5.4.1 Translation shifts and their analysis
The most obvious way to apply structuralism to translation is to see the source and
target texts as sets of structures. We can compare the texts and see where the structures
are different, we then have specific structures (the differences) that somehow belong to
the field of translation. That idea is as simple to understand as it is difficult to apply.
The structural differences between translations and their sources can be
described as “translation shifts,” a term found in many different theories. For Catford,
shifts are “departures from formal correspondence” (1965: 73), which sounds clear
enough. If formal correspondence is what we find between “Friday the 13
th
” and
“viernes y 13,” then any other rendition will be a “shift” of some kind. The range of
possible shifts might thus include all the things that Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) found
translations doing, or indeed anything detected by anyone within the equivalence
paradigm. A shift might come from the translator’s decision to render function rather
than form, or to translate a semantic value on a different linguistic level, or to create the
correspondence at a different place in the text (using a strategy of compensation), or
indeed to select different genre conventions. Much research can be carried out in this
way: compare the texts, collect the differences, then try to organize the various kinds of
shifts.
There are at least two ways of approaching this task: bottom-up analysis starts from
the smaller units (usually terms, phrases or sentences) and works up to the larger ones
(text, context, genre, culture); top-down analysis goes the other way, starting with the
larger systemic factors (especially constructs such as the position of translations within
the sociocultural system) and working down to the smaller ones (especially categories
like translation strategies). In principle, it should make no difference which end you
start at: all roads lead to Rome, and there are always dialectics of loops and jumps
between levels. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the difference between bottom-up and top-
down has a lot to do with the role of theory in description.
5.4.1.1 Bottom-up shift analysis
The range and complexity of bottom-up analysis is most completely seen in the
comparative model developed by Kitty van Leuven-Zwart (1989, 1990), where shifts
are categorized on many levels from the micro (below sentence level) to the macro (in
her case, text-scale narrative structures). A useful summary is in the first edition of
Munday’s Introducing Translation Studies (2001: 63-65) (and Hermans 1999: 58-63),
however the model is omitted from the second edition of Munday (2008) since it is
rarely used any more. Here we are interested in the underlying reasons why it is no
longer used.
In Leuven-Zwart, the basic textual units entering into comparison are called
“transemes” (cf. the “translemas” in Rabadán 1991). For example, the two
corresponding units might be English “she sat up suddenly” and the Spanish “se
enderezó,” which basically means that she sat up. What these two transemes have in
common would be the “architranseme.” Once you have identified that, you can start to
look for shifts, which can then be categorized in much the same way as Vinay and
Darbelnet had proposed from within the descriptive paradigm. For example, you might
note that the two phrases occupy corresponding positions in the two texts but the
English has a value (suddenness) that seems to be absent in the Spanish. So we write
down “absence of aspect of action,” and we call this absence a shift. Eventually we will
have compiled a notebook full of such shifts, which we hope will form patterns
(manifesting structures of some kind) that can tell us something about the translation.
What could be wrong with that? Since this “sit up” example is presented as being
relatively uncomplicated in both Hermans and Munday, it is worth spending some time
on the difficulties it might actually involve:
- For a start, how can we be sure that the value of “suddenly” is not in the
Spanish? The verb “enderezó” is in the preterit tense (actually the pretérito
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |