Translation
is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an
equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates
writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature;
there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2000
BCE) into Southwest Asian languages of the second millennium BCE.
Translators
always risk inappropriate spill-over of source-language idiom and usage into
the target-language translation. On the other hand, spill-overs have imported
useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched the target
languages. Indeed, translators have helped substantially to shape the languages
into which they have translated.
Due to the
demands of business documentation consequent to the Industrial Revolution that
began in the mid-18th century, some translation specialties have become
formalized, with dedicated schools and professional associations.
Because of
the laboriousness of translation, since the 1940s engineers have sought to
automate translation (machine translation) or to mechanically aid the human
translator (computer-assisted translation). The rise of the Internet has
fostered a world-wide market for translation services and has facilitated
language localization.[6] Translation studies deal with the systematic study of
the theory, the description and the application of translation.
Etymology
 |
| Rosetta Stone |
The word
translation derives from the Latin translatio (which itself comes from trans-
and fero, the supine form of which is latum, together meaning "to carry
across" or "to bring across"). The modern Romance languages use
words for translation derived from that source or from the alternative Latin
traduco ("to lead across"). The Germanic (except Dutch) and Slavic
languages likewise use calques of these Latin sources.
The Ancient
Greek term for translation, μετάφρασις (metaphrasis, "a speaking
across"), has supplied English with metaphrase (a "literal," or
"word-for-word," translation) — as contrasted with paraphrase
("a saying in other words", from παράφρασις, paraphrasis). Metaphrase
corresponds, in one of the more recent terminologies, to "formal
equivalence"; and paraphrase, to "dynamic equivalence."
Strictly
speaking, the concept of metaphrase — of "word-for-word translation"
— is an imperfect concept, because a given word in a given language often
carries more than one meaning; and because a similar given meaning may often be
represented in a given language by more than one word. Nevertheless,
"metaphrase" and "paraphrase" may be useful as ideal
concepts that mark the extremes in the spectrum of possible approaches to
translation.
A secular
icon for the art of translation is the Rosetta Stone. This trilingual
(hieroglyphic-Egyptian, demotic-Egyptian, ancient-Greek) stele became the
translator's key to decryption of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Thomas Young,
Jean-François Champollion and others.
In the United
States of America, the Rosetta Stone is incorporated into the crest of the
Defense Language Institute.
Theory
Western
theory
 |
| John Dryden |
Discussions
of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show
remarkable continuities. The ancient Greeks distinguished between metaphrase
(literal translation) and paraphrase. This distinction was adopted by English
poet and translator John Dryden (1631–1700), who described translation as the
judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in the target
language, "counterparts," or equivalents, for the expressions used in
the source language:
When [words]
appear . . . literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they
should be changed. But since... what is beautiful in one [language] is often
barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to
limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words: ’tis enough if
he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense.
Dryden
cautioned, however, against the license of "imitation", i.e., of
adapted translation: “When a painter copies from the life... he has no
privilege to alter features and lineaments..."
This general
formulation of the central concept of translation — equivalence — is as
adequate as any that has been proposed since Cicero and Horace, who, in
1st-century-BCE Rome, famously and literally cautioned against translating
"word for word" (verbum pro verbo).
 |
| Cicero |
Despite
occasional theoretical diversity, the actual practice of translation has hardly
changed since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early
Christian period and the Middle Ages, and adapters in various periods
(especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have
generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents —
"literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary — for the
original meaning and other crucial "values" (e.g., style, verse form,
concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with speech articulatory
movements) as determined from context.
 |
| Samuel Johnson |
 |
| Martin Luther |
Generally,
the greater the contact and exchange that have existed between two languages,
or between those languages and a third one, the greater is the ratio of
metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating among them. However,
due to shifts in ecological niches of words, a common etymology is sometimes
misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. For
example, the English actual should not be confused with the cognate French
actuel ("present", "current"), the Polish aktualny
("present", "current," "topical," "timely,"
"feasible"), the Swedish aktuell ("topical",
"presently of importance") or the Russian актуальный
("urgent", "topical").
The
translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between
cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, the 2nd-century-BCE Roman
adapter of Greek comedies. The translator's role is, however, by no means a
passive, mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an artist.
