TRANSLATION STUDIES
IN HUNGARY
EDITEDBY
KINGA KLAUDY
JOSÉ LAMBERT
ANIKÓ SOHÁR
The Editors gratefully acknowledge the support of the “FEFA Fund”
TRANSLATION STUDIES
IN HUNGARY
EDITED BY
KINGA KIAUDY JOSÉ LAMBERT ANIKÓ SOHÁR
Sc/ioCastica
Translation Studies in Hungary Felelős kiadó: a Scholastica Kiadó igazgatója
Felelős szerkesztő: Klaudy Kinga ISBN 963 85281 2 5
Tipográfia és tördelés: Regál Grafikai Stúdió, Budapest Készült a Szekszárdi Nyomdában, 1996-ban
Felelős vezető: Vadász József
Introduction
Jósé LAMBERT: Translation and!as Research for Societies... 11 István BART - Kinga KLAUDY: Translation, Translators
and the Study of Translation in Hungary... 26 General Aspects
János KOHN: What Can (Corpus) Linguistics do
for Translation? ... 39 Sándor ALBERT: Some Aspects of the Philosophy of Literary
Translation ... 53 Zsolt LENGYEL - Judit NAVRACSICS: The Ontogenesis
of Translation ... 60 Linguistic Aspects
Pál HELTAI: Lexical Contrasts in Learner’s Translations ... 71 Tamás VRAUKO: Positive Interference in Translating Some
English Idioms into Hungarian ... 83 Endre LENDVAI: Types of Untranslatable Jokes... 89 Kinga KLAUDY: Back-Translation as a Tool for Detecting
Explicitation Strategies in Translation ... 99 Krisztina BOHÁK SZAB ARI: Problems in Translating
Legal Texts (with German-Hungarian Examples)... 115 Literary Aspects
Anikó SOHÁR: Cultural Importation of Genres. The Case of
SF and Fantasy in Hungary ... 125 Zsuzsa VALLÓ: Translating an American Comedy for the
Hungarian Stage ...134 Erzsébet CS. JÓNÁS: The Ageless Chekhov. Text modality as
a Key to Three Hungarian Chekhov Interpretations...149
Contents
Zsuzsanna UJSZÁSZI: Investigating a Translator’s Poetics: Amy Károlyi’s Translations of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry...157 Interpreting
Mária DURHAM: Temporal Characteristics of Simultaneous
Interpreting ...165 József BENDIK: On Suprasegmentals in Simultaneous
Interpreting ...176 Zsuzsa GERGELY LÁNG: Information Processing During
Interpreting and Some Teaching Implications ...191 About the Contributors ...197 Selected Bibliography of the Contributors ...202
Hungary is a country with a long tradition in literary translation. The eminent poets, as well as prose writers, some of them classics of Hungarian literature, who built up during the centuries the huge body of translation extant today, also wrote brilliant essays, reflecting on their work. At the same time, very little sys
tematic research was done on the linguistic, cultural, philosophic etc. aspects of translation.
Research in this field - called Translation Studies - was started in the nine
teen seventies in connection with the beginnings of the training of professional translators, while the study of translation became a legitime academic field of research only recently. For a long time, university lecturers, scholars, practicing translators and interpreters who started translation research were painfully iso
lated not only from what was going on in translation studies in the world at large, but also from each other.
This double isolation is being eased today. University lecturers, translators and interpreters interested in research, have found their forum at the regular meetings of the Translation Research Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Science. Hungarian scholars have also begun participating at international conferences, started publishing in international journals, and finally in 1996, they host an international conference on studies in translation and interpreting, with more than 400 hundred participants from all over the world.
This conference provides a good occasion to review the progress Hungarian scholars have made in Translation Studies so far. eTranslation Studies in Hun- gary’is a first attempt to assess the state of the art in Hungary at the end of the XXth century.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to Professor Jose Lambert for reviewing the draft version of the papers, for his critical remarks and valuable advice and in particular for his introductory article to this volume.
September, 1996
Kinga Klaudy
Introduction
Jose Lambert
1. (Re)discovering Translation
The aim of this introduction to a new discussion is to provide a better insight in the relationship between societies, in their self-definition and re-definitions, among others with the aid of language policies, and in particular via translation policies.
In traditional terms it might be called a theoretical discussion. In fact, it is meant to be a theoretical discussion of another kind, since its aim is not just to theorize but to develop models and maps for a better analysis of real cultural situations from past and present times and to make explicit proposals for concrete research on any society (let me distinguish once for all between society, country, nation, and linguistic community).
One of the key problems will be the interaction between what is supposed to be the private use of languages on the one hand, and public discourse, translated and/or not translated, on the other. As is indicated in the title, I accept from the beginning, with reference to an already well-established theoretical frame (see fur
ther), that translation is more than a private enterprise which would involve only a translator and one or two texts or languages: it is supposed to be a matter of com
munication, and probably a particular kind of communication, which has to be studied as such from various angles.
While widening the scope and stressing the fact that translation can never be only a matter of language, I want to stress that translation as a cultural phenome
non is inevitably a problem for societies and that the way in which societies tend to solve it (and to study/not to study it), consciously and unconsciously, teaches us how societies define and re-defme themselves. From this perspective the study of translation would be one of the instruments which allow to analyse the (re)shaping of societies and cultural maps.
Whatever the particular theoretical and cultural backgrounds of this paper may be, I do not want to recommend any strategies, or to influence translators, politi
cians or language teachers. I rather have in mind to analyse aspects of the transla
tional phenomenon as a scholar, not as a translator or a language teacher, and to study translation from an interdisciplinary point of view. It is part of my enterprise to integrate better the question of translation into disciplines (linguistics included) which have hardly taken the question into consideration, and to show what are the inevitable limits of translation research which would remain what I would call for
mal, technical, atomistic, instead of functional.
