Translation

• Translation studies is the academic discipline related to the

study of the theory and phenomena of translation.
• By its nature it is multilingual and also interdisciplinary,
encompassing any language combinations, various branches of
linguistics, comparative literature, communication studies,
philosophy and a range of types of cultural studies including
postcolonialism and postmodernism as well as sociology and
historiography.
• Because of this diversity, one of the biggest problems in
teaching and learning about translation studies is that much of
it is dispersed across such a wide range of books and journals.
The term translation itself has several meanings: it can refer to the
general subject field, the product (the text that has been translated)
or the process (the act of producing the translation, otherwise known
as translating).

The process of translation between two different written languages

involves the translator changing 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).

This type corresponds to ‘interlingual translation’ and is one of the

three categories of translation described by the Russo-American
structuralist Roman Jakobson in his seminal paper ‘On linguistic
aspects of translation’ (Jakobson 1959/2004: 139). 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’.
• Intralingual translation would occur, for example,
when we rephrase an expression or when we
summarize or otherwise rewrite a text in the same
language.
• Intersemiotic translation would occur if a written text
were translated, for example, into music, film or
painting.
• It is interlingual translation, between two different
verbal languages, which is the traditional, although
by no means exclusive, focus of translation studies.
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. Yet the study of translation as an
academic subject has only really begun in the past
sixty years. In the English-speaking world, this
discipline is now generally known as ‘translation
studies’, thanks to the Dutch-based US scholar
James S. Holmes.
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 1988,
Mary Snell-Hornby, in the first edition of her Translation
Studies: An Integrated Approach, was writing that ‘the
demand that translation studies should be viewed as an
independent discipline . . . has come from several
quarters in recent years’ (Snell-Hornby 1988, preface).
• By 1995, the time of the second, revised, edition of her
work, Snell-Hornby is able to talk in the preface of ‘the
breathtaking development of translation studies as an
independent discipline’ and the ‘prolific international
discussion’ on the subject (Snell-Hornby 1995 preface).
Mona Baker, in her introduction to the first edition of The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation (1998), 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
disciplines.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DISCIPLINE
Writings on the subject of translating go far back in recorded history.
The practice of translation was discussed by, for example, Cicero and
Horace (first century BCE) and St Jerome (fourth century CE); as we
shall see in Chapter 2, their writings were to exert an important
influence up until the twentieth century. In St Jerome’s case, his
approach to translating the Greek Septuagint into Latin would affect
later translations of the Scriptures. Indeed, in western Europe the
translation of the Bible was to be – for well over a thousand years and
especially during the Reformation in the sixteenth century – the
battleground of conflicting ideologies.
In China, it was the translation of the Buddhist sutras that inaugurated
a long discussion on translation practice from the first century CE.
• However, although the practice of translating is long established, the
study of the field developed into an academic discipline only in the
second half of the twentieth century. Before that, translation had
normally been merely an element of language learning in modern
language courses.
• In fact, from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s, language
learning in secondary schools in many countries had come to be
dominated by what was known as the grammar-translation method.
This method, which was applied to classical Latin and Greek and
then to modern foreign languages, centred on the rote study of the
grammatical rules and structures of the foreign language. These
rules were both practised and tested by the translation of a series of
usually unconnected and artificially constructed sentences
exemplifying the structure(s) being studied, an approach that
persists even nowadays in certain countries and contexts.
• The gearing of translation to language teaching and
learning may partly explain why academia considered it
to be of secondary status. Translation exercises were
regarded as a means of learning a new language or of
reading a foreign language text until one had the
linguistic ability to read the original.
• Study of a work in translation was generally frowned
upon once the student had acquired the necessary skills
to read the original. However, the grammar-translation
method fell into increasing disrepute, particularly in
many English language countries, with the rise of the
direct method or communicative approach to English
language teaching in the 1960s and 1970s.
• This approach placed stress on students’ natural capacity
to learn language and attempts to replicate ‘authentic’
language learning conditions in the classroom. It often
privileged spoken over written forms, at least initially,
and shunned the use of the students’ mother tongue.
This focus led to the abandoning of translation in
language learning.
• As far as teaching was concerned, translation then
tended to become restricted to higher-level and
university language courses and professional translator
training, to the extent that present first-year
undergraduates in the UK are unlikely to have had any
real practice in the skill.
• In the USA, translation – specifically literary translation – was
promoted in universities in the 1960s by the translation workshop
concept. Based on I. A. Richards’s reading workshops and practical
criticism approach that began in the 1920s and in other later
creative writing workshops, these translation workshops were first
established in the universities of Iowa and Princeton.

