Theory of translation
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PART IV. SEMANTIC PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATIONChapter 1. WORD CHOICE IN TRANSLATION§1. TYPES OF TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTSSource language words and target language words may interact in different ways. They may correspond to each other as monoequivalents or as regular equivalents. A monoequivalent is a regular equivalent of the source language word that can consist of one word or be a phrase: oxygen - кислород to seine – ловить неводом рыбу the House of Commons – палата общин Mostly, regular equivalents are terms or proper names. Multi-equivalents are variable equivalents, which means that to translate a source language word one has to make choice of the equivalents having the same meaning. Multi-equivalents can be monosemantic: curtsey – реверанс, приседание concise – краткий, сжатый уверить – to assure, convince, persuade Or they can be polysemantic, each meaning having one or more equivalents: essence – 1. сущность, существо; суть; 2. эссенция представить – 1. to present, offer;
Each of the variable equivalents conveys the meaning of the target language word partially: e.g., claimant – претендент (на престол), candidate – претендент (на должность), suitor – претендент (на руку женщины), contender – претендент (на победу в спорте), challenger – претендент (на победу в шахматах). What are the reasons that make it impossible to have monoequivalents in abundance?
§2. INTERACTION OF WORD SEMANTIC STRUCTURESThe semantic structure of a word is a set of regular meanings featured in a dictionary’s entry. Words corresponding to each other in their primary meanings are usually non-equivalent in other meanings, which is seen in their word combinations. Let us, for example, compare the translation of the words brother and брат. They correspond in their primary meaning (“a man or boy with the same parents as another person”) but in other meanings there are different equivalents: Брат : 2. a son of one’s aunt or uncle = двоюродный брат – cousin
5.a man whose job is to care for people who are ill or injured, esp. in hospital = брат милосердия – male nurse 6. a person = (два яблока) на брата – (two apples) a head Brother: 2. A person sharing the same job = brother in arms – собрат по оружию brother-doctor – коллега-доктор
§3. WORD CONNOTATION IN TRANSLATIONEven words having the same referential (denotative) meaning are not full equivalents as far as their connotation is concerned. Thus, an English-Russian dictionary gives two translations for the word dog: собака, пёс. The former translation equivalent is neutral, the latter is colloquial, expressive. Since the English word dog is more general, it is only a partial equivalent to пёс. Or the Russian word дохлый is not a full equivalent of the English dead, as is given by the Oxford Russian dictionary145. Дохлый is a very informal, expressive word, whereas dead is its neutral counterpart. Not only the denotative (referential) meaning of the word, but also its connotative shades should be taken into account in translating:
Another example: in English, a chicken is used derogatory to refer to a cowardly person: Why won’t you jump? Are you a chicken? In Russian, цыпленок is associated with a helpless little creature and is often referred to a small child that needs help. In translation, the connotative meaning is sometimes lost either because of the neutral text that requires no expressiveness or because of the lacking connotative equivalent (to commence – начинать; вечор - yesterday). Usually, these connotatively partial equivalents are compensated in the text (within the same sentence or even in the surrounding sentences). We can illustrate it by the following sentence from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. In the episode of fighting with a Model Boy, Tom teases the boy about his hat: “Smarty! You think you are some, now, don’t you? Oh, what a hat!” And the boy answers, ”You can lump that hat if you don’t like it. I dare you to knock it off – and anybody that I’ll take a dare will suck eggs.” In the Russian text, the highly colloquial, slangish words and expressions are compensated by slang words and very informal syntactic constructions in both Tom’s utterance and the boy’s sentence:
§4. INTRALINGUISTIC MEANINGWords influence each other and presuppose choice of their neighboring dependants. They cannot combine if they belong to different styles (*светлоокая девка, a boozy-woozy lady). Words do not combine if they do not match speech norms, i.e. their word combinability is beyond the norm. Thus, in Russian we say молодой картофель but we cannot say in English *young potatoes, as the word potatoes requires the adjective new (new potatoes). Words in their primary meaning cannot be combined together if their near context is not taken into consideration. The Russians say “Не пейте сырой воды”, which cannot be rendered by the phrase “Don’t drink *raw water.” because English-speaking people use in this case quite a different word combination: “unboiled water”. So in translation we have to substitute one word for another that naturally fits the context. Intralinguistic meaning is also revealed in puns, or plays upon words, which make most puzzling tasks for a translator. In this case a translator cannot use translation equivalents but has to compensate a word by another one that can be also played upon. For example, to translate a children’s riddle into English: Why is a book like a king? – Because it has many pages. (where the word page is associated with two homonymous meanings: 1) страница, 2) паж), a translator compensated the homonymous page by the Russian homonym глава (1.head, 2.chapter): Что общего между книгой и драконом? – У обоих несколько глав. §5. CONTEXUALLY-BOUND WORDSThe context-bound word is a word whose meaning is clear only in a specific context. Context is the text that comes immediately before or after a particular word or phrase and helps to explain its meaning. The context is classified into micro- and macrocontext. The microcontext is a word surrounding within a sentence or phrase. The macrocontext is a larger text (a passage, a story, etc) where the word is used. In translation both types of context are essential for guessing the meaning of a polysemantic word or a homonym. For example, a macrocontext is very important for translating newspaper headlines which are characterized by ellipses not only of structural words but also of notional parts of the sentence. It is obligatory for a translator to take into account, along with the context, the consituation, which is often called background knowledge. This notion implies awareness of the time, place, and circumstances of what is spoken about. For example, to translate the following microdialogue:
several versions might be offered depending on the situation: “How much?” – “Two dollars five cents.” (in the store); “What’s the score?” – “Two to five” (after a match); “What’s the time?” – “Five minutes after two.” The context helps to find a translation equivalent to a word not fixed in the dictionary or fixed in the dictionary but with another meaning. For example, in his novel Pninwritten in English, V. Nabokov used the phrase a very commonplace mind to characterize a hero. None of the dictionary equivalents (банальный, избитый, плоский) suited the translator (Barabturlo), who found his own equivalent: трафаретный ум. This is an occasional, irregular equivalent, fitting in a certain context. An occasional equivalent is obtained by substituting one word for another one to better reveal the contextual meaning. Over time, a contextual meaning may become a normative meaning fixed by the dictionary. This occurred, for instance, with the word dear. All dictionaries translated it as дорогой, милый, любимый. But in the phrase my dear this word is used as a term of a very formal address and, therefore, corresponds to the Russian глубокоуважаемый, which has recently been fixed by the 3-volume New EnglishRussian Dictionary, edited by Y. Apresyan. To find an occasional equivalent to a word, a logical method of interpolationis used. The contextual meaning of a word, expressed by the occasional equivalent, is found by studying the whole semantic structure of the word and deducing the appropriate meaning from the two adjacent meanings fixed in the dictionary. For example, in the sentence The waves lap the granite of the embankment. the word lap contextualizes its two meanings at the same time: 1) to drink by taking up with quick movements of the tongue, which corresponds to the Russian лакать, жадно пить, глотать; and 2) to move or hit with little waves and soft sounds, corresponding to the Russian плескаться. The first meaning brings up an image of some kind of creature. The image is retained with the interpolated equivalent in translation: Волны лижут гранит набережной. No doubt, to interpolate the equivalent, a translator should be aware of all the meanings a word has by using translation and monolingual dictionaries, as well as dictionaries of synonyms and thesauri. Another way to translate a word whose dictionary equivalent does not suit a translator is to explain the meaning of the word. For example, at a meeting the chairperson can say, “Mr. N will be our timekeeper.” The word timekeeper has the following dictionary equivalents: хронометражист, хронометрист, счетчик времени, but none of them suits the style or the con-situation. Thus, a better solution for a translator will be translation by explanation: Господин Н. будет следить за регламентом собрания. Usually explicatory translation is applied to neologisms, or newly coined words not yet fixed by bilingual dictionaries: e.g., People with can-do attitudes are essential to enterprise culture. – Люди, готовые к новым делам, очень важны для предпринимательства. |