ASSIGNMENT

Issues of Untranslatability

SUBMITTED BY: SUBMITTED TO:

FACULTY OF ENGLISH
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
UNIVERSITY OF GUJRAT
NOVEMBER, 2020
 Untranslatability in literary translation
Definition:
Untranslatability defined “The degree of difficulty of translation depends on their nature, as well
as on the translator’s abilities.” Untranslatability is a property of a text of any utterance, in SL,
for which no equivalence text or utterance can be found in TL. A text or utterance that is
considered to be “untranslatable” is actually a ‘lacuna’ or ‘lexical gap’.
Detail:
The question of untranslatability arises when the translator is unable to find out a translation
equivalent for the source language unit in the target language. It is difficult to say that an item or
unit is exclusively translatable or exclusively untranslatable. The degree of difficulty in
translating one into another depends upon the nature of the source text and also on the skill of the
translator. Generally, an item is said to be untranslatable if the translator finds it out as a lacuna
or lexical gap in the target language. It is very difficult to say that there is always one-to-one
correspondence the between the source and the target language for all the units under
consideration. A number of translation procedures are available to a translator to overcome this
lacuna. Therefore, untranslatability or difficulty of translation does not always carry deep
linguistic relativity implications. Denotative meaning can be easily carried from source language
to target language. But connotative meaning is difficult to transfer from source to target
language. The translation procedures that are available to a translator to overcome the
untranslatability or lexical gaps include the following: adaptation, borrowing, calque,
compensation, paraphrase, translator’s notes, and register.
The translation of poetry:
The translation of poetry is the field where most emphasis is normally put on the creation of a
new independent poem, and where literal translation is usually condemned. It is simply a process
of creation. For translation of poetry, we need a whole culture of that means information of that
poetry’s culture from where it belongs.
The notion of the 'no-equivalent’ word:
The difficulties of literal translation are often highlighted not so much by linguistic or referential
context as by the context of a cultural tradition. Bagehot wrote about 130 years ago that
'Language is the tradition of nations. people repeat phrases inculcated by their fathers, true in the
time of their fathers but now no longer true.
To write off as 'untranslatable' a word whose meaning cannot be rendered literally and precisely
by another word is absurd, particularly when it could at least be better delineated by
componential analysis into four or five words, though as a footnote, not in the text of the play.
Looking at translation in an ideal sense, Gadamer has pointed out that 'no translation can replace
the original the translator's task is never to copy what is said, but to place himself in the direction
of what is said (i.e. in its meaning) in order to carry over what is to be said into the direction of
his own saying'.
The sub-text (text within text):
Another reason may be the search for the 'hidden agenda', the pursuit of the sub-text. Michael
Meyer (1974) has made much of the concept of the 'sub-text', what is implied but not said, the
meaning behind the meaning. To an intelligent reader, the true meaning behind the meaning is
clear, and the translator must word the sentence in such a way that the sub-text is equally clear in
English.' Thus, sub-text as a reason for embroidering on the original will not stand. If someone
says one thing while he means another, that is a psychological feature that has to be cleanly
translated; it must be equally inhibited or concealed in the translation; it may or may not be
culturally induced, but, linguistically, the translation is not affected, must not be tampered with.
Re-creative translation:
Literal translation is the first step in translation, and a good translator abandons a literal version
only when it is plainly inexact or, in the case of a vocative or informative text, badly written. A
bad translator will always do his best to avoid translating word for word. Re-creative translation -
'contextual re-creation' as Delisle (1981) calls it - which means, roughly, translating the thoughts
behind the words, sometimes between the words, or translating the sub-text, is a procedure which
some authorities and translation teachers regard as the heart or the central issue of translation
('get a. far away as possible from the words'). The truth is the opposite: 'interpret the sense, not
the words' is, to my mind, the translator's last resource; an essential resource, certainly, and a
touchstone of his linguistic sensitivity and creativity, not to mention his alertness and
perspicacity, when words mislead. Further, contextual re-creation is likely to be more common in
interpretation, if delegates are speaking off the cuff, than in written language translation, where
words are more carefully measured and perhaps closer to thought. But most translation is not
creative in this sense. You have to like struggling with words before you reach the longer
passages.
Words as myths:
Componential Analysis is used for the words that have become symbols of untranslatability and
cultural consciousness, they were conscious of the gap in feeling and connotation between the
SL and the TL word, which they considered to be unbridgeable. But in fact, the explanation is
the translation. An ordered account of the cultural difference between two words with the same
referent but different pragmatic components is offered by CA, rather than two separate
definitions.
'Unfindable' words:
Tracing apparently 'unfindable' words and phrases can be a difficult and time-consuming task; it
is a problem in translation theory which is often considered to lie outside the scope of theoretical
or applied linguistics. The translation theorist should, however, propose a frame of reference or
guidelines - a non-diagrammatic flow chart - for this task. The purpose of this is to put some
order into the translator's search for the meaning of unfindable words.
Types of unfindable word:
