Fathoming Translation as Discursive Experience

Theorization and Application

Chunshen Zhu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429812248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

With his positive approach to translation studies featured in this highly original volume, Chunshen Zhu brings into perspective from the vantage point of translation the workings of human factors in text production, interpretation, and dissemination in and through translation in varying social situations.

This book examines a variety of key issues heatedly debated or largely neglected in the field of translation studies and beyond – for example, meaning making, nature of the unit of translation, augmentation of transitivity by modification, signification of repetition, and cognitive effects of syntactic iconicity – by critically engaging insights from functional linguistics and philosophy of language, among other fields of study. These issue-driven, phenomenon-focused, and theorization-oriented studies, presented in eight chapters with ample exemplification and case studies, form a coherent whole to bring a network of correlations between theory and practice, linguistics and literature, form and content, information structure and communicative function, intention and effect, and textuality and experience to bear upon the study of translation, fathoming its depths not only as a linguistic operation but more significantly as a textually accountable process of intersubjective and cross-lingual sign making that facilitates humans' understanding of themselves and of the world.

The book is therefore a useful reference for scholars, teachers, and postgraduate and research students who are interested in a comprehensive yet focused approach to translation as an academic subject straddling linguistics and literary, cultural, and social studies. It will also be useful for those who would like to observe bilingualism and cross-cultural communication through translation in general and translation involving the Chinese language in particular.

1

INTRODUCTION

Towards a positive study of translation

1.1 3 + 1 childhood diseases

The moment human beings realized that a gift of tongues had been bestowed upon them, a practice of re-saying that was to become known as translation started to appear on the scene. Since then, translation has never faded from the foreground of the development of human civilizations, across the world and through history, as Bates (1943: 7) puts it, ‘nothing moves without translation’. Yet since its debut, millennia have passed with translation being undertaken but underestimated, translators besought then belittled, complimented yet condescended to.

Admittedly, there seems to have been a big and brave conceptual leap over a span of 70 years from Bates’s assertion that ‘translation moves everything’ to Venuti’s (2013) ‘Translation Changes Everything’, the title for his collection of 14 essays, but the question remains as to why and how translation changes, or has to change, this ‘everything’. Or was Venuti’s remark an incidental impromptu sound bite as Pym seems to have hinted in his (2015) book review, since ‘translation is still sidelined in the United States’ (p. 796), and indeed across the world where translators still tend to be ‘seen as routine performers and not creators … whose creative value is seldom recognised’ (Sager 1994: 296; see also Barbe 1996)?

Furthermore, in translation studies as an academic pursuit, there have been too many normative, laconic, and frequently contradictory claims based purely on intuitive speculation, and too few well-organized attempts at systematic theorization, apart from, as Holmes (1988: 67) puts it, certain ‘incidental and desultory attention from a scattering of authors’ from different backgrounds, to present translation as a coherent driving force in the evolution of human civilization. The potential fullness of the discipline of translation studies, as flexible as language itself, as dynamic as culture, and as multifarious as its social contexts, seems yet to be duly realized and described. As late as the 1990s, Lefevere still felt obliged to point up in the opening paragraph of his (1993) review article ‘Discourses on Translation: Recent, Less Recent and to Come’ three interrelated (or ‘concomitant’) ‘childhood diseases’ in translation studies, namely ‘always re-inventing the wheel’, ‘not reading what other people have written’, and ‘ignoring its own history’, among which the second should be the pivotal one responsible for the other two. The situation had been noted by Kelly (1979: 225) as a long-standing ‘[i]solation of theorist from theorist’, and nearly three decades on it remains, in Mason’s words (in Ren 2007: 26), as a state of ‘insularity’ among traditions and approaches in the world’s translation studies.

To this we may add a fourth childhood disease that is more fundamental to the intellectual identity of the discipline, that is, perplexity over the relationship between theory and practice – which, in translation studies, can be ‘the most tricky’ issue (Boase-Beier 2009a: xi), whereas in a more developed discipline the claim of the relatedness of theory to practice is all but a ‘truism’ (Fawcett and García 2009: 11). And decades after Holmes’s seminal modelling of translation studies (1972, reprinted in Holmes 1988), not to mention earlier attempts in the last century, such as Amos’s Early Theories of Translation (1920, reprinted 2007) and Bates’s Intertraffic – Studies in Translation (1943), Newmark still found it necessary to raise the issue of why and what regarding the status, nature, and relevance of translation theory in his (1997) seminar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Almost at the same time, Gentzler (1998) took on the question of how as the title of his chapter – ‘How Can Translation Theory Help Undergraduates?’ – to affirm the usefulness of translation theory and to criticize the ‘manufactured’ ‘schism’ and even ‘antagonism between theory and practice’ (p. 29).

