Handbook of Translation Studies: A reference volume for professional translators and M.A. students

By Bruno Osimo

This Handbook of Translation Studies reflects my experience as a translation scholar, and a translation teacher, and a translator from Russian. The knowledge of the Russian language allowed me to read (and translate into Italian) crucial authors like Popovič, Lyudskanov, Torop, Revzin and Rozentsveyg. Since not many Western translation scholars know them, we get as a consequence a translation theory which is split between West and East according to a sort of 'cultural Berlin wall'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruno Osimo
• Release date: Sep 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9788898467785

Book preview

Bruno Osimo

Handbook of Translation Studies

A reference volume for professional translators and M.A. students

Copyright © Bruno Osimo 2019

Bruno Osimo is an author/translator who publishes himself

ISBN 9788898467778 for the paper edition

ISBN 9788898467785 for the ebook edition

To contact the author/translator/publisher: [e-mail]

Introduction

1. Scientific approach

2. Inner speech

3. Continuous and discrete languages

4. How sense is formed

5. How sense is communicated

6. Languaculture

7. Oral versus written communication

8. Emotive and conative functions

9. Empiric author and model author

10. Metalingual function

11. Audiobook as translation

12. Phatic function

13. Conative function

14. Poetic function

15. The text

16. Open and closed text

17. The hermeneutic circle

18. Metaphor and metonymy

19. A few styles

20. Prototext and metatext

21. The metatext and information about the author

22. Language as a worldview and translatability

23. The academic Berlin Wall: ideology and freedom of thought

24. Translation produces diversity, not equivalence

25. The intersection between semiotics and inner speech

26. Translation as invariant of sense

27. Translation as creativity

28. Translation as interpretation

29. Versions and interpretations

30. Intralingual translation

31. Interpretation by approximation

32. The intertext

33. The translator

34. Translation: interpretation and re-creation

35. Translator as metaphor

36. The translator as third wheel

37. Popovič’s translationality and Toury’s developments

38. The problem of genre

39. Realia

40. Model reader

41. The horizon of expectation and its recreation

42. Sense postulates

43. Common frame of reference

44. Words, terms, accuracy, types of translation

45. Exact translation and model reader

46. Second-degree intertextuality

47. The phases of the mental process of translation

48. Mother tongues and rational tongues

49. Revision and its traps

50. Translation-focused analysis and translation types

51. Translation and residue: the metatext

52. Translatability of connotation

53. Translation-focused analysis

54. Translation as a game

55. Poetic translation

56. Translation for publishers

57. Special-purpose translation

58. Essay translation

59. Terminology

60. Translation for cinema

61. Translation for theatre

62. Personal limitations

63. Plurivocity: registers and idiolects

64. Repetition of repetitions

65. The dictionary

66. Internet for translators

67. Transliteration, transcription

67.1 The Arabic alphabet

67.2 The Cyrillic alphabet

67.3 The Hebrew alphabet

67.4 General principles

Extract from the ISO 2384 standard on translation

References

Introduction

This Handbook of Translation Studies reflects my experience as a translation scholar, and a translation teacher, and a translator from Russian and English. The knowledge of the Russian language allowed me to read (and translate into Italian) crucial authors like Popovič, Lyudskanov, Torop, Revzin and Rozentsveyg. Since not many Western translation scholars know them, we get as a consequence a translation theory which is split between West and East according to a sort of 'cultural Berlin wall'.

In this handbook I tried to synthesize both Western and Eastern points of view about the translation process. In science I don’t think that the existence of ‘schools’ can be of any use. Schools imply belief, while science implies evidence.

The terms that are used belong to both worlds.

For a deeper knowledge of the terminological aspects, you can use another book, ‘Dictionary of Translation Studies’, available both in paper and in ebook form.

I have been teaching translation at the Civica Scuola Interpreti e Traduttori «Altiero Spinelli» in Milan, Italy, for 30 years, and translation theory for 20 years. My students made an important contribution to this book, through their feedback during lectures and exams. Year after year I had the opportunity to evolve my view accordingly. And in the last quarter of a century my books have been reflecting such evolution.

Bruno Osimo

Deiva Marina, 17 September 2022

P.S. Since I hate the hypocrisy of political correctness, to make up for male dominance I have simply used the feminine for all examples.

