Филологические науки / 6. Актуальные проблемы перевода

Lyubov Zrazhevska

East European University of Economics and Management, Cherkasy, Ukraine

Notes on Translation and Linguistics

Translation is one of the most necessary tasks of any literature, because it directs those who do not know another language to forms of art and human experience that would otherwise have remained totally unknown. Although careful attention is given to translation we can never expect that what is sublime, immense and wxtraordinary in the original language will be easily and immediately comprehensible in the translation. Ease and clarity always remain virtues that a translator attains only with the utmost difficulty.

Texts are also easiest to translate when you think of them not as syntactically structured collections of words and phrases but as channels through which people influence each other's actions, describe what they see and do, make sense of their worlds; linguistics is a useful reduction of the complexity of actual language use to a few simple stable structures; even more useful than the actual structures it offers, however, is the process of reduction by which the linguistic theorist moved from complexity to simplicity, actual use to ideal model, dynamic change to static structure.

Translation is, after all, an operation performed both on and in language. In Latin translation used to be referred to as translatio linguarum, the translation of languages, to distinguish it from other kinds of translation, like translatio studii, the translation of knowledge, and translatio imperil, the translation of empire.

And until very recently, virtually all discussions of translation both in class and in print dealt primarily or exclusively with language. The ability to translate was thought of largely as an advanced form of the ability to understand or read a foreign language. Translation studies was thought of as a specialized branch of philology, applied linguistics, or comparative literature. Translator training revolved around the semantic transfer of words, phrases, and whole texts from one language to another. The chief issue in the history of translation theory since Cicero in the first century before our era has been linguistic segmentation: should the primary segment of translation be the individual word or the phrase, clause, or sentence

Language is an integral part of every aspect of translation. The purpose of discussing "people" or "working people," rather than, say, equivalence or terminology studies, has not been to downplay the importance of language but rather to place it in a larger social context - the context in which language takes on meaning, and in which linguistic matters are learned and unlearned.

Language, after all, seems to have a life of its own. It changes; and it stays the same. It is difficult to catch individual speakers of a language in the act of changing it, or of preventing it from changing; if anything, in fact, it changes them, and keeps them from changing. One entire school of linguistic thought from Wilhelm von Humboldt in the early nineteenth century to Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the middle of the twentieth argues persuasively that language, as the shaping force of a people or a culture or a nation, molds all of its individual speakers in more or less uniform ways. Tell me what language you speak, and I'll tell you who you are.

And languages seem to have more or less permanent patterns, regularities, which do change with time and place, but so slowly and incrementally that at any given moment they seem somehow built in, intrinsic. We do not normally check dictionaries or grammar books when someone says something that sounds odd; we just know that people don't usually say things that way. The language "inside our heads" seems to have a shape and size and color and feel that rejects or at least resists other ways of saying things - especially when those other ways come from people outside our group, speakers of different regional dialects of our language, or of other languages. The sentence structures and idiomatic expressions of foreign languages seem not only alien but wrong to us, both when we are first learning a foreign language and when we speak in our language to a foreigner who doesn't speak it very well.

Hence the value of stepping back from the contexts in which language is produced and the people who produce it, and of looking at it as if it were a more or less stable "thing" in its own right. And even when it is less rather than more stable, even when language seems so volatile as to be more cataract or forest fire than structural system, it can be useful to treat it like a coherent object. Certainly simultaneous interpreters, and many other translators and interpreters as well, often seem to be riding language like a wild horse, or to be holding onto a tiger's tail. To treat these "rides" linguistically is to simplify them, to tame them; but in many cases that is the only way to talk about them at all.

In languages we find infinite differences and similarities. Strictly speaking, everything is different from everything else, but also everything looks somewhat like everything else. Reality is a limitless continuum of diversity. In order not to get lost in it, we have to slice it, portion it out, and separate the parts.That is wht translation is an excessively demanding task. Some translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works.

LITERATURE:

1. Basic Translation / [Miram H. E., Daineko V. V., Hon A. M. et al.]. – K. : Elga, 2006. – 280 p.

2. Korunets I. V. Theory and Practice of Translation / Korunets I. V. – Vinnytsya : Nova knyha, 2003. – 448 p.

3. The Craft of Translation / [edited by J. Biguenet and R. Schulte]. – Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 1989. – 154 p.

4. Theories of Translation / [edited by R. Schulte and J. Biguenet]. – Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 1992. – 254 p.