Mail

The existence of competing norms in a society involves choices. Translators tend to follow the mainstream norms so as to be more easily patronized. In some cases, however, particularly at times of cultural transition, several conflicting norms might be equally influential. This enables translators to decide to go with one norm and accept one patronage rather than another.The translator's position is crucial at this moment. One example is that during the Sino-Japan War (1937-1945), works both in praise of and severely critical of, the Japanese aggression were translated into Chinese, though in different regions of China.

Breach of poetical norms is very common in literary translation and is diversified by the translator's personal aesthetic preferences. For instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, three kinds of temporal dialects co-existed and were available for the translation of creative fiction in Chinese:

a) The classical dialect (wenyan)
b) The simple classical dialect and
c) The vernacular dialect (baihua).

Most translators stuck to the use of one form, but some alternated between the two. In rendering the same text, some people followed the source culture norms and translated more literally, while others attached greater importance to the readership and produced works with more latitude.

The translator's response to the editor's poetic requirements and the critic's comments is also complex. Translators normally obey the obligatory requirements, but may accept or reject the technical suggestions according to their own professional judgment. Some translators may establish good relationships with the critics, while others may insist on their own principles in spite of the critics' opposition.

The selection of alternative norms involves a price to pay. But it does not necessarily lead to severe punishment, nor does it mean the invalidity of norms. At times, a slight breach of norms is not only tolerated, but also encouraged.

"Some literary translators might claim that their intention is precisely to break these norms. And translations of advertisements sometimes appear deliberately to flout the expectancy norms of the target culture"

(Chesterman 1997: 60)

Norms are "the main factors ensuring the establishment and stability of a social order" (Toury 1995:55), but they may also, in effect, restrain innovation. In this sense, they must sometimes be challenged and changed. Otherwise, prejudice will last a long time. Hence failure to adhere to norms does not always mean anything negative. On the contrary, it may be the source of cultural creativity. Only when the previous norms are broken is it possible for new ones to become dominant, and for cultures to develop.

3. The Translator's Agency in Different Phases of Translation

Translation is governed by norms, but as a creative activity, it also requires the maximum use of the translator's agency.

"The translator's agency is manifested not only in the translator's comprehension, interpretation and artistic re-presentation of the source texts, but also in the selection of source texts, the cultural motivations of translation, the adoption of strategies, and the manipulation in the prefaces of the expected functions of the translations in the target culture".

(Cha et al 2003: 22)

The translator's role in text selection varies from time to time. In most cases, it is the publisher who selects source texts and translators. But translators have the right to accept or reject the rendition of certain works. Regardless of the actual power of translators, in the Chinese context, text selection has often been an important criterion of translation criticism. A case in point is the different evaluations Yan Fu (1853-1921) and Lin Shu (1852-1924) received. Patriotic motivations and careful selection of Western social works have often been considered a significant feature of Yan's translation whereas Lin Shu has been repeatedly criticized for being unselective and having wasted most of his time rendering a large percentage of secondary or third-class literature into Chinese.

The product of translating is directly shaped by the translator's comprehension of the source texts and the specific strategies he employs. Competence is crucial to the accuracy of translation, but the translator's conscious or unconscious intervention is inevitable, particularly in the forms of ideological and/or poetical deletions, rewritings and additions. Manipulation exists not only in the translations, but also in the prefaces and postscripts, which are short, conspicuous, and therefore very effective in manipulating the readers to produce the desired cultural results.

Translators manipulate the source texts in the service of power. They are in turn manipulated by the patronage so that the target readers and society are manipulated. On some occasions, however, translators may manipulate their patrons.

"Translation involves trust. The audience, which does not know the original, trusts that the translation is a fair representation of it".

(Lefevere 1990: 15)

Trust from readers and translation commissioners bring some power to translators, the exercise of which is closely connected with the translator's loyalty and reliability. In case translators have access to information unavailable to their clients, or where translators are in short supply, they might make full use of this and manipulate both the source texts and the patrons in order to achieve certain purposes. This helps us to understand why translators who have exclusive or near-exclusive access to information otherwise unavailable to those in power tend to be closely supervised and vetted for political loyalty (Hermans 1999b: 130).

One Chinese example of manipulating the patrons is found in the Treaty of Tientsin (1858), signed between the Qing dynasty feudal court and the British government. Article L of the English version stipulated that

All official communications addressed by the Diplomatic and Consular Agents of Her Majesty the Queen to the Chinese Authorities shall, henceforth, be written in English. They will for the present be accompanied by a Chinese version, but it is understood that, in the event of there being any difference of meaning between the English and the Chinese text, the English government will hold the sense as expressed in the English text to be the correct sense. This provision is to apply to the Treaty now negotiated, the Chinese text of which has been carefully corrected by the English original.

(1917, vol. 1: 418)

However, the Chinese text of the same article read somewhat differently, which is:

Henceforth the communication shall be written in English; but until China has selected students for learning the English language and their English has become very fluent, the communication shall be accompanied with a parallel text in Chinese. …

There is no way of telling how this statement found its way into the Chinese text. Due to lack of bilingual Chinese, for a long time, the Qing court had relied on Western missionaries for interpretation in diplomatic communications or in signing treaties with Western powers. Wang Kefei and Fan Shouyi (1999) said that the negotiators probably intended to include the statement in the Chinese text in order to force the Emperor to start a language school for training interpreters.

Manipulation in translation is often very subversive because translation offers a cover for the translator to go against the dominant constraints of his or her time, not in his or her own name, but rather in the name of a writer. This gives the translator two privileges: S/He relies on the authority of the author when s/he himself is not well known; expressing his own opinions with the discourse of the author, within a certain limit, the translator takes no responsibility for his/her own statements. Moreover, deviations occurring in translations often meet with greater tolerance. And the way censorship is applied to translations has often been much more lenient. One reason for this difference is that the presumed non-domestic origin of translations makes them look less menacing. Another is that there seems to be no way of actually going after the 'absent' author, who should presumably take most of the blame. Translation thus constitutes a convenient way of introducing novelties into a culture, without arousing too much antagonism, especially in cultures reluctant to deviate from sanctioned models and norms (Toury 1995: 41).

Translating involves both the source and target norms and this enables translators to make a choice as to which to follow. Translators tend to stay partly within and partly out of these two sets of norms.

4. Social Determinism and the Translator's Idiosyncrasy

Government and creativity are two sides of the same translation coin. In contrast to scholars from the philological school, who highly value artistic creation and the translator's freedom in literary translation, scholars in the Manipulation School attach greater importance to the constraints of the target cultural norms on translation. This evokes criticism from some scholars. Antoine Berman, for example, argued that since norms tended to prescribe translations of the naturalizing kind, and translators were supposed to obey norms, a norm-based approach denied all creativity to translation and translators(Berman cited in Hermans 1999b: 154-5). And as Anthony Pym pointed out, a mechanistic application of the norms concept is bound to downgrade the individual translator's agency (Pym cited in Hermans 1999b: 154 -5).

However Hermans (Hermans 1999b: 128-132) contends that constraints are conditioning factors, not absolutes. Individuals can choose to go with or against them. Translators, too, can decide to defer to the powers or foment opposition, be it poetic or political. He then quotes from Bourdieu, adding that two dangers threaten research in the human sciences:

naïve teleological or 'finalist' thinking, which sees the end of a known process as illuminating the path towards the goal; and mechanistic determinism, which interprets processes as the inevitable unraveling of a set of initial conditions.

(Hermans 1999b: 128-132)

PREV | TOP | NEXT