Strategies of translation
The translation's methods of different kinds of literature, their types and the value in life of the humanity. Grammatical, lexical, stylistic and phraseological difficulties of translation of literature, some samples of translation of their expressions.
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1. Strategies of Translation 5
1.1 Source Text Analysis and Methods of Its Translation 5
1.2 Translation Equivalence and Methods of Its Approaching 10
1.3 Problems of Technical Text Translation 15
2. Literal Translation 22
2.1 Literal Translation of Technical Text 22
2.2 Calque in Technical Text Trasnlation 27
In this Qualification Paper we've set forth to study the translation methods of different kinds of literature at a deeper level, their types and ways of their translation of literature, to consider the function of different kinds of literature in everyday life of the humanity.
The object of this Qualification paper can be considered as one that gives the detailed review of the ways foreign literature can be translated into Russian language. It also helps to improve one's understanding of the principal rules of translation which plays leading role while processing translation.
The aim of this work is to introduce the translation approach to foreign literature so that to make it easy to perceive for those willing to keep up their educational and scientific carrier in the science of translation, it was purposed to broaden their view on translation studies and peculiar features while translating any kind of literature.
In this work we set the following tasks:
- to review all the sources of translating literature;
- to reveal the methods of translation of foreign literature;
- to investigate grammatical, lexical, stylistic and phraseological difficulties of translation of different kinds of literature.
We should mention that this research work represents a great theoretical value for those willing to take up their future carrier in the field of translations as invaluable reference to the methods and the ways of translation of literature.
And the practical value of this work involves the idea that translation represents a field aimed at training future translators/interpreters to translate verbal and written materials on Political subjects basing on the study of International politics, economics, finance, banking, etc. to differentiate the language features of English, Russian and other languages as well as specific lexicology, phraseology, syntax and style.
The source information for this research work has been carefully studied and investigated before it was applied to the given work.
The originality of this work is in its creative approach to the study and methods of translation, besides, it contains a detailed review of ways and methods of translation.
The given Qualification paper contains introduction, two chapters, conclusion and bibliography list.
The first chapter gives a detailed review of the study of the theory of translation and also reveals the role of literature and terms in everyday life of the humanity which are believed to be interesting to future translator/interpreters. It also discussed the methods of translation of literature with purpose to make it easier for translator to achieve adequate translation in the target language.
The second chapter deals with the detailed study of grammatical, lexical, stylistic difficulties involved in translation of literature. It also gives some hints on translation of idioms and set expressions and their behavior in literature.
We have also attached some samples of translation of set expressions so that to enable the future translator to benefit from the given paper in their further researches in the fields of translation.
In conclusion we have summed up the results of our laborious investigation translation of foreign literature.
At the end of the research paper we have attached the bibliography list to enable the future translator to use information sources used in this Paper.
1. Strategies of Translation
1.1 Source Text Analysis and Methods of Its Translation
Most translators prefer to think of their work as a profession and would like to see others to treat them like professionals rather than as skilled or semi-skilled workers. But to achieve this, translators need to develop an ability to stand back and reflect on what they do and how they do it. Like doctors and engineers, they have to prove to themselves as well as others that they are in control of what they do; that they do not just translate well because they have 'flair' for translation, but rather because, like other professionals, they have made a conscious effort to understand various aspects of their work.
Unlike medicine and engineering, translation is a very young discipline in academic terms. It is only just starting to feature as a subject of study in its own right, not yet in all but in an increasing number of universities and colleges around the world. Like any young discipline, it needs to draw on the findings and theories of other related disciplines in order to develop and formalize its own methods; but which disciplines it can naturally and fruitfully be related to is still a matter of some controversy. Almost every aspect of life in general and of the interaction between speech communities in particular can be considered relevant to translation, a discipline which has to concern itself with how meaning is generated within and between various groups of people in various cultural settings. This is clearly too big an area to investigate in one go. So, let us just start by saying that, if translation is ever to become a profession in the full sense of the word, translators will need something other than the current mixture of intuition and practice to enable them to reflect on what they do and how they do it. They will need, above all, to acquire a sound knowledge of the raw material with which they work: to understand what language is and how it comes to function for its users.
Translation is a process of rendering a text, written piece or a speech by means of other languages. The difference of translation from retelling or other kinds of transfer of a given text is that that translation is a process of creating an original unity in contexts and forms of original.
The translation quality is defined by its completeness and value.
Translation must take into account a number of constraints, including context, the rules of grammar of the two languages, their writing conventions, their idioms and the like. Consequently, as has been recognized at least since the time of the translator Martin Luther, one translates best into the language that one knows best.
Traditionally translation has been a human activity, though attempts have been made to computerize or otherwise automate the translation of natural-language texts (machine translation) or to use computers as an aid to translation (computer-assisted translation).
Perhaps the most common misconception about translation is that there exists a simple "word-for-word" relation between any two languages, and that translation is therefore a straightforward and mechanical process. On the contrary, translation is always fraught with uncertainties and with the potential for inadvertent "spilling over" of idioms and usages from one language into the other.
