Translating as a Purposeful Activity

Functionalist Approaches Explained

Christiane Nord

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351189330
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This bestselling text is a comprehensive overview of functionalist approaches to translation in English. Christiane Nord, one of the leading figures in translation studies, explains the complexities of theories and terms in simple language with numerous examples. Covering how the theories developed, illustrations of the main ideas, and specific applications to translator training, literary translation, interpreting and ethics, Translating as a Purposeful Activity concludes with a concise review of both criticisms and perspectives for the future. Now with a Foreword by Georges Bastin and a new chapter covering the recent developments and elaborations of the theory, this is an essential text for students of translation studies and for translator training.

1

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The following pages describe the development of modern functionalism in translation studies. Of course, since functionalism didn’t suddenly appear overnight, a brief description of early functionalist views of translation is needed in order to sketch the situation from which the more recent theories and methodologies emerged. We will then outline the landmarks of what is now often referred to as the ‘German School’ of functionalist translation theory: Katharina Reiss and functionalist translation criticism, Hans J. Vermeer’s Skopostheorie and its extensions, Justa Holz-Mänttäri’s theory of translational action, and a number of works oriented towards the use of functionalist methodology in translator training. The basic concepts of translational action and Skopostheorie will be analysed in detail later on; this chapter is merely designed to give a chronological overview of authors and works.

Early views

Functional approaches to translation were not invented in the twentieth century. Throughout history we find translators – mainly literary or Bible translators – observing that different situations call for different renderings. However, ‘translation proper’ is frequently associated with word-for-word fidelity to the source text, even though the result may not be considered appropriate for the intended purpose. Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) described the dilemma as follows:

That is to say I translated the most famous orations of the two most eloquent Attic orators, Aeschines and Demosthenes, orations which they delivered against each other. And I did not translate them as an interpreter but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and the forms, or as one might say, the “figures” of thought, but in language which conforms to our usage. And in so doing I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the general style and force of the language. For I did not think I should count them out to the reader like coins, but to pay them by weight, as it were.

[46 b.c.e.]1949, De optimo genere oratorum, v. 14

Many Bible translators have felt that the process of translating should involve both procedures: a faithful reproduction of formal source-text qualities in one situation and an adjustment to the target audience in another. Jerome (348–420) and Martin Luther (1483–1546) held the view that there are passages in the Bible in which the translator must reproduce “the very order of the words” (Jerome, Letter to Pammachius, [394]2004) or not “depart from the word” (Luther, An Open Letter on Translating, [1530]2017); in other passages, they believed it was more important “to render sense for sense” (Jerome) or to adjust the text to the target audience’s needs and expectations.

In a similar vein, Eugene A. Nida (1964) distinguishes between formal and dynamic equivalence in translation, with ‘formal equivalence’ referring to a faithful reproduction of source-text form elements and ‘dynamic equivalence’ denoting equivalence of extralinguistic communicative effect:

A translation of dynamic equivalence aims at complete naturalness of expression, and tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture; it does not insist that he understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend the message.

Nida 1964:159

In ‘A Framework for the Analysis and Evaluation of Theories of Translation’ (1976), Nida places special emphasis on the purpose of the translation, on the roles of both the translator and the receivers, and on the cultural implications of the translation process:

When the question of the superiority of one translation over another is raised, the answer should be looked for in the answer to another question, ‘Best for whom?’. The relative adequacy of different translations of the same text can only be determined in terms of the extent to which each translation successfully fulfils the purpose for which it was intended. In other words, the relative validity of each translation is seen in the degree to which the receptors are able to respond to its message (in terms of both form and content) in comparison with (1) what the original author evidently intended would be the response of the original audience and (2) how that audience did, in fact, respond. The responses can, of course, never be identical, for interlingual communication always implies some differences in cultural setting, with accompanying diversities in value systems, conceptual presuppositions, and historical antecedents.

1976:64f

Nida calls his approach ‘sociolinguistic’. However, when trying to apply it to translation in general, he suggests a three-stage model of the translation process. In this model, source-text surface elements (grammar, meaning, connotations) are analysed as linguistic kernel or near-kernel structures that can be transferred to the target language and restructured to form target-language surface elements (cf. Nida 1976:75, also Nida and Taber 1969:202f). This basically linguistic approach, whose similarity to Noam Chomsky’s theory of syntax and generative grammar (1957, 1965) is not accidental, had more influence on the development of translation theory in Europe during the 1960s and 1970s than did the idea of dynamic equivalence.