There may be at least eighteen types of unfindable word in a source language text:
(1) Neologisms, recent and original, including newly coined forms, newly devised phrases, new
collocations, compound nouns, new terminology, old words and phrases with new senses,
acronyms, abbreviations, blends, eponyms, new combinations of morphemes. Hundreds of these
appear every year in non-specialized periodicals and newspapers for an educated readership and
many soon disappear. Tens of thousands are devised to form part of specialized vocabularies in
every sphere of knowledge.
(2) Dialect, patois and specialized language which is spoken more often than written.
(3) Colloquialisms, slang, taboo words - now usually recorded, but not in all senses ('non-
metropolitan' words, e.g. Canadian French (or joual, its colloquial form)); words commonly used
in, say, remote anglophone areas rather than the UK (e.g. 'kelper').
(4) Third language or target language words waywardly introduced into a SL text.
(5) New or out-of-date geographical and topographical terms and 'rival' alternative names
('Malvinas', 'Azania', etc.).
(6) Names of small villages, districts, streams, hillocks, streets. They may, in novels, be real (e.g.
'Flatbush') or invented, and may or may not have local connotations; street plans may have to be
inspected.
(7) Names of obscure persons.
(8) Brand names, names of patented inventions, trademarks - usually signaled by capitalization
and often more or less standard suffixes.
(9) Names of new or unimportant institutions.
(10) Misprints, miscopying, misspellings, particularly of proper names (people and geographical
names) and bizarre transliterations.
(11) SL, TL and third language archaisms.
(12) Unfamiliar connotations and symbolic meanings of words and proper names.
(13) Familiar alternative terms or words.
(14) Codewords.
(15) Common words with specific SL or third language cultural senses.
(16) Private language or manifestations of 'underlife'. ('Underlife' is the evidence of the writer's
personal qualities or private life which can be indirectly or tangentially deduced from a reading
of the SL text.)
(17) Exophoric (or external) reference. The 'unfindable' word may refer to an object or activity
mentioned previously, in or not in the SL text. Thus: Razmishlenya prodolzhajutsja appears to
mean 'My thoughts are still on this matter', but in the context means 'The lectures on
(transcendental) meditation are continuing.' Here razmishlenya, 'reflections, thoughts,
meditations', is the word chosen by the writer to denote, as a 'synecdoche', lectures on
transcendental meditation. The absence of definite/indefinite articles adds to the difficulty. The
proximity of previous reference to the lectures governs the ease of solution, which requires a
lateral approach.
(18) Dictionary words. These are words that are rarely used but have time-honored places in the
dictionary. Thus spasmophilie, 'spasmophilia', and 'haemoscope'. A good dictionary refers the
reader to more commonly used classifiers or generic words such as 'proneness to spasms' and
'haematoscope'.
Jargon:
I assume that the translator is entitled to delete, reduce or slim down jargon, by which I mean,
mainly, more or less redundant words or words that are semantically too broad for the features
they are describing; in particular, more verbal or adjectival nouns. When these have a technical
sense (e.g., city 'development') I cannot quarrel with them. But take Gowers's and Frazer's
'untranslatable' piece and I should say that a translator cannot afford himself the luxury of
qualifying any stretch of language as untranslatable, unacceptable, deviant).
Difficulties with words:
Difficulties with words are of two kinds:
(a) you do not understand them;
(b) you find them hard to translate. If you cannot understand a word, it may be because all its
possible meanings are not known to you, or because its meaning is determined by its unusual
collocation or a reference elsewhere in the text.
Translation of Idioms: A Hard Task for the Translator:
Idioms can be considered as a part of everyday language. They are the essence of any language
and the most problematic part to handle with. Not all idioms have direct equivalents in another
language, because they are linguistic expressions which are typical for a language and specific to
a single culture. It is impossible to define any unique approach in the translating process since so
many idioms are culturally specific and thus the pragmatic meaning must be much more prized
than the literal meaning. If they are to be translated literally or word for word, they lead to
extreme confusion.
Procedures to compensate for this problem
The translation procedures that are available in cases of lacunae, or lexical gaps, include the
following:
1. Adaptation:
An adaptation, also known as a free translation, is a translation procedure whereby the
translator replaces a social, or cultural, reality in the source text with a corresponding
 reality in the target text; this new reality would be more usual to the audience of the
target text.
2. Borrowing:
Borrowing is a translation procedure whereby the translator uses a word or expression
from the source text in the target text unmodified. In English text, borrowings not
sufficiently anglicized are normally in italics.
3. Calque:
Calque entails taking an expression, breaking it down to individual elements and
translating each element into the target language word for word.
4. Compensation:
Compensation is a translation procedure whereby the translator solves the problem of
aspects of the source text that cannot take the same form in the target language by
replacing these aspects with other elements or forms in the source text.
5. Paraphrase:
Paraphrase, sometimes called periphrasis, is a translation procedure whereby the
translator replaces a word in the source text by a group of words or an expression in the
target text. The Portuguese word “saudade” is often translated into English as "the
feeling of missing a person who is gone". gone
6. Translators note:
A translators note is a note added by the translator to the target text to provide additional
information pertaining to the limits of the translation, the cultural background, or any
other explanations; Some translation exams allow or demand such notes. Some
translators regard resorting to notes as a failure.