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Basic and systematic research has indeed hardly started in this area. Neverthe
less my argument is less new than one may assume as far as the theoretical basis is concerned. I just refer to the symptomatic shift in the study of translational phe
nomena from a technical and pragmatic into a cultural and functional approach.
Scholarship does not work in an absolutely tabula rasa situation, not even in the case of Translation Studies (as I shall call it: the name itself shows how ambiguous the nature of the thing still is), although this field of study often looks like a no man’s land. Hence some explanations on the study of translation and on its recent history may be necessary, but they will be reduced here to a minimum.
1.1. Consequences of the norms concept
It seems the Translation Studies, in comparison with other disciplines, is still in a very underdeveloped state. This is not surprizing at all, given its weak institution
al position within the international and national academic structures. Cultural fac
tors may also explain why the question of translation is not really taken seriously:
monolingual societies have strong ideological reasons for ignoring it, and for aban
doning it to the cultural diaspora countries, i.e. to those countries where intercul- tural and interlinguistic relations are not taken for exceptional matters. The fact that the “stronger” and “bigger” countries (France, the Unites States) do not offi
cially tend to play a role in the academic approach to translation has obviously reduced the chances for the establishment of the discipline. But whatever these cir
cumstances may imply, the very goals of the discipline are not clear at all: “Trans- latology” does not distinguish between those who want to teach/produce/improve translations and those who want to study translation, whereas “Translation Studies”
has been introduced (by James S Holmes, then Gideon Toury, later by Mary Snell- Hornby and then by many others) as the basis for an academic and research ori
ented discipline. It would have been hard to accept the idea of such a discipline without the norms concept, i.e. without the full awareness that there are no ideal translators nor translations: all translation phenomena are of a historical kind, and the very concept is not clear at all, which means that historical-descriptive research becomes necessary, in systematic interaction with the theoretical and conceptual component. Hence the goals of translation theory cannot be reduced any more to translation practice. Much more is needed than translation theory and translation practice.
The very use of the concept of norms implied from the beginning that transla
tion was not to be defined any more in strictly linguistic terms, but rather in terms of conventions and collective principles in a given frame at a given time, to the very point that it became utopian even to believe in the possibility of an absolute definition out of time and space. Prescriptive or normative theories are parts of the object of study, they can never be a sufficient basis for scholarly research (in fact, even the scholar’s theories, e.g. this one, are also objects of study, but not on the same level). Any kind of historical-descriptive research has to be based upon theoretical models which are, in fact, rather hypotheses than closed theoretical schemes.
This shift in Translation Studies is, in fact, nothing else than a shift from a for
mal into a more functional and relativistic approach. But the idea of norms allowed
for a radical re-formulation of the entire question of translation in terms of com
munication, e.g. in sociological and in semiotic terms, but also as a matter of reli
gious, social, literary, and of course linguistic principles. It also allowed a new for
mulation of the various social activities linked with translation, and of the scholarly activities linked with the topic.
After twenty years of research it has become necessary to stress some underesti
mated consequences of the norms concept, which explain why research on transla
tion cannot be simply located in the traditional territory of philology only (linguis
tics, literary studies). It is part of Social Sciences and of research on culture:
(1) Without an explicit contextualization, scholars cannot account for the rules of the translational game (“Contextualization”);
(2) This contextualization makes us aware of complex translation phenomena which are not necessarily identified as such, to the point that precisely their ambiguity is meaningful (“Hidden translation strategies”).
1.1.1. Contextualization
In the conceptualization of norms the shift from the more or less strictly formal (linguistic) view into a functional one has focused, among others, on the position of translations within other kinds of communication. Any kind of translation bor
rows its rules from at least two different linguistic traditions, quite often also from different moral, religious, artistic traditions. In case intermediary cultures have served as a channel between various cultures and text traditions (which is one of the most unknown common patterns in the history of translation), there may even be layers of several competing cultural patterns, which explains why translations can never look exactly like original texts, either in the source or in the target lan
guage.
A detailed description of translational phenomena within and in between vari
ous cultural traditions has often been provided in recent years from this perspective (Toury 1978; Tbury 1995; van den Broeck & Lefevere 1979; Lambert & Lefevere 1993; Lambert & Van Gorp 1985). The main change was probably the use of a multiplicity of parameters for the description and the search for the dominant ones as well as for their precise origins. It has been shown how translators decompose and re-compose previous messages while deleting, substituting, adding, interven
ing textual material according to norms and models that are always complex but never totally isolated from a precise context, even when this context can be distant in space and time. They delete, substitute, add single words as well as metaphors, sentences, paragraphs, dialogues, even characters and chapters, whether we like it or not (and quite often nobody is aware of it). Although translations are never to
tally rational, nor individual, they rely upon regularities. It can even be accepted that the idea of norms implies the concept of system (Hermans 1991) (1).
In terms of norms, the question of translation becomes part of entire organisa
tion of the socio-cultural world, of the relationships between societies, and of the active/passive attitudes between them. Hence translation in certain cases is proba
bly nothing else than a key pattern of cultural colonization, and it can be part and has often been part of colonization in general (Lambert 1995a) (2). For exactly
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the same reasons it is such a crucial aspect of cultural exchange from the point of view of (rather) closed civilizations.
