New Insights into Arabic Translation and Interpreting

Mustapha Taibi

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783095261
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book addresses translation and interpreting with Arabic either as a source or target language. It focuses on new fields of study and professional practice, such as community translation and interpreting, and offers fresh insights into the relationship between culture, translation and interpreting. Chapters discuss issues relating specifically to Arabic and the Arab cultural context and contribute views, research findings and applications that come from a language combination and a cultural background quite different from traditional Eurocentric theoretical and professional positions. This volume isa significant addition to resources on Arabic translation and interpreting andcontributesfresh perspectives to translation studies in general. It is of interest to students, researchers and professionals working in public service, community, legal, administrative and healthcare translation and interpreting, as well as intercultural communication and translator education.

1Through the Master Discourse of Translation

Said Faiq

Translation does not exist; it becomes. This becoming is realized through a complex process that should be explored in a cross-cultural site of interaction. Currently, globalization is the term used to refer to this site where intercultural communication through translation-becoming takes place. Here, information is communicated as translation that forms or further consolidates an existing body of knowledge of the translating culture about the translated one.

Cronin, 2013

1. Introduction

Axiomatically, globalisation invokes the existence of something else that is not so globalised – something local. It is a truism to say that different cultures have historically represented each other in ways that have reflected the type of existing power relationships between them. Nonetheless, since the 1990s postcolonial and translation studies in particular have contributed a great deal to illuminating issues of the formation of cultural identities and/or representation of foreign cultures; in 1999, (the late) André Lefevere named this process ‘composing the other’. The conceptualization of translation involves a binarism based on conflict, as Salama-Carr puts it:

From within the discipline itself, the traditional issue of mediation linked with the increased visibility of the translator and the interpreter as agents, a shift of perspective promoted in great part by the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in translation and interpreting studies, followed and complemented by a ‘sociological’ engagement has paved the way for the growing interest in the role and responsibilities of translators and interpreters in relating and formulating conflict, and in issues of trust and testimony that often arise in that context of shifting power differentials. (2013: 32)

Negative representations of ‘weak’ cultures by ‘powerful’ ones – the latter mostly assumed to be Western – have been part of the scheme of history (the terms ‘West’ and ‘Western’ are used here to refer to intellectual framings rather than to geographical places). However, no culture has been misrepresented and deformed by the West like the Arab/Islamic one. Between these two antagonistic worlds, translation remains a prime medium of communication/interaction. Translation usually refers to the handling of written texts and spoken discourse is left to the realm of interpreting (i.e. oral translation). In addition, translation normally refers to both the process of translating and to the product, the target text. As such, the term covers a broad range of concepts and both denotes and connotes different meanings.

Within this context, the purpose of this chapter is to examine the constraints and pressures of the discourse through which translation is carried out. Particularly from perceived weaker cultures, translations are received by audiences at whose disposal is a master discourse that animates issues of identity, similarity and difference across cultures. Drawing on textual import from Arabic, the chapter shows how a culturally defined master discourse affects the act of translating at all levels.

2. The Master Discourse of Translation

Across the different approaches/models of translation, whether named or not, the primary objective is to achieve the same informational and emotive effects in the target translations that are contained in and by the source texts. Opposition and conflict between various approaches/models has been the norm in translation studies. According to Salama-Carr,

Much of the academic discourse on translation and interpreting has been articulated more or less explicitly in terms of conflict. Whilst some authors have focused on the tensions that are inherent in the process of translation (source texts versus target text, adequacy versus acceptability, literal translation versus free translation, semantic translation versus communicative translation, and formal correspondence versus dynamic equivalence, to name but a few dichotomies and constructed oppositions that underpin discussions of translation and classification of approaches and strategies), others have represented translation as an aggressive act. (2013: 31)

The given that is at the heart of the dichotomies listed above, the main theoretical basis has centred on the concept of equivalence. Therefore, actual equivalence in and through translation has been sought at both the content level and the expressive (form) level. This search has often led theorists and translators alike to focus on aspects of either form or content. But such polarization of what translation involves ignores two simple facts: any text produced through a given language is the product of a unique union between form and content (manner and matter), and the production and reception of a text are embedded in a specific cultural context. Seeing translation as an equivalence-seeking endeavor has further ignored that languages and their associated cultures are different and that complete equivalence, at one or multiple levels, is impossible. In the main and except for specific samples, texts cannot be accurately, faithfully, and neatly translated into other languages and still be the same as their originals. Linguistic difficulties (vocabulary, idioms, grammar, collocations, etc.) and cultural difficulties (perceptions, experiences, values, religions, histories, etc.) persist.

