Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and Interpreting

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KINGA KLAUDY-JÁNOS KOHN (eds.)

TRANSFERRE NECESSE EST

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and Interpreting

5-7 September, 1996, Budapest, Hungary

with plenary lectures by

Mary Snell-Hornby, Eugene Nida, Daniel Gile, José Lambert, Peter Newmark,

Geoffrey Kingscott

Schol astica

1997

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KINGA KLAUDY-JÁNOS KOHN (eds.)

TRANSFEREE NECESSE EST

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and Interpreting

5-7 September, 1996, Budapest, Hungary

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The Editors gratefully acknowledge the support of the

Open Society Institute Regional Publishing Center

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KINGA KLAUDY-JÁNOS KOHN (eds.)

TRANSFEREE NECESSE EST

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and Interpreting

5-7 September, 1996, Budapest, Hungary

with plenary lectures by

Mary Snell-Hornby, Eugene Nida, Daniel Gile, Jose Lambert, Peter Neivmark,

Geoffrey Kingscott

l S\J

Sc/wCastica

1997

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Transferre Necesse Est

Felelős kiadó: a Scholastica Kiadó igazgatója Felelős szerkesztő: Klaudy Kinga

ISBN 963 85281 5 X

Tipográfia és tördelés: Regál Grafikai Stúdió Készült a Szinkron Press Nyomdában, 1997-ben

Felelős vezető: Kámán András Printed in Hungary

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Editors’ Note

The Proceedings ofthe 2ndInternationalTransferre Necesse Est Conference on Current Trends in Studies ofTranslation and Interpreting is an attempt to commemorate the event, when during three rainy September days in 1996, in an old building of the ELTE University of Budapest, 400 translation specialist from 40 countries gathered to find common ground to discuss the burning issues of our multilingual world at the turn of the century - translation, interpreting, their teaching and research.

The lively interest in this topic can be illustrated by the number of presentations, more than 200 lectures were delivered during the three days in 10 different sections:

• Preparations for European Union Integration, Crosscultural Differences and Users’Expectations (Section 1)

• LSP and Translation (Section 2)

• Interpreting, Media T/I (Section 3)

• The State of Art in Translation Studies, Linguistic Aspects, General Aspects (Section 4-5)

• Teaching Translation and Interpreting (Section 6-7)

• Literary Translation (Section 8-9)

• Translation and Technology (Section 10)

The wide range of topics has been motivated by the desire of the organisers to encourage the possibly widest participation of translation and interpreting specialists from all over the world.

This volume contains all plenaries, and 82 of the section-papers. In the following we would like to outline the principles of formulating the structure of the whole vol

ume, and applied in the editing of section papers.

(1) In order to preserve the atmosphere of the conference, the editors decided to follow as much as possible the actual structure of the conference. The titles and the contents of different chapters coincide with the titles and the contents of the respec

tive sections. The speakers under the chapter headings follow each other not in the alphabetical order of their family names, but rather in the sequence of their presenta

tions. An alphabetical list of authors can be found at the end of the volume.

(2) As authors of section-papers were asked to limit the written text of their pre

sentation to six pages, papers exceeding this limit, had to be cut accordingly. The style of references and linguistic examples also had to be unified. Otherwise no edit

ing was attempted therefore authors are responsible themselves for the text of their papers.

Editing this volume was laborious work, but a source of great pleasure at the same time. While bending over the lengthy and monotonous job of editing the style of references, we could not help enjoying the wide panorama of thoughts and ideas.

We can only hope, our future readers will enjoy themselves equally.

Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the plenary speakers for publish

ing their lectures in this volume, and to all contributors, who have taken the trouble and let us have their papers in a final, written form.

Kinga Klaudy - János Kohn 13

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Greetings

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Árpád Göncz

President of

the

Republicof

Hungary

Translation - its role and place in Hungarian literature (excerpt)

“(...) The translator had never been on the icy shores of Hudson Bay in the dead of Winter, let alone in a nutshell of a small sailing boat, and particularly not during the first years of the seventeenth century, or at any time ever since, not even in a modern trawler, equipped with diesel engines. He had not been there to live through Uhuru - the liberation of black Africa, - his transcendental experiences stop short of the Siberian shaman’s great adventure of climbing up the tree of life to Heaven, and the bloodstained solemnity of life, fettered by etiquette at the Meiji emperors’ court is somewhat baffling to him and rather confounding to imagine, likewise the life of dazed, pot-smoking teenagers in American Suburbia, where people speak a strange Freudian jargon as their mothertongue and seem to have confused extramarital rela

tionships, that are a little confusing for him. Most of the people, who read his trans

lations share his bewilderment. While the text, which he is following sentence by setence, is telling stories about just such strange and yet stranger things, alien to a degree that he is at loss sometimes even giving them a name. How could he aspire to describe them truly and faithfully to the original?

There is only one way to achieve this: the translator has to become part of - not the sentence or the text - but of the situation, which is described by it. He has to enter the setting. Like an actor is entering the spirit of his role. Only then will he know with certainty what the book or the subject of a particular sentence may have and should have said at that point and how he did say or do whatever he said or did.

Because at that point, in that situation and at that particular place or moment these were the only words he could have said. Whether he is emperor, shaman or American teenager. So the translator sitting by his typewriter, has no choice but turn himself into emperor, shaman or American teenager. He develops a sensitivity, for which otherwise, in his daily life, he has no use at all. Because this is the only way for him to put to the page in Hungarian with certitude nothing but exactly what was written in a foreign language by the author, who had presumably lived through himself the situation he describes, either in reality or at least in his imagination. Yet the concept of “exactlywhat was written in a foreign language” is somewhat more complicated, for the translator can only write “exactly what was written in aforeign language” with claim to the validity of truth, if what he describes is the way he himself “lived it through” - that is, as actors “live” their roles, putting on the personality of another man, yet at the same time watching themselves from the outside with cool collected

ness. Now, this “actor” is inescapably what and who he is: he is living in his time, at this place and speaks in his Hungarian mothertongue. While translating, he remains

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Greetings

unchanged, like an actor in a role; the gestures he makes, and the words he speaks remain his own; and no matter how true or faithful he strives to be, the fact remains that he is only acting as if... He is conveying - with the greatest truthfulness! - the words, gestures and views of characters remote in time or space, for people, who live in the present and at this particular place on the earth, using words and gestures of people, who live here and now. If he would not, or would choose other means of expression, he could never hope to be understood. If he would not, he would falsify the impact and effect the original makes. (...)”