The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics such
as Cicero. Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after
life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back
at least to Samuel Johnson’s remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a
flageolet, while Homer himself used a bassoon.
 |
| Johann Gottfried Herder |
If translation be an art, it is no easy one. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon wrote that if a translation is to be true, the translator must know both languages, as well as the science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether.
 |
| Ignacy Krasicki |
The translator of the Bible into German, Martin Luther, is credited with being the first European to posit that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language. L.G. Kelly states that since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, "it has been axiomatic" that one translates only toward his own language.
Compounding
the demands on the translator is the fact that no dictionary or thesaurus can
ever be a fully adequate guide in translating. The British historian Alexander
Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that
assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries.
The same point, but also including listening to the spoken language, had
earlier, in 1783, been made by the Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Andrzej
Kopczyński.
The
translator’s special role in society is described in a posthumous 1803 essay by
"Poland's La Fontaine", the Roman Catholic Primate of Poland, poet,
encyclopedist, author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French and
Greek, Ignacy Krasicki:
“ [T]ranslation . . . is in fact an art both
estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor and portion of
common minds; [it] should be [practiced] by those who are themselves capable of
being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than
in their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they
render their country.”
Religious
texts
An important
role in history has been played by translation of religious texts. Buddhist
monks who translated the Indian sutras into Chinese often skewed their
translations to better reflect China's distinct culture, emphasizing notions
such as filial piety.
One of the
first recorded instances of translation in the West was the rendering of the
Old Testament into Greek in the 3rd century BCE. The translation is known as
the "Septuagint", a name that refers to the seventy translators
(seventy-two, in some versions) who were commissioned to translate the Bible at
Alexandria, Egypt. Each translator worked in solitary confinement in his own
cell, and according to legend all seventy versions proved identical. The Septuagint
became the source text for later translations into many languages, including
Latin, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian.
Still
considered one of the greatest translators in history, for having rendered the
Bible into Latin, is Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translation. For
centuries the Roman Catholic Church used his translation (known as the
Vulgate), though even this translation at first stirred controversy.
The period
preceding, and contemporary with, the Protestant Reformation saw the
translation of the Bible into local European languages — a development that
contributed to Western Christianity's split into Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism due to disparities between Catholic and Protestant versions of
crucial words and passages. Lasting effects on the religions, cultures and
languages of their respective countries have been exerted by such Bible
translations as Martin Luther's into German, Jakub Wujek's into Polish, and the
King James Bible's translators' into English.
A famous
mistranslation of the Bible is the rendering of the Hebrew word קֶרֶן (keren),
which has several meanings, as "horn" in a context where it actually
means "beam of light". As a result, for centuries artists have
depicted Moses the Lawgiver with horns growing out of his forehead; an example
is Michelangelo's famous sculpture. Some Christians with anti-Semitic feelings
have used such depictions to spread hatred of the Jews, claiming that they were
devils with horns.
Asian theory
There is a
separate tradition of translation in South Asia and East Asia (primarily modern
India and China), especially connected with the rendering of religious texts —
particularly Buddhist texts — and with the governance of the Chinese empire.
Classical Indian translation is characterized by loose adaptation, rather than
the closer translation more commonly found in Europe, and Chinese translation theory
identifies various criteria and limitations in translation.
In the East
Asia Sinosphere (sphere of Chinese cultural influence), more important than
translation per se has been the use and reading of Chinese texts, which also
had substantial influence on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages,
with substantial borrowings of vocabulary and writing system. Notable is
Japanese Kanbun, which is a system of glossing Chinese texts for Japanese
speakers.
Fidelity vs.
transparency
Fidelity (or
faithfulness) and transparency, dual ideals in translation, are often at odds.
A 17th-century French critic coined the phrase "les belles infidèles"
to suggest that translations, like women, can be either faithful or beautiful,
but not both.
Faithfulness
is the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the
source text, without distortion.
Transparency
is the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target
language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to its
grammar, syntax and idiom.
A translation
that meets the first criterion is said to be "faithful"; a
translation that meets the second, "idiomatic". The two qualities are
not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The criteria
for judging the fidelity of a translation vary according to the subject, type
and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context,
etc.
