423.4.4  : DISCUSSION

     Catford (1965) distinguishes between 'literal' and 'free' translation. We are not getting into a discussion on the two types here. Our observations regarding the public notice translations above, however, place them in the former category. Mere literal translations of any given text are not sufficient. As pointed out by Newmark (1982), "any given word in a particular language is interpreted from its context".. Wittgenstein (1958) also states in this regard that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language". This is why literal translations are often incomprehensible to the native speakers of the target language. Central government offices all over India have public notices on their walls written both in English and Hindi. The texts in Hindi are often difficult to comprehend and many native speakers of Hindi, if educated, try and comprehend Hindi notices via their English counterparts.

     This brings us to the main point of discussion here. Prose literature in any language could be of two types: creative and factual. The term creative here refers to the writings which may be lengthier, written in a language which is more ornamental and involving a more imaginative use of language. The language of fiction, journalism and advertising would thus fall into the category of creative prose writing. Short, precise statements of facts on the other hand would fall under the category of factual prose writing which includes administrative, scientific and technical literature. The language of public notices also falls under the second category. Since the two types are totally different in their style and content the approaches to translating them also need to be different. The former is the conceptual translation involving idiomatic language; the latter, on the other hand, is the factual translation of statements. The creative language used in the former is much more culture bound than the staid and precise language used in the latter. The latter involves the translation and coinage of technical terminology. The former has more ambiguity because of its complex structure.

     The need to translate, notwithstanding the kind of text involved, brings us to the concept of 'equivalence'. Popovic distinguishes four types of translation equivalence:

     Placed against this definition one finds that public notices of the type given above fall under the first category of word to word translation. They also, to a certain extent, fill the criteria for the fourth by retaining the similar syntactic forms though maintaining a different order. What is required of the translations of public notices is, however, maintenance of functional equivalence (third type) thus achieving the goal of 'expressive identity'. The goal behind such a translation is to replace the SL word or phrase by a word or phrase from TL carrying the same notion.

     Ludskanov calls this process 'semiotic transformations' (quoted from Bassnet-McGuire),

     Semiotic transformations (T s ) are the replacements of the signs encoding a message by signs of another code, preserving (so far as possible in the face of entropy) invariant information with respect to a given system of reference.

     The concept seems to be relevant for translation studies and especially when it comes to the translation of texts such as those found in public notices. The main task of a public notice is communication of information. The information content of the languages concerned needs to be identical so that the readers of different languages do not interpret or understand them differently. The important objective in a theory of semiotic transformation is to keep the 'invariant information' constant in the two or more concerned languages and change the lexical shape according to the requirements of the TL. The 'invariant information' in case of due to in example 5 above is as per. Though 'kaaraN' is the correct semantic equivalent of 'due to' the invariant information of 'as per rules' is not maintained here. The invariant information of 'kaaraN' is 'cause of'. Therefore, the use of 'kaaraN' looks improper. Moreover, it does not even fit into the Hindi structure. The right choice here would have been 'anusaar' having the invariant information 'as per'. Therefore, a better translation of 5 would have been:

     SurakSaa niyamõ ke anusaar yaatrii apne haath m? kewal ek thElii le jaa sakte h?.

     The theory needs to be further studied in relation to the translation of public notice texts.

Points to Remember(6f)