(Theopening speech of the President, novelist, playwrightand a noted literary translator himselfbefore his election, wasnotrecorded; instead, this excerpt ofanessay ofhis published in1981 is printed hereby his kind permission.)

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Welcoming speech hy Péter Medgyes

Vice-Rector of

the Eötvös Loránd

University of

Budapest

Professors, Colleagues!

Ladies and Gentlemen!

On behalf of Professor Szabó, Rector of Eötvös University, it is my great honour to welcome you at our university.

Founded by Archbishop Pázmány Péter in 1635, Eötvös University is the oldest university in Hungary. With close to 14, 000 students in our four faculties, we are also the largest university. If there were no representatives of other Hungarian uni

versities in the audience, I would also claim that we are the best university in the country.

Old universities have a tendency to outgrow their size in terms of space, and we are no exception. Eötvös University is situated on more than 100 locations scattered around Budapest; some of our premises are in the heart of the city, others are a few kilometres off-centre like this campus. But those of us, who work on this campus regard this rather as an advantage since the air is less polluted here on the edge of the City Park. Incidentally, it is well worth taking a walk in the City Park, even at the expense of cutting a seminar, I believe. Just for the record, this campus houses the two largest foreign-language institutes, the Institute of Germanic Studies and the School of English and American Studies.

Ladies and Gentlemen! I am particularly pleased to have the privilege of opening this conference because when I am not wearing my Vice-Rector’s hat, I am wearing the hat of an applied linguist and teacher educator, and as such I’ve always been involved with matters of translation and interpreting. Less so in the past, more so in the present.

Less in the past, because for a few decades it was anathema to use mother tongue in the foreign language class. I’ll never forget an English lesson I observed in the late 60s. The teacher explained each new lexical item in English, often going out of her way to get the meaning across, only to whisper the Hungarian equivalents in the end. But why didn’t she begin by giving the Hungarian translations in the first place, I wondered. It would have saved so much time and energy. Well, she did’nt dare because a teacher caught in the act of opening her mouth in the mother tongue was in danger of getting a severe reprimand from the inspector in those days. And as for translation tasks, well, they were downright fordbidden.

At present, translation is in the process of being reinstated in foreign-language education. In many places, it is not merely allowed but it is actually encouraged in the classroom. The only professional who is loath to acknowledge the importance of two-way communication is the monolingual native speaker - a rapidly dwindling

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Greetings

species, Fam glad to say. Jean Apatride wrote: Ein- und ausschlüpfen Un Sprachen, aus SprachenJPendelfahrt zwischen den IWelten. Indeed, what good is a teacher who is unable to slip into languages, out of languages, thus commuting between worlds?

Over the past few years, I have attended several conferences where facilities for simultaneous interpreting have been provided. I have often put on the headphones just to enjoy the interpreters’ high level of professional skills. What’s going on in their minds as they are juggling with words, I wonder? In any case, nine times out of ten they’re more fun to listen to than the speakers whose ideas and words they’re obliged to convert.

Ladies and gentlemen! Navigare necesse est. So let’s pull up the anchor, set the sails and off we go in search of new lands! The sea is calm and the weather promises to be good for the next three days. God be with us!

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Welcoming speech by Kinga Klaudy

Chairman

of

the

Organizing

Committee

ofthe 2nd

Transferre

Necesse Est

Conference

Dear friends and colleagues,

Navigarenecesseest... - sailing is necessary. It was Henry, the Navigator, prince of Portugal, who said so five hundred years ago, because sailing was a must for his country. Similarly, nothing can be more important for us today, than translation, the only means of navigation we have on this sea of languages, where our lives we live. With this in mind, I welcome you in Budapest on the occasion of the 2nd inter

national Transferrenecesseest... conference.

Instead of my formal welcoming speech, which you can read on the first page of the programme anyway, I would like to say a few words to put this conference into context.

First, I would like to tell you, what a pleasure it was to organize this conference.

It was very exciting to experience the overwhelming responses from all over the world. We have here 400 participants from 40 different countries; the largest delega

tions coming from Spain, Finland and the United Kingdom, but also people from distant countries, like Brazil, New Zealand, Australia.

Why is this conference important for Hungary?

Hungary has a great tradition in literary translation, built up over centuries by the greatest of our national authors. Translation as a science however, is a young disci

pline with us. The 1st international Transferre necesse est... conference, held in Szombathely, Hungary four years ago, gave a great impetus to Hungarian translation studies and I hope we can demonstrate now some of the results

I have to confess, that with the organization of this conference, we had rather self

ish purposes. For the last twenty years, while TS became a successful new field of research all over the world, Hungarians were unable to travel abroad and participate in international academic interchange. This is now changing, but we have a lot to make up for. Our intention was to accelerate this process. To compensate for the long years of isolation, we decided to bring the world to Hungary. And, as you can see, the world did come.

Why is this conference important for translation and interpreting studies?

International conferences can be landmarks in the development of a science and this is especially the case with the science of translation, which is so young, that sometimes even its very existence is questioned. If TS wants to justify itself, it will have to become first a solid, established field of science.

