FACOLTÀ DI STUDI UMANISTICI Lingue e culture per la mediazione linguistica Traduzione LESSON 1 Prof.ssa Olga Denti a.a. 2015-2016

What is translation? What words come to your mind when talking about translation?

INTRODUCTION TO KEY ISSUES IN TRANSLATION PART 1 INTRODUCTION TO KEY ISSUES IN TRANSLATION

Communication Sender message Receiver Codification decodification feedback

Language and culture Culture: a series of practices Meaning making: identity, belonging Meaning: context, usage and historical circumstances Language: a shared code Concepts: organized, arranged, classified into a conceptual system

Key concepts Translation: MULTILINGUAL Translation: INTERDISCIPLINARY involving Languages, Linguistics, Communication Studies, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, thus Sociolinguistics Textlinguistics DA Speech act theory Ethnography

Some definitions Translation: a. the subject field, b. the product, c. a process-oriented approach linking formal and functional aspects of communication Cross-cultural communication: learning a new language v requiring a translator (w.) or interpreter (o.) Translation: the development of intercultural communication skills, cross-cultural awareness & understanding between peoples Monitoring effectiveness

Therefore, Successful cross-cultural communication: structures, functions and socio-cultural aspects Process of translation: original written text (the Source Text, henceforth ST) in the original verbal language (Source language, henceforth SL) a written text (Target Text, henceforth TT) in a different verbal language (Target Language, henceforth TL)

In particular, Meaning making: from the text level to the surface level language elements relate to context of text, situation and culture: 1. The ST is assessed against its cultural and social context 2. Its communicative function is recognized 3. Its structure is evaluated (from wider textual elements to grammar & lexis)

The process of translation: Syntactic component: formality Semantic component: content Pragmatic component: purpose Intended meaning of the ST writer’s message: semantic v pragmatic (context-free/context-bound) (Ulrich 1992: 8)

Translation involves Comparing 2 diverse languages Understanding their socially-conditioned aspects Clarifying their functions in a particular context Our main aim: translation skills, being able to translate different text types and discourses “to a satisfactory degree of communicative equivalence and competence” (Ulrich 1992: 9)

The quality of translation: Text type Socio-cultural context (client, market or translator) Quality standard Key Skills needed: linguistic & cognitive, training/practice, connected (reading & writing, text & stylistic analysis), working knowledge of the topic

Jakobson’s categories Intralingual translation (or rewording) Interlingual translation (or translation proper) Intersemiotic translation (or transmutation) (Jakobson 1959/2000: 114 in Munday 2001: 5)

The Origin of Translation studies James S. Holmes (1972, 1988) – a cluster of issues concerning translating and translation Mary Snell-Hornby (1988) & Mona Baker (1997) – a ‘new’ independent discipline

SOME NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF TRANSLATION PART 2 SOME NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF TRANSLATION

Conflicting guidelines for the translator (Ulrich 1992: 15)

Keys issues over the centuries Word v Sense (unit, focus, ST & TT relation) Literal v Free Faithful v Free Form v Content Pedagogic translation v Imitation Formal v Dynamic Semantic v Communicative Degrees of Faithfulness Word-for-word Imitation

The origin CICERO (literal v free translation) & HORACE (faithfulness to the sentence) (1st century BCE – ) ST JEROME & MARTIN LUTHER (4th century CE – Middle Ages) – not word-for-word T but a readable & intelligible vernacular version of the Bible (TL) DOLET (1540) – guidelines for the translator (sense/content, SL/TL knowledge, meaning faithfulness, plain speech, style) Latin -> French, religious -> literary/poetic texts DRYDEN (17TH c.) – metaphrase, paraphrase, imitation + morel duty of translator: TL orientation

DENHAM (1656) v FRASE TYTLER (early 1900s): idea, style/manner, ease DENHAM (1656) v FRASE TYTLER (early 1900s): idea, style/manner, ease. Loyalty to truth & beauty Romanticism (18th c.) & creative power: GOETHE – Literary translation: plain prose, parodistic, symbiosis/fusion Victorian England & national pride (guide the TL reader) From the late 18th century to mid-1900, a grammar-translation method mechanic/ repeated study of grammatical rules and structures)

Direct method or communicative approach to English lg teaching (replicate authentic lg learning conditions) ARNOLD (1914) – direct, simple & noble style; aesthetics over accuracy In the 1960s, in the USA: the translation workshop concept, comparative literature & contrastive analysis approaches SL content & form (SL-oriented approach) v TL reader by adapting the ST form to TL conventions (TL-oriented approach)

NIDA (1960s) – shift to the message receiver + + formal v dynamic equivalence (text in context + pragmatic effect) Same period: NEWMARK’s categories of semantic (contextual meaning) & communicative translation (effect) + KOLLER’s analysis of equivalence No one single way to translate + no one single methodology VINAY & DARBELNET’s taxonomy of the linguistic changes occurring in translation CATFORD’s linguistic model and LEUVEN-ZWART’s 1980s translation shift approach

REISS & VERMEER’s text-type and skopos theory (1970s-1980s) + NORD’s text-linguistic approach HOUSE’s register analysis + the development of discourse-oriented approaches (1990s): BAKER & HATIM & MASON – Halliday’s linguistic approach – translation as a communication w/in a socio-cultural context EVEN-ZOHAR, TOURY & the Manipulation School – systems theories & target-oriented ‘descriptive’ translation studies LEFEVERE’s (1980s-1990s) – cultural studies, gender studies & translation & postcolonial translation theories

BERMAN & VENUTI – the foreign element in translation and the ‘invisibility of the translator (Munday 2001: 16); naturalizing as the main method to translate STEINER’s ‘hermeneutic motion’, POUND’s use of archaisms, BENJAMIN’s ‘pure language’, DERRIDA & the deconstruction movement SNELL-HORNBY’s integrated approach

Munday 2001: 10

Munday 2001: 13

Future trends MT (machine translation) v HT Text linguistics, DA, AI, Computational linguistics -> analysis of the SL texts and their synthesis in the TL MAT (computerized dictionaries, text-related glossaries, concordance)