The translation process, whether it be for translation or interpreting, can be described as:
Decoding the meaning of the source text; and
Re-encoding this meaning in the target language.
To decode the meaning of a text, the translator must first identify its component "translation units," that is to say, the segments of the text to be treated as a cognitive unit. A translation unit may be a word, a phrase or even one or more sentences. Behind this seemingly simple procedure lies a complex cognitive operation. To decode the complete meaning of the source text, the translator must consciously and methodically interpret and analyze all its features. This process requires thorough knowledge of the grammar, semantics, syntax, idioms, and the like, of the source language, as well as the culture of its speakers.
The translator needs the same in-depth knowledge to re-encode the meaning in the target language. In fact, in general, translators' knowledge of the target language is more important, and needs to be deeper, than their knowledge of the source language. For this reason, most translators translate into a language of which they are native speakers.
In addition, knowledge of the subject matter under discussion is essential.
In recent years, studies in cognitive linguistics have provided valuable insights into the cognitive process of translation.
Translating texts from one language into another is probably the most difficult task.
What is a good translation? Or what would you think if you hear that a text has been translated well, or badly? A definite answer can hardly be found. It's much easier to find a grammatical or lexical mistake in a sentence than to say whether the translation is good, though grammatically or even lexically incorrect. If, for instance, you come across the sentence «I has a interesting book», you will easily understand what it means and correct both mistakes, so, on the one side, the sentence is not correct, but, on the other side, it is understandable and, so to say, correctable. On the contrary, there may be such mistakes that make the contents incomprehensible, or, which is even worse, «lead the user astray».
To approach the problem of translation quality, we should first analyze user subgroups and see who needs what, otherwise we shall hardly be able to distinguish between «good» and «bad» since «good» implies the existence of a user who is satisfied, that is answering the question «Good for whom?».
Direct translation has the word-for-word basis. For example, when translating from Russian into English, the translater substitutes each Russian word or phrase found in the dictionary with its English equivalent. This is called direct translation because the translation system is based on direct correspondence between 2 languages, such as Russian-English, German-Spanish, Dutch-French, etc. It can only translate between the given language pair, and it's not capable of anallyzing the source language sentence for subsequent translation into another target language.
On the contrary, the transfer approach presupposes independent analysis of the source text sentences as well as independent generation of the target text ones. This means that the system, instead of translating word-for-word, first analyzes the source sentence and comes up with a special grammatical representation of this sentence, which (representaton) is then transformed into a sentence in the target language. “Transfer” means the transition to the target language after the first stage of the translation process, the analysis.
Generally speaking, the interlingua philosophy resembles the transfer one. You see, an interlingua is a special artificial language used for making source language sentence representations. The idea is really great! Just imagine that you have to develop a system to translate between 20 languages, which would make 400 language pairs! Which would be easier to make: 400 direct translation programs, or 20 programs for translating from each of the 20 languages into the interlingua plus 20 programs for translating from the interlingua into each of the 20?
This situation is but very well known to practical developers of language engineering systems, who constantly face the «noise/recall(completeness)» dilemma. From time to time, we come across the typical situation: too much analysis causes poorer translation quality than no analysis at all.
So, here is a general outline of the translation procedure in some translation systems.
Stage 1. The system makes what is called word-for-word and phrase-for-phrase translation of the source text, recognizing phrases and single words and extracting the corresponding grammatical data from the dictionary. This is done using the morphological analysis rules. For example, when analyzing English texts, a table of irregular verbs is made use of, as well as a set of rules for recognizing noun plural forms; the German morphological analysis is based on the rules of linking German separable prefixes to their corresponding verbs; Slavonic words are recognized in the source text due to special tables of Russian paradigms.
Stage 2. The system analyzes the resulting text and makes its best to eliminate as many ambiguities as it can. Doing so, it makes use of special contextual rules for grammatical and semantic disambiguation. In this case, contexts of ambiguous words are analyzed.
Stage 3. The system generates the target text. The task consists in making the target sentences look as natural as possible. The system tries to insert articles (which is even a difficult task for some humans, to say nothing of an algorithm), changes word order, etc.
The latter two are very difficult-to-implement stages, and, I as said, `too much analysis' may really turn out to be `too little analysis'. For instance, the system sometimes transposes words in such a way that the resulting sentence seems to make no sense at all.
Let's call a spade a spade: if the grammatical structures of the source and target languages are not so much alike as, for example, this of Russian, the output texts are very far from those made by qualified translators.
Experience shows that the most efficient technology of translating from Russian into English and from English into Russian is using an automatic translation system (PARS or another) and a dictionary look-up system with large professional dictionaries (like Polyglossum) to complement each other, if, and this is important, the translation system dictionaries are not representative enough, that is either they don't contain some specific terms the Polyglossum-like dictionaries have, or the user needs explanations of some terms to choose the most appropriate variants.
The fact is that the Polyglossum system has a program for dictionary look-up, and the word entries in its dictionaries contain numerous explanations and commentaries. That is why, Polyglossum is not only a source of new PARS dictionaries, but it also serves for translating technical terms which PARS fails to translate, or for choosing the most appropriate translation variant if the human translator post-editing the raw machine translation needs an explanation of a term.