The criteria
for judging the transparency of a translation appear more straightforward: an
unidiomatic translation "sounds wrong"; and, in the extreme case of
word-for-word translations generated by many machine-translation systems, often
results in patent nonsense.
Nevertheless,
in certain contexts a translator may consciously seek to produce a literal
translation. Translators of literary, religious or historic texts often adhere
as closely as possible to the source text, stretching the limits of the target
language to produce an unidiomatic text. A translator may adopt expressions
from the source language in order to provide "local color".
In recent
decades, prominent advocates of such "non-transparent" translation
have included the French scholar Antoine Berman, who identified twelve
deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations, and the American
theorist Lawrence Venuti, who has called upon translators to apply
"foreignizing" translation strategies instead of domesticating ones.
Many
non-transparent-translation theories draw on concepts from German Romanticism,
the most obvious influence being the German theologian and philosopher
Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture "On the Different Methods
of Translation" (1813) he distinguished between translation methods that
move "the writer toward [the reader]", i.e., transparency, and those
that move the "reader toward [the author]", i.e., an extreme fidelity
to the foreignness of the source text. Schleiermacher favored the latter
approach; he was motivated, however, not so much by a desire to embrace the
foreign, as by a nationalist desire to oppose France's cultural domination and
to promote German literature.
Current
Western translation practice is dominated by the dual concepts of
"fidelity" and "transparency". This has not always been the
case, however; there have been periods, especially in pre-Classical Rome and in
the 18th century, when many translators stepped beyond the bounds of
translation proper into the realm of adaptation.
Adapted
translation retains currency in some non-Western traditions. The Indian epic,
the Ramayana, appears in many versions in the various Indian languages, and the
stories are different in each. Similar examples are to be found in medieval
Christian literature, which adjusted the text to local customs and mores.
Equivalence
The question
of fidelity vs. transparency has also been formulated in terms of,
respectively, "formal equivalence" and "dynamic [or functional]
equivalence". The latter expressions are associated with the translator
Eugene Nida and were originally coined to describe ways of translating the
Bible, but the two approaches are applicable to any translation.
"Formal
equivalence" corresponds to "metaphrase", and "dynamic
equivalence" to "paraphrase".
"Dynamic
equivalence" (or "functional equivalence") conveys the essential
thought expressed in a source text — if necessary, at the expense of
literality, original sememe and word order, the source text's active vs.
passive voice, etc.
By contrast,
"formal equivalence" (sought via "literal" translation)
attempts to render the text literally, or "word for word" (the latter
expression being itself a word-for-word rendering of the classical Latin verbum
pro verbo) — if necessary, at the expense of features natural to the target
language.
There is,
however, no sharp boundary between functional and formal equivalence. On the
contrary, they represent a spectrum of translation approaches. Each is used at
various times and in various contexts by the same translator, and at various points
within the same text — sometimes simultaneously. Competent translation entails
the judicious blending of functional and formal equivalents.
Common
pitfalls in translation, especially when practiced by inexperienced
translators, involve false equivalents such as "false friends" and
false cognates.
A
"back-translation" is a translation of a translated text back into
the language of the original text, made without reference to the original text.
Comparison of
a back-translation with the original text is sometimes used as a check on the
accuracy of the original translation, much as the accuracy of a mathematical
operation is sometimes checked by reversing the operation. But while useful as
approximate checks, the results of such reverse operations are not always
precisely reliable. Back-translation must in general be less accurate than
back-calculation because linguistic symbols (words) are often ambiguous,
whereas mathematical symbols are intentionally unequivocal.
In the context
of machine translation, a back-translation is also called a "round-trip
translation."
When
translations are produced of material used in medical clinical trials, such as
informed-consent forms, a back-translation is often required by the ethics
committee or institutional review board.
Mark Twain
provided humorously telling evidence for the frequent unreliability of
back-translation when he issued his own back-translation of a French
translation of his short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County". He published his back-translation in a single 1903 volume
together with his English-language original, the French translation, and a
“Private History of the 'Jumping Frog’ Story”. The latter included a synopsized
adaptation of his story that Twain stated had appeared, unattributed to Twain,
in a Professor Sidgwick’s Greek Prose Composition (p. 116) under the title,
“The Athenian and the Frog”; the adaptation had for a time been taken for an
independent ancient Greek precursor to Twain's "Jumping Frog" story.
When a
historic document survives only in translation, the original having been lost,
researchers sometimes undertake back-translation in an effort to reconstruct
the original text. An example involves the novel The Saragossa Manuscript by
the Polish aristocrat Jan Potocki (1761–1815), who wrote the novel in French
and anonymously published fragments in 1804 and 1813–14. Portions of the
original French-language manuscript were subsequently lost; however, the
missing fragments survived in a Polish translation that was made by Edmund
Chojecki in 1847 from a complete French copy, now lost. French-language
versions of the complete Saragossa Manuscript have since been produced, based
on extant French-language fragments and on French-language versions that have
been back-translated from Chojecki’s Polish version.
Similarly,
when historians suspect that a document is actually a translation from another
language, back-translation into that hypothetical original language can provide
supporting evidence by showing that such characteristics as idioms, puns,
peculiar grammatical structures, etc., are in fact derived from the original
language.
For example,
the known text of the Till Eulenspiegel folk tales is in High German but
contains puns that work only when back-translated to Low German. This seems
clear evidence that these tales (or at least large portions of them) were
originally written in Low German and translated into High German by an
over-metaphrastic translator.
Similarly,
supporters of Aramaic primacy — of the view that the Christian New Testament or
its sources were originally written in the Aramaic language — seek to prove
their case by showing that difficult passages in the existing Greek text of the
New Testament make much better sense when back-translated to Aramaic: that, for
example, some incomprehensible references are in fact Aramaic puns that do not
work in Greek.
Due to
similar indications, it is assumed that the 2nd century Gnostic Gospel of Judas,
which survives only in Coptic, was originally written in Greek.
Literary
translation
Translation
of literary works (novels, short stories, plays, poems, etc.) is considered a
literary pursuit in its own right. For example, notable in Canadian literature
specifically as translators are figures such as Sheila Fischman, Robert Dickson
and Linda Gaboriau, and the Governor General's Awards annually present prizes
for the best English-to-French and French-to-English literary translations.
Other writers,
among many who have made a name for themselves as literary translators, include
Vasily Zhukovsky, Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges,
Robert Stiller and Haruki Murakami.
History
The first
important translation in the West was that of the Septuagint, a collection of
Jewish Scriptures translated into Koine Greek in Alexandria between the 3rd and
1st centuries BCE. The dispersed Jews had forgotten their ancestral language
and needed Greek versions (translations) of their Scriptures.
Throughout
the Middle Ages, Latin was the lingua franca of the western learned world. The
9th-century Alfred the Great, king of Wessex in England, was far ahead of his
time in commissioning vernacular Anglo-Saxon translations of Bede's
Ecclesiastical History and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Meanwhile the
Christian Church frowned on even partial adaptations of St. Jerome's Vulgate of
ca. 384 CE, the standard Latin Bible.
In Asia, the
spread of Buddhism led to large-scale ongoing translation efforts spanning well
over a thousand years. The Tangut Empire was especially efficient in such
efforts; exploiting the then newly invented block printing, and with the full
support of the government (contemporary sources describe the Emperor and his
mother personally contributing to the translation effort, alongside sages of
various nationalities), the Tanguts took mere decades to translate volumes that
had taken the Chinese centuries to render.[citation needed]
Large-scale
efforts at translation were undertaken by the Arabs. Having conquered the Greek
world, they made Arabic versions of its philosophical and scientific works.
During the Middle Ages, some translations of these Arabic versions were made
into Latin, chiefly at Córdoba in Spain. Such Latin translations of Greek
and original Arab works of scholarship and science helped advance the
development of European Scholasticism.
The broad
historic trends in Western translation practice may be illustrated on the
example of translation into the English language.
The first
fine translations into English were made in the 14th century by Geoffrey
Chaucer, who adapted from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio in his own Knight's
Tale and Troilus and Criseyde; began a translation of the French-language Roman
de la Rose; and completed a translation of Boethius from the Latin. Chaucer
founded an English poetic tradition on adaptations and translations from those
earlier-established literary languages.
