AND TRANSLATION UNITS

TRANSLATION STRATEGIES

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1. Modes (methods) of translating.

2. Translation units and text segmentation.

3. Types of transformations in translation.

1. Translation is converting a message in source language into a message in target language. Faithful translation is impossible by definition due to the source and target languages being different in their grammatical structure and vocabulary, to say nothing of the cultural differences which may also affect the modes and results of translation. The translator is expected to know the source and target cultures equally well. However, it is far from being the case. In most cases the translator assesses certain cultural elements, or even whole source text categories, only approximately, and translates them accordingly. The problem of cross-cultural correspondences is compounded by the fact that there are no comparative reference books on the cultures of different nations.

Nevertheless, texts based on common cultural values, or at least on comparable values, are quite translatable if the translator focuses on rendering common and universal concepts rather than on untranslatable components of source information, stylistic, emotional, evaluative, which are responsible for translation difficulties, since they manifest themselves differently in different national and cultural traditions. The range of variation of such problems is rather wide: from separate untranslatable elements to the whole source text, the nature of the same translation problem varying, depending on the direction of translation.

When a business letter is translated from English into Russian, the English form of address Dear Sir is often rendered into Russian as Дорогой сэр. This form of address is not common to the Russian business style although more or less acceptable since Russian culture is more tolerant towards foreign borrowings. A more appropriate form of address would be Уважаемый господин директор, even though it does not retain the lexico-semantic composition of the initial English form. Thus, a translator from English into Russian has more room for manoeuvring since he has a choice among the correspondences.

However, the same problem manifests differently in translating from Russian into English. Neither the use of an exclamation mark, nor a word-for-word translation Deeply respected Mr. Obama would be an acceptable target language correspondence to the form of address Глубокоуважаемый господин Обама!

Translation problems of this kind are resolved owing to the translator’s mediation, existing reference grammars, bilingual dictionaries, and culture handbooks. The communicative success of translation greatly depends on how correctly the translator chooses the mode of translating, applies the relevant strategy, and determines translation units.

First of all, the translator is supposed to determine the mode of translating, i.e. the measure of information order (информационная упорядоченность) for the target text. The first step in choosing the mode of such structuring is to determine the form in which the source text will be represented in target culture, full or partial. Depending on the communicative task, either full or abridged, partial translation is chosen.

According to T.A. Kazakova, partial translation can be applied to any type of text to be translated. The result of applying partial translation may be theses, abstracts, annotations, summaries, and so on. In fact, partial translation can be done in two fundamental ways: selective translation and functional translation. As a mode of partial translation, selective translation consists in choosing key units of the source text and translating them in full. All the other source text components are rejected as secondary and are not subject to translating at all. Such a mode is employed for rendering in brief business letters, newspaper materials, scientific articles, reports, and so on.

As a mode of partial translation, functional translation consists in arranging target text from the functionally transformed source text units. Functional change can be based on lexico-semantic, grammatical, and stylistic transformations of the source text applied for the purpose of abridging or simplifying it. A typical example of such translation is the so-called literary retelling/rendition (литературный пересказ) when a whole work of literature is retold in a simplified version.

The aim of full translation is a thorough reproduction of the source text information structure in target language units. Full translation can be effected in various ways, but the most common ones are a word-for-word translation, semantic translation, and communicative translation.

A word-for-word translation is a word-for-word reproduction of the source text using target language units which preserves, as far as possible, the sequence of the source text elements. In fact, a word-for-word translation is seldom used for communicative purposes, its sphere of application being science. Thus, for linguistic purposes a word-for-word translation is preferred to the other modes of reproducing the source text as it allows conveying information about the syntactic structure of the original. A word-for-word translation is also used in commentaries to untranslatable play on words or phraseological units.

In semantic translation, the translator tries to reproduce, as fully as possible, the contextual meaning of the source text units using target language units. The process of semantic translation is a natural interaction of two strategies: a strategy orientated towards the mode of expression accepted in the target language, and a strategy orientated towards the preservation of the initial form of expression. The former strategy is applied to source text conventional lexical and grammatical elements, such as standard syntactic structures, punctuation, sentence length, trite metaphors, conjunctions, morphological structures, generally used terminological words, etc. The latter strategy proves to be appropriate in translating individual locutions, individual stylistic devices, unusual words, and so on. In such cases semantic translation tries to retain as many peculiarities of the initial sign as possible.