Given the fact that the distinction between exceptional/common patterns seems to be basic, it can also be understood why it is so crucial to establish which areas, companies, institutions, societies, cultures are the origin and the target of the ex
change, and where exactly the initiative of the exchange starts, whether it is the ini
tiative of very individual beings or of large groups and even well-established, insti
tutionalized groups, whether it is a private or a public matter, and for whom. This question of the orientation of the communication, its direction, is inevitably, at least partly, a matter of economics (e.g. in the case of book distribution).
Hence it may be relevant to insist on the links between the cultural process of translation and the economic one by formulating it in terms of exportation and importation (Lambert 1980) (3). It is obvious then why scholars have to establish who is the exporting or the importing unit, and whether they are isolated as the central exporting unit, or whether, on the contrary, they are part of a series of so
cieties where messages from other societies are systematically imported via sec
ondary or tertiary units (that’s what is called “indirect translation”, a kind of trans
lation which, on strict formal grounds, does not even deserve to be labelled as translation, but which is precisely one of the dominant kinds of translation in so many cultures). It is this unidirectional relationship as well as its pervasiveness that develops stereotyped roles in exchange and, on the long run, “colonial” traditions.
(One recognizes easily here what is so common in our mass media age and why the contemporary mass communication situation is different from 18th century and 19th century situations (Lambert 1989b). But without digging too much into the problem of colonization it may be stressed that, just as in economical export/
import relationships, it is not clear on beforehand who among the importing and the exporting unit will, on the long run, profit most from the exchange. In the im
portation of translation and technology (which may have a similar impact on the value scales in the receiving society) hardly anything is possible without the contri
bution of the receptor and of his environment. One of the well-known struggles then becomes the struggle, not between the exporting and the importing unit, but between the members of a given society and its institutional or other power, partly because the receiving society may feel that its cultural identity is threatened by cer
tain (indigenous/exogenous) linguistic (other) items or even systematic strategies.
Like most matters of feeling, such (also positive, but mostly) negative reactions are conditioned by the internal organization of societies, by their degree of awareness of their cohesion as an autonomous structure and also their awareness of being in
vaded by foreign communication. Even the total lack of such an awareness does not mean at all that the given society is coherent as such, for there are no reasons to believe that any society is totally coherent, even in matters of language. These matters of identity and hence these attitudes towards (cultural, linguistic) import are, by definition, never totally conscious, and it can be indicated why, especially in the case of translation, so much will often inevitably and systematically remain un
conscious.
1.1.2. Strict versus large definition, or the importance of hidden translation strategies
It seems fundamental to correct, and especially to enlarge the traditional defi
nition of translation in any society. For rather simple reasons the observation that translation has not been defined so far in a satisfactory way - as far as I know - implies that narrow, strict definitions are inevitably irrelevant, probably more than larger and more flexible definitions which have more chances not to exclude im
portant features of the phenomenon.
Specialists of translation used to accept as translations only those texts (mes
sages, generally reduced to the written ones) which have a well-defined relation
ship (often called “equivalence”) with one particular and well-identified source text. It is one of the consequences of the norms concept that certain texts pretend to be translated whereas they are not (such as pseudo-translations) and that other texts are translated without pretending so. Even in case there would be a satisfac
tory “universal” definition of translation, we are supposed to study the status of given messages, their links with other messages which may be their model(s), iden
tified or unidentified as such (often called “original(s)”, unfortunately). It has been shown how pseudo-translations provide a stereotyped scheme of “foreign” texts and habits. Plagiarism, imitations, parodies may be used as an object of study in similar ways.
As long as there is no better and satisfactory definition of what translation is and could be, we have no grounds for reducing translation to individual and entire texts.
Every text contains translated elements: quotations, sentences, isolated words, col
loquial patterns, metaphors, paragraphs, etc. Quite often these “loan items” (which we avoid to reduce to loan-words only) were imported into a given language and into given texts a long time ago, and they are not perceived any more as “foreign”
or translated items. There is no reason why they would be phenomena totally dif
ferent from texts that have been translated entirely, the more since similar transla
tional rules also often apply to entire texts. Many among them have also been trans
lated (recently/a long time ago) but they are not perceived any more as foreign nor translated (e.g. religious texts, legal documents, diplomatic notes, etc.). This is the more obvious in cases where the translated status of entire messages (or fragments) is hidden for reasons of efficiency, as in the case of advertisements, magazine arti
cles, articles in newspapers. This extension of the translation phenomenon has enor
mous consequences for the observation of societies and their discursive strategies.
It indicates how much more widespread translation is than scholars in the Humani
ties may believe and how important it may be to determine when, why and in what various ways translated communication is concealed rather than manifest. Such differentiations in matters of translation status and translation strategy can be most clearly illustrated by one of the key channels for international communication nowa
days: those of dubbing and/or subtitling. Dubbing is generally identified as such at the beginning of a movie but who notices so (still), especially in cultures where it is the only translation procedure used on TV and in movie programmes?
In these functional terms we cannot escape the following extreme consequence:
even the very fact that there is NO TRANSLATION at all becomes meaningful, especially within frames where translation is normally being used, hence more par
Jósé Lambert
ticularly within messages that have been translated and where in certain fragments/
sentences the transposition of the foreign word/sentence is suddenly preferred to the translation into the target language (traditional Comparative Stylistics consid
ered non-translation to be one of the translation procedures; but in that case it was supposed to be only a microscopic phenomenon within one sentence). In func
tional terms, the study of translation cannot be reduced any more to translation, even in its largest sense, it implies also NON-TRANSLATION and the relation
ship with other solutions to the interlinguistic communication.
