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LITERARY TRANSLATION AS A

FORM OF COMMUNICATION

Abdellah Elboubekri
HOUSEKEEPING
 Attendance is mandatory
 Tardiness is not accepted
 Mutual respect and appreciation
 Mutual support and collaboration
 Constructive criticism
 Assignments must be done seriously
and on time
 Personal initiatives are welcomed
INTRODUCTION

 Translation is the communication of meaning from


one language (the source) to another language (the
target).
 Translation refers to written information, whereas
interpretation refers to spoken information.
 "Translation is one of the few human activities in
which the impossible occurs by principle.” Mariano
Antolín Rato
 "Translators are the shadow heroes of literature,
the often forgotten instruments that make it
possible for different cultures to talk to one another,
who have enabled us to understand that we all,
from every part of the world, live in one
world.” Paul Auster
 Without translation, we would be living in provinces
bordering on silence.” George Steiner
 "Without translation I would be limited to the borders of
my own country. The translator is my most important
ally. He introduces me to the world." Italo Calvino
 "Translation is that which transforms everything so
that nothing changes." Grass Günter
 "Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not
faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not
beautiful." Yevgeny Yevtushenko
 "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." Robert Frost
 "Translation is at best an echo." George Borrow
 "Translation is the art of failure." Umberto Eco
 "A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age
of translations." Ezra Pound
 "Translating is writing." Marguerite Yourcenar
 "Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of
making intelligible a whole culture." Anthony Burgess
 “The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from
the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne
across the world, we are translated men. It is normally
supposed that something always gets lost in
translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that
something can also be gained.” Salman Rushdie
 “When I work, I'm just translating the world around
me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my
readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar.
But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just
what I see and hear.” Don DeLillo
PRESCRIPTIVE TRANSLATION

 The aim is to attain a kind of textual equivalence (fidelity); what


John Catford (1965) termed ‘formal correspondence’, which
caters for the syntactical and lexical structures of original texts.
 It adheres to structural linguistics which perceives translation as
a form of meaning transfer from one linguistic code to another.
 The main focus in (S Ling) was to explicate how language
creates and carries meaning in order to make the operation of
meaning transfer possible.
 Linguistics was centered on studying the linguistic signs
‘signifiers’ that are involved in the production of the referents
‘signifieds,’ with a minor consideration of its socio-cultural
context.
 The dependence of Translation Studies on the notion
of textual adequacy/conceptual identity between the
‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’ as theorized in linguistics
“structuralism”

 Lawrence Venuti (1998,25), driven by its scientific


orientation, the linguistics-oriented approaches
remain restricted by their understanding of language
as ‘a set of systematic rules autonomous from cultural
and social variation’, which extends to viewing
translation as a ‘systematic operation autonomous
from the cultural and social formations in which they
are executed.”
THE DESCRIPTIVE TURN
 Jacques Derrida’s (1978) deconstructive philosophy
questions the established assumption about the existence
of the conceptual identity between the ‘signifier’ and the
‘signified’. As such, every translated text is seen as a new
production that does not exactly reflect the original which
is varied in nature and cannot be refracted by only one
version.
 In discussing the ‘the task of the translator’, Walter
Benjamin (2000, 17) stresses the inevitability of textual
alteration during the act of translation. He argues that ‘no
translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it
strives for likeness of the original’.
 When the translator approaches the original text he/she
seeks to convert what is comprehended in his/her native
linguistic code. This is a reconstruction of meaning rather
than on refraction of it.
 Two concepts accompanied the poststructuralist
transformation in translation:
 Foreignization: when the transformations on the body of
the translated text are explicit
 Domestication: when the transformations are invisible
enough to be appropriated and domesticated as part of the
TT and culture.
 Friedrich Schleiermacher summarized the two strategies
of foreignization and domestication stating ‘either the
translator leaves the writer in peace, as much as possible,
and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader
in peace, as much as possible, and moves the writer
towards him’
 The first case is about imparting the ‘same image’
understood from the foreign text, the second method of
domestication entails turning the writer of the foreign text
into one of the target audience.
 This discussion dates back to ancient Cicero and Horace debates,
since the first century BC, about what is described as ‘word-for-
word’ literal transfer of the original text, or ‘sense-for-sense’ free
transfer of the general content of the ST
 The controversies that attended to Translation Studies reflected the
differing ideological and political backgrounds of the involved
theorists.
 Domestication is thought to solidify the hegemony of English into
which a huge percentage of world translation is made. The Anglo-
American tradition of translation is marked with fluency to smoothen
the process of reading in the target culture. The translator tends to
disappear as the ST is rendered identical to the cultural norms and
aesthetics of the TT.
 Resistance can be enacted within the realm of foreignization that is
fundamentally anti-ethnocentrism.
 Berman (2000) calls for translational practice that is
based on word-for-word translation. It is a kind of
foreignization which seeks to maintain the originality of
the translated texts and bolster the translating language.
 Translation Studies, in a later descriptive move,
applied the functionalist method in an attempt to cover
the metalanguage context underlying translation.
 M. Halliday stresses the significance of taking the type
and register of the text into consideration and on relating
language utterances to their social contexts.
 Katharina Reiss developed a translation communicative
strategy that seeks to realize equivalence through
distinguishing the typologies of the text as each type
(informative, expressive, operative …) has a distinct way
of translation. For the first type, for example, the strategy
revolves around providing full and even extra explanation
of every fact
 As for Christiane Nord (1997), she focuses on the notion of
Skopos (aim in Greek) and sees Translation as a
Purposeful Activity.
 Knowing the purpose of translation helps the translator
decide on choices to make vis-à-vis the process of
prioritizing the STs or TTs, such as which ideas to
highlight or foreshadow, which elements to subject to
ellipsis.
 Eugene Nida (1964) redefines the textual adequacy
assumed by the prescriptive theories. He considers the
goal and purpose behind translation as the dynamic
determinator of the final translated product. His
‘dynamic adequacy’ allows for all kinds of modification
that could result in equivalent effects of the ST: a sense-
for-sense translation.
THE CULTURAL TURN OF TRANSLATION
 In spite of their focus on the notion of equivalence, the previous
research ignored the cultural backgrounds that decide, most of the
time, the understandability of the message encoded in the ST.
 Scholars in the field of translation have started to forsake their
concern with the text as an independent entity into reflecting on the
context of production and circulation of the text.
 Gideon Toury (1995, 29), one influential figure in the new wave of
translation, sees that translations are ‘facts of target cultures,’
 The translator was to assume a social role that is conscious of the
regular rules, norms and idiosyncrasies in both the source and target
languages.
 This subsequently affects a concrete change vis-à-vis the translation
approaches, ‘from an ahistorical, largely prescriptive concept to a
historical one.’
 Such a diachronic view considers the position of translated texts
within the spatial and temporal contexts, and sees the texts as
body, rather than as individual, functioning within the historical,
social and cultural systems of the particular receptive readers.