This it will not be however, unless we build up an understanding amongst our

selves through the use of a unified terminology of our own, for example, and a body

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Greetings

of canonized knowledge and acknowledged classics of our own - some of whom we have present in this room, fortunately.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us hope, that the 2nd international Transferre necesse est conference is going to bring us closer to the independence and selfrule of translation and interpreting studies.

I very much hope, that you will remember Budapest not only as the venue of a conference but also as a cordial host to her visitors. The organizers are doing their best to make you welcome and cherished guests. On behalf of the Organizing Committee, I wish you a successful conference and a great time in Budapest.

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Welcoming speech by János Kohn

Chairman

of

the

Organizing

Committee

of the 1st

Transferre

Necesse Est Conference

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you Mr. Poe, for making meatranslator is the title of one of the confessional articles of the late György Radó, published in 1975 in the International Journal for Translation, Babel, edited by him between 1974-1988. More than 25 years later, on a bleak November afternoon in 1991, a handful of his friends, among them the chief organizer of this conference, Prof. Kinga Klaudy, and myself, met him in the myste

rious shadows of his flat in number 9 Petőfi street, full of countless curious volumes of forgotten lore, to draw up the programme of an international conference on cur

rent issues of translation Transferre necesse est ... to be held in honour of György Radó on his 80th birthday at Berzsenyi Dániel College in Szombathely.

Our decision stemmed from two things: first that it was our honourable duty to celebrate the grand old man of the Hungarian translation world and one of the last polymaths, whose prolific work had left its marks on both the theory and the practice of translation, and who has done so much to bestride the gulf between these not opposed but complementary aspects. And to do this, moreover, in a period when he was unfairly ignored and forgotten. Secondly, it was our conviction that his name was able to bring together distinguished scholars from all over the world, and thereby to offer a unique opportunity for an international conference on translation problems.

But nobody at that moment could suspect the real role and significance of this conference which took place at Berzsenyi College on 13-14. November 1992: it brought to Hungary not only a great number of prestigious translatologists from abroad, but for the Hungarian colleagues working in this field it also represented the first opportunity to meet each other and to discuss subjects of common interest.

The volume with the proceedings of the first Transferre necesse est conference, published in 1993, brings some 30 papers read in English or German together in five sections and is not only the first publication in which a number of young Hun

garian researchers appear in the company of names like Eugen Nida, Gideon Toury, Geoffrey Kingscott, Antony Pym or Evald Osers, but it also represented a bridge to and an integration with contemporary international translation studies.

The Szombathely conference was the first occasion when the newly set-up Work

ing Committee for Translation Theory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences met and formulated its role and perspectives. Ever since then, this Committee has met regularly and has become a real coordinating body of Hungarian translatology, and has also played a substantial part in the organizing of the present conference.

Looking at the figures of the present conference (over 400 participants and 200

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Greetings

papers in 10 sections) makes one aware not only of the ever-increasing interest in the field of Translation Studies, but also of the prestige and vitality of Hungarian translatology.

On behalf of the Institution which is proud to have hosted the first Transfers necesseest translation conference 4 years ago and to have started such a fruitful tradi

tion, I would like to wish all participants a pleasant and successful second Transferre necesse est conference and Many happy returns of the day!

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Plenary Lectures

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Lingua Franca and Cultural Identity - Translation in the Global Village

MarySnell-Hornby,Vienna,

Austria

I wish to speak to you today about the tragedy of Europe. This noble conti

nent, comprising on the whole the fairest and the most cultivated regions of the earth, enjoying a temperate and equable climate, is the home of all the great parent races of the western world. It is the fountain of Christian faith and Christian ethics. It is the origin of most of the culture, arts, philosophy and science both of ancient and of modern times. If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance, there would be no limit to the hap

piness, prosperity and glory which its three or four hundred million people would enjoy. Yet it is from Europe that have sprung that series of frightful nationalistic quarrels, originated by the teutonic nations which we have seen even in this twentieth century and in our own lifetime wreck the peace and mar the prospects of mankind.

Those words were spoken by Winston Churchill at the beginning of his memo

rable address to the ‘academic youth of the world’ held in the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946, almost exactly fifty years ago.1 Europe was then in ruins, and the speech is in essence a visionary description of Churchill’s dream of a ‘United States of Europe’, which he then saw as the remedy of the ills of the time. From the viewpoint of today - 1996 - there are several aspects of the speech that are remark

able, above all the fact that basically history did indeed take the turn that Churchill had hoped for, beginning with the reconciliation and renewed friendship between France and Germany and leading up to that community of nations now called the European Union. Remarkable too is the unmistakable Churchillian rhetoric, couched in a kind of prose which today strikes us as being powerful but singularly old-fash

ioned. And indeed, despite the immediacy of some aspects of Churchill’s message, the lines I have just read to you contain elements that may be disconcerting to the citizen of the outgoing twentieth century. One is its unashamed and even self-evident Eurocentricity. Europe is extolled, not only as the fountain of Christian ethics and the origin of culture and arts (ignoring other world religions and cultures of which we Europeans are so aware today), but even as ‘the home of all the great parent races of the western world’. In 1946 the British Empire - along with other forms of Euro

pean colonial rule - was not only still formally intact, but for a man like Churchill,

1 I am indebted to the University of Zürich for placing the unpublished manuscript at my dis

posal.

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Plenary Lectures

one of the last great representatives of the old world order, it was even a source of pride and veneration.

Fifty years later we see things quite differently. After European powers had for centuries dominated most of the earth’s surface, nearly all colonies have now gained independence - which usually meant the transfer of power from the colonial over- lords to an indigenous elite - and new nations have emerged with an identity of their own, though the links to the past cannot be severed completely and the way to democ

racy has often been accompanied by traumatic social and political upheavals. Parallel to this, the political scene was rearranged in the post-war years with the division of Europe and the Cold War, leading to new alliances and new confrontations - and yet again to new hopes and new crises when these crumbled in 1989. Economically, the last fifty years have seen unparalleled growth, prosperity and technological progress - including the field of communication technologies - followed by crises, recessions, uncertain bouts of recovery, phases of disorientation, and the polarization of rich and poor nations. This is the global village in which we live today - it is a ‘post’-world:

post-war, post-colonial, post-communist, post-apartheid, post-industrial, post-mod

ern, post-structuralist and post-totalitarian. The world of today is essentially a hybrid world, where the former clear-cut and conflicting power structures and systems have given way to interacting, heterogeneous groups and often unpredictable forces in a constant state of flux.