The observation that translation is part of discourse rather than a particular kind of texts increases the complexity of translation phenomena in a radical way.
In fact it is known already that the borderlines between translation and adaptation, imitation, etc., i.e. in terms of “genres” or “kinds of texts” are not better estab
lished at all than the borderlines between “translated discourse” and “non translat
ed discourse”.
In such terms the discursive position of translation may become more loose and vague, which may be a pity mainly for those who like clear-cut theories and objects of study, but its relevance for the study of language, communication and society increases enormously because it provides a remarkable tool for the study of com
petition and interaction between individual, collective and institutional discourse, and also between distinct discursive strategies. Being a matter of norms, it provides keys to the observation of value scales and their dynamics.
1.2. Languages and societies
Let us focus more specifically on the relationships between society, language and translation. If it is true that, from the point of view of societies, matters of lan
guage are always more than just matters of language, the same applies to transla
tion, first to translation in its traditional meaning (well-identified translated mes
sages), but also in its larger meaning (translated discourse).
According to Joshua A. Fishman (Fishman et al. 1985: XI.) there are three ma
jor ways in which language is related to culture: “(...) language itself is part of cul
ture, every language provides an index of the culture with which it is most inti
mately associated, and every language becomes symbolic of the culture with which it is most intimately associated.” - Such statements are not at all surprising, be
cause they partly reflect popular views on language and on the role played by lan
guage for the cultural identity of a given community. It is not compromising for Fishman’s thesis that it is in harmony with the man in the street’s ideas, for it can be validated by empirical research. It may be wise however to consider also the op
posite of this thesis by asking whether language is necessarily and entirely part (in
dex, symbol) of one single culture only. At first sight there is no reason for exclud
ing translational phenomena from Fishman’s thesis since translations are also part of a given language, maybe of more than one, but in an ambiguous way. It is not sure at all as I shall demonstrate that translated communication is always that pe
ripheral within a given society. Even when peripheral it deserves special attention from the point of view of a discipline which, like sociolinguistics, is looking for the homogeneity/heterogeneity patterns in language. So far sociolinguistics has dealt
systematically with bilingualism and multilingualism, but hardly with translation (the same applies, by the way, to specialists of “intercultural communication).
It remains true from the beginning that the Fishman thesis does not always nor systematically apply to translations in the way it applies to other language rules and areas. It is our task precisely to establish whether this is the case or not, when and where, and what might be the explanation of such differentiations. Of course noth
ing more can be provided here and now than suggestions for research.
If it is true that the question of translation deserves to be integrated into the sociolinguistic views on language and culture, this is even much more the case for contemporary societies. This observation can also be deduced from Fishman’s work, at least from his recent considerations on contemporary language policies:
translation is one of the inevitable consequences of “ethnolinguistic democracy”
(Fishman 1993).
Given the mobility of populations in terms of space and time in our contempo
rary world, we have strong reasons for accepting that nowadays the entire question of language and society is being redefined. As far as translation is concerned, there are no reasons, to put it in negative terms, for assuming that the question of trans
lation would not be determined by similar patterns. Which means that in the age of internationalization and globalization the question becomes to what extent the reshuffling of political and economic maps implies a parallel reorganization of lan
guage maps and of maps which may account for translation strategies, or for the interaction between partners via translation. The internationalization of commu
nication is supposed to be an obvious phenomenon as such, but it is often over
looked that traditional societies are only partly affected by it since only certain lay
ers of the pre-existing societies are involved in the new communication situation.
The intellectual and physical mobility of societies due to new technologies can be only a “surimposition” on the structure of societies, which implies that the new and the old world order coexist within the same frames. The intensification of commu
nication in one or in various languages defeats the principle of the static relation
ships in between societies, but there is no indication so far that the traditional world of side-by-side and group-by-group communication between societies has disap
peared, although there is a growing trend to present internationalism as superior to - not incompatible with - nationalism. It is a very new phenomenon that the ideal of a better society is so systematically linked nowadays with a new “Weltkul- tur” and that it implies the promotion of a totally new “lingua franca” and its value scales, and especially that the development of translation and of particular transla
tion strategies is an unknown aspect of the new world model. The question then becomes what kind of new patterns develop and how they coexist with the previous patterns. Within a country like Belgium, which is a young country on the old con
tinent, there are at least three distinct translational strategies in competition with each other and the basis for their distinction is a matter of discursive identity). It deserves to be studied to what extent these language and translation strategies are particular to this particular West-European area and whether the international mod
els tend to dominate also in other societies. Or to what extent this will promote a new world map and of what kind.
Whatever the answers may be, there are strong indications that our traditional view on the interactions via translation between well-located language groups,
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although still relevant in many cases, is not sufficient any more in our contempo
rary societies. Which implies that our well-known views on source and target lan
guages and cultures will have to be located in new world maps (Lambert 1989) (4).
1.3. From theory to research
The fact that I ask so many questions on translation and society indicates that some of the most basic aspects of translation-within-culture have not yet been in
vestigated, or only in an atomistic way. It is worthwhile, for a better understanding, not of translation (only), but of societies and cultures, to study translation policy along the lines of such a world map and world history. It must be asked whether such an idea of maps is not just a metaphor. Maybe it is just the other way round.
Our traditional view on societies, languages and their links accept from the begin
ning that these territories are linked with the political maps, which is nothing else than the substitution of undiscussed political (and Euro-centric) answers to schol
arly questions. This is nothing else than a metaphorical answer to a serious ques
tion, whereas the attempt to reconstruct cultural borderlines, even to the point that they may overlap with many other territories, is the most radical way of question
ing our concepts.
