Thinking German Translation

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 4511...

Author: Ian Higgins | Michael Loughridge | Hervey Sandor

827 downloads 7044 Views 911KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

THINKING GERMAN TRANSLATION Second Edition

Thinking German Translation is a comprehensive practical course in translation for advanced undergraduate and first-year postgraduate students of German. It focuses on improving translation quality by showing in detail the roles of clarity, method and awareness of purpose in translation, not as substitutes for creativity and flair, but as essential underpinnings. This second edition brings the course up to date, is much less literary in focus, has been thoroughly revised to give clearer explanations of key concepts, and features totally rewritten chapters on genre, compensation, and revision and editing. Offering over 30 practical translation exercises, and further texts analysed in detail to illustrate the stage-by-stage presentation of the method, Thinking German Translation features much new contemporary material taken from a wide range of sources, including: • • • • •

business, economics and politics advertising, marketing and consumer texts tourism science and engineering modern literary texts and popular song.

A variety of translation issues are addressed, among them cultural differences, genre, and the challenge for the translator of producing idiomatic English from consistently more compact German structures. Thinking German Translation is essential reading for all students seriously interested in improving their translation skills. It is also an excellent foundation for those considering a career in translation. A Tutor’s Handbook for this course, giving guidance on teaching methods and assessment, as well as specimen answers, is available in PDF format from our website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/0415341469. The late Sándor Hervey was Reader in Linguistics at the University of St Andrews. Michael Loughridge was Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews and is now a full-time translator with MITI status. Ian Higgins is Honorary Senior Lecturer in French at the University of St Andrews.

TITLES OF RELATED INTEREST Thinking Arabic Translation: A Course in Translation Method: Arabic to English James Dickins, Sándor Hervey and Ian Higgins Thinking French Translation: A Course in Translation Method: French to English Sándor Hervey and Ian Higgins Thinking Italian Translation: A Course in Translation Method: Italian to English Sándor Hervey, Ian Higgins, Stella Cragie and Patrizia Gambarotta Thinking Spanish Translation: A Course in Translation Method: Spanish to English Sándor Hervey, Ian Higgins and Louise M. Haywood Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies Mona Baker (ed.) In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation Mona Baker Becoming a Translator: An Accelerated Course Douglas Robinson Translation Studies Susan Bassnett Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications Jeremy Munday

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

THINKING GERMAN TRANSLATION Second Edition A Course in Translation Method: German to English

Sándor Hervey, Michael Loughridge and Ian Higgins

First published in 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2006 Sándor Hervey, Michael Loughridge and Ian Higgins This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hervey, Sándor G.J. Thinking German translation: a course in translation method, German to English / Sándor Hervey, Michael Loughridge, Ian Higgins. – 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. German language – Translating into English. I. Loughridge, Michael. II. Higgins, Ian. III. Title. PF3498.H46 2005 428′.0231 – dc22 2005022414 ISBN10: 0–415–34146–9 (Print Edition) ISBN13: 9–78–0–415–34146–2

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

To the memory of Trevor Jones (1908–84)

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Contents Preface to the second edition

xi

Acknowledgements

xv

Introduction

1

1

6

2

3

4

5

Preliminaries to translation as a process Practical 1 1.1 Intralingual translation: Exodus 14 1.2 Gist translation: Manufactum Küchenmesser

13 13 14

Preliminaries to translation as a product

16

Practical 2 2.1 Degrees of freedom; translation loss: Audi Dieseltechnologie 2.2 Degrees of freedom; translation loss: Im Westen nichts Neues

25

27

Cultural issues in translation

31

Practical 3 3.1 Cultural issues: Kulturelle Vielfalt in Europa: Bayern 3.2 Cultural issues: Die Duwaksblanze

37 37 39

Compensation

40

Practical 4 4.1 Compensation: Audi A8 4.2 Compensation: Biermann, ‘Kunststück’

48 48 49

Textual genre and translation issues

52

Practical 5 5.1 Genre 5.2 Genre 5.3 Genre 5.4 Genre

56 56 58 59 61

and and and and

translation: translation: translation: translation:

Wilhelm Furtwängler Wertmanagement der BASF Der Rennsteigtunnel Katz und Maus

25

viii

Contents

The formal properties of texts: Introduction 6

7

8

9

63

The formal properties of texts: Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues in translation

65

Practical 6 6.1 Phonic/graphic 6.2 Phonic/graphic 6.3 Phonic/graphic 6.4 Phonic/graphic

71 71 73 74 76

and and and and

prosodic prosodic prosodic prosodic

issues: issues: issues: issues:

Vorfrühling im Auwald IBM advertisement Nena, ‘99 Luftballons’ ‘Großer Dankchoral’

The formal properties of texts: Grammatical and sentential issues in translation

78

Practical 7 7.1 Grammatical and sentential issues: Der vulkanische Kaiserstuhl 7.2 Grammatical and sentential issues: Kapstadt 7.3 Grammatical and sentential issues: Ein fliehendes Pferd

89 89 90 91

The formal properties of texts: Discourse and intertextual issues in translation

93

Practical 8 8.1 Discourse issues: ‘Trügerischer Trend’ (Arbeitslosigkeit) 8.2 Discourse issues: Glenn Gould

104 104 106

Literal meaning and translation issues

108

Practical 9 118 9.1 Literal meaning and translation: Lucas-Cranach-Ausstellung 118 9.2 Literal meaning and translation: Mobilfunk und Wettbewerb 118

10

11

12

Connotative meaning and translation issues

120

Practical 10 10.1 Connotative meaning: Celan, ‘Todesfuge’ 10.2 Connotative meaning: Die Rechtsextremen

129 129 131

Scientific and technical translation

133

Practical 11 11.1 Scientific and technical translation: Tunnelauskleidung 11.2 Scientific and technical translation: Inline-Servoverstärker 11.3 Scientific and technical translation: Malaria-Impfstoff

142 142 143 144

Translating consumer-oriented texts

145

Practical 12 12.1 Consumer-oriented translation: Volkswagen Touran 12.2 Consumer-oriented translation: Miles & More 12.3 Consumer-oriented translation: Felina informiert

150 150 151 153

Contents 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

13

Revising and editing TTs

155

Practical 13 13.1 Revising and editing: Der Fall Telekom 13.2 Revising and editing: Hapimag Algarve

163 163 166

Contrastive topics and practicals: Introduction 14 15 16 17

ix

168

Contrastive topic and practical: The function of modal particles

170

Contrastive topic and practical: Concision and the adverb in German

188

Contrastive topic and practical: Word order and emphasis in German

198

Summary and conclusion

210

Postscript: A career in translation?

214

Glossary of terms used Works cited Index

218 227 231

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 21 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Preface to the second edition This book is a completely revised and rewritten edtion of Thinking German Translation, which was published in 1995. We believe that the revisions make the course more widely relevant and more consistently convincing. The method is the same, but better explained. Before presenting the changes, we want to record that the first instigation for a course along these lines came from Sándor Hervey. It is a matter of personal sorrow and professional regret that Sándor, who died suddenly in 1997 at the age of 55, had virtually no hand in the changes made to the original concept. However, we are confident that the changes are consistent with our collective thinking as it evolved over the 13 years following the first pilot course in St Andrews. Consequently, while the ‘we’ of the Preface denotes Michael Loughridge and Ian Higgins, the ‘we’ throughout the rest of the book includes all three of the original authors. If anything in the book deserves credit, let that go to the three authors jointly. Any faults in this edition that are not present in the original are entirely ours, not Sándor’s. The most notable conceptual refinements bear on the notions of compensation and genre, but all chapters benefit from sharper focus, clearer definitions and fuller and more relevant illustration. For example, in Chapter 2, the reservations about the term ‘equivalence’ are explained and illustrated more comprehensively, as is the important concept of translation loss. Such changes make for a longer chapter, but they have been made in response to consistent feedback from students and colleagues over the years. Compensation has been given a chapter to itself. Our original section on compensation presented an over-elaborate categorization of types of compensation that proved unnecessary in the classroom, and, in two of the categories, had a conceptual fuzziness that was confusing for students and tutors. The new chapter is less ambitious taxonomically, but more rigorously argued and more convincingly illustrated. The other major change concerns genre. The first edition had two chapters on genre, and paid disproportionate attention to differences between oral and written texts. These differences are important, of course, but our discussion of them did not leave enough room in the genre chapters for

xii

Preface to the second edition

it to be made clear to students what to focus on in their textual analyses and their decision-making. A slimline, single-chapter format has worked much better in the Italian and revised French versions of the course, and we have used this as the basis for the genre chapter in this book. We have also moved the discussion of genre forward to Chapter 5. The new single chapter comes immediately between the one on compensation and those on the levels of textual variables. Naturally, there are good arguments for keeping discussion of genre until later in the course. First, the genre-membership of a text can often not be finally decided until its other salient features have been isolated. These are features on the levels of textual variables (including literal and connotative meaning). Second, students are often more confident in responding to genre requirements after working on these other features. The reason for siting the genre chapter earlier is that the defining element in genre is the relation between textual purpose and textual effect. This relation is what makes the text ‘what it is’ while the translator is tackling it, and it is what experienced translators respond to; and it is in turn the relation between ‘what the ST is’ and the purpose of the TT that determines the translation strategy. Putting genre in Chapter 5 is in effect a forceful early statement of these fundamentals. We have found that this has made for as coherent and progressive a course as before. The six levels of textual variables are presented in the same order as before, from the phonic/graphic to the intertextual (Chapters 6–8). Given that the genre chapter now comes before these three, this order may seem perverse, especially as linguistic orthodoxy requires a ‘top-down’ approach, from macro to micro. However, in teaching different versions of the course – French and Italian as well as German – we have found that students are more comfortable, and produce better work, with a ‘bottom-up’ approach. Naturally, this is purely a matter of pedagogic effectiveness, not of how translators set about their work. Indeed, it is precisely to reflect professional practice that the genre chapter is placed so early, before discussion of textual variables. In the first edition, there were two chapters on language variety. We now think that this was spinning things out too far, at the expense of other factors that needed more attention. In any case, with the exception of register, language variety is a question that is primarily of interest to literary translators. Since the present volume gives far less space to literary material than the previous one, there is no chapter specifically on language variety. The notion of register is introduced as such in the chapter on connotative meaning, but of course attention is drawn whenever necessary to the importance of getting the register right. The revision and editing chapter has been completely rewritten, with more helpful analysis of examples to show the range of considerations and constraints that revisers and editors – whether of other people’s translations or of their own – must always keep in mind.

Preface to the second edition 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

xiii

As regards the illustrative and practical material, some has been retained from the first edition, but most is new. A lot of what many colleagues regarded as marginal or over-specialized has been replaced with ‘realworld’ material, notably from the fields of journalism, publicity, business, engineering and tourism. The ‘real world’ is not the whole world, of course, and there is no reason why tutors who find that effective texts from the first edition have disappeared should not go on using them in classes. A feature dropped from practicals in this edition is the speed translation. This is not meant to imply that translators do not work under fierce time pressure after all. It is more that the speed translations belong in a different sort of course. Perhaps they would be useful as a kind of bridge between an interpreting course and this one. As this course stands, though, the existing practicals are already more than enough for likely time available. In any case, it is open to tutors to impose any time limit they choose on any exercise they choose. Finally, we would stress that Thinking German Translation, like its companion volumes, is eclectic, practical and addressed to a wide readership – both generalist modern languages students with an interest in translation and students embarking on undergraduate or postgraduate translator training. Very many students from the first group have gone on to study for a translation diploma and now earn their living as translators. The book is not intended to be an introduction to translation studies or to translation theory as such, although it does lay an effective foundation for further study in these fields. It is our experience that students using Thinking German Translation and the other courses in the series have a big enough challenge in mastering the concepts introduced and applying them in translation practice; reflection on a range of descriptions or theories of translation is something best kept for the next stage – a specialist undergraduate module, a Master’s, or a Ph.D. Michael Loughridge Ian Higgins April 2005

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Acknowledgements We would like here to express our deep gratitude to the many individuals who have given up their time to help us in so many various ways, and who have given us, in addition, information, insight, a sense of perspective and the reassurance that comes from consulting people expert in their field. We will not have named here anything like all of those who helped us forward in some way. In saying that, we think not only of our personal contacts, but also of the good-natured helpfulness of many employees of large and small firms and other institutions whose texts we asked to use. But at the very least we would like here to say thank-you publicly to John Amson, Inge Aschenbach, Jeffrey Ashcroft, Chris Beedham, Birgit Boes, Helen Chambers, Rebecca Cunningham, Sabine Dedenbach, Sigrid and Ernst Dietzel-Küchenhoff, Ulrich and Annelies Erker-Sonnabend, Tammy Hervey, Richard Higgins, Sabine Hotho, Anne Hulme, Malcolm Humble, Karl Junge, Gordon, Dorothy, Sylvia, James and Anne Loughridge, Alasdair and Rosey McClure, Lorna Milne, Boyd Mullan, Judy Norwell, Karen Ottewell, Nicola and Zbig Pacult, Katharina Riebel, Alison Roy, Ines Sobanski, Bärbel Steffens, Dieter Wessels, Ina Westphal and Michael Zwanger. We would also like to thank our editors, Sophie Oliver and Elizabeth Johnston, for their efficiency, helpfulness and patience. The authors and publisher would like to thank the following people and institutions for permission to reproduce copyright material. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but in a few cases this has not been possible. Any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future printings. Cambridge University Press: extracts from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s Patentee, Cambridge University Press. Audi AG, for material from their financial reports for 2003. Kiepenheuer & Witsch for material from Im Westen nichts Neues by E.M. Remarque, © 1959, 1971, 1984, 1993 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch Köln and from Alle Lieder by W. Biermann, © 1991 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch Köln. The Estate of the late Paulette Goddard Remarque, New York, for material from All Quiet on the Western Front by E.M. Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues, copyright 1928 by Ullstein A.G.; copyright renewed © 1956 by E.M. Remarque; All Quiet on the Western Front, copyright 1929, 1930 by Little, Brown and Company; copyright renewed © 1957, 1958 by E.M. Remarque. All

xvi

Acknowledgements

Rights Reserved. The Random House Group Ltd for material from All Quiet on the Western Front by E.M. Remarque, translated by B. Murdoch, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. Also for material from Runaway Horse by M. Walser, translated by L. Vennewitz, published by Secker & Warburg. Reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd. Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg, for material reprinted by kind permission from CD booklet 447 439–2, German text by Karl Schumann and translation by Mary Whittall, both © 1995 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg. BASF AG, for material from their financial reports for 2003. Frank Bochert, for material from the Rennsteigportal website. Steidl Verlag, for material from Katz und Maus by Günter Grass. WERGO and Michael G. Wilson, for material from record sleeve SM 9003–50 Frühlingskonzert im Auwald. IBM Germany, for material from an advertisement. Suhrkamp Verlag, for material from Bertolt Brecht, Werke, Band 11, Suhrkamp Verlag. Erste Auflage 1988 and from Ein fliehendes Pferd by M. Walser, © 1978 Suhrkamp Verlag and Runaway Horse by M. Walser, Copyright © 1978 by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main. Translation copyright © 1980 by Martin Walser and Leila Vennewitz. Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, for material from B.I.F. Futura. HB Verlag, for material from HBBildatlas Südschwarzwald. Lufthansa Magazin for kind permission to use material from a feature on Cape Town. The Getty Research Institute, for excerpts in both the original German and English translation from the essay ‘Between Grâce and Volupté. Boucher and Religious Painting’ by Martin Schieder published with permission of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. The complete English-language version of this essay will appear in Rethinking Boucher, eds. Melissa Hyde and Mark Ledbury, to be published by the Getty Research Institute, spring 2006. Copyright 2005 The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved. Die Zeit and the author Udo Perina, for permission to use part of an article on unemployment. The Bundesverband der deutschen Industrie, for material from its Für ein attraktives Deutschland programme. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt GmbH, for permission to reproduce the poem ‘Todesfuge’, from Paul Celan, Mohn und Gedächtnis, © 1952 Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart. The Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft, Wilhelmshaven, for material from Journal of Ornithology. Georg-Thieme Verlag KG, for material from Zeitschrift gesamte Inn. Medizin. DEGES Deutsche Einheit Fernstraßenplanungs- und -bau GmbH, for material from information issued to prospective contractors. Phoenix Contact, for material from their control engineering product descriptions. Professor H. Feldmeier, for part of his Die Welt online article on malaria research. Volkswagen AG, for material from their German and English Touran owner handbooks. Miles & More, for material from a promotion in Lufthansa Magazin. Felina GmbH, Mannheim, for a lingerie newsletter text. Hapimag-Havag AG, for material from their client magazine Holiday.

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Introduction ‘Can translation be taught?’ The question is asked surprisingly often – sometimes even by good translators, who you would think would know better. Certainly, as teachers of translation know, some people are naturally better at it than others. In this respect, aptitude for translation is no different from aptitude for any other activity: teaching and practice help anyone, including the most gifted, to perform at a higher level. Even Mozart had music lessons. Here again, teachers of translation know that a structured course will help most students to become significantly better translators – often good enough to earn their living at it. This book offers just such a course. Its progressive exposition of different sorts of translation problem is accompanied with plenty of practice in developing a rationale for solving them. It is a course not in translation theory, but in translation method, encouraging thoughtful consideration of possible solutions to practical problems. Theoretical issues do inevitably arise, but the aim of the course is to develop proficiency in the method, not to investigate its theoretical implications. When technical or theoretical terms are first explained, they are set in bold type; they are also listed in the Glossary of terms used (pp. 218–26). If this is not a course in translation theory or linguistics, it is not a language-teaching course, either. The focus is on how to translate. It is assumed that the student already has a good command of German, and is familiar with the proper use of reference materials, including dictionaries and databases. The course is therefore aimed at final-year undergraduates, and at postgraduates or others seeking an academic or professional qualification in translation. That said, the analytical attention given to a wide variety of texts means that students do learn a lot of German – and probably a fair bit of English, too. This last point is important. While our main aim is to improve quality in translation, it must be remembered that this quality requires the translator to have a good command of English as well as of German. Assuming

2

Thinking German translation

that this is the case, translator training normally focuses on translation into the mother tongue, because higher quality is achieved in that direction than in translating into a foreign language. Hence the predominance of translation from German into English in this course. By its very nature, however, the course is just as useful for German students learning how to translate into English: this is an important part of English studies in Germany, and Thinking German Translation offers an effective methodology and plenty of practical work in this area. Since the course is an introduction to the interlingual operations involved in translating, we do not discuss machine translation, or how to use translation software. We give examples of online search facilities with which it is important for students to familiarize themselves, and we point out the major role played for professionals by translation memory software, but these sorts of consideration are not our main concern. Our aim is that students learn to recognize what is linguistically and culturally at stake in a given translation task and that, through practice, they gain confidence in their ability to do so. Our experience has been that, after this basic training, students who go into translating as a career are well equipped to make intelligent use of translation memory when the time for advanced training comes. The course has a progressive structure. It begins with the fundamental issues, options and alternatives of which a translator must be aware: translation as process, translation as product, cultural issues in translation, and the nature and importance of compensation in translation. Next, it looks at the question of genre. It then moves, via a survey of translation issues raised on six layers of textual variables (from the phonic to the intertextual), to semantic and stylistic topics, including literal meaning, connotative meaning and register. Further chapters are given to technical translation, consumer-oriented translation, and revision and editing. Chapter by chapter, then, the student is progressively trained to ask, and to answer, a series of questions that apply to any text given for translation. Pre-eminent among these are: ‘What is the purpose of my translation, and what are the salient features of this text?’ No translation is produced in a vacuum, and we stress throughout the course that the needs of the target audience and the requirements of the person commissioning the translation are primary factors in translation decisions. For this same reason, when students are asked in a practical to do a translation, we always include a translation brief in the assignment. As for the salient features of the text, these are what add up to its specificity as typical or atypical of a particular genre or genres. Once its genre-membership and purpose have been pinned down, the translator can decide on a strategy for meeting the translation brief. Attention is kept focused on this issue by the wide variety of genres found in the practicals – students are asked to work on different sorts of technical, journalistic and literary text, song, advertising, tourist brochures, instruction manuals, etc.

Introduction 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

3

The sorts of question that need to be asked in determining the salient features of any text are listed in the schema of textual matrices on p. 5. The schema amounts to a checklist of potentially relevant kinds of textual feature. These are presented in the order in which they arise in the course, in Chapters 3 and 5–10. (Compensation, the subject of Chapter 4, is not a textual feature, and does not figure in the schema.) The student would be well advised to refer to the schema before tackling a practical: it is a progressive reminder of what questions to ask of the text set for analysis or translation. While the course systematically builds up a methodical approach, we are not trying to ‘mechanize’ translation by offering some inflexible rule or recipe. Very much the opposite: translation is a creative activity, in which flair is tempered with rigour, and the translator’s personal responsibility is paramount. We therefore emphasize the need to recognize options and alternatives, the need for rational discussion, and the need for decision-making. Each chapter is intended for class discussion at the start of the corresponding seminar, and a lot of the practicals are best done by students working in small groups. This is to help students keep in mind that, whatever approach the translator adopts, it should be reflective and methodical. The course is divided into a series of units intended to fit into an academic timetable. Each of the first ten units comprises a chapter outlining a coherent set of notions and problems, and a practical or practicals in which students are set concrete translation tasks relevant to the chapter. These units are designed to be studied in numerical order, and are the essential foundation for the rest of the course. Chapters 11 and 12 give practice in genres that provide much of the bread and butter of professional translators. Ideally, both of these should be worked through, but local conditions may oblige the tutor to leave one out. Chapter 13 focuses on revision and editing. Chapters 14–16 are different from the others. They can be studied at whatever points in the course seem most opportune. These chapters are devoted to three areas of ‘contrastive linguistics’ in which German–English translation problems commonly occur. Each unit needs about two hours of seminar time. It is vital that every student should have the necessary reference books in class: a c.2,000-page monolingual German dictionary, such as the Duden Deutsches Universalwörterbuch, a similar-sized German–English/English–German dictionary, an English dictionary and an English thesaurus. Some of the practical work will be done at home – sometimes individually, sometimes in groups – and handed in for assessment by the tutor. How often this is done will be decided by tutors and students between them. Full suggestions for teaching and assessment can be found in Sándor Hervey, Michael Loughridge and Ian Higgins, Thinking German Translation: Tutor’s Handbook (available at www.routledge.com/textbooks/0415341469). The Tutor’s Handbook

4


also contains texts not found in the present volume, but intended for distribution in class. Students doing the course often enquire about the possibility of translation as a career. The Postscript (pp. 214–17) outlines the nature, attractions and drawbacks of professional translation work, and contains information about professional bodies that can give detailed help and advice. The abbreviations used in the book are explained in Chapter 1. As for symbols, there are only two that need any comment, the slash and the brace in examples where alternative translations are given. Basically, we use slashes, with no space before or after, to indicate the different possibilities, as in: ‘Der Sound’ can be used similarly to ‘style/thing/way’ in English. Where necessary, we use braces to make the division between units in the alternatives absolutely clear, e.g.: ‘Der Sound’, like English ‘sound’, may imply ‘characteristic {sound/tone}’. Here, the braces show that the alternatives are (1) ‘characteristic sound’ and (2) ‘characteristic tone’, not (1) ‘characteristic sound’ and (2) ‘tone’. Note that a slash with a space before and after it does not indicate alternatives, but simply a division between e.g. lines of verse, as in ‘There was a young fellow from Warwick / Who had reason for feeling euphoric’.

Introduction 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

5

SCHEMA OF TEXTUAL MATRICES QUESTION TO ASK ABOUT THE TEXT

MATRIX OF FEATURES

EXAMPLES OF TYPICAL FEATURES

GENRE MATRIX (Chapter 5) What genre(s) does this text belong to:

Genre types: empirical philosophical religious persuasive literary hybrid Oral vs written:

scientific paper, etc. essay on good and evil, etc. biblical text, etc. user manual etc. short story, etc. parody, company report, etc. dialogue, song, etc.

CULTURAL MATRIX (Chapter 3) Is there a significant choice between:

Exoticism Calque Cultural borrowing Communicative translation Cultural transplantation

wholesale foreignness idiom translated literally, etc. name of political body, etc. public notices, proverbs, etc. Berlin recast as London, etc.

FORMAL MATRIX (Chapters 6–8) Are there significant features on the:

Phonic/graphic level Prosodic level Grammatical level: lexis syntax Sentential level Discourse level Intertextual level

alliteration, layout, etc. vocal pitch, rhythm, etc. archaism, overtones, etc. simple vs complex syntax, etc. sequential focus, etc. cohesion markers, etc. pastiche, allusion etc.

SEMANTIC MATRIX (Chapters 9–10) Are there significant instances of:

Literal meaning Allusive meaning Attitudinal meaning Associative meaning Collocative meaning Reflected meaning Affective meaning

synonymy, etc. echo of proverb, etc. attitude to referent gender stereotyping etc. collocative clash, etc. homonymic echo, etc. attitude to addressee

1 Preliminaries to translation as a process This chapter examines translation as a process – what it is the translator actually does. But first, we must note a few basic terms that will be used throughout the course: Text Any given stretch of speech or writing assumed to make a coherent whole. A minimal text may consist of a single word preceded and followed by a silence or a blank – e.g. ‘Ach!’, or the road sign ‘Stop’. A maximal text, such as Thomas Mann’s Joseph und seine Brüder, may run into volumes. Source text (ST) The text to be translated. Target text (TT) The text that is a translation of the ST. Source language (SL) The language in which the ST is spoken or written. Target language (TL) The language into which the ST is to be translated. Strategy The translator’s overall ‘game-plan’, consisting of a set of strategic decisions taken after an initial reading of the ST, but before starting detailed translation of it. Strategic decisions The first set of reasoned decisions taken by the translator. These are taken before starting the translation in detail, in response to the following questions: ‘What is the translation brief – i.e. what is the purpose and intended audience of my TT? What is the purpose of this ST? What genre does it belong to, and what audience is it aimed at? What is its message content? What are its salient linguistic features? What are its principal effects? What are the implications of all these factors? If a choice has to be made among them, which ones should be given priority in ensuring that the TT is fit for its purpose?’ Decisions of detail Reasoned decisions concerning the specific problems of syntax, vocabulary, etc. encountered in translating particular expressions or stretches of text in their particular context. Decisions of detail

Preliminaries to translation as a process 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

7

are made in the light of the strategy. However, problems of detail may well arise during translating that raise unforeseen strategic issues and oblige the translator to refine the original strategy. With these terms in mind, the translation process can be broken down into two types of activity: understanding an ST and formulating a TT. These do not occur successively, but simultaneously; indeed, it is often only when coming up against a problem in formulating the TT that translators realize they have not fully understood something in the ST. When this happens, the ST may need to be reinterpreted in the light of the translator’s new understanding of it. This reinterpretation sometimes entails revising the original strategy, the revision in turn necessitating changes to some of the decisions of detail already taken. Nevertheless, it is useful to discuss ST interpretation and TT formulation as different, separable processes. The processes of translation are not different from familiar things that everyone does every day. Comprehension and interpretation are processes that we all perform whenever we listen to or read a piece of linguistically imparted information. In everyday communication, evidence that a message has been understood may come from appropriate response – for example, if your mother asks you for a spoon, and you give her a spoon and not a fork. Or it may come from appropriate linguistic response – such things as returning a greeting correctly, answering a question satisfactorily, or filling in a form. None of these are translation-like processes, but they do show that the comprehension and interpretation stage of translation involves an ordinary, everyday activity that simply requires an average command of the language used. However, one everyday activity that does resemble translation proper is what Roman Jakobson actually calls ‘inter-semiotic translation’ (Jakobson 1971: 260–6), that is, translation between two semiotic systems (systems for communication). ‘The green light means go’ is an act of inter-semiotic translation, as is ‘The big hand’s pointing to twelve and the little hand’s pointing to four, so it’s four o’clock’. In each case, there is translation from a non-linguistic communication system to a linguistic one. To this extent, everyone is a translator of a sort. Still more common are various sorts of linguistic response to linguistic stimuli that are also very like translation proper, even though they actually take place within a single language. These sorts of process are what Jakobson (ibid.) calls ‘intralingual translation’. In the rest of this chapter, we shall look at the two extremes of intralingual translation: gist translation and exegetic translation. We shall keep in mind the relevance of the discussion to translation proper by illustrating each extreme with examples of translation from German into English. Take the following scenario. Jill is driving Jack through the narrow streets of a small town. A policeman steps out and stops them. As he leans in to speak to Jill, she can see over his shoulder that, further on, a

8


trailer has tipped over and blocked the street. At one extreme of intralingual translation lies the kind of response typified in this exchange: POLICEMAN

JILL JACK JILL

There’s been an accident ahead, Madam – I’m afraid you’ll have to turn left down St Mary’s Lane here, the road’s blocked. Oh, OK. Thanks. What did he say? We’ve got to turn left.

