Bayanic translation

2.1 Hunáyn Ibn Ishaq as a model

After carefully studying various translations, Al-Jáhiz made the following require­

ments for a good performance:

1. thorough knowledge of the subject;

2. perfect command both of source and target languages;

3. knowledge of customsand traditions(culture);

4. improvementof the text by the translator, through an adaptation to the TL;

5. revision, verification and comparison of different copies (in SL);

6. translation for thereader;

7. conciseness, clarity, simplicity and elegance;

8. translation should be sentence-based (al-lafd).

Hunáyn Ibn Ishaq (809-873) was a model for Al-Jahiz concept of translation. He was under a dual influence of the heavily literal syriac translation school and the Arab bay an. It seemed that Hunayn was influenced by Aristotle’s book of poetics and that Al-Jáhiz developed his bayanic theory on the basis of that book and of Hunayn’s translations.

2.2 Hunayn’s methodology

According to Salah Al-Dfn Al-Safadf (1296-1362) and Bahá’Al-Din Al-cÁmilí (1546-1637), Hunayn’s method “consisted of reading the whole sentence, comprehending its meaning and then expressing it with a correspondingsentence

Mohammed Didaoui

whether words are equivalent or not.” (Al-Jamili 1982: 36, Khüri 1988: 51 and Salama-Carr 1990: 64-65, emphasis added). The sentence occupied a central posi­

tion in his translations.

In fact, the importance of the sentence and the word has been emphasized in modern linguistics, and within the context of machine-translation (Papegaaij and Schubert 1988). Sinclair (1994: 17) affirms that:

The text is the sentence that is in front of us when an act of reading is in progress. Each sentence then is a new beginning to the text. Each sentence organizes language and the world for that particular location in the text, not dependent on anything else.

An accurate translation will therefore concentrate on the sentence, with special emphasis on terminology and phraseology. Language parallelism is guaranteed and a high degree of accuracy and correspondence is reached.

The architect,as a whole and as a sequence of sentences, determines the general context.

Hunayn fully adapted each sentence according to the Arabic language standards.

He was perfectly imbued with the Arabic bayan, and his translations were character­

ized by elegance, clarity and smoothness (cf Bergstrásser 1913, Meyerhof 1928, Rosenthal 1975 and others). He was quality-minded and he systematically revised his colleagues’ work in Bayt Al-Hikma or even some of his own translations done at an earlier stage as he gained more experience and expertise.

His approach had two other main traits:

1. His translations were modelled according to the specific needs of the user and the purpose of translation, thus applying what is known today as “skopostheo- rie” in the German School, with special emphasis on informativity and accept­

ability.

This idea is stressed in modern linguistics, as a text-producer should always have in mind an imagined reader (Coulthard 1994).

2. As a specialist, a scholar in his own right, he was always anxious to deliver product with a touch of eleganceand clarity,as he was in full command of the cognitive content (cf Bergstrásser 1913, Meyerhof 1928, Rosenthal 1975 and others). He particularly excelled in the translation of medical texts, as he was a renowned physician.

It is therefore evident that he departed from the literal concept of the Syriac School and developed it into a more balanced technique with a skillful combination of a maximum correspondence between the ST and TT at the micro-level and a fore­

most utilization of the Arabic virtual system (cf de Beaugrande 1995), with the valuable support of the Arabic bayan which was flourishing at that time.

Section 1. Crosscultural Differences

3. Conclusion

Bayanic translation finds its roots at the bayanic concept of Al-Jahiz, which was applied in practice by both Al-Jáhiz and Hunayn Ibn Ishaq under a dual influence of Aristotle and facilitated by the Arabic language potentialities. It is the most suitable mode for multilingual translation in an international setting, as it combines clarity, conciseness,simplicity and elegance and is reader-oriented. Revision, for qual­

ity control purposes, play an important role in it. This kind of translation guarantees a maximum parallelism between Text and is suited for machine-aided translation.

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Crosscultural Differences in Users ’