Three years into the present millennium, the issue still looms large and has caught such extensive critical attention as to warrant a full-scale international conference, namely, ‘Translation: From Theory to Practice and from Practice to Theory’, organized by Université de Bretagne Sud, France, in July 2003, followed by two almost concurrent postgraduate conventions in the UK in 2008: ‘Translation: Theory and Practice – A Postgraduate Symposium’ hosted by the University of East Anglia in February and ‘With/out Theory: The Role of Theory in Translation Studies Research’ by UCL in April, with the most recent one being the CIUTI Conference 2019 (Monash University, June 2019), which took up as its overarching theme ‘Bridging the Divide between Theory and Practice’ to command a variety of topics ranging from research design to migration and translation and interpretation policies. Alongside this, the ambivalence between theory and practice, as so aptly deconstructed in the UCL conference theme by a ‘With/out’, is documented in a book-length ‘dialogue’ between Chesterman and Wagner (2002). In the dialogue, Wagner, by quoting Yves Bambrier’s e-mail, takes exception to, among others, those studies ‘carried out by isolated scholars’ and ‘often repetitive’ in nature (p. 135), which reminds us of two of the childhood diseases Lefevere described (see earlier). On the other hand, Chesterman does not agree that a ‘practice-oriented theory’, as Wagner calls it, would mean a ‘radically’ different kind of theory. This is so not just because the so-called best practice such a theory is supposed to feed on is hard to define in absolute terms – if ‘good translations’ have to be determined by whether they relatively ‘meet the agreed standards’ in the first place (pp. 133, 134) – but also because in the disciplinary structure of translation studies presented by Holmes, applied translation studies has already been given an important place. Chesterman also rightly argues that ‘ “Borrowing methods from other disciplines” is not necessarily a bad thing’ (p. 135). Indeed, as we can see, through interdisciplinary borrowings, or critical engagement if you like, on both conceptual and methodological levels a ‘developing’ discipline will in the long run have an intellectual bearing on the lender paradigms and eventually have its identity established and asserted.

While the currency of the issue in the field of translation pedagogy and research is further evidenced in Hanna (2009) and in Yearbook 2009 of the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) Translation: Theory and Practice in Dialogue (Fawcett et al. 2009), translation studies in the Chinese tradition has experienced a similar perplexity. A mini but upfront dialogue, equally revealing, was found on a now-defunct website on China’s translation studies (中國翻譯研究, http://tscn.tongtu.net/) in 2004, which reads in English to the following effect (IPs are not shown in full; translation mine):

• The same criticism about lack of relevance between theory and practice is heard again. Why should it have been a recurrent issue in China? A lot has been said about it, I am surprised that someone still took it as a worthwhile topic for doctoral research. (From 158.132.xx.xx, 2004–06–18 11:44.)
• Response: Because no conclusion has yet been reached. (From 220.170.xx.xxx, 2004–06–18 22:59.)
• Response: The truth is that no conclusion can ever be reached on such issues. Why should one blame bad translations on theory? If anyone feels that others’ theory cannot provide guidance for practice, why can’t they formulate a theory themselves that can do the job? (From 61.10.x.xxx, 2004–06–21 19:58.)
• Response: You have thought too highly of theory. Good translations are not the outcome of theoretical guidance. And bad ones are the fault of theory. (From 61.149.xxx.xxx, 2004–06–21 20:57.)
• Response: There is no hierarchical difference between theorists and practitioners. (From 220.170.xx.xx, 2004–06–22 00:52.)
• Response: Traditional Chinese thinking overstresses the combination of theory and practice. I wonder whether this is one of the characteristics of Chinese translation theory, or whether it is something that will jeopardize the development of Chinese translation theory. (From 219.136.x.xxx, 2004–06–20 10:42.)

Underlying the aforementioned conference and yearbook themes and dialogues, among other publications, we can see a serious concern about the conception of academic research that goes beyond translation studies per se. In fact, it begs for a more fundamental question, which can be asked from two seemingly opposite perspectives: For those who advocate ‘combination’ of theory and practice, why should theory and practice be combined and how should they be combined? And for those arguing for differentiating between theory and practice, why should theory be differentiated from practice and how should one be differentiated from the other? Yet such questions, with all their epistemological implications, can never be answered conclusively.

