Translation and Society

An Introduction

Sergey Tyulenev

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317687900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This essential new textbook guides readers through the social aspects and sociologically informed approaches to the study of translation.

Sergey Tyulenev surveys implicitly and explicitly sociological approaches to the study of translation, drawing on the most important and influential works both within translation studies and in sociology, as well as recent developments in the field. In addition to the theoretical grounding provided, the book explains in detail the methodology of studying translation from a sociological point of view.

Translation and Society discusses why translation should be studied sociologically, reinforces the foundation of the sociologically informed translation research already in existence in the field and outlines possible new directions for the future. Throughout the book there are many examples and case studies and each chapter includes thought-provoking discussion points, possible assignments, and suggestions for further reading. This is an invaluable textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Translation Studies.

Chapter 1

Setting the scene

The main questions:

• In what sense is translation a social activity?

• What is sociology?

• What is the difference between sociology and psychology?

• What is the relationship between the social and the individual in the translator’s experience?

• What are the two main meanings of the term society and what is their relevance to sociologically informed translation research?

Social within and without

When starting the discussion of the relationship of sociology and translation, the fundamental question bound to arise is: Why study translation sociologically? In this book we will be looking into a variety of aspects of this question, but if pressed for a very brief answer, the following can be said: translation should be studied sociologically because translation is an intrinsically social activity. The term ‘social’ refers to human collectivities and interactions that take place in them.

First, translation is never practised (and therefore, should not be theorised) outside the social context: it mediates – successfully or not, partially or impartially – between peoples, nations, groups and individuals. Second, translators themselves are social beings: they grow up in a society, absorbing a particular worldview, and ethical and aesthetical values. Becoming professionals, they remain socialised individuals. They learn to be more open-minded to other cultures, they learn not to be rash, let alone bigoted or biased, in their evaluations of the people for whom they translate. They do not turn into translating machines. Their work, their translations, whether written or oral, bear an imprint of their socialisation, sometimes invisible even to translators themselves. On the surface many decisions translators make appear as their own. The social underpinnings of their decisions, however, always lurk behind their individual wills and individual styles. To bring them to the fore, a meticulous analysis, taking into account the entire social milieu in which translators work(ed), is required.

Box 1.1: Sociology: Ab ovo

The earliest known ideas about human communities go as far back as ancient and medieval cultures. One of the earliest thinkers who considered factors underlying social order was the Chinese philosopher, educator and politician Confucius (sixth to fifth centuries B.C.E.). His teachings in the collection Lunyu (or Analects) explain the comportment of the ideal man in his interaction with others and different forms of society and government.

Ancient Greek political thought found its classical expressions in the works by Plato (fifth century B.C.E.), especially in one of his Socratic dialogues The Republic, and by Aristotle (fourth century B.C.E.), in his Politics. Both discussed principles governing social and political life in ways that make their ideas still relevant to modern sociological thought.

At around the same time the Hindu philosopher and statesman Kautilya (also known as Chanakya and Vishnugupta; fourth century B.C.E.) wrote his treatise Artha-shastra (The Science of Material Gain), in which he summarised early Indian thought about property and material success. Kautilya’s book was meant to be a guide for the founder of the Mauryan empire of northern India Chandragupta and is often compared with Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513), a famous European socio-political treatise.

Ibn-Khaldun (1332–1406), considered to be one of the greatest Arab historians, wrote his Muqaddimah (“Introduction”) in which he laid out principles of social historiography, anticipating some of the ideas that would be developed by early modern social thinkers.

Sociology as we know it today started to take shape in Europe on the basis of the philosophy of history, biological theories of evolution, ideas about reforming social systems and political philosophy.

The main idea underlying the philosophy of history was the idea of the evolution of human society from lower to higher stages of social sophistication. In the eighteenth century, society was mostly compared to a mechanism and thinking on society was modelled on physics. In the nineteenth century, biological models gained popularity among social thinkers and society was viewed as an organism.

Surveying the social condition was yet another vital element that contributed to the creation of modern sociology. The first surveys were conducted with the aim of studying society in the same quantitative and measureable fashion as in the natural sciences.

Eventually the study of social phenomena focused on political and economic processes. Ideas were borrowed from political philosophy. The political thread is strong in sociology to this day: different theories are assessed in political terms – as conservative, critical, promoting reforms or even radical.

