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CHAPTER 1

Main issues of translation studies

Key concepts

■

Definitions of translating and interpreting.

The practice of translating is long established, but the discipline

of translation studies is new.

In academic circles, translation was previously relegated to just

a language-learning activity.

A split has persisted between translation practice and theory.

The study of (usually literary) translation began through

comparative literature, translation ‘workshops’ and contrastive

analysis.

James S. Holmes’s ‘The name and nature of translation studies’

is considered to be the ‘founding statement’ of a new discipline.

Translation studies has expanded hugely, and is now often

considered an interdiscipline.

■

Key texts

Holmes, James S.

(1988b/2004) ‘The name and nature of translation studies’,

in Lawrence Venuti (ed.) (2004),

The Translation Studies Reader,

2nd edition,

pp. 180–92.

Jakobson, Roman

(1959/2004) ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’, in Lawrence

Venuti (ed.) (2004),

The Translation Studies Reader,

2nd edition, pp. 138–43.

Snell-Hornby, Mary

(2006)

The Turns of Translation Studies,

Amsterdam and

Philadelphia: John Benjamins, Chapter 1.

van Doorslaer, Luc

(2007) ‘Risking conceptual maps’, in Yves Gambier and Luc

van Doorslaer (eds)

The Metalanguage of Translation,

special issue of

Target

19.2: 217–33.

www.routledgetranslationstudiesportal.com

INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES

1.1 The

concept of translation

The main aim of this book is to introduce the reader to major concepts and

models of translation studies. Because the research being undertaken in this

field is now so extensive, the material selected is necessarily representative and

illustrative of the major trends. For reasons of space and consistency of approach,

the focus is on written translation rather than oral translation (the latter is

commonly known as

interpreting

interpretation

), although the overlaps

make a clear distinction impossible (cf. Gile 2004).

The English term

translation

, first attested in around 1340,

derives either

from Old French

translation

or more directly from the Latin

translatio

(‘trans-

porting’), itself coming from the participle of the verb

transferre

(‘to carry over’).

In the field of languages,

translation

today has several meanings:

(1) the general subject field or phenomenon (‘I studied translation at

university’)

(2) the product – that is, the text that has been translated (‘they published the

Arabic translation of the report’)

(3) the process of producing the translation, otherwise known as

translating

(‘translation service’).

The

process of translation

between two different written languages involves

the changing of an original written text (the

source text

) in the original

verbal language (the

source language

) into a written text (the

target text

) in a different verbal language (the

target language

Source text (ST)

in source language (SL)

Target text (TT)

in target language (TL)

Thus, when translating a product manual from Chinese into English, the ST is

Chinese and the TT is English. This type corresponds to ‘interlingual translation’

and is one of the three categories of translation described by the Russo-American

structuralist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) in his seminal paper ‘On linguistic

aspects of translation’. Jakobson’s categories are as follows:

(1)

intralingual

translation, or ‘rewording’ – ‘an interpretation of verbal

signs by means of other signs of the same language’

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MAIN ISSUES

(2)

interlingual

translation, or ‘translation proper’ – ‘an interpretation of

verbal signs by means of some other language’

(3)

intersemiotic

translation, or ‘transmutation’ – ‘an interpretation of verbal

signs by means of signs of non-verbal sign systems’.

(Jakobson 1959/2004: 139)

These definitions draw on

semiotics

, the general science of communication

through signs and sign systems, of which language is but one (Cobley 2001,

Malmkjær 2011). Its use is significant here because translation is not always

limited to verbal languages.

Intersemiotic translation

, for example, occurs

when a written text is translated into a different mode, such as music, film or

painting. Examples would be Jeff Wayne’s famous 1978 musical version of

H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novel

The War of the Worlds

(1898), which was

then adapted for the stage in 2006, or Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 Bollywood

Bride

and Prejudice

adaptation of Jane Austen’s

Pride and Prejudice

Intralingual

translation

would occur when we produce a summary or otherwise rewrite a

text in the same language, say a children’s version of an encyclopedia. It also

occurs when we rephrase an expression in the same language. In the following

example,

revenue nearly tripled

is a kind of intralingual translation of the first part

of the sentence, a fact that is highlighted by the trigger expression

in other words

In the decade before 1989 revenue averaged around [NZ]$1 billion a year

while in the decade after it averaged nearly [NZ]$3 billion a year – in other

words, revenue nearly tripled.