The policeman’s essential message is ‘Turn left’. But he does not want to sound brusque. So he mollifies the driver with a partial explanation, ‘There’s been an accident’, and then cushions his instruction with ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to’. ‘Down St Mary’s Lane’ gives a hint of local colour and fellow-citizenship; but he does add ‘here’, just in case the driver is a stranger. Finally, he completes his explanation. When Jack asks what he said, however, Jill separates the gist of the policeman’s message from the circumstantial details and tonal subtleties, and reports it in her own words. This type of intralingual translation we shall call gist translation. The example also shows two other features that intralingual translation shares with translation proper. First, Jill’s is not the only gist translation possible. For instance, she might have said ‘We’ve got to go down here’. Among other things, this implies that at least one of them does not know the town: the street name has no significance. A third possibility is ‘We’ve got to go down St Mary’s Lane’: if Jack and Jill do know the town, the policeman’s gist is accurately conveyed. The other feature shared by intralingual translation and translation proper is that the situation in which a message is expressed and received affects how it is expressed and received. By ‘situation’ here we mean a combination of three elements: the circumstances in which speaker and addressee find themselves (such as being stopped in a car and having to take a diversion), the accumulated experience they carry with them all the time (knowing or not knowing the town; familiarity or unfamiliarity with conventions for giving and receiving instructions; liking or disliking the police, etc.), and the linguistic context. ‘Context’ is often used metaphorically in the sense of ‘situation’ (and sometimes even in the sense of ‘meaning’). In this book we shall use it specifically to denote the rest of a text in which a given expression or stretch of text occurs. For example, the context of Jill’s reply to Jack is everything that precedes ‘We’ve got to turn left’. As will become clear, the whole context is an important consideration in translation; but the more immediate the context, the more crucial it is in making decisions of detail. There are always so many variables in the message situation that it is impossible to predict what the gist translation will be or how the addressee will take it. Jill might simply have said ‘Turn left’, an economical, practical

Preliminaries to translation as a process

9

way of reporting the gist. However, depending on how she says it and how Jack receives it, it could give the impression that the policeman was brusque. Another reason why ‘Turn left’ could sound brusque is that, grammatically, it looks like direct speech (an imperative), whereas all the other gist translations we have given are clearly indirect speech. Now all translation may be said to be indirect speech, inasmuch as it reformulates the ST in the translator’s words. Yet most TTs, such as ‘Turn left’, mask this fact by omitting the typical markers of indirect speech – e.g. ‘The policeman says that [we’ve got to turn left]’. As a result, it is easy for reformulation consciously or unconsciously to become distortion, either because the translator misrepresents the ST or because the reader misreads the TT, or both. In professional translating, gist translation is most commonly required when less space is allotted to the TT than to the ST. This is often the case with in-flight magazines, tourist leaflets or digests of foreign news. Here is a typical example from a mail-order catalogue. The company publishes a German and an English version of its catalogue. Both are in A4 format, and both are printed in four 44mm columns, in the same font and size of type. But the English catalogue is less than half the length of the German one: many items are omitted altogether, presumably for market reasons, and many others (though not all) are given less text than in the German original. In this example, the ST and the TT are both printed under a photograph of the item; the photograph is the same size in both, but the TT is only allotted a column of 27mm of text, as against the 43mm of the ST:

5

10

15

ST Pfeifen von Hudson & Company. Das versilberte Original: METROPOLITAN PFEIFE Wahrscheinlich die berühmteste Pfeife der Welt, denn die englische Hudson & Co. („world renowned whistles“) liefert sie seit 1873 an Scotland Yard. Sie wirkt mit ihrer Lautstärke von 115 dB aus der Nähe weitaus erschütternder, als jemand ahnen kann, der sie bisher nur aus dem Kino kennt. Ob ihr Betrieb in London als Amtsanmaßung geahndet wird, entzieht sich unserer Kenntnis. Massives Messing, versilbert, Länge 6,5 cm. Bestell-Nr. 5539 587 € 15,00 (Manufactum 2003a: 356)

TT THE ORIGINAL SILVERPLATED METROPOLITAN WHISTLE Probably the most famous whistle in the world, because since 1873 Hudson & Co. has been supplying them to Scotland Yard. At 115 decibels, its sound is terrifying indeed. Solid brass, silver-plated. Length 6.5 cm. Order no. 5539 590 £9.50 (Manufactum 2003b: 159)

10


That any translation, like this gist translation, is a process of interpretation is seen even more clearly if we return to intralingual translation and take an example from the opposite extreme. Jill might just as easily have interpreted the policeman’s words by expanding them. For example, she could build on an initial gist translation as follows: ‘We’ve got to go down St Mary’s Lane – some fool’s tipped a trailer over and blocked the High Street.’ This puts two sorts of gloss on the policeman’s message: she adds details that he did not give, and her own judgement of the driver. We shall use the term exegetic translation to denote a translation that explains and elaborates on the ST in this way. The inevitable part played by the translator’s accumulated experience becomes obvious in exegetic translation, for any exegesis by definition involves explicitly bringing considerations from outside the text into one’s reading of it – here, the overturned trailer, Jill’s local knowledge and her attitude towards other road-users. An exegetic translation can be shorter than the ST, as in this example, but exegesis is usually longer, and can easily shade into general observations triggered by the ST but not really explaining it. Jill might easily have gone on like this: ‘The street’s just too narrow for a thing that size.’ This explanation is exegesis, but it goes beyond exegetic translation. Exegetic translation is often used in professional translation for cultural reasons. In the following example, from a tourist brochure, the translator translates some of the names, for clarity, but also includes the ST names because the tourist is likely to see them on road signs etc.:

5

10

15

ST Im Süden wird der Hunsrück eingerahmt von dem Flüsschen Nahe und dem Naheland. Gleich drei Heilbäder bieten Körper und Geist Entspannung bei mineralhaltiger Erde, salzhaltiger Luft oder heilendem Wasser. Entlang der deutschen Edelsteinstraße rund um IdarOberstein werden Edelsteine geschliffen und zu Kunstwerken veredelt. Von hier aus führt die Reise weiter ins romantische Rheintal, zwischen Bingen und Koblenz, ins Tal der Loreley [. . .].

TT In the south of the area the Hunsrück is framed by the small river Nahe and the Nahe Valley – Naheland. Three spas can provide relaxation for both body and spirit with their mineral rich earth, salty air and healing waters. Along the German gemstone trail – Edelsteinstraße – in and around Idar-Oberstein precious stones are cut and turned into works of art. From here the journey continues to the romantic Rhine valley – Rheintal – between Bingen and Koblenz, in the Loreley Valley [. . .].

Another cultural issue is that of reference or allusion. An allusion that is transparent to SL readers might be opaque to TT readers without exegetic


11

translation. Here is an example from Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues. Himmelstoß is a blustering NCO. He encounters a group of soldiers he had humiliated when they were new recruits, and starts trying to bully them again. One of them, Tjaden, refuses to do as he is told: ‘Tjaden erwidert gelassen und abschließend, ohne es zu wissen, mit dem bekanntesten Klassikerzitat. Gleichseitig lüftet er seine Kehrseite’ (Remarque 1955: 64). The allusion is to Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, who rejects a call to surrender thus: ‘Sag deinem Hauptmann [. . .], er kann mich im Arsch lecken’ (Goethe 1985: 349). (Most editions since 1774 have dashes instead of the last three words, but such is their legendary status that German readers are well aware what they stand for.) The first published English TT is mystifying, and misleading: ‘Tjaden replies, without knowing it, in the well-known classical phrase. At the same time, he ventilates his backside’ (Remarque 1930: 94). A later translation takes the exegetic approach: ‘Tjaden gives an unworried and conclusive reply, quoting (although he doesn’t know he’s doing so) one of Goethe’s best-known lines, the one about kissing a specific part of his anatomy. At the same time he sticks his backside up in the air’ (Remarque 1994: 59). This makes explicit much of what the ST leaves implicit, while cleverly preserving with its coyness something of the allusiveness of the ST. The cost is length and cumbersomeness, but at least the reader understands. Finally, gist translation and exegetic translation often occur in close association with one another. Sometimes, they seem to be inseparable, especially in the rewording of metaphor. But this is not confined to intralingual translation or to literary texts. Here is an example from a German publication on social policy:

5

ST 1990 etablierte sich die internationale Organisation „Disabled People International“ (DPI) in Deutschland unter der Bezeichnung Interessenvertretung „Selbstbestimmt Leben“ (ISL). (Stern 1996a: 9)

TT In 1990, the global organization Disabled People International (DPI) was set up in Germany as ‘Interessenvertretung “Selbstbestimmt Leben” Deutschland’ (ISL – i.e. Self-Determined Life). (Stern 1996b: 8)

The TT is both an exegetic (with ‘i.e. Self-Determined Life’) and a gist translation (it neither translates nor explains ‘Interessenvertretung’, even though this is included in the acronym ‘ISL’). A similar mixture of exegesis and gist is often inevitable when the translator has to convey a significant distinction between ‘du’ and ‘Sie’, as in this example from Im Westen nichts Neues:

12

5


ST Himmelstoß wendet sich ihm zu: „Das ist doch Tjaden, nicht?“ Tjaden hebt den Kopf. „Und weißt du, was du bist?“ Himmelstoß ist verblüfft. „Seit wann duzen wir uns denn? Wir haben doch nicht zusammen im Chausseegraben gelegen.“ (Remarque 1955: 63)

TT Himmelstoss turns to him. ‘Tjaden, isn’t it?’ Tjaden lifts his head. ‘And do you know what you are, chum?’ Himmelstoss is taken aback. ‘What do you mean, “chum”? I don’t think we’ve ever drunk ourselves into the gutter together.’ (Remarque 1994: 58–9)

The first ‘chum’ is an exegetic addition to ‘you’, an attempt to render the insubordinate familiarity of the ‘du’. It prepares the way for ‘What do you mean, “chum”?’, a very clever exegetic translation. At the same time, however, ‘chum’ only gives the gist of ‘du’, losing the specificity of second-person singular address. As our examples show, it is not only sometimes hard to keep gist translation and exegetic translation apart, but also it can be hard to see where translation shades into comment pure and simple. It certainly seems very difficult to achieve an ideal rephrasing, a halfway point between gist and exegesis that would use terms radically different from those of the ST, but add nothing to, and omit nothing from, its message content. And yet, with its constant movement between gist and exegesis, intralingual translation happens all the time in speech. It is also common in written texts. Students regularly encounter it in annotated editions, where obscure terms are explained for e.g. a modern reader. As all our examples have suggested, the dividing lines between gist, exegesis, translation and comment are often blurred. Things could not be otherwise. If one thing has become clear in this chapter, it is the difficulty of controlling (and even of seeing) how far an intralingual TT omits from, adds to or faithfully reproduces the ST message content. And, as our interlingual examples have already suggested, we shall see in the next chapter and throughout the course that what applies to intralingual translation applies a fortiori to translation proper: the ST message content can never be precisely reproduced in the TT, because of the very fact that the two forms of expression are different. There are other important respects in which the three types of intralingual translation – gist, exegesis and rephrasing – are on an equal footing with translation proper. They all require knowledge of the subject matter of the source text, familiarity with the source language and source culture in general, and interpretive effort. But they also require knowledge of the nature and needs of the target public, familiarity with the target culture in general – and, above all, mastery of the target language. Synopsiswriting, reported speech, intralingual rephrasing and exegesis are therefore excellent exercises for our purposes, because they develop the ability to


13

find and choose between alternative means of expressing a given message content. This is why the first exercise in this course is a piece of intralingual translation in English. PRACTICAL 1 1.1 Intralingual translation Assignment (i) Identify the salient features of content and expression in the following ST, and say what its purpose is. (ii) Recast the ST in different words, adapting it for a specific purpose and a specific public (i.e. a specific readership or audience). Say precisely what the purpose and the public are. Treat the ST as if you were recasting the whole book of Exodus, of which it is a part. (As a rule, whenever you do a translation as part of this course, you should proceed as if you were translating the whole text from which the ST is taken.) (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took in making the textual changes. (Insert into your TT a superscript note-number after each expression you intend to discuss, and then, starting on a fresh sheet of paper, discuss the points in numerical order. This is the system you should use whenever you annotate your own TTs.) Contextual information The text is from the Authorized Version of the Bible, published in 1611. The best way of making sense of it is to read the rest of Exodus 14. The forces of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, are pursuing the children of Israel, led by Moses, who are seeking to escape slavery in Egypt. Seeing their pursuers, the people lose their nerve, and ask Moses why he has led them into this adventure.

5

10

ST And the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward: But lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it: and the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea. [. . .] And the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I have gotten me honour upon Pharaoh, and upon his chariots, and upon his horsemen. [. . .] And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.

14

15

20

25


And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left. And the Egyptians pursued, and went in after them to the midst of the sea, even all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen. And it came to pass, that in the morning watch the Lord looked unto the host of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of the cloud, and troubled the host of the Egyptians, And took off their chariot wheels, that they drave them heavily: so that the Egyptians said, Let us flee from the face of Israel; for the Lord fighteth for them against the Egyptians. And the Lord said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand over the sea, that the waters may come again upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots, and upon their horsemen. And Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to his strength when the morning appeared; and the Egyptians fled against it; and the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea. (Exodus 14, v. 15–27) 1.2 Gist translation Assignment (i) You have been commissioned to translate, in abridged form, the upmarket mail-order catalogue from which the following ST is taken. The TT is to take up three-quarters as many lines as the ST, so it should contain between 220 and 240 words (the ST only contains 236, but many of these are long compounds). Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed work on this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Produce a gist translation of the specified length. (iii) Discuss the main decisions of detail you took, concentrating on explaining your omissions and any exegetic elements that you introduced. (iv) Compare your TT with the published one, which will be given to you by your tutor. Concentrate on the omissions, and on whether they have entailed introducing any exegetic elements. Contextual information The text introduces the long section on kitchen knives in the catalogue. The English catalogue is just as comprehensive, though more economical of space. Both repeatedly emphasize the superior quality of the knives offered.


15

ST SCHNEIDWERKZEUG – FÜR DEN GUTEN SCHNITT Küchenmesser – der Unterschied. Bei Messern liegen Welten zwischen einem handwerklich gearbeiteten Qualitätsprodukt und billiger Massenware. Sie merken es – Schnitt für Schnitt. 5

10

15

20

25

30

Die Stähle: schnitthart oder rostbeständig? Zähe, Härte und Elastizität sind Eigenschaften, die nur als Möglichkeit im (ursprünglich weichen) Eisen liegen und erst durch Schmelzen, „Frischen“, „Puddeln“ und die vielen anderen hüttentechnischen Prozeduren geweckt werden. Hohe Härte und elastische Bruchfestigkeit sind die Kennzeichen eines guten Messerstahls, und optimal vereinigt waren sie in den Werkzeugstählen mit relativ hohem Kohlenstoffanteil. Dieser klassische Messerstahl ist allerdings nicht rostfrei, und deshalb – wegen mangelnder Koexistenzfähigkeit mit der Spülmaschine also – wurde er in den letzten Jahrzehnten von rostbeständigeren, aber weniger hoch härtbaren Edelstählen aus der Messerproduktion fast vollständig verdrängt. Kenner haben das immer bedauert. Die Bearbeitung: geschmiedet oder gewalzt. Hochwertige Messer, bei denen es auf Langlebigkeit ankommt, werden geschmiedet, also in jenem Verfahren der Metallverformung erzeugt, bei dem das Material unter Hammerschlägen solange getaucht, gestreckt und verdichtet wird, bis es in Form und innerem Gefüge optimal der späteren Funktion entspricht. Die Rohlinge für einfachere Messer werden aus gewalztem Bandstahl gestanzt. Die Zurichtung: „Haarscharf“ bis zur Schrammenreinheit. Ob geschmiedet oder gestanzt: Seine endgültige Qualität erhält ein Messer erst durch die Zurichtung in der Schleiferei. Dort wird die „Wate“ (Schneide) aufgebaut, die bei besten Messern in schlanken Schliffwinkeln bis zu 1/400 mm dünn wird, und dort wird die Oberfläche bearbeitet, bis alle Schleifriefen für Hand und Auge unerkennbar sind. (Manufactum 2003a: 11)

2 Preliminaries to translation as a product Chapter 1 viewed translation as a process. In this chapter, we view it as a product. Here, too, it is useful to examine two diametric opposites: in this case, two opposed degrees of freedom of translation, showing extreme SL bias on the one hand and extreme TL bias on the other. DEGREES OF FREEDOM OF TRANSLATION At the extreme of SL bias is interlinear translation, where the TT does not necessarily respect TL grammar, but has grammatical units corresponding as closely as possible to every grammatical unit of the ST. Here is an example, from a manufacturer’s catalogue: Das Sofa lässt sich mit wenigen Handgriffen in ein Bett verwandeln. The sofa lets itself with few manipulations into a bed transform. Interlinear translation is normally only used in linguistics or language teaching. It is an extreme form of the much more common literal translation, where the literal meaning of words is taken as if straight from the dictionary, out of context, but TL grammar is respected. (The literal – or ‘cognitive’ or ‘denotative’ – meaning of an expression is the appropriate conventional referential meaning given in the dictionary, regardless of any connotations or nuances it has in a particular context.) A possible literal translation of our example is: ‘The sofa can, with few manipulations, be transformed into a bed.’ For practical purposes, we shall take literal translation as the extreme of SL bias. At the opposite extreme, TL bias, is free translation, where there is only an overall correspondence between the textual units of the ST and those of the TT. Between the two extremes, the degrees of freedom are

Preliminaries to translation as a product 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

17

infinitely variable. However, in assessing translation freedom, it can be useful to situate the TT on a scale between extreme SL bias and extreme TL bias, with notional intermediate points as in the following diagram: SL bias Literal

TL bias Faithful

Balanced (SL/TL)

Idiomizing

Free

The five points on the scale can be illustrated from the example we have just used, ‘Das Sofa lässt sich mit wenigen Handgriffen in ein Bett verwandeln’: LITERAL FAITHFUL BALANCED IDIOMIZING FREE

The sofa can, with few manipulations, be transformed into a bed. With a few simple movements, the sofa can be converted into a bed. It’s quick and easy to convert the sofa into a bed. Converting the sofa into a bed is a matter of moments. Take one sofa, press here, pull there – and hey presto, it’s a bed!

We should define what we mean by ‘faithful’ and ‘idiomizing’. In a case where a literal translation is not fully idiomatic, a faithful translation is one that is more idiomatic, but still does not sound completely natural in the TL; an idiomizing translation is one that respects the ST message content, but typically uses TL idioms or familiar phonic and rhythmic patterns to give an easy read, even if this means sacrificing nuances of meaning or tone. By idiom we mean a conventional figurative expression whose meaning cannot be deduced from the literal meaning of the words that make it up, as in ‘football’s not my cup of tea’, ‘that’s a different kettle of fish’, etc. ‘Idiomizing’ is not synonymous with ‘idiomatic’: throughout this course, we use the term idiomatic to denote what sounds ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ to native speakers – a linguistic expression that is unexceptional and acceptable in a given context. Thus, in our five examples, the last three are idiomatic, but only one of them is an idiomizing translation. The five examples call for comment. First, it should be noted that, since literal translation respects TL grammar, it very often involves grammatical transposition – the replacement or reinforcement of given parts of speech or grammatical categories in the ST by others in the TT. In our literal translation, there are two grammatical transpositions: (1) the verbplus-object ‘lässt sich’ becomes the modal (and therefore intransitive) verb ‘can’; (2) the plain infinitive ‘verwandeln’ becomes the present passive infinitive ‘be converted’. But this still has not made for a very plausible

18


TT. Not surprisingly, there are further structural changes in the faithful and balanced translations. The faithful translation has the same two grammatical transpositions, plus a reordering of the clauses and more suitable terminology (‘movements’ and ‘converted’ instead of ‘manipulations’ and ‘transformed’). This TT is more appropriate for a furniture catalogue in both structure and vocabulary, but it could still sound a little odd in most contexts. In the balanced translation, the key differences from the ST are grammatical; and this time, even though the verb ‘convert’ reverts to the active form used in the ST, the sentence’s impact is radically different. Relative to the ST, (1) the sofa has its grammatical role switched from subject to object; (2) a new, impersonal (or ‘dummy’) subject is introduced; (3) in one of the most frequent of all grammatical transpositions in German– English translation, the adverbial phrase ‘mit wenigen Handgriffen’ is turned into the complement of the new main verb ‘[i]s’; thus, as ‘quick and easy’, it is given a fulcrum role in the sentence, linking the adjectives ‘quick’ and ‘easy’ much more closely to what they qualify than the faithful translation’s ‘with . . . movements’. The text’s purpose is to sell convertible sofas, and the real selling point is now highlighted. Three major grammatical transpositions, then, but they are unexceptional and acceptable: this balanced translation is more idiomatic and more convincing, and hence better as a selling text than the literal and faithful translations. Another important point about the degrees of freedom is that the dividing lines between them are fluid. Each of the TTs is open to query, and others could be suggested. For instance, the balanced translation earlier might be said to have an idiomizing element in ‘quick and easy’, as against ‘easy’. Again, do the balanced and idiomizing translations misrepresent the focus of the ST? After all, it foregrounds the sofa more than the ease of conversion; these TTs highlight the convertibility rather than the sofa. Likewise, these two and the faithful TT are in one respect freer than the ‘free’ TT: they suppress the explicit point made by the ST about the use of hands. As for the free translation, the translation brief might indeed ask for the jokey, salesman tone, but that tone is achieved in part by details found neither in the ST nor in any other TT: ‘press here, pull there’ would be rash indeed unless the translator had actually checked the facts. It is clear, then, that the five categories are fluid, and that, depending on context and the translation brief, any of these TTs – or others – could be the preferred choice. However, some contexts offer less choice than others. Sometimes, all five categories will be found useful in organizing one’s thinking in advance of a translation, but often the context will make some of them irrelevant. And many utterances do not lend themselves to so many degrees of faithfulness: it would be pointless to look for five different renderings of ‘Ich liebe dich!’ on that basis. This brings us to our final point: in certain circumstances, the freest TT may in fact hardly be a free choice at all! This is often the case if the


19

ST contains an SL idiom, proverb or other expression standard for a given situation, and the TL offers an idiom, proverb or other expression standard for an equivalent target-culture situation. In such cases, using the TL equivalent is often inescapable. So, in most contexts, the following TTs will generally seem near-mandatory: ST Fundsachen

TT Lost property

Frisch gestrichen!

Wet paint

Das hat nichts zu sagen.

It’s not serious/significant.

vom Regen in die Traufe (kommen)

(to jump) out of the frying pan into the fire

Haustür

front door

We shall call this sort of rendering a communicative translation – one produced when, in a given situation, the ST uses an SL expression standard for that situation, and the TT uses a TL expression standard for an equivalent target-culture situation. We will discuss communicative translation in Chapter 3. For the moment, we will just point out a seeming paradox: inasmuch as they diverge greatly from ST literal meanings, these ready-made communicative translations are examples of free translation; yet the translator seems to have little free choice as to whether or not to adopt them. Note that, although the idiomizing translations ‘Converting the sofa into a bed is a matter of moments’ or ‘Converts to a bed in no time’ are relatively free and colloquially plausible, they are not communicative translations, because they are not the standard expressions in the given situation. (There is no standard expression for this situation.) So their freedom – and, still more, that of the TT labelled ‘free’ – is gratuitous, and might well be considered excessive: it might be considered out of key with the advertiser’s house style, and the TT is in any case avoidably different in message content and tone from the ST. Note also that a free translation does not have to be colloquial. It could just as easily be highly formal, as in: ‘This product is designed for maximum ease of conversion between its two principal functions, namely from sofa to bed and vice versa.’ EQUIVALENCE AND TRANSLATION LOSS We referred earlier to ‘equivalent’ idioms and proverbs, and ‘equivalent’ target-culture situations. As a matter of fact, most writers on translation use the terms ‘equivalence’ and ‘equivalent’, but they use them in so many

20


different ways that equivalence has become a confusing concept even for teachers of translation, let alone their students. So we need to say what we mean, and what we do not mean, by ‘equivalence’ and ‘equivalent’. We shall not go in detail into the philosophical implications of the term ‘equivalence’: this is not a course on translation theory. Hermans (1999) provides a useful introduction to the question. The many different definitions of equivalence in translation fall broadly into two categories: they are either descriptive or normative. Descriptively, ‘equivalence’ denotes an observed relationship between ST utterances and TT utterances that are seen as directly corresponding to one another. According to this view, each of the TTs illustrating degrees of freedom (p. 17) is equivalent to ‘Das Sofa lässt sich mit wenigen Handgriffen in ein Bett verwandeln’. Normatively, ‘equivalence’ denotes the relationship between an SL expression and the ‘norm’, the standard TL rendering of it, for example as given in a dictionary, or as required by a teacher, or as consonant with a given theory or methodology of translation. So, normatively, the pairs tabulated on p. 19 are equivalents. An influential variant of normative equivalence is the ‘dynamic equivalence’ of Eugene Nida. This is based on the ‘principle of equivalent effect’, the principle that ‘the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message’ (Nida 1964: 159). Nida’s view has real attractions. As we have just seen, there are all sorts of good reasons why a translator might not want to translate a given expression literally. However, there is a danger of ‘dynamic equivalence’ being seen as giving carte blanche for freedom to write more or less anything as long as it sounds good in the TL and does reflect, however tenuously, something of the ST message content. This is a real danger, as most teachers of translation will confirm. It is a symptom of theoretical problems contained in the very notion of ‘equivalent effect’, most notably the normative implications. To begin with, who is to know what the relationship between ST message and source-culture receptors is? For that matter, is it plausible to speak of the relationship, as if there were only one: are there not as many relationships as there are receptors? And who is to know what such relationships can have been in the past? Wilhelm Tell, Das Kapital, Der Tod in Venedig: each is, and has been, different things to different people in different places at different times – and indeed, different to the same person at different times. In any case, most texts have plural effects even in one reading by one person; the less technical the text, the more likely this is. And these problems apply as much to the TT as to the ST: who is to foresee the multiple relationships between the TT and its receptors? Finally, whatever the relationships between the ST and source-culture receptors, and between the TT and target-culture receptors, can we be satisfied that ‘found things’ and ‘lost property’, or rain and frying pans, produce ‘equivalent effects’ on their respective receptors? And the


21

connotations of ‘Haustür’ surely produce a significantly different effect from those of ‘front door’? The more normative the use of ‘equivalence’, the more the term risks being taken to imply ‘sameness’. Indeed, it is used in this way in logic, mathematics and sign-theory, where an equivalent relationship is one that is objective, incontrovertible and – crucially – reversible. In translation, however, such unanimity and such reversibility are unthinkable for any but the very simplest of texts – and even then only in respect of literal meaning. For example, ‘Das hat nichts zu sagen’ translates as ‘That’s not serious/ significant’, but will back-translation (i.e. translating a TT back into the SL) of either expression automatically give ‘Das hat nichts zu sagen’? ‘That’s not serious’, for example, could just as easily give ‘Das ist nicht (weiter) schlimm’, ‘Das ist nichts Schlimmes’, ‘Das hat nichts zu bedeuten’ or ‘Das ist nicht der Rede wert’. And differences are not always subtle. ‘Thank you for the flowers!’ goes into German unproblematically as ‘Danke für die Blumen!’. This might seem eminently reversible – except that, as often as not, the German phrase ‘Danke für die Blumen!’ is intended as a sarcastic ‘Thanks a bunch!’ or ‘Thanks for nothing!’. In so far as the principle of equivalent effect implies ‘sameness’ or is used normatively, it seems to be more of a hindrance than a help, both theoretically and pedagogically. Consequently, when we spoke of ‘an equivalent target-culture situation’, we were not intending ‘an equivalent’ to have a sense specific to any translation theory, but were using it in its everyday sense of ‘a counterpart’ – something different, but with points of resemblance in the aspects judged to be most relevant. This is how the term will be used in this book. Given the problems associated with ‘equivalence’, we have found it more useful, both in translating and in teaching translation, to avoid an absolutist ambition to maximize sameness between ST and TT, in favour of a relativist ambition to minimize difference: to look, not for what is to be put into the TT, but for what might be saved from the ST. There is a vital difference between the two ambitions. The aim of maximizing sameness encourages the belief that, somewhere out there, waiting to be found, is the ‘right’ translation, the TT that is ‘equi-valent’ (has ‘equal value’) to the ST, at some ideal halfway point between SL bias and TL bias. But it is more realistic, and more productive, to start by admitting that, because SL and TL are fundamentally different, the transfer from ST to TT inevitably imposes difference – or, as we shall argue, loss. We shall give the term translation loss to non-replication of the ST in the TT – that is, the inevitable loss of culturally relevant features. By ‘culturally relevant’ features, we mean features that are specific to the SL and the source culture and that make the ST what it is. We suggest that, since translation loss is inevitable, translators should not agonize over it, but should feel encouraged to concentrate on ‘reducing’ it – i.e. controlling and channelling it.

22


We have found this approach practical both in translating and in the classroom. Once the concept of inevitable translation loss is accepted, translators can forget the unrealistic aim of seeking the ‘right’ TT, and concentrate instead on the realistic one of channelling translation loss. Indeed, one of the attractions of the notion is that it frees translators actually to exploit translation loss – to introduce any loss, however major, that enables them to implement the strategy fully. Quite apart from any need for compensation in actually doing the translation, the brief itself may require a gist translation, or an exegetic translation, or an adaptation for children or immigrants, or for the stage or radio, etc. We saw a good example of deliberately introduced translation loss in the first extract from Im Westen nichts Neues (p. 11). The older published TT stays fairly close to the original German – and would probably baffle most readers. The later translation introduces substantial translation loss – text added being a loss just like text taken away – but this is less serious than the obscurity of near-literal translation that leaves the allusion unexplained. As we shall see throughout the course, then, translation loss is only to be regretted when it prevents successful implementation of the translator’s strategy, i.e. if it means that the TT is not fit for its purpose. Finally, ‘loss’ is a reminder that, if you read a translation of, say, Die Blechtrommel, you are not reading Die Blechtrommel, you are reading a reading of it. To show some of the implications of translation loss for the translator, it is enough to take a few very simple examples, at the primitive level of the sounds, rhythm and literal meaning of individual words. There is translation loss even at the seemingly most trivial level. For instance, true SL–TL homonymy rarely occurs, and rhythm and intonation are usually different as well. So, in most contexts, German ‘fast’ and English ‘almost/nearly’ will be synonyms, and there will be no loss in literal meaning in translating one by the other. But ‘fast’ and either English translation sound completely different: there is total phonic and rhythmic loss. The immediate and obvious question is whether such losses actually matter. The equally obvious answer is that, for almost all communicative purposes, they matter not at all. But if the ST word is part of an alliterative chain in a literary text, or if it rhymes (e.g. ‘War ein Ries’ bei mir zu Gast, / Sieben Meter maß er fast’), then the loss could be important. Translation loss in respect of sound is almost always entailed, even in cases where the ST word has already entered the TL. For instance, German ‘Hinterland’ and English ‘hinterland’ sound different from one another; so do ‘Kindergarten’ and ‘kindergarten’, if less strikingly. Similarly, when German ‘Marketing’ is translated as English ‘marketing’, or ‘Fairness’ as ‘fairness’, there is palpable loss in terms of sound. Nor would it help if these German loan-words were pronounced in authentic German fashion in an English oral TT – though this is less true of more specialized terms such as ‘Schadenfreude’. Pronouncing ‘Hinterland’ or ‘Kindergarten’ in an authentically German way would actually increase the translation loss:


23

it would increase the phonic and rhythmic foreignness (which are absent from the ST), and it would introduce a comic or off-putting pretentiousness (again absent from the ST). In respect of meaning, too, there is clear translation loss in using loanwords. Quite apart from the sound of the words, using ‘Zeitgeist’ or ‘Kindergarten’ in an English TT introduces a semantic foreignness that is not present in the ST: that is, the TT loses the cultural neutrality of the ST expression. Conversely, translating German ‘Fairness’ or ‘Know-how’ as English ‘fairness’ or ‘know-how’ loses the cultural foreignness of the ST expression. In the case of a loan-word from a third language, it may well have different connotations or even different meanings in the two borrowing cultures. For example, English has borrowed ‘chef’ from French to denote the head man in the kitchen only; by extension, the word has acquired connotations of specialist culinary expertise. The German ‘Chef’, by contrast, is no more specific than English ‘boss’ or ‘leader’. An important implication of the concept of translation loss is that it embraces any non-replication of an ST, whether this involves losing features in the TT or adding them. Take the plural noun ‘Gehbehinderte’. Suppose this is translated as ‘persons with limited mobility’. The TT is acceptable in terms of literal meaning, but it has added three words and replaced literal terminology (‘geh-’ and ‘behindert’) with abstractions. Conversely, rendering ‘persons with limited mobility’ as ‘Gehbehinderte’ is more economical in words and syllables, and also brings the nature of the handicap more vividly to mind. Such losses are very common. Another common source of translation loss between English and German concerns gender-specific forms. These are much more frequent in German for ‘occupational’ names – terms such as ‘teacher’, ‘baker’, ‘student’, but also ‘applicant’, ‘recipient’, etc. For decades, German radio audiences have been ‘(Liebe) Hörer und Hörerinnen’. An article (published 2004) on science research funding has a footnote to the word ‘Wissenschaftler’ in its first sentence saying that this term ‘[. . .] wird im folgenden für Wissenschaftler und Wissenschaftlerinnen verwandt’. In German, which has traditionally tended to greater compactness, or density, than English, the perceived long-windedness of the two gambits cited above (‘Hörer und Hörerinnen’, and the disclaimer footnote) has led to innovations such as ‘BewerberInnen’ (to denote both sexes) and the less striking plural ‘Studierende’. This last term, generally preferred to ‘StudentInnen’, is one of the few gender-neutral formulae that can be said to involve minimal lexical translation loss in either direction. However, the German– English translator will not long remain complacent about the convenience of ‘scientist’, ‘applicant’, etc. Sometimes the nature of the translation brief may call for explicitly inclusive language. And then there are pronouns: the gender-neutrality of ‘scientist’ or ‘applicant’ in the article on research funding disappears as soon as the ST follows up (for instance) ‘Antragsteller’ with ‘er’, ‘sein’, etc. The translator here has a range of

24


options – ‘he or she’, use of plurals, an initial footnote – on which it is normally wise to ascertain the client’s policy or particular wishes. Before drawing conclusions for the practice of translation from this discussion of equivalence and translation loss, we should briefly explain the advantages for apprentice translators of insisting that there is, always and everywhere, translation loss: that translation loss, as we have defined it, is in fact inevitable. After all, the examples we have just used almost always involved gain in some respect: economy, vividness, avoidance of ambiguity, etc. In so far as equivalence implies sameness, or zero difference, it might be inferred that ‘gain’ implies a plus value, ‘loss’ a minus value. However, the apparent symmetry of the three-valued scheme (loss ~ sameness ~ gain) is illusory. Added features in the TT, however desirable, are tangible differences from the ST, and in our view should be registered as translation loss. The three-valued model gives a false attractiveness to ‘gain’. That attractiveness makes it difficult for student translators to resist the temptation of gratuitously adding or altering detail, either to ‘improve on’ the ST, or in the vague hope that the losses will be outweighed by a greater volume of gains. By contrast, the two-valued model (loss ~ no loss) eliminates the hazardous notion of ‘gain’ and so focuses the translator’s attention on two things: the ST, and the challenge of minimizing the differences – the loss – that will inevitably be incurred in translating it. Translators are thus freed from the demoralizing notion that, somewhere, the ‘right’ or perfect TT is waiting to be found, and that those not lucky enough or clever enough to find it are somehow failures. And the effort to minimize difference, to save ST elements from disappearance, requires a closer attention to the properties of the text. To know what can and should be saved, one has to know what features are there, and what their functions are. As some of the examples in this chapter suggest, if translation loss is inevitable even in translating single words, it is obviously going to feature at more complex levels as well – in respect of sentence structure, for example, or discourse, and so on. There is no need to give further examples of these just now: plenty will arise, chapter by chapter, as we deal with these and other topics. For the moment, all we need do is point out that, if translation loss is inevitable, the challenge to the translator is not to eliminate it, but to control and channel it by deciding which features, in a given ST, it is most important to respect, and which other features can most legitimately be sacrificed for their sake. This is where the classroom advantages of the translation loss approach lead directly to its advantages for the practising translator. For the translator has always to be asking, and answering, such questions as: does it matter if ‘know-how’ is foreign in German and not in English, and sounds different? Does it matter if, say, ‘shredder’ is connotatively more limited than ‘Wolf’? Or if ‘noted for reliable snowfall’ is phonically, rhythmically and grammatically different from ‘schneesicher’? There is no once-and-for-all answer to questions like these. The answer will


25

depend every time on the translation brief, the nature of the target audience, and what role the textual feature has in its context. Whether the final decision is simple or complicated, it has to be made, afresh, every time, and only the translator can make it. PRACTICAL 2 2.1 Degrees of freedom; translation loss Assignment Taking the ST below: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

Identify the most noteworthy features of its content and expression. Taking the published TT (printed below the ST) as a whole, place it on the scale of degrees of freedom given on p. 17, and explain your decision. Taking the detail of the TT, discuss the main differences between it and the ST, paying special attention to cases where it incurs, or manages to avoid, unacceptable translation loss. Where you think the TT can be improved, give your own revised version and explain the revision.

Contextual information The ST is from the first part of the annual report for 2003 (published in identical format in German and English) of the car manufacturer Audi. The second part of the report consists purely of the detailed financial statements and balance sheets, but the first part, elaborate in layout and illustration, combines publicity with information on the company’s main activities and policies. The ST is taken from a section entitled ‘Technik’, and concerns a new engine called the V8-TDI. The A8 is a model of car. ‘Biturbo’ is explained in a glossary at the end of the report as follows: ‘Der Zusatz „Biturbo“ weist bei Audi V-Motoren darauf hin, dass zwei Abgasturbolader – einer je Zylinderbank – eingebaut sind.’ ST Audi setzt weiteren Meilenstein in der Dieseltechnologie Bulliges Drehmoment, hohe Leistung, Bestwerte in Beschleunigung und Durchzug: Charakteristika eines Spitzensportlers. Seit 1989 stellt Audi seine Vorreiterrolle bei der Entwicklung hocheffizienter und leistungsfähiger TDI-Modelle immer wieder eindrucksvoll unter Beweis. Jüngstes herausragendes Beispiel ist der neu entwickelte 4,0-Liter-V8-TDI, der im A8 zum Einsatz kommt. Er verleiht der leichtgewichtigen Luxuslimousine den Charakter eines Spitzensportlers: Moderate Verbrauchswerte

26 10

15

20

25

5

10

15

20


und hohe Laufkultur machen den A8 4.0 TDI quattro auch zum idealen Langstreckenspezialisten. Der leistungsstärkste V8-Dieselmotor der Welt Mit dem neuen Modell vergrößert Audi das Angebot um eine weitere, sportliche Variante. Der V8-TDI-Motor im Audi A8 ist mit 202 kW (275 PS) und 650 Newtonmeter Drehmoment der derzeit leistungs- und drehmomentstärkste V8-Selbstzünder, der in einer Serienlimousine zu finden ist. Das maximale Drehmoment, das zwischen 1.800 und 2.500 Umdrehungen pro Minute anliegt, verschafft dem Fahrer in allen Geschwindigkeitsbereichen ein Durchzugserlebnis, das sich sonst nur in Sportwagen erfahren lässt. Der 4,0-Liter-V8-TDI mit Biturbo-Aufladung und zwei Ladeluftkühlern ist ein weiterer Vertreter der neuen V-Motorenfamilie von Audi, der bei den Benzinmotoren bereits die 4,2-Liter-Aggregate im Audi S4 und Audi allroad quattro 4.2 angehören. Wichtige Neuerung bei den V-Motoren: Anstelle eines Zahnriemens kommt ein Kettenantrieb für Nockenwellen und Nebenaggregate zum Einsatz. (Audi 2004a: 20) Published TT Another landmark achievement in diesel technology for Audi Substantial torque, high performance, and outstanding acceleration and pulling power: all characteristics of a top athlete. Audi has repeatedly restated its pioneering role in the development of ultra-efficient, high performance TDI engines since as far back as 1989. The latest remarkable example is the new 4.0-litre V8 TDI, which is used in the A8. It lends this lightweight luxury saloon the attributes of a top athlete. Moderate fuel consumption and plentiful refinement also make the A8 4.0 TDI quattro the ideal companion for long journeys. The most powerful V8 diesel engine in the world The new model represents the addition of a further sporty version to Audi’s range. The V8 TDI engine in the Audi A8 is currently the highest-powered, highest-torque V8 diesel engine in any production saloon car, developing 202 kW (275 bhp) and 650 Newton-metres of torque. Its peak torque of 650 Newton-metres, which is achieved from engine speeds of 1,800 to 2,500 rpm, offers a quality of traction across the entire road-speed range that can otherwise only be experienced in sports cars. The 4.0-litre V8 TDI biturbo with two intercoolers is a further representative of Audi’s new family of V-engines, which already includes the 4.2-litre petrol versions in the Audi S4 and Audi allroad quattro 4.2. One significant new feature of the V-engines is that there is a chain drive for the camshafts and auxiliaries instead of a toothed belt. (Audi 2004b: 20)

Preliminaries to translation as a product 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 5 2 3 4 5 6 10 7 8 9

15

27

2.2 Degrees of freedom; translation loss Assignment Here is an ST for comparison with two published TTs. Your tutor will tell you which of the TTs to discuss. (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

Identify the salient features of content and expression in the ST. Taking each TT as a whole, place it on the scale of degrees of freedom given on p. 17, and explain your decision. Taking the detail of each TT, discuss the main differences between it and the ST, paying special attention to cases where it incurs, or manages to avoid, unacceptable translation loss. Where you think the TT can be improved, give your own revised version and explain the revision.

Contextual information The ST is from Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (first published 1929), perhaps the best-known of all Great War novels. A group of comrades who, as new recruits, had been bullied by Unteroffizier Himmelstoß (a postman in civilian life), encounter him at the front. One of them, Tjaden, insolently refuses to obey an order given by Himmelstoß, who storms off to report the matter to his superiors. Tjaden goes off into a hut so as to keep out of trouble. The others fall to reminiscing about their schooldays and wonder what, if anything, they learned at school. After a few minutes, Himmelstoß returns with a fat Feldwebel. ST Wir erheben uns. Der Spieß schnauft: „Wo ist Tjaden?“ Natürlich weiß es keiner. Himmelstoß glitzert uns böse an. „Bestimmt wißt ihr es. Wollt es bloß nicht sagen. Raus mit der Sprache.“ Der Spieß sieht sich suchend um; Tjaden ist nirgendwo zu erblicken. Er versucht es andersherum. „In zehn Minuten soll Tjaden sich auf Schreibstube melden.“ Damit zieht er davon, Himmelstoß in seinem Kielwasser. „Ich habe das Gefühl, daß mir beim nächsten Schanzen eine Drahtrolle auf die Beine von Himmelstoß fallen wird“, vermutet Kropp. „Wir werden an ihm noch viel Spaß haben“, lacht Müller. Das ist unser Ehrgeiz: einem Briefträger die Meinung stoßen. Ich gehe in die Baracke und sage Tjaden Bescheid, damit er verschwindet. Dann wechseln wir unsern Platz und lagern uns wieder, um Karten zu spielen. Denn das können wir: Kartenspielen, fluchen und Krieg führen. Nicht viel für zwanzig Jahre – zuviel für zwanzig Jahre. Nach einer halben Stunde ist Himmelstoß erneut bei uns. Niemand beachtet ihn. Er fragt nach Tjaden. Wir zucken die Achseln. „Ihr solltet ihn doch suchen“, beharrt er.

28

20

25

30

35

5

10

15

20


„Wieso ihr?“ erkundigt sich Kropp. „Na, ihr hier–“ „Ich möchte Sie bitten, uns nicht zu duzen“, sagt Kropp wie ein Oberst. Himmelstoß fällt aus den Wolken. „Wer duzt euch denn?“ „Sie!“ „Ich?“ „Ja.“ Es arbeitet in ihm. Er schielt Kropp mißtrauisch an, weil er keine Ahnung hat, was der meint. Immerhin traut er sich in diesem Punkte nicht ganz und kommt uns entgegen. „Habt ihr ihn nicht gefunden?“ Kropp legt sich ins Gras und sagt: „Waren Sie schon mal hier draußen?“ „Das geht Sie gar nichts an“, bestimmt Himmelstoß. „Ich verlange Antwort.“ „Gemacht“, erwidert Kropp und erhebt sich. „Sehen Sie mal dorthin, wo die kleinen Wolken stehen. Das sind die Geschosse der Flaks. Da waren wir gestern. Fünf Tote, acht Verwundete. Dabei war es eigentlich ein Spaß. Wenn Sie nächstens mit rausgehen, werden die Mannschaften, bevor sie sterben, erst vor Sie hintreten, die Knochen zusammenreißen und zackig fragen: Bitte wegtreten zu dürfen! Bitte abkratzen zu dürfen! Auf Leute wie Sie haben wir hier gerade gewartet.“ Er setzt sich wieder, und Himmelstoß verschwindet wie ein Komet. (Remarque 1955: 68–9) TT (i) We get up. ‘Where’s Tjaden?’ the sergeant puffs. No one knows, of course. Himmelstoss glowers at us wrathfully. ‘You know very well. You won’t say, that’s the fact of the matter. Out with it!’ Fatty looks round enquiringly; but Tjaden is not to be seen. He tries another way. ‘Tjaden will report at the Orderly Room in ten minutes.’ Then he steams off with Himmelstoss in his wake. ‘I have a feeling that next time we go up wiring I’ll be letting a bundle of wire fall on Himmelstoss’s leg,’ hints Kropp. ‘We’ll have quite a lot of jokes with him,’ laughs Müller.– That is our sole ambition: to knock the conceit out of a postman.– I go into the hut and put Tjaden wise. He disappears. Then we change our possy and lie down again to play cards. We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight. Not much for twenty years;–and yet too much for twenty years. Half an hour later Himmelstoss is back again. Nobody pays any attention to him. He asks for Tjaden. We shrug our shoulders. ‘Then you’d better find him,’ he persists. ‘Haven’t you been to look for him?’

Preliminaries to translation as a product 1111 2 3 25 4 522 6 7 8 922 30

1011 1 2 5

10

15

20

25

30

29

Kropp lies back on the grass and says: ‘Have you ever been out here before?’ ‘That’s none of your business,’ retorts Himmelstoss. ‘I expect an answer.’ ‘Very good,’ says Kropp, getting up. ‘See up there where those little white clouds are. Those are anti-aircraft. We were over there yesterday. Five dead and eight wounded. And that’s a mere nothing. Next time, when you go up with us, before they die the fellows will come up to you, click their heels, and ask stiffly: “Please may I go? Please may I hop it? We’ve been waiting here a long time for someone like you.”’ He sits down again and Himmelstoss disappears like a comet. (Remarque 1930: 100–2) TT (ii) We stand up. The sergeant major puffs, ‘Where’s Tjaden?’ None of us knows, of course. Himmelstoss glares angrily at us. ‘Of course you know, you lot. You just don’t want to tell us. Come on, out with it.’ The CSM looks all round him, but Tjaden is nowhere to be seen. He tries a different tack. ‘Tjaden is to present himself at the orderly room in ten minutes.’ With that he clears off, with Himmelstoss in his wake. ‘I’ve got a feeling that a roll of barbed-wire is going to fall on Himmelstoss’s legs when we’re on wiring fatigues again,’ reckons Kropp. ‘We’ll get a good bit of fun out of him yet,’ laughs Müller. That’s the extent of our ambition now: taking a postman down a peg or two . . . I go off to the hut to warn Tjaden, so that he can disappear. We shift along a bit, then lie down again to play cards. Because that is what we are good at: playing cards, swearing and making war. Not much for twenty years – too much for twenty years. Half an hour later, Himmelstoss is back. Nobody takes any notice of him. He asks where Tjaden is. We shrug our shoulders. ‘You lot were supposed to look for him.’ ‘What do you mean “you lot”?’ asks Kropp. ‘Well, you lot here –’ ‘I should like to request, Corporal Himmelstoss, that you address us in an appropriate military fashion,’ says Kropp, sounding like a colonel. Himmelstoss is thunderstruck. ‘Who’s addressing you any other way?’ ‘You, Corporal Himmelstoss, sir.’ ‘Me?’ ‘Yes.’ It is getting to him. He looks suspiciously at Kropp because he hasn’t any idea of what he is talking about. At all events, he loses confidence and backs down. ‘Didn’t you lot find him?’

30

35

40


Kropp lies back in the grass and says, ‘Have you ever been out here before, Corporal Himmelstoss, sir?’ ‘That is quite irrelevant, Private Kropp,’ says Himmelstoss, ‘and I demand an answer.’ ‘Right,’ says Kropp and gets up. ‘Have a look over there, Corporal, sir, where the little white clouds are. That’s the flak going for the aircraft. That’s where we were yesterday. Five dead, eight wounded. And that was actually an easy one. So the next time we go up the line, Corporal, sir, the platoons will parade in front of you before they die, click their heels and request in proper military fashion “Permission to fall out, sir! Permission to fall down dead, sir!” People like you are all we need out here, Corporal, sir.’ He sits down again and Himmelstoss shoots off like a rocket. (Remarque 1994: 63–5)

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

3 Cultural issues in translation In this chapter, we complete the introduction to translation loss by looking at cultural transposition. We shall use this term to cover the main types and degrees of departure from literal translation that may be resorted to in transferring the contents of an ST from one culture into another. For it should never be forgotten that translating involves not just two languages, but a transfer from one whole culture to another. Of course, one of the defining characteristics of a culture is its language or languages: among the ‘culturally relevant features’ (p. 21) that make a text what it is are linguistic features. To that extent, the degrees of freedom considered on pp. 16–19 all reflect a greater or lesser degree of constraint in transferring messages from culture to culture. In this chapter, we look at translation procedures that are chosen by the translator in the light of general cultural differences that go beyond purely linguistic differences. The two overlap, of course, and are often inseparable. Some of the most straightforward examples of the basic issues in cultural transposition are offered by proper nouns, or names. Dealing with names in translation is not usually a major issue, but it does provide a useful introduction to the cultural dimension of translation. There are two main alternatives in dealing with names. The name can be taken over unchanged into the TT, or it can be adapted to conform to the phonic/graphic conventions of the TL. Assuming that the name is an SL name, the first alternative introduces a foreign element into the TT. This loss will not usually matter; most often it will actually be welcomed as a reminder of the origin of the text. More serious is the sort of case where using the ST name introduces into the TT different associations from those in the ST. Brand names are a typical danger area. French motorists were not attracted by the Toyota MR2, because ‘MR2’ sounds like ‘merdeux’ (‘shitty’). In the unlikely event of translating a German narrative in which someone wearing Gammon aftershave snacked on Mini Dickmans, it might be prudent to

32


drop the brand names altogether, or perhaps invent English ones with more product-enhancing associations. Translators are more likely to be given consumer-oriented material featuring brand names to translate (‘How to use your Kumonit sharpener’ etc.). Big firms will get a branding consultant to advise on suitable TL product names before ever giving the ST to a translator. But small concerns do not always do this, and translators will sometimes discreetly suggest changes: ‘Glühfix isn’t a very appetizing name for a hot drink in English’, etc. With fictional names, there is often more latitude, but care may be needed even here. Simply using the ST name unchanged in the TT may in any case sometimes be impracticable, if it actually creates problems of pronounceability, spelling or memorization. This is unlikely with ‘Schmidt’ or ‘Haider’, but it can easily happen with, say, Polish or Russian names. The second alternative in dealing with names, transliteration, to some extent solves these problems by using TL conventions for the representation of an ST name. This is the standard way of coping with Russian and Chinese names in English texts. How a name is transliterated may be entirely up to the translator, if it has never been put into the TL before. Or it may be necessary to follow a precedent established by earlier translators. Standard transliteration varies from language to language, as is easily seen with place names: compare Venezia/Venice/Venise/Venedig, etc. Translating an Austrian tourist brochure, the translator would use ‘Vienna’, perhaps inserting a reminder, the first time it occurs, that the German name, as seen on public notices etc., is ‘Wien’. Some names do not need transliteration at all, but have standard TL equivalents. Compare German ‘St. Johannes/Hl. Johannes’, French ‘Saint Jean’ and Italian ‘S. Giovanni’; or German ‘der [Ärmel]kanal’ and French ‘la Manche’: in these cases there is little choice but to use ‘St John’ and ‘the Channel’, unless the translator wants deliberately to draw attention to the foreign origin of the text. The same applies to initials and acronyms: compare German ‘MwSt’ and English ‘VAT’, German ‘HNO-Arzt’ and English ‘ENT specialist’, etc. Keeping the German form here would normally introduce needless obscurity and undermine confidence in the translator. So would failure to spot differences between, say, SL and TL historical and geographical conventions. Thus, for example, ‘die Schlacht bei Waterloo’ translates as ‘the Battle of Waterloo’, but ‘die Völkerschlacht’ is ‘the Battle of Leipzig’ and ‘die Sgakerrakschlacht’ is ‘the Battle of Jutland’. ‘Der Golf von Mexiko’ translates as ‘the Gulf of Mexico’, but ‘der Golf von Neapel’ becomes ‘the Bay of Naples’. The translator has to be alert to such variations in convention between languages. Another alternative in dealing with names is cultural transplantation. SL names are replaced by indigenous TL names that are not their conventional or literal equivalents, but have similar cultural connotations. In the German translations of Hergé’s Tintin books, ‘Dupont et Dupond’ have become ‘Schulze und Schultze’. This ingeniously Germanizes the two characters,

Cultural issues in translation 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

33

retains the connotations of commonness of the names, and imitates the ST play on different spellings. However, cultural transplantation of names must be done with care. For example, in Heinrich Spoerl’s humorous story ‘Mädchen ohne Singular’, the name ‘Hildegard Müller’ is used as a stereotypical name for the anonymous chorus-girl. The translator may be tempted to render this as something like ‘Tracey Brown’. But this could become incongruous if the story is clearly set in Berlin or Tracey Brown turns out to be addicted to sliced sausage and pickled gherkins. CULTURAL TRANSPOSITION The question of names in translation is enough to show that there may be ST expressions that, for cultural reasons, must be taken over unchanged into the TT, or need to be ‘naturalized’, or are best dropped altogether. This brings us to discussion of more substantial problems of cultural transposition. Any degree of cultural transposition involves the choice of features indigenous to the TL and the target culture in preference to features with their roots in the source culture. The result is to reduce foreign features in the TT, thereby to some extent naturalizing it into the TL and its cultural setting. Whether this is desirable or not depends on the purpose of the TT. The various degrees of cultural transposition can be visualized as points along a scale between the extremes of exoticism and cultural transplantation: Source-culture bias Exoticism

Target-culture bias Calque

Cultural borrowing

Communicative translation

Cultural transplantation

Exoticism A TT marked by exoticism is one which consistently uses grammatical and cultural features imported from the ST with minimal adaptation, thereby constantly signalling the exotic source culture and its cultural strangeness. This may be one of the TT’s chief attractions, as in certain translations from Arabic (e.g. Nicholson 1987), but the TT will have an impact on the TL public quite unlike any that the ST could have had on an SL public, for whom the text is not exotic. Cultural transplantation At the other end of the scale is cultural transplantation, whose extreme forms are more like adaptations than translations – the wholesale rewriting

34


of the ST in a target-culture setting. Examples include the transplantation of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac into the film Roxanne, and the 2005 Dundee production of The Visit, in which the Swiss Anytown of Dürrenmatt’s Der Besuch der alten Dame, with its long-haul trains that no longer stop, was transposed to a Scottish airport town where the last fragments of hope ‘departed with the last Ryanair flight’. These are not essentially different from the intralingual adaptation of Romeo and Juliet into West Side Story, or of Shaw’s Pygmalion into My Fair Lady. Cultural transplantation on this scale can produce highly successful texts, but it is not normal translation practice. Sometimes, the decision whether to operate cultural transplantation is taken out of the translator’s hands by the TL publisher or even the targetculture censor. For instance, Hergé several times had to remove black people from the story because his American publishers objected to black people appearing alongside white people in books intended for young readers (Farr 2001: 38, 96). In such extreme cases, the decision is not the translator’s to make. But it often also happens that a translator needs to consult the ST author over linguistic or cultural issues. This often results in a voluntary rewrite of parts of the ST for translation purposes, sometimes amounting to a small-scale cultural transposition (see e.g. Bell 2002: 163). Cultural transplantation is sometimes used by literary translators where an ST contains a lot of dialect. It would be incongruous to have e.g. Bavarian peasants using TL regionalisms, so, if dialect is essential to the text, cultural transplantation is sometimes the only solution. Otherwise, translators generally ignore dialect, which tends to be irrelevant in informative texts. By and large, normal translation practice avoids the two extremes of exoticism and wholesale cultural transplantation. In avoiding the extremes, the translator will consider the alternatives lying between them on the scale given on p. 33. Calque One alternative is to introduce a momentary foreignness in the form of calque. A calque is an expression that consists of TL words and is acceptable as TL syntax, but is unidiomatic in the TL because it is modelled on the structure of an SL expression. This lack of idiomaticity may be purely lexical and relatively innocuous, or it may be more generally grammatical. The following calques are more or less unidiomatic: ST (Ein) gebranntes Kind scheut das Feuer.

TT A burnt child shuns the fire.


35

Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund.

Morning hour has gold in the mouth.

Das Hengstaufzuchtgestüt Hunnesrück ist neben der privaten Hengstaufzucht ein wichtiges Standbein zur Ergänzung des aktiven Hengstbestandes.

The stallion rearing stud Hunnesrück is besides the private rearing of stallions an important support leg for the completion of the active stallion stock.

For most translation purposes, it can be said that a bad calque is misleading or ungrammatical in the TL, while a good one compromises between imitating ST features and offending against TL grammar. It is all too easy to mar the TT with bad calques. However, in some TTs the momentary foreignness of calque may be necessary, even if its effects need to be palliated by some form of compensation. Cultural borrowing Another alternative introducing an element of foreignness is to transfer an ST expression verbatim into the TT. This is termed cultural borrowing. Of course, foreignness is by definition exotic; this is why, when the occasion demands, it can be useful to talk about exotic elements introduced by various translation practices. But cultural borrowing is different from exoticism and calque, because it does not involve adaptation of the SL expression into TL forms. Translators often turn to cultural borrowing when it is impossible to find a suitable indigenous TL expression. ‘Weltanschauung’ is an example: first attested in English in 1868, it is defined in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a particular philosophy or view of life; a conception of the world’. Cultural borrowing is most frequent in texts on history or legal, social or political matters, in references to institutions or concepts which have no clear counterpart in the TL. The simplest solution is often to insert into the TT a definition of terms like ‘Bundesrat’, ‘Bund’, ‘Länder’ or ‘Bafög’ the first time they occur, and thereafter to use the SL term as a loan-word in the TT. One frequently used term that resists this treatment is ‘der Gesetzgeber’, where TL readers are better served by a choice (according to context) from ‘parliament’, ‘the legislature/legislative’ and ‘the law’. Socio-political and historical references are likely to figure in journalism, autobiography and fiction, as well as in scholarly texts. Here, the translator’s decision may be more difficult. As always, the critical factors are the function of the ST feature and the purpose of the TT. We shall see examples in Chapter 4, when examining German words in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz that have far-reaching, gruesome implications. These present the translator with serious problems of cultural transposition that can only be solved with the help of compensation.

36


For the moment, we can say that cultural borrowing only presents the translator with a true choice in cases where previous translation practice has not already firmly established the ST expression in the TL. So unless the context militates against it, it is virtually mandatory to render loanexpressions like ‘Weltschmerz’ or ‘Kindergarten’ verbatim into an English TT, because they have become the standard conventional equivalents of the SL expressions. It must be rare for a German loan-word not present in the ST to be used in the TT, but one of the possible renderings for a 1927 writer’s ‘Wandlungen, die durch eine andere geistige Struktur der Zeit [. . .] hervorgerufen werden’ (Lotz 1927: 297) must surely be ‘changes [. . .] brought about by movement in the zeitgeist as a whole’. However, caution needs to be exercised in translating SL words that have become TL loan-words, and vice versa. A good example is ‘Lebensraum’, which is used in a much wider range of situations in German than in English. In English, having entered the language during the 1930s, when the Nazis were using it as part of their expansionist rhetoric, it specifically denotes ‘territory claimed by a nation or state as being necessary to its growth or survival’. It thus has strong connotations of Nazi aggression and imperialism. Both the literal meaning and the connotations are now inescapable when the term is used in English. The same connotations are of course present in German too – but to what extent they are active depends on the context. The difference is that English knows only the one sense, whereas in German, despite historical memories still uppermost for many, the term ‘Lebensraum’ is used routinely in biology and is also found in texts on architecture and town planning. In such contexts it is a value-neutral term meaning ‘habitat’, ‘living space’, etc., and to translate it with the loan-word ‘lebensraum’, rather than with a term appropriate to the discipline, would be a serious error. English loan-words in German texts should also be treated with caution. German ‘pink’, for example, is not far from English ‘shocking pink’; contrast ‘rosa(rot)’. ‘Der Sound’, similarly, is a hyponym of English ‘sound’, implying ‘characteristic {sound/tone}’, usually that of a band, etc., but capable of being extended in journalism to characterize a person, similarly to ‘style/thing/way’ in English. ‘Der Oldtimer’ is likely to be a vintage car. Also well-established is ‘Mobbing’, standard usage for workplace harassment, also for bullying at school. Possibly the most radical Umfunktionierung of an English word in current German is also one of the best-known: ‘das Handy’, in universal use, with pronunciation ‘Händy’, for ‘mobile (phone)/cellphone’. Communicative translation As we saw on p. 19, communicative translation is usually adopted for those clichés, idioms, proverbs, etc. that have readily identifiable communicative equivalents in the TL. Only special contextual reasons could justify not choosing communicative translation in such cases as the following:


ST (Ein) gebranntes Kind scheut das Feuer.

TT Once bitten, twice shy.

Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund.

The early bird catches the worm/ Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

mausetot

dead as a doornail

die Katze im Sack kaufen

to buy a pig in a poke

Vorsicht, bissiger Hund!

Beware of the dog.

37

Literal translation of expressions such as these would introduce a foreignness not present in the ST. (This would not matter, of course, if the translation strategy were to signal the foreign origin of the text through exoticism or frequent calque.) As the example of ‘Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund’ shows, there may be a choice of communicative equivalents. Which one is appropriate depends on the context. Usually, however, there is not this luxury of choice, and it sometimes happens that the obvious communicative equivalent will not be appropriate in the context. This is usually because the TL expression clashes with the context either in literal meaning or in its overtones. In such cases, the solution is generally to use some kind of compensation. We shall begin Chapter 4 with an example of this.

PRACTICAL 3 3.1 Cultural issues Assignment (i) The ST below is from an address to a mixed-nationality audience. You are to produce an English TT for members of the audience with insufficient German to follow the speaker. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the second and third paragraphs of the ST (lines 12–36) into English, paying special attention to the cultural issues involved. (iii) Explain the major decisions of detail you had to make, indicating whether you think the issues involved are primarily linguistic or primarily cultural. (iv) Compare your TT with the official one, which will be given to you by your tutor.

38


Contextual information The ST is the opening section of a c.1,600-word address described as the ‘Grußwort des Bayerischen Staatsministers für Unterricht, Kultus, Wissenschaft und Kunst Hans Zehetmair anläßlich des Brauchtumsabends der bayerischen Kommunalen Spitzenverbände am 9. Mai 1996 in Brüssel’, and bearing the title ‘Kulturelle Vielfalt in Europa’.

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

ST Viele Worte braucht man zu dem, was wir hier genießen dürfen, eigentlich nicht mehr zu verlieren. Die Darbietungen unserer bayerischen Musikanten, Sänger und Tänzer – bzw. Musikantinnen, Sängerinnen und Tänzerinnen – sprechen schon für sich und für unsere bayerische Heimat. Trotzdem möchte ich die musikalischen Auftritte wenigstens kurz rhetorisch unterbrechen, um Sie alle in meiner Eigenschaft als Stellvertreter des Bayerischen Ministerpräsidenten und als Kultusminister Bayerns sehr herzlich zu diesem Brauchtumsabend der bayerischen Kommunalen Spitzenverbände zu begrüßen. Ich möchte Ihnen allen auch die besten Grüße und Wünsche des Bayerischen Ministerpräsidenten Dr. Edmund Stoiber übermitteln. Es ist für mich eine besondere Freude, heute mit Ihnen zusammen einige Kostproben echten bayerischen Brauchtums und echter bayerischer Volkskultur zu erleben. Die Betonung liegt auf echt, denn Sie wissen vermutlich alle, daß nichts so sehr zur Klischeebildung neigt wie die Vorstellungen über die Volkskultur. Die Bayern werden dann gerne als ewig jodelnd, fensterlnd und schuhplattelnd dargestellt, am besten gekleidet mit Haferlschuhen, Wadelstrümpfen, Gamsbart und Sepplhut. Es ist übrigens äußerst interessant zu beobachten, wie gerade die Bayern mit diesen bekannten Vorurteilen zu kämpfen haben. Niemand könnte ohne weiteres angeben, wie ein typischer Hesse oder ein Saarländer auszusehen habe. Fast könnte man auch so weit gehen, wie der Bayernkorrespondent der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, der einmal geseufzt hat: „Das dumme Gerede über die Bayern hört nie auf.“ Ich kann ihn da aber beruhigen. Erstens gibt es zu Bayern ganz andere Stimmen: und zweitens haben wir die nötige Souveränität, über etwaige Ausfälle auch hinwegzusehen. Die Wirklichkeit sieht ohnehin etwas anders aus. Davon abgesehen, daß Bayern heute ein modernes, postindustrielles High-tech-Land geworden ist: Bei den drei in Bayern beheimateten Volksstämmen – den Altbaiern, den Franken und den Schwaben – gab es und gibt es zum Teil völlig unterschiedliche Formen der Volkskultur: das zeigt sich in der Tracht und im Brauchtum, in der Volksmusik, im Volkslied und im Volkstanz. Diese unterschiedlichen Ausdrucksformen sind sicher auch ein Hinweis auf jeweils unterschiedliche Mentalitäten, die in Bayern – wie anderswo auch – aufeinandertreffen. Bisher sind wir aber damit sehr gut zurechtgekommen. (Zehetmair 1996a: 1–2)

Cultural issues in translation

39

3.2 Cultural issues Assignment (i) For an educational TV channel, you are translating for voice-over broadcast a number of interviews with older residents of Südhessen (between Darmstadt and Mannheim). The ST is an extract from one such interview. The voice-over will be accompanied in the usual way by shots of the interviewee, cutting once or twice to landscape and crops. Your tutor may give you a ‘Hochdeutsch’ transcript of the ST. Specifying where in the English-speaking world the programme is to be transmitted, discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Discuss the main decisions of detail you took. Contextual information The text is a transcript of an undated interview archived by Inter Nationes. Lamberte = Lampertheim; Hiddefäld = Hüttenfeld; Lissebärwel = Elisabeth.

5

10

ST Die Duwaksblanze sitze, des häb ich groad gäschdern gsäje, wie ich driwe war in Lamberte wäije Schbargel. Un bei dere Gäläjenheit häb ich festgschdellt, daß in Hiddefelt noch de Glabberschdoik dahoam is. Gschäfte häb ich nadierlich koani mit’m gämoacht, indem daß unseroans dodefeer sou oalt is. Es wunnert mich net, wann’s koa Kinner mäih git, wou sou wenich Schdäik do sin. Un es werd nimmäih lang dauern, dann kimmt gar koaner mäih. Waat ämol oab! Je mäihner Fawarike un je mäihner verdräkte Oabwässer meer grieje, je wenischer Fresch un je wenischer Schdäik wern’s. Der Mensch zerschdert sein Läwensraum sälwert. Do hälfe koa Gsetze un nix; dann koaner helt sich drou. Es gäiht als im oalde Trott weirer. Lissebärwel, du glaabscht net, wie bei uns sunndoags die Luft verpescht is . . . (Kultureller Tonbanddienst n.d.: 25–6)

4 Compensation In Chapter 3, we said that when the TT context rules out an obvious communicative translation, the usual solution is to use compensation: that is, where any conventional translation (whether literal or otherwise) would entail an unacceptable translation loss, this loss is reduced by the freely chosen introduction of a less unacceptable one, such that important ST effects are rendered approximately in the TT by means other than those used in the ST. Here is an example, from a text in which an architect sarcastically criticizes the slabs projecting over the front doors and steps in housing designed by a rival architect: ‘Da sie weder Entwässerung noch Gefälle haben, bleibt der Schnee auf ihnen vermutlich bis zum Wegtauen und Abtropfen – gerade auf die „geschützten“ Treppen – liegen, die so aus dem Regen in die Traufe kommen dürften’ (Adler 1927: 387). While ‘vom Regen in die Traufe (kommen)’ can usually be translated without significant loss by its communicative equivalent, ‘(to jump) out of the frying pan into the fire’, chance has intervened here, forcing the translator to think again. If the TT is to convey the writer’s barb with similar polemic force – that is, without significant translation loss – it must do it with compensation. Here is one possibility: ‘[. . .] the meltwater runs off – straight onto the “sheltered” steps, upon which one may thus truly say it never rains but it pours’. The ST uses a popular quasi-proverbial saying to tease the architect. As the conventional communicative translation is not used, there is significant translation loss. The TT compensates for this loss by using a popular proverb to do the teasing. The image is different, but it is a similar kind of rhetorical ploy to the ST’s, and has a similar effect. It also retains suitably damp imagery. It does incur translation loss, of course. The TL proverb is convenient, but it has lost its own figurative meaning: its function is not actually to say that ‘misfortunes never come singly’, but to preserve a style and tone. This loss is mitigated in turn by the slightly facetious formulation ‘upon which one may thus truly say’. The substitution of one figurative image for another is thus a loss that is willingly incurred as being a lesser evil than the loss of the ST’s

Compensation 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

41

tone. In the end, the TT’s suitability depends on what readership is intended. In this case, our example is from a TT addressed to students of the history of urban planning, so we wanted to preserve the punning hint at human rivalries underlying even such things as housing design. Note that these departures from literal translation have not been forced on the translator by the dictates of TL grammar. The changes have been freely chosen to compensate for a (rarely occurring) major snag involving a standard translation. This question of choice versus constraint is vital to the understanding of compensation. Even if a German expression has no closely matching structural counterpart in English, this does not necessarily mean there is a problem – let alone any need to compensate. Grammatical transposition is as much the rule as the exception; and where a communicative translation is indicated, there is usually no problem in using the appropriate expression. So it is not a case of compensation when ‘ich habe Hunger’ is rendered by ‘I’m hungry’, or ‘zu verkaufen’ by ‘for sale’, or ‘Gehen Sie doch vor!’ by ‘After you’, or ‘aus dem Regen in die Traufe’ by ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’. These are constraints: the only element of choice is in the decision not to depart from the standard rendering. Compensation does not come into the reckoning until there is something that rules out using the obvious, conventional translation. That is what happened in the architecture text, and it required a freely chosen, creative compromise between losses. This solution, a true case of compensation, is virtually unrepeatable, because produced in response to a virtually unique problem. Compensation is more of a concern in non-technical texts than in technical ones. Normally, in translating a specialist or technical text, the need for compensation is minimal: the translator identifies the relevant TL expressions and uses them. (There is more to technical translation than that, of course, but compensation rarely comes into it.) In many genres, however, successful translation is impossible without compensation. Compensation is most clearly illustrated from literary texts, so our examples here will be from such texts. But, as the course progresses, it will be found that compensation is needed in translating many different types of text. To illustrate how compensation works, we shall use examples from published translations. Of course, deciding what another translator’s decisions have been is mostly guesswork. But it is possible to analyse ways in which translation loss has actually been compensated for, deliberately or not. That is what we shall be doing in what follows. However, this does not mean that compensation should be a matter of guesswork for the translator. When we said at the start of this chapter that unacceptable translation loss is reduced by the freely chosen introduction of a less unacceptable one, we meant exactly that: freely choosing a solution entails carefully weighing the possibilities and making a conscious, deliberate decision. Several of our examples come from W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. This is because it is a well-known and unusually compelling text, embraces a

42


familiar and morally urgent subject, and has been translated by a distinguished translator. The lessons we draw from it are, however, potentially applicable to any ST, not just to Sebald’s. In Austerlitz, many foreign expressions are quoted verbatim, in Flemish, French, Czech, etc., without translation or explanation. In practically every case, the English translator has kept the feature. This strategy ensures that TL readers face the same kind of challenge to their sophistication as SL readers. However, a difference between SL and TL readers’ experience does arise when the narrator singles out German expressions as especially significant. These sometimes pose serious problems. Most come late on, when Austerlitz tells the narrator about the notorious Theresienstadt ghetto set up by the Nazis as, in effect, an antechamber to the concentration camps. We shall take two examples from a long, ten-page sentence which, in its exhaustive and often grotesque detail, imitates the suffocating nightmare existence of the inmates. In this context, certain words are so emotionally loaded that it is vital for the TT’s purpose that the reader be aware of their full force, as the ST reader is. Here is one (the reference is to temporary improvements designed to conceal the true nature of Theresienstadt from a Red Cross visitation in 1944):

5

ST [. . .] über tausend Rosenstöcke wurden gesetzt, eine Kriechlingskrippe und ein Kleinkinderhort mit Zierfriesen, Sandkästen, Planschbecken und Karussellen ausgestattet, [. . .] (Sebald 2001: 343)

TT [. . .] over a thousand rose-bushes were planted, a children’s nursery and crèche or Kriechlingskrippe, as it was termed, said Austerlitz, in one of those perverse formulations, were adorned with pretty fairy-tale friezes and equipped with sandpits, paddling pools and merry-gorounds, [. . .] (Sebald 2002: 339–40)

Almost inevitably, the TT is an exegetic translation. Like the ST reader, the TT reader will see the irony of setting up a crèche and a nursery in a transit camp on the road to extermination. But the ST expressions are more expressive than their TT counterparts. Comparing them is an instructive illustration of semantic translation loss. ‘Nursery’ denotes a place providing day care for young children. ‘Kleinkinderhort’ has a similar literal meaning, but it also draws attention to the littleness and vulnerability of the children. There is an even stronger contrast between ‘crèche’ and ‘Kriechlingskrippe’. ‘Crèche’, a loan-word from French, denotes a place where very young children can be looked after. ‘Kriechlingskrippe’ is more vivid: it explicitly mentions babies at the crawling stage, and ‘Krippe’ still regularly denotes a manger or crib, whereas this meaning has just about vanished from English ‘crèche’. Even the connotation of

Compensation 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

43

‘Nativity scene’ is stronger in ‘Kriechlingskrippe’ than in ‘crèche’. Taken together, the two ST words are far more compelling than their TT counterparts, both in literal meaning and in their connotations of vulnerability and Christ’s Nativity. Of course, for a German-speaker, these connotations are predominantly latent. But in this context they are triggered by two things: partly by the very inappropriateness of this show of tenderheartedness in Theresienstadt, but largely also by the alliteration and assonance on [k] in the key words, which makes them stand out and crystallizes their literal and connotative meanings into an overall emotive sense of ‘littleness’, ‘weakness’, ‘protection’ and (via the connotation of Nativity) ‘generous love’. The contrast between the sham of care and the reality of Theresienstadt is made strident and painful. The TL words can have little of this effect. Even ‘crèche’ does not connote ‘Christ’s Nativity’ as readily as ‘Krippe’ or ‘crib’. The TT compensates for this significant loss in two ways. The first is a cultural borrowing, ‘Kriechlingskrippe’, which suggests that the very language used by the authorities is in some way noteworthy. The second device is the emotive exegetic addition to the cultural borrowing: ‘as it was termed, said Austerlitz, in one of those perverse formulations’. This confirms that there is something objectionable about the official term. However, although the reference to ‘perverse formulations’ does make explicit some of the critical attitude that is implicit in the ST, it is too general to be clear: which perverse formulations? and what’s perverse about them? Perhaps, unusually, the compensation does not work very well here. Here, for discussion in class, are some possible alternatives: Kriechlingskrippe, as it was termed, said Austerlitz, in another of their barbarisms. Kriechlingskrippe, as they termed it, said Austerlitz, in another barbarous perversion of the language. Kriechlingskrippe, as it was termed, said Austerlitz, in one of their barbarous perversions of the language. Kriechlingskrippe, as they barbarously called it. Kriechlingskrippe, as they chose to call it, said Austerlitz. These use a similar approach to the published TT’s, but make the target of criticism more explicit. However, they introduce an emotiveness that is absent from the ST: a major feature in Austerlitz’s account of Theresienstadt is his relative dispassionateness – more eloquent than exclamations of outrage. In addition, the specific ST connotations are lost; the closest these alternatives come to compensating for this is in a connotation of ‘wickedness’ in ‘perversion’, and, especially, of ‘uncivilized’, ‘primitive’ and ‘murderous cruelty’ in ‘barbarous/barbarism’. The next example illustrates another typical approach to compensation for lost ST connotations. Early in the ten-page sentence, Austerlitz lists

44


some of the myriad jobs that the ghetto inmates were compelled to do. There were 60,000 people, he says, forced to work

5

10

in einer von der Abteilung für Außenwirtschaft zur Profitschöpfung eingerichteten Manufakturen, in der Bandagistenwerkstatt, in der Taschnerei, in der Galanteriewarenproduktion, in der Holzsohlen- und Rindsledergaloschenerzeugung, auf dem Köhlereihof, bei der Herstellung von Unterhaltungsspielen wie Mühle, Mensch ärgere dich nicht und Fang den Hut, beim Glimmerspalten, in der Kaninchenhaarschererei, bei der Tintenstaubabfüllung, der Seidenraupenzucht der SS oder in den zahlreichen Binnenwirtschaftsbetrieben, in der Kleiderkammer, den Bezirksflickstuben, der Verschleißstelle, im Lumpenlager, bei der Bucherfassungsgruppe, der Küchenbrigade, der Kartoffelschälerei, der Knochenverwertung oder im Matratzenreferat, [etc.] (Sebald 2001: 337) The arbitrary diversity and sheer number of these activities mirrors the intimidating incomprehensibility of the whole lunatic enterprise. But the emotional impact of this passage is more than the sum of its parts. For instance, the reference to parlour games acquires grisly overtones in this context, which literal translation cannot convey. Here is the published translation of the whole extract:

5

10

in one of the primitive factories set up, with a view to generating actual profit, by the External Trade Section, assigned to the bandage-weaving workshop, to the handbag and satchel assembly line, the production of horn buttons and other haberdashery items, the manufacturing of wooden soles for footwear and of cowhide galoshes, to the charcoal yard, the making of such games as Nine Men’s Morris and Catch the Hat, the splitting of mica, the shearing of rabbit fur, the bottling of ink dust, the silkworm-breeding station run under the aegis of the SS or, alternatively, employed in one of the operations serving the ghetto’s internal economy, in the clothing store, for instance, in one of the precinct mending and darning rooms, the shredding section, the rag depot, the book reception and sorting unit, the kitchen brigade, the potato-peeling platoon, the bone-crushing mill, the glue-boiling plant or the mattress department, [etc.] (Sebald 2002: 333) The ST expressions that concern us here are the parlour games. ‘Mühle’ is correctly translated as ‘Nine Men’s Morris’, and ‘Fang den Hut’ as ‘Catch the Hat’. ‘Mensch ärgere dich nicht’ is more of a problem. It is much the same game as ‘Sorry’, a children’s variant of ludo in which players take fiendish delight in thwarting one another and saying ‘sorry’ as they do so. Compared with ‘Sorry’, the German term has greater potential for

Compensation 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

45

exquisitely polite malicious glee. In this context, it may acquire a jarring irony. If the reader registers what the name of the game literally means, it takes no effort to imagine SS supervisors mockingly saying ‘Don’t be cross’ – in a situation whose very existence is ample reason for anger. ‘Sorry’ could give only a hint of such overtones. This is perhaps why ‘Mensch ärgere dich nicht’ has not been translated. The loss is, however, very successfully compensated for, together with another loss incurred in the translation of ‘Mühle’. The literal translation of ‘Mühle’ is ‘Nine Men’s Morris’. Although nothing in the etymology of the English term suggests it, the reference to a group of men and the collocation of ‘men’ with ‘morris’ is likely to prompt an association with morris men, particularly as morris dancing is a form of entertainment and Nine Men’s Morris is a sociable game. In this context, there is a potential irony in these TL connotations that might partly compensate for the loss of those in ‘Mensch ärgere dich nicht’. Even so, ‘Mühle’ here has gruesome overtones that ‘Nine Men’s Morris’ lacks. It acquires these in two stages. First, this context of unremitting labour will, for some readers, awaken the primary sense of ‘Mühle’ as ‘mill’ or ‘grindstone’, and so perhaps also the connotation of ‘Knochenmühle’, in its colloquial figurative sense of a place of unremitting toil (as in e.g. ‘der Betrieb ist die reinste Knochenmühle’). But then, a few lines later, almost comically slipped in between potato-peeling and the mattress department, comes ‘Knochenverwertung’, the ‘utilization’ or ‘exploitation’ of bones. For many readers, this will clinch the implication of ‘Knochenmühle’, in its literal sense as well as its figurative one – especially as the text is addressed to a public all too aware that the Nazis did sometimes literally ‘process’ the bodies of their exterminated victims – teeth, fat, even skin. Acceptable translations of ‘Knochenverwertung’ here would be ‘boneprocessing’ or ‘recycling bones’. But the ST word offers a good opportunity to compensate for the significant loss incurred in translating ‘Mühle’ as ‘Nine Men’s Morris’. This is what the translator has done, turning the abstract ‘verwertung’ element into specific physical instances of utilization or processing and explicitly mentioning a bone-works: ‘the bone-crushing mill, the glue-boiling plant’. The translation loss in this exegetic translation is obvious: the TT is less economical than the ST, and goes into explicit, concrete detail where the ST is implicit, abstract and generic. Yet this loss triumphantly compensates for the greater loss incurred in not translating ‘Mensch ärgere dich nicht’ and in the innocent associations of ‘Nine Men’s Morris’. The Theresienstadt examples mostly involve problems posed by connotations. But connotation is not the only thing that can necessitate compensation. Compensation often solves problems posed by grammatical structures. A common problem is the difference between SL and TL verb systems. Here is an example involving the German subjunctive, taken

46


from Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser. Five women are on trial for an alleged war crime. One of them is Hanna, with whom the narrator, the law student Michael, has a complex relationship. Michael attends the proceedings. Eventually, the charges are read out:

5

In der zweiten Woche wurde die Anklage verlesen. Die Verlesung dauerte eineinhalb Tage – eineinhalb Tage Konjunktiv. Die Angeklagte zu eins habe . . . , sie habe ferner . . . , weiter habe sie . . . , dadurch habe sie den Tatbestand des Paragraphen soundsoviel erfüllt, ferner habe sie diesen Tatbestand und jenen Tatbestand . . . , sie habe auch rechtswidrig und schuldhaft gehandelt. Hanna war die Angeklagte zu vier. (Schlink 1997: 101) There is an acute problem here. Michael comments on the special form of language used in the reading of the charges – ‘eineinhalb Tage Konjunktiv’ – and gives six examples. This Konjunktiv I is used for certain limited special purposes, is formal, and is instantly recognized. The convention of using it for reported speech is nowhere more scrupulously observed than in reporting unproven allegations. Yet, although it is utterly conventional in this situation, Michael deliberately emphasizes it, with the dash and repeated ‘eineinhalb’. The suggestion is that a day and a half of this stuff is highly tedious, and that the linguistic impersonality does not reflect the emotional reality of the position the defendants find themselves in. For translating subjunctives, there are set procedures. However, for ‘eineinhalb Tage Konjunktiv’ the translator does have a choice: between a literal translation, which would be accurate, but would baffle most readers and lose Michael’s reaction, and a free translation, which would compensate for the loss by expressing Michael’s reaction through other means. The first course is taken in the published TT:

5

In the second week, the indictment was read out. It took a day and a half to read – a day and a half in the subjunctive. The first defendant is alleged to have . . . Furthermore she is alleged . . . In addition, she is alleged . . . Thus she comes under the necessary conditions of paragraph so-and-so, furthermore she is alleged to have committed this and that act . . . She is alleged to have acted illegally and culpably. Hanna was the fourth defendant. (Schlink 2003: 103) The legal jargon and the repetition of ‘is alleged’ convey oppressive formality, so some of the ST effect is preserved. But can one compensate for the loss of Michael’s attitude? To drop the term ‘subjunctive’ might be a pity, since there could be some TL readers who do understand its implications. One possibility, then, would be to embed the key word in an exegetic translation:

Compensation 1111 2 3 4 522 5 6 7 8 922

1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1

47

During the second week the charges were read out. The reading took a day and a half. A day and a half of the stiff subjunctive verbs used for indictments: Prisoner no. 1 is alleged to have . . . It is further alleged that she . . . Subsequently, it is alleged, she . . . In so doing, it is alleged, she committed a felony as defined in Subsection such and such . . . She is further alleged to have committed a felony in terms of Subsection this and Subsection that . . . She is charged with having acted unlawfully and with malice aforethought. Hanna was Prisoner no. 4. ‘Stiff subjunctive verbs’ suggests there is something alien about the legal language, and the liberal injection of TL legal jargon gives a flavour of this. So, although an important ST effect is lost in the literal translation of ‘Konjunktiv’, there is some compensation for that in the rest of the sentence. This solution has a serious drawback, however: it contains no subjunctives! It is in fact hard to see how TL subjunctives could be brought in here. A better exegetic rendering might therefore be to drop reference to the subjunctive and to compensate in a different way: ‘The reading took a day and a half – one and a half days of the stuffy language used for indictments.’ The switch to ‘one and a half days’ draws extra attention to the length of time, and so prepares the way for ‘stuffy’. We preferred ‘stuffy’ to alternatives like ‘stiff’, ‘starchy’ or ‘pompous’ because it has stronger connotations of the stifling atmosphere of a boring courtroom. Once this atmosphere is set, the rest of the published TT can be used, because there is no longer any need for extra jargon. Omitting reference to the subjunctive and its associations is therefore a significant translation loss, but keeping it would be a bigger one; a suitable exegetic formulation compensates for this loss. However, it is important to note that this is the full extent of the compensation in this example. The use of ‘is alleged’ to render ‘habe’ is a grammatical transposition, but it is a constraint in translating between German and English, not a case of compensation. Certainly, ‘she is alleged’ is more redolent of the courtroom than ‘she is said’ or ‘it is claimed that’, but that is simply a matter of deciding on the correct conventional expression for the context. It would have been wrong not to choose the correct term, but there is no compensation involved in avoiding this elementary mistake. The examples we have analysed illustrate the three most common features of compensation. The first is that it generally involves a change in place, the TT effect occurring at a different place, relative to other features in the TT context, from the corresponding textual effect in the ST context. All our examples show this, but the ‘Mühle/Mensch ärgere dich nicht’ compensation is a particularly clear case. Compensation usually also entails a change in ‘economy’. Sometimes, the TT feature will be shorter than the corresponding ST one. More often, though, ST features have to be spread over a relatively longer length of TT, whether continuous or divided into parts. This is almost inevitable

48


when there is any element of exegetic translation. This, too, is seen in all our examples. Finally, compensation nearly always entails a difference in kind between the ST textual effect and the TT textual effect. It may involve making explicit in the TT what is implicit in the ST, or vice versa. It may involve substituting abstract for concrete, or concrete for abstract. An ST effect produced through alliteration may have to be rendered through some grammatical device, or vice versa. An ST rhyme or pun may have to be replaced with a different form of wordplay. Compensation nearly always involves using different parts of speech and grammatical structures from those indicated by balanced translation. All these sorts of substitution may be confined to single words, but they more usually extend to whole phrases, sentences or even paragraphs. Sometimes, indeed, a whole text may be affected. The Biermann song text in Practical 4.2 is an example of this. A strategic decision to produce a singable TT from it entails wholesale translation loss. Consequently, major compensation is needed throughout the text, specifically to prevent rhythm and rhyme being foregrounded at the expense of message content. To conclude, the question of whether and how to compensate can never be considered in and for itself, in isolation from other crucial factors: context, style, genre, the purpose of the ST, the purpose of the TT, the TT’s readership, etc. Compensation is needed whenever consideration of these factors confronts the translator with an unwelcome compromise. Simply put, it is a less unwelcome compromise, the reduction of an unacceptable translation loss through the calculated introduction of a less unacceptable one. Compensation is unlikely to be successful if inspiration is not allied with analysis. It is not a matter of putting any old finesounding phrase into a TT in case any weaknesses have crept in, but of countering a specific, clearly defined, serious loss with a specific, clearly defined, less serious one. So, before deciding on how to compensate for a translation loss, it is best to assess as precisely as possible what the loss is and why it matters both in its immediate context and in the TT as a whole. This reduces the likelihood of inadvertently introducing more serious translation losses than the one that is being compensated for. When all the possibilities have been reviewed, the decisive question is: ‘Will the proposed compensation make the TT more fit for its purpose, or less?’ PRACTICAL 4 4.1 Compensation Assignment (i) You are translating Part 1 of the Audi AG annual report from which Practical 2.1 was taken. (Some further details about the report are

Compensation

(ii) (iii) (iv)

49

given there.) Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to make before starting detailed translation of this ST, paying particular attention to the constraints imposed on your TT by the layout requirements explained in the contextual information. Translate the text into English. Discuss the main decisions of detail you took, paying special attention to cases where you used compensation to avoid unnecessary translation loss. Compare your TT with the published one, which will be given to you by your tutor.

Contextual information The ST for this assignment is advertising copy carefully laid out to accompany the ‘Technik’ chapter’s photographs and informational text. The car featured is the A8 L 12-Zylinder. The ST starts on a left-hand page, and then stretches across all six A4 pages of the chapter as a kind of continuously developing header; thus it is split into six fragments, one to a page, each marked off by suspension points before and after. Certain words are printed in larger type – one on each page except the first. On each of pages 19–23, the ST is printed in a single line across the page without undue stretching. Audi require the English-language edition of their company report to be laid out exactly like the German edition. The numbers we supply in square brackets are the page numbers of the original publication.

5

10

ST [18] Er ist gewohnt, vorn . . . [19] . . . mitzufahren. Vorwärtsdrang ist seine typische Eigenschaft. Stets und zu jeder Stunde . . . [20] . . . Die Gewissheit, gut zu sein: Anspruch des Gewinners. Hochschalten in den sechsten Gang . . . [21] . . . Entschlossenheit heißt Format beweisen. Führen mit Stil und Klasse. Im Detail und mit Niveau . . . [22] . . . Genau wie sein A8. Blinker links. Sanfte Beschleunigung. Sicher lenkt er auf die Überholspur . . . [23] . . . Erfolg mit allen Sinnen genießen. Jeden Tag aufs Neue. Für heute ist er erst einmal am Ziel. (Audi 2004a: 18–23) 4.2 Compensation Assignment Comparing the ST and TT printed here, examine the main cases where the translator seems to have used compensation to alleviate translation loss. Say why you think the compensation is successful or unsuccessful; if you think it could be improved, give your own translation, and explain

50


why you think it is better. Include in your analysis cases where you think that significant translation loss is incurred without the translator apparently having tried to alleviate it with compensation; give your own translation of these cases, and explain why you think it is better. Contextual information It will be useful to bear in mind that the ST is a song, with a ballad-like rhythm which the translator imitates fairly closely. It is by Wolf Biermann, a singer-songwriter whose critical political songs made him a thorn in the flesh of the GDR throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1976, while he was performing in the Federal Republic, he was stripped of his citizenship by the East German authorities. Although banned from the East German media, Biermann’s critical, acid songs, proclaiming his own personal communism and his opposition to hypocrisy and degradation, continued to penetrate every corner of German culture. ‘Kunststück’ is one of his lighter pieces, but it is characteristic in its blend of politics with celebration of a love of life and of the common man.

6

ST Wenn ich mal heiß bin Wenn ich mal heiß bin lang ich mir ne Wolke runter und wring sie über mir aus. Kalte Dusche. Kunststück.

TT When I get hot, son When I get hot, son I reach up and grab a cloud and wring it out over me. Ice-cold shower. Piece a cake.

12

Wenn ich mal kalt bin Wenn ich mal kalt bin lang ich mir die Sonne runter und steck sie mir ins Jackett. Kleiner Ofen. Kunststück.

When I get cold, son When I get cold, son I reach up and grab the sun and pop it under my coat. Little oven. Piece a cake.

18

Wenn ich bei ihr bin Wenn ich bei ihr bin schwimmen Wolken mit uns [runter rollt die Sonne gleich mit. Das ist Liebe. Kunststück.

When I’m with her, son When I’m with her, son clouds come floating down, son, [with us and the sun comes down too. That’s love for you. Piece a cake.

24

Wenn ich mal müd bin Wenn ich mal müd bin lang ich mir den lieben Gott runter und er singt mir was vor. Engel weinen. Kunststück.

When I get tired, son When I get tired, son I reach up and grab the dear Lord so he’ll sing me a song. Angels weeping. Piece a cake.

Compensation

51

30

Wenn ich mal voll bin Wenn ich mal voll bin geh ich kurz zum Teufel runter und spendier Stalin ein Bier Armer Alter Nebbich.

When I get pissed, son When I get pissed, son I nip down to see the devil and buy old Stalin a beer. Poor old bugger. Nebbish.

36

Wenn ich mal tot bin Wenn ich mal tot bin werd ich Grenzer und bewache die Grenz zwischen Himmel und [Höll. Ausweis bitte! Kunststück.

When I am dead, son When I am dead, son I’ll be keeping an eye on the [border the border of heaven and hell. Passports ready! Piece a cake.

(Biermann 1977: 70–2)

(Biermann 1977: 71–3)

5 Textual genre and translation issues It will have become clear by now that different STs require different strategic priorities. In deciding which textual variables to prioritize, the translator has always to ask: what is the purpose of the ST, and what is the purpose of the TT? These questions imply two others: what kind of text is the ST, and what kind of text should the TT be? The texts we have used as examples and in practicals all illustrate the importance of these four inseparable questions in deciding a strategy. At issue here is a fundamental consideration in translation: all texts are defined in terms of genre. By genre we mean what Hymes calls a ‘type of communicative event’ (quoted in Hervey 1992: 199) – that is, a category to which, in a given culture, a given text is seen to belong and within which the text is seen to share a type of communicative purpose and effect with other texts. In this definition, the term also covers the traditionally identified genres of literature, and genres bearing what Mona Baker calls ‘institutionalized labels’ such as ‘journal article’, ‘science textbook’, ‘newspaper editorial’ or ‘travel brochure’ (Baker 1992: 114). Most texts belong to a genre or genres. Some innovative texts arguably do not, when they first appear: but even these are defined by contrast with genres they do not belong to. Innovative texts aside, it can be said that any ST shares some of its properties with other texts of the same genre, and is perceived by an SL audience as being what it is on account of such genre-defining properties. Therefore, in order to assess the nature and purpose of the ST, the translator must have some sort of overview of genre-types in the source culture, and be familiar with the characteristics of relevant genres within those types. What is true of SL texts is true of TL texts. Since the nature and the purpose of a given text imply one another, the translator has to be as familiar with target-culture genre-types and genres as with those of the source culture. Paying due attention to the nature and purpose of the TT

Textual genre and translation issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

53

guarantees a degree of TL bias that helps to prevent the excessive SL bias that so often defeats the purpose of the TT. Since translators need to consider these genre-related questions before translating a text, it is useful for them to have a framework of broad genretypes. This will help students to identify salient genre characteristics of the ST, and to check those of the TT they are producing. At this training stage, it will take some time to learn how to pick out the features that signal a particular genre and – just as important – what the TL expectations are for that genre. However, once this ability has been developed, applying it takes very little time. This is especially true in many professional situations: in areas like technical, legal or financial translation, the translator knows in advance what genre most STs are likely to belong to, and it only takes a quick look at the text to confirm this. We shall suggest five broad genre-types. Within each type, there are innumerable genres. And many texts have important characteristics from more than one genre and more than one genre-type. So we are not going to attempt an exhaustive typology of genres; that would be far too elaborate for our purposes. In determining the genre of a text, two essential factors need to be considered. The first is the author’s attitude to the treatment of the subject matter of the text. (We use ‘author’ to denote the originator of the text, whether it is oral or written.) The second is the question of whether the text is an oral one or a written one. Subject matter in itself is not a useful criterion for describing genres, because the same subject matter can figure in very different genres. What is at issue is the author’s attitude, implicit or explicit, to treatment of the subject matter. This attitude comprises three things: first, the author’s attitude to the subject matter itself; second, the author’s intention or desire that the text should have a particular sort of effect on the reader or listener; third, the likelihood – i.e. the probability or improbability – of this intention being achieved. On this basis, we shall distinguish five broad categories of genre. The first category is that of empirical genres. These deal with the real world as it is experienced by observers. An empirical text is more or less informative, and it is understood to take an objective view of observable phenomena. Scientific, technological and many scholarly texts fall into this category. It goes on diversifying into new genres and sub-genres as new scientific and academic disciplines are created. There is always scope for specialists to disagree with one another about the broader implications of, say, a text on the transport of nuclear waste, but the author of an empirical text will nevertheless be pretty confident that, as long as it is written in a particular way, it will fulfil its purpose of unambiguously relaying a body of facts and a conclusion drawn from them. The second category comprises philosophical genres. These have as their subject matter a ‘world’ of ideas. Pure mathematics is the best example of the kind of subject matter that defines philosophical genres. Even in

54


the field of metaphysics, however original the text, the author is understood not to be free to develop theoretical structures at will, but to be constrained by some standard of rationality. This does not, of course, prevent it being easy for the reader to misunderstand the point; hence the elaborate t-crossing and i-dotting with which philosophical authors try to reduce the uncertainty of effect. Philosophical genres have not proliferated as much as empirical ones, but they are strikingly diverse nonetheless. The third category comprises religious genres. In terms of the author’s attitude, the subject matter of religious texts implies the existence of a spiritual world that is not fictive, but has its own external realities and truths. The author is understood not to be free to create the world that animates the subject matter, but to be merely instrumental in exploring it. Even so, the author can never be certain that the desired effect will be produced – witness the proselytizing or threatening tone of many religious texts. The category of religious genres has diversified less than the others, but it still has a wide range of styles, from formal to informal. The fourth category is that of persuasive genres, which aim to make listeners or readers behave in prescribed or suggested ways. This aim can be pursued through various means: we are classifying in a single category the entire gamut of texts from instruction manuals, through laws and regulations to propaganda leaflets and advertisements. The many genres and sub-genres in this category have a common purpose, that of getting an audience to take a certain course of action, and perhaps explaining how to take it. The very notion of trying to persuade implies an element of uncertainty as to whether the text will succeed. From propaganda to video manuals, the history of persuasive genres is marked by failure as well as success. This is a crucial factor in the selection of a style for such texts. Finally, there is the category of literary genres. These have subdivided and diversified very greatly over the centuries. There are innumerable subgenres of poetry, prose narrative and drama, each with its characteristic style. However, all texts in this category have two essential features. First, they concern a world created autonomously in and through the texts themselves, and not controlled by the world outside. However close a literary text is to history or autobiography, it recreates experience in terms of a subjective, internal world, which is fundamentally perceived as fictive, for all its similarities to the world outside the text. Second, whatever other characteristics they have, literary texts contain features of expression that emphasize, modify or actually create features of content. For example, the extract from Austerlitz on p. 42 was taken from a ten-page sentence that imitates the scale and grotesqueness of the Theresienstadt operation. With their reliance on suggestion – through e.g. connotation, imagery or analogy – literary genres are especially vulnerable to chance and subjectivity. An acceptance of this uncertainty is part of the literary author’s attitude to treatment of subject matter.

Textual genre and translation issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

55

Consideration of the author’s attitude to treatment of the subject matter concentrates the translator’s mind on four groups of vital strategic questions. First, what are the salient features of the ST? What do these features imply about its purpose? What genre do the features and purpose suggest it belongs to? Second, does the ST have recognizable genre-specific characteristics that require special attention? If so, which of them should be retained in translation? Third, what TL genre(s) provide a match for the ST genre? What do existing specimens of these TL genres suggest regarding formulation of the TT? Fourth, what genre should the TT ultimately belong to, and what genre-specific features should it have? The translator must also ask a fifth question: is the text an oral one or a written one? Each of the five genre categories includes both oral and written texts. In truth, it is almost impossible not to distinguish an oral text as belonging to a discrete oral genre, and a written text as belonging to a discrete written genre, even where the texts share the same subject matter: the difference in medium generally entails a difference in attitude to treatment of the subject matter. Thus, a story told in a pub is in a different genre from a story printed in a magazine. A sermon on the Beatitudes, a talk about the Berlin Wall, a tutorial explanation of quarks – each is in a different genre from any kind of written reflection on the topic. A complicating factor is that many oral genres also involve written texts: songs, plays, sermons, lectures, a salesperson’s patter – all may be performed on the basis of a written text that is either read out, or spoken from memory, or used as the basis for improvisation. A song read silently from the page is in a different genre – and is arguably a different text – from the same song performed aloud. An awareness of the properties of oral texts is a necessary starting-point for translating an oral ST into an oral TT. Spoken communication has characteristics that are very much language-specific. Oral translation is not simply a matter of verbal transposition: the genre-related body language of the target culture must be respected as well, including gestures, facial expressions, and so on. Translating a joke, for instance, will generally involve quite different genres from conference interpreting; yet both make it clear that an oral text in any genre is not only an utterance, but also a dramatic performance. However, translators actually do most of their work in a written medium, even when it involves an oral text. Inevitably, the crossover from written to oral and vice versa results in changes. These changes are essentially due to the fact that writing is such a pale copy of speech in terms of expressive nuance. A good example is the song in Practical 4.2: translating for oral performance imposes constraints – and requires applications of compensation – which can be ignored if it is translated for silent reading. Whatever the text, two words of caution are needed by way of conclusion. First, it is easy for student translators to begin their strategic considerations something like this: ‘This text belongs to genre A, therefore

56


it has characteristics x, y and z.’ This is putting the cart before the horse. It is much more useful to identify the text’s characteristics first, and then, on that basis, to assign it to a genre. Of course, in many professional situations translators know in advance what genre the text will belong to. But they still have to serve an apprenticeship in mastering the particularities of that genre. In any case, many other professional translators do not get such predictable work, and have to decide what genre-features the latest text has before getting down to detailed work. This is why, at this stage, we urge students to look at the text first, decide what its defining features are, and only then allot it to a genre. This approach permits a more sensitive appraisal of the true purpose of the text. It also makes it easier to be flexible and to recognize cases where the ST actually has a blend of features – it may be predominantly typical of one genre, but also have features from other genres. So, for example, instruction manuals may vary in character between the empirical and the persuasive categories. Advertising commonly shares features with literary texts, as do religious and philosophical texts. Religious texts often share features with persuasive texts. Many legal or administrative texts – e.g. contracts, annual reports or memoranda of agreement – combine empirical and persuasive genre-features. Texts may quote from texts that belong to other genres, or may parody other genres. The second word of caution is that it is essential for translators to be familiar with the characteristic features of the TL genre or genres that they decide correspond most closely to the ST genre(s). If in doubt, examine sample texts from the chosen TL genre before the translation is started. Professional translators tend to specialize in particular fields, and one of the first things they do is acquire an awareness of relevant TL genre characteristics. Before embarking on any of the exercises in Practical 5, the student should where necessary do some of this preliminary TL genre-sampling. PRACTICAL 5 5.1 Genre and translation Assignment (i) You are translating a text for the CD booklet for a reissue of two recordings by the Berliner Philharmoniker under the great Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886–1954). The works in question are Haydn’s Symphony no. 88 in G and Schubert’s Symphony no. 9 in C, ‘The Great’. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took.

Textual genre and translation issues (iv)

57

Compare your TT with the published one (Schumann 1995), which will be given you by your tutor.

Contextual information The ST is taken from a short essay by Karl Schumann. The TT is not subject to any special constraints of length or layout. ‘Die Unvollendete’ is Schubert’s eighth symphony, ‘The Unfinished’, of which he only completed two movements. ‘D 944’ indicates that the C major symphony is no. 944 in the Deutsch index of Schubert’s works. Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957) was regarded by many as the greatest Italian conductor of his generation. ST WILHELM FURTWÄNGLERS STRAHLKRAFT

5

10

15

20

25

30

Der Musikkritiker K.H. Ruppel (1900–80) sagte 1961 in einem Gedenkwort: »Haydn war unter den Klassikern der einzige, bei dem Furtwängler sich dem gelösten Ausgleichen der Kräfte überließ, wenngleich auch da (wie im Largo und im Trio des Menuetts der Symphonie Nr.88) ein beinahe dramatisch zu nennendes Element nicht unbemerkt bleiben kann, auch wenn es sich bald wieder beschwichtigt.« »Im Largo von Nr.88 hebt und senkt sich eine Synkopenmelodie; schwer, nachdenklich, aber doch nicht ohne inneren Schwung. Sie erinnert an ein burgenländisches Volkslied: Am Sonntag auf d’ Nacht, i geh’ zu mei’m Schatz. Siebenmal erklingt das Thema, in andere Tonarten versetzt, immer reicher umgeben von Figuration und Klang. Es ist wie eine Vorahnung von Bruckners Adagio-Steigerungen. Nur nicht so wuchtig, nicht so mächtig, aber seinen Willensimpulsen nach der Brucknerschen Satzentwicklung im wesentlichen ähnlich«, erläutert der österreichische Musikologe Leopold Nowak in seiner Haydn-Biographie von 1959. Just dieses Brucknerische in Haydns Largo verwirklicht Wilhelm Furtwängler. Durchaus dem späten 19. Jahrhundert, seiner geistigen Heimat, entsprach Furtwänglers Schubert-Bild: Er überging die sechs frühen Symphonien und konzentrierte sich im wesentlichen auf die großen Orchesterwerke, die Unvollendete und die C-dur-Symphonie D 944, von der man damals noch annahm, sie sei erst in Schuberts Sterbejahr entstanden. Furtwängler dachte hier nicht anders als sein Antipode Toscanini und andere Dirigenten seiner Generation: Die große C-dur-Symphonie ist Schuberts orchestrales summum opus, die Krönung seiner Instrumentalmusik. K.H. Ruppel in seinem Gedenkwort: »Wenn es unter den großen Musikern unserer Zeit noch eine anima naturaliter tragica gab, so war es Furtwängler. Wie übermächtig er die Gewalt der dualistischen Spannung nachfühlte, weiß jeder, der es erlebt hat, wie er in einem in Sonatenform angelegten Symphoniesatz nach der Durchführung in die Reprise zurückkehrte: Das war keine Überleitung, keine Sänftigung der in der Durchführung miteinander ringenden

58

35


Kräfte, sondern ihre Zusammenraffung in einer ungeheuren dramatischen Peripetie, nach der man die Lösung im Wiedereintritt des Hauptthemas zugleich als Erlösung empfand . . . Keiner hat Schuberts große C-dur-Symphonie oder Schumanns Opus 120 so monumental, so in ihrem ‘dionysischen’ Kern erfaßt, keiner ihre rhythmischen Energien so dramatisch erlebt, in ihren Klangflächen solche Spannungen entdeckt wie er.« (Schumann 1995a: 4–5) 5.2 Genre and translation Assignment (i) You are translating the annual financial report of BASF, from which the following ST is taken. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took. (iv) Compare your TT with the published one (BASF 2004b), which will be given to you by your tutor. Contextual information The ST is taken from the ‘Lagebericht’, which precedes the ‘Jahresabschluss’ or Consolidated Financial Statement. It is part of an outline of the company’s strategy. The financial report as a whole is soberer in layout, illustration and tone than the Audi report used in Practicals 2.1 and 4.1; the company is nevertheless confident enough for its aim to be ‘auch in Zukunft das weltweit führende Unternehmen der chemischen Industrie zu sein’. ‘EBIT’ is an acronym of the English ‘earnings before interest and taxes’. ST WERTMANAGEMENT DER BASF

5

10

Die nachhaltige Steigerung des Unternehmenswertes ist unser vorrangiges Ziel. Darum messen wir unternehmerische Entscheidungen und Leistungen an den Renditeanforderungen unserer Kapitalgeber, den Kapitalkosten. Unser Anspruch ist es, eine Prämie auf die Kapitalkosten zu erwirtschaften. Ab 2004 setzen wir daher das EBIT (Ergebnis der Betriebstätigkeit vor Zinsen und Steuern) nach Kapitalkosten als zentrale Ziel- und Steuerungskennzahl für unsere Unternehmensbereiche und Geschäftseinheiten ein. Diese müssen ein EBIT von 10% auf das operative Vermögen erzielen, um den Verzinsungserwartungen der Eigen- und Fremdkapitalgeber gerecht zu werden sowie die zu entrichtenden Steuern zu decken. Bezogen auf das für 2004 geplante operative Vermögen von 28 Milliarden € entspricht dies einem von der BASF-Gruppe zu erzielenden MindestEBIT von 2,8 Milliarden €.


15

20

25

30

35

59

Der so definierte Kapitalkostensatz vor Zinsen und Steuern in Höhe von 10% entspricht einem Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) von rund 6% nach Zinsen und Steuern. Wir setzen uns damit ein ehrgeiziges Ziel. Die Berechnung von WACC ist eine international anerkannte Methode, um die Kapitalkosten eines Unternehmens zu ermitteln. Dazu werden die Renditeansprüche der Aktionäre und die Zinsen auf das Fremdkapital bestimmt und gewichtet. Die Kosten des Eigenkapitals ermitteln wir auf Basis des Marktwertes der BASF-Aktien. Eine Prämie über die Kapitalkosten können wir sowohl durch eine Verbesserung des EBIT als auch durch eine optimale Nutzung des eingesetzten Kapitals erzielen. Die Kennzahl unterstützt damit unsere Bemühungen zur Verbesserung der Kostenstrukturen, zum profitablen Wachstum und einer noch größeren Disziplin beim Kapitaleinsatz. Verankerung des Wertmanagements in den Zielvereinbarungen Konsequenterweise nutzen wir den Wertschaffungsindikator EBIT nach Kapitalkosten auch als Basis der erfolgsabhängigen Managementvergütung. Der Vorstand gibt im Rahmen der operativen Planung diese Zielgröße für die gesamte BASF-Gruppe sowie daraus abgeleitet für die einzelnen Unternehmensbereiche und Geschäftseinheiten vor. Die Zielerreichung bestimmt dabei entscheidend die variable Vergütung. Für unsere Mitarbeiter, zum Beispiel in Produktion, Marketing, Vertrieb und Supply-Chain-Management, haben wir darüber hinaus ein Kennzahlensystem entwickelt, das es ihnen ermöglicht, ihren persönlichen Beitrag zur Wertsteigerung zu erkennen und dementsprechend zu handeln. Durch ein verbessertes Wertmanagement wird unternehmerisches Denken auf allen Ebenen der BASF gefördert. (BASF 2004a: 19) 5.3 Genre and translation Assignment (i) You are translating a number of pages from a website called ‘Rennsteigportal’ that aims to encourage tourist interest in the central/eastern German state of Thüringen and specifically in the hills of the Rennsteig region. The point of the translation is to attract some of the English-speaking visitors for whom Germany means little more than Bavaria and the Rhine Valley. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the text, or part of it, into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail that you took. (iv) Compare your TT with a sample one, which will be given to you by your tutor.

60


Contextual information The ST was evidently commissioned for release soon after the tunnel’s official opening in July 2003, and for the purposes of the exercise it should be assumed that the translation was to appear at the same time. The ST page appeared with three photographs (two showing the opening) and a table of facts and figures considerably amplifying the ‘Zahlen und Fakten’ section of the ST – but without a map. The website’s other pages are of general tourist interest: local history, events, scenery, etc. The Rennsteig itself is a long-established ridgeway path for walkers and cyclists. Flössgraben (sic) and Kehltal are local placenames. The ST has – apart from the missed umlaut – various minor misprints and errors. ST

5

10

15

20

25

30

Der Rennsteigtunnel Am 05.07.2003 wurde innerhalb eines grossen Volksfestes, Deutschlands grösster Autobahntunnel – der Rennsteigtunnel – mit einer Gesamtlänge von 7916m eröffnet und seiner Bestimmung übergeben. Kurz vor 11.00 Uhr landetet Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder vor dem Nordportal des Rennsteigtunnels und durchfuhr mit einer Limousine den Rennsteigtunnel. Auf der anderen Seite angekommen hielt er seine Rede und durchschnitt mit Staatssekretärin Iris Gleike und Thüringens Ministerpräsident Dieter Althaus das Eröffnungsband. Ab 12.00 Uhr strömten nach Angaben der Polizei von beiden Seiten ca. 30.000 Menschen von beiden Seiten zu Fuss, per Rad oder Inline-Skatern durch den Tunnel. Den ganzen Tag über riss der Besucherstrom nicht ab. Insgesamt waren an diesem Tag über 100.000 Menschen am Rennsteigtunnel auf den Beinen um dieses einmalige Ereignis zu feiern und sich das Jahrhundertbauwerk in Ruhe anzuschauen. Zahlen und Fakten Im Zuge der Tunneleröffnung wurde ein 16,5 Kilometer langer Autobahnabschnitt der A71 zwischen Ilmenau/West und Oberhof/Zella-Mehlis fertiggestellt. Damit ist die Autobahn auf einer Länge von 83 Kilometern zwischen Erfurt und Meiningen durchgehend befahrbar. Die Gesamtbaukosten beziffern sich auf ca. 250 Mio. Euro. Davon wurden ca. 50 Mio Euro nur für Sicherheitstechnik ausgegeben. Beide Tunnelröhren werden vollelektronisch überwacht. Damit ist der Rennsteigtunnel einer der sichersten Tunnel der Welt. Beide Röhren werden durch Schächte ständig mit Frischluft versorgt. Hierfür wurden eigens zwei Luftaustauschzentralen erbaut. Die beiden Luftaustauschzentrallen heissen ‘LAZ Flossgraben’ und ‘LAZ Kehltal’. Die ‘LAZ Flossgraben’ hat einen Zuluftstollen von 135m Länge. Die ‘LAZ Kehltal’ hat einen Zuluftstollen von 129m Länge. Die beiden Luftaustauschzentralen teilen den Rennsteigtunnel in 3 Lüftungsabschitte von ca. 2.5km. Die Längslüftung in diesen Abschitten erfolgt jeweils durch Stahlventilatoren (30 Einheiten pro Röhre). In jeder Luftaustauschzentrale


35

40

61

wird die Tunnelluft mit 4 Axialventilatoren abgesaugt und über einen Abluftkamin von jeweils 6,2m Durchmesser ausgeblasen. Die Tunnelröhren sind mit jeweils 2 Fahrspuren ausgestattet und sind alle 350m durch Querstollen verbunden. Dadurch ergeben sich 25 unterirdische Fluchtwege. Der Rennsteigtunnel ist eine technische Meisterleistung und besticht noch über ein beeindruckendes Merkmal. In Nähe des Bahnhofes Oberhof überquert er den ca. 120 Jahre alten zweigleisigen Eisenbahntunnel ‘Brandleitetunnel’, welcher bis heute in Betrieb ist. Beim Bau des Rennsteigtunnels wurde dieser Tunnel nicht bautechnisch verstärkt oder verändert. Er wurde lediglich beim Sprengen messtechnisch überwacht. Zwischen dem Ausbau des Eisenbahntunnels und der Sohle des Rennsteigtunnels liegen nur ca. 6-7m Gebirgsfeste. (Rennsteigportal 2005) 5.4 Genre and translation Assignment (i) You have been commissioned to produce a new translation of Katz und Maus (1961), the novella by Günter Grass from which the following ST is taken. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took. (iv) Compare your TT with the published one (Grass 1966), which will be given to you by your tutor. Contextual information The narrator is a pupil at a boys’ secondary school in Danzig during the Second World War. A former pupil of the school, now a U-boat captain, has come to give a talk about his war experiences. Pupils from the top two classes of the local girls’ school have also been invited to the talk. The submariner wears a medal at his throat, which is actually more often referred to as e.g. ‘das Ding am Hals’ than as an ‘Orden’. The ‘Sprechmund’, insisted on (six mentions) as the narrator sets the scene, appears to be an authorial alienating device drawing attention to the artificiality of the language that is put in the Kapitänleutnant’s mouth. ‘Wabos’ are ‘Wasserbomben’. ST Es füllte jener Kapitänleutnant mit dem hochgestochenen Ding am Hals seinen Vortrag, obgleich er zweihundertfünfzigtausend Bruttoregistertonnen, einen leichten Kreuzer der Despatch-Klasse, einen großen Zerstörer der Tribal-Klasse angebohrt hatte, weniger mit detaillierten

62 5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45


Erfolgsmeldungen als mit wortreichen Naturbeschreibungen, auch bemühte er kühne Vergleiche, sagte: ». . . blendend weiß schäumt auf die Hecksee, folgt, eine kostbar wallende Spitzenschleppe, dem Boot, das gleich einer festlich geschmückten Braut, übersprüht von Gischtschleiern, der todbringenden Hochzeit entgegenzieht.« Es gab nicht nur bei den Mädchen mit Zöpfen Gekicher; aber ein nächster Vergleich wischte die Braut wieder aus: »Solch ein Unterseeboot ist wie ein Walfisch mit Buckel, dessen Bugsee dem vielfach gezwirbelten Bart eines Husaren gleicht.« [. . .] Peinlich wurde es, wenn er Sonnenuntergänge auszupinseln begann: »Und bevor die atlantische Nacht wie ein aus Raben gezaubertes Tuch über uns kommt, stufen sich Farben, wie wir sie nie zu Hause, ein Orange geht auf, fleischig und widernatürlich, dann duftig schwerelos, an den Rändern kostbar, wie auf den Bildern Alter Meister, dazwischen zartgefiedertes Gewölk; welch ein fremdartiges Geleucht über der blutvoll rollenden See!« Er ließ also mit steifem Ding am Hals eine Farbenorgel dröhnen und säuseln, kam vom wäßrigen Blau über kaltglasiertes Zitronengelb zum bräunlichen Purpur. Mohn ging bei ihm am Himmel auf. Dazwischen Wölkchen, zuerst silbrig, dann liefen sie an: »So mögen Vögel und Engel verbluten!« sagte er wörtlich mit seinem Sprechmund, und ließ aus dem gewagt beschriebenen Naturereignis plötzlich und aus bukolischen Wölkchen ein Flugboot, Typ »Sunderland«, mit Kurs auf das Boot brummen, eröffnete, nachdem das Flugboot nichts hatte ausrichten können, mit gleichem Sprechmund aber ohne Vergleiche, den zweiten Teil des Vortrages, knapp trocken nebensächlich: »Sitze auf Sehrohrsattel. Angriff gefahren. Kühlschiff wahrscheinlich: sinkt übers Heck. Boot in den Keller auf hundertzehn. Zerstörer kommt auf in hundertsiebzig Bootspeilung, Backbord zehn, neuer Kurs hundertzwanzig, hundertzwanzig Grad liegen an, Schraubengeräusch wandert aus, geht wieder an, hundertachtzig Grad gehen durch, Wabos: sechs sieben acht elf: Licht bleibt aus, endlich Notbeleuchtung und nacheinander Klarmeldung der Stationen. Zerstörer hat gestoppt. Letzte Peilung hundertsechzig, Backbord zehn. Neuer Kurs fünfundvierzig Grad . . .« Leider folgten dieser wirklich spannenden Einlage sogleich weitere Naturbeschreibungen, wie : »Der atlantische Winter«, oder: »Meeresleuchten auf dem Mittelmeer«, auch ein Stimmungsbild: »Weihnachten auf dem U-Boot« mit dem obligaten zum Christbaum verwandelten Besen. Zum Schluß dichtete er die ins Mystische gehobene Rückkehr nach erfolgreicher Feindfahrt mit Odysseus und allem Drum und Dran: »Die ersten Möwen künden den Hafen an.« (Grass 1995: 78–80)

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

The formal properties of texts: Introduction The threat of translation loss is perhaps most immediately obvious when the translator confronts general issues of cultural transfer (cf. Chapter 3). But the biggest threat is actually posed by the ST’s formal properties. In Chapters 6–8 we shall look at these on six discrete levels. In any text, there are many points where it could have been different in sound, spelling, intonation, punctuation, word order, etc. – compare ‘cutting time for tea roses’ with ‘rutting time for tea cosies’, ‘What rubbish!’ with ‘What rubbish?’, ‘She’s not happy’ with ‘Happy she’s not’, ‘I was bored. I went out’ with ‘I was bored, so I went out’, etc. We shall call these points of detail – points where a text could have been different, i.e. a different text – textual variables. Looking at textual variables on a series of discrete levels makes it easier to see which are important in the ST and which are less important. As we have seen, all ST features inevitably fall prey to translation loss in some respect or other. Even if the TT conveys literal meaning exactly, there will at the very least be phonic loss, and probably also loss in terms of grammar, sentence structure, connotations, etc. It is helpful in forming a translation strategy to decide in broad terms which categories of textual variables are indispensable in a given ST, and which can be ignored. And of course the adequacy of a putative TT can be assessed in the same way. The six levels are hierarchically arranged, in the sense that each level is built on top of the preceding one. This does not mean that features on a ‘higher’ level are by definition more important than those on a ‘lower’ level: textual features on a given level always have their effect in relation to features on the other levels, and their relative importance varies from text to text or even utterance to utterance. We shall work our way up through the levels, from phonic details to intertextual questions, showing what kinds of variable can be found on each, and how they may function in a text. Together, the six levels constitute part of a checklist of questions

64


that the translator can ask of an ST, in order to determine what levels and properties are important in it and most need to be respected in the TT. This does not imply a plodding or piecemeal approach to translation: applying the checklist quickly becomes automatic and very effective. (For the whole checklist, see p. 5.)

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

6 The formal properties of texts: Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues in translation THE PHONIC/GRAPHIC LEVEL Taking a text on the phonic/graphic level means looking at it as a sequence of sound-segments (or phonemes), or as a sequence of letters (or graphemes), or as both. Oral texts are normally only looked at in phonic terms. Even written texts may need to be looked at in phonic terms as well – in fact, translators consider them more often phonically than graphically. Phonemes and graphemes are on the same level of textual variables. To help keep this in mind, we shall normally refer to the ‘phonic/graphic level’, whether the text is oral or written. Generally, listeners and readers take little notice of the sounds or shapes of what they hear and read, paying attention primarily to the message of the utterance. The sounds and shapes are usually irrelevant to the message. Often, however, repetition of sounds does have an expressive function, so it is useful to have terms in which to analyse it. Repetition of sounds in words can generally be classified as either alliteration or assonance. Alliteration is the recurrence of the same sound or sound-cluster at the beginning of words occurring next to or near one another, as in ‘two tired toads’, ‘clever kleptomaniacs’ or ‘all awful ornithologists’. Assonance is the recurrence, within words occurring next to or near one another, of the same sound or sound-cluster, as in ‘a great day’s painting’ or ‘a swift snifter afterwards’. Alliteration and assonance often occur together, as in ‘Testwork has been carried out on screenbowl centrifuges dewatering froth-floated coal’. Terminal sounds that are the same, but are not strictly speaking rhyme, are conveniently defined as

66


assonance; so the five [z] sounds in the following are most simply described as assonance: ‘dazzling harmonies of bells and xylophones’. Note that it is the sound, not the spelling, that counts in discussing alliteration and assonance. The more technical or purely informative the text, the less account is taken of repetitions or other sound patterns, because they rarely have any thematic or expressive function. That is true of the sentence about screenbowl centrifuges (from an engineering text): the alliteration and assonance are incidental to the message. However, many texts are marked by the expressive use of phonic patterns, including rhyme. We shall say that two words rhyme where the last stressed vowel, and all the sounds that follow it, are identical and come in the same order, as in ‘bream/seem’, ‘Warwick/euphoric’, ‘incidentally/mentally’, ‘faul/Maul’, ‘Rede/Fehde’, ‘Sterblichen/verderblichen’. The less purely factual the text, the more likely it is that alliteration, assonance and rhyme will be exploited. The most obvious example is poetry. But they are also often exploited in fiction, drama, journalism, advertising, polemic, etc: on the phonic/graphic level, the only difference between poetry and many other genres is one of degree. What are the implications of these observations for translators? As always, the translator must be guided by the purpose of the ST, the purpose of the TT and the function of the feature in its context. The use of phonic echoes and affinities for thematic and expressive purposes is sometimes called sound-symbolism. It takes two main forms. In the context, the sounds of given words may evoke other words that are not present in the text. Or the sound of a given word occurs in one or more others, and sets up a link between the words, conferring on each of them connotations of the other(s). The first two lines of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ offer examples of both: ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun’ (Keats 1958: 273). The context is crucial. Given the title of the poem and the reference to fruitfulness, ‘mellow’ is almost sure to evoke ‘yellow’, a colour of fruit and autumn leaves. In its turn, the ‘sun’ is likely to be a rich yellow, glowing like a ripe fruit through the autumn haze. These two effects ensure that the ‘mists’ are received positively by the reader/listener, and not as damp and grey. The alliteration in ‘mists . . . mellow . . . maturing’ reinforces the effect, and also gives ‘maturing’ an intransitive sense as well as its transitive one: the sun itself is growing mature as the year advances. If the sun is maturing, it may well be low in the sky; if so, it looks larger when seen through mist, like a swelling fruit. The [m] in ‘bosom’ links this word, too, with the other three; so the mellow fruits are perhaps reminiscent of milk-filled breasts, as if the season, sun and earth affectionately unite in maternal bountifulness. This suggestion is itself reinforced by the alliteration and assonance in ‘fruitfulness . . . friend’, and by the repeated alliteration and assonance on [s], which associates all these key words still more closely with one another.

Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

67

Not many translators earn their living translating poetry. But in respect of sound-symbolism poetry offers very clear examples of two vital factors that all translators do need to bear in mind. The Keats example is useful for this very reason. Practically none of the images and associations derive from literal meaning alone. All are reinforced, or even created, by phonic features. This points to the first factor that needs to be remembered: unlike many other sorts of symbol, features treated as ‘sound-symbolism’ do not have a single, unchanging meaning. In fact, none of the phonic features in the lines from Keats has any intrinsic meaning or expressive power. Such expressiveness as they have derives from the context – and that is the second vital factor. In a different context, the same features would have a different effect. The sounds of the words have their effect in terms of the literal and connotative meanings of the words. Without the title, ‘mellow’ might well not evoke ‘yellow’. And there is nothing intrinsically mellow, maternal or mature about the sound [m]: the smell in a pig-yard might be described as ‘the mingling miasmata from the slime and muck’. To take a German example, the sound [v] does not in itself suggest subtle light and sound phenomena in Nature, nor a terrifying, chaotic maelstrom just off a rocky coast. Yet, with the help of a certain alliterative insistence, of rhythmical effects, and of context, it does suggest the first of these in Mörike’s lines in ‘Gesang zu zweien in der Nacht’: Vernehm ich doch die wunderbarsten Stimmen, Vom lauen Wind wollüstig hingeschleift, Indes, mit ungewissem Licht gestreift, Der Himmel selber scheinet hinzuschwimmen. (Mörike 1975: 58) And it carries the other connotations, of Nature at its most violent, in Schiller’s sea description in ‘Der Taucher’: ‘Und es wallet und siedet und brauset und zischt, / Wie wenn Wasser mit Feuer sich mengt’ (Schiller 1987: 369). In both these cases, [v] draws most of its suggestive power from two things: first, the literal and connotative meanings of the words it occurs in and the words associated with them in the context; and second, other phonic qualities of those groups of words, notably assonance. Clearly, before starting to translate, a translator confronted with soundsymbolism has to decide how it is produced, what its function is, and how it relates to the purpose of the text. The aim will be to convey as much of the ST message as possible. Even if it is essential to this message that the TT include sound-symbolism, it is almost certain that the TL sounds involved will be different from the ST ones: trying to reproduce phonic patterns in the TT usually entails too much loss in respect of literal and connotative meaning. The translator’s question therefore has to be: is it the specific sounds in the ST’s alliteration, assonance, etc. that matter, or is it rather the fact that there is alliteration, assonance, etc.? It should also

68


be borne in mind that poets sometimes use words musically rather than suggestively, in which case sound-symbolism does not come into it. Fortunately, the specific sounds are rarely the crucial factor, and it is usually possible to compensate for the loss of given ST phonic details by replacing them with TL ones that are different but have a comparable effect. The translator is only likely to want to replicate ST sounds when they are onomatopoeic. An onomatopoeia is a word whose phonic form imitates a sound – ‘splosh’, ‘bang’, ‘cuckoo’, etc. In translating onomatopoeia, there will virtually always be some phonic translation loss. This is usually inconsequential, as for instance in translating ‘patsch’ by ‘splash’. It can be more significant if, as often happens, the ST onomatopoeic word does not have a one-to-one TL counterpart. The translator’s job is to choose the best term for the context, as in this extract from the bilingual user manual for a refrigerator:

5

10

15

20

25

ST Das Brummen kommt vom Motor (Kompressor). Es kann kurzfristig etwas lauter werden, wenn sich der Motor einschaltet. Das Blubbern, Gurgeln oder Surren kommt vom Kältemittel, das durch die Rohre fließt. Das Klicken ist immer dann zu hören, wenn der Thermostat den Motor ein- oder ausschaltet. Knackgeräusche können auftreten, wenn . . . – die automatische Abtauung erfolgt – sich das Gerät abkühlt bzw. erwärmt (Materialausdehnungen) Bei einem Mehrzonen- oder Nofrost-Gerät kann ein leises Rauschen von der Luftströmung im Geräte-Innenraum herrühren. (Bosch n.d.: 15)

TT The humming noise [cf. buzz, growl, drone, mutter] is emitted by the motor (compressor). When the motor switches ON, the noise may briefly increase in volume. The bubbling [cf. muttering, mumbling], gurgling [cf. gargling] or whirring [cp. humming] noise is emitted by the refrigerant as it flows through the pipes. The clicking noise can always be heard when the thermostat switches ON/OFF the motor. Cracking [cf. creaking, crackling] sounds may occur if ... – the automatic defrosting is operating. – the appliance is cooling down or warming up (material expansion). A multi-zone or No-Frost appliance may cause a low hissing [cf. rushing, rustling, swishing, roaring] noise emitted by the air flow inside the appliance. (Bosch n.d.: 28)


69

As for rhyme, similar considerations apply as to alliteration and assonance. Only very rarely will it be desirable or possible to use the ST rhyme sounds in the TT. In fact, there can be no hard and fast rule regarding rhyme in translation. Each TT requires its own strategic decision. Often, producing a rhyming TT means an unacceptable sacrifice of literal and connotative meaning, and it is best not to try. Translators often compensate for this loss by using different sorts of recurrent sound, such as assonance, alliteration or half-rhymes, and perhaps gratefully accepting the odd true rhyme if it presents itself and is not inappropriate. With some sorts of ST (especially comic or sarcastic ones), where the precise nuances of meaning are less important than the phonic mockery, it is often easier, and even desirable, to stock the TT with rhymes and echoes that are different from those of the ST, and perhaps differently distributed, but have a similar effect. Our examples have concerned the sounds of words, because the shapes are less commonly a source of textual effects. However, written texts often do depend to some extent on their visual layout. Advertisements, magazines, publicity material and websites often use visual effects on the phonic/graphic level, ranging from using different typefaces to fitting text round pictures or arranging it in significant shapes. Such effects can lead to problems of layout if the TT takes up more space than the ST, or uses short words where the ST has long ones, etc. Practical 4.1 raised this issue. THE PROSODIC LEVEL The prosodic level comprises three things. The first is stress (or accentuation or voice stress) – that is, the emphasis given to certain syllables by speaking them more loudly than surrounding ones. In English and German, in any word of more than one syllable, more loudness or emphasis is conventionally given to one of the syllables than to the other(s). Thus, in ‘loudness’, the first syllable bears greater stress than the second; and in ‘conventionally’, the second syllable is more stressed than the others. On top of this standard accentuation, voice stress can be used for greater expressiveness or clarity. For example, if the person you are speaking to mishears ‘somebody’ as ‘some buddy’, you will very likely repeat it with special stress on the second syllable – ‘somebody’ instead of the usual ‘somebody’. The second feature on the prosodic level is intonation – that is, the variations in vowel pitch and voice modulation that make up the ‘melody’ of an utterance. Intonation is often crucial in determining what the speaker is intending to communicate: compare the melodic pattern in the question ‘You’re not coming in?’ with the very different one when the statement ‘You’re not coming in’ is intended as an instruction. Naturally, voice stress is also different in these two sentences. As this example suggests,

70


stress and intonation always function together in any spoken utterance, along with the third prosodic feature, namely the speed of vocal delivery. Like stress and intonation, speed of delivery varies for expressiveness or clarity. In texts not meant to be read aloud, prosodic patterns are unlikely to have much textual importance. However, in texts intended for oral performance, such as speeches, plays, poetry or songs, prosodic features can be very important in creating moods and reinforcing themes. This is sometimes even true in literary narrative not intended for reading aloud: insistent prosodic patterns may draw attention to themselves and acquire expressive force. In texts where prosodic effects do play an important role, the translator may have to pay special attention to the prosodic level of the TT. Occasionally, it is worth aiming for similar rhythms in the TT to those of the ST. For instance, if part of the ST’s expressive effect stems from imitative rhythms – galloping horses, breaking waves, dripping water, etc. – there would be significant translation loss on the prosodic level if the TT failed to use similar rhythms to similar effect. Prosodic translation loss often arises from a failure to heed the nature and function of ST intonation and stress. This is relatively straightforward in the case of oral texts. Even in written texts, the intonation and its communicative purpose will usually be shown by the grammatical structure, the context, or, very often, modal particles. Take the following two sentences: Er spricht auch perfekt Französisch [e.g. as well as excellent Spanish]. Auch er spricht perfekt Französisch [e.g. like a rival for the job]. Neither of these sentences is remotely ambiguous. In each, the grammatical structure engenders a specific prosodic profile – intonation and stress pattern – and a specific meaning. This implies that the translator will normally select an intonation and a stress pattern that give the TT sentence the same communicative purpose as the ST one. If the genre or style of the TT precludes using italics to mark the stress, a judicious comma or cohesion marker may do the trick. Here, for discussion, are some possible written renderings of the two sentences: ST Er spricht auch perfekt Französisch.

TT He speaks perfect French as well. He speaks perfect French as well. He speaks perfect French, as well. And he also speaks perfect French.

Auch er spricht perfekt Französisch. He speaks perfect French too. He speaks perfect French too. He too speaks perfect French.


71

German modal particles are extremely important indicators of the tone or drift of a given utterance. They can put a disarming spin on a potentially tactless question – or add needle to a neutral remark. With almost no English modal particles to deploy, a written TT has to rely on prosodic means and/or grammatical restructuring to convey the nuance carried in a German ST by the modal particle. Detailed examples and discussion will be found in Chapter 14, but a brief illustration can be provided here by the two sentences ‘Fahr doch selber hin!’ and ‘Fahr doch mal selber hin!’. Possible renderings of the first one (for discussion) might include ‘Why don’t you go yourself?’, ‘Why not go yourself?’, ‘Go yourself!’, and ‘You go!’. The second sentence needs to be nuanced differently. In each case, to safeguard the communicative purpose of the ST sentence, the translator has to select an appropriate TL intonation and stress pattern, using one or more of the available linguistic ploys such as italics, punctuation, grammatical transposition or idiomizing translation. Although they are on the ‘lowest’ level in our hierarchy of textual variables, phonic/graphic and prosodic features can be as significant as any other – as the texts in Practical 6 will confirm. PRACTICAL 6 6.1 Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues Assignment (i) You have been commissioned to translate the booklet accompanying a CD of woodland sounds in springtime, from which the following ST is taken. With special reference to phonic/graphic features, but not overlooking other major issues, discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate lines 17–52 of the text (i.e. from ‘Vorfrühling im Auwald’ to the end) into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took. (iv) Compare your TT with the published one, which will be given to you by your tutor. Contextual information The ST reproduces the sleeve notes to recordings made in the March valley, on the Austrian-Slovakian border. Obvious misprints in the original have been corrected here. In this text, it is as important to give the birds their correct names as to render their calls accurately. So you will probably find it useful to consult either an ornithologist or a good bird book, such as the Collins Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, by R. Peterson, G. Mountfort and P.A.D. Hollom.

72


ST AUWALD

5

10

15

In die klangliche Wunderwelt des Auwaldes, der Marchauen im Frühling, sollen diese Naturhörbilder einführen und einen kleinen Eindruck von der klanglichen Vielfalt des Auwaldes vermitteln. Das Anhören möge Freude und Entspannung bereiten, Erinnerungen wachrufen oder auch zu eigenen Beobachtungen anregen. Diese Aufnahmen sollen aber vor allem zu mehr Verständnis für den Schutz und die Erhaltung unserer letzten Aulandschaften in Mitteleuropa beitragen. Auch eine noch so gute Aufnahmetechnik (DIGITAL) und entsprechende Wiedergabe zu Hause kann nicht das eigene Naturerlebnis draußen in der Au ersetzen. Charakteristisch für die Auen – meist Laubwälder im zeitweisen Überschwemmungsgebiet der Flüsse – ist die besonders vielfältige und reiche Tier- und Pflanzenwelt. Wie jede Landschaft ihr ganz eigenes Klangbild besitzt, unterscheidet sich das des Auwaldes doch recht erheblich von dem eines Mittelgebirgsoder gar Bergwaldes. Vorfrühling im Auwald (April)

20

25

30

35

Nacht / Waldesrauschen Ein kalter Wind weht durch die kahlen Äste der alten, knorrigen Bäume. Das Vorfrühlingshochwasser der March, das weite Teile des Auwaldes bedeckt, ist noch nicht zurückgegangen. Waldkäuze (Strix aluco) rufen, das Männchen „hu . . . u . . . uuuuh“, das Weibchen antwortet später mit „kiuwitt . . . kiuwitt . . .“. Äste knarren, Graureiher (Ardea cinerea) schreien „kraiik . . .“ und leise hört man wiederholt eine Erdkröte (Bufo bufo) „oäck . . . oäck . . .“ rufen. Enten wassern, Weißstörche (Ciconia ciconia) fauchen und klappern in ihren Baumnestern. Morgendliches Vogelkonzert Der Wind hat nachgelassen, auch wird es langsam wärmer. Enten wassern, ein Fuchs (Vulpes vulpes) schnürt vorbei, ein junger Waldkauz bettelt leise „szieh . . . szieh . . .“, ein Stockenten-Weibchen (Anas platyrhynchos) warnt laut quäkend. Mit dem Gesang des Rotkehlchens (Erithacus rubecula) beginnt das morgendliche Vogelkonzert, das immer lauter und vielfältiger wird. Der Reihe nach (Auswahl) sind zu hören: Waldkauz, Rotkehlchen, Fasan (Phasianus colchicus), Singdrossel (Turdus philomelos), Turmfalken (Falco tinnunculus) lahnen: „wrii . . . wrii . . .“ und „kji-kji-kjii . . .“, Störche klappern, ein Reh (Capreolus capreolus) wechselt vorbei, Blaumeise (Parus caeruleus) singt: „ti-ti-ti-tirrrr . . .“, Kohlmeise (Parus major) singt: „zi-zi-peh . . .“, Haushahn, Kuckuck (Cuculus canorus), Stare (Sturnus vulgaris) zwitschern, Ringeltauben

Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues 40

45

50

73

(Columba palumbus) rufen: „gugu-gug-hu-huuuuhu-hug . . .“, Rabenkrähen (Corvus corone), Zilpzalp (Phylloscopus collybita), Kleiber (Sitta europaea), Mittelspecht (Picoides medius) „kixt“, Kleinspecht (Picoides minor) trommelt, Dohlen (Corvus monedula), ein Mittelspecht quäkt und das Flügelklatschen der Ringeltauben beim Ausdrucksflug ist deutlich zu hören. Tag / Mittelspecht und Schwarzspecht Ein Mittelspecht „quäkt“ recht laut, ein Buntspecht (Picoides major) trommelt, Dohlen rufen, Buchfink (Fringilla coelebs), Ringeltaube, Kohlmeise und Zilpzalp sind zu hören und mit „kijack . . . kijack . . .“ Rufen löst ein Schwarzspecht-Männchen (Dryocopus martius) sein in der Bruthöhle demonstrativ klopfendes Weibchen ab, das dann mit wuchtigen Flügelschlägen die Nisthöhle verläßt. (Tilgner 1988) 6.2 Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues Assignment (i) The following advertisement having proved successful in Germany, you are to translate it for a TL campaign. Concentrating mainly on phonic/graphic features and their implications, discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took, paying special attention to graphic issues. Contextual information The advertisement was one of a series which appeared in Germany in the late 1990s. Similar advertisements appeared in other European countries at the same time. It took the form of a two-page spread in a magazine. The ST was printed on the right-hand page, opposite an illustration comprising fourteen different ‘Open’ signs in fourteen different styles and languages, reflecting the worldwide diversity of the markets IBM offers access to.

74


ST

Jetzt können Sie Ihre Pläne für neue Vertriebswege einen Moment beiseite legen. Denn diese Überlegung wird Ihnen auf den ersten Blick einleuchten: Ihre Produkte könnten schnell

in aller Welt

Käufer finden, wäre da nicht der immense Aufwand für eine weltweite 5

Vertriebsorganisation. Die Alternative heißt Internet. So können Sie jetzt

Läden eröffnen, wo immer dieses Netz hinreicht. Mit den neuen IBM Lösungen für den Online-Handel sind Sie bei Millionen von Internet-Benutzern präsent,

ohne dass Ihnen die Kosten davonlaufen.

Damit können Sie sogar das Kaufverhalten analysieren, Trends aufspüren, 10

und aktuelle Preise und Angebote gehen im Handumdrehen

an alle

Welt. Dabei ist für die nötige Sicherheit z.B. bei Kreditgeschäften ebenfalls gesorgt. So als wären Sie selbst vor Ort – nur eben ohne einen

Miete zu zahlen.

einzigen Pfennig Laden-

(IBM Deutschland c.1996)

6.3 Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues Assignment (i) For a tour of the United Kingdom, the singer Nena wants to sing an English version of her vintage hit ‘99 Luftballons’, and you have been commissioned to do the translation. Listen first to the song, without following the printed text. Treating it as an oral text, discuss its genre, content and impact. (ii) Examine the words of the song, and discuss its salient features as a written text. (iii) Listen to the song again, following it on the printed text, and discuss the relation between the words and the music. (iv) Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (v) Produce a translation of the text that can be sung to the original music. (vi) Explain the main decisions of detail you took.

Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 4 8 9 8

12

16

20

24

28

75

Contextual information The song dates from 1984. (This download has obvious errors in lines 8, 30, 31.) You may hear slight discrepancies between the printed words and those actually sung: one of your decisions will be what to do about these. Nena did actually record an English version of the song; however, resist the temptation to track this down – you will be given a copy by your tutor to compare with your own version. Note: To do this exercise, you do not need to be a musician at all. It is enough just to listen to the song two or three times, marking on the text where the strong beats come. The melody is simple and easy to remember. Fitting a TT to the music and rhythm is quite straightforward. ST Hast du etwas Zeit für mich Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich Von 99 Luftballons Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont Denkst du vielleicht g’rad an mich Singe ich ein Lied für dich Von 99 Luftballons Und das sowas von sowas kommt 99 Luftballons Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont Hielt man für Ufos aus dem All Darum schickte ein General ’Ne Fliegerstaffel hinterher Alarm zu geben wenn’s so wär Dabei war’n dort am Horizont Nur 99 Luftballons 99 Düsenflieger Jeder war ein grosser Krieger Hielten sich für Captain Kirk Das gab ein grosses Feuerwerk Die Nachbarn haben nichts gerafft Und fühlten sich gleich angemacht Dabei schoss man am Horizont Auf 99 Luftballons 99 Kriegsminister Streichholz und Benzinkanister Hielten sich für schlaue Leute Witterten schon fette Beute Riefen: Krieg und wollten Macht Man wer hätte das gedacht

76

32


Das es einmal soweit kommt Wegen 99 Luftballons Wegen 99 Luftballons 99 Luftballons

36

40

99 Jahre Krieg Liessen keinen Platz für Sieger Kriegsminister gibt’s nicht mehr Und auch keine Düsenflieger Heute zieh ich meine Runden Seh’ die Welt in Trümmern liegen Hab’ ’nen Luftballon gefunden Denk’ an dich und lass’ ihn fliegen (Nena 2005) 6.4 Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues Assignment (i) You are translating a number of texts for an evening of performances to celebrate the work of the Marxist writer Bertolt Brecht, who, as well as being a widely discussed dramatist and dramatic theorist, was also an incisive lyric poet. As well as extracts from plays, the programme includes songs and poems, including the ST printed below. The ST is closely modelled on a familiar hymn (see Contextual information). With particular reference to phonic/graphic and prosodic issues (but not overlooking other major decisions), discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Produce an English translation of the text that is close enough rhythmically to the ST to be singable to the same tune. Even if you do not know the usual tune, the text has characteristic rhythmical features that are not hard to match in English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took; pay special attention to phonic/graphic and prosodic issues, but do not overlook other major decisions. Contextual information ‘Großer Dankchoral’ (first published 1927) is a satirical pastiche of a wellknown hymn by Joachim Neander (1650–80). The English version of the hymn, ‘Praise to the LORD, the Almighty, the King of creation’, is just as well-known to Christians in Britain. You may find it useful to consult the original hymn in determining the nature and function of the ST. We have modified the punctuation but not the spelling.

Phonic/graphic and prosodic issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 4 5 6 7 8 8 9

77

Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren / Meine geliebete Seele, das ist mein Begehren / Kommet zu Hauff / Psalter und Harfe, wach’t auff / Lasset die Musicam hören. Lobe den Herren, der alles so herrlich regieret / Der dich auff Adelers Fittichen sicher geführet, / Der dich erhält, / Wie es dir selber gefällt / Hast du nicht dieses verspühret? Lobe den Herren, der künstlich und fein dich bereitet, / Der dir Gesundheit verliehen, dich freundlich geleitet / In wie viel Noht / Hat nicht der gnädige Gott / Über dir Flügel gebreitet. Lobe den Herren, der deinen Stand sichtbar gesegnet / Der aus dem Himmel mit Ströhmen der Liebe geregnet! / Dencke daran, / Was der Allmächtige kan, / Der dir mit Liebe begegnet. Lobe den Herren was in mir ist, lobe den Namen! / Alles was Othem hat lobe mit Abrahams Saamen / Er ist dein Licht; / Seele vergiß es ja nicht, / Lobende, schließe mit Amen! (Neander 1937: 230–1) ST GROSSER DANKCHORAL Lobet die Nacht und die Finsternis, die euch umfangen! Kommet zuhauf Schaut in den Himmel hinauf: Schon ist der Tag euch vergangen. Lobet das Gras und die Tiere, die neben euch leben und sterben! Sehet, wie ihr Lebet das Gras und das Tier Und es muß auch mit euch sterben.

12

Lobet den Baum, der aus Aas aufwächst jauchzend zum Himmel! Lobet das Aas Lobet den Baum, der es fraß Aber auch lobet den Himmel.

16

Lobet von Herzen das schlechte Gedächtnis des Himmels! Und daß er nicht Weiß euren Nam noch Gesicht Niemand weiß, daß ihr noch da seid.

20

Lobet die Kälte, die Finsternis und das Verderben! Schauet hinan: Es kommet nicht auf euch an Und ihr könnt unbesorgt sterben. (Brecht 1988: 77)

7 The formal properties of texts: Grammatical and sentential issues in translation We saw in Chapter 6 that the alliteration and assonance of ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ trigger effects over and above the literal meaning of this phrase. We were considering the alliteration and assonance as features on the phonic/graphic level. But, like all utterances, this one can also be considered on the other five levels of textual variables. The extra meanings, for instance, are features on the grammatical level, while part of the effect of Keats’s phrase derives from features on the sentential level. These are the levels we look at in the present chapter. THE GRAMMATICAL LEVEL There are two features on the grammatical level: (1) words, and their formation by affixation, inflection, derivation and compounding; (2) syntax, the arrangement of words into phrases and sentences. Translation loss on this level is very common, so we shall only give a few examples here. The course as a whole yields scores more, and Chapters 14–16 will be devoted to three areas in which grammatical and sentential translation loss is particularly frequent. Words Everybody is familiar with dictionaries. They list the practical totality of the words in a given language. This totality is known as the lexis of a language (adj. lexical). However, meanings are not found exclusively in

Grammatical and sentential issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

79

the words individually listed in the dictionary. Any text shows that the combination of words creates meanings that they do not have in isolation, and even meanings that are not wholly predictable from the literal senses of the words combined. In translation, lexical loss can occur for all sorts of reasons. It very often arises from the fact that exact synonymy between SL words and TL words is relatively rare. The translator is usually obliged to choose between either more specific or less specific TL words. A few examples among thousands: Less specific behave

More specific sich benehmen, sich verhalten

cousin

Cousin, Kusine

friend

Freund(in), Bekannte(r)

Geist

mind, spirit, ghost

rauschen

to roar, murmur, rustle, swish, etc.

schwimmen

to swim, float

We shall look at this important issue in detail in Chapter 9. Another common source of lexical translation loss is the fact that, in any text, words have connotations on top of their literal meaning. The lines from Keats are a good example (see pp. 66–7). It is difficult, and usually impossible, to find TL words that will convey an accurate literal meaning and produce appropriate connotations. We shall look at these questions in more detail in Chapter 10. Grammatical arrangement Lexical issues are a particular category of grammatical issue, so it is not surprising that some of them are most conveniently examined under the heading of grammatical arrangement. Under this heading, we subsume two types of grammatical structure: (1) patterns affecting individual words – affixation/inflection, compounding and derivation; (2) syntax (adj. syntactic), the patterns whereby words are linked to form more or less complex phrases and sentences. In both, what concerns the translator is the fact that the structural patterns differ from language to language. One way in which German differs from English is that it gender-marks far more nouns – e.g. those denoting people’s occupations. In most contexts, the translator will not pause over, say, ‘Ute, Lehrerin aus Flensburg’: ‘Ute, a teacher from Flensburg’ suffices. But if a report says: ‘Wir erhielten nur zwei Zuschriften, von einer Lehrerin in Flensburg und einem oberbayerischen Arzt’, the translator will have to choose, either to give less information than the ST provides, or to supply that information

80


– ‘a woman/female teacher . . . and a male doctor . . .’ – in a wordier, clumsier form that may exaggerate its importance. Just as ‘teacher’ covers a more general range of meaning than ‘Lehrerin’, so, also, the preposition ‘bei’ is used in far more situations in German than any one English preposition. It may stand for ‘near’, ‘in circumstances of’, ‘in the event of’, ‘with’, occasionally ‘by’, and even ‘in spite of’. But it is now only in a technical or formal context that ‘in the event of’ will be used in English. Otherwise, when ‘bei’ is used in that precise sense, most translators will turn to grammatical rearrangement. For instance, in a text about translation problems in the EU, a sentence begins: ‘Selbst bei einer Erweiterung der EU um lediglich fünf Länder . . .’. It is not beyond the resources of English to render this idea through roughly equivalent grammatical structures, but (as so often with ‘bei’) an idiomatic English version can only be produced by replacing preposition + noun with an if-clause: ‘Even if the EU is/were enlarged by . . .’. The cost – the translation loss – is a certain loss of compactness quite acceptable here. Compounding, too, differs from language to language. We shall take a look at compound nouns first, before moving on to illustrate a few of the ways in which compounding by prefixes can modify German verbs. Compounding in German is very often parallel with English, but more prolific: English has no compact noun match for e.g. ‘Fundort’ or ‘Hausrat’. All one can confidently say about German noun compounds is that the final element is the core noun, and that elements preceding it are there to define and describe. For the learner of German, or the apprentice translator, an early discovery is that the most important and/or difficult words in German tend to have five letters or less, while even the second part of the description ‘Aschaffenburger Ungeziefervertilgungsanstalt’ (incised over a doorway in that town) is more imposing than difficult. Less arresting, but equally productive and often more interesting, are the multifarious prefixes by which a given root verb in German can be made to serve dozens of different meanings and contexts. Only the briefest of illustrations can be given here. Consider, for instance, the consistency with which the transitives ‘anblicken’, ‘ansehen’, ‘anlächeln’, ‘anlachen’, ‘anfahren’, ‘anbrüllen’, ‘anfauchen’, ‘anschnauzen’ correspond to English verbs of person-to-person contact in the form ‘look at’ etc. And then consider the anomalies that keep the translator alert: if English ‘overlook’ means ‘afford a view of’ or ‘fail to notice’, largely according to its grammatical subject at the time, German too has its own sharp distinctions between, for instance, ‘übersehen’ and ‘überschauen’; while ‘überhören’ is analogous to ‘übersehen’ and not to English ‘overhear’. (The problem of ‘false friends’ is quite difficult here, in that ‘übersehen’ is not even reliably false, but does sometimes mean ‘have an overview of’. The point underlines the crucial importance of grasp of context and meticulous dictionary work.) Given that ‘zer-’ features consistently in verbs denoting disassembly, disintegration or dispersal, look at examples of ‘zerreden’ used in the


81

general figurative sense of ‘to spoil or defeat [something] by excessive talking’, and suggest how that concept in specific STs might be compactly conveyed in English. For instance: ‘Jeder wollte zu Wort kommen, und am Ende haben sie das schöne Gedicht nur zerredet’; or again (an example of an increasingly frequent usage) the news headline: ‘Grüne: Moscheebau in Köln darf jetzt nicht zerredet werden’. Finally, another inseparable prefix, ‘ver-’, is often associated with negation of the root verb’s meaning, or with faulty execution, as in e.g. ‘verlernen’ (‘to forget’ (a skill etc.)), ‘sich vertippen’ (‘to make a typing error’), ‘verspielen’ (‘to play and lose’, ‘to miscalculate’). But ‘ver-’ may carry no lexical meaning at all, for instance simply repackaging another part of speech as a verb, as in ‘vermarkten’, ‘to market’, or ‘verunsichern’, ‘to make (someone) uncertain’, ‘to put off’. It takes considerable experience and familiarity with German verb prefixing to get a feel for it sufficient to steer by in reading new coinages; while ‘ver-’ in the purely functional role last discussed is probably the most prolific begetter of nonce-words and genuine neologisms, only a specialist study can give an idea of the fields opened up by German prefixing practice (see e.g. Durrell 2002a: 508–18; Duden 1998: 452–71). We come now to what is perhaps the most familiar grammatical reef of all in translation from German to English: the extended attributive phrase, with participle, preceding the noun. The first example to be considered comes from a historical account of ‘Nordic’ culture in late nineteenthcentury Berlin, and in fact poses three problems on the grammatical level for the translator into English. It reads: ‘Der aus Polen stammende Literat Stanislaus Przybyszewski gibt eine eindringliche Schilderung dieser Boheme in Berlin.’ First, the term ‘Literat’ lacks a close singular equivalent in English. Second – like ‘Lehrer’ – it is gender-marked; the translator may feel an English-speaking target audience could do with similar help, as ‘Stanislaus’ will not enlighten many. Third, the participial phrase preceding ‘Literat’ will need to be assimilated into the English version of the phrase without significantly gaining or losing in prominence. The information is incidental, so in this case, at least, a solution with two main verbs is out of the question. A relative clause, again, would be wordy, tending to unbalance the TT. The most compact solution, the single adjective ‘Polish’, would lose the ST’s implication that Przybyszewski was close to the Berlin scene. If the priority is to reproduce the balance of the German sentence as closely as possible, a better solution – prompted by the text’s focus on cultural perspective – might be an appositional phrase following the noun: ‘The intellectual and writer Stanislaus Przybyszewski, himself Polish by origin, [. . .]’. The extended attributive phrase is frequent in all formal written German, particularly when space is short: for instance, it is almost as common in travel journalism as in scientific discourse. German–English translators in every field from chemistry to politics know that accurate, idiomatic

82


translation of this distinctively German structure means reconstruction of syntax, and that any restructuring of grammar is virtually certain to have semantic consequences – a shift in meaning or in illocutionary impact. It is up to the translator to minimize these translation losses. Every case has to be taken individually. Considerations of emphasis may be outweighed by others, for instance clarity or elegance. Here is another example. In contrast to the concise ‘aus Polen stammende’ variant, this one is representative of the many difficult and complicated cases in which the extended attributive with participle tests the ingenuity of the translator. The source is a recent account of Robert Koch’s bacteriological research. It may take a little thought to produce an accurate, reasonably idiomatic English rendering of the sentence beginning at ‘Dem –’ in the following text: Selbst die berühmten Postulate entpuppen sich bei näherem Hinsehen als historiographisches Konstrukt der Schüler Kochs: Dem – wie erwähnt – von Loeffler geprägten Begriff der Postulate standen von Fall zu Fall variierende Nachweiskriterien bakterieller Ätiologien bei Koch selbst gegenüber. (Gradmann: unpublished) As often happens with this construction, there is no ‘obvious best translation’. In the TT extract reproduced below for discussion, the relative clause that is probably the nearest thing to a conventional solution has been avoided in dealing with the first of the two problems and adopted – after a fashion – in the second: Having become a recognized concept thanks to Loeffler, as already mentioned, they nonetheless must be seen in the context of criteria set up by Koch himself for demonstrating bacterial aetiology – criteria which vary from case to case. (Gradmann 2003: 87) Perhaps the most complex topic that needs to be addressed in the context of grammatical differences is the use of the subjunctive mood in German. Some common subjunctive uses in German pose no particular translation problems: ‘Es lebe die Königin!’ (‘Long live the Queen!’) and ‘Wenn ich reich wäre, . . .’ (‘If I were rich. . .’). The subjunctive of reported speech is a different matter. In practice it is often avoided by using a circumlocutory modal verb (‘wollen’ or ‘sollen’ with the infinitive), or an adverb such as ‘angeblich’. Among the variants to choose from are: Er behauptet, er habe alles gefilmt.

Er will alles gefilmt haben. Seiner Aussage nach hat er alles gefilmt.


Man sagt, er habe alles gefilmt.

83

Er soll alles gefilmt haben. Angeblich hat er alles gefilmt.

Informal discourse often simply puts reported speech in the indicative. And so, when the subjunctive is chosen for reported speech, its use invariably comes across as deliberate and meaningful. Two situations involving sustained – not necessarily uninterrupted – use of the subjunctive of reported speech offer expressive possibilities that are distinctively German and need to be rendered in other ways in English translation. The first of these belongs to the factual domain and might be described as ‘scrupulous reporting’ of another person’s statements, beliefs, etc., sometimes even questions. Take the example of political journalism. If the editorial decision is to offer a résumé of what some newsworthy person has said, then it will be possible, through the use of subjunctive forms, to keep the reader/listener clearly aware, over a long stretch of text if necessary, that the content is relayed, i.e. secondhand. English verb forms have no matching capabilities (other than for briefly sustaining past-tense formulation in the reporting of present-tense direct speech – e.g. ‘Jones said this was the last straw. He was going to report us – right away’). Given that German has at its disposal appropriate verb forms as clear reminders that reported material is reported, another rhetorical advantage follows: reversion in due course to the indicative verb forms will achieve a definite, often even striking, communicative impact. The switch into indicative brings back the anchor voice of the journalist: ‘The Minister said all that. But I’m your trusted reporter and I’m telling you . . .’. Similar considerations apply in the second, specifically literary, use of the subjunctive mood in reported speech. On the face of it, even in a work of fiction, we will have ‘scrupulous reporting’ as described earlier. However, the appearance misleads. The author’s choice of reported speech for words that were perhaps never even directly imagined – let alone spoken or written – may well be motivated by the particular impact intended for the reported-speech passage actually printed. The German subjunctive system has the resources to provide the reader with a ‘virtual’ version of sustained real or fictional discourse, with no limits on complexity; and every verb acts as a distancing or ‘alienating’ device. Once a text’s author has established an immediate narrative framework, for instance a public speech, a private admonition, or someone’s self-defence, the author has the means to sustain the report mode almost indefinitely without recourse to those verbs of speaking – ‘he continued’, ‘she insisted that’, etc. – which characteristically punctuate extended reporting in English. The special features of the German ‘subjunctive of reported speech’ – formality, complexity, versatility and a consistently distinctive ‘signature’ or recognition value – suit it admirably for certain forms of literary discourse, particularly those that use narrative perspective to distance the reader from the action. In a German novel, an extended passage held

84


together by reported-speech subjunctives will generate a more constant and subtler effect of distancing – and, if sought, irony – than is possible in reported speech in English, where the lack of a comparable set of subjunctive verbs means that it can be difficult to sustain narrative perspective without explicit authorial intrusions. Consequently the extended narrative subjunctive mode in German confronts literary translators with a real challenge. Our examples in this chapter so far have shown some areas in which German and English grammatical arrangement consistently differ. The areas we discussed are only an illustrative selection. But it is clear that translation loss on the grammatical level is universal and inevitable. Accordingly, translators tend to give priority to the mot juste and to constructing idiomatic TL sentences, accepting inevitable changes in grammatical structure or economy. As long as significant loss is compensated for, there is no need to fret over this. Of course, an exception may be made when the translator has reason to colour the TT with exoticism. More often, the ST may have salient textual properties resulting from the manipulation of grammatical structure. A typical issue is that of syntactic simplicity versus syntactic complexity. In literary texts, the handling of syntax is very often functional, that is to say controlled for its contribution to the text’s overall impact. With literary STs and, more generally, persuasive STs such as speeches or advertisements, the translator has first to decide how distinctive the grammatical structures are, then what their function is, and what the aim of the ST is. And only then can a decision be taken about how distinctive the TT’s grammar should be: about whether, for instance, to divide long ST sentences into shorter TT ones, or merge short ST ones into longer TT ones, or reflect ST sentence length as closely as possible. We referred in Chapter 4 to an extreme case, the ten-page sentence in Austerlitz – which the translator not surprisingly keeps intact. With a casual, disorganized or incoherent ST such as, for example, early eye-witness accounts of a frightening event, the situation is quite different. Here, provided always that the message is more important than the presentation, the translator need not feel obliged to respect grammatical anomalies or errors in the ST. More organized or formal STs may well also allow some freedom over syntax issues such as sentence length. (This is a point that arises in Practical 8.2, for example.) In some sorts of text, however, the translator has little choice, and must usually adhere strictly to the norms governing such texts in the TL. This is especially true of scientific and legal texts. In such cases, TL grammar will certainly demand grammatical transpositions, but the imperative priorities are to respect the structural and intellectual integrity of the ST message and to observe the TL conventions for formulating such messages. Here is an example for discussion. It is taken from a European Council decision in late 2002 on international co-operation against terrorism. It is not clear which of the texts, if either,

Grammatical and sentential issues

85

is the ST. Which text is a translation of which is not the issue here, however; the point is that they exemplify German and English conventions for the genre. DER RAT DER EUROPÄISCHEN UNION – [. . .] BESCHLIESST: Artikel 1 5

10

15

20

25

Schaffung des Mechanismus für die Begutachtung: (1) Es wird ein Mechanismus geschaffen, mit dem im Rahmen der internationalen Zusammenarbeit zwischen den Mitgliedstaaten die einzelstaatlichen Vorkehrungen zur Terrorismusbekämpfung gegenseitig begutachtet werden sollen; die Einzelheiten sind nachstehend geregelt. (2) Die Mitgliedstaaten verpflichten sich zur engen Zusammenarbeit ihrer jeweiligen Behörden mit den Gutachterausschüssen, die im Rahmen dieses Beschlusses im Hinblick auf dessen Anwendung eingesetzt werden; hierbei sind die einzelstaatlichen Rechts- und Standesvorschriften zu beachten. Artikel 2 Gegenstand der Begutachtung (1) Für jede Begutachtungsrunde werden der genaue Gegenstand der Begutachtung sowie die Reihenfolge der zu begutachtenden Mitgliedstaaten auf Vorschlag des Vorsitzes vom Ausschuss „Artikel 36“ festgelegt. Ferner legt der Ausschuss „Artikel 36“ je nach dem genauen Gegenstand, der für die Begutachtung ausgewählt worden ist, fest, welche dem Ausschuss „Artikel 36“ nachgeordnete Arbeitsgruppe des Rates die Begutachtung durchführen soll oder ob er diese selbst durchführt. Der Ausschuss „Artikel 36“ legt darüber hinaus für jede Begutachtungsrunde die Häufigkeit fest. (Europäische Gemeinschaften 2002: L 349/1) THE COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION, [. . .] HAS DECIDED AS FOLLOWS: Article 1

5

Establishment of the evaluation mechanism 1. A mechanism for peer evaluation of the national arrangements in the fight against terrorism within the framework of international cooperation between Member States shall be established in accordance with the detailed rules set out below.

86 10


2. Each Member State shall undertake to ensure that its national authorities cooperate closely with the evaluation teams set up under this Decision with a view to its implementation, with due regard for the rules of law and ethics applicable at national level. Article 2

15

20

Evaluation subjects 1. For each evaluation exercise, the specific subject of the evaluation as well as the order in which Member States are to be evaluated shall be defined by the Article 36 Committee, on a proposal from the Presidency. Depending on the specific subject chosen for the evaluation, the Article 36 Committee shall also decide whether to designate a Council Working Party subordinate to it to carry out the evaluation or to carry it out itself. In addition, the Article 36 Committee shall decide the frequency of each evaluation exercise. (European Communities 2002: L 349/1) Apart from grammatical and genre issues, these texts also serve to introduce the sentential level of textual variables. This is something to discuss in the practical, after reading the remainder of this chapter. THE SENTENTIAL LEVEL We can use the lines from ‘To Autumn’ to show how different grammatical arrangements create different assumptions in the listener or reader as regards the communicative purpose of an utterance. Keats’s own lines – ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun’ – are partly an address to Autumn and partly an exclamation about it: the very structure of the utterances leads the listener/reader to expect an expression of wonderment and enthusiasm. A different grammatical arrangement, however, would most likely announce a different communicative purpose. For instance: ‘Autumn is a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. / Indeed, it is a close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.’ This structure tells us that we are about to read an informative text – even though, in the event, phonic and lexical features do give the utterances something more than simply informative value. In each version, the grammatical arrangement marks the utterances as having a particular communicative purpose, whatever the overtones. When, as here, the communicative purpose of a grammatical arrangement is studied, rather than the grammatical arrangement in its own right, the utterance is studied on the sentential level: that is, it is being considered as a sentence or sentences. A sentence is defined as a complete, self-contained and readymade vehicle for communication: nothing needs to be added before it can be uttered and understood in concrete situations. The starter’s command


87

‘Go!’ is a sentence. So is ‘In your dreams’ as an expression of mocking dismissiveness. In this definition, a sentence does not necessarily contain a verb. Any text counts on the sentential level as a succession of sentences, each with a built-in communicative purpose. This purpose is usually conveyed by one or more of three features: (1) prosodic features, such as intonation or stress (e.g. the rising pitch that signals a question in both English and German); (2) grammatical features, such as sequential focus (e.g. ‘[. . .] sieben Millionen Hektoliter produzieren; verkaufen lassen sich davon nur fünf’); (3) illocutionary particles, such as the particle ‘mal’, which slips into almost every statement or request intended to sound casual, or tags such as ‘nicht (wahr)?’; illocutionary particles do not fit into syntax proper, but simply mark the sentence as having a particular communicative purpose – i.e. they tell the listener/reader how to take the utterance. The sentential level of spoken language is extremely rich, fine shades of intonation and stress distinguishing sentences with subtly different nuances. It is possible to take the same words, in the same order, and turn them into quite different sentences, with different communicative purposes, purely through manipulating features on the prosodic level – most notably, varying intonation and stress. Such refinements largely disappear in written texts, because the only ways of explicitly conveying intonation and stress in writing are punctuation and typography. These offer far fewer alternatives than the rich nuances of speech. Over and above prosodic control, further possibilities are opened up by combining it with sequential focus and illocutionary particles. This implies that, in translating both oral and written texts, the sentential level needs as much care as any other. Illocutionary particles and sequential focus are easier to represent in written texts than prosodic features are. But how to translate them still cannot be taken for granted, because what is expressed in German through lexis, sequential focus or illocutionary particles may well be more idiomatically expressed in English through voice stress and intonation alone. The five German sentences given here illustrate the point. In an oral English TT, each of them can be satisfactorily translated as ‘I’m not cleaning this up’, the speaker choosing from the vast prosodic range of English to make the communicative purpose clear. In a written TT, however, while some of this impact may be conveyed with italics and punctuation, it will be much vaguer. The effect may in some cases be clearer if an illocutionary particle or a different grammatical arrangement is used. Here are the sentences. Try reading them out to achieve the stated communicative purpose: Written sentence Ich mach(e) hier nicht sauber.

Communicative purpose Statement.

Ich habe nicht vor, hier sauberzumachen.

Firm statement.

88


Hier saubermachen fällt mir nicht ein!

Indignant or belligerent statement.

Hier saubermachen fällt mir nicht ein!

As previous, but with focus on place or task.

Ich jedenfalls mache hier nicht sauber.

Firm disclaimer of responsibility.

The challenge is how to convey in a written TT the intonation, stress and emotive impact corresponding to each ST sentence. Here, for performance, discussion and improvement in class, are some possible renderings of the German sentences: Italics + punctuation only

Italics + punctuation + illocutionary particles + grammatical rearrangement

I’m not cleaning this up.

N/A

I’m not cleaning this up.

I don’t intend to clean this up.

I’m not cleaning this up!!

Come off it, I’m not cleaning this up!/No way am I {cleaning/going to clean} this up!

I’m not cleaning this up!

I’ll clean up within reason, but not this/here.

I’m not cleaning this up!

Someone else will have to clean this up, not me.

We have spent time on these examples to show two things. First, that it is worthwhile – especially with informal STs – investigating whether prosodic features in an English TT will do what grammatical arrangement does in the ST. As we have seen, this will not always work, but it is often a clearer and more idiomatic solution than copying the ST sentence structure. However – and this is the second point – reliance on prosodic features in English to convey emphasis or focus may introduce ambiguity, at least in written texts. If the target audience hesitates over how to read a TT sentence in context, where the ST had been clear, the translation will have incurred unnecessary loss. So the translator must balance priorities. For realistic dialogue in a novel, naturalness comes first, and it will take careful attention to textual coherence to ensure that the TL audience encountering a potentially ambiguous sentence is able to read and mentally ‘hear’ it confidently and correctly. But in a closely reasoned passage of argument, the translator does well to play safe and use verbal means to ensure the sentence has correct emphasis. For example, ‘cleft’ and ‘pseudo-cleft’ structures (see Ch. 15, pp. 190, 195–6) are used in English – much more readily than in German – as a way of focusing emphasis clearly.

Grammatical and sentential issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 5 2 3 4 5 10 6 7 8 9 15

89

PRACTICAL 7 7.1 Grammatical and sentential issues Assignment (i) You have been commissioned to produce English text for some of the popular mid-market HB Bildatlas series of illustrated regional guides, in this case the one entitled Südlicher Schwarzwald – Hochrhein – Kaiserstuhl, from which the ST has been taken. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy that you adopt. (ii) Translate the ST into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took in connection with grammar and syntax. (iv) Compare your TT with a sample one, which will be given to you by your tutor. Contextual information The book is in A4 format and includes maps; however, most double-page spreads, including that with the ST, have a 7cm-wide column, far right, containing about 220 words of text, and about six good-quality colour photographs of various sizes arranged on the remaining area; the terraced vineyards feature prominently. ST Mit neuem Gesicht: der vulkanische Kaiserstuhl Egal, aus welcher Richtung man sich dem Kaiserstuhl nähert: Schon von weitem ist diese mitten in der Oberrheinebene aufgebuckelte Erhebung zwischen Vogesen und Schwarzwald zu erkennen. Die bis zu 557 Meter hoch aufragende Hügelgruppe macht ihrem monumental klingenden Namen alle Ehre, denn die durch längst erloschene Vulkantätigkeiten entstandenen Bergkuppen sind in der Form eines großen, nach Südwesten geöffneten Hufeisens angeordnet. Das Ganze sieht aus wie ein riesiger Lehnstuhl, der einem sonnenhungrigen Fabelriesen bequem Platz bieten würde. Daß die Sonne in dieser Gegend eine überragende Rolle spielt, läßt sich nicht übersehen. Die überall in großem Maßstab neu angelegten Rebterrassen weisen darauf hin. Sie haben dem Kaiserstuhl in den vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnten ein völlig neues Gesicht verliehen, sehr zum Leidwesen der Naturschützer. Im kleinen verraten aber noch immer zahlreiche aus mittelmeerischen Gefilden stammenden Pflanzen am Wegesrand, daß im Kaiserstuhl südländische Klimaeinflüsse vorherrschen. Es gibt übrigens ganz in der Nähe »unbearbeitete« Natur: das Altrheingebiet Taubergießen.

90 20

25


Neue Terrassen, alte Hohlwege Den schönsten Blick auf die Kaiserstuhllandschaft gewährt der Badberg. Man erreicht diese kahle, von Trockenrasen bedeckte Buckelwelt am besten vom Schelinger Paß aus, wo ein von langen Tischen und Bänken umgebener Kiosk zur zünftigen Vesper einlädt. Links erhebt sich das Totenkopfmassiv, leicht zu erkennen an seinem Sendemast, und im Hintergrund, Richtung Rhein, erkennt man die wie von Zyklopenhand hingeklotzten, treppenförmig ansteigenden Rebterrassen der »Oberbergener Mondhalde«, eine der bekannten Kaiserstühler Weinlagen. (Klugmann 1989: 21) 7.2 Grammatical and sentential issues Assignment (i) Discuss the strategic decisions that you would have to take before starting detailed translation of the German ST below, and outline and justify the strategy you would adopt. (ii) Outline and discuss the salient issues of grammar and syntax raised by the solutions used in the English TT below. (iii) Produce your own English TT of paragraphs 2 and 3 (lines 18–45). (iv) Explain the main decisions of detail you took, in particular any that led to significant divergences between your TT and the published one. Contextual information The following texts appeared side by side in the August 2003 edition of Lufthansa’s in-flight magazine. They are excerpted from a bilingual cover feature on Cape Town.

5

10

15

ST Kapstadt war lange die kleine europäische Lüge an der Südspitze Afrikas. So hübsch die Stadt. Wer aber die falsche Hautfarbe hatte, wurde an den hässlichen Rand gedrängt. Noch immer sieht man schon auf dem Weg vom Flughafen die großen schwarzen Townships. Doch entscheidet heute nicht mehr die Pigmentierung über den Wohnort, sondern der Geldbeutel. Das Resultat ist allzu häufig noch identisch. Aber es gibt Veränderung. Es gibt eine

TT For a very long time, Cape Town was the European ‘white lie’ at the southern tip of Africa. A lovely city – but if your skin was the wrong color, you were relegated to its ugly fringe. Today, visitors still pass large black townships as they drive in from the airport, but it’s not politics that decide where you live, it’s your wallet. All too often, the result is the same, although changes are evident: Cape Town has a black middle class, but also white poverty.

Grammatical and sentential issues

20

25

30

35

40

45

schwarze Mittelschicht. Es gibt auch arme Weiße. „Ohne Vergebung gibt es keine Zukunft. Aber ohne Bekenntnis kann es keine Vergebung geben“, hat der wohl berühmteste Kapstädter gesagt, der anglikanische Erzbischof Desmond Tutu, ein Mann von Weisheit und Witz, der dem Land hilft, mit seinen Wahrheiten zu leben. So konnte Südafrika zur Demokratie werden, zu einem komplexen, quicklebendigen MultikultiGebilde. Gerade am Kap wird dessen Charme heute spürbar. Faszinierend die Fülle der Stile und Gesichter. Da sind die Supervillen in Clifton und Camps Bay, pompös und chic, mit Atlantikblick. Aber auch, viel angesagter, das verwinkelte Bo-Kaap-Viertel aus dem 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, in Pastellfarben gehalten, geprägt von den Nachfahren der Sklaven, die man aus Madagaskar, Indien, Ceylon, Indonesien und Malaysia hierher holte. Ihre scharfen Currys retten die südafrikanische Küche. (Schimmeck 2003: 21)

91

‘Without forgiveness there is no future, but without confession there can be no forgiveness.’ These are the words of the man who is probably Cape Town’s most famous: Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a man of wisdom and wit, who is helping his country to live with its truths. He sees the possibility of South Africa becoming a democracy, a complex and lively multicultural society. The charm of such a society is visible today, especially on the Cape, with its wealth of styles and influences: the extravagant elegance of the supervillas overlooking the Atlantic in wealthy Clifton and Camps Bay, but also the very trendy Bo-Kaap quarter with an 18th and 19th century tangle of streets: its pastel colors bearing witness to the slaves brought here from Madagascar, India, Ceylon, Indonesia and Malaysia. The hot curries of the latter are the redeeming feature of South African cuisine. (Schimmeck 2003: 21)

7.3 Grammatical and sentential issues Assignment (i) You are commissioned to write a new translation of Martin Walser’s novella Ein fliehendes Pferd (1978), from which the ST below is taken. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy that you adopt. (ii) Translate the ST into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took in connection with grammar and syntax. (iv) Compare your TT with the published one, which will be given to you by your tutor.

92


Contextual information The ST is taken from Chapter 2 of Ein fliehendes Pferd. Helmut Hahn, aged 46, a schoolteacher on holiday by Lake Constance, sitting at a pavement café table with his wife Sabine, has just been accosted by Klaus Buch, whom Helmut at first guesses to be a former pupil. Buch is accompanied by his own wife Helene, usually ‘Hel’ in Walser’s text.

5

10

15

20

25

ST Nein, der flammend Blonde in Blau, mit Augenweiß und Zähneweiß und nackten Füßen und schönen unbeschädigten Zehen, war kein Schüler, es war Klaus Buch. Und Klaus Buch wollte nicht glauben, daß ihn sein Schulkamerad und Jugendfreund und Kommilitone Helmut nicht mehr kenne. Helmut konnte sich nur immer wieder entschuldigen. Sein Erinnerungsvermögen für Gesichter sei professionell erschöpft, sagte er. Er habe sich schon zu viele Gesichter und Namen merken müssen. Klaus Buch . . . – er log sich vorwärts – . . . natürlich, jetzt erwache in ihm die Vertrautheitsempfindung, sowohl dem Namen wie dem Gesicht gegenüber. Und das ist also Sabine, Helmuts Frau. Und das ist Helene, genannt Hel, Klaus’ Frau. Als er dieser Hel die Hand gab, spürte er, daß Klaus jetzt ein Kompliment erwartete. Das war eine Frau wie eine Trophäe. Zumindest hätte Helmut seinem früheren Freund Klaus jetzt sagen müssen, wie perplex er, Helmut, sei, weil Klaus eher aussehe, als sei er ein Schüler von Helmut. Obwohl er jetzt allmählich zugeben müsse, einen Freund gehabt zu haben, der Klaus Buch geheißen und ausgesehen habe wie der junge vor ihm stehende Mann, könne er den vor ihm Stehenden überhaupt nicht mit dem in seiner Erinnerung allmählich auftauenden Klaus Buch zusammenbringen, einfach weil sein Klaus Buch inzwischen auch sechsundvierzig sein müßte, während der vor ihm Stehende doch eher sechsundzwanzig sei. Samt seinem Mädchen. Vor allem wegen seines Mädchens. All das sagte Helmut nicht. Kein Kompliment. Du wirst dich wundern, dachte er. Er sah den beiden auf die Fußspitzen. Auch ihre Zehen lagen wohlig und gerade beieinander. Die beiden redeten. Redend setzten sie sich. Sitzend redeten sie weiter. (Walser 1978: 20–1)

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

8 The formal properties of texts: Discourse and intertextual issues in translation In the last chapter, we briefly discussed a grammatical rearrangement of the two lines from ‘To Autumn’: ‘Autumn is a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. / Indeed, it is a close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.’ We saw that, on the sentential level, this arrangement marks the text as informative, rather than as an expression of excitement. Now, part of this sentential effect derives from the adverbial ‘Indeed’ and the pronoun ‘it’, which explicitly link the two sentences. ‘Indeed, it’ announces that the second sentence is going to confirm and amplify the first, conveying additional information about autumn. The linking of one sentence to another is the most significant feature found on the discourse level. THE DISCOURSE LEVEL The textual variables considered on the discourse level are those that distinguish a cohesive and coherent textual flow from a random sequence of unrelated utterances. Strictly speaking, this level is concerned with intersentential relations (relations between sentences) and with relations between larger units, such as paragraphs, chapters, stanzas and so on. Accordingly, for the most part, we shall be concentrating on intersentential relations. But before looking at the translation issues these raise, we should point out that it is often useful also to consider relations between parts of sentences on the discourse level, as if the parts were sentences in their own right. For instance, the rearranged lines from ‘To Autumn’ could easily have been written as one sentence, whether in verse or prose,

94


as in the following: ‘Autumn is a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness: indeed, it is a close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.’ Here, the colon acts as a connector between the two statements, with ‘indeed’ indicating the kind of direction the second one will go in. We shall see similar examples later. It is useful to distinguish between two aspects of discourse: cohesion and coherence. Following Halliday and Hasan (1976), we define cohesion as the transparent linking of sentences (and larger sections of text) by explicit discourse connectors like ‘then’, ‘so’, ‘however’, and so on. These act as signposts pointing out the thread of discourse running through the text. Coherence is a more difficult matter than cohesion, because, by definition, it is not explicitly marked in a text: it is a tacit, but discernible, thematic or emotional development running through the text. We can illustrate the difference with a simple example: I was getting hungry. I went downstairs. I knew the kitchen was on the ground floor. I was pretty sure the kitchen must be on the ground floor. I didn’t expect to find the kitchen so easily. I made myself a sandwich.

I was getting hungry. So I went downstairs. Well . . . I knew the kitchen was on the ground floor. I mean, I was pretty sure it must be there. Still, I didn’t expect to find it so easily. Anyway, I made myself a sandwich.

The first text is given a degree of cohesion by the repetitions, although there are no intersentential connectors as such. It is also coherent, thanks to the underlying chronological narrative structure. In the second text, a train of thought is restored by inserting connectors (printed in italics). These act as cohesion markers, setting up a transparent intersentential structure. Some of the cohesion markers link the sentences by explaining or commenting on the speaker’s actions: ‘So’, ‘Well’, ‘I mean’, ‘Still’, ‘Anyway’. Others are instances of grammatical anaphora – that is, the replacement of previously used words and phrases by expressions referring back to them; here, the anaphoric elements are ‘it’ (replacing ‘the kitchen’) and ‘there’ (replacing ‘on the ground floor’). The sentential and discourse levels are by definition closely related. In the Keats example, the intersentential elements ‘Indeed’ and ‘it’ are also what mark the text as informative. In the kitchen example too, many of the intersentential connectors also function on the sentential level; rather like illocutionary particles, they give each utterance a particular tone and tell the listener how to take it – ‘So’, ‘Well’, ‘I mean’, ‘Still’, ‘Anyway’. For example, the two versions of the third sentence will almost certainly be spoken differently, because, on the sentential level, they have different functions: the first announces a new fact out of the blue, while in the second, ‘Well’ marks the sentence as explaining or justifying the decision to go downstairs. ‘Well’ therefore has both a sentential and a discourse

Discourse and intertextual issues

95

function here. Punctuation can have a similar double function, as in the following example from an advertisement. A colour photograph shows a wide field with a Renault Mégane superimposed, driving round the tight curves of an appropriately magnified Scalextric track. The headline text reads: ‘Schon als Kinder wussten wir, dass nur die Straßenlage zählt.’ On the facing page, under the car name and in smaller print, the text continues: Wir wussten zwar nicht, was das bedeutet. Aber wir kannten den Effekt: Den meisten Spaß machen die Wagen, die förmlich an der Fahrbahn kleben. Und die schnell und zuverlässig jede Kurve nehmen. Mit dem neuen Renault Mégane können Sie diesen Effekt jetzt auf der Straße täglich erleben. Reservieren Sie noch heute Ihre Probefahrt und überzeugen Sie sich vom Mégane-Effekt. The colon after ‘wir kannten den Effekt’ has a discourse function, doing duty for either a relative clause (e.g. ‘Effekt, der darin besteht, dass . . .’) or a sentence break plus the explicit cohesion marker ‘nämlich’. But it also has a sentential function, marking for emphasis the short sentence with the advertisement’s key message about road-holding. Then, with ‘Und die schnell . . . Kurve nehmen’, a similar effect is achieved in a different way. Parallel relative clauses in German always bind conspicuously together because of the verb placing. Yet here a full stop has been inserted to highlight a sentence that by traditional standards is grammatically incomplete. A 2003 Skoda advertisement features an unusually wide variety of cohesion types. Above the picture, it has three separate headlines, of which the first is in two lines, as indicated, and prominent: Edel und stark, Hilfreich und gut. Der Sˇkoda Octavia COLLECTION, sportlich sparen, komfortabel fahren. Sˇkoda. Ganz schön clever. The main text (omitting only the contact details) reads:

5

Einspruch! Sportlichkeit und Komfort sind keine Gegensätze. Das Sondermodell Sˇkoda Octavia COLLECTION ist der Kronzeuge. Die Beweislage ist bestechend, egal ob Combi oder Limousine: Xenonlicht, Climatronic, Bordcomputer, Alu-Felgen und vieles mehr. Sie sparen eine Menge Tagessätze, nämlich bis zu 1.700 Euro. Bleibt nur noch eine Frage offen: welche Motorisierung? Dazu sollten Sie mit sich ins Gericht gehen, denn dieses Urteil müssen Sie selbst fällen. Im Namen des Gesetzes: Ganz schön clever. Sie haben ihn angefasst, jetzt müssen Sie ihn auch Probe fahren.

96


First, the main body of the text relies heavily on a binding metaphor, signalled by the insistent use of law-court terminology – ‘Einspruch’, ‘Kronzeuge’, ‘Beweislage’, ‘Tagessätze’, etc. This level of coherence is internal to the advertisement, the legal metaphor being absent from similarformat advertisements appearing at the same time for other Skoda models. On the other hand, the phrase ‘Ganz schön clever’ does appear in the parallel advertising, and is thus used as a general Skoda identifier. That in turn makes this phrase strictly speaking an intertextual reference. Finally, the first headline involves two intertextual references, of which one reaches back more than 200 years. We will look at these briefly in the second half of the chapter. Many connectors can be used to join short sentences together to form longer ones. Conjunctions such as ‘so’, ‘and’ or ‘but’ are simple examples. This is another way in which intersentential and sentential functions are often close in practice, even though they are distinguishable in analysis. For instance, ‘I was getting hungry, so I went downstairs’ will probably have a different communicative impact from ‘I was getting hungry. So I went downstairs’. Similar considerations apply to rhetorical anaphora – that is, the repetition of a word or words at the start of successive or closely associated clauses or phrases. Typically, this occurs at the start of sentences. Rhetorical anaphora is common in political speeches, advertising, journalism and literary texts. Some examples, like Winston Churchill’s ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ passage, have found a place in folk memory. As a contrasting example, here is part of a Stern editorial published in July 1988:

5

Gorbatschow, ein Neuerer vom Format Peters des Großen, will Abrüstung, um Kräfte für vernünftige Ziele freizusetzen, will westliche Technologie und westliches Markt-Know-how, um sowjetische Industrieprodukte endlich konkurrenzfähig zu machen. Sein Wunschpartner für diese »zweite russische Revolution« ist die Bundesrepublik. Sie hat entscheidendes Gewicht in der nordatlantischen Allianz. Sie bietet politische Stabilität. Sie ist eine wirtschaftliche Supermacht. Sie wirkt – auch unter Kanzler Kohl – mäßigend auf die USA. (Liedtke 1988: 3) The tone may be undemonstrative, but a succession of four simple subjectfirst sentences in a standard political text in German is arresting enough to constitute striking rhetorical anaphora even though the only repeated word is the pronoun ‘sie’. A translator will normally try to ensure that rhetorical anaphora in the ST is reflected in similar structuring in the TT. A curiosity in this instance is that it would be difficult to reproduce the full force of the Stern text’s rhetorical anaphora in English, because the simple sentences that constitute the real repeated element do not run against the grain of English as they do against the SL (see Chapter 16).

Discourse and intertextual issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

97

Common though it is, rhetorical anaphora is a special case. The presence or absence of explicit discourse connectors is a more common translation issue. Consider, for example, literary texts with a marked absence of discourse connectors, as in the first of our two ‘kitchen’ texts, or with a predominance of ‘and’, as in the first three chapter openings of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Here too, as with rhetorical anaphora, the principle applies that distinctive structuring in the ST will usually be reflected in the TT. However, that certainly does not mean German connectors should be rendered on a one-for-one basis into English. Languages differ in this respect as in many others. It is in general more common in German than in English for texts to be explicitly structured with connectors (‘nun’, ‘also’, ‘zwar’, ‘nämlich’, ‘auch’, ‘so’ in the sense of ‘zum Beispiel’) that signpost the relationship between sentences. An English TT using explicit connectors to reproduce all those found in a German ST will often sound unidiomatic or pedantic. This piece of dialogue is a simple example: ST Das findet man öfter bei Rilke. – Ich dachte auch gerade an Rilke.

TT You often get that in Rilke. – I was thinking of Rilke.

The ‘auch’ is part connector and part illocutionary particle. But even taking it purely as a connector, it would probably be rendered in an oral TT by voice stress and intonation, not with a connector. In a written TT, it might well be rendered with a connector: ‘I was indeed thinking of Rilke’. The decision will be influenced by the genre of the ST. In a play or a novel, italics would probably be used rather than the connector. But in e.g. an academic text, ‘indeed’ will be more likely than the italics. Another common form of explicit cohesion is grammatical anaphora. However, rules of anaphora differ from language to language. There is a lot of parallelism between German and English practice, so much, indeed, that fluent German-native speakers of English often fail to exploit the versatility of English as a TL. For instance, German relative clauses almost always can be rendered with a closely matching English relative clause; and as a consequence they too often are so rendered. The result is not by any means always an unidiomatic calque: the first three examples that follow could just as well use a TL relative. But in the long run, overfaithful adherence to German formulations results in, at best, a certain monotony. English has a range of other ways of handling information contained in an ST relative clause. Participial constructions are perhaps the solution most often overlooked by translators, but, as the examples show, there are other possibilities: ST Kunden, die auf sofortiger Erstattung bestehen, werden an Schalter 10 verwiesen.

TT Customers insisting on immediate refunds are to be referred to Desk 10.

98


Wer auf den Ausflug lieber verzichtet, meldet sich bitte bei meiner Kollegin.

Anyone not taking the excursion should see my colleague.

Wer sich von so was beleidigt fühlt, möge einfach wegbleiben.

Those offended by such things should just stay away.

Wer in [der Politik] Machtpositionen behauptet, ausbauen oder erringen will, wer nur die eigenen Zwecke verfolgt, [. . .]. Wer dagegen Politik auch als Aufgabe versteht, [. . .].

If I use politics to assert, consolidate or win power, if I pursue my own aims exclusively [. . .]. If on the other hand I see politics as involving a task that is given to me [. . .].

[From a swimwear blurb] Das Badethema ‘Magische Zauberwelten’ hat Felina in vier faszinierende Farbgruppen aufgeteilt, die Sie je nach Anlass und Stimmung durch die Sonne begleiten.

[. . .] four fascinating colour tonalities to suit your mood and the occasion all summer long.

Even where SL and TL rules for grammatical anaphora as such are not different, other grammatical factors can be a trap. A common one is the implications of gender. For instance, translators from English to German particularize anaphoric ‘it’ (for objects and concepts) into masculine, feminine and neuter to meet German gender rules. In the other direction, however, rendering ‘es’ by English ‘it’ may sometimes actually introduce an ambiguity not present in the ST. Consider how one might translate the following: ‘In einer neuen Studie wird die Reduzierung des Nahrungsdefizits differenzierter dargestellt. Danach betrug es 1997 65%, um 1998 auf 40% und 1999 auf nur 22% zu fallen’ (F. Bliss unpublished ST). This quotation resembles the doctored Keats quotation in that the anaphora ‘es’ links the second sentence to the first. The second sentence slips deceptively easily into English. Suppose the phrase ‘. . . betrug es 1997 65%’ were to be translated as ‘. . . in 1997 it was 65%’. Then the TL user would be left with a problem that was not in the ST: what is said to be 65%, the deficit or the reduction of the deficit? In this informative, factual ST, such an ambiguity would represent serious translation loss. An unambiguous TL formulation is not hard to find; the point is to be alive always to what exactly it is that unobtrusive connectors such as this ‘es’ are doing in the ST and to check whether the first-to-mind TT will play an essentially similar role. German texts in which reasoning is important are quickly recognized through the specifically logical connectors, which tend to be more copiously provided than in English – words such as ‘deshalb’, ‘daher’, ‘somit’, ‘mithin’, ‘folglich’, ‘also’, all meaning much the same thing, but also e.g.


99

‘andererseits’, ‘vielmehr’ and others, which announce a shift to a counterargument, ‘zum einen’ for the first of two or more parallel arguments, ‘zwar’ announcing a point that is conceded, with a stronger counterargument to follow, etc., etc. They are associated, obviously enough, with legal, scientific or other specialized argument, but some of them may be used heavily in a much less formal context. The risk for the translator dealing with these logical connectors is not one of misunderstanding their function in any tightly argued passage, though a few, e.g. ‘immerhin’ and ‘allenfalls’, may be tricky. The real difficulty is that reasoned texts in German are closely knitted together by logical connectors of which many must be rendered explicitly in an English TT – and some, possessing distinct yet relatively weak connective force, are teasing to translate, and on occasion best left untranslated. This does at least mean that one can work to a fail-safe principle. On the one hand, omission of a needed logical connector is a serious error; while on the other hand inclusion of a non-essential connector in the English TT is a stylistic error, unidiomatic, but not damaging to the cogency of the argument. Generally speaking, however, a truly successful translation is idiomatic; and if it is to be truly accurate, its idiomatic English will also be attentive to fine nuance in the ST. This is the area in which German discourse connectors need a fair amount of discussion and example. Our first point is a general one: the translator can be drawn into translating too mechanically and repetitively. Where it matters to have the TT flow naturally, it is a good thing to vary the formula occasionally by judicious restructuring of the sentence. Thus ‘folglich’ (etc.) can often be rendered by e.g. ‘This means that . . .’ or ‘It follows that . . .’. Our second point is that some frequently used German discourse connectors lack ready idiomatic equivalents in English, and may tempt the translator into unidiomatic TL usage. Here the relationship between German usage and English usage is much less clear-cut than with the connectors we described as essential. Fuller discussion is needed, and at least some extended examples. We can make a start with ‘zwar’. Close in meaning to ‘freilich’ and ‘allerdings’ in the sense of ‘admittedly’, ‘zwar’ routinely occurs as an advance partner of a ‘jedoch’ or ‘andererseits’ (etc.) to come. In this role, ‘zwar’ more often than not would be too emphatic if rendered with ‘admittedly’ or ‘indeed’ (see Chapter 16, p. 201). Or, again, German ‘so’ is – among very many other uses – routinely used to replace an initial ‘zum Beispiel’ in a full sentence. But it is weaker. In literal meaning it corresponds exactly to the decidedly formal English ‘thus’ at the beginning of an illustrative sentence. Yet, more often than not, ‘thus’ is ruled out on grounds of register, and it is more idiomatic in the TL to leave the link implicit. A third example is ‘vielmehr’, used almost mechanically in many German texts to introduce a positive statement following a negative. The stock English equivalent, ‘rather’, is suitable in many cases – so often, in

100


fact, that it tends to be written down uncritically in TTs where English actually requires a different connector, or zero. Consider the following two sentences from an academic article about the French artist Boucher: Das Ausbleiben kirchlicher Aufträge bedeutete also keineswegs, daß damit seine Karriere als religiöser Maler beendet gewesen wäre. Vielmehr entstanden in den fünfziger Jahren eine Reihe privater Andachtsbilder, die in der Pariser Kunstszene für Aufsehen sorgten. (Schieder: unpublished) To render ‘Vielmehr’ by ‘rather’ in this TT – whether initially or elsewhere – would yield a faintly but distinctly unidiomatic calque. The best TL discourse connector might be ‘In fact . . .’. Yet the logical relation between the two sentences is still perfectly clear without any TL connector: ‘. . . did not by any means signify the end of his career as a religious painter. In the 1750s he went on to produce . . .’. Even in academic argument, then, it is not mandatory for logical connectors in German STs to be translated one-for-one. A notable case in point is the explanatory ‘Denn . . .’ as sentence opener. When the Richard Mason novel (and the film) The Wind Cannot Read appeared in Germany, it was under the title Denn der Wind kann nicht lesen: quite a striking illustration of a felt need for a connector. And the expository English of German (or German-trained) academics has the singularity of beginning sentences with this connective ‘For’ – corresponding to German ‘Denn’ – much more frequently than is idiomatic in present-day English. The relatively more frequent provision of discourse connectors in German, at least in narrative and analytical text-types, is also well illustrated by the phrase ‘denn auch’. Essentially it marks an expectable consequence of an action or event just reported. Unlike ‘vielmehr’, it has never acquired a stock English translation. Close in function to the modal particle ‘auch’ (see Chapter 14, § 3.4.2), ‘denn auch’ is used quite freely in some older literary texts, in linking narrative. But it is also to be found in more modern and less discursive contexts such as the Schieder essay on French art history quoted earlier. Here is one of 4 occurrences in 16 pages:

5

ST Seine Illustrierung der Heilsgeschichte in Form pittoresker Graphiken schien dem Ort ihrer Publikation nicht angemessen – in den nachfolgenden Auflagen des Breviariums tauchten sie denn auch nicht mehr auf. (Schieder: unpublished)

TT His presentation of the Christian story in the form of picturesque visual images seemed inappropriate to the place of their publication – and in later editions of the breviary they no longer appeared. (Schieder 2006)


101

The cause-and-effect implication here is clear in the TT without any logical linking more explicit than the dash plus ‘and’. However, it is an indication of the elusiveness of ‘denn auch’ in TL terms – in spite of its consistent meaning – that the four occurrences in the Boucher article find four different translations. In one case, the antecedent ‘cause’ consists of complex argument and a three-line quotation. The ‘denn auch’, marking the upshot, therefore needs relatively explicit translation: ST Die meisten von Bouchers alttestamentarischen Kabinettsbildern fanden denn auch den Weg in angesehene Privatsammlungen; [. . .] (Schieder: unpublished)

TT It was only natural, then, that most of Boucher’s Old Testament cabinet pictures should find their way into notable private collections; [. . .] (Schieder 2006)

As these examples show, the translator’s task with discourse connectors is not so much to render the individual term as to read its function and provide TL linking that minimizes translation loss in terms not only of semantics but also of the TL’s linking conventions: term-for-term rendering of all German connectors may result in obtrusive, clumsy linking in the TT. Register too has to be allowed for; German native speakers in particular tend to use ‘therefore’ in contexts where ‘so’ would be more idiomatic. ‘Reading the function’ of connectors also, of course, involves being alert to cases where the ST uses them inconsistently or obscurely. This can happen in hastily written texts. In such cases, the translator needs to analyse the argument carefully. Otherwise, TT cohesion marker errors may occur, which clouds the issue further. On the discourse level, then, translators have to ask three simple but important questions. Assuming that the ST is coherent, are the connective elements explicit (e.g. cohesion markers, or sequential focus acting as a connector) or implicit (e.g. prosodic features, or narrative chronology)? What is the thematic and expressive function of the connective elements? And what, in context, is the most accurate and idiomatic TL way of marking a given intersentential relation – should it be explicit or implicit, and does it require grammatical transposition? As for relations between larger units on the discourse level (paragraphs, chapters, etc.), these are generally less problematic than intersentential relations. As usual, the translator must first ask what the function of such features is in the ST. If they have no marked purpose, but simply reflect SL conventions, altering them to match TL conventions is unproblematic. Commercial considerations may also come into play: for instance, a publisher may be afraid that a text full of long paragraphs or unusually short ones would not sell. On the other hand, if the division into paragraphs does have a thematic or emotive function, the translator should hesitate

102


before significantly altering it. In some genres, there can be no question of the translator choosing whether or not to alter ST paragraphing: in texts having the force of law, for instance, the ST structure generally has to be observed, however inelegant or difficult this makes the text for a non-specialist. THE INTERTEXTUAL LEVEL No text, and no part of any text, exists in total isolation from others. Even the most innovative texts and turns of phrase form part of a whole body of speaking and writing by which their originality or unoriginality is measured. We shall give the term intertextual level to the level of textual variables on which texts are viewed as bearing significant external relations to other texts in a given culture or cultures. There are two main sorts of intertextual relation that particularly concern translators. The most common is that of genre-membership. We examined the implications of this in Chapter 5. A variation on genre-membership that concerns us here is imitation, which may shade into parody. The translator must be alert to this, and also be able to produce the TL style appropriate to the genre parodied. From entertainment to satire, parody can have many purposes and effects. It is found in advertising, and is common in journalism and literary texts. Some texts imitate or parody a whole range of genres. Practical 5.4 provides a compact and telling example: Günter Grass’s U-boat officer in Katz und Maus delivers a parody of war fiction in contrasting styles, the lush Nature descriptions actually reaching further back to recall yet earlier writers, in a kind of two-stage parody. Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., appearing in the 1970s as a successful stage play and an ‘Erzählung’, had its own comment to make on contemporary society – by way of an elaborate parody of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774). As the parody involves not only a vivid cultural transplantation of key elements from the original Werther story into a contemporary DDR setting but also a number of vigorously commented quotations from the 200-year-old Goethe text, it is difficult to envisage an English-language version suitable for any audience other than well-read Germanists. Though an extreme case, this exemplifies the difficulties created for the translator by elements of parody in an ST. Where the parody element is crucial to the ST, anyone commissioning or undertaking a translation needs to know whether the subject of the parody will be readily recognized outside the source culture, and, if so, by what kind of audience. The German hymn parodied by Brecht (Practical 6.4) is a special case, almost as well-known in English as in German. By contrast, Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., focused on a specific early literary text, enjoyed great success in the German-speaking countries yet


103

virtually defies translation (and cultural transplantation) for general audiences elsewhere. At the other extreme, wide accessibility of a different kind is represented by Brecht’s Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui, where the parody focuses on a real-life subject with enormous intercultural recognition value: Hitler. In this case the relationship to other texts is the diffuse, multimedial intertextuality that has become much more familiar since Brecht: the parody of Hitler and other Nazis recognized by the Arturo Ui audiences was not literary – even though one memorable scene simultaneously parodies Goethe’s Faust – and was only partly linguistic; much of the recognition depended on the medium of film. Parody brings us to the second category of intertextual relation, that of quotation or allusion. These are very widespread in many kinds of text, from novels to advertisements. Many allusions are hard to render without elaborate compensation or obtrusