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    Basic notions of Translation Theory: For B.A. students
    Basic notions of Translation Theory: For B.A. students
    Basic notions of Translation Theory: For B.A. students
    Ebook191 pages2 hours

    Basic notions of Translation Theory: For B.A. students

    By Bruno Osimo

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    About this ebook

    This book reflects my experience as a translation scholar, and a translation teacher, and a translator from Russian. The knowledge of the Russian language allowed me to read (and translate into Italian) crucial authors like Popovič, Lyudskanov, Torop, Revzin and Rozentsveyg. Since not many Western translation scholars know them, we get as a consequence a translation theory which is split between West and East according to a sort of 'cultural Berlin wall'.
    In this book I tried to synthesize both Western and Eastern point of views about the translation process.
    The terms that are used belong to both worlds.
    For an explanation of a more professional character, you can use my other book, "Handbook of Translation Studies", available both in paper and in ebook form.
    I have been teaching translation at the Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori «Altiero Spinelli» in Milan, Italy, for 30 years, and translation theory for 20 years. My students made an important contribution to this book, through their feedback during lectures and exams. Year after year I had the opportunity to edit my text accordingly.
    For an explanation of the terms used in this book, I refer students to my Dictionary of Translation Studies.
    Bruno Osimo
    Milano, 7 July 2019
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBruno Osimo
    Release dateDec 30, 2020
    ISBN9788898467099
    Basic notions of Translation Theory: For B.A. students

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      Book preview

      Basic notions of Translation Theory - Bruno Osimo

      Bruno Osimo

      Basic Notions of Translation Theory

      Semiotics - linguistics - psychology

      for B. A. students

      Copyright © Bruno Osimo 2020

      Bruno Osimo is an author translator who publishes himself

      ISBN 9788898467099 per l’edizione elettronica

      ISBN 9788831462860 per l’edizione hardcover

      To contact the author translator publisher: osimo@trad.it

      Introduction ​3

      1 Communicating always means translating ​4

      1.1 What is translation? ​4

      1.2 Theoretical backup ​11

      1.3 Translating everything ​19

      1.4 Intralingual translation ​23

      1.5 Intersemiotic translation ​29

      1.6 Intertextual translation ​32

      1.7 Cultural translation ​42

      1.8 Metatextual translation ​44

      ​1.9 Mental translation ​47

      1.10 Deverbalizing translation ​59

      1.11 Dream and psychotherapy as multiple intersemiotic translation processes ​62

      2 What is the sense of meaning? ​65

      2.1 Deduction ​67

      2.2 Induction ​69

      2.3 Abduction ​72

      2.4 Semiosis ​74

      2.5 Hermeneutic circle ​79

      2.6 Interlingual translation and the process of interpreting meaning ​82

      2.7 Textual cooperation ​90

      3 Equivalents and synonyms ​93

      ​3.1 Denotation and connotation ​94

      3.2 Connotation circle ​96

      3.3. Open and closed texts ​98

      3.4 Semantic spectrum and interlingual translation ​102

      3.5 Semantic field: cultural differences ​104

      3.6 Synonyms ​106

      ​4 Translatability and translationality ​110

      4.1 Culture and chronotope ​111

      4.2 The dominant ​115

      4.3 Dominant and interlingual translation ​117

      4.4 Translation-oriented analysis ​120

      4.5 Recoding and transposition ​123

      4.6 Communication loss ​126

      4.7 Communication loss in interlingual communication ​128

      4.8 Intercultural translatability: loss and redundancy ​131

      4.9 High Translationality (adequacy) ​134

      4.10 Low Translationality (acceptability) ​137

      5 Prototext-metatext comparative analysis ​140

      5.1 Proofreading and self-criticism ​141

      6 From theory to practice ​143

      6.1 Translating everything: textual and metatextual translation ​145

      6.2 Reading and writing as translation processes ​147

      6.3 Implicit and explicit intertext ​150

      6.4 Abductive reading ​152

      6.5 Reading and interpreting ​153

      6.6 Interlingual translation of a word ​155

      6.7 Equivalence and synonyms in translation ​157

      6.8 Model readers and dominants ​165

      6.9 Recoding and transposition ​167

      6.10 Communication loss ​169

      6.11 Loss and redundancy: factors of translatability ​170

      6.12 High and low translationality (adequacy and acceptability) ​171

      Glossary ​172

      References ​195

      Introduction

      This book reflects my experience as a translation scholar, and a translation teacher, and a translator from Russian. The knowledge of the Russian language allowed me to read (and translate into Italian) crucial authors like Popovič, Lyudskanov, Torop, Revzin and Rozentsveyg. Since not many Western translation scholars know them, we get as a consequence a translation theory which is split between West and East according to a sort of 'cultural Berlin wall'.

      In this book I tried to synthesize both Western and Eastern points of view about the translation process.

      The terms that are used belong to both worlds.

      For an explanation of a more professional character, you can use my other book, Handbook of Translation Studies, available both in paper and in ebook form.

      I have been teaching translation at the Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori «Altiero Spinelli» in Milan, Italy, for 30 years, and translation theory for 20 years. My students made an important contribution to this book, through their feedback during lectures and exams. Year after year I had the opportunity to edit my text accordingly.

      For an explanation of the terms used in this book, I refer students to my Dictionary of Translation Studies.

      Bruno Osimo

      Milano, 7 July 2019

      P.S. Since I hate the hypocrisy of political correctness, to make up for male dominance I have simply used the feminine for all examples.

      1 Communicating always means translating

      In the past, according to the Western tradition translation studies have often been considered as part of literary studies. Since 1959, with Jakobson's famous article On Linguistic Aspects of Translation, a new era for translation has started. From then on, researchers realized that translation theory belonged to communication studies. Not only that, but it was also clear that any kind of communication implies a translation process.

      1.1 What is translation?

      When speaking about translation, people usually think of the transposition of a text from a language (a natural code) to another, different from the one in which the text was originally conceived and written. As a matter of fact, that is just a peculiar subprocess within the boundless universe of translation. One of the first steps towards a more scientific and complete approach to translation as it is generally thought of consists in acknowledging all its potential aspects.  

      The translation process is often described with metaphors relating to space and movement. In some languages the terms referring to source text and target text are undoubtedly linked to the notion of space. In Italian, for instance, "testo di partenza and testo d’arrivo (word for word, starting text and arrival text) refer to the semantic field of running races. The same is true, for example, for the French texte de départ and texte d’arrivée".

      To some extent, it seems that translation is a sort of transportation of something (apparently words) from one place to another. And this might be due to the fact that even the Latin word from which translation derives, "translatus", comes from the verb trans-fero meaning to bring on the opposite side of. But even though it is true that translation has a spatial dimension, it also has a temporal and cultural one, all three made up of a number of other interrelated elements.

      To avoid all the words that are too explicitly linked to the semantic field of departures and arrivals, or that remind of military targets (target text) or that imply the misleading idea that there were no previous influences on the first text (source text), one may call original the text from which the translation process stems, and translation the text resulting from it. However, the word translation does not allow to make a distinction between the process and the outcome.

      That is why the ideal terms would be prototext (i.e. first text, the original text) and metatext (i.e. the subsequent text, deriving from the first one). Such terms were coined by the Slovak semiotician Anton Popovič (1933-1984), who gave a substantial boost to translation studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, his ideas spread to the Western countries – after a short tentative connection through James H. Holmes – only after he had prematurely died.

      It is also necessary to define the notion of text. The first definition that comes to mind when speaking of a text is a consistent group of written words with a unified structure that makes it a whole. But according to semiotics, the notion of text needs to be extended to nonverbal languages, such as music, figurative arts, cinema, advertisement, natural environment, street signals, fashion, and so on.

      The consequences of such a widening of horizons are clear: if by translation we mean any process transforming a prototext into a metatext, with the text belonging to any verbal or nonverbal language or code (and by the way, prototext and metatext can even belong in the same code!), then the notion of translation process embraces a very wide range of processes, related to all possible transformations of texts.

      That is why the translation process includes apparently different phenomena, such as film translation (often called movie version, a definition which does not stress its belonging to the sphere of translation) and intertextual translation (quotations, references, allusions, and so on). Already in 1683 the French churchman and scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet wrote in his De interpretatione:

      the term translation also refers to the clarification of abstruse doctrines, to the interpretation of enigmas and dreams, to the interpretation of oracles, to the solution of complex issues, and, finally, to the spreading of all that is unknown. (Huet 1683:18)

      Communication act

      In the previous table, each row contains a communicative act which belongs to the translation process. Let us see some examples of translation processes. The first row shows the standard interlingual translation process. The prototext is expressed in a natural code (i.e. in a language – English for instance – that differs from artificial codes such as, say, mathematics), and its transformation into a metatext is verbal (both metatext and prototext are verbal texts) and interlingual (the prototext language is different from the metatext language).

      The second row shows paraphrase: the process is the same as interlingual translation, but paraphrase usually occurs within the same language, as the content of the message is simply re-expressed in other words.

      Quotations may take on the form of references or allusions especially if their ‘delimiters’ (such as inverted commas) are missing: sometimes it is a very hard task for the reader to recognize them as alien texts which were originally part of another, far different text. Even quotations are forms of translation because a word or a sentence uttered by someone in a given context and co-text (→ section 3.1 ) is re-uttered in a new context and co-text. In this way, the original utterance is now part of a new text: it is ‘translated’. The Internet and all the other telecommunication media are exponentially increasing intertextuality in our everyday communication practice. It is extremely easy for people with access to the Internet to come into contact with the other’s words, and the most modern communicative acts are consequently intertexts, i.e. intertextual translations.

      Among the different types of intersemiotic translation there are also reading and writing, all the stages of dream elaboration as both intra- and interpersonal phenomena (i.e. reporting the dream, transcribing it), and psychotherapy, consisting both in the repeated translation of affects, feelings, and drives into words, and in the decoding and recoding of such words, which finally act as a feedback for the patient.

      With a scientific explanation for the translation process as its goal, contemporary translation science does not only deal with interlingual translation. The present course on the basic notions of translation theory does not aim at teaching how to translate – the translation practice represents a different asset in the education of translators –, but at shedding light on an often taken for granted and unconsciously practiced activity, as well as at paving the way for the interlingual translation practice.

      1.2 Theoretical backup

      The previously mentioned terms, notions and ideas are supported by some of the theories developed since the

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