Against this background of disorientation and insecurity, language remains a rel

atively stable factor. Indeed, the legacy of language is one of the most deep-seated elements of colonial rule left behind by what Churchill referred to as the European parent races. And this is the reason why European languages - French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch, but especially English - are spoken nearly all over the world.

Within this context I should like to differentiate between what I call a dominant lan

guage and a linguafranca. A dominant language is one forced on the subjugated peo

ple along with the foreign world-view and culture; a lingua franca is one more or less freely accepted or chosen as a system of communication for mutual understanding.

In the case of newly formed nations after independence from colonial rule, the for

mer dominant language is usually established either as a lingua franca or even as the official language. At the same time however the new communities see their indige

nous language as a means of expressing their individual cultural identity, an essential factor one cannot overlook as a natural reaction to any form of foreign domination.

The developments in Central and Eastern Europe during and after communist rule form an interesting parallel - but with a vital difference. In the countries of the for

mer Eastern bloc Russian was the prescribed dominant language; the violent reac

tion is now the rejection of Russian in general in most of the new democracies that emerged after 1989, and an insistence on developing the local language as an expres

sion of national identity, even to the extent of separating language varieties where only limited formal differences exist and where there is complete mutual understand

ing. (A sad example is the development of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian from Serbo-Croatian as a result, not of organic development, but of ethnic animosities).

The vital difference in this Eastern European scenario - as this conference confirms - is that the freely accepted lingua franca is not the former dominant language, but English.

So beside the psychological need for national or cultural identity as expressed

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Mary Snell-Hornby

through language, there is also the pragmatic necessity for international and supra- cultural communication in a world which is growing ever smaller. And here, as has just been implied, English has assumed a hitherto unparalleled role as international lingua franca and world language. This is of course partly due to its former role as dominant language of the British Empire, whereby standard British English has diver

sified into numerous regional and local varieties or ‘new Englishes’. It is also due to the world-wide domination of American technology and culture, and the adoption of English as the lingua franca of science and commerce; and it is furthermore due to the fact that English - that is, its basic grammar and core vocabulary (cf. Strevens 1992:39) - can be relatively easily acquired for everyday conversation as needed for superficial communication by speakers of other languages all over the world, whereby the latter factor is coupled with a structural flexibility in the language itself and a general policy of openness among the English-speaking cultural institutions (as against the purist policy, for example, of the Academic Francaise). All in all, English has long since left the ownership of the native speakers in England and has become, as Henry Widdowson has put it, ‘world property’ (Widdowson 1993:5).

Taking this differentiation between the dominant language of colonialism or dic

tatorship and the postcolonial lingua franca, I would like to introduce two further concepts taken from, or at least inspired by, recent discussions on linguistic and cul

tural developments. In October 1993 an interdisciplinary conference was held in Vienna on the topic ‘Language of dictatorship’, with immediate reference to the lin

guistic conventions familiar in countries of the former Eastern bloc. The conference Proceedings were published last year with the title Totalitáre Sprache - Languede bois -Language of Dictatorship (Wodak & Kirsch 1995). Langue de bois - ‘wooden lan

guage’, or real-life Newspeak. In this case the topics ranged from the political slogans of Soviet Russia to official reports on citizens’ personal conduct from the German Democratic Republic and even to conventions of propaganda poetry in Ceausescu’s Romania. The language of dictatorship in itself is not the topic of my lecture, but I would like take the image of the ‘wooden language’, symbolizing the artificial and rigid clichee as the tool for power of a dominant regime, as a starting point for my deliberations on what can happen when a lingua franca is developed, as in the case of English, that gradually loses track of its cultural identity - its idioms, its hidden connotations, its grammatical subtleties - and turns into a kind of bland and flat

tened ‘plastic language’ or ‘langue de plastique’ available for the common denomina

tor of international communication.

For translation purposes we should, I think, view the phenomenon of the English language in the world today from three different perspectives: firstly, the lingua franca

‘langue de plastique’, a reduced, standardized form made to serve the specific pur

pose of supra-cultural communication; secondly, the individual variety of English as an expression of cultural identity with its idioms, metaphors and culture-specific allusions (e.g. British English, as shown in any feature article from the DailyMail), and thirdly, the hybrid forms as shown for example in the novels of Salman Rushdie.

This classification should be viewed as a prototypology of tendencies today, and it shows, on the one hand, the inextricable links between language and culture. On the negative side, it also reflects the conflict between globalism and tribalism, described in 1992 by Benjamin Barber as the ‘two axial principles of our age’ (1992: 53). To ver

balize the concept of that world-wide mass culture or ‘cultura franca’ that dominates

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our technological ‘post’-world of today, Barber coined the term ‘MeWorld’. In another interdisciplinary conference held in Austria in 1992 - this time in Graz - to com

memorate the so-called discovery of America, this notion was taken up again. In her essay in the Proceedings called ‘Amerika im Gedáchtnis’, the Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli mourns the destruction of the ancient Indian cultures by the Euro

pean conquistadors, and she reviews critically the semi-feudal system that has mean

while divided Latin America into a privileged elite minority on the one hand and an impoverished majority on the other, now dominated, not by Spain but by North American values and norms - Benjamin Barber’s ‘McWorld’. Belli sees the essence of the cultural identity of Latin America in its resistance to this system (Belli 1994:16).

Cultural identity here emerges in a positive sense as against Barber’s notion of the essentially destructive force of tribalism.

