CHAPTER 1: Introduction

• Our profession is based on knowledge and experience.

• The first stage of the career pyramid – the apprenticeship stage – is

the time we devote to investing in ourselves by acquiring knowledge
and experience of life.

• to achieve this, they need to develop an ability to stand back and

reflect on what they do and how they do it.
• almost every aspect of life in general and of the interaction between
speech communities in particular can be considered relevant to
translation, a discipline which has to concern itself with how meaning
is generated within and between various groups of people in various
cultural settings and with what impact on society.

• they have to make constantly look to developments in neighbouring

disciplines to appreciate the varied, complex dimensions of their
work.
• Among the many skills they need to acquire through training is the
skill to understand and reflect on the raw material with which they
work: to appreciate what language is and how it comes to function for
its users.
• a tool for generating meanings. It should therefore have a great deal
to offer to translation studies; it can certainly offer translators and
interpreters valuable insights into the nature and function of
language. This is particularly true of modern linguistics, which no
longer restricts itself to the study of language per se but embraces
such sub-disciplines as text linguistics (the study of text as a
communicative event rather than as a shapeless string of words and
structures) and pragmatics (the study of language in use rather than
language as an abstract system).
• Chapter 2 , ‘Equivalence at word level’, initially adopts a naive
building-block approach and explores the meaning of single words
and expressions.

• In Chapter 3, ‘Equivalence above word level’, the scope of reference

is widened a little by looking at combinations of words and phrases:
what happens when words start combining with other words to form
conventionalized or semi-conventionalized stretches of language.
• Chapter 4 , ‘Grammatical equivalence’, deals with grammatical categories, such as
number and gender.

• Chapters 5 and 6 cover part of what might be loosely termed the textual level of
language.

• Chapter 5 deals with the role played by word order in structuring messages at text
level.

• Chapter 6 discusses cohesion: grammatical and lexical relationships which provide

links between various parts of a text.
• Chapter 7 , ‘Pragmatic equivalence’, looks at how texts are used in
• communicative situations that involve variables such as writers, readers and
• cultural context.

• Chapter 8 , ‘Semiotic equivalence’, is new; it moves beyond verbal expression to

explore the interplay between verbal and visual elements in genres as varied as
comics, films, children’s literature and concrete poetry.

• Chapter 9 , ‘Beyond equivalence: ethics and morality’, is intended to encourage

• students to reflect on the wider implications of their decisions and the impact of their
mediation on others
• the term equivalence is adopted in this book for the sake of
convenience – because most translators are used to it rather than
because it has any theoretical status. It is used here with the proviso
that although equivalence can usually be obtained to some extent, it
is influenced by a variety of linguistic and cultural factors and is
therefore always relative.
• Snell-Hornby (1988 :69) suggests that ‘textual analysis, which is an
essential preliminary to translation, should proceed from the “top
down”, from the macro to the micro level, from text to sign’, and
Hatim and Mason’s model of the translation process ( 1990 , 1997 )
also adopts a top-down approach, taking such things as text-type and
context as starting points for discussing translation problems and
strategies. The top down approach is the more valid one theoretically,
but for those who are not trained linguists, it can be difficult to follow;
there is too much to take in all at once.
• it is equally unhelpful to expect a student to appreciate translation
decisions made at the level of text without a reasonable
understanding of how the lower levels, the individual words, phrases
and grammatical structures, control and shape the overall meaning of
the text.
• Back-translationinvolves taking a text (original or translated) which is
written in a language with which the reader is assumed to be
unfamiliar and translating it as literally as possible 1 into English –
how literally depends on the point being illustrated, whether it is
morphological, syntactic or lexical, for instance.
• the term back-translation because, since the source language is often
English, this involves translating the target text back into the source
language from which it was originally translated. A back-translation
can give some insight into aspects of the structure, if not the meaning
of the original, but it is never the same as the original. The use of
back-translation is a necessary compromise; it is theoretically
unsound and far from ideal, but then we do not live in an ideal world
– very few of us speak eight or nine languages – and theoretical
criteria cease to be relevant when they become an obstacle to fruitful
discussion.
• it has brought and continues to bring people of different cultural and
linguistic backgrounds closer together, has enabled many to share a
more harmonious view of the world and has built bridges of
understanding and appreciation among different societies.
TRANSLATION THEORIES
• 1. THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPROACH
• According to the sociolinguistic approach to translation, the social
context defines what is and what is not translatable and what is or
what is not acceptable through selection, filtering and even
censorship. According to this perspective, a translator is necessarily
the product of his or her society: our own sociocultural background is
present in everything we translate. This approach was developed by
the School of Tel Aviv and by linguists and professors such as Annie
Brisset, Even Zohar, and Guideon Toury.
• 2. THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH
This theory is referred to as interpretive. Scholars Danica Seleskovitch
and Marianne Lederer developed what they called the “theory of
sense,” based chiefly on the experience of conference interpreting.
According to this perspective, meaning must be translated, not
language. Language is nothing more than a vehicle for the message and
can even be an obstacle to understanding. This explains why it is always
better to deverbalize (instead of transcoding) when we translate.
• 3. THE HERMENEUTIC APPROACH
The hermeneutic approach is mainly based on George Steiner’s
research. Steiner believed of any human communication as a
translation. His book After Babel shows that translation is not a science
but rather an “exact art”: a true translator should be capable of
becoming a writer in order to capture what the author of the original
text “means to say.”
• 4. THE LINGUISTIC APPROACH
• Linguists such as Vinay, Darbelnet, Austin, Vegliante, or Mounin,
interested in language text, structuralism, and pragmatics, also
examined the process of translating. From this perspective, any
translation –whether it is a marketing translation, a medical
translation, a legal translation or another type of text– should be
considered from the point of view of its fundamental units, that is the
word, the syntagm, and the sentence.
• 5. THE LITERARY APPROACH
The literary approach does not consider that a translation is a linguistic
endeavor but instead a literary one. Language has an “energy” revealed
through words that the result of experiencing a culture. This charge is
what gives it strength and ultimately, meaning: this is what the
translation-writer should translate.
• 6. THE SEMIOTIC APPROACH
• Semiotics is the study of signs and signification. A meaning is the
result of a collaboration between a sign, an object, and an interpreter.
Thus, from the perspective of semiotics, translation is thought of as a
way of interpreting texts in which encyclopedic content varies and
each sociocultural context is unique.