A general focus on straight linguistics rather than dynamic functionalism is reflected in the importance Nida’s work has been given in recent surveys of modern translation theories (as in Larose [1989]1992, Gentzler 1993). For Edwin Gentzler (1993:46), Nida’s work became “the basis upon which a new field of investigation in the twentieth century – the ‘science of translation’ – was founded”. Given this emphasis, it is not surprising to find Gentzler allocating just two small paragraphs to what he calls ‘the Reiss/Vermeer approach’, which he sums up in the following way:

Reiss’s work culminates in the co-authored Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie, written together with Hans J. Vermeer in 1984, in which they argue that translation should be governed primarily by the one functional aspect which predominates, or, in the new terminology, by the original’s ‘Skopos’….

1993:71

One of the aims of the present book is to correct the impression caused by publications like Gentzler’s, both with regard to authorship details and with respect to the relationships between text typology (Reiss) and Skopostheorie (Vermeer). But we will come to this in due course.

The fact that the reception of Nida’s approach focussed on its linguistic implications must be understood in historical terms. Linguistics was perhaps the dominant humanistic discipline of the 1950s and 1960s. Early experiments with machine translation had to draw on contrastive representations of languages. The optimistic view that machine translation was feasible is reflected in Anthony Oettinger’s definition of translation:

Translating may be defined as the process of transforming signs or representations into other signs or representations. If the originals have some significance, we generally require that their images also have the same significance, or, more realistically, as nearly the same significance as we can get. Keeping significance invariant is the central problem in translating between natural languages.

1960:104

At the same time, structuralist linguistics, along with the idea of language as a code and the conception of language universals, nourished the illusion that language – and translation as a linguistic operation – could be an object of strictly scientific investigation on a par with any object in the natural sciences. Translation had previously been regarded as an art or a craft; now, translation scholars were happy to have their activity recognized as a science and admitted to the inner circle of scholarly pursuits as a branch of applied linguistics. Many definitions of translation emphasized the linguistic aspect:

Translation may be defined as follows: the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent material in another language (TL).

Catford 1965:20

Translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message.

Nida and Taber 1969:12

These linguistic approaches basically saw translating as a code-switching operation. With the more pragmatic reorientation at the beginning of the 1970s, the focus shifted from the word or phrase to the text as a unit of translation, but the fundamental linguistic trend was not broken. Equivalence as a basic concept or even constituent of translation was never really questioned. For Wolfram Wilss, for example,

Translation leads from a source-language text to a target-language text which is as close an equivalent as possible and presupposes an understanding of the content and style of the original.

Wilss [1977]1982:62

Equivalence-based linguistic approaches focussed on the source text, the features of which had to be preserved in the target text. For Werner Koller,

there exists equivalence between a given source text and a given target text if the target text fulfils certain requirements with respect to these frame conditions. The relevant conditions are those having to do with such aspects as content, style and function. The requirement of equivalence thus has the following form: quality (or qualities) X in the SL text must be preserved. This means that the source-language content, form, style, function, etc. must be preserved, or at least that the translation must seek to preserve them as far as possible.

[1979]1989:100, emphasis in the original

This is a normative statement. It declares any target text that is not equivalent (“as far as possible”) to the corresponding source text to be a non-translation. Many theorists still adhere to this view, although some have had to recognize that there may be cases of non-equivalence in translation caused by the pragmatic differences between source and target cultures. We can see this in some of Koller’s more recent work:

Ad-hoc cases of adaptation have to be regarded as text-producing elements in the translation process; they may be appropriate, or even inevitable, in order to make the translation reach its audience, i.e. from the point of view of pragmatic equivalence.