The first
great English translation was the Wycliffe Bible (ca. 1382), which showed the
weaknesses of an underdeveloped English prose. Only at the end of the 15th
century did the great age of English prose translation begin with Thomas
Malory's Le Morte Darthur—an adaptation of Arthurian romances so free that it
can, in fact, hardly be called a true translation. The first great Tudor
translations are, accordingly, the Tyndale New Testament (1525), which
influenced the Authorized Version (1611), and Lord Berners' version of Jean
Froissart's Chronicles (1523–25).
Meanwhile, in
Renaissance Italy, a new period in the history of translation had opened in
Florence with the arrival, at the court of Cosimo de' Medici, of the Byzantine
scholar Georgius Gemistus Pletho shortly before the fall of Constantinople to
the Turks (1453). A Latin translation of Plato's works was undertaken by
Marsilio Ficino. This and Erasmus' Latin edition of the New Testament led to a
new attitude to translation. For the first time, readers demanded rigor of rendering,
as philosophical and religious beliefs depended on the exact words of Plato,
Non-scholarly
literature, however, continued to rely on adaptation. France's Pléiade,
England's Tudor poets, and the Elizabethan translators adapted themes by
Horace, Ovid, Petrarch and modern Latin writers, forming a new poetic style on
those models. The English poets and translators sought to supply a new public,
created by the rise of a middle class and the development of printing, with
works such as the original authors would have written, had they been writing in
England in that day.
The
Elizabethan period of translation saw considerable progress beyond mere
paraphrase toward an ideal of stylistic equivalence, but even to the end of
this period, which actually reached to the middle of the 17th century, there
was no concern for verbal accuracy.
In the second
half of the 17th century, the poet John Dryden sought to make Virgil speak
"in words such as he would probably have written if he were living and an
Englishman". Dryden, however, discerned no need to emulate the Roman
poet's subtlety and concision. Similarly, Homer suffered from Alexander Pope's
endeavor to reduce the Greek poet's "wild paradise" to order.
Throughout
the 18th century, the watchword of translators was ease of reading. Whatever
they did not understand in a text, or thought might bore readers, they omitted.
They cheerfully assumed that their own style of expression was the best, and that
texts should be made to conform to it in translation. For scholarship they
cared no more than had their predecessors, and they did not shrink from making
translations from translations in third languages, or from languages that they
hardly knew, or—as in the case of James Macpherson's "translations"
of Ossian—from texts that were actually of the "translator's" own
composition.
The 19th
century brought new standards of accuracy and style. In regard to accuracy,
observes J.M. Cohen, the policy became "the text, the whole text, and
nothing but the text", except for any bawdy passages and the addition of
copious explanatory footnotes. In regard to style, the Victorians' aim,
achieved through far-reaching metaphrase (literality) or pseudo-metaphrase, was
to constantly remind readers that they were reading a foreign classic. An
exception was the outstanding translation in this period, Edward FitzGerald's
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), which achieved its Oriental flavor largely by
using Persian names and discreet Biblical echoes and actually drew little of
its material from the Persian original.
In advance of
the 20th century, a new pattern was set in 1871 by Benjamin Jowett, who
translated Plato into simple, straightforward language. Jowett's example was
not followed, however, until well into the new century, when accuracy rather
than style became the principal criterion.
Modern
translation
As languages
change, texts in an earlier version of a language – either original texts or
old translations – may be difficult for more modern readers to understand.
Texts may thus be translated into more modern language, called a modern
translation (sometimes modern English translation or modernized translation).
This is
particularly done either for literature from classical languages (such as Latin
or Greek), most prominently the Bible (see Modern English Bible translations),
or for literature from an earlier stage of the same language, such as the works
of William Shakespeare (which is largely understandable to a modern audience,
but presents some difficulties), or The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer
(which is not generally understandable to modern readers). Modern translation
is applicable to any language with a long literary history; for example in
Japanese, The Tale of Genji (11th century) is generally read in modern
translation – see Genji: modern readership.
Modern
translation often involves literary scholarship and textual revisions, as there
is frequently not a single canonical text. This is particularly noteworthy in
the case of the Bible and Shakespeare, where modern scholarship can result in
significant changes to the text.
Modern
translation meets with opposition from some traditionalists; in English this is
most significant in some people preferring the Authorized King James Version of
the Bible to modern translations, and to reading Shakespeare in the original
(c. 1600) text, rather than in modern translation.