The other trouble is that no human beings seem able to represent clearly this universe and its history. It is of course again a very symptomatic and humanistic re
action that we long for solipsistic representations rather than for collectively planned research. There are no reasons to dream about simple worlds in many other disci
plines and there are no strong arguments for believing that only the question of translation has to be formulated in simple and conceivable terms. It is rather en
couraging that precisely in these research areas a few very general research frames are developing nowadays.
Most scholars will ask what kind of human beings will be willing to plan such a huge enterprise and to work within its frame. It is of course typical for the human
istic and individualistic spirit of research in the human sciences that the very idea of collective and long-run planning of research is questioned at all since nothing else than scholarship as such is at stake. On the other hand there are at least par
tial frames already for such organized research (I refer especially to the handbook planned by a German publisher and which involves about ten years of internation
al team research) and more aspects of the world history of translations are known than we are aware of. They are integrated little by little into the more general world map and it can be expected and wished that young scholars are willing to multiply them in the near future.
2. How societies can use research on translation
During a long period after the second world war, the political as well as the socio
cultural world have been heavily influenced by a dominantly dualistic organization.
It is not only since 1989 that this “world order” has been shaken. Anyway there seem not be many chances that it will be re-established in one way or another. For many years already the internationalisation process has crossed most borderlines and influenced the daily life of most citizens. Whatever it may offer to populations,
it has enormous consequences for their self-definition in the world frame. The fact that so many new nations try to conquer a seat at the United Nations indicates clearly that our world is much less static than ever. New borderlines are being es
tablished in many parts of the world, and internal as well as external struggles (or wars) are the most substantial part of the media news. When political order is not at stake, economic and/or cultural autonomy may be questioned or redefined. After all, this is just a matter of values, value hierarchies and power. The problem is which groups/institutions are accepted by given populations as their authority.
On the occasion of a congress organized in the heart of the new European world (Lambert 1993), I have demonstrated how translation may offer a privileged ap
proach to the analysis of the new socio-cultural organization. In case the basic rules of socio-cultural life have indeed been revised, this is supposed to influence very basic activities such as verbal communication, discourse, language and languages.
It is on the basis of such a general hypothesis that I have suggested to study to what extent the basic rules of verbal communication have changed in diplomatic discourse, in the discourse of the media and in business communication. There are strong indications that heavy shifts have taken place long before the Berlin wall has collapsed, which implies that more has changed than just political order.
From the perspective of the West-European countries, where traditions used to be well-established and stable, it seems that autonomy is not much less at stake than in other parts of the world. The EU tends to envisage the power of the Ameri
can media industry as a threat for its own economy, or rather for its own culture.
Heavy discussions have taken place around treatment of economic activities with cultural consequences, at least in the case of the audio-visual media. Where exactly are the borderlines between economics and culture? This is one of the key issue in the relationships between the EU and the USA. It is not sure at all that our politi
cal leaders need any help from scholarship in their definition of concepts, since they may be more interested in (economic) power than in the discussion itself. But the fact that culture is so central in political and economic decision-making is an interesting point for historians and for scholarship. In fact this is not new at all in history. Martiné Danan has shown how French film industry since the twenties has systematically used the same kind of arguments in order to protect itself against the American invasion (Danan, forthcoming). In this case language has always been treated as a key aspect of culture, sometimes as a cultural value, at other moments as an economic weapon.
The question of language has been a crucial issue since the very beginning within the European Union. It has been linked with a very new language policy which has been defined as “ethnolinguistic democracy” (Fishman 1993), since it aims at pro
tecting the rights of minorities with the aid of language. The boom of translational activities on behalf of Europe is a direct consequence of this peculiar language pol
icy. Whatever such a democracy may imply (Lambert 1994b), it is a rather surpris
ing phenomenon in a group of nations with - in certain cases - a strong tradition of centralization and monolingual language policy. According to some hesitations and discussions it is not sure at all that it will survive in an enlarged European Union.
On the other hand it is not sure at all that the European Union would have good chances for revival from the moment it would drop its ethnolinguistic democracy
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principles (Coulmass 1991). And such observations stress the relevance of language and translation as part of political strategies.
Some member states of the EU have also been submitted to a reshuffling, with
out any apparent change of borderlines. This has been obviously the case in Bel
gium, where different communities have conquered autonomy within the Belgian constitution. Such a reshuffling of a nation born in several steps during the 19th century has not really been perceived in the international world since in this case no weapons nor wars have attracted the international media. However it has changed everyday life in Belgium rather profoundly. For our topic, the use of the language principle as a distinctive borderline for political, economic and cultural options is an interesting matter. It confirms that language is more than a simple technical tool in our contemporary world.
As a newly established society, the Flemish Community and its government even work out strategic models for the integration of language and culture into its gen
eral long term plans. In a way similar to the GATT policy of the EU, it tries to pro
tect the Flemish economic and financial backgrounds of its enterprises against the foreign (French) impact (Brockmans 1993).Within the Language Union (“Taalunie”) that links the young Flemish society with the well-established Dutch nation (16th century), it is often the Flemish partner that is the most dynamic one. After all, the Netherlands have never really cared nor had to care about their language: their international business companies tend to use English as the official language and even their universities, sometimes supported by their minister of education, feel attracted by the idea to offer their programs in English rather than in Dutch. How
ever, the Language Union is used by both the Dutch and the Flemish government as a support for their international activities, not at the least in the European Union.