1.2 Translation Equivalence and Methods of Its Approaching
If a specific linguistic unit in one language carries the same intended meaning / message encoded in a specific linguistic medium in another, then these two units are considered to be equivalent. The domain of equivalents covers linguistic units such as morphemes, words, phrases, clauses, idioms and proverbs. So, finding equivalents is the most problematic stage of translation. It is worth mentioning, however, it is not meant that the translator should always find one-to-one categorically or structurally equivalent units in the two languages, that is, sometimes two different linguistic units in different languages carry the same function. For example, the verb "happened" in the English sentence "he happens to be happy" equals the adverb "etefaghan" (by chance) in the Persian sentence: "u etefaghan khosh hal ast". The translator, after finding out the meaning of an SL linguistic form, should ask himself / herself what the linguistic form is in another language--TL--for the same meaning to be encoded by.
The analysis of fictional texts reveals some interesting features. The main observation is that the author, not infrequently, resorts to disintegration of the linear chronological sequence of described events. The typical example is given in Ivan Bunin's story "The tender breathing". It starts with the death of Olya Meshcherskaya, the main heroine. Then the author resumes with a depiction of her life in natural temporal order. However, the order is broken several times with a subsequent resumption of the event line. The text has a lot of digressions from the principal thread of narrative, which supply the reader with background information. At the end of the story the author is back to the scene of Olya's death. To explain the author's intentions, we should consider theories of " time ", since causal relations (events) in the text are, in effect, unfolded within the temporal structure.
The structure of poetic texts often has the same characteristics. Consider the following example:
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The sonnet in its core contains the semiotic time model, since the events are represented in space. One can observe the cyclic manner of representation: at first Shelley introduces the scene of Ozymandias's remnants, i.e. death, then animates the king, describes his appearance, manner and habits, i.e. life. Finally the author resumes with the decay of that colossal wreck, i.e. turns to the death. Words like stand, desert, lies, stamped, boundless, stretch play a role as space indicators. In this framework, Shelley's "Ozymandias" shows a resemblance in its time model with Bunin's "The tender breathing". To analyse the poem from the translator's angle let us consider the theory of dynamic equivalence.
In his theory of dynamic equivalence in translation, Eugene Nida (1964) argues that the art of translation had outstripped the theory of translation. His work was written in an effort to provide a theoretical basis for what was already being produced.
Following the dynamic equivalence principle, the target text is considered to be adequate to the original when the reaction of the target text reader coincides with that of the source language reader.
Accordingly, with the aim of revealing the adequacy of translations to the original in terms of the recipient's aesthetic response, we have made an experiment with the application of Osgood's Semantic Differential, a direct associative test and content analysis. The method of the semantic differential, as claimed by Osgood (1957), proves to be universal for speakers of different languages.
As a first step, 33 native English speakers estimated the poetic text (the above-mentioned Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias) on the basis of the factors of evaluation, potency and activity. The three core scales (good-bad, strong-weak, active-passive) exemplify these factors. Each factor contained four seven-point bipolar rating scales, the end-points of which were anchored with antonymic adjectives. Scores ranged from -3 at the negative end of each scale to +3 at the positive end. The subjects were instructed to mark a chosen number. The responses showed the respondents' subjective judgment of the stimulus (text) and reflected their semantic space content.
As second step, 37 native Russian speakers followed the same procedure. As a result, semantic profiles of the original text and its three Russian translations were drawn up. It has been revealed that V. Koptilov's translation is the closest version (translation) of Shelley's sonnet (original) in terms of respondents' semantic space content.
The qualitative content analysis reveals three principal categories in the original text: power, life, death. The results of the associative experiment held with English and Russian speakers demonstrate that in the English speakers' mentality the concept "power" has positive or emotionally neutral associations, for instance, order, president, money, taxes, manager, and the like. The Russian subjects gave primarily negative responses: pocket, Gongadze, oil, magnate, money, to lie, and the like. The word "life" is evaluated positively by English participants, and less positively by Russians. The stimulus "death" shows a cultural paradox: for Russians it is not so bad, and contrasts with English speakers' responses. In a third of the Russians the attitude is neutral, more than a half of respondents evaluate it negatively, the rest - positively.
Content analysis was undertaken to reveal and to compare features of the main categories in the original text and in its Ukrainian and Russian versions. Consider the following example taken from J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" (Salinger 1998):
"Daddy's going to kill you. He's going to kill you," she said. I wasn't listening, though. I was thinking about something else - something crazy.
"You know what I'd like to be?" I said. "You know what I'd like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?"
"What? Stop swearing."
"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like-"
"It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said.
"It's a poem. By Robert Burns."
"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns." She was right, though. It is "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." I didn't know it then, though.
"I thought it was 'If a body catch a body,'" I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
There are three main categories in the text: DANGER, HUMAN, TIME&SPACE. The first category is represented by the nouns cliff, edge, catcher. The second one contains nouns body, kids, choice. The third one has the nouns rye, field, day (see Table 1).
Table 1: Content analysis of the original and target texts
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