An opposite
process is found in translating modern literature into classical language,
particularly for the goal of extensive reading – see List of Latin translations
of modern literature for examples.
Poetry
Poetry
presents special challenges to translators, given the importance of a text's
formal aspects, in addition to its content. In his influential 1959 paper
"On Linguistic Aspects of Translation", the Russian-born linguist and
semiotician Roman Jakobson went so far as to declare that "poetry by
definition [is] untranslatable".
In 1974 the
American poet James Merrill wrote a poem, "Lost in Translation",
which in part explores this idea. The question was also discussed in Douglas
Hofstadter's 1997 book, Le Ton beau de Marot; he argues that a good translation
of a poem must convey as much as possible of not only its literal meaning but
also its form and structure (meter, rhyme or alliteration scheme, etc.).
In 2008,
Taiwanese linguist Grace Hui Chin Lin suggests communication strategies can be
applied by oral translators to translate poetry. Translators with cultural
backgrounds can oral translate poetry of their nations. For example, poetry of Tung
dynasty can be introduced to people outside of Chinese communities by oral
translation strategies. Also, several communication strategies for facilitating
communicative limitations are applicable as oral translation strategies for
interpreting poetry. Grace Hui Chin Lin translated and interpreted a number of
English poetry into Chinese, using communication strategies. The book contains
sufficient examples of literature translation through communication strategies.
Sung texts
Translation
of a text that is sung in vocal music for the purpose of singing in another
language — sometimes called "singing translation" — is closely linked
to translation of poetry because most vocal music, at least in the Western
tradition, is set to verse, especially verse in regular patterns with rhyme.
(Since the late 19th century, musical setting of prose and free verse has also
been practiced in some art music, though popular music tends to remain
conservative in its retention of stanzaic forms with or without refrains.) A
rudimentary example of translating poetry for singing is church hymns, such as
the German chorales translated into English by Catherine Winkworth.
Translation
of sung texts is generally much more restrictive than translation of poetry,
because in the former there is little or no freedom to choose between a
versified translation and a translation that dispenses with verse structure.
One might modify or omit rhyme in a singing translation, but the assignment of
syllables to specific notes in the original musical setting places great
challenges on the translator. There is the option in prose sung texts, less so
in verse, of adding or deleting a syllable here and there by subdividing or
combining notes, respectively, but even with prose the process is almost like
strict verse translation because of the need to stick as closely as possible to
the original prosody of the sung melodic line.
Other
considerations in writing a singing translation include repetition of words and
phrases, the placement of rests and/or punctuation, the quality of vowels sung
on high notes, and rhythmic features of the vocal line that may be more natural
to the original language than to the target language. A sung translation may be
considerably or completely different from the original, thus resulting in a
contrafactum.
Translations
of sung texts — whether of the above type meant to be sung or of a more or less
literal type meant to be read — are also used as aids to audiences, singers and
conductors, when a work is being sung in a language not known to them. The most
familiar types are translations presented as subtitles or surtitles projected
during opera performances, those inserted into concert programs, and those that
accompany commercial audio CDs of vocal music. In addition, professional and
amateur singers often sing works in languages they do not know (or do not know
well), and translations are then used to enable them to understand the meaning
of the words they are singing.
Censorship
In the field
of translation censorship (also called bowdlerization) can be defined as
supervision, control and manipulation in cross-cultural interaction using
cultural, aesthetic, linguistic and economic methods. This is not only done by
punishing the publication of considered undesirable texts, but also by
correction and sometimes self-correction. To avoid censorship different
strategies can be applied, for example non-translating the probably “dangerous”
or “offensive” word or describing the matter in a more indirect way by
paraphrasing or allusions. A distinction can be made between two main
categories: institutional censorship and individual censorship.
Institutional
censorship
In contexts
of considerably restricted political freedom, institutional censorship is often
organised rather publicly. As examples serve 20th century totalitarian regimes,
which employed a censorial preventive system that expurgated translations
considered ideologically destabilising. However, generally speaking, in the
course of history the official reason for censorship by institutions – often
state or Church – has been concern for the moral acceptability of given texts.
