LECTURE 1: Preview to Translation studies

LITERARY TRANSLATION

Translation studies is an established academic discipline related to the study of the theory,
practice and phenomena of translation. The English term translation, first attested in around
1340, derives either from Old French translation or more directly from the Latin translatio
(‘transporting’), 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 or ST) in the original verbal language (the source
language or SL) into a written text (the target text or TT) in a different verbal language (the
target language or TL):

Source text (ST) Target text (TT)

Thus, when translating a product manual from Kazakh into English, the ST is Kazakh and
the TT is English. However, internationalization and communication practices have meant
that this traditional conceptualization of translation needs to be broadened to include those
contexts in which there is no clearly defined source text. This may be because there are
multilingual versions of the same text, each of which is deemed to be equally valid (e.g. the
Acquis body of European Union law), or because of an ‘unstable’ source text that is subject
to constant updating or adaptation, each iteration of which requires a modification of existing
target texts rather than a completely new translation (e.g. a multilingual website).
The traditional ST-TT configuration is the most prototypical of ‘interlingual translation’,
one of the three categories of translation described by the 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’
(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 1959/2012: 127)

Semiotics is the general science of communication through signs and sign systems. The
use of the term semiotics is significant here because translation is not always limited to
verbal languages. Intersemiotic translation 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. For example, “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. Sandra Halverson (1999) claims that translation can be
better considered as a prototype classification, that is, that there are basic core features we
associate with a prototypical translation, and other translational forms which lie on the
periphery. Much of translation theory has until recently also been written from a western
perspective and initially derived from the study of Classical Greek and Latin and from
Biblical practice. 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.
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 importance of translation. By
2015, the global market for outsourced translation, interpreting and related technologies was
estimated to exceed US$38 billion, while international organizations such as the European
Union translate between 24 languages and spend some €456 million per year on translation
and interpreting services. 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 generally known as ‘translation studies’ according to scholar James S.
Holmes (1924–1986).
There are four very visible ways in which translation studies has become more prominent.
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. They include MAs in applied translation
studies, scientific and technical translation, conference and bilateral interpreting, audiovisual
translation, specialized Sign Language and audio description, the practice of literary
translation. The practice of translation is long established, the study of the field developed
into an academic discipline only in the latter part of the twentieth century. Before that,
translation had often been relegated to an element of language learning.
Second, the past decades have also seen a proliferation of conferences, books and journals
on translation in many languages. Longer-standing international translation studies journals
such as Babel (the Netherlands) and Meta (Canada), first published in 1955, were joined by
TTR (Traduction, terminologie, redaction, Canada) in 1988, Target (the Netherlands) in
1989, Perspectives (Denmark) in 1993 and The Translator (UK) in 1995.
Online accessibility is increasing the profile of certain publications including open access
journals such as The Journal of Specialised Translation and New Voices (see
www.routledge.com/cw/munday). Third, as the number of publications has increased so has
the demand for general and analytical instruments such as anthologies, databases,
encyclopedias, handbooks and introductory texts. Their number is ever-growing. Fourth,
international organizations have also prospered. The Federation Internationale des
Traducteurs (International Federation of Translators, FIT) was established in 1953 by the
Societe francaise des traducteurs and its president Pierre-Francois Caille (1907–79). It
brought together national associations of translators. In more recent years, translation studies
scholars have banded together nationally and internationally in bodies: Canadian Association
for Translation Studies/Association canadienne de traductologie (CATS, founded in Ottawa
in 1987), the European Society for Translation Studies (EST, Vienna,1992), the European
Association for Studies in Screen Translation (ESIST, Cardiff,1995), the American
Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA, Kent, OH, 2002), the International
Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS, Seoul, 2004) and the Asia-
Pacific Forum on Translation and Intercultural Studies (Hangzhou-Tsinghua, 2011), Ұлттық
аударма бюросы (Astana, 2017), Mazmundama (Almaty, 2018). International conferences
on a wide variety of themes are held in an increasing number of countries. From being a
relatively quiet backwater in the early 1980s, translation studies has now become one of the
most active and dynamic new areas of multidisciplinary research.

Themes for discussion:

1) Study about the early history of translation studies and prepare a short report on it.
2) Study the ‘applied’ branch of Holmes’s framework concerns applications to the
practice of translation.
3) Development of translation studies (translatology) in Kazakhstan.

Questions for discussion:

References: Jeremy Munday (Introducing translation studies, pp 8-12)