Report in Introduction into Translation

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.

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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.