In Other Words

A Coursebook on Translation

Mona Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317213178
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In Other Words has been the definitive coursebook for students studying translation for nearly three decades. Assuming no knowledge of foreign languages, it offers a practical guide based on extensive research in areas as varied as lexis, grammar, pragmatics, semiotics and ethics. It thus provides a solid basis for training a new generation of well-informed, critical students of translation.

Drawing on linguistic theory and social semiotics, the third edition of this best-selling text guides trainee translators through the variety of decisions they will have to make throughout their career. Each chapter offers an explanation of key concepts, identifies potential sources of translation difficulties related to those concepts and illustrates various strategies for resolving these difficulties. Authentic examples of translated texts from a wide variety of languages and genres are examined, and practical exercises and further reading are included at the end of each chapter.

The third edition has been fully revised to reflect recent developments in the field and includes a new chapter that engages with the interplay between verbal and visual elements in genres as varied as children's literature, comics, film, poetry and advertisements.

This key text remains the essential coursebook for any student of translation studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Writing my own novels has always required a huge effort of organisation and imagination; but, sentence by sentence, translation is intellectually more taxing.

(Parks 2010)

Professionals in every walk of life form associations and institutes of various kinds to provide practising members with a forum to discuss and set standards for the profession as a whole, to set examinations, assess competence and lay codes of conduct. The standards set by a given profession may well be extremely high, but this does not necessarily guarantee recognition by those outside the profession. Notwithstanding the length and breadth of one’s experience, recognition, in our increasingly qualification-conscious society, comes mostly with proof of some kind of formal education. Every respectable profession (or every profession which wants to be recognized as such) therefore attempts to provide its members with systematic training in the field.

There are two main types of training that a profession can provide for its members: vocational training and academic training. Vocational courses provide training in practical skills but do not include a strong theoretical component. A good example would be a course in plumbing or typing. At the end of a typing course, a student is able to type accurately and at speed and has a piece of paper to prove it. But that is the end of the story; what the student acquires is a purely practical skill which is recognized by society as ‘skilled work’ but is not generally elevated to the level of a profession. Like vocational courses, most academic courses set out to teach students how to do a particular job, such as curing certain types of illness, building bridges or writing computer programs. But they do more than that: an academic course always includes a strong theoretical component. The value of this theoretical component is that it encourages students to reflect on what they do, how they do it and why they do it in one way rather than another. This last exercise, exploring the advantages and disadvantages of various ways of doing things, is itself impossible to perform unless one has a thorough and intimate knowledge of the objects and tools of one’s work. A doctor cannot decide whether it is better to follow one course of treatment rather than another without understanding such things as how the human body works, what side effects a given medicine may have, what is available to counteract these effects and so on.

Theoretical training does not necessarily guarantee success in all instances. Things still go wrong occasionally because, in medicine for example, the reaction of the human body and the influence of other factors, such as stress, will never be totally predictable. But the value of a theoretical understanding of, say, the human apparatus and such things as the nature and make-up of various drugs is that (a) it minimizes the risks involved on any given occasion and prepares the student for dealing with the unpredictable; (b) it gives the practising doctor a certain degree of confidence, which comes from knowing that his or her decisions are calculated on the basis of concrete knowledge rather than ‘hunches’ or ‘intuition’; and (c) it provides the basis on which further developments in the field may be achieved because it represents a formalized pool of knowledge which is shared and can be explored and extended by the professional community as a whole, not just locally but across the world. Needless to say, this type of theoretical knowledge is itself of no value unless it is firmly grounded in practical experience.

Throughout its long history, translation has never really enjoyed the kind of recognition and respect that other professions, such as medicine and engineering, have enjoyed. Translators have constantly complained that translation is underestimated as a profession. In summing up the first conference held by the Institute of Translation and Interpreting in Britain, Professor Bellos (reported by Nick Rosenthal) stated, ‘The main impetus and concern of this first ITI Conference was the unjustly low status in professional terms of the translator. An appropriate theme, since it was one of the main reasons for the formation of the ITI’ (Bellos 1987:163). Some two decades later, the novelist and translator Tim Parks still had to remind us that at least ‘for a few minutes every year we really must acknowledge that translators are important’ (Parks 2010). There is no doubt that the low status accorded to translation as a profession is ‘unjust’, but one has to admit that this is not just the fault of the general public. The translation community itself has traditionally been guilty of underestimating not so much the value as the complexity of the translation process and hence the need for formal professional training in the field, though this situation is thankfully changing quite rapidly. Since the first edition of this book was published, in 1992, numerous training programmes have been set up for translators and interpreters across the world. Translation has become a highly attractive career for young people with a love for languages and for engaging with other cultures, as well as a growing area of research. Those entering the profession now have to demonstrate that they can reflect on what they do and that they have invested in acquiring not only the vocational but also the intellectual skills required to undertake such a complex and highly consequential task, one that has a major impact on the lives of the many people who rely on them as mediators.