Censored
content
Of course,
not only individual texts can be censored. Sometimes also whole genres are
banned – e.g. in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany translations of detective
stories were prohibited because of their success among the population which
made them – at least from the regime`s point of view – suspicious of
encouraging immoral and nonconformist behaviour. Another aspect can be a ban on
every text a particular author or translator has produced because of his/her
identity. This also happened in Italy around that time, for instance with translations
of Thomas Mann`s works. As well as texts films have been and are nowadays still
being censored. By dubbing and subtitling, they are adapted to the supposed
needs of a particular audience, thus censoring e.g. obscene or extremely
violent content.
Individual
censorship
Bowdlerization
can also be employed individually as a form of self-censorship. In this case
the translator tries to pre-empt institutional interference by appearing
conform to its restrictions.
Translators
Attributes
A competent
translator has the following qualities:
- a very good knowledge of the language, written and spoken, from which he is translating (the source language);
- an excellent command of the language into which he is translating (the target language);
- familiarity with the subject matter of the text being translated;
- a profound understanding of the etymological and idiomatic correlates between the two languages; and
- a finely tuned sense of when to metaphrase ("translate literally") and when to paraphrase, so as to assure true rather than spurious equivalents between the source- and target-language texts.
Misconception
It is
commonly assumed that any bilingual individual is able to produce satisfactory
or even high-quality document translations simply because he is a fluent
speaker of a second language. However, this is often not the case. Because of
the very nature of the different skills that each possesses, bilinguals and
translators are not equally prepared to perform document translations. The ability,
skill and even the basic mental processes required for bilingualism are
fundamentally different from those required for translation.
Bilingual
individuals are able to take their own thoughts and ideas and express them
orally in two different languages, their native language and a second language,
sometimes well enough to pass for native speakers in their second language.
However, some persons will have a native command of two languages but prove
inept at translating even simple sentences.
Translators
must be able to read, understand and retain somebody else’s ideas, then render
them accurately, completely and without exclusion, in a way that conveys the
original meaning effectively and without distortion in another language.
In other
words, translators must be excellent readers in a source language, for example,
in English as their second language, and excellent writers in a target
language, for example, in Spanish as their native language.
Among
translators, it is generally accepted that the best translations are produced
by persons who are translating from their second language into their native
language, as it is rare for someone who has learned a second language to
have total fluency in that language.
"In the
translation industry, it is considered 'standard procedure' to translate only
from an individual's second language, into their native language; never the
other way around. For example, a native Spanish speaker should always translate
English documents into Spanish; however, this fundamental rule is often ignored
by amateur translators, and surprisingly, is often accepted without question by
translation buyers.".[40] In China, Japan and elsewhere, native
translators will regularly work into and out of their native tongue.
Moreover, a
fully competent translator is not only bilingual but bicultural.
Translation
has served as a writing school for many prominent writers. Translators,
including monks who spread Buddhist texts in East Asia and the early modern
European translators of the Bible, in the course of their work have shaped the
very languages into which they have translated. They have acted as bridges for
conveying knowledge between cultures. Along with ideas, they have imported from
the source languages, into their own languages, loanwords and calques of
grammatical structures, idioms and vocabulary.
Accreditation
This section
does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by
adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
(May 2010)
There are
private or parastatal translation organizations which offer accreditation in
translation.
In many
countries, courts of law will not admit into evidence a translation by other
than a translator they have certified.
Interpreting
 |
| Cortés (seated) and La Malinche (beside him) at Xaltelolco |
Interpreting,
or "interpretation," is the facilitation of oral or sign-language
communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two, or among
more, speakers who are not speaking, or signing, the same language.
The term
"interpreting," rather than "interpretation," is
preferentially used for this activity by Anglophone translators, to avoid
confusion with other meanings of the word "interpretation."
Unlike
English, many languages do not employ two separate words to denote the
activities of written and live-communication (oral or sign-language)
translators. Even English does not always make the distinction, frequently
using "translation" as a synonym for "interpreting."
Interpreters
have sometimes played crucial roles in history. A prime example is La Malinche,
also known as Malintzin, Malinalli and Doña Marina, an early-16th-century Nahua
woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast. As a child she had been sold or given to
Maya slave-traders from Xicalango, and thus had become bilingual. Subsequently given
along with other women to the invading Spaniards, she became instrumental in
the Spanish conquest of Mexico, acting as interpreter, adviser, intermediary
and lover to Hernán Cortés.