Since the 1980s, translation studies has been extended to consider various and challenging issues. In particular, the view of culture-modeling through translation has ushered in questions that cannot be adequately answered by the conventionalised notions of equivalence, accuracy, fidelity, or ‘sourceer vs. targeteer’ approaches to translation and translating. The focus has shifted from (un)translatability to the cultural, political, and economic ramifications of translation; away from concerns with translated texts towards treating translation as a combination of social, cultural, and political acts that occur within and are attached to global and local relations of power and dominance. Marinetti comments:

[C]ulturally-inflected studies have looked at translation as cultural interaction and have developed the question of translation ethics in the context of political censorship, endorsement of or resistance to colonial power and gender politics, generating a substantial body of literature that has developed these ideas into legitimate sub-areas. (2013: 29)

It follows then that translating involves the transporting (carrying-over) of languages and their associated cultures to specific target constituencies, and the recuperation of the former by the latter. Such constituencies have at their disposal established systems of representation which include norms and conventions for the production and consumption of meanings vis-à-vis people, objects, and events. These systems ultimately yield a master discourse through which identity and difference are marked and within which translating is carried out (Faiq, 2007). In this respect, Venuti (1996: 196) succinctly sums up the nature of translation, as a particular instance of writing, within the Anglo-American tradition:

The violence of translation resides in its very purpose and activity: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that pre-exist it in the target language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality. (1996: 196)

Elsewhere, Venuti attempts to exorcise the ideological in the process of representation through translation. Using the terms ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’, he traces how, over the last three centuries, Anglo-American (by extension, Western) translation theory and practice have had normalising and neutralising effects. The ultimate aim of such effects has been to subdue the dynamics of texts and realities of indigenous societies and to represent them in terms of what is familiar and unchallenging to Western culture.

In intercultural communication, translation should perhaps most appropriately be seen and appreciated as involving interaction (communication) between and across different cultures through the languages of these cultures. This communication means that those carrying out the acts of translating bring with them prior knowledge (culture) learned through their own (usually mother or first) language. In any communicative act (even between people of the same group), culture and language are so intertwined that it is difficult to conceive of one without the other (Bassnett, 1998).

A culture seeks to instruct its members about what to expect from life; by doing so it reduces confusion and helps them predict the future, often on the basis of one or more pasts. Cultural theorists generally agree that the most basic elements of any culture are history, religion, values, social organization, and language itself. The first four are interrelated and animated and expressed through the fifth. Through its language, a culture is shared and learned behaviour is transmitted across generations for the purposes of promoting individual and group survival, growth, and development, as well as the demarcation of itself and its group vis-à-vis other cultures and their respective members.

A very basic definition of language is that it is no more than the combination of a good grammar book and a good dictionary. But this definition does not explicate what users actually do with grammar rules and neatly listed words; in reality, these mean what their users make of and want them to mean. So use depends very much on the user, and language as a whole assumes its importance as the mirror of the ways a culture perceives reality, identity, self, and others.

Because it brings culture and language together, translation requires transporting (in the literal sense, causing to travel) texts (comprised of languages and their associated cultures) so that they become other texts (that reside in other languages and their associated cultures). The culture of the others (the ‘destination’ culture) usually has an established system of representation that helps define it to its members but, more importantly, helps them to define the languages and cultures they are translating from vis-à-vis their own.

Thus, translation is by necessity a cultural act (Lefevere, 1998). As such, translation has a culture (politics, ideology, poetics) that precedes the actual act of translation. Culture A views culture B in particular ways, and vice versa; in turn, these particular ways affect how Culture A translates from Culture B, and vice versa. To express this union between culture and language, perhaps one can say that translation means transporting texts from Culguage A into Culguage B, where ‘culguage’, the blend of culture and language, is intended to capture the intrinsic relationship between the two.

In translation, the norms of producing...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Through the Master Discourse of Translation
• 2 Curriculum Innovation in the Arab World: Community Interpreting and Translation as an Example
• 3 Translating for Pilgrims in Saudi Arabia: A Matter of Quality
• 4 Interpreting Taboo: The Case of Arabic Interpreters in Spanish Public Services
• 5 Terminology in Undergraduate Translation and Interpreting Programmes in Spain: The Case of Arabic as a First Foreign Language
• 6 Towards a Functional Approach to Arabic–English Legal Translation: The Role of Comparable/Parallel Texts
• 7 Translating Colour Metaphors: A Cognitive Perspective
• Concluding Remarks: The Turn of Translating (into) Arabic
• Index