But the Flemish government is obviously more eager than its partner to promote an international media policy on the basis of cultural and linguistic guide-lines. It has supported and organized recently several symposia on the interaction between culture and economics. During an important symposium organized in Brussels (van Zutphen & Nootens 1994), it was the Flemish Community that took the initiative to gather countries like Aruba, Indonesia, Surinam and, of course, the Netherlands on the basis of their Dutch speaking backgrounds in order to work out a (more) common media policy, including the book market. The participation of the new post-apartheid South Africa to such a symposium was an interesting event in itself since this nation tends to question more and more its own Dutch (speaking) backgrounds, and many among the other participants, including the Netherlands, indeed rejected the idea of a language union for their media. During the discussions, it appeared time and again that other cultural components than language have a strongly differentiating impact on the various traditions. But the most fascinating observation was and remains that the various cultural groups who were invited to report on their media landscape did not know too well how exactly to catch the language component, in particular in the case of translations.
In a situation where the basic task of the partners was to describe the local me
dia production in relation with imported media production, it became obvious that governments are badly informed on import from the moment the language of the local population is used: the experts stress that the language matter is everywhere conditioned by economic circumstances, but they recognize that they cannot
analyse them at this stage. The techniques and the figures used in order to distin
guish between “original production” in Dutch and the productions translated into Dutch were not only declared primitive and unclear by the experts themselves, they were not even considered to be important: from the perspective of the media experts involved, foreign programs translated into Dutch tend to be perceived as Dutch, and it is only due to certain obviously imported and exotic looking best
sellers that the question of translation finally pops up, not as a threat for the Dutch language, but as an economic problem. The fact that enormous areas of the (liter
ary) book production is invaded by foreign writers and genres in Dutch translation is not interpreted as a problem for the autonomous production, nor even for the dynamics of the Dutch (standard) language. Even the Language Union hardly cares about the translator’s strategies, it rather attempts to systematically promote the translation of Dutch (literary) works into foreign languages.
This is why governments who take their cultural and linguistic policy seriously have strong reasons for not ignoring any more the translation phenomenon. That’s what some scholars in social studies happen to discover exactly at this moment, and the strange thing is that it occurs in the Netherlands. A few months only after the Universiteit van Amsterdam has decided to dismantle the institute where James S Holmes has been teaching for many years, in a country where institutes for trans
lation training are not only very small in number, the Amsterdam School for Social Research has decided to focus on translation as an important aspect of social be
haviour. In a programmatic article (Heilborn 1995) published in a book devoted to the international position of the Netherlands, it is even recommended to orga
nize research on translation as an aspect of language competition and as an aspect of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems (Wallerstein 1991), although Wallerstein himself rather excludes the language problem from his world systems. The argu
ment is well taken, but the information on translation studies as a discipline is very incomplete and somewhat unsystematic (historical-descriptive research would be rather limited to translated literature). An interesting idea is anyway that the statis
tical analysis of translations in terms of export and import provides useful data about the dynamics of a given nation (see also Milo 1984).
This has been the starting point, precisely, of various projects carried out at KU Leuven since 1980. Beside limited inquiries about “la traduction comme probléme beige” (Geysens 1986) and about recent trends in the interaction in Belgium be
tween different languages after the second world war (Capelle & Meylaerts 1995), it is mainly in the Reine Meylaert’s Ph D. research (Meylaerts, forthcoming) and in Katrin Van Bragt’s impressive bibliography (Van Bragt et al. 1995) that the fluc
tuations in translational exchange have been interpreted as a key to the dynamics of a given society. A decisive step into a systemic interpretation of bibliographical data on translation has been made in Van Bragt 1995 due to the development of interactive electronic programs: synchronic and diachronic correlations of all kinds can be examined by the reader of the bibliography, and the answers are formulated as graphics and statistics. Statistical data lead simply and directly towards the fluc
tuations and trends in the various subareas of French culture and towards a gener
al interpretation of the import trends during a period of thirty years. Bibliographi
cal statistics and their electronic analysis provide us with a barometer of translated importation into France.
Jósé Lambert
The resources of contemporary electronics indeed open the way into investiga
tions and towards tools that so far belonged to scholarly Utopias, i.e. the systemat
ic analysis of relationships between the various areas of (cultural) production. For decades already economists have analysed the export/import relationships in a giv
en society and on the world level. To the extent that translations can easily be con
sidered as (economic and cultural) import, they certainly deserve to be observed in relationship with export - as in Heilborn 1995 -, but more in particular with non-translated cultural import and, before all, with the local production and repro
duction of communications (of all kinds). This is exactly what Even-Zohar (Even- Zohar 1978) had in mind when dealing with the position of translations in a given culture. The innovation that becomes possible nowadays is 1° the statistical descrip
tion and analysis of such positions and relations, 2° not only in economic terms, but also in terms of cultural relations including the language component. Since computers are strong and sophisticated enough, societies who decide so are able to construct a cultural barometer which indicates the degree of both economic and cultural autonomy, both in particular subareas of society (such as children’s litera
ture or television programs) and more generally for the society in its overall behav
iour towards its neighbours. It is even possible to isolate the language component from the cultural and economic components, which finally allows us - translation scholars - to ask the question: “Is there really any evidence that language and trans
lation help in shaping societies and their values?” As in any kind of research, the results of such - now electronic - investigations do not offer any absolute certainty, they simply offer indications. But in this case, according to the kind of data one wants to collect and control, the possibility to test out data and to reach empirical evidence has become quite strong. And this might mean a historical moment for those who have always tried to establish historical-descriptive translation studies.
The use that could be made of such research may become a delicate matter: from the moment political leaders are offered instruments that allow for application, the independence of research is very much at stake, but this can never be a sufficient reason for keeping research far away from real life.
