Autors: Nezināms
Translation
is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever their
intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manpulate
literature to function in a given society in a given way. Rewriting is
manipulation, undertaken in the service of power, and in its positive aspect
can help in the evolution of a literature and a society. Rewritings can
introduce new concepts, new genres, new devices, and the history of literary innovation, of the shaping power
of one culture upon another. But rewriting can also repress innovation, distort
and contain, and in an age of ever increasing manipulation af all kinds, the
study of the manipulative translation can help us towards a greater awareness
of the world in which we live.
Translation
has its own excitement, its own interest. A satisfactory translation is always
possible, but good translator is never satisfied with it. It can usually be
improved. There is no such thing as a perfect, ideal or ‘correct’ translation.
A translator is always trying to extend his knowledge and improve his means of
expression; he is always pursuing facts and words. He works on four levels:
translation is first a science, which entails the knowledge and verification of
the facts and the language thet describes them – here, whar is wrong, mistakes
of truth, can be identified; secondly, it is a skill, which calls for
appropriate language and acceptable usage; thirdly, an art, which distinguishes
good from undistiguished writing and is the creative, the intuitive, sometimes
the inspired, level of the translation; lastly, a matter of taste, where
argument ceases, preferences are expressed, and the variety of meritorious
translation is the reflection of individual differences. This time I will
regard translation as a skill, translation of idioms within a culture.
Victor Hugo,
1802 – 1885. French novelist, poet, dramatist.
Extract from
the preface he wrote for the Shakespeare translations published by his son,
Francois-Victor, in 1865.
When you offer
a translation to a nation, that nation will almost always look on the
translation as an act of violence against itself. Bourgeois taste tends to
resist the universal spirit.
To translate a
foreign writer is to add to your own national poetry; such a widening of the
horizon does not please those who profit from it, at least not in the
beginning. The first reaction one of rebellion. If a foreign idiom is
transplanted into a language in this way, that language will do all it can to
reject that foreign idiom. This kind of taste is repugnant to it. These unusual
locutions, these unexpected turns of phrase, that savage corruption of
well-known figures of speech, they all amount to an invasion. Well, then, will
become of one’s own literature? Who could ever dare think of infusing the
substance of another people into its own very life-blood? This kind of poetry
is excessive. There is an abuse of images, a profusion of metaphors, a
violation of frontiers, a forced introduction of the cosmopolitan into local
taste.
Juan Luis Vives,
1492-1540. Spanish humanist.
Extract from
“Versiones seu Interpretationes”(“Versions of Translations”), published in
1531.
A version is
the transfer of words from one language into another in such a way that the
sense is preserved. In some versions you can see only the sense, in others only
the phrasing and the diction. If a man wanted to transfer the speeches of
Demosthenes or Marcus Tullius [Cicero], or the poems of Homer and Virgil into
other languages, he would have to pay attention first and foremost to the way
the text is put together and to the figures of speech it contains. If he did
that he would soon realize how great the differences between languages are, if
he had not already done so before, since no one language is rich enough to
match another in all stylistic traits and figures of speech, even the most
primitive ones. “When we translate from Greek we should not follow that
language in all things”, says Marcus Fabius [Quintilianus] “especially not when
they want to use their words to designate our things.” There is a third kind of
text in which both the substance and the words are important, in which words
bring power and elegance to the senses, so to speak, whether taken singly, in
conjuction with other words, or in the text as a whole. Texts written with only
the sense in mind should be translated freely and the translator should be allowed
to omit what does dot add to the sense, or add what improves it. It is
impossible to express the figures of speech and patterns characteristic of one
language in another, even less so when they are idiomatic, and I fail to see
what purpose would be served in admitting solecisms and barbarisms with the
sole aim of representing the sense with
as many words as are used in the original, the way some translations of
Aristotle or Holy Writ have been made. iT should be acceptable to render two
words by means of one, or one word by means of two, or more as usage dictates,
and add words ot to leave them out.
Petrus Danielus Huetius,
1630-1720. French bishop and educator.
Extract from
“De optimo genere interpretandi”(“On the Best Way of Translating”), Book One of
De interpretatione libri duo (“Two
Books on Translation”), published in 1683. The work, written in the form of a
dialogue, is often referred to, but almost never quoted from. This is its first
partial translation into English.
