Translation and Text Transfer

Translation and Text Transfer An Essay on the Principles of Intercultural Communication Anthony Pym First published: Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna: Peter Lang, 1992: Out of print. Revised edition: Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group, 2010 ISBN 978-84-613-8543-0 Corrected June 2018, with thanks to Wang Jun © Anthony Pym 1992, 2010, 2018 [Back cover] More than just a linguistic activity, translation is one of the main ways in which intercultural relationships are formed and transformed. The study of translation should thus involve far more than merely defining and testing linguistic equivalents. It should ask what relation translation has to the texts that move Between cultures; it should have ideas aBout why texts move and how translated texts can represent such movement; and it should Be aBle to inquire into the ethics of intercultural relations and how translators should respond them. In short, By relating the work of translators to the problematics of intercultural transfer, translation studies should take its rightful interdisciplinary place among the social sciences. But what kind of conceptual geometry might make this development possiBle? Refusing simple answers, this Book sees the relation Between translation and transfer as a complex phenomenon that must Be descriBed on both the semiotic and material levels. Various connected approaches then conceptualize this relationship as Being causal, economic, discursive, quantitative, political, historical, ethical and epistemological... and indeed translational. Individual chapters address each of these aspects, placing particular emphasis on phenomena that are mostly ignored by contemporary theories. The result is a dense But highly suggestive and hopefully stimulating vision of translation studies. Anthony Pym was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1956. He studied at Murdoch University, the University of Western Australia and at Harvard before completing his doctorate in the Sociology of Literature at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Smut and weaponry are two areas in which we’ve improved. Everything else has gotten worse. You can’t get good bread anymore even in good restaurants (you get commercial rolls). Melons don’t ripen, grapes are sour. They dump sugar into chocolate candy bars because sugar is cheaper than milk. Butter tastes like the printed paper it’s wrapped in. Whipped cream comes in aerosol bombs and it isn’t whipped and isn’t cream. People serve it, people eat it. Two hundred and fifty million educated Americans will go to their graves and never know the difference. That’s what Paradise is — never knowing the difference. Joseph Heller, Something Happened! Fidelity is ethical, but also, in the full sense, economic. George Steiner, After Babel Preface to the revised version Translation and Text Transfer was first published in 1992, as a rewrite of my Masters dissertation Divagations for a Political Economy of Translation, completed in 1980. The basic ideas thus date from some 30 years ago. Those basic ideas were then rewritten again in my 2004 book The Moving Text, where they were framed by localization theory. In that book, the term “transfer” became “distribution” in order to avoid confusion and to stress the sense of material movement, and I would hope the terminological shift can be read back into the older text as well. The 2004 book also added many considerations that pertain to the localization industry. So why return to the old book now? First, because I can make it available for free. Second, because it was not all bad, and it was not all carried into the 2004 version. And third, because some of the very fundamental issues of translation theory are still subject to debate, particularly among Asian colleagues, and I feel that contemporary discussions are badly served by some of the simplified oppositions that have persisted (domesticating vs. foreignizing, equivalence or transformation, etc.). In that new context, the old book might say something like the following: 1) it is possible to carry out a technical analysis of the ways translations function as a discourse; 2) there is nothing reductive or simplistic about the workings of equivalence as a social illusion, and 3) despite the strong logics at work in translational discourse, history pervades all. After all, this was originally a search for a political economics, in the most noble nineteenth-century sense of the term. There is also, no doubt, a certain vanity involved in reviving an old text, importantly as an implicit plea for personal justice. I do not appreciate benighted commentators telling me that, for example, my theories tell translators what to do, or that the concept of intercultures is a surrogate for neutrality, or that I fail to see the creativity of translators. Rather than respond directly to such comments, I prefer simply to point to what I was saying on these points some 20 or 30 years ago. This revised edition retains all of the original text, making only stylistic corrections. I am a little amused at how dated it all sounds, particularly in the references and examples: Marx was still important in the 1980s (hence the political economics), “La Movida” was something people could still relate to, and it made some sense to argue with Peter Newmark. All those things have changed (I later learned to respect Newmark). But the book might yet have its word to say. Tarragona, December 19, 2009 CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................................................... 13 1. Translation depends on transfer ............................................................. 15 Transfer and translation work on distance ............................................... 15 Transfer is a precondition for translation ................................................. 16 Exactly what is transferred? ..................................................................... 19 Translation can be intralingual or interlingual ......................................... 23 Translation can be approached from transfer .......................................... 27 Transfer can be approached through translation ...................................... 29 How these approaches are used in this essay .......................................... 32 2. Equivalence defines translation ............................................................. 37 Equivalence could be all things to all theorists ......................................... 37 Equivalence is directional and subjectless ............................................... 38 Equivalence is asymmetrical .................................................................... 40 Value is an economic term ...................................................................... 43 Equivalence is an economic term ............................................................ 45 Equivalence is not a natural relation between systems ............................ 47 Equivalence has become unfashionable .................................................. 49 3. “I am translating” is false ...................................................................... 53 The translator is anonymous ................................................................... 53 The utterance “I am translating” is necessarily false ............................... 55 Can interpreters say they are frightened? ................................................. 56 Second persons can be anonymous ......................................................... 58 Third persons allow translators to talk .................................................... 61 Does anyone speak Redford’s language? ................................................ 63 Third persons can conflict ....................................................................... 65 Ideal equivalence can be challenged ........................................................ 66 4. Quantity speaks ...................................................................................... 69 Quantities replace the translator .............................................................. 67 Quantity is of practical and theoretical importance .................................. 71 Equivalence is absolute, relative, contradictory or not at all ..................... 72 A. Transliteration (absolute equivalence) ............................................... 76 The proper name is sometimes improper .................................... 76 B. Double presentation (strong relative equivalence) .............................. 80 Relative equivalence presents asymmetry .................................. 80 Relative equivalence tends to paraphrase (“La Movida” moves) . 83 Why translational paraphrase tends to stop at sentence level ...... 85 C. Single presentation (weak relative equivalence) .................................. 87 Single presentation hides at least one quantity ........................... 87 Simple signs indicate expansion and addition, abbreviation and deletion ................................................................................ 88 Notes are expansion by another name ........................................ 89 Abbreviation and deletion can be difficult to justify .................... 92 Authoritative subjectivity allows addition and deletion .............. 94 Expansion and addition can run into political trouble ................. 98 D. Multiple presentation (contradictory equivalence) ............................ 100 Some translations become originals

Load more