Notes
(1) Since the mid-seventies there has been a rather heavy discussion of the systems concept in Translation Studies (and in other disciplines). In 1989 the Gottingen Sonderforschungs- bereich devoted a Symposium to the topic. The bibliography on “translation” and “sys
tems” is enormous and the discussion is still very open. See Lambert 1995b.
(2) A few years ago several scholars have discovered the importance of the links between trans
lation and colonization (Susan Bassnett, Cheyfitz), but without linking it explicitly with the very nature of translation as an inevitable problem, in any society, which involves power mechanisms. This has become exactly the area of research where Clem Robyns (Robyns, forthcoming), but also Andreas Poltermann, Lawrence Venuti and Canadian scholars such as Annie Brisset, Sherry Simon and others are looking for discursive strategies and for pow
er relations in explicit and implicit discourse on translation. Since 1990 power in transla
tion has developed as one of the keys issues for research.
(3) It is since about 1980 that I deal myself with the very delicate matter of (economic?) im
portation/ exportation in literature and in translation. The key problem is in fact whether import, export and the like are indeed “just metaphors”, whether they have necessarily an economical and strictly economical “essence”. See the second part of this discussion.
(4) See my suggestions for a new “cartography” of linguistic, literary, translational and cultur
al phenomena which I have developed in several articles since Lambert 1989c. They argue against a static world view where scholars accept without any critical distance that tradi
tions would coincide only and necessarily with political (“national”) and/or linguistic bor
derlines. This implies that they support the normative organization of would-be totalitarian and coherent societies.
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Translation, Translators
and the Study of Translation in Hungary
István Bart - Kinga Klaudy
1. The social background of Hungarian translators - language policy and translation policy in Hungary after the second World War
Before the second World War the most important and most frequently used for
eign language in Hungary was German, which has a centuries’ old history and tra
dition in the country and used to be a veritable second language even of the state up to the middle of the last century. Hence, the Hungarian middle-classes, and professionals in particular, were practically bilingual - to some extent, even in the interwar period -, with 20% at the most having French as a third language, while the knowledge of English was rather rare.
After the communist takeover, when the country’s Western ties were radically cut overnight, the knowledge of both German and French became socially useless.
The middle-classes themselves were ousted of power and dispossessed, profession
als lost their status and in many cases their livelihood as well.
The country was facing East and the newly forged political links created a huge demand for the new lingua franca of the region, that is Russian. In Hungary, a non- Slavic country, the study of Russian had no traditions at all. By an act of political will - an early example of conscious language-policy -, a new academic field was created, clearly with the aim of building a large body of Russian speakers to link up Hungary and the Soviet Union for the foreseeable future.
During the forthcoming 40 years, every Hungarian student, in fact, every single Hungarian child - not only in the cities - but even in the smallest of village schools, was taught Russian as a first foreign language, from the age of ten. Russian became the only mandatory foreign language under high school level.
Where did Russian translators come from?
By force of the situation, almost exclusively former Greek, Latin, German and French teachers were made to teach Russian, though most of them were only a few lessons ahead of their pupils - obviously, the level of tuition was abysmal. The Hun
garian school system was not able provide the country with well trained Russian translators for a long time.
Extended version of a lecture delivered at the European Conference on Translation “An European Union Enlarged Towards the East: What Role for Translation ” organized by the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpret! eTraduttori, 28 May 1996.Trieste, Italy.
The majority of Russian translators were trained in the Soviet Union. The sons and daughters of the new ruling class, - of previously underprivileged classes - were sent by the Party to different Soviet universities to study for degrees in every imag
inable academic subject, from architecture to chemistry. Such was the demand in Russian translators and interpreters however, that returning home, many of them - instead of employment in their profession - rather became well paid translators, be
cause the total exposure to the Russian language made their knowledge of Russian incomparably higher than the level anybody could achieve at home.
The small number of translations that were still needed from the German, French or English language, was - strangely enough - made by the members of the de
classe aristocracy or bourgeoisie, considered politically unreliable as a matter of course and consequently excluded from jobs of higher responsibilities. One no
table example of such translators, is dr. Árpád Göncz, the first President of the Republic of Hungary, a lawyer by training, who became an eminent translator of contemporary American fiction. He started translating while serving a long sen
tence in prison after the revolution in 1956. He was employed at the Translation Office - set up in the prison by the secret police to translate particularly sensitive materials, acquired by secret agents.
Literary translation in this period became the livelihood of some of the best writers and poets of the country, who were banned from publishing their own works.
This had the unexpected effect of raising both the standards and prestige of liter
ary translation.
2. The status of translators
These two sources of translator-supply explain why the profession of non-liter- ary translators was not a very prestigious one in the 50’and 60’ or even the 70’. The popular image of the translator was a dry little old man in faded, old fashioned clothes, making a miserable livelihood by long hours of hackwork. Until the 70’, practicing translators - without exception - had no professional training whatsoev
er and they only became translators by force of circumstances. Fees were accord
ingly not very high. Most translators worked part-time to supplement their income of other sources. The level of professional awareness was low, accidental and super
ficial. One explanation for this may be, that any attempt on the side of professional translators to form an association, was blocked even in the early 80’ for the clearly political reason of the unreliability of the practitioners of the trade.
Literary translation however, especially the translation of poetry, was an excep
tion from under the rule. It is symptomatic that the once powerful Writers’ Asso
ciation - a veritable Ministry of Literature at a time - did have a branch for trans
lators, where some of the very best prose writers and poets were members. This or
ganization even became a member of FIT; incidentally, the Association of Hunga
rian Translators, the body formed after the political changes, is still not a member.
