Applied Translation

Studies
Lecture 1
Contents:
• Main Issues of Translation Studies
1. The Concept of Translation
2. What is Translation Studies?
3. A Brief History of the Discipline
4. The Holmes/Toury ‘map’
5. Developments since the 1970
Key concepts
• Definitions of translating and interpreting.
• The practice of translating is long established, but the discipline of
translation studies is relatively 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.
1. The Concept of Translation
• The English term translation came from the participle of the verb
transferre (‘to carry over’). In the field of languages, translation today
has several meanings:
a. the general subject field or phenomenon (‘I studied translation at
university’)
b. the product – that is, the text that has been translated (‘they
published the Arabic translation of the report’)
c. 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). Thus, when translating a product manual from
Chinese into English, the ST is Chinese 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 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 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’.
(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’.
• 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). The use of the term semiotics 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.
• 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
2. What is Translation Studies?
• Translation studies is an academic research area that has expanded
massively over the years.
• Translation was formerly studied as a language-learning methodology
or as part of comparative literature, translation ‘workshops’ and
contrastive linguistics courses.
• The discipline as we now know it owes much to the work of James S.
Holmes, who proposed both a name and a structure for the field, but
the context has now advanced. The interrelated branches of theoretical,
descriptive and applied translation studies initially structured research.
• Over time the interdisciplinarity and specialization of the subject have
become more evident and theories and models have continued to be
imported from other disciplines.
• 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 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 development of translation studies
as an independent discipline’.
• 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.
• The types of translation covered at each institution vary. These may include
MAs in applied translation studies, scientific and technical translation,
conference and bilateral interpreting, audiovisual translation, specialized
Sign Language and audio description.
• 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, rédaction,
Canada) in 1988, Target (the Netherlands) in 1989, Perspectives (Denmark) in
1993 and The Translator (UK) in 1995.
• 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. Among these
are Translation Studies (Bassnett 1980/1991/2002/2013), Contemporary
Translation Theories (Gentzler 1993/2001), The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Translation Studies (Baker and Malmkjær 1998; Baker and Saldanha 2009),
Dictionary of Translation Studies (Shuttleworth and Cowie 1997), Introducing
Translation Studies (Munday 2001/2008/2012) etc.
• Fourth, international organizations have also prospered. The Fédération
Internationale des Traducteurs (International Federation of Translators, FIT) was
established in 1953. It brought together national associations of translators.
• In more recent years, translation studies scholars have banded together nationally
and internationally in bodies such as the Canadian Association for Translation
Studies (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).
• 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.
3. An early history of the discipline
• Writings on the subject of translating go far back in recorded history.
The practice of translation was crucial for the early dissemination of key
cultural and religious texts and concepts.
• In the west, the different ways of translating were discussed by, among
others, Cicero and Horace (first century ) and St Jerome (fourth
century ). 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 Bible into Latin would affect later translations of the
Scriptures. Indeed, in western Europe the translation of the Bible was to
be the battleground of conflicting ideologies for well over a thousand
years and especially during the Reformation in the sixteenth century.
• While 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. In fact, from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s and
beyond, language learning in secondary schools in many countries had
come to be dominated by what was known as grammar-translation (Cook
2010: 9–15). Applied to Classical Latin and Greek and then to modern
foreign languages, this 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. This is an approach that persists even today in certain contexts.
• Translation exercises were regarded as a means of learning a new language
or of reading a foreign language text.
• Then, with time, Grammar-translation fell into increasing disrepute,
particularly in many English-language countries, with the rise of alternative
forms of language teaching such as the direct method and the
communicative approach from the 1960s and 1970s
• The communicative approach stressed 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 generally avoided use of the students’ mother tongue.
• This 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. It is only relatively recently that there has been a move to restore
translation to language teaching.
• In 1960s USA, literary translation was promoted by the translation
workshop concept. The translation work shops 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. Running parallel to this approach was that
of comparative literature, where literature is studied and compared
transnationally and transculturally, necessitating the reading of some
works in translation.
• Another area in which translation became the subject of research was
contrastive linguistics. 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.
• The contrastive approach heavily influenced important linguistic research into
translation, such as Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) and Catford (1965)
• The continued application of linguistics-based models has demonstrated their
obvious and inherent link with translation. Among the specific models used
are those related to generative grammar, functional linguistics and pragmatic.
• The more systematic, linguistic-oriented, approach to the study of
translation began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. There are a number of
now classic examples:
• Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet produced their Stylistique comparée
du français et de l’anglais (1958).
• Eugene Nida (1964a) incorporated elements of Chomsky’s then
fashionable generative grammar as a theoretical underpinning of his books,
which were initially designed to be practical manuals for Bible translators.