In the past, talented translators who had no systematic formal training in translation but who nevertheless achieved a high level of competence through long and varied experience tended to think that the translation community as a whole could achieve their own high standards in the same way:

Our profession is based on knowledge and experience. It has the longest apprenticeship of any profession. Not until thirty do you start to be useful as a translator, not until fifty do you start to be in your prime.

The first stage of the career pyramid – the apprenticeship stage – is the time we devote to investing in ourselves by acquiring knowledge and experience of life. Let me propose a life path: grandparents of different nationalities, a good school education in which you learn to read, write, spell, construe and love your own language. Then roam the world, make friends, see life. Go back to education, but to take a technical or commercial degree, not a language degree. Spend the rest of your twenties and your early thirties in the countries whose languages you speak, working in industry or commerce but not directly in languages. Never marry into your own nationality. Have your children. Then back to a postgraduate translation course. A staff job as a translator, and then go freelance. By which time you are forty and ready to begin.

(Lanna Castellano 1988:133)

Lanna’s recommended career path no doubt worked for many people in the past. Her own case proves that it did: she is a widely respected first-class translator. The question is whether it was ever feasible for most aspiring translators to pursue this career path and whether this approach is or was right for the profession as a whole, bearing in mind that it stresses, at least for the first thirty or forty years of one’s career, life experience rather than formal academic training. One obvious problem with this career path is that it takes so long to acquire the skills you need as a translator that your career is almost over before it begins.

Lanna Castellano has never been opposed to formal academic training; on the contrary, she has always encouraged it and recognized its value to the profession. But I have met professional translators in the past, and still come across some very occasionally today, who actually argue strongly against formal academic training because, they suggest, translation is an art which requires aptitude, practice and general knowledge – nothing more. The ability to translate is a gift, they say – you either have it or you do not – and theory (almost a dirty word in some translation circles) is therefore irrelevant to the work of a translator. To take the analogy with medicine a step further, if we accept this line of thinking, we will never be seen as anything but witch doctors and faith healers. And while it may well suit some individuals to think that they can heal people because they have magic powers or a special relationship with God, rather than because they have a thorough and conscious understanding of drugs and of the human body, the fact remains that witch doctory and faith healing are not recognized professions and that medicine is.

Most translators and interpreters prefer to think of their work as a profession and would like to see others treat them as professionals rather than as skilled or semiskilled workers. But to achieve this, they need to develop an ability to stand back and reflect on what they do and how they do it. Like doctors and engineers, they have to prove to themselves as well as others that they are in control of what they do and that they do not just translate or interpret well because they have a ‘flair’ for it, but rather because, like other professionals, they have made a conscious effort to understand various aspects of their work.

Unlike medicine and engineering, translation studies is a relatively young discipline in academic terms, though it is increasingly featuring as a subject of study in its own right in many parts of the world. Like any young discipline, it needs to draw on the findings and theories of numerous related disciplines in order to develop and formalize its own methods – from linguistics to literary theory, from sociology to cognitive science and media studies. This is not surprising, given that almost every aspect of life in general and of the interaction between speech communities in particular can be considered relevant to translation, a discipline which has to concern itself with how meaning is generated within and between various groups of people in various cultural settings and with what impact on society. For translation to gain more recognition as a profession, translators cannot resort to a mixture of intuition and experience to think through and justify the decisions they have to make but must constantly look to developments in neighbouring disciplines to appreciate the varied, complex dimensions of their work. Among the many skills they need to acquire through training is the skill to understand and reflect on the raw material with which they work: to appreciate what language is and how it comes to function for its users.

Linguistics is a discipline which studies language both in its own right and as a tool for generating meanings. It should therefore have a great deal to offer to translation studies; it can certainly offer translators and interpreters valuable insights into the nature and function of language. This is particularly true of modern linguistics, which no longer restricts itself to the study of language per se but embraces such sub-disciplines as text linguistics (the study of text as a communicative event rather than as a shapeless string of words and structures) and pragmatics (the study of language in use rather than language as an abstract system). This book attempts to explore some areas in which modern linguistic theory can provide a basis for training translators and can inform and guide the decisions they have to make in the course of performing their work.