I hardly need explain the implications behind his concept ‘McWorld’: that once so culturally specific ex-pat prefix ‘Me’ has long since emigrated from its ancestral home in the Scottish glens to connote the world of technology and of bland fast food as symbolic of our international consumer society of today. This supra-cultural, tech

nologically oriented society is a major element of our global village, and it forms the background of the professional translator, a figure rather drastically portrayed by Patricia Violante-Cassetta in an essay entitled Jack in theYear2000. Jack is identified as ‘a translator in the United States’, but:

I share many traits and characteristics with colleagues all over the world.

Jacks such as myself may be staffers at international organizations, multina

tional corporations, government agencies, private concerns, or we may be self-employed. We wade through documents that are often highly technical (sometimes barely legible2) and translate them into other languages. One day it might be environmental regulations and the next day the specifications for a desalinator. (1996: 199)

‘Jack’ has a variety of tasks and varied working conditions, but it is clear firstly that he/she will not survive without technology: computers for producing texts, on-line services providing continuously updated glossaries of terms, e-mail, internet, MT systems and so forth. A second ‘universal’ of the translator’s condition today is stress, whether caused by time-pressure, defective texts, lack of access to essential back

ground material, or whatever. The third important point, only implied in Violante- Cassetta’s article, is that the modern translator’s work, even within this cultura franca ‘McWorld’, is itself of a hybrid nature: it is not only a linguistic activity, but involves, besides the necessary cultural knowledge, specific subject-area expertise often in non-academic domains. For translation studies specialists this is a truism, but, as even recent studies show, it is still a cause of misunderstanding. I would like to illustrate this by three examples.

Firstly let me read you a comment made during an interview in May 1996 by the marketing manager of an international electronics firm which employs translators3:

2 Violante-Cassetta may perhaps mean ‘barely readable’.

3 The interview, conducted by Eveline Sobotka for a research project, was in German. This is my English translation.

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Basically the translations I receive are quite acceptable on the semantic and syntactic level - but I wonder whether there’s any point in producing text conversions of this kind, because they only serve as material for further pro

cessing by specialists in my company. Modern MT systems only require a single investment and produce the same result as human translators: in both cases post-editing is necessary to produce user-friendly instruction manuals.

Translators only bother about translating - they can’t be expected to familiar

ize themselves with everything else that goes on in my firm, they haven’t the time, there isn’t the money, and they are not trained for it. The other day I advised a translator to replace some rather complicated instructions by a drawing, because it’s easier to show how a machine works than to put it into words. He answered that he was a translator and not an engineering draughtsman.

The solution is that text-production of this kind requires both skills - graphic and linguistic - a fact pointed out back in 1984 by Justa Holz-Mánttári in discussing translation as an expert activity (‘translatorisches Handeln’), but unfortunately her book was firstly written, not in the world lingua franca English but in German, and secondly it was only available in academic circles, where it was treated as theoretical heresy.

My second example is taken from a recent issue of Language International (3196), where it is correctly pointed out that currently the fastest growing area for transla

tion services is not, as is often assumed, technical documentation, but media transla

tion (television, film, video). What interested me particularly was this comment:

The reason this rapid growth is often overlooked by the profession is that the practitioners are often not part of the translation mainstream. Indeed the word

‘translation’ is often d iscarded in favour of terms such as ‘language transfer’

or ‘versioning’. (1996:16)

The third example is taken from a recent issue of CurrentIssues in Language and Society, where in a lecture entitled ‘Translation and Advertising: Going Global’, the Canadian translation scholar Candace Séguinot again correctly points out that:

... the globalisation of the translation business sometimes means providing full marketing services in addition to translation and interpreting. (...) Transla

tors need to understand the basics of marketing; they need to know the legal jurisdictions of their market; they must know how cultural differences affect marketing; they must be aware of constraints placed by the form and func

tions of the source text, and they must be able to interpret the visual elements which are of key importance in advertising. (Séguinot 1994: 249)

During the ensuing debate Kirsten Malmkjaer - a linguist - questioned whether this was really ‘translation’ or ‘... deconstructing the message and then recreating it as something very different for a different culture’ (1994: 269).

What all three examples illustrate is firstly the increasingly complex job profile of the translator in the global village of the outgoing 20th century: language proficiency

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is of course a necessary prerequisite, but it must be coupled with other skills. Thus the technical translator may well require the skills of a draughtsman. In media trans

lation, technical knowhow (and cultural knowledge) will be essential both for subti

tling and dubbing, especially if the translator is to join the production team and do more than merely provide a rough version for subsequent processing. And in adver

tising work knowledge of both marketing and the legal systems involved should be taken for granted if the translator is to accept the responsibility for the text he/she produces. Secondly, all three examples illustrate yet again the need for reconsidering the meaning of the term ‘translation’, whether as ‘language transfer’ or ‘deconstruct

ing the message and recreating it’. Here too translation scholars have long since used such definitions: since the early 1980s the skopos theorists have even viewed trans

lation as a ‘cultural transfer’ (see Vermeer 1986), but yet again their work was writ

ten, not in the world lingua franca English but in German and again it was mainly debated within academe - practitioners usually dismissed it as being ‘too theoretical’

to bother about. Certainly academics need to consider the nitty-gritty and the needs of the practitioners in their deliberations, but conversely the work of the translator Jack McWorld might profit if he sometimes read some standard literature on transla

tion studies.

