11.2
O.Sacks (1985)
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. London:
Picador (cited in Francis and Kramer-Dahl 1992).
11.3
Enoch Powell (cited in Sykes 1985).
11.4
The Woolwich Building Society; reproduced with permission, from an
old advertisement used here for illustration only.
11.5
World Health Forum vol. 5, no. 2, 1984. Reproduced by permission
of
the Office of Publications, World Health Organization.
11.6
UN Official Record of the Diplomatic Conference (1974–7).
12.1
EU directive.
While the authors and publishers have made every effort to contact copyright
holders of material used in this volume, they would be grateful to hear from any
they were not able to contact.
xii
Chapter 1
Unity
in diversity
The world of the translator is inhabited by an extraordinary number of
dichotomies, reflecting divisions which either exist or are supposed to exist
between mutually exclusive opposites. Some of these are professional,
corresponding to the traditional areas of activity of translators (the technical
translator, the literary translator, the legal, the religious and so on). Others
distinguish between different modes of translating: written, oral (such as
simultaneous interpreting) and written-from-oral (such as screen subtitling),
which again correspond to different professional orientations. A further set of
dichotomies pertains to an age-old debate concerning the translator’s priorities:
‘literal’ versus ‘free’, ‘form’ versus ‘content’, ‘formal’ versus ‘dynamic
equivalence’, ‘semantic’ versus ‘communicative translating’ and—in more
recent times—translator ‘visibility’ versus ‘invisibility’.
This proliferation of terms and categories reflects the diversity of the
translation world. Between the experience of the Bible translator, working in
remote locations and with wholly unrelated languages, and that of the staff
translator producing parallel copy of in-house documents in closely related
languages, there is indeed a world of difference. Many of the concerns of the court
interpreter are not shared, for example, by the translator of classical poetry.
Indeed, their paths hardly ever cross. Yet there is a core of common concern
which sometimes escapes unnoticed. It is striking that, beyond the widely
diverging constraints which operate in different fields and modes of translating,
so many of the intractable problems are shared. In this book, we propose to
investigate areas of mutual interest and to uncover the striking uniformity which
emerges when translating is looked upon as
an act of communication which
attempts to relay, across cultural and linguistic boundaries, another act of
communication (which may have been intended for different purposes and
different readers/hearers). The common thread here is communication and, as
the title of this book implies, our investigation is of communication strategies in
the sense of the underlying principles behind the production and reception of
texts—
all texts, written and spoken, source and target, technical and non-
technical, etc. The translator is, of course, both a receiver and a producer. We
would like to regard him or her as a special category of communicator, one
whose act of communication is conditioned by another, previous act and whose
reception of that previous act is intensive. It is intensive because, unlike other
text receivers, who may choose to pay more or less attention to their listening or
reading, translators interact closely with their source text, whether for immediate
response (as in the case of the simultaneous interpreter) or in a more reflective
way (as in the translation of creative literature).
There are, as always, some apparent exceptions to the general rule. It may, for
instance, be argued that poetry is essentially an act of self-expression and not one
of communication. Therefore, an account of communication would be irrelevant
to the work of the translator of poetry. But a poem which is to be translated has
first to be read and the act of reading is, we submit, part of what we understand
as communication. There may be all kinds of constraints which make the
translation of poetry a special case, with its own concerns and problems, but the
fact remains that there are a text producer and a text receiver, standing in some
kind of relationship to each other. It is the nature of this relationship in general
which interests us. The peculiarities of special cases, however constraining they
may be, can only be truly appreciated once the underlying nature of the
transaction is made clear.
The model of communication underlying all of our analyses will be the
subject of
Chapter 2
. In this first chapter, we want to illustrate (from text samples
in English, French and Spanish) some of the common concerns in all fields and
modes of translating, to highlight what unites, rather than what divides them. In
doing so, we hope to show the need for the (necessarily somewhat technical)
description of text processing contained in the next chapter and how it will
further our understanding of all kinds of acts of translating.
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