 The translated text should be approached as a discourse


that is, as any other discourse, institutionalized and enmeshed in
the social and cultural fabric, and is part and parcel of cultural
construction.

 The receptive culture, within the polysystem framework,


determines the artistic as well as the pedagogical value of the
translated text, taking into account the social convention in the
receiving culture and socio-cultural agenda the translator has to
comply with.
THE AMERICAN LITERARY CONTEXT
 Toury (1995) and Even Zohar (1990) refer to the
reinvigorating force of translation. The foreign text
introduces new idea and forms to the target culture.
 George Steiner (1975, 26), who considered all attempts
for translation as ‘at the same time reproductive and
innovatory’.
 Edwin Gentzler (1998, 143) noted that a ‘Mayan,
Guatemalan or North African/Berber texts,’ translated
into English through the method of foreignization,
achieved noticeable circulation among readership. These
foreignized translations were claimed to introduce
innovation in the TC system.
 Foreignization not only serves the enriching
of national language in Schleiermacher’s sense, it is also
used as a means to subvert the supremacy of imperial
languages
 What Venuti termed ‘minoritizing translation’ does
destabilize the authenticity and hegemony of the American
literary canon. He (1995, 41) argues that ‘the foreign text is
privileged in foreignizing translation only insofar as it
enables a disruption of target language cultural values’.
 Given its emerging function as unsettling the authority of
the canonized, the minor translated text turns into an
arena for the operation of ideological dichotomies and the
accompanying of power relationships. Therefore, it has
become an instrumental document for the study of unequal
relationships that usually mark the relationship between
the cultures related to the ST and TT.
THE POSTCOLONIAL TRANSLATION
 The postcolonial translation was in essence informed by the
descriptive analysis of the cultural and social skopos of the
translated text and its discursive impact on both the receptive
audience and their culture. It, however, laid emphasis on the role
of ideology and power and adopts the Cultural Studies
methodologies of interpretation.
 Basnett and Lefevere (1990, xii/xiv), prominent upholders of the
cultural turn in translation, suggest that researchers on
Translation Studies will learn a lot by going into ‘the vagaries
and vicissitudes of the exercise of power in a society, and what
the exercise of power means in terms of the production of culture,
of which the production of translation is part’.
 The socio- cultural/political circumstances as well as the process
of intercultural communication (with special focus on questions of
to whom, when, where, how, who translate and for what purpose)
must be considered.
 Being similar to the various forms of literary
production, all kinds of translated texts are to be
approached in terms of discursive constructions in
service of the ideological line of the target culture.
 Toury (1985, 18/19) asserted that translation does
always serve the ideologies of the receptor culture.
He declares that translation is “conditioned by the
goals it is designed to serve, and these goals are
set in, and by, the prospective receptor system (s).
Consequently, translators operate first and
foremost in the interest of the culture into which
they are translating, and not in the interest of the
ST, let alone the source culture.”
 Lefévere (1992, xi) puts forward: “All rewritings,
whatever their intention, reflect a certain
ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate
literature to function in a given society in a given
way. Rewriting is manipulation, undertaken in
the service of power”
 Deconstructing and unsettling this textual
manifestation of power characterize the
application of the postcolonial theory and
practices to translation which reside mainly on
those structures of feeling and identification that
resisted domestication and effacement. Hence,
postcolonial translation is to be marked with the
ethics of difference and alterity.
GLOBALIZATION
 The postcolonial turn in translation is not all about
resistance. Translation fosters a kind of cultural
hybridity that is suggestive of mutual creativity of
the source and target languages.
 Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994)
maintains that cultural hybridization is an ongoing
process of cultural translation that is conducive to
a new way of living that is free from hegemonic
polarization and dichotomies.
 Translation Studies since the early 1990s have
been marked by a cultural turn that foregrounds
translation as a form of intercultural
communication
 Maria Tymoczko (1999, 23): the transposing of foreign
imageries and worldviews does not only enrich the dominant
languages, but it opens up a space for interaction between
different traditions and tongues.
 Ngũgĩ reasserts that ‘the different languages should be
encouraged to talk to one another through the medium of
interpretation and translation … through translations, the
different languages of the world can speak to one another.’
 Arianna Dagnino (2012, 1) defines transcultural writers ‘as
imaginative writers who, by choice or by life circumstances,
experience cultural dislocation, live transnational
experiences, cultivate bilingual/pluri-lingual proficiency,
physically immerse themselves in multiple
cultures/geographies/territories, expose themselves to
diversity and nurture plural, flexible identities’.

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