Like Basic English of the war years, International English as a purely instrumen

tal lingua franca is a reduced language which has lost its cultural roots and is not identical with a dominant language used as a tool for power, as was definitely the case both under dictatorial regimes and in the early colonial years. In her enlighten

ing study on language in the colonial context of India, Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) has shown how both language and translation were deliberately used to enforce and perpetuate unequal relations of power, prejudice and domination, particularly where Indian texts were translated into English. Her outstanding example is the work of Sir William Jones, who arrived in India in 1783 and sought to use translation, as Edward Said described it ‘to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European learning’ (Niranjana 1992:12). Niranjana maintains that Jones’s work, which has had a lasting impact on generations of scholars up to the present day, has helped construct a powerful but falsified image of a submissive and indolent nation of

‘Hindus’ taken over wholesale by later writers. She diagnoses the basic factors under

lying Jones’s approach as follows (1992:13): firstly, the professed need for translation by a European and not an Indian translator, because the natives were considered unreliable interpreters of their own laws and culture; secondly, the desire as colonial overlord to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their ‘own’ laws (i.e. as seen by the col

onizers after translation by a colonizer), and thirdly, the desire to ‘purify’ Indian cul

ture and speak on its behalf. Such an attitude is not only created through language and by translation but characterizes any type of domination by one group of human beings over another. It is important however to stress that such false stereotypes can be and very often are reinforced in translation.

Another outstanding example from India is that of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who in 1913 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for a collection of poems which he had himself translated into English. He immediately became a lit

erary vogue in the West, and was hailed as a saint and mystic. The Indian scholar Mahasweta Sengupta (1990) has shown that these translations, unlike the Bengali source texts, were deliberately phrased ‘to suit the ideology of the dominating cul

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ture. (...) He fits perfectly into the stereotypical role that was familiar to the colo

nizer, a voice that not only spoke of the peace and tranquillity of a distant world, but also offered an escape from the materialism of the contemporary Western world’

(1990:58). The Nobel committee even saw Tagore as a religious prophet, '...as a person who was following the Christian missionaries in their task of unshackling the natives from the bondage of tradition and history’ (Sengupta 1990:61). In other words, Tagore distorted his own works and with them his own cultural identity, to fit in with the cliche image of the colonizers. When European aesthetic ideology changed with the First World War, and when Tagore outgrew the strait)acket the West had made for him and became an innovator in Bengali literature, he was discarded, and then even vehemently attacked. Andre Lefevere has shown that the character of Anne Frank, in the German translation of her diary made after the war (i.e. certainly not into a dominant or victor’s language), was made to conform ‘...to a cultural stereo

type and made to water down the description of the very atrocities which destroyed her as a person’ (1992:72).

Clearly we are here moving in a different universe of discourse from what was described above as the workplace of our prototype figure Jack McWorld, and it would be misleading to limit the problems of cultural identity only to literary translation:

they are noticeable in any area where language is used as a means of self-expression, entertainment, satire or persuasion (and this includes advertising). They are however most prominent in literary works and are discussed mainly by scholars dealing with literary translation, notably Lawrence Venuti. Rather confusingly, Venuti (1994) uses the term ‘cultural identity’ in the sense of a cliche image or false stereotype as pro

jected on to a group or community from outside and as through translation; he gives the example of a ‘canon of Japanese fiction in English which reflects a domestic nos

talgia for an exotic pre-war Japan’ (1994:201). Where I would challenge Venuti is in his suggested translation strategy for avoiding false stereotypes and for counterbal

ancing what he criticizes as the ‘international expansion of Anglo-American culture’

(1995:15) - Benjamin Barber’s ‘McWorld’. Reviving Friedrich Schleiermacher’s well- worn dichotomy of 1813, Venuti deplores what he calls the current ‘domesticating’ - i.e. transparent or idiomatic - type of translation, and he pleads for a ‘foreignizing’

strategy which involves ‘bending the language’, hence creating an artificial transla

tion code or ‘translationese’ which marks the text as a foreign work. Venuti does not mention the recent debates on such issues by translation scholars in Europe (again, these took place mainly in Germany - see Reiss and Vermeer 1984, Snell-Hornby 1988), where such a strategy is called into question, but I would like to voice my doubts here. As I have shown elsewhere with examples from short stories translated from Malayalam, the language of Kerala in Southern India, and Hiligaynon, a lan

guage of the Central Philippines, into English, artificial translationese is a dubious way of expressing cultural identity, and it tends rather to create the stereotype it seeks to deny. Particularly in the case of English however, with its numerous natural vari

eties, there are other strategies available. As recent studies of Commonwealth litera

ture have shown (Ashcroft et al.1989), the language of the ex-colonizer can indeed be used creatively for linguistic emancipation, but it must be ‘a new English’, as the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has expressed it, ‘still in communion with its ances

tral home, but altered to suit its new surroundings’ (cit. Widdowson 1993:7). The result is the so-called ‘hybrid text’, now a familiar feature of the postcolonial scene,

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written by the ex-colonized in the language of the ex-colonizer, which has succeeded in forging a new language ‘in between’ (Sarnia Mehrez 1992), a language based how

ever on the creative use of living varieties of English and not a language that has been constructed artificially.

A prominent example of such a text in English is Salman Rushdie’s recent novel The Moor’s Last Sigh with its teeming profusion of super-hybridity: language varieties, idiolects, jargon, metaphors, puns, coinages and an abundance of allusions. Hybridity of this kind is not however present only in postcolonial literature: it exists to a lim

ited extent in most texts, particularly expressive ones, and characterizes a number of modern novels, as for example, Malcolm Bradbury’s satirical novel Dr. Criminale (1992), which caricatures, among other things, the kind of English spoken by non

native speakers of various nationalities. With reference to the topic of this lecture, I would like to read you a simple example. The narrator, a young British journalist called Francis Jay, described as ‘a Nineties person, streetwise but eco-friendly, smart but naive’, travels Europe in search of the mysterious and elusive Dr. Bazlo Criminale, who is celebrated as a great philosopher and political thinker. The scene here is the welcome dinner at an international conference at which Dr. Criminale, as guest of honour, has failed to turn up. Francis Jay tries to make conversation with one of his neighbours:

‘Did you have a good journey here?’ I asked.

‘Nein, it was terrible,’ said Cosima Bruckner.’Are you also one of these writers?’

‘A journalist,’ I said, ‘Are you a writer?’

I work in the Beef Mountain of the European Community,’ she said.

‘Really, how fascinating,’ I said, ‘How do you like the villa?’

‘Bitté?’

‘Do you like it here? I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Bruckner, ‘Maybe.’

‘Have you a good view?’ I asked.

‘Of what?’ asked Bruckner.

‘From your window,’ I asked, ‘Is your room nice?’

‘It is so-so,’ said Bruckner. ‘Why do you ask me this?’

‘It’s just small-talk,’, I said.

‘Small-talk, yes, I think so,’ said Cosima Bruckner, turning to tap her neigh

bour on the other side with her fork to demand his attention.

The point of this dialogue as failed communication lies in the difference between the very culturally specific British small-talk, which simply seeks to keep the patter of conversation going regardless of any truth or sincerity values, and the supra-cultural lingua franca English used and understood by the German conference participant Cosima Bruckner at semantic face-value. She hence provides direct answers to ques

tions which have little more than phatic function, thus offering information and voic

ing opinions which actually hamper communication, and she herself fails to see the point of her British neighbour’s attempts at conversation. This tension between the supra-cultural denotation and the culture-specific insinuation is the mainspring of the passage and should be reflected in a translation of the novel.

I opened my lecture with a classic example of pristine Churchillian rhetoric reflect-

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ing a vision for the future and at the same time the beliefs and attitudes of an age that was soon to belong to the past. In our hybrid world of today we have the con

viction that no one age or nation should dominate another (even if this belief is not always borne out by reality). This is reflected in the languages we use, whether for self-expression or for international communication, whereby, far as English is con

cerned, the rich and scintillating prose of writers such as Rushdie and Bradbury form the counterpart to the ‘language de plastique’ of the ‘McWorld English’ which dominates our global village - but only in quantitative terms, because a reduced code of this kind cannot have the same function as the dominant languages of colo

nial or totalitarian epochs. Another essential feature of our global village is instant and easy communication through the media and by telecommunications. Ours is the electronic age - one label at least where the prefix ‘post’ is not yet justified. In such a ‘brave new world’ as this the work of the translator is situated, a world of instant information, and a world ‘in between’ - between languages, between established dis

ciplines and professions, and between cultures. ‘Transferre necesse est’: that cer

tainly still holds for translation in our global village, but the transfer is no longer a fixed and clear-cut journey from one shore, from one closed and alien world to another, as Jakob Grimm saw it many years ago, but a swift and dynamic process involving instant readjustment to the task in hand and constant reorientation to clients or partners from cultures that seem to be crowding in on each other more and more closely as the new millennium approaches.

References

Ashcroft, B. & Griffiths, G. & Tiffin, H. 1989. The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.

Barber, B. 1992. Jihad vs. McWorld. The Atlantic Monthly ol.Vol. 1 (3), 53-63.

Batsleer, J. 1985. Rewriting English. London: Methuen.

Belli, G. 1994. Amerika im Gedáchtnis. In: König, O. & Renner, F. & Wolf, M. (eds.) ^Amerika

im Gedáchtnis. „500 Jahre Widerstand in Lateinamerika“. Eine Selbstbeschreibung. Wien:

Böhlau. 11-21.

Bradbury, M. 1992. Dr. Criminale. Harmonsworth: Penguin.

Churchill, W. 1946. Ansprache an die akademische Jugend derWelt. Zürich.

Dries, J. 1996. Profile of a Linguist. Language International. 8/3, 16-17.

Lefevere, A. 1992. Translation I History/Culture: A Sourcebook. London and New York: Routledge.

Mehrez, S. 1992. Translation and the postcolonial experience: The francophone North African text. In: Venuti, L. (ed.) Rethinking Translation. Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London:

Routledge. 120-138.

Niranjana, T. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context.

Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Reiss, K. & Vermer H.J. 1984. Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tübingen:

Niemeyer.

Séguinot, C. 1994. Translation and Advertising: Going Global. In: Current Issues in Language and Society. Vól. 1 (3), 249-265.

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Sengupta, M. 1990. Translation, Colonialism and Poetics: Rabidranath Tagore in Two Worlds.

In: Bassnett, S. & Lefevere, A. (eds.) Translation, History, Culture. London: Pinter. 56-63.

Snell-Hornby, M. 1988. Translation Studies - An Integrated Approach. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Strevens, P. 1992. English as an International Language: Directions in the 1990s. In: Kachru, B.B. (ed.) The Other Tongue. English Across Countries. Chicago: Univ. of Illionis Press.

27-47.

Vermeer, H. J. 1986. Übersetzen als kultureller Transfer. In: Snell-Hornby, M. (ed.) Überset- zungswissenschaft - Eine Neuorientierung. Zűr Integrierung von Theorie und Praxis. Tübingen:

Francke, 30-53.

Venuti, L. 1994. Translation and the Formation of Cultural Identity.In: Current Issues in Language and Society, Vol. 1, (3), 201-217.

Venuti, L. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation. London: Routledge.

Violante-Cassetta, P. 1996. Jack in the Year 2000. In: Gambier, Y. & Snell-Hornby, M. (eds.).

Problemi e Tendenze nella Didattica dellTnterpretazione e della Traduzione I Problems and Trends in the Teaching of Interpreting and Translation Misano Adriatico: Istituto San Pellegrino.

199-213.

Villareal, C. D. 1994. Translating the Sugilanon: Reframing the Sign. Quezon City: Univ. of the Philippines Press.

Widdowson, H. 1993. The ownership of English. TESOL Quaterly,Vo\. 28, 377-389.

Wo dak, R. & Kirsch, F.P. 1995. Totalitare Sprache - Langue de bois - Language of Dictatorship.

Wien: Passagen-Verlag.

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The Principles

of Discourse Structure and Content in Relation to Translating

Eugene A.

