★ Berman, Antoine (1984). ''"L'épreuve de l'étranger"''. Excerpted in English in: Venuti, Lawrence, editor (2002, 2nd edition 2004). ''The Translation Studies Reader''.
★ Darwish, Ali (1999). "Towards a Theory of Constraints in Translation". (
@turjuman Online).
★
Kasparek, Christopher, "The Translator's Endless Toil," ''
The Polish Review'', vol. XXVIII, no. 2, 1983, pp. 83-87. Includes a discussion of
European-language cognates of the
term, "translation."
★
The True Interpreter: a History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West, Kelly, L.G., , , New York, St. Martin's Press, 1979, ISBN
★
Translation Contract: A Standards-Based Model Solution, Muegge, Uwe, , , AuthorHouse, 2005, ISBN
★ Rose, Marilyn Gaddis, guest editor (1980). ''Translation: agent of communication''. (A special issue of ''Pacific Moana Quarterly'', 5:1)
★ Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1813). ''"Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens"''. Reprinted as "On the Different Methods of Translating" in: Venuti, Lawrence, editor (2002, 2nd edition 2004). ''The Translation Studies Reader''.
★
Nimrod's Sin: Treason and Translation in a Multilingual World, Simms, Norman, editor, , , , 1983,
★
The Translator's Invisibility, Venuti, Lawrence, , , Routledge, 1994, ISBN
See also
★
Translation-quality standards
External links
Resources
★
UNESCO Clearing House for Literary Translation
★
Meaning and Music — essay discussing the translation of song lyrics, specifically from English into Spanish. Sample verses from Disney's ''High School Musical''.
★
EN-15038:2006 (English) .pdf file, Final draft January 2006
★ 1920 text by Flora Ross Amos from the series ''Columbia University studies in English and comparative literature.''
Publications
★
''Multilingual Computing''
★
''Translation Journal'', quarterly edited by Gabe Bokor
★
''Translation Review'', published three times annually by the Center for Translation Studies
★
''Translation News'', news about translations
Associations
★
International Association of Conference Translators
★
International Federation of Translators
★
Localization Industry Standards Association
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