TRANSLATION THEORY

COURSE III

If the author uses a turn of phrase and it is not ungrammatical it must be translated as such.
A text can have some variables (linguistic norms of the source language) :
the semantic sense of each word and of each sentence
the communicative value
its place in time and space
information about the participants involved in its production and reception.
All of the above can vary within some parameters:
the message in the text
the purpose for which the text was issued (informing, persuading, flattering etc)
the type of communication (setting the text into its historic context)
the place of communication (physical location of the speech event in the text)
- the medium of communication or the mode of discourse(channels selected to carry
the signal: in speech vs in writing; verbal vs non-verbal)
- the manner of delivery or the tenor of discourse
- the domain of discourse (the sphere of human activity that the discourse is used for/in)
It is of much help if a translator knows the writer's social background, his style (for written
translations), the data and participants involved in the translation (especially for oral translations),
the indicators of the physical, temporal and social background of the user (dialect, sociolect, idiolect
and register).
A problem with translation appears when trying to relate some sociological variables with
linguistic forms.
Sociolinguistic variables

Linguistic forms

Participants

tenor

lexis

The setting

mode

syntax

Purposes

domain

There are no universally accepted rules or principles according to which one should
translate.
In translation theory it is important to know the how (the process) and the what (the
product) translation is a mental process, therefore the translator should have knowledge of
psychological studies.
Cognitive science deals with perception, information processing and memory equally. Given
that the process involves two languages the process should draw on linguistics.

Psycholinguistics examines the process in the mind

Sociolinguistics places the source-language text and the target-language text in
their cultural context

Translator
All communicators are translators. (George Steiner - After Babel, thoery of translation
chapter Understanding as translation) - paraphrasing is also translating
All receivers essentially behave the same way. They receive a signal (in speech or in
writing) which contains messages encoded in a communication system which is or is not identical
to their own.
Back-version from the mother tongue into a foreign language
Translation from a foreign language into the mother tongue
When the communicator takes turn as a receiver he has to encode a different message than
the one he received.
Only half way is the act of translation equatable to the one of understanding.
The translator re-encodes in another language the message he has received and transmits it
differently to a group of receivers.
They convert anamorphos ideas into a concept which he organizes into a semantic
proposition. (semantic knowledge)
Proposition mapping the proposition onto the clause-generating system of a language
(syntactic knowledge)
Clauses utterances/text use of rhetorical knowledge
clauses - written, grammatical construct, have semantic sense
utterances/text spoken, act of speech, have/has communicative value
Act of speech:
locutionary mear communication
illocutionary illicits a reaction from the receiver
perlocutionary speech act about a speech act
Functions of the language:
communicative (locutionary)
phatic (illocutionary)
poetic (illocutionary)
metalinguistic (perlocutionary)
conative (perlocutionary)
Normal communicators have only the three types of knowledge previously mentioned
(semantic, syntactic and rhetorical). For the translator there are at least two languages involved and
two cultures. In addition to the types of knowledge that a common communicator has a translator
should have at least two more types:
a procedural knowledge (series of techniques by which the act of translation should
be performed in the best forms)
a factual knowledge (the similarities and the differences between the two languages
contrastive synopsis)