Nida,

Savannah, GA,

USA

Many translators believe that if they take care of the words and the grammar, the discourse will take care of itself, but this concept results from an insufficient under

standing of the role of discourse structure in interlingual communication. The vari

ous means for indicating foregrounding and backgrounding, the diverse ways of indicating emphasis, and the distinctive means of showing the relations between sen

tences, paragraphs, and sections must also be carefully considered.

Some mistakes in treating the discourse patterns of a text result from not reading an entire text before starting to translate or from not paying adequate attention to a following page. In one instance, a translator rendered a statement meaning Thismer

its further consideration anddiscussion as simply As maybe noted in what follows. But he had not read the following page that introduced a completely new subject.

There are significant differences in the beginning and ending of commercial let

ters between business men in Latin America and North America. Intelligent secre

taries in North America know how to delete overly complimentary statements from Latins, and to add appropriate expressions of greeting and friendship from their north American bosses. Otherwise, Latinos will think that American business men are entirely too unfriendly and impersonal, while American business men will be reluctant to do business with Latinos who appear to be too flattering and insincere.

In the Orient there is a tendency to produce documents without topic sentences to begin paragraphs or topic paragraphs to begin a text. These writers often believe that it is much better to state a series of reasons and leave the implications of such information to the addressees to draw the proper conclusions. But people in the Western World interpret such an approach as “beating around the bush” or as calcu

lated evasiveness. Many Orientals, however, consider that their type of approach to certain forms of discourse is more polite because it allows readers to come to the proper conclusions without having been imposed on by introductory statements of theme or purpose. In some instances, translators have rectified possible misunder

standing by appropriate alterations or additions to the titles or introductions to such documents.

The basic components of discourses

The basic components of discourses are not necessarily the formal classes of words, as so many people imagine, but the referential classes that refer to the cul

tural entities of the society in question. These universal referential classes consist of (1) entities (e.g. people, animal, mountain, lake, tree, sun, galaxy, ideas), (2) activities

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or events (e.g. run, walk, explosion, arrival), (3) states, often the result of activities (e.g. sick,alive, angry, happy, depressed), (4) processes, as changes in states or charac

teristics (e.g. reincarnate, enlarge, widen, sicken, beautify), (5) inherent characteristics (e.g. tall, wide, round, red, beautiful), and (6) terms that link words and groups of words (e.g. and, or, because, inorder to, after, during through).

Referential classes are not the same as formal classes. For example, the two phrases his arrival and he arrived contain very different formal classes, but the referential classes are essentially the same, and the semantic relations between the constituent parts are identical, namely, an entity engages in a particular activity. Furthermore, some words consist of more than one referential class, e.g. dancer, that consists of an entity and an activity, “one who dances,” and in the phrase good dancer the adjective qualifies the quality of the dancing, not the character of the person. Similarly, in the phrase molecular biologist the term biologist refers to an entity that does something about living matter, while molecular does not qualify the person but refers to the enti

ties that the biologist studies or deals with.

It may seem strange to regard ideas as entities, but they may be said to be ” bounded thoughts", in the sense of have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that is to say, a definable structure and content. The same type of entities occur in verbaliza

tion, e.g. a speech vs. to speak. The latter is clearly an event, but a speech has a unitary structure that makes it a definable entity, and may be regarded as a verbal entity.

These basic referential components of texts must, however, be organized in such a way as to combine both progression and cohesion. In other words, the content of a text must move from one point to another and at the same time there must be cohe

sion between the parts. Before considering progression and cohesion, however, it is important to mention the integral roles of the three universal constraints: time, space, and thought processes.

The constraints of time, space, and thought processes

In the physical world nothing can exist or happen apart from the constraints of time and space, and all languages have various ways of indicating time, whether it is related to events external to or contained in the discourse. Time may also be related to the time of the utterance or writing of a discourse, and in some languages time is closely related to aspect. Time is, of course, always relative to something else. Tem

poral factors figure primarily in narratives, personal accounts, history, epic poetry, legends, and biography. And space is a crucial factor in the description of entities and of events. Time and space may also be combined in a description of a building, in which a writer describes the building during a tour of its rooms, halls, staircases, and baths. In fact, most narratives are composites of elements related in time and space.

It would be quite wrong to think that all languages handle time and space in the same manner. Some languages do not employ different tense forms, but indicate rel

ative time by separate words and phrases. Likewise, space may be regarded from a quite different perspective if it is related also to time. For example, in some Quechua dialects the “future” is regarded as “behind” and the past is spoken of as “ahead.”

Quechua speakers defend such a viewpoint by insisting that the future that they can

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and Interpreting

KINGA KLAUDY-JÁNOS KOHN (eds.)

TRANSFERRE NECESSE EST

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and Interpreting

5-7 September, 1996, Budapest, Hungary

Mary Snell-Hornby, Eugene Nida, Daniel Gile, José Lambert, Peter Newmark,

Geoffrey Kingscott

Schol astica

TRANSFEREE NECESSE EST

KINGA KLAUDY-JÁNOS KOHN (eds.)

TRANSFEREE NECESSE EST

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and Interpreting

5-7 September, 1996, Budapest, Hungary

Mary Snell-Hornby, Eugene Nida, Daniel Gile, Jose Lambert, Peter Neivmark,

Geoffrey Kingscott

l S\J

Sc/wCastica

1997

Table of Contents

Editors’ Note

Greetings

Árpád Göncz

the

Hungary

Welcoming speech hy Péter Medgyes

the Eötvös Loránd

Budapest

Welcoming speech by Kinga Klaudy

Chairman

the

Committee

Transferre

Conference

Welcoming speech by János Kohn

Chairman

the

Committee

Transferre

Plenary Lectures

Lingua Franca and Cultural Identity - Translation in the Global Village

Austria

The Principles

of Discourse Structure and Content in Relation to Translating

Eugene A.

Savannah, GA,