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| Post Graduate Diploma in Translation Studies |
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| UNIT 411.4: MODELS OF TRANSLATION |
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| 2. |
Recall the point, made at 4.1.3, that the maximal goal of translation is complete success in rendering all significant content and form features of the text concerned. Pragmatically based models do not abandon the possibility of aiming for such a goal, as one might imagine at first sight. They redefine the notion of "significant content and form features", as they alter the form-content relation itself. Divergentist translation theorists begin their project by doubting the possibility of a serious semantic analysis that can sustain convergentist models of the fundamentalist or foundationist type. This doubt leads them to recast the analysis of language in terms of expressions and their uses rather than forms and their meanings. In particular, what is significant and therefore must be retained at the maximal translation level, for a pragmatically oriented theorist, is what will make sense to the TL audience and yet correspond to what made sense to the SL audience. |
| 3. |
Pragmatically based models of translation reconcile the fact of divergence with the widespread desire for convergence by emphasizing the different needs of various sections of the TL audience, the divergent strategies invited by SL texts of different sorts, and then considering how translators can converge on a narrow range of appropriate translations for a given SL text with a given audience context in mind. This feature of such models is very clear in the work of Peter Netmark, to which we shall return shortly. |
| 4. |
However, there is an influential trend of pragmatically oriented thinking about translation which makes the strong claim that there are never any serious or valid translations capable of equating a textual representation of knowledge. A in language X with an equivalent text embodying knowledge B in language Y. In other words, there are never any authentic translations that are valid in theory. |
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SL item
X
with range of uses U
translates as:
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| in context 1 |
in context 2 |
in context 3 |
etc., depending on what we |
| TL item |
TL item |
TL item |
think the relevant TL reader might |
| A |
B |
C |
want to hear |
| for use P/1 |
for use Q/2 |
for use R/3 |
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Pragmatically Based Model
Fig 2. |
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| The practice of translation goes on only because some actual translations are accepted by the market in practice. This mode of thinking finds its clearest articulation in the |
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| philosophical work of Willard Van Orman Quine, whose famous thesis of the indeterminacy of translation states that no expression in one language ever has a valid determinate translation in another language. This Quinean view casts a shadow on much contemporary work in translation studies. This trend emphasizes divergence and does not try to reconcile it with the desire for convergence |
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| 5. |
Then there are positions intermediate between Newmark and Quine. George Steiner and Andre Lefevere hold such positions. Such literary scholars suggest that one must focus on how a translation reads in the TL cultural space, and that literary criticism provides the right perspective for such a reading. Scholars holding such views try to specify the context of origin of the SL text as well as the context of reception of the TL text in political and ideological terms, and propose that the unit of translation, far from being the word or the sentence, is not even the individual text, but the entire culture as a space where texts flow into each other! While it is difficult to characterize this position as a model of translation, there is a sense in which such authors do make a case for a negotiate, diplomacy-like view of translation. And it seems clear that this view is half-way between Quine and Newmark. |
| 6. |
Newmark's model of translation classifies texts into informative (science and so forth), expressive (poetry etc.), and vocative texts(advertising and the like). He argues that it is only to expressive texts that literary criteria apply with full force-especially the criterion that a colorless or colorful SL expression must be matched by a correspondingly common or unusual TL equivalent. If this criterion is considered 'scientific', he notes, it follows that the translation of artistic texts must obey this scientific law. In contrast, it suffices to reproduce the cognitive content of informative texts or the persuasive force of vocative ones. Thus, the translation of such nonartistic texts is an art, he notes, not a science. |
| 7. |
The most important contribution that NewMark makes to translation theory is his extension and reformulation of Nida's distinction (4.3.10) between formal and dynamic equivalence. In New mark, it becomes a distinction between communicative translation, a pragmatically oriented task of serving a particular audience and taking liberties with the SL text if necessary, and the narrower enterprise of semantic translation, with maximally high standards of semantic accountability. A typology texts, of audiences, and of uses to which translations may be put helps us to decide how communicative or how semantic a path we should take when we do a particular job. |
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