Santa Clara University Scholar Commons Communication College of Arts & Sciences 1999 Communication models, translation, and fidelity Paul A. Soukup Santa Clara University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/comm Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Soukup, Paul A. (1999). Communication models, translation, and fidelity. In P. A. Soukup, & R. Hodgson (Eds.). Fidelity and translation: Communicating the Bible in new media (pp. 219-231). Chicago: Sheed and Ward and New York: American Bible Society. Copyright © 1999 Sheed and Ward. Reprinted and reproduced by permission of Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher for permission to copy, distribute or reprint This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts & Sciences at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 12 Communication Models, Translation, and Fidelity Paul A. Soukup, SJ The fact that people regularly translate from one language to another or-as the American Bible Society (ABS) New Media Translations Project has done-from one medium to another, may seem to make it easier to evaluate those translations. At some point, people can, and do, claim that one translation "works" whi le a nother does not, that one translation has greater aesthetic qualities than another, o r th at one translation is more fa ith­ ful than another. The fact that people make s uch judgments, though, does not necessarily make it easier to explain theoretically how they make them. Among other things, communication study examines both the process of communicating a nd the product. What might it contribute to an under­ standing of fidelity in translati on? Various perspectives on communication, reflected in models of communication, can illuminate the process and , indi­ rectly, the attendant question of fidelity. Without attempting a ny compre­ hensive treatment, I shall present four such perspectives: communicati on as transportation, communicati on as a semioti c system, communication as rit­ ual , and communicati on as conversation. After a brief introduction to each, I shall examine the consequences of each for fidelity in translation. Finally, I shall offer some more general comments drawn from this treatment. Earl y communicati on theory, fo llowin g a kind of transportation model, fosters a view of fidelity th at favors a sense of equivalence-something that can be measured. Later communicati on theory foll ows a more rituali stic view and asks what communicators do with communication; in this view, fi­ delity becomes more functional. Yet another approach sees communication as a manifestati on of semi otic systems; in thi s v iew, fidelity manifests s ur­ face changes in a deeper stru cture (see essays by Hodgson and Stecconi in this volume). Finally, an interactive approach places communicati on as a conversational system; here fidelity takes on a different va lue-more a c har­ acteristic of the a udi ence than of the text. 2 19 220 Paul A. Souku Communication as Transportation In an influential review article, James Carey ( 1975/1989) proposed a distinction between communication as transportation and communication as ritual. By the former he characterized what had dominated North American communication studies through the mid- I 970s: a sense that communication primarily involved the transfer or transportation of a message from one per­ son or source to another through some medium or agent. That kind of traditional communication study diagrams the communi­ cation process as a linear process involving a sender (or source), a message, a receiver (or target), a channel (or medium), a context, and various sources of noise. (See Figure I .) Originally designed by C laude Shannon (S hannon & Weaver, 1949) as a tool for measuring the electronic transmi ssion capac­ ity of telephone circuits where one could compare an input signal to an out­ put signal, the model, despite its mechanistic presuppositions, has found application in roughly identifying stages of communication. This model pos­ sesses a certain power since it diagrams various general aspects of commu­ nication and thus holds a certain universal applicability-describin g communication in situations ranging from face-to-face interaction through written texts to electronic transmission. Eugene Nida and William Reyburn ( 1981) have successfully appli ed this model to translation. The elements of the model identify key "places" in communication. The source or sender originates a message. Note that this implies that the source somehow determines or controls the message, thus becoming the "original" or yardstick against which to measure any copy or transported message. The receiver, or end location of the message, makes its version of the message available for measurement. If the message differs, then some distortion has occurred-due to "noise" in the channel through which the message passed or due to a change in context that affects the resulting pro­ cess of understanding. This model works well to hi ghlight what occurs in the transfer of a message from one place, or language, to another. It points out the places in which a message mi ght undergo change due to the system of transportation-exactly what an engineer needs to discover. The model Figure 1: Transportation model of communication. Communication Models, Translation, and Fideli 221 applies to texts somewhat m echani call y, but it does give a degree of insight into the communicati on p rocess. With thi s model, we could d escribe a tra nslati on in one of two ways. First of all , we could regard the translati on as an intermedi ate process. A message source creates a message and transmits it through a medium (the translator) who in turn sends it on t o the receiver. The process of translati on may inj ect n oise into the translati on, though it should adjust the message t o the context of the receiver. That very a djustment, though, makes the messages different in language and in presuppositions, as Nida points o ut in several pl aces. Second, we could regard the translator as the c reator of a new m es­ sage, whi ch reac hes a receiver th rough some c hannel or other. In thi s in­ stance, a double process of communicati on occurs: from the message source to the translator; from the tra nslator t o a receiver. In each case, one theoreti­ call y could measure the message at each end of the process and compare the two. The preponderance of authority o r p ower remains at the point of ori­ gin- in the o ri ginal, which acts as the yardsti ck for measurement. From the sender-receiver t ransport perspective, fidelity becomes the demonstrated equi valence o f th e message transmitted from source to re­ ceiver. In the s implest (and original) a pplicati on, one would measure the electronic signal at each end of the model and compare the two. Fidelity re­ sults when the recei ved ( or transmitted/translated) signal di verges little from the o ri gin al. In more c omplicated settings-language translati on, for exam­ ple-one would have to determine an appropriate measure (Thomas, 1994a). Nida a nd Reyburn illustrate this move by showing how a w ord-for-word translati on d oes not necessaril y result in a fa ithful translation since it ig­ nores idiomati c usage, cultural conventions, and so forth . They propose in ­ stead the c oncept of functi onal equivalence, preferring that the translation communicate the same function from one language o r culture to another. For example, the biblical phrase, "to beat one's breast," may not communi­ cate sorrow or repentance in all cultures; in some, a different acti on may serve that fun ction. The faithful translati on mu st change the lingui sti c phrase to convey the s ame meaning. In thi s kind of lingui sti c translati on, a bilingual speaker, one who un­ derstand s both th e c ulture of the o ri gin al or source language and the c ulture of the target l anguage, best judges the fidelity of the translated work to the ori gin al. The sense of measurement implicit in the Shannon model applies almost directly since such a s peaker could quantify the degree of d eviation of the target from source. Though difficult in practice, that kind of m easure­ ment remains fairly simple from the theoreti cal perspective of the model. (When applied t o e lectronic c ircuits-the intent of the model-such meas­ urement also re mains fairl y s imple in practi ce.) Multimedia translation poses a s imilar, but a more complex, situati on. A m essage moves not n ecessaril y from one c ulture to another but from one means of expression to another, usually within the same c ulture. The means of expression, though, do not p arallel each other the way that l anguages do. 222 Paul A. Souku What should a measurement of fidelity measure in this case? T hi s s ituati on touches bibli cal work in two ways. On th e one hand, t he process is not com­ pletely new fo r the b iblical m essage, since it has hi stori call y undergone a major media transi tion from oral p erform ance to written t ext. However, that transi ti on characterizes not onl y the Bible, but a w ide range of t exts, and so th e conventi ons of writing have evolved t o encompass the rhetori cal and oral cues of the spoken word- oft en slav ishl y.