As a rule, semantic translation is applied to texts of high social and cultural status, namely: important historical documents, high literature works, and unique samples of epos. In semantic translation, attention to minute linguistic details of the source text often outweighs considerations of target text “readability”. Such a mode of translation is used, first of all, in academic editions, meant for a narrow circle of specialists, and in translating single-copy documents as well as directions, scientific publications, and legal documents.

The communicative mode of translating implies a mode of rendering the source text which results in creating a target text whose communicative effect upon the receptor is analogous to that of the source text. It is the source text content and its aesthetic value that become the chief object of translation. Unlike functional translation, communicative translation does not admit of any abridgement or simplification. As a matter of fact, what is known as literary-artistic translation is nothing more than communicative translation. It takes into account, or programs, the pragmatics of the receptor. This mode is the most optimal one for translating the greater part of fiction, journalistic texts, partly for translating scientific and popular science materials.

In actual translation, most complex texts are translated by translators’ using different modes, with one of them being dominant. The dominant mode of translating determines the character of the relationship between source text and target text on the whole, the mode of source text segmentation, the units of translation, and the choice of translation techniques.

An ability to segment the source text in different ways is one of the main skills the translator is supposed to master. Exact segmentation of the text into translation units is a major precondition for faithful translation, on the whole. The

concept “translation unit” is conventional, to a degree, and scholars disagree as regards the term itself and the nature of the concept.

L.S. Barkhudarov defines the translation unit as a source text unit to which a correspondence can be found in the text of translation but whose constituent parts, taken separately, do not have any correspondences in target text. He admits that the most important task a translator faces in the process of translation is finding in the source text a minimal unit to be translated, or as it is customarily referred to, a translation unit. A translatologist attempting to describe the translating process is confronted with the same task. L.S. Barkhudarov specifies that the term “translation unit” is largely conventional, and it would be more accurate to speak of a unit of translation equivalence. In practice, qualifying a translation as “equivalent” or “non-equivalent”, if comparatively long stretches of text are translated, cannot be absolutely unconditional. It would be more correct to speak of different degrees of translation equivalence. Full equivalence is rather an ideal than reality.

Another noteworthy aspect of L.S. Barkhudarov’s definition of the term is his identification of the translation unit with language units. Translation units, therefore, turn out to be different both in the complexity of the meanings expressed and in their length. L.S. Barkhudarov notes that a translation unit is a variable category. Levels of translation may be distinguished in accord with the hierarchy of levels of lingual units. The phonemic level presupposes translation at the level of phonemes (transcription); graphemes of written speech presuppose translation at the level of graphemes (transliteration). Phonemes and graphemes turn out to be translation units in such cases. The morphemic level makes it possible to do a translation at the level of morphemes (blue-print); the word level presupposes translation at the level of words (lexical equivalence); the phrase level – at the level of phrases; the sentence level – at the level of sentences; the text level – at the level of texts. L.S. Barkhudarov gives examples of translation units corresponding to different language levels: 1) Translation at the level of phonemes: Heath [ hı:θ] – each phoneme of the English word is replaced by a similar phoneme of the Russian language. Thus, [h] is substituted for by the Russian phoneme [x]; [ı:] – by the phoneme [и]; the spirant [θ] – by the Russian occlusive consonant [т]. The English name Heath, thus, acquires the form [Хит] in Russian. 2) Translation at the level of graphemes (transliteration): Lincoln ['liŋkən] must be Линкен in transcription, but not Линкольн, where we observe transcription and transliteration. 3) Translation at the level of morphemes: table+s = стол+ы. 4) Translation at the word level: He came home. = Он пришел домой. 5) Translation at the phrase level: come to the wrong shop – обратиться не по адресу. The terrestrial globe is a member of the solar system. – 1. Земной шар входит в солнечную систему. – 2. Земля входит в солнечную систему. 6) Translation at sentence level: a) proverbs, b) announcements: Slow, men at work. – Осторожно, дорожные работы. 7) Translation at text level – translation of poetry.