1. Scientific approach

There is a tendency in Italy to think that there is a strict distinction between scientific and humanities disciplines. But in much of the rest of the world, disciplines are called sciences and are, by definition, scientific. Scientific is an adjective that, applied to any context, distinguishes the register of those who deal with something in a serious and documented way from the register of those who address their discourse not to their peers, but to the people, and then prefer a popularizing register (and content). Popularization is translation of the scientific register into the popular register. Sometimes the use of humanistic (as opposed to scientific) discourse serves to mask the impotence of a study that would like to be systematic but is not. Rather than compete with the sciences, one entrenches oneself behind this label to shield oneself from indiscreet comparisons. But, in the final analysis, even human phenomena are decomposable into distinctive traits, and therefore scientifically tractable, although to think so, and to try to do so, one must not be lazy.

The science of translation studies the transformation of text (text in the semiotic sense, thus any cohesive and coherent set of signs) that occurs in its transfer from one culture to another (culture in the semiotic sense, thus any set of individuals united by a shared and taken-for-granted heritage of beliefs, and thus also any individual).

Figure 1 Diagram of the translation process.

In the translation process, it is necessary for one part of the text to be transferred intact (invariant), one part to be transferred modified (variant), one part not to be transferred (loss), and one part to be created (added information). In the absence of any of these four conditions, it is not possible to speak of translation. This section has the ambition to lay the technical foundations of translation discourse: that is why it is devoted to communication.

2. Inner speech

The first key to understanding how translation communication works is to become aware of the existence of inner speech, a widely established scientific fact that is shrouded in a thick blanket of ignorance in our culture. The scholar who discovered the existence of inner speech was the Russian psychologist Vygotsky. Since his discovery was not very much in harmony with the dialectical materialism of the Stalin government, he did not fare very well in Russia, but it must be said that his invaluable teaching did not fare much better in the very democratic West either. Vygotsky’s early research focused on the child.

[...] the discovery of the sentence and the increasing freedom in its lexical filling out in the child’s linguistic behavior is accompanied by a gradual freezing of word creation. Neologism is eclipsed by syntactic tasks. The period of freedom and productivity of words, which contrasts so strikingly with the fixed vocabulary of the adult, has been shrewdly recognized by the greatest observers of human language. [...] The American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce maintains that the child, ‘with his wonderful genius for language’ [1.349], loses this remarkable gift as time passes (Jakobson 1979:147).

Jakobson realized how little Vygotsky's inner speech had been received in the West, sought its historical roots, and realized that in the Middle Ages science in this was more advanced than in later centuries.

[...] attention to internal speech, termed verbum mentis sive interius by Thomas Aquinas, sermo interior by Occam, for whom triplex est terminus: scriptus, prolatus, and conceptus, more exactly defined as intentio and as pars propositionis mentalis. Later this vital aspect of language remained underrated or unnoticed for a long span of time (Jakobson 1968:192).

It is precisely in the light of inner speech that the word substantive takes on meaning. We are accustomed to consider it almost a synonym for noun, but in the light of inner speech it is well understood that it stands for the concretization, the substantiation of what is volatile in the mind. Boethius writes:

[...] a substantive does not name a substance but shows only that the given conceptus mentis is represented like a substance (per modum substantiae), yet could be actually represented by any other part of speech (idem conceptus mentis per omnes partes orationis potest significari), and on the other hand, everything, whether an actual entity or a negation or a pure figment, in its linguistic expression may obtain modum significandi essentialem nominis. Hence all such words become genuine substantives, irrespective of their lexical meaning (significata lectionum) (Jakobson 1968:193).

It is again Jakobson who reminds us that Bernard Bolzano, a Czech mathematician and communication scholar, in the 19th century posed the problem of the difference between interpersonal and internal communication, taking it for granted that both exist and are comparable, of equal importance.

[...] between signs (Zeichen) and indices (Kennzeichen) which are devoid of an addresser, and finally on another pressing theme, the question between interpersonal (an Andere) and internal (Sprechen mit sich selbst) communication (Jakobson 1975b:202-3).

Peirce, the founder of semiotics, also speaks of inner dialogue as a means of self-communication, a fact that at first glance may seem strange, as if different psychic entities coexist within each person, but in reality it is explained by the fact that, since the person is constantly evolving, in each instant the person is different, and therefore the various persons relative to different moments of existence dialogue with each other.

Thus, for instance, inner speech, keenly conceived by Peirce as an 'internal dialogue', is a cardinal factor in the network of language and serves as a connection with the self’s past and future (Jakobson 1967:662-3).

In Russia, this strand of research on inner speech has had a very strong development, especially since the twentieth century.

[...] Language is a vehicle not only for interpersonal, but also for intrapersonal communication. This field, for a long time scarcely explored or even totally ignored, faces us, especially after such magnificent reconnaissances as those of L. S. Vygotsky and A. N. Sokolov, with an imminent request for investigating the internalization of speech and the varied facets of inner language which anticipates, programs and closes our delivered utterances and in general guides our internal and external behavior, and which shapes the silent retorts of the tacit auditor (Jakobson 1968:697).

