Exploring translation theories

Where does equivalence notion come from?

The assumption that languages are equal, the age when a reality has demised as
the main means of transferring texts, and the printing press. For the first time
when you have the printing press, you can be equivalent to something. Prior to the
printing press, a translator had to go and establish the source text, that is collect
different manuscripts, compare the variations and decide which was the source text
that was going to be translated. The printing press says “there it is and there you
are”. And the national vernaculars started their standardization process which
was also a direct consequence of the printing press.
So equivalents really belong to the age of equality between languages, that is
nation states, the printing press, and a standardization of languages. That`s
equivalents, that applied in the 1950s, the 1960s, and 1970s. It hasn`t really been
questioned enough until today.
The equivalence paradigm appears when determinants coincide: multilingual
governance, training for trust, evangelical religion, intellectual scientism.
Paradigms – a set of terms that enable us to talk about translation. It`s not yet a
solution, it`s not yet the problem in itself, but it enables us to address a series of
problems with a common language.
People in one paradigm will not understand people in the other paradigm. There
will be serious misunderstandings when you cross from one to the other. And there
is lots of misunderstanding not just between theorists and practitioners, which is a
huge misunderstanding both ways, but especially between theorists that are
working on different problems in different contexts.
Skopos theory
From around 1984, the regime of equivalence was strongly challenged by a set of
German-language theories that have come to sail under the flag of Skopos.
Scopos just means the aim or purpose of your translation. The fundamental thing
here is that translations are done to fulfill a target-side purpose (Skopos), which
is at least partly defined by the requirements of a client. Since purposes and
clients change, the one source text can theoretically be translated in different ways.
Translation as a form of mediated cross-cultural communication (Christiana
Nord)
“Translatorial action” is a mode of communication that is cross-cultural and
mediated. The idea here was that translators do more than translate.
Why Skopos?
Market demands for more-than-translation. Academic promotion of translation
(independent from modern-language faculties).
Why polysystems?
What is the role of translation within society, when we see society as a system?
Polysystems means that translation happens between this society and this society,
this one is a system of systems to complex systemic structure, polysystem, and so
is this one. And I can see where the translation enters their system, does it occupy a
central role, in which case it brings about cultural change and becomes very
important for the culture, or does it occupy a peripheral role, which case it acts in a
conservative way and reinforces the patterns that are predominant in the culture.
This way of thinking about translation developed in small countries as Israel,
Belgium, Holland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic: smaller societies the smaller
your language, the higher the percentage of translations in that language.
It coincided of course with a structuralism, again that a desire for science and
these people could refer back to the addition of Russian formalism.
They thought that way because they were in small societies.
Why foreignization?
Lawrence Venuti argues that translators should show the foreignness of the source
text, they should not read in a fluent manner, the mediation of the translator should
be visible.
To develop the German language from Greek (from Schleiermacher to Benjamin
and Heidegger).
To open the culture to the other (Berman).
The basic problem being handled by Venuti is that of making a (monolingual)
leftist intellectual culture appear international.
We can associate foreignization with a critique of the rest. Anglo-american
cultures only translate two to four percent of their book production, and are,
therefore, hegemonic, and are, therefore, closed to the outside, and are, therefore,
xenophobic in the international relations. The only way to solve this is to translate
in a foreignizing way (like we do, the progressive New York-based elite).
Why domestication?
To develop a language from within its morphological resources (the protection of
the culture requires domestication, we don`t like borrowing terms from the
outside).
To promote literacy through standardization and simplification.
(Different situation – different problem, you cannot pick up the solution from one
place and apply it in another.)
Why comparative corpora?
The application of corpus linguistics was announced by people like Sarah
Leviosa, as being a revolution within translation studies, because it brought in new
tools with which to study translation and a relatively apparently new set of
questions.
One of the innovations that corpus studies brought to translation was the possibility
of looking at a corpus, that is just a big electronic collection of texts and our
translations in English, and then looking at the British national corpus and there are
other corpora, which is a whole big mess of texts, that are non-translations, and
you compare the translation statistically against the non-translations, and you find
that statistically there are differences that translators tend to use a kind of language
that non translators don`t use.
Why did that methodology appear at that time and place?
One of the main industries in the United Kingdom is international students who go
there to improve their English.
It`s big business, they pay big university fees, because of that applied linguistics,
especially of English, is a very big profitable academic discipline.
So most English theorists working on translation are applied linguists.
Translation can be studied in English alone.
Why cultural translation?
Cultural translation is a product of the late 1990s and it refers to translation as a
problematic issue and a process in which there are no translations, translation
without translations. The first usage of the term “cultural translation” was in work
by British ethnographers. They started to think about primitive distant society`s
production of descriptions as cultural translations, they were translating a culture,
not a source text, a whole culture.
Postcolonial societies are multicultural and complex.
Trying to analyze the communication produced within and across the third space
(places with no pure cultures) is a problem that people want to deal with through
the term “translation” used as a willful metaphor.
Translation provide a metaphors of non-binary categories.
Translation is operating in a whole series of cultural and professional third spaces
that are quite different from the binary oppositions.
A metaphor translation enables people to think about communication without
assuming any correct, ideal understanding, communication in which there is
always shifting, always transformation. And this metaphor can be applied to
hermeneutics, immigration, travel, cultural heritage, governance, etc.
Cultural translation has nothing to do with translations.
Different problems, same solutions?
For all the problems that you have to encounter try the solutions from the past, or
from other cultures, or from other theorists, disciplines, then adapt them to new
circumstances, see what works, and if it doesn`t work, you go back to the drawing
board.