1.2 ‘Theory’

This is because ‘theory’ is an open-ended notion. In its etymological origin in Greek, theory is akin to ‘looking at, viewing, contemplation, speculation’ (OED 2009), similar to the Buddhist concept of 觀 ‘viewing’ or 觀照 ‘viewing-shining’ in Chinese: to view the world quietly with wisdom so as to realize the workings of 事 ‘things and events’ and the 理 ‘reason’ behind them (HYDCD 2007). The ultimate goal of such watching, or contemplation and speculation, in a Chinese sense is to get closer to the dao (道), the Way, by formulating that which is given in the OED annotation of theory as:

[a] scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena … confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.

The Chinese counterpart of ‘theory’, 理論, comprises two semantic elements: 理 ‘reason/reasoning’ or ‘sorting out/putting in order’ and 論 ‘argument/discourse’ or ‘arguing/discoursing’, which have a direct conceptual kinship with the dao as seen in a more secular version of the concept: 道理, which suggests both a verb-object compound of ‘articulating (道) the reason (理)’ and a noun-noun compound meaning ‘laws/principles and reason’. In either sense the combination of the two points to an ab uno disce omnes mode of cognition which strives to penetrate the surface of a phenomenon to get to its core, seeking through microscopic observation to achieve a systematic understanding¹ of the macro dao, or, as the previous OED annotation of ‘theory’ has it, to obtain ‘an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena’. Both ‘theory’ and 理論, therefore, represent a mode, a process, of truth- or dao-seeking by way of watching, thinking, and reasoning – arguing with/for reason – with an ultimate purpose of enlightening the mind rather than perfecting the instrumentation of a craft.

It has to be noted that, at this fundamental level of cognition, ‘viewing’ presupposes both the spatial distance and the here-and-now relevance between the viewing subject and the viewed object. Likewise, ‘articulating’ presupposes both the temporal distance and the here-and-now relevance between the subject and object. When a person views a phenomenon to see the ‘reason’ behind, and ‘reasons’ to ‘articulate’ the dao, the distance between the person and the phenomenon and the dao is therefore an absolute precondition, whereas relevance is all but a relative here-and-now happening. In this sense, saying translation practice has nothing to do with theory would be tantamount to saying that translation, as a type of event in the universe or ‘very probably the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos’ (Richards 1953), cannot be explained, accounted for in terms of general laws and principles, or dao. On the other hand, if we take theory merely as some device to improve a practitioner’s skill, we are not doing it justice as a sophisticated intellectual enterprise of contemplation.

Whether one advocates marriage or divorce between theory and practice, there is a further question to be answered: How has ‘theory’ been conceived of in its presentations? If it is not a nebulous mass, and in Newmark’s (1997: 99) view nor is it ‘a grey academic abstraction’ but is concerned with ‘a manner of translating, a reason and an explanation for translating, a system of rules, procedures and assumptions used to produce a result’, then why can’t ‘theory’ allow for a coexistence of such reasons, explanations, and systems as heteroglossic intellectual abstractions? Probably it is more incumbent upon Chinese discourses on translation, among others, to remain alert to the distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘theories’, for when ‘theory’ is mentioned in Chinese as 理論, the noun, as other common nouns in the language, does not indicate in form whether it is singular or plural.

1.3 ‘Theories’ or ‘turns’

To view ‘theory’ as a coexistence of theories provides an antidote to the antagonism not only between theory and practice but between different theories and approaches related to translation. Over the last decades, the development of the discipline has been measured and expressed by ‘turns’: for instance the ‘cultural turn’ in the 1980s and 1990s following and presumably in reaction to a previous ‘linguistic turn’ marked by Catford (1965). This turn-perception of the discipline’s development, sounding like Thomas Kuhn’s conception of incommensurability in paradigm shifts in scientific revolution being played out in a minor key in translation studies, suggests an impossibility of systematic theorization about translation, reminiscent of the ‘oversimplications and oversights’ Medina (2005: 1) has described in the study of language in the 19th century:

In the absence of systematic elucidation of the complex and diverse communicative nature of language, researchers of language often took one single communicative function as primary and fundamental (sometimes even exclusive) without any argument, taking a part for the whole and producing one-sided and distorted accounts of language.

Such a perception hinders the discipline’s development because, as House (2016: 7) sees it, ‘translation studies’ history of mimicking fashionable trends, is here … simply replayed’. As Medina (2005: 133, 134) has noted, the assumption of incommensurability, when grafted on to the study of language (or in our case translation), can be ‘highly controversi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: towards a positive study of translation
• 2 Structure of meaning (SOM): making of meaning and triggering of discursive experience
• 3 From structure to experience: meaning making in translation
• 4 The sentence as unit of translation (UT): from function to experience
• 5 Augmentation of transitivity: modification and attention management in translation
• 6 Touching base with text: repetition and signification in translation
• 7 Language in action: syntactic iconicity and translation
• 8 Deceptive language and conflict of experience: text (re)production and dissemination through translation