In his classification of language units L.S. Barkhudarov departs from a strictly linguistic Saussurean discrimination of language and speech. He supposes, not without reason, that in translation we do not deal with a system of language but with speech. So, units of language are identified with units of speech which has something in common with Retsker’s conception who claimed that translation was keen on the functional aspect of language units.

It becomes evident from this account that the notion “translation unit” constructed on the basis of language units and speech (text) turns out to be rather a broad one.

There is still another aspect of L.S. Barkhudarov’s definition of translation unit which is of interest to us. He regards a translation unit as the smallest, minimal unit of language which has a correspondence in target text. It enables him to link the category “translation unit” with the category of equivalence. The translator should strive to achieve the appropriate level of equivalence at the right level.

T.A. Kazakova points out that not only a word but any lingual unit, from the phoneme to the supra-phrasal unity, can serve as a basic unit of translation. Eliciting the textual function of that or another source unit is a necessary condition for determining correctly the source unit to be translated. It is wrong assessment of the textual functions of lingual units that accounts for the inappropriateness of a word-for-word translation. When used in that or another communicative situation (oral or written) the word as a unit of language turns out to be linked with other words of the given text by systemic relations; it becomes situationally dependent upon the conditions of the text. The dependences are of systemic character, and form a hierarchy of contexts, ranging from the minimal (the adjacent word) to the maximal (the whole text or even hypertext connections).

In fact, the translator has to deal not with isolated words but with a system of dependences conditioned by the source text.

Two types of textual units to be translated are distinguished in the process of segmenting the source text and determining translation units: units with standard dependence on the context and units with non-standard dependence.

Translation of units with standard dependence on the context, or typologically equivalent units, is done comparatively easily at the level of lexical and grammatical correspondences, taking into account the typological characteristics of the two languages. Transformations of source text units of this type are also standard, and they boil down to inter-language correspondences. Units with non-standard dependence on the context, or equivalent-lacking units, require special translating technologies as their structure and function may substantially differ in the two languages, considering also differences between source and target cultures, the background knowledge of the source text author, translator, and target text receptor. Special translation techniques are needed for translating equivalent-lacking units. It is also important to consider a combination of linguistic, cultural, and psychological factors.

The translator has three main groups of translation techniques at his/her disposal for dealing with equivalent-lacking source text units: lexical, grammatical, and stylistic.

Lexical devices are applicable when there is a non-standard linguistic unit at the word-level, e.g. some proper name present in the source linguistic culture and absent in the translating language, specialist terms, words denoting specific national objects, phenomena, and concepts. The most common devices of rendering non-standard source language lexical elements are transliteration / transcription, blue-printing (loan-translation), modulation (sense development), description, commentary, mixed (parallel) translation.

Grammatical translation devices are used when the object of translation is that or another equivalent-lacking grammatical structure, ranging from the morpheme to the supra-phrasal unity. In comparison with lexical problems of translation grammatical ones present lesser difficulty for the translator, although they have a specific character of their own and presuppose the translator’s ability to use appropriate devices. Among the grammatical translation devices T.A. Kazakova mentions extension, addition, joining, functional change as grammatical transformations, and antonymous (antonymic) translation, zero-translation, and some others.

Stylistic translation devices are employed when the object of translation is a stylistically-marked unit of the source text. As is known, some stylistic units defy translation at all, others need substantial transformations, and still others, which are an insignificant minority, can be given standard correspondences in translation. Among the main translation devices one could mention here change of lexical composition, change of the image, change of the figure of speech (or, change of the trope), elimination of the figurative meaning, a word-for-word translation) accompanied by a commentary or without it.

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Казакова Т.А. Практические основы перевода. English ↔ Russian. –СПб.: «Издательство Союз», 2001.

Гарбовский Н.К. Теория перевода: учебник. – М.: Изд-во Моск. ун-та, 2004.