What inner speech operates is a continuous translation between external reality and the individual's internal reality. The individual needs to recognize reality, and to recognize it he must translate it into an inner language, which is the same language from which she starts to formulate her own messages. Therefore, it is precisely the inner language (metalanguage) through which persons operate endless series of translations, at the basis of their interaction with external and internal reality.

[...] The progress of a child’s language depends on his ability to develop a metalanguage, that is, to compare verbal signs and to talk about language. Metalanguage as a part of language is, again, a structural trait that has no analogues in other signs systems. The founder of the Moscow linguistic school, F. F. Fortunatov (1848-1914), stressed that ‘the phenomena of language themselves appertain to the phenomena of thought’. Interpersonal communication, which is one of the indispensable preconditions for the infant's access to speech, is gradually supplemented by an internalization of language. Inner speech, one's dialogue with oneself, is a powerful superstructure on our verbal intercourse. As the study of language disturbances shows, impairments of inner speech take a conspicuous place among verbal disorders. A lesser dependence on environmental censorship contributes to the active role of inner speech in the rise and shaping of new ideas. The equivalence relation that under various names – transformation, transference, translation and transposition – has since the interwar era been gradually approached by linguists at different ends of the world proves to be the mainspring of language. In the light of this relation several controversial questions of verbal communication may receive a more exact and explicit treatment (Jakobson 1972:90-1).

External speech is an outgrowth of inner speech (a fact that sometimes shines through, in moments of stress, fear, distraction, fatigue, when inner speech surfaces and receives partial acoustic expression, unintelligible to others), is a translation of it into comprehensible and linear mode (while linear inner speech is not).

[...] At first, each statement consists solely of a holophrase, a one-word sentence, to use an inexact expression which anticipates the future concepts of the word and the sentence and brings them into the discussion prematurely. In the state which follows, the holophrastic unity expands to comprise a second constituent. Thus, the first grammatical divisions arise simultaneously, on the one hand word and word-structure, on the other hand the main-word (open class) and the marked accessory-word (‘pivot’, according to the terminology of Martin Braine), e.g. it ball, more ball, there ball, little ball. Many observers have tried to find predication already in this stage, but the interpretation of such structures as individual, situationally-conditioned predicates represents a superfluous extension of the meaning of the term ‘predicate’ (Jakobson 1977:145).

A great many people are familiar with the Jakobsonian distinction between intralinguistic, interlinguistic, and intersemiotic translation, but perhaps some are unfamiliar with the other distinctions that Jakobson proposes for the reader's attention. One of them is precisely about intrapersonal communication.

[...] The classification of human sign systems must resort to several criteria as, for instance: the relation between the signans and signatum (in accordance with Peirce’s triadic division of signs into indices, icons, and symbols with the transitional varieties); discrimination between sign production and mere semiotic display of ready-made objects; difference between merely bodily and instrumental production of signs; distinction between pure and applied semiotic structures; visual or auditory, spatial or temporal semiosis; homogeneous and syncretic formations; various relations between the addresser and the addressee, in particular intrapersonal, interpersonal or pluripersonal communication (Jakobson 1967: 661).

The continuous, bidirectional translation that the infant is forced to operate between internal and external language (at first passive and later also active) serves to develop metalinguistic competence, which remains indispensable for any communicative activity even as an adult.

[...] The buildup of the first language implies an aptitude for metalingual operations, and no familiarization with further languages is possible without the development of this aptitude (Jakobson 1956:121).

The fact that there is a dialogic world in our mind that reacts to external reality and internal reality, and has its own life and dialectic, makes it possible to understand why meaning is not intrinsic in objects (or words), but is produced in the mind after being triggered by the sign.

[...] The meaning of the words cheese, apple, nectar, acquaintance, but, mere, and of any word or phrase whatsoever is definitely a linguistic or – to be more precise and less narrow – a semiotic fact. Against those who assign meaning (signatum) not to the sign, but to the thing itself, the simplest and truest argument would be that nobody has ever smelled or tasted the meaning of cheese or of apple. There is no signatum without signum (Jakobson 1959: 260).

The issue of internal discourse, as we can see, is central to the understanding of meaning and translation. I considered it essential to discuss it at the very beginning, along with the next section on continuous and discrete languages, in order to introduce the following, on meaning.