Nearly three
centuries later, in the United States, a comparable role as interpreter was
played for the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–6 by Sacagawea. As a child,
the Lemhi Shoshone woman had been kidnapped by Hidatsa Indians and thus had
become bilingual. Sacagawea facilitated the expedition's traverse of the North
American continent to the Pacific Ocean. Four decades later, in 1846, the
Pacific Ocean would become the western border of the United States.
Machine
translation
Claude Piron
Machine
translation (MT) is a process whereby a computer program analyzes a source text
and, in principle, produces a target text without human intervention. In
reality, however, machine translation typically does involve human
intervention, in the form of pre-editing and post-editing.
With proper
terminology work, with preparation of the source text for machine translation
(pre-editing), and with reworking of the machine translation by a human
translator (post-editing), commercial machine-translation tools can produce
useful results, especially if the machine-translation system is integrated with
a translation-memory or globalization-management system.
Unedited
machine translation is available to a large public through tools on the
Internet such as Babel Fish, Babylon, and StarDict. These produce a rough
translation that, under favorable circumstances, "gives the gist" of
the source text. There are also companies like Ectaco which produce pocket
translation devices that utilize MT.
Relying
exclusively on unedited machine translation, however, ignores the fact that
communication in human language is context-embedded and that it takes a person
to comprehend the context of the original text with a reasonable degree of
probability. It is certainly true that even purely human-generated translations
are prone to error; therefore, to ensure that a machine-generated translation
will be useful to a human being and that publishable-quality translation is
achieved, such translations must be reviewed and edited by a human.
Claude Piron
writes that machine translation, at its best, automates the easier part of a
translator's job; the harder and more time-consuming part usually involves
doing extensive research to resolve ambiguities in the source text, which the
grammatical and lexical exigencies of the target language require to be
resolved. Such research is a necessary prelude to the pre-editing necessary in
order to provide input for machine-translation software, such that the output
will not be meaningless.
Recently,
Taiwanese translation scholar, Grace Hui Chin Lin suggests application of
Machine Translation has been accepted by academic fields, efficiently producing
academic theses or dissertations. Countless theses in Chinese have been machine
translated into English for updated publications. How the on-line translators
and ready-made software can be utilized have been explained in her articles.
For example, Machine Translation for Academic Purposes and Machine Translation
in Post-contemporary Era have
contributed to fieldworkers with basic concepts how Machine Translation have
been being applied in Taiwan.
CAT
Computer-assisted
translation (CAT), also called "computer-aided translation," "machine-aided
human translation" (MAHT) and "interactive translation," is a
form of translation wherein a human translator creates a target text with the
assistance of a computer program. The machine supports a human translator.
Computer-assisted
translation can include standard dictionary and grammar software. The term,
however, normally refers to a range of specialized programs available to the
translator, including translation-memory, terminology-management, concordance,
and alignment programs.
With the
Internet, translation software can help non-native-speaking individuals
understand web pages published in other languages. Whole-page-translation tools
are of limited utility, however, since they offer only a limited potential
understanding of the original author's intent and context; translated pages
tend to be more humorous and confusing than enlightening.
Interactive
translations with pop-up windows are becoming more popular. These tools show
one or more possible equivalents for each word or phrase. Human operators
merely need to select the likeliest equivalent as the mouse glides over the
foreign-language text. Possible equivalents can be grouped by pronunciation.
Internet
Web-based
human translation is generally favored by companies and individuals that seek
more accurate translators. In view of the frequent inaccuracy of machine
translators, human translation remains the most reliable, most accurate form of
translation available. With the recent emergence of translation crowdsourcing,
translation-memory techniques, and internet applications, translation companies
and agencies have been able to provide on-demand human-translation services to
SMBs, individuals, and enterprises.
While not
instantaneous like its machine counterparts such as Google Translate and Yahoo!
Babel Fish, web-based human translation is becoming increasingly popular as a
solution for relatively fast, accurate translation for business communications,
legal documents, medical records, and software localization. This solution also
appeals to private users for websites and blogs through the "string"
system that enables websites to localize easily.
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