1.1 About the Organization of This Book

The organization of this book is largely hierarchical and is based on a straightforward principle: it starts at the simplest possible level and grows in complexity by widening its focus in each chapter. Chapter 2, ‘Equivalence at word level’, initially adopts a naive building-block approach and explores the meaning of single words and expressions. In Chapter 3, ‘Equivalence above word level’, the scope of reference is widened a little by looking at combinations of words and phrases: what happens when words start combining with other words to form conventionalized or semi-conventionalized stretches of language. Chapter 4, ‘Grammatical equivalence’, deals with grammatical categories, such as number and gender. Chapters 5 and 6 cover part of what might be loosely termed the textual level of language. Chapter 5 deals with the role played by word order in structuring messages at text level, and Chapter 6 discusses cohesion: grammatical and lexical relationships which provide links between various parts of a text. Chapter 7, ‘Pragmatic equivalence’, looks at how texts are used in communicative situations that involve variables such as writers, readers and cultural context. Chapter 8, ‘Semiotic equivalence’, is new; it moves beyond verbal expression to explore the interplay between verbal and visual elements in genres as varied as comics, films, children’s literature and concrete poetry. Chapter 9, ‘Beyond equivalence: ethics and morality’, is intended to encourage students to reflect on the wider implications of their decisions and the impact of their mediation on others. Again, like members of any other profession that strives to be taken seriously, translators and interpreters have to engage reflectively with the ethical implications of their work and demonstrate that they are responsible professionals and citizens of society.

To return to the bulk of this book, namely Chapters 2 to 7, it is important to point out that the division of language into seemingly self-contained areas, such as words, grammar and text, is artificial and open to question. For one thing, the areas are not discrete; it is virtually impossible to say where the concerns of one area end and those of another begin. Moreover, decisions taken at, say, the level of the word or grammatical category during the course of translation are influenced by the perceived function and purpose of both the original text and the translation and have implications for the discourse as a whole. But artificial as it is, the division of language into discrete areas is useful for the purposes of analysis, and provided we are aware that it is adopted merely as a measure of convenience, it can help to pinpoint potential areas of difficulty in translation and interpreting.

Like the division of language into discrete areas, the term equivalence is adopted in this book for the sake of convenience – because most translators are used to it rather than because it has any theoretical status. It is used here with the proviso that although equivalence can usually be obtained to some extent, it is influenced by a variety of linguistic and cultural factors and is therefore always relative. Kenny (2009) offers an excellent overview of the notion of equivalence and the various ways in which it has been approached in the literature.

The organization followed in this book is a bottom-up rather than a top-down one: it starts with simple words and phrases rather than with the text as situated in its context of culture. This may seem somewhat at odds with current thinking in linguistic and translation studies. Snell-Hornby (1988:69) suggests that ‘textual analysis, which is an essential preliminary to translation, should proceed from the “top down”, from the macro to the micro level, from text to sign’, and Hatim and Mason’s model of the translation process (1990, 1997) also adopts a top-down approach, taking such things as text-type and context as starting points for discussing translation problems and strategies. The top-down approach is the more valid one theoretically, but for those who are not trained linguists, it can be difficult to follow; there is too much to take in all at once. Moreover, an excessive emphasis on ‘text’ and ‘context’ runs the risk of obscuring the fact that although ‘a text is a semantic unit, not a grammatical one … meanings are realized through wordings; and without a theory of wordings … there is no way of making explicit one’s interpretation of the meaning of a text’ (Halliday 1985:xvii). In other words, text is a meaning unit, not a form unit, but meaning is realized through form and without understanding the meanings of individual forms one cannot interpret the meaning of the text as a whole. Translating words and phrases out of context is certainly a futile exercise, but it is equally unhelpful to expect a student to appreciate translation decisions made at the level of text without a reasonable understanding of how the lower levels, the individual words, phrases and grammatical structures, control and shape the overall meaning of the text. Both the top-down and the bottom-up approaches are therefore valid in their own way; I have opted for the latter for pedagogical reasons – because it is much easier to follow for those who have had no previous training in linguistics.

1.2 Examples, Back-Translations and the Languages of Illustration

In each chapter, an attempt is made to identify potential sources of translation difficulties related to the linguistic area under discussion and possible strategies for resolving these difficulties. The strategies are not preconceived, nor are they suggested as ideal solutions; they are identified by analyzing authentic examples of translated texts in a variety of languages and presented as ‘actual’ strategies used rather than the ‘correct’ strategies to use. The examples are quoted and discussed, sometimes at length, to illustrate the various strategies identified and to explore the potential pros and cons of each strategy. Although the discussion is occasionally critical of certain translations, finding fault with published translations is never the object of the exercise. It is in fact virtually impossible, except in extreme cases, to draw a line between what counts as a good translation and what counts as a bad one. Every translation has points of strength and points of weakness, and every translation is open to improvement.

The source language of most examples is English. This is because in both literary and non-literary translation today, English is probably the most widely translated language in the world. And since it also happens to be the language in which this book is written, I feel justified in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the first edition
• Acknowledgements
• Credits
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Equivalence at word level
• 3 Equivalence above word level
• 4 Grammatical equivalence
• 5 Textual equivalence: thematic and information structures
• 6 Textual equivalence: cohesion
• 7 Pragmatic equivalence
• 8 Semiotic equivalence
• 9 Beyond equivalence: ethics and morality
• Glossary
• References
• Name index
• Language index
• Subject index