Chapter 2
Translation Studies and Language Studies Then and Now
2.A A “linguistic theory of translation”?
2.1. At the time when this chapter was first compiled, the increasing quantity and quality of contributions to translation studies (cited in such bibliographies as Bausch, Klegraf, & Wilss 1969, 1973, and Van Hoof 1973) attested to a heartening upsurge of interest after some rather desiccated decades of relative neglect. Much of this work was based upon “linguistics”, the “science of language” academically so designated. Emblematically, the modifier “linguistic” has been alternately used for “belonging to that domain and its research” versus simply “pertaining to language”. The two uses are by no means equivalent or synonymous, however expedient the ambiguity may have been in arbitrarily taking for granted just what was yet to be shown: that such abstract or technical meanings do in fact capture the nature of “language” in social life and communicative practices. These meanings have been sustained by waves of arcane fashions that have at times seemed to me not merely “non-practical” but “anti-practical”, e.g., in setting aside “actual speech”, “parole”, “performance”, etc. etc. [Note1]
2.2 I would thus advise caution regarding the term “linguistic theory of translation” if it signifies “translation appropriating the meaning(s) of ‘language’ current in academic linguistics” say, as neatly compartmentalised into “phonetics” and “phonemics”, “morphemics" or “morphology”, “syntax”, and (maybe!) “semantics” and “lexicology”. The two last domains were, I think, least popular because they were the ones most of all pressured to take on complex issues of “meaning”. Already in “morphology”, the modest projects to study “minimal meaningful forms” (the “morphemes") disconcertingly confronted the signal discrepancy between recognising a unit as meaningful versus defining its meaning.[Note 2]
2.3 Rather than academic “linguistic theories of translation”, I would propose linguistic, cognitive, and social theories of the event of translation: how the distinctive linguistic resources of multiple languages (in the broadest sense) influence the formation and transition of knowledge, and who organises the corresponding interactions.[Note 3] It is worth pointing out that meaning itself is a theory (or a set of theories) we agree to share whenever we engage in “meaningful interaction”. Even though we can never physically prove we know what we mean, let alone what anyone else means, being meaningful carries forward its own quotidian actional evidence of and in itself. Meaning is such an amazingly successful theory because it drives and is driven by practice in such rich profusion and nicety that we can hardly manage to be amazed at all – until, that is, we are pressed to explain or account for it.
2.4 Logically, then, a “theory of translation” would be a recursive “theory about a theory”, and I do not see how we can anticipate much material support from academic “semantics”. Its standard terms and concepts like “synonyms” and “antonyms” represent a premature and noncommittal level of abstraction, substantially more theoretical than practical. Working with very large corpora of authentic data over the recent years has bestowed on me a principled scepticism toward generalisations about the “same meaning” or the “opposite meaning” when massive evidence suggests that very few items – perhaps virtually none – are precisely identical or antithetical in their usages or occurrences. Fortunately, of course, identity is not a requirement for communication or translation, since the practices of usage are well-tuned for on-line approximations; but then explicit or implicit assumptions of identity cannot serve as rational anchors for “theories of meaning”, and least of all in translation studies.
2.5 Yet even if a “theory of translation” is a “theory about a theory”, it must yet must be resolutely conceived as driven by the practices of translating. Formulating such a theory is no trivial requirement, and I do not state it lightly. But having recently posted for public use two fairly extensive books based entirely on copious reserves of authentic data from discursive practice,[Note 4] I feel some confidence that we can do more justice to these facts than I would have ventured to assert thirty years ago. At that time, I underwent the test of theory by practice without such mediation; and if I did not derive much guidance from “language studies” in general and “linguistics” in particular, I was – I would hope, manifestly – engaged in searching for other and broader modes and sources of guidance.
2.B From equivalence to convergence and coincidence
2.6 Ironically, much importance was allotted to the term and concept of equivalence, although, even in languages as closely related as English and German, equivalence in any formal sense is far less common than diversity. In fact, the formal systems seem if anything more disparate, and so, in many respects, do the systems of meaning. Thus, the much-invoked notion of “equivalence” remained unstable if not elusive for both theory and practice of translation, the more so when we wished to measure it by conventional “linguistic features” in a selected pair of source text and target text.
2.7 I would propose instead convergence as an activity and perhaps achievement of circumspect rapprochement; and coincidence as the activity of exploiting available parallels between system and inducing parallels where they are not available but still within reach. Neither activity implies any guarantee of success. Yet they do encourage and guide resourcefulness and creativity during translation, as distinct from any cut-and-dried tallying of properties in finished products like proportions of nouns and verbs.
2.8 Here, for illustration ,is a brief passage from a poem by W.B. Yeats and my own translation of it.
To Ireland in the Coming Times (1893)
Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong
Ballad and story, rann, and song.
Nor be I any less of them
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan.
An Irland in den aufkommenden Zeiten
Ich will gezählet werden, wisst,
Zu den Genossen, welche Zwist
Und Unrecht Irlands treu versüssten,
Mit Lied, Ballade, Mär begrüssten.
Noch sei ich weniger vom Raum,
Weil dem rotem Rosensaum
von ihr, der’ Ahnenschaft begann
Eh’ Gott die Engelschar ersann.
I insist that if a source text is composed with rhyme and metre, it must obligatorily be recreated as such by the translator (cf. 3.16). The archaic style of Yeats has enough parallels in the German of the latter 19th century to support substantial convergence, provided I could generate certain approximate coincidences, such as reordering the syntax and rendering “history” as “Ahnenschaft”, or “made” as “ersann”. To be honest, I felt they might heighten the totality of the textual effect, especially the historical and social aspects that permeate such works of Yeats when Ireland was still a political vassal of its rapacious and violent neighbour across the Irish Sea. The “red-rose hem” presumably invokes the House of Lancaster, with whom the Irish sided during the War of the Roses.
2.9 Admittedly, this mode of creativity was rarely among the provisos of the “linguistic theories of translation” I read back in the 1970s deliberating about “equivalence”. Indeed, those “theories” might suggest my version is not “linguistically equivalent” in their technical sense. Perhaps not; but I like to think Yeats himself and his courageous co-patriots would have seen my point, which I shall be elaborating with authentic data throughout this radically revised new book.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. See Beaugrande 1991 and 1997 for detailed analysis.
2. As an apparent compromise, research largely addressed “function words” (like articles) or word components (like prefixes) serving to arrange or sort the “content words”. See again Beaugrande 1991 and 1997 for details.
3.
See also my paper
“Cognition, communication, translation, instruction: The geopolitics of
discourse”, in
Language,
Discourse, and Translation in the West and the Middle East
(edited by myself with Abdulla Shunnaq and Mohammed Heliel). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1994, 4-26.
And Bahaa-Eddin
M. Mazid, A Politics of Translation: Power,
Culture, Ideology and X-phemism in
Translation between Arabic and English.
4 . Beaugrande 2004 and 2007.
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