l.The system of transfer operations
4. A framework for an Indo-European-Hungarian transfer typologytransfer typology
Four languages - English, French, German, and Russian - will be contrasted with Hungarian which is a Finno-Ugric language, and will be briefly referred to as Indo-European languages (abbreviated as IE languages). Despite the systemic differences inside the IE group, we decided to treat them together in relation to Hungarian. Our decision was based (1) on the literature on language typology, (2) experiences of practising translators, editors of translations and translator trainers, and (3) the evidence of our corpus.
Data collection began in the 80s (cf. Klaudy 1991a. Transfer Operations in Translation. Budapest: College of Foreign Trade), long before corpus studies became common in translation studies. Therefore, when we use the word “cor
pus”, “parallel corpus”, “multilingual corpus” we do not refer to a collection of machine-readable texts, as described in Baker (1993, 1995).
4.1. Language-typological reasons
It is commonly known from the literature on language typology that the lexical and grammatical systems of the four IE languages under investigation differ in similar ways in their basic features from the lexical and grammatical system of Hungarian (cf. the analytical morphological and lexical structuring in IE languages versus the synthetic morphological and lexical structuring in Hungarian, synthetic sentence structuring in IE languages vs analytical sentence structuring in Hungarian, domi
nantly SVO basic word order in IE languages vs dominantly SOV basic word order in Hungarian, the complementation of nominal structures to the left in Hunga
rian vs. their complementation to the right in IE languages, subject-prominence in English vs. topic-prominence in Hungarian, etc., cf. Bárczi 1975, Dezső, 1980, 1982b, Ferenczy 1973, É Kiss 1982). On the basis of all of this, contrasting the four IE languages as a group with Hungarian seemed a legitimate undertaking.
4.2. Experience as a practising translator
I was also stimulated to do so by my experience as a translator and translator-train
er. Generations of Hungarian translators have passed on their experience about potential trouble spots translating from English, French, German and Russian into Hungarian. These intuitive, experience-based observations strongly resemble one another. Various pieces of advice - to “verbalise” (i.e., use verbs), to use
“hogy” ('that'), to “chop up” sentences, to use the singular for paired organs, to search for active subjects, etc. - all came in handy for translators, independently of whether they were translating from English, French, German or Russian. These
4. The framework of an Indo-European-Hungarian transfer typology
intuitive explanations contained a lot of very witty intuitive observations about the differences between Hungarian and IE languages:
(1) "Hungarian likes to use verbs when IE languages use nouns.”
(2) "Hungarian likes to use active when IE languages use passive.”
(3) "When you translate from IE languages into Hungarian you have to begin the translation from the end of the sentence.”
(4) "Hungarian cannot manage the long chains of complements in preposition to the nouns.”
(5) "IE languages force Hungarian to use this long nominal chain, but we do not like it.”
(6) "IE languages cannot evoke the whole richness of Hungarian verbs.”
(7) "When translating from Indo-European languages an impoverishment of the Hungarian language takes place - against which translators have to tight etc.”
As a novice translator I myself also got similar advice from the readers and editors of Európa Publishing Company. These views were so unanimously held by writ
ers, poets, translators, readers and editors working there that I felt as if there exist
ed a "translation norm” typical of Európa Publishing Company. So I decided to explore the linguistic basis of this translation norm, in order to describe it in a more systemic way and to use in my work as a translator trainer. Later on, acquainted with the practice of several Hungarian publishing companies I realised that this
"translation norm” was followed not only at Európa Publishing Company, but was held widely in the Hungary’s translator community, even though no-one vol
unteered to codify it.
4.3. Evidence of the corpus
Since one of the main objectives of this book is to reveal the rules behind intuitive translator decisions and to linguistically describe the experience of several genera
tions of translators, I was naturally also interested to see whether these four lan
guages really behave in a similar way in being translated from or to Hungarian.
The data collected confirmed the assumption that the four Indo-European languages in many aspects "contrasted” with Hungarian in a similar way. I found the following example beautifully illustrating this phenomenon on the first page of a Budapest travel guide published by Corvina Publishing Company (for explana
tion see GR 4.3 )
Hol is kezdjük? (lit.: Where shall we start?) (Bart 1) Where shall we begin our journey} (Gorman 1) Par ou commencer notre flânerie? (Chehádé 1)
Wo sollen wir unseren Spaziergang beginnen? (Dira 1) Otkuda nachat’ nasu progulku? (Voronkina 1)
4.4. The difficulties of a joint investigation
Of course, I am aware of the abundant differences inside the IE group. The lexi
cal and grammatical systems of all four Indo-European languages under investiga
tion have their own typical features, which distinguish them from the others.