It is

interlingual translation

, between two different verbal sign systems, that

has been the traditional focus of translation studies. However, as we shall see as

the book progresses, notably in Chapters 8 to 10, the very notion of ‘translation

proper’ and of the stability of source and target has been challenged. The question

of what we mean by ‘translation’, and how it differs from ‘adaptation’, ‘version’,

‘transcreation’ (the creative adaptation of video games and advertising in parti-

cular, see section 11.1.8), ‘localization’ (the linguistic and cultural adaptation of a

text for a new locale, see section 11.2) and so on, is a very real one. Sandra

Halverson (1999) claims that translation can be better considered as a

prototype

classification, that is, that there are basic core features that we associate with a

prototypical translation, and other translational forms which lie on the periphery.

Much of translation theory has also been written from a western perspective

and initially derived from the study of Classical Greek and Latin and from Biblical

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INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES

practice (see Chapter 2). By contrast, Maria Tymoczko (2005, 2006, 2007:

68–77) discusses the very different words and metaphors for ‘translation’ in

other cultures, indicative of a

conceptual orientation

where the goal of close

lexical fidelity to an original may not therefore be shared, certainly in the practice

of translation of sacred and literary texts. For instance, in India there is the Bengali

rupantar

(= ‘change of form’) and the Hindi

anuvad

(= ‘speaking after’, ‘following’),

in the Arab world

tarjama

(= ‘biography’) and in China

fan yi

(= ‘turning over’).

Each of these construes the process of translation differently and anticipates that

the target text will show a substantial change of form compared to the source.

1.2 What

is translation studies?

Throughout history, written and spoken translations have played a crucial role in

interhuman communication, not least in providing access to important texts for

scholarship and religious purposes. As world trade has grown, so has the impor-

tance of translation. By 2008, in the European Union alone the turnover of the

translation and interpreting industry was estimated at 5.7 billion euros.

Yet the

study of translation as an academic subject only really began in the second half of

the twentieth century. In the English-speaking world, this discipline is now gener-

ally known as

‘translation studies’

, thanks to the Dutch-based US scholar

James S. Holmes (1924–1986). In his key defining paper delivered in 1972, but

not widely available until 1988, Holmes describes the then nascent discipline as

being concerned with ‘the complex of problems clustered round the phenomenon

of translating and translations’ (Holmes 1988b/2004: 181). By 1995, the time of

the second, revised, edition of her

Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach

Mary Snell-Hornby was able to talk in the preface of ‘the breathtaking develop-

ment of translation studies as an independent discipline’ and the ‘prolific interna-

tional discussion’ on the subject (Snell-Hornby 1995, preface). Mona Baker, in

her introduction to the first edition of

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation

(Baker and Malmkjær 1998: xiii), talked effusively of the richness of the ‘exciting

new discipline, perhaps the discipline of the 1990s’, bringing together scholars

from a wide variety of often more traditional areas. In 2008, the second edition of

the

Encyclopedia

shows how far this discipline has evolved. It comments on ‘new

concerns in the discipline, its growing multidisciplinarity, and its commitment to

break away from its exclusively Eurocentric origins, while holding on to the

achievements of the past decades’ (Baker and Saldanha 2009: xxii).

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MAIN ISSUES

There are four very visible ways in which translation studies has become

more prominent. Unsurprisingly, these reflect a basic tension between the prac-

tical side of professional translating and the often more abstract research activity

of the field. First, just as the demand for translation has soared, so has there been

a vast expansion in

specialized translating and interpreting programmes

at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. These programmes, which attract

thousands of students, are mainly oriented towards training future professional

commercial translators and interpreters and serve as highly valued entry-level

qualifications for the professions. Take the example of the UK. The study of

modern languages at school and university has been in decline but the story of

postgraduate programmes in interpreting and translating, the first of which were

set up in the 1960s, is very different. At the time of the first edition of this book

(2001), there were at least twenty postgraduate translation programmes in the

UK and several designated ‘Centres for Translation Studies’. By 2010–11, the

keyword search ‘translation’ revealed over twenty institutions offering a combined

total of 143 MA programmes, even if translation was not necessarily central to

all.

The types of translation covered at each institution may also vary. These may

include MAs in applied translation studies, scientific and technical translation,

conference and bilateral interpreting, audiovisual translation, specialized British

Sign Language and audio description.

A smaller number of programmes focus on the practice of literary translation.

In Europe, literary translation is also supported by the RECIT network of centres

where literary translation is studied, practised and promoted.

The first of these

was set up in Strälen, West Germany, in 1978.

Second, the past decades have also seen a proliferation of

conferences,

books and journals

on translation in many languages. Longer-standing interna-

tional translation studies journals such as

Babel

(the Netherlands) and

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