The beginnings of sociology as a distinct scholarly discipline may be traced to the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The name of the new science was coined by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1794–1859). It is a hybrid of the Latin word socius meaning ‘companion’ and the Greek word logos meaning ‘word’ or ‘science’. Comte explained his hybrid term as a way to commemorate “the two historical sources – the one intellectual, the other social – from which modern civilization has sprung” (cited in Bottomore 1987: 15). Comte’s logic would be criticised today as Eurocentric: by “modern civilization” he meant what is loosely referred to as the ‘Western world’ tracing its origins to Greco-Roman antiquity. Comte, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Georg Simmel, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber are usually honoured as the founders of sociology.

Sociology went through different periods of searching for its own subject matter, eventually focusing on generalised patterns of human collective behaviour. Initially, its claim to be an academic discipline was doubted, but today it is a well-respected social science that both influences and provides inspiration to other social sciences, including Translation Studies.

A good example of such an analysis is the study of the famous Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (also referred to as the Old Testament) the Septuagint (Cook 2009: 17–18). Translated from Greek, the word ‘septuagint’ means ‘seventy’.¹ It is a translation, which, according to a legend, was carried out by seventy translators (or seventy-two, according to another version of the legend) in seventy days in the first half of the third century B.C.E. Translating a sacred text has always been believed to require reverence and extra caution on the part of translators to exclude any interference with the original. Such translations may later be canonised and respected as highly as their originals, even replacing them. This is what happened to the LXX. In later variants of the legend of its creation, the translators were said to have worked under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit and thereby the guarantee of supreme quality was divinely assured.

Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the influence of socio-cultural traditions upon the translators of the LXX was quite considerable. Scholars find evidence of Jewish exegesis (rules of interpreting sacred texts) and legalism, which is only natural, as the LXX was a translation of a Jewish text. There are also traces of Greek philosophical, Platonic and Stoic ideas and rhetorical stylistic features.

At least some of the data absent from the original are believed to have been added by translators inadvertently. It was noted that the influence of external traditions is especially noticeable whenever there was an exegetical, textual or theological problem in the original text. To resolve the problem, translators had to interpret dubious passages, and their own values, of which they may not have been fully conscious as they took these values for granted (as all of us do), influenced the translators’ decisions. To use a metaphor, the necessity of rendering a particular difficult passage or term in the original was like a fissure in the earth’s crust, letting the subterranean forces, otherwise hidden, make themselves manifest. These subterranean forces are the translators’ philosophical views, religious beliefs and aesthetical preferences. The social came out from within the individual.

What is this social and how does it come out from within the individual? Language is a prime example. Language is a social phenomenon because it is the basis of all things social. As Anthony Giddens, a leading modern sociologist (see more on his sociological theory in Chapter 9), says: “All of us speak languages which none of us, as individuals, created, although we all use language creatively” (1991: 8). On the one hand, we learn the language of our community, and that is what Giddens means when he says that none of us created the languages we speak – we only learn them as they have been before us. They are an example of the social factors affecting our individual lives. They are the social in us. That is what the Russian-American linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson meant in his classical article “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” (1959: 236; emphasis in original²). For example, he explains, in languages where action is expressed in terms of whether it was completed or not, “naturally the attention of native speakers and listeners will be constantly focused on such items as are compulsory in their verbal code” (ibid.). Note the words Jakobson uses here: “naturally,” “constantly” and “compulsory.” These words emphasise the fact that watching for linguistic characteristics of words we use in our native languages is natural, that is something beyond our conscious control, rather it is something subconscious (it may not always be so when we speak foreign languages). Our focusing on grammatical aspects in our language is also constant because whenever we speak in or listen to our mother tongue, we inevitably – although mostly subconsciously – register all linguistic nuances. All grammatical features are either compulsory or optional – we must or may say something (in English we may say ‘a female student’, but in French we must say ‘étudiante’), but what is crucial for a sociological interpretation of this phenomenon is that it is a particular language as a product of a particular society that makes our choices either compulsory or optional; it is a particular language as a social phenomenon that makes us naturally and constantly focus on some features of what and how we speak.

Yet Giddens’s phrase cited above is well-balanced: language is not only social, it also allows us to express our individuality. We may also recall Ferdinand de Saussure’s concepts langue and parole. Langue is a language as an abstract system which is spoken by the speech community to which we belong. Parole is an individual and, perhaps, creative part of how we use our languages. Our use of our languages has both social and individual aspects. The linguistic aspect of our social translator/interpreter behaviour has been studied in depth in TIS, especially in the earlier stages of its development as a theoretical discipline.

Box 1.2: The three pillars of modern society

Anthony Giddens defined sociology as a social science studying the social institutions that have been formed as a result of three major transformations of the past several centuries (2001: 5). The first transformation was the French Revolution of 1789. It radically changed the political dimension of human existence contributing to the development of modern social democratic values: liberté, égalité, fraternité (freedom, equality and brotherhood) are universally accepted standards, if not always realised, of social life today.

The second great transformation was what is known today as the scientific revolution, which can be traced back to as early as the Renaissance (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) but gained major prominence in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries with Isaac Newton’s universal laws governing a mechanical universe as its pinnacle. The scientific revolution embraced all major domains of knowledge – from cosmology and physics through anatomy and physiology to philosophy with the reconsidered conceptions of ontology and epistemology. The scientific revolution also proclaimed the universal accessibility of knowledge. The scientific revolution is often associated with the Enlightenment as an intellectual revolution (1730s–1800). This was yet another extension of the political ideal of equality which, in turn, made a third major transformation possible.

The third great revolution is the industrial revolution starting in eighteenth-century Britain and spreading across the entirety of Western Europe into the United States and further. This revolution was a major factor in the transformation of the socio-economic dimension. Modern sociology focuses on contemporary industrial societies, the study of other types of society having been relegated to anthropology.

The three major transformations may be considered the pillars of modern society.

Another aspect of the social is behavioural patterns. This is a big topic and I will limit myself only to one example – Desmond Morris et al.’s book Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution (1979). Morris and his research team (twenty-nine research workers and interpreters) focused on gestures of western and southern Europe and the Mediterranean. Twenty key gestures were studied over the period of two years (1975–77) in forty localities of twenty-five countries. Morris distinguishes between gestures-’illustrators’ and gestures-‘emblems’, the former accompanying verbal statements while the latter replace verbal statements. Gestures are an interplay of individual and social factors. Some gesticulatory reactions seem to be more culturally determined;³ some are results of conscious decisions of individuals. Morris gives two examples:

[A]man is talking excitedly and, as he does so, his arms gesticulate vigorously, beating time to his words and emphasizing the points he is making. These illustrators are not performed consciously or deliberately [ … ] Ask a man who has just been gesticulating wildly, what movements his hands were making, and he will be unable to tell you. [ … A] woman crosses a road watched by two young men. One man turns to the other and winks at him; the latter replies by shaking his fingers as if they have been burned by something hot. No word is spoken between them. Here the gestures have replaced speech and, if the young men were asked later what precise gestures they had used, they would be able to recall them and, in the case of the wink, actually name one of them.

(1979: xvii)

Morris explains that both types of gestures, both consciously and unconsciously produced, are parts of cultural symbolic conventions: tapping one’s temple with the tip of the forefinger can mean either ‘crazy’ or ‘intelligent’, the interpretation will depend on “the acceptance of this particular [cultural] equation, an acceptance born of local, cultural exposure and learning” (ibid.).

? Applying this to translation studies, it would be interesting, for example, to study gesticulatory behaviour of interpreters of different languages/cultures and possible interferences of different gesticulatory or general behavioural patterns. This type of interpreter studies may help sensitise interpreters to the behavioural features of their professional performance.

Worldview or, to use the original German term Weltanschauung, is yet another and perhaps the most comprehensive sphere in which the social and the individual are intertwined. Worldview is a rather amorphous notion embracing religious beliefs, scientific knowledge and moral and aesthetic values. It encompasses what may be generally termed as a conception of the world or a philosophy of life.

Each individual has a worldview, which ultimately can be traced to the society or societies in which their worldview was form...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the scene
• 2 The backdrop
• 3 Preparing to act
• 4 Acting
• 5 Observing the acting
• 6 Scenarios
• 7 A panoramic view
• 8 A close-up
• 9 Negotiating a balance
• Conclusion
• Selected bibliography
• Index