These differences have been studied in detail by translation scholars: the specific problems of translation within the IE group were studied e.g., by: Vinay and Dar- belnet 1959, 1995 (English-French), Hervey and Higgins 1992 (English-French), Adab 1993, 1996 (English-French), Doherty 1987, 1992 (English-German), Malblanc 1944, 1968 (French-German), Gak 1977 (French-Russian), Komis
sarov and Koralova 1990 (English-Russian), etc.
As for the internal differences within the IE group it is enough to think of the lack of the article or the difference between continuous and perfect verb forms in Russian, the obligatory second position of the verb, the sentence frame and related word order problems, or to refer to the possibilities of long compounds in German, or to mention the differences in word formation of English and German and so on.
The different traditions in the linguistic description of English, French, German, and Russian also caused problems. Let me illustrate this with a simple example.
While Russian linguistic description distinguishes between adjectival participles (present, past, active, passive) and adverbial participles (perfect, continuous), Ger
man linguistic description only distinguishes the category of the present parti
ciple, and English grammars merely mention the various types of -ing form and -ing clause. I solved this problem by following the Hungarian tradition of linguis
tic description, sometimes, even forcing onto it the foreign language categories as well (for example I will use the distinction between “parts of speech” such as verb, noun, adjective, numbers, pronouns etc., and “parts of sentence” such as predi
cate, subject, object, attribute and adverb, which is strictly followed by the tradi
tional Hungarian grammars, but not by English grammars).
It should also be mentioned that all along I tried to use the concepts and ter
minology of traditional descriptive grammars, in order to avoid confusion that might arise from different approaches to language description.
4.5. The framework of an IE-Hungarian transfer typology
Following the description of IE-Hungarian and Hungariant-IE transfer opera
tions, the framework of a general Indo-European-Hungarian and Hungarian-Indo- European translation typology, or in other words, transfer typology is outlined, which has already been referred to sporadically, but has not yet been systematical
ly studied on the basis of a large corpus.
The contrasts between Hungarian and English, French, German, and Russian are widely discussed in the literature (Hungarian-German: Juhász 1970, 1980, Hun- garian-English: Dezső and Nemser 1980, Dezső 1982b, 1984, Stephanides 1986, 1989, Heltai 1992, Hungarian-Russian: Papp 1979), and investigations in language typology have also shown that with regard to certain universal traits (Greenberg 1963) the lexical and grammatical systems of Indo-European languages differ from the lexical and grammatical system of Hungarian in a similar fashion (Bárczi
4. The framework of an Indo-European-Hungarian transfer typology
1975, Dezső 1982b), but no-one has applied this knowledge in the description of translational operations so far.
The examples also show (and we shall often refer to this in the summary com
ments at the end of each section) that in translations from Indo-European lan
guages into Hungarian a typical translation norm can be observed, which is not always identical with the mother tongue norm, i.e., translators seem to insist on certain native language norms more than non-translator language users do.
4.6. The sources of the examples
We intended to work with a wide range of materials in constructing the transfer typology. We tried to include the translation of many texts and the work of several translators, because we did not want to explore special translation feats, but rather the typical solutions (cf. the difference described in 1.1. regarding the linguistic and the literary approach).
The examples are taken from five languages (English, French, German, Rus
sian and Hungarian) and eight directions of translation (English -» Hungarian, Hungarian -» English, French -» Hungarian, Hungarian -» French, German -»
Hungarian, Hungarian -» German, Russian -» Hungarian, Hungarian -» Russian).
Approximately 50 English, 50 French, 50 German, and 50 Russian literary works and their Hungarian translations, and about 100 Hungarian literary works and their 25 English, 25 French, 25 German, and 25 Russian translations, altogether about 300 book-length original work and their translations that is 600 literary works have been examined on the basis of given criteria, and the systematic analy
sis of the resulting note-cards (typed into a computer in the meantime) produced transfer types and subtypes.
Literary works were selected to avoid the database becoming quickly outdated.
The masterpieces of Hungarian and world literature are only used as sources of language examples, and we do not intend to make relevant assumptions from the point of view of literary translation theory. The present discussion will not tackle the problem of how to translate Dickens, Balzac, Thomas Mann or Pasternak into Hungarian and Mikszáth, Krúdy, and Örkény into English, French, German, and Russian; instead, it will look at what happens to these languages and how these five languages function together during the process of translation.
After every example used in the book we shall indicate the page number, together with, in the case of an original work, the name of the author, and in the case of a translated work the name of the translator (e.g., Kafka 140, Györfíy 141). If the same author has been translated several times by the same translator, then the source will include numbering as well (e.g., Mann 1. 234, Lányi 1. 23). The exact bibliographical data of the original works and the translations are listed, according to language pairs in the Sources section.