There are
certain phrases specific to each language (grammarians call them idioms) that would be utterly
ridicilous if transposed into another language, or else they would create more
ambiguities that could be avoided only if the translator were to resort to long
circumlocutions. I think if a translator were to render Greek proverbs
literally into French he would be considered a fool and become the
laughing-stock of all who read him. Saint Jerome said that
It
is difficult not to cut here and there when following lines written by another,
and it is hard to preserve the elegance with which things have been expressed
in the original when you are writing a translation. A given word may mean a
very specific thing in one language and I may not have a word to render it with
another, and while I ponder how to fill in its sense, I may be confusing a
narrow space with a long widing road. Add to this the digressions caused by
rhetoric, the differences in declesions, the number of stylistic features and,
finally, the feature which sets each individual language apart, its genius, as
they say. If I translate word for word all this will sound ridiculous, but if I
am forced to change something in the syntax, or in the text, I may give the
impression that I am neglecting the task of the translator.
This statement is an obvious refutation
of yours.
*
* *
Whenever
similar difficulties occur in other texts the translator should resort to words
related in meaning, or even to parpahrase, as long as he does not do so in an
outrageous manner. If he is faced with an idiom or a metaphor I do not want him
to mix in another proverb or another metaphor. He should render the words as
they are and if their meaning is ambiguous he should briefly explain it in the
margin or in footnotes, as I said before. If he fails to do so he will find
himself moving farther and farther away from the author, because of the
difference n their languages. As to the sleepy, yawning reader you referred to
at the end of your remarks: I do not like those delicate, fastidious men whose
paplate cannot be pleased except by cakes ans sweetmeats, sesame, poppies,
wheat, and crushed nuts. I do not think only adolescents in schools grow dumb
on those things as Petronius Arbiter pointed out. I think the same thing
happens to men of a mature age and a stupid, puerile dispotion. If you are
depressed and have a sour stomach, don’t blame the food. These are the
arguments I had gathered, my dear Thuanus, to refute our opponent’s attack and
his subtle machinations. If he wants to insist we need not despair in our
souls.
Alexander Fraser Tytler,
Lord Woodhauselee, 1747 – 1814. Scottish lawyer, judge, and academic.
Extract from
his Essay
on the Principles of Translation, 1790.
Among the
different species of poetical composition, the lyric is that which allows of
the greatest liberty in translation, as a freedom both of thought and
expression is agreeable to its character. Yet even in this, which is the freest
of all species of translation, we must guard against licentiousness; and
perhaps the more so, that we are apt to persuade ourselves that the less
caution is necessary. The difficulty indeed is, where so much freedom is
allowed, to define what is to be accounted licentiousness in poetical
translation. While a translator endeavours to give to his work all the ease of
original composition, the chief difficulty he has to encounter will be found in
the translation of idioms, or those turns of expression which do not belong to
universal grammar, but of which every
language has its own, that are exclusivelu proper to it.
And as a
conlusion, the translators of the Authorized Version warn in their
preface that “he that meddleth with men’s religion in any part, meddleth with
their custom, nay, with their freehold.” If a text is considered to embody the
core values of a culture, if it functions as that culture’s central text,
translations of it will be scrutinized with the greatest of care, since
“unacceptable” translations may well be seen to subvert the very basis of the
culture itself. This is what Sir Thomas More accuses Tyndale of when he makes
the charge that “Tyndale changed in his translation the common known words to
the intent to make a change in the faith.” If, on the other hand, a certain
cultures, it is likely to treat the texts produced by those cultures in the
rather cavalier manner Herder deplores in the French translations of
Homer:”Homer must enter France a captive and dress according to their fashion,
so as not to offend their eyes.” Edward Fitzgerald, a member of the central
culture that succeeded in France, actually boasts:”It os an amusement for me to
take what liberties I like with these Persians.”
It is in the
treatment of texts that play a central role within a culture and in the way a
central culture translates texts produced by cultures it considers peripheral,
that the importance of such factors as idealogy, poetics, and the universe of
Discourse is most obviously revealed.
Bibliography:
Lefevere, Andre. Translation/Culture/History. London: Routledge, 1992.
Newmark, Peter. A Textbook of Translation. Hertforshire: Phoenix ELT, 1995.
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