3. Continuous and discrete languages

The reason why the presence of nonverbal inner speech greatly complicates the picture of the translation process is that natural languages are discrete languages, whereas inner speech is continuous. Discrete languages are characterized by the fact that they contain units, that descriptions occur by steps, that one can speak of high/low definition of language: examples of this are digital, numerical languages, such as those used by the digital clock, the digital camera, the CAT scan. While in the digital clock there is an abrupt transition from the message 10:31 to the message 10:32, without continuity, in the analog clock the hand gradually moves from 10:31 to 10:32, and, if the clock is large enough, or if my visual ability is sufficiently powerful, I can see at any instant where the exact time indication is between 10:31 and 10:32.

Similarly, if I look at a painting in which the painter has incompletely blended two hues, and brushed them together leaving shades that go almost imperceptibly from one hue to the next, I can see with my eye this seemingly endless series of shades, because the eye can perceive the overall view and describe it to the mind as a continuum. If, however, I try to translate these perceptions of mine into words, words are not enough for me to describe all the minute differences between one point and another in the picture and color, and I am forced to approximate: if I am asked about the color of one point I will say yellow, of another point I will say a slightly darker yellow, until I say of another point orange, neglecting all the intermediate shades.

Unlike verbal language, mind uses a continuous inner language. Thoughts fade into one another, have no precise boundaries. The images of the mind are immediate, global, embracing an entire moment. Mental speech is creative multimedia synthesis of reality. This is why it is so useful for us to understand the sense of the sentences we read (even when we have to translate them into another ‘outer’ language).

Thus we have at our disposal two languages: a flash one in which we immediately guess everything, and a tedious and meticulous one with which we fix in words the precision of what we want to say, or want others to say. Precisely because of their inherently and structurally different nature, these two languages are mutually translatable only at the cost of a large communicative residue. Reading the original serves to transform the text of words into a text of ideas (inner language), the processing of which must then produce another speech of words. Thus every translation between two languages consists of a pair of translations from discrete language to continuous language, and from continuous language to discrete language. The continuous compulsion to transform a speech of words into a continuous mental speech (reading, listening) and to transform a thought into a fragmentary speech of words (writing, speaking) is very creative. Creativity arises from the clash/encounter between two structurally different languages. Thus, because of the translation filter, what is communicated is always different from what one wishes to communicate, and in that difference lies the creative contribution that translation makes to life.

4. How sense is formed

Many translators are bothered by theory, and they have good reason to be. But all translators, like it or not, have a conception of translation. (What they write when they translate is necessarily a translation of that conception.) Any conception of translation has as its foundation a conception of meaning, or rather sense. Translators are not only so much specialists in understanding what words mean, but in understanding what sense they make in context. A necessary premise to introduce Jakobson's criticism of Saussure, who unfortunately has heavily influenced the entire Western world.

According to Saussure’s Cours, the inner duality of synchrony and diachrony threatens linguistics with particular difficulties and calls for a complete separation of the two facets: what can be investigated is either the coexistent relations within the linguistic system ‘d’où toute intervention du temps est exclue’ or single successive changes without any reference to the system. His fallacious identification of two oppositions – synchrony versus diachrony, and statics versus dynamics – was refuted by post-Saussurian linguistics. The essential precondition of the envisaged inquiry had been posited by an earlier French thinker, Joseph de Maistre: ‘Ne parlons donc jamais de hasard ni de signes arbitraires’ (Jakobson 1971a[2]:722).

The utopian vision of a language in which, in a kind of symmetrical splitting of reality, on one side there is the gallery of words and on the other side there is the gallery of corresponding things is fascinating but simplistic (very). And let's say right away that, if that were the case, human translators would be useless, because, when it comes to two-way correspondences, computers are much stronger than we are. Sense is something alive that begins to exist away from the dictionary, in the mind of the person who transposes something. Every text, and every person, constitutes a culture, a system. Communication is the explanation of one culture to another culture; it is the translation of a text for a receiver. The reason there is a bias, a biais, a perceptual deviation for any text, for any word, is to be found in the translation of the word into each individual's internal language, into what Peirce calls the interpretant. Just as a river, which disperses some of its content into the ground while flowing, and absorbs new content from tributaries and the environment, so a text changes, evolves, accumulates new senses and loses old ones while being communicated. Translation is evolution of sense. The science that explains this to us is semiotics. If, on the other hand, we resorted to Saussure's semiology, we would derive that translation is equivalence. And this is the famous theory that does not explain the practice. Equivalence is no longer to be sought outside in the translated text, but inside the mind of the translator, in the logical concatenation leading from the original sign to its interpretation, and then from its interpretation to the metatext sign.

Figure 2 Equivalence in a Peirceian view of translation

In this conception equivalence is not between signs (outside the individual), but in nexuses (within the individual), in the sign-interpretant-object concatenation.

‘Signs are viewed by Peirce as equivalent ‘when either might have been an