PhD in Philosophy, Petrova Yulia Andreevna
Chumayan Mariya Igorevna
Rostov State University of Economics (RIPE)
The Main Theoretical and Methodological Foundations in the Translation
Theory.
There has been a long-standing
discussing of whether translation is science or art. This also is part of
tension. It is both. Linguists study language as a part of the culture, and art
— is the expression or application
of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form, producing
works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power [6],
according to aesthetic principles science and art are interdependent, just as
the theory and practice are. In our article, we give a short description of
some very specific aspects of translation theory, but first we would like to
mention the first linguist, who investigated the vital connection between
language and culture, language and human behavior —
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1787-1835).
The increasing interdisciplinary nature of translation studies
has multiplied theories of translation. A shared interest in a topic, however,
is no guarantee that what is acceptable as a theory in one discipline or
approach will satisfy the conceptual requirements of a theory in others. And
the most frequently cited theorists comprised a fairly limited group. One such
catalogue might include: Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, Goethe, Schleiermacher,
Arnold, and Nietzsche. Since the beginning of the twentieth century,
translation theory has revealed a much expanded range of disciplines and
approaches in line with the differentiation of modern culture: not only
varieties of linguistics, literary criticism, philosophical speculation, and
cultural theory, but experimental studies and anthropological fieldwork, as
well as translation training and translation practice. Any account of
theoretical concepts and trends must acknowledge the disciplinary sites in
which they arose in order to understand and evaluate them [7].
In 1988, Snell-Hornby presented a
model of Translation Studies as an integrated discipline within a
prototypological framework covering all kinds of translation, from literary to
technical. [3;35] M. Snell-Hornby asserted: “Translation begins with a
text-in-situation as an integral part of the cultural background; translating a
text means to consider its cultural specificity and to take into account the
distance between the cultural marks of the source text and the ones belonging
to the receptors of another language.” For Snell-Hornby, the concept of culture
as the totality of knowledge, competences and perceptions is fundamental in the
process of translation [3; 41-42].
Linguists and translators investigated
the translation theory
and proposed numerous definitions and analyses. The general
attention to discourse analysis developed in the
1970s has found applications in translation theory in the 1980s and into the 1990s.
The discourse analysis on translation was approached from a linguistic
perspective, focusing on words and meanings, and then, on functions of textual
views. Socio-anthropologists and ethno-linguists proposed a new vision in the
translation theory, which undoubtedly shed more light onto the complex
interrelatedness of language and culture. New functionalist approaches
were introduced in the translation theory.
The functionalist approach to
translation according to H. Vermeer`s “skopos theory” (Greek for aim or
purpose) provided an adequate theoretical framework for a specific area of
translation. Vermee stated clearly the purpose of translation in his theory,
where the quality and functionality of translation determined by indicating the
intended target-text function (Nord
1997,137), where an intercultural transfer are embedded in the corresponding
cultures, which means that the translator needs to be an intercultural expert,
capable of following Nord’s guideline that ‘translating means comparing
cultures’ (1997, 34), i. e. interpreting source culture phenomena in the light
of one’s own knowledge of both the source and target culture for target culture receivers.
The definition of the cultural
paradigm enriched the theory of translation, which meant that translation is
not only a process of language transferring, but also a process of
communication in social and cultural contexts.
Umberto Eco (2001) captured a key
difficulty in translation: “Equivalence in meaning cannot be taken as a
satisfactory criterion for a correct translation, first of all because in order
to define the still undefined notion of translation one would have to employ a
notion as obscure as equivalence of meaning, and some people think that meaning
is that which remains unchanged in the process of translation. Totally accrued
translation is impossible, but imperfect translation is ubiquitous and
essential.” In general he pointed out that translation is not a mechanical art,
but a skilled and emphatic re-rewriting or re-performing of a text or utterance
in which an understanding of the two cultures being bridged is essential
[2;14].
Even if the majority of translation
studies focused on text in source and target language, a moment of liberation
from the concept of text occurred in the cultural turn of translation theory.
In 1990, André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett also brought out theory
beyond linguistic studies to examine the way how culture effects on
translation. S. Bassnett, and A. Lefevere, redefined translation as “a verbal
text within the network of literary and extra literary signs in both the source
and target cultures” and perceived the text of translation to be
“inter-temporal” and “intercultural”
[1;135].
There were some researchers who
took the translation field beyond language. Although everybody agreed that we
couldn’t exclude source and target texts from the translation process, which
meant that intercultural communication could not only be verbal. New approaches
in the translation theory appeared, in which scholars started to redefine the
text as a “communicative occurrence”, in relation with nonverbal communication.
The perspective of perceiving
translation through the instruments of nonverbal communication was introduced
by Fernando Poyatos, who was a leading international scholar in the
multidisciplinary field of non-verbal communication.
Nonverbal communication in F.
Poyatos’s investigations was defined as: “the emissions of signs by all the
nonlexical, artifactual and environmental sensible sign systems contained in a
culture, whether individually or in mutual co-structuration, and whether or not those emissions constitute
behavior or generate personal interaction” [5; 3]. Nonverbal communication is
based on paralanguage (qualities of voice such as timbre, resonance, loudness,
tempo, pitch, intonation range, syllabic duration and rhythm) and kinesics
(body movements, posture, gestures, and facial expression) [4; 42–43]. He came
into conclusion that “translators need to become extremely sensitive to all
that happens or does not happen as they translate a text, for it is well known
that translation is not only an interlinguistic object, but an intercultural
one as well” [4; 16-17].
F. Poyatos mentioned that his own
studies of nonverbal communication emerged from interdisciplinary approaches
and he outlined with more detailed description, that various aspects of
nonverbal communication could be related to language, culture and literature.
In his interdisciplinary interpretations, he faced to literary translations and
he made the connection between the process of translation and nonverbal
communication, emphasizing that the nonverbal systems underwent profound
changes through translations.
Since
the twentieth century, the translation theory has constantly expanded by
utilizing the norms of other disciplines such as linguistics, semiotics,
anthropology, sociology, psychology etc. Definitions, ideas and concepts have
been created, commented upon, contradicted, expanded in constantly refreshable
models, creating shifts in the translation theory.
References
1. BASSNETT, Susan & LEFEVERE, André (1990),
Translation, History and Culture.
2. ECO, Umberto (2001), Experiences in Translation.
3. SNELL-HORNBY, Mary (1998), Translation Studies. An
Integrated Approach.
4. POYATOS, Fernando (1997a), “Aspects, problems and
challenges of nonverbal communication in literary translation”, in Nonverbal
Communication and Translation.
5. POYATOS, Fernando (1997), Nonverbal Communication and
Translation. New Perspectives and Challenges in Literature, Interpretation and
the Media.
6. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/art
7. https://books.google.ru/ The translation Studies Reader, Third Edition by
Lawrence Venuti, published by Taylor & Francis Group, 2012