WHAT IS TRANSLATION?
In the early years of Translation Studies, Peter Newmark defined translation as a craft consisting in the attempt to replace a written message and/or statement in one language by the same message and/or statement in another language. (1981, p.7, my emphasis. First published 1976). In 1988, Newmark offers another definition of translation:
What is translation? Often, though not by any means always, it is rendering the meaning of a text into another language in the way that the author intended the text. (1988, p.5, my emphasis)
These definitions would not now be considered satisfactory, but they are useful because they show evidence of two very deeply entrenched phenomena in translation theory:
1) the feeling that the translation should somehow be ‘the same’ as the original (related to theories of identity and equivalence) and
2) that the function of a translation is to render ‘the meaning’ behind the source text, in this case expressed as a function of the author’s intention (which brings in the concept of fidelity).
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Both of these notions were heavily problematized in the second half of the twentieth century (we will have a chance to look into this in more detail over the next couple of weeks). The legacy of the Romantic era (in the UK this is roughly the early nineteenth century) was the conceptualization of the author as primary creator, and the privileging of originality as the criterion for literary worth. This primacy of the author, and the understanding of textual interpretation as a search for authorial intention, was challenged by critical theorists in the twentieth century. Two of the best-known challenges came from two French critics, Roland Barthes, in his essay ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (‘The Death of the Author’, written in 1968, translated into English 1977), and Michel Foucault, in ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ (‘What is an author?’, written in 1969, translated 1979). Barthes argues against the idea of authorial originality, pointing out that texts are always heavily dependent on other texts for composition and interpretation (intertextuality). Foucault posited the ‘author-function’; the author matters not because they are a real person with a creative process, or because they are a text’s originator (though they may be both things), but because our cultural systems and institutional structures require something called an ‘author’ as a means of organizing discourse and attributing value.
If we look at more recent definitions of translation we will see that they steer clear of both the author’s intention and the idea of equivalence:
Translation is a process by which the chain of signifiers that constitutes the source-language text is replaced by a chain of signifiers in the target language which the translator provides on the strength of an interpretation (Venuti 1995, p.17)
Translation is the process of replacing an original text, known as the source text, with a substitute one, known as the target text. (House 2009, p. 4)
A translation may be defined as a text in one language that represents or stands in for a text in another language; the term translation also refers to the act of producing such a text. (Palumbo 2009, p.122)
In the field of languages, ‘translation’ today has several meanings:
(1) the general subject field or phenomenon […]
(2) the product – that is, the text that has been translated […]
(3) the process of producing the translation, otherwise known as translating […]
The process of translation between two written languages involves the changing of an original written text (the source text or ST) in the original verbal language (the source language or SL) into a written text (the target text or TT) in a different verbal language (the target language or TL) (Munday 2012, p.8)
As we can see, these definitions all acknowledge the pair of texts constituting source text and target text. They posit that these texts stand in a relationship of some kind to each other which could be referred to as a relationship of substitution (Venuti, House, Palumbo) or representation (Palumbo). As a rule, however, they steer carefully clear of value judgments, and avoid attempting to define the natureof the relationship between ST and TT. This is as a result of the shift from prescriptiveviews of translation (‘this is how it ought to be done’) towards descriptiveapproaches (‘this is how it is done’; see Toury 1995). Again, we will have an opportunity to explore this later in the unit.
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