• They were intended as a platform for the introduction of new

translations into the target culture and for the discussion of the
finer principles of the translation process and of understanding a
text (for further discussion of this background, see Gentzler 2001:
Chapter 2). Running parallel to this approach was that of
comparative literature, where literature is studied and compared
transnationally and transculturally, necessitating the reading of
some literature in translation
• Another area in which translation became the
subject of research was contrastive analysis.
This is the study of two languages in contrast in
an attempt to identify general and specific
differences between them. It developed into a
systematic area of research in the USA from the
1930s onwards and came to the fore in the
1960s and 1970s. Translations and translated
examples provided much of the data in these
studies (e.g. Di Pietro 1971, James 1980).
• The contrastive approach heavily influenced other
studies, such as Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958) and
Catford’s (1965), which overtly stated their aim of
assisting translation research. Although useful, contrastive
analysis does not, however, incorporate sociocultural and
pragmatic factors, nor the role of translation as a
communicative act. Nevertheless, although sometimes
denigrated, the continued application of a linguistic
approach in general, and specific linguistic models such as
generative grammar or functional grammar), has
demonstrated an inherent and gut link with translation
THE HOLMES/TOURY 'MAP'
• A seminal paper in the development of the
field as a distinct discipline was James S.
Holmes’s ‘The name and nature of translation
studies’ (Holmes 1988b/2004). In his
Contemporary Translation Theories, Gentzler
(2001: 93) describes Holmes’s paper as
‘generally accepted as the founding statement
for the field’, and Snell-Hornby (2006: 3)
agrees.
Interestingly, the published version was an expanded
form of a paper Holmes originally gave in 1972 in the
translation section of the Third International Congress of
Applied Linguistics in Copenhagen. Holmes draws
attention to the limitations imposed at the time by the
fact that translation research was dispersed across older
disciplines. He also stresses the need to forge ‘other
communication channels, cutting across the traditional
disciplines to reach all scholars working in the field, from
whatever background’ (1988b/2004: 181).
• Crucially, Holmes puts forward an overall framework,
describing what translation studies covers. This framework
has subsequently been presented by the leading Israeli
translation scholar Gideon Toury as in Figure 1.1. In
Holmes’s explanations of this framework (Holmes
1988b/2004: 184–90), the objectives of the ‘pure’ areas of
research are:
• (1) the description of the phenomena of translation
(descriptive translation theory);
• (2) the establishment of general principles to explain and
predict such phenomena (translation theory).
• The ‘theoretical’ branch is divided into general and
partial theories. By ‘general’, Holmes is referring to those
writings that seek to describe or account for every type
of translation and to make generalizations that will be
relevant for translation as a whole. ‘Partial’ theoretical
studies are restricted according to the parameters
discussed below. The other branch of ‘pure’ research in
Holmes’s map is descriptive. Descriptive translation
studies (DTS) has three possible foci: examination of (1)
the product, (2) the function and (3) the process:
1. Product-oriented DTS examines existing translations. This
can involve the description or analysis of a single ST–TT pair or
a comparative analysis of several TTs of the same ST (into one
or more TLs). These smaller-scale studies can build up into a
larger body of translation analysis looking at a specific period,
language or text/discourse type. Larger-scale studies can be
either diachronic (following development over time) or
synchronic (at a single point or period in time) and, as Holmes
(p. 185) foresees, ‘one of the eventual goals of product-
oriented DTS might possibly be a general history of translations
– however ambitious such a goal might sound at this time’.
2. By function-oriented DTS, Holmes means the
description of the ‘function [of translations] in the recipient
sociocultural situation: it is a study of contexts rather than
texts’ (p. 185). Issues that may be researched include
which books were translated when and where, and what
influences they exerted. This area, which Holmes terms
‘socio-translation studies’ – but which would nowadays
probably be called cultural-studies-oriented translation –
was less researched at the time of Holmes’s paper but is
more popular in current work on translation studies
3. Process-oriented DTS in Holmes’s framework is
concerned with the psychology of translation, i.e.
it is concerned with trying to find out what
happens in the mind of a translator. Despite later
work from a cognitive perspective including think-
aloud protocols (where recordings are made of
translators’ verbalization of the translation process
as they translate), this is an area of research which
is only now being systematically analysed.
1. Medium-restricted theories subdivide according to
translation by machine and humans, with further
subdivisions according to whether the machine/computer is
working alone or as an aid to the human translator, to
whether the human translation is written or spoken and to
whether spoken translation (interpreting) is consecutive or
simultaneous.
2. Area-restricted theories are restricted to specific
languages or groups of languages and/or cultures. Holmes
notes that language-restricted theories are closely related
to work in contrastive linguistics and stylistics.
3. Rank-restricted theories are linguistic theories that have been
restricted to a specific level of (normally) the word or sentence.
At the time Holmes was writing, there was already a trend
towards text linguistics, i.e. text-rank analysis, which has since
become far more popular .
4. Text-type restricted theories look at specific discourse types or
genres; e.g. literary, business and technical translation. Text-type
approaches came to prominence with the work of Reiss and
Vermeer, amongst others, in the 1970s.The term time-restricted is
self-explanatory, referring to theories and translations limited
according to specific time frames and periods. The history of
translation falls into this category.
5. Problem-restricted theories can refer to specific problems
such as equivalence – a key issue of the 1960s and 1970s – or
to a wider question of whether universals of translated
language exist.
6. translator training: teaching methods, testing techniques,
curriculum design;
7. translation aids: such as dictionaries, grammars and
information technology;
8. translation criticism: the evaluation of translations,
including the marking of student translations and the reviews
of published translations.