This more systematic approach began to mark out the territory of the
‘scientific’ investigation of translation. The word science was used by Nida
in the title of his 1964 book (Toward a Science of Translating, 1964a).
4. 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.’
• Interestingly, in view of our discussion above of how the field evolved from
other disciplines, 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 1972).
• Crucially, Holmes put forward an overall framework, describing what
translation studies covers. This framework was subsequently 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; and
2. the establishment of general principles to explain and predict such phenomena
(translation theory).
• The ‘theoretical’ branch is divided into general and partial theories.
1. By ‘general’, Holmes is referring to those writings that seek to describe or account
for every type of transla tion and to make generalizations that will be relevant for
translation as a whole (one example would be Toury’s ‘laws’ of translation; see
Chapter 7).
2. ‘Partial’ theoretical studies are restricted according to the parameters discussed
below (medium, text-type, etc.).
.
• The descriptive branch of ‘pure’ research in Holmes’s map is known as
descriptive translation studies. It may examine: (1) the product; (2) the function;
and (3) the process.
• Product-oriented DTS examines existing translations. This may 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).
• 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’. Issues that may be researched include which texts were
translated when and where, and the influences that were exerted. For example,
the study of the translation and reception of Shakespeare into European
languages, or the subtitling of contemporary cartoon films into Arabic. Holmes
terms this area ‘socio-translation studies’. Nowadays it would probably be called
the sociology and historiography of translation. It was less researched at the time
of Holmes’s paper but is more popular in current work on translation studies
• 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. Work from a cognitive
perspective includes think-aloud protocols (where recordings are made
of translators’ verbalization of the translation process as they
translate).
• The results of DTS research can be fed into the theoretical branch to evolve either a
general theory of translation or, more likely, partial theories of translation ‘restricted’
according to the subdivisions in Figure 1.1.
• Medium-restricted theories subdivide according to translation by machine and
humans, with further subdivisions according to whether the machine/ computer is
working alone (automatic machine translation) or as an aid to the human translator
(computer-assisted translation), to whether the human translation is written or spoken
and to whether spoken translation (interpreting) is consecutive or simultaneous.
• Area-restricted theories are restricted to specific languages or groups of languages
and/or cultures. Holmes notes that language-restricted theories (e.g. for the Japanese<
>English pair) are closely related to work in contrastive linguistics and stylistics.
• Rank-restricted theories are linguistic theories that have been restricted to a level of
(normally) the word or sentence. At the time Holmes was writing, there was already a
trend towards text linguistics, i.e. analysis at the level of the text, which has since
become far more popular.
• Text-type restricted theories look at discourse types and genres; e.g.
literary, business and technical translation. Text-type approaches came
to prominence with the work of Reiss and Vermeer, among 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.
• Problem-restricted theories may refer to certain problems such as
equivalence (a key issue that came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s)
5. DEVELOPMENTS SINCE HOLMES
• The surge in translation studies since Holmes has seen different areas of the map come to the fore.
• Concept of equivalence associated with it has been questioned and reconceived . Germany has seen the
rise of theories centred around text types and text purpose (the skopos theory of Reiss and Vermeer,).
• The Hallidayan influence of discourse analysis and systemic functional grammar, which views language
as a communicative act in a sociocultural context, came to prominence in the early 1990s, especially in
Australia and the UK. It was applied to translation in a series of works by scholars such as Bell (1991),
Baker (1992/2011), Hatim and Mason (1990, 1997), Calzada Pérez (2007), Munday (2008, 2012).
• The late 1970s and the 1980s also saw the rise of a descriptive approach that had its origins in
comparative literature and Russian Formalism.
• A pioneering centre was Tel Aviv, where Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury pursued the idea of the
literary polysystem in which, among other things, different literatures and genres, including translated
and non-translated works, compete for dominance.
• The polysystemists worked with a Belgium-based group including José Lambert and the late André
Lefevere (who subsequently moved to the University of Austin, Texas), and with the UK-based scholars
Susan Bassnett and Theo Hermans. A key volume was the collection of essays edited by Hermans, The
Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation (Hermans 1985a), which gave rise to the
name of the Manipulation School’.
• ‘Bassnett and Lefevere’s volume Translation, History and Culture (1990)
then introduced the term ‘cultural turn’. This dynamic, culturally oriented
approach held sway for much of the following decade . The 1990s saw
the incorporation of new approaches and concepts: Canadian-based
translation and gender research led by Sherry Simon,, and postcolonial
translation theory with the prominent figures of the Bengali scholars
Tejaswini Niranjana and Gayatri Spivak.
• Research activity, as well as the practice of translation, has also been
revolutionized by new technologies. These new areas include machine
and automatic translation, audiovisual and multimodal translation,
localization and corpus-based translation studies .Furthermore, the
international reach of the discipline has expanded enormously with
research and training in Asia and the Arab world in particular.