1992:235, my translation

For Koller, such adaptations do not mean that the requirement of equivalence between the source and target texts has been abandoned. What has happened to it, then? The borderline between ‘translation with elements of text revision’ (= equivalence) and ‘text revision with translated elements’ (= non-equivalence) (Koller 1995:206ff) seems to have become a question of quantities. The equivalence approach lacks consistency: Some scholars praise literalism as the optimum procedure in translation (Newmark 1984/85:16); others, such as Koller, allow a certain number of adaptive procedures, paraphrases, or other non-literal procedures in specific cases in which, as Koller puts it, “they are intended to convey implicit source-text values or to improve the comprehensibility of the text for the target audience” (1993:53, my translation). These rather arbitrary criteria do not account for the fact that implicit values should remain implicit in some cases nor do they recognize that comprehensibility is not a general purpose common to all texts or text types.

The theorists of equivalence tend to accept non-literal translation procedures more readily in the translation of pragmatic texts (instructions for use, advertisements) than in literary translation. Different or even contradictory standards for the selection of transfer procedures are thus set up for different genres or text types. This makes the equivalence approach rather confusing.

Summing up the theorizing of translation over the centuries, Louis G. Kelly states,

A translator moulds his image of translation by the function he assigns to language; from function, one extrapolates to nature. Thus those who translate merely for objective information have defined translation differently from those for whom the source text has a life of its own.

1979:4

This may be the reason why some translation scholars working in training institutions started to give functionalist approaches priority over equivalence-based approaches. Quite simply, they started to look at the profession for which they were training. They found that professional translating includes many cases in which equivalence is not called for at all. In the translation of a British school certificate for a German university, for example, the target text is not expected to look like, or function as, a German school certificate.

In this situation, some scholars became increasingly dissatisfied with the relationship between translation theory and practice. A new theory was called for.

Katharina Reiss and the functional category of translation criticism

As early as 1971, Reiss (written Reiß in German) introduced a functional category into her ‘objective approach to translation criticism’. Although still firmly within equivalence-based theory, her book Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik may be regarded as the starting point for the scholarly analysis of translation in Germany (Reiss [1971]2000). Taking equivalence as her basis, Reiss develops a model of translation criticism based on the functional relationship between source and target texts. According to her, the ideal translation would be one “in which the aim in the TL [target language] is equivalence as regards the conceptual content, linguistic form and communicative function of a SL [source-language] text” ([1977]1989:112). She refers to this kind of translation as “integral communicative performance” ([1977]1989:114).

In 1971, Reiss was already an experienced translator herself, having translated works from Spanish into German, among them José Ortega y Gasset’s famous essay Miseria y esplendor de la traducción (Misery and Splendour of Translation). She knew that real life presents situations in which equivalence is not possible and, in some cases, not even desired. Her objective approach to translation criticism (cf. Nord 1996b) thus accounts for certain exceptions from the equivalence requirement. These exceptions are due to the specifications of what we will be referring to as the ‘translation brief’ (Übersetzungsauftrag). One exception is when the target text is intended to achieve a purpose or function other than that of the original. Examples include adapting a prose text for the stage, translating Shakespeare’s plays for foreign-language classes, or providing word-for-word translations of an Arabic poem intended to serve as a basis for a free rendering by an English poet who does not know the source language. A further exception is when the target text addresses an audience different from the intended readership of the original. Examples include translating Gulliver’s Travels for children and various forms of ideological editing motivated by religious, ethical, or commercial criteria.

Reiss excludes these cases from the area of ‘translation proper’ and suggests that they be referred to as ‘renderings’ (Übertragungen) ([1971]2000:92f). In such situations, the functional perspective takes precedence over the normal standards of equivalence. The translation critic can no longer rely on features derived from source-text analysis but has to judge whether the target text is functional in terms of the translation context. Thus, for Reiss,

It goes without saying that all the types of translation mentioned may be justified in particular circumstances. An interlinear version can be extremely useful in comparative linguistic research. Grammar translation is a good aid to foreign language learning. Learned translation is appropriate if one wishes to focus on the different means whereby given meanings are verbally expressed in different languages. And the changing of a text’s function, as a verbal component wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword to the new English edition
• Introduction
• 1 Historical overview
• 2 Translating and the theory of action
• 3 Basic concepts of Skopostheorie
• 4 Functionalism in translator training
• 5 Functionalism in literary translation
• 6 Functionalist approaches to interpreting
• 7 Criticisms
• 8 Function plus loyalty
• 9 Future perspectives at the end of the 1990s
• 10 Skopos theory and functionalism in the new millennium
• Glossary
• Bibliographical references