The first era of linguistic translation theory

The development of translation theory was divided into periods by several schol­

ars (Steiner 1975, Gentzler 1993). Since the first researchers of translation worked in relative isolation in different countries, it is hard to define the exact beginning.

Interestingly, though, despite the fact that western European and American researchers hardly know the works of their Russian colleagues, they still agree on the fact that the birth of a linguistic translation theory was marked by the appear­

ance in 1953 of Audrey Fedorov’s study, Vvedenie v teoriyu perevoda (Introduction to the theory of translation), which was published again in 1958, 1968 and 1983 (the West only knew about this Russian book from reviews, e.g. Cary’s review in Babel 1957/3).

Fedorov was the first to offer a systematic overview of the tasks and the histo­

ry of translation theory, the problem of translatability, the lexical, grammatical, genre-specific, and stylistic questions of translation, and he did so using a predomi­

nantly linguistic terminology. It is important to note that Eugene Nida, the great American translation theorist, appears as early as in 1952 with his work God's Word in Man's Language, but his work takes a decisive turn only when he adapts Chomsky’s theory to translation.

At the end of the 1950s, more and more studies appear which, even if not com­

pletely distancing themselves from the literary approach, look at translation from a broader perspective (Cary 1956, Savory 1957, Smith 1958, Vinay and Darbelnet 1958). The collection of studies On Translation, edited by Reuben A. Brower (1959) merits special mention. It contains, among several other studies highlighting the various aspects of translation, Jakobson’s famous article entitled On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In this study Jakobson distinguishes between intralingual (within die same language), interlingual (between languages), and intersemiotic (between systems of signs) translation. He was the first linguist to state that the study of language should involve the study of translation as well. The first studies dealing with the translation of scientific and technical texts distance themselves or have to distance themselves more and more from the literary approach (Jumpelt

1961).

The 1960s bring a real breakthrough in the development of linguistic transla­

tion theory. In the years 1963, 1964, 1965 works of fundamental importance on linguistic translation theory are published in various parts of the world independ­

ently of one another. Revzin and Rozentsveig publish their Osnovi obshchevo i mashinnovo perevoda (Foundations of general and machine translation) in 1964, containing their lectures given at the translator training department of Maurice Thorez Foreign Language Pedagogy College, Moscow between 1959 and 1961.

They consider Fedorov’s approach too literary and argue for a more exact linguis­

tic description and a fully formalised account of the process of translation.

In 1965, John Catford publishes his work entitled A Linguistic Theory of Translation, based on a series of lectures he gave at Edinburgh University for stu­

dents of applied linguistics. Georges Mounin publishes his study Les problèmes théoriques de la traduction in 1963, and Eugene Nida publishes his work Toward a Science of Translating: with special reference to principles and procedures involved in Bible translating in 1964, a work that came to be considered the Bible of the theory of translation.

Nida’s way to theory led through practice. What he wanted was to find theoret­

ical support for his principles of Bible translation, and he found it in linguistics.

The book he published in 1964 was dedicated to his colleagues working in the trans­

lation department of the American Bible Society, and was intended to provide theo­

retical foundations for new Bible translations addressing a wider audience than ever before. The theoretical basis he built upon was Chomsky’s transformational generative language theory (Chomsky 1957, 1965). Following this theory, Nida argued that in the process of translation the translator reduces complicated source language surface structures to simple kernel structures and arrives at target lan­

guage surface structures through restructuring (for more details see the chapter on the modelling of translation). In a later study published in 1976, Nida claims that he conceived of the notion of deep structure earlier than Chomsky did. About this interesting and historically still open question see Gentzler (1993).

The studies referred to above played an important role in the establishment of the linguistic theory of translation as a sovereign discipline, but its legitimacy was still a matter of debate at the end of the 1960s and at the beginning of the 1970s.

The German name of this new field, Übersetzungswissenschaft, appeared as early as 1813 in Schleiermacher (quoted inWilss 1977); it was named théorie de la traduction in French, following a study by Edmond Cary, Pour une théorie de la traduction, published in 1962 (quoted in Radó 1981); and it is referred to as science of translation (Nida 1964) or theory of translation (Catford 1965) in English.

James Holmes’s role in legitimising the new discipline was remarkable. He introduced the term “translation studies” in a lecture on The Name and Nature of Translation Studies, held at the 3rd AILA Congress in 1972. This term became more widely used following the publication of Bassnett-McGuire’s 1980 book under the same title. In his 1972 lecture, subsequently published in a journal, Holmes proposed a structural division of translation studies into theoretical translation studies and descriptive translation studies, dividing the latter into three subfields, namely product-oriented, process-oriented, and function-oriented translation studies. He divided theoretical translation studies into general translation theory and partial translation theories, the latter studying the problems of translation depending on who the translation is produced by, a person or a machine (medium restricted translation theories), what language the translation is done from or into (area-restricted translation studies), what text type is being translated (text-type restricted theories), etc. Beside theoretical and descriptive translation studies he identifies a third type as well, applied translation studies, whose subdivisions are translator training, translation aids, translation policy, and translation criti­

cism (Holmes 1972 in 1988: 67-80).

Holmes noted that at the end of the 1960s and at the beginning of the 1970s theoretical research followed two directions and these two directions of research characterised the development of translation studies until the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s.

One of these directions is represented by general translation theory (Allge­

meine Translationstheorie, obshchaya teoriya perevoda), which deals with the gen­

eral problems of translation independent of language and genre, such as translata- bility, the modelling of the process of translation, equivalence, etc. (Kade 1968, Neubert 1968, Nida and Taber 1969, Holmes 1972, Shveitser 1973, Komissarov

l.The origins of a linguistic theory of translation

1973, Retsker 1974, Steiner 1975, Barkhudarov 1975, Jäger 1975,Wilss 1977, House 1977, Koller 1979, Komissarov 1980, Bassnett-McGuire 1980, Toury 1980 and Wilss 1980).

The other direction involves partial translation theories (chastnaya teoriya perevoda), which deal with the problems of translation related to language pair, direction of translation, genre, and text type (Wandruszka 1969, Gak and L’vin 1970, Reiss 1971, Levitskaya and Fiterman 1973, Chernyahovskaya 1976, Gak 1977,Vaseva 1980,Vlakhov and Florin 1980).

It is hard to mark the end of the early stage. For the sake of simplicity, we shall cut it off with 1980, although this arbitrary decision will exclude some important authors and works, such as Peter Newmark, whose Approaches to Translation, pub­

lished in 1982, addressed some of the most fundamental issues of linguistic trans­

lation studies.

The second and third eras of translation studies, leading up to the present day, will be discussed in Chapter 1.7.