The translation of belles lettres and poetry was regarded as an art-form with a relatively high prestige because it shared in the glory of the Hungarian literary tra
dition. Hungarian poets have traditionally regarded their translations as an integral part of their oeuvre. Few of them turned into full-time, professional translators, yet their level of professional awareness was very high. A very important factor in
István Bart - Kinga Klaudy
this highly developed professionalism were the two or three publishing houses - naturally state-owned and under strict control of the Ministry -, permitted and at the same time, confined to publish foreign literature in translation. At these pub
lishing houses - perhaps surprisingly - most of the editors were not political com
missars, but rather the same class of people themselves, as the translators they em
ployed, and for whom they provided a shelter. This association lead to the develop
ment of a creative atmosphere, in which professionalism flourished, and in which, we may say, the foundations of a translation theory were laid down unconsciously.
3. The training of translators
The first step to the increase of professionalism in technical translation, was the foundation of the “Fordító- és Tolmácsképző Csoport”, the Training Center for Translators and Interpreters” (TCTI) at the University of Budapest (ELTE) in 1973.
Since its inception, the Center’s objective has been to train professional transla
tors and consecutive interpreters.
Today, the programme includes two semesters of postgraduate studies and training in the following language combinations: English-Hungarian, French- Hungarian, German-Hungarian, Russian-Hungarian.
Candidates applying to the program are required to hold a university degree or college diploma, and Certificate of Proficiency in their second language. Finishing the course, students are awarded either or both of the so called “Certificate of Translation” and “Certificate of Consecutive Interpreting”.
One year after the foundation of the Training Center, in 1974, graduate transla
tor training was introduced for professional translators at different Hungarian uni
versities, where students receive a joint degree in science/engineering and transla
tion. This form of training has been offered by at least 6 to 8 universities for the last twenty years. (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Faculty of Science; Kossuth Lajos University, Debrecen, Faculty of Science; University of Agriculture, Debrecen;
Janus Pannonius University, Pécs, Faculty of Economics; University of Miskolc, University of Agriculture, Gödöllő etc.)
On the basis of their certificate in translation and consecutive interpreting grad
uates are issued a translator’s licence by local authorities. Originally, it would have been mandatory for both in-house translator/interpreters and temporarily em
ployed translator/interpreters to hold such a licence. It has never had however much significance, as employers largely disregard and rarely ask for it.
There has never been institutional training for literary translators. At the faculty of humanities however, at every large Hungarian university there are very success
ful translation workshops offered by famous literary translators. Many young and aspiring literary translators were first introduced to translation by such masters of the trade, before they found their way to professionalism.
4. After the changes - the new market for translations
The two types of training mentioned above, produced during the last twenty years about 30 new, trained translators and interpreters and approximately 30 tech
nical translators annually. Not all the trainees became actually translators, yet their
numbers were sufficient to satisfy the needs of the economy and business or ad
ministration during the socialist era, when Hungary’s external relations were scarce.
One notable exception however has to be mentioned here. With the gradual development and heavy growth of Comecon from the early 60’s onwards, in the Russian language alone a real translation-market did evolve in Hungary. Like Comecon itself in the economy, the translation/interpretation-market based on it was equally huge but not quality oriented. It did not require anything more, than reliable, run-of-the-mill translations of highly formalized texts. The huge demand in the translation of stylistically unpretentious texts naturally called for a certain kind of professionalism however, and a large body of reliable, but mediocre trans
lators, satisfied with volume and not interested in quality.
After the political changes in 1989, the translation market underwent dramatic changes as well. Among other developments, the total collapse of the Comecon- related market should be mentioned in this context.
The Iron Curtain disappeared and the whole Hungarian political and econom
ic system opened up and turned towards the West. The changes in political life - the establishment of a freely elected Parliament, the multi-party system, the rapid growth of private ownership and a free market economy, - though not without precedents in Hungarian history, meant the close emulation of Western patterns - largely by translation, in more than one sense of the word. On the other hand, the nearly total privatization of state property also meant a large influx of foreign capi
tal concomitant with the appearance of multinational companies and joint ventures - and brought daily exchange with their Western partners for all the actors of the Hungarian economy. International business contacts have increased and intensi
fied enormously over the past few years, creating a hitherto unknown demand for interpreters.
Naturally, the political and economic changes created a host of new opportuni
ties for translators as well. Earlier, “The Hungarian National Office for Translations and Attestations” (OFFI) - established more than a century ago by royal charter - held a monopoly in Hungary. They had processed the bulk of Comecon-transla- tions together with fulfilling virtually all the government’s translation needs, unat
tended by the translation bureaux of various ministries or industrial complexes themselves. The Office fell under the authority of the Ministry of Justice, and was the only institution in Hungary authorized to notarize translations. Today, nota
rization is the last relic of their onetime monopoly. On the translation market they have to compete with more than 300 new private translation offices. Such a large number of new ventures - though their professional standards vary widely - is a clear sign of a hugely increased market, of course.
A new linguistic environment came into existence virtually overnight - defined by the translation of a mass of business and other documents to and from English, German, etc. The new environment requires a very creative approach on the part of translators and interpreters. Hungarian usage is undergoing great changes and translators, interpreters often find themselves challenged to introduce old-new terms - like stock-exchange, share, mortgage, limited liability, to mention just a few obvious examples - that were virtually forgotten over the last 40-50 years.
Apart from the economy, the media is another huge market for translations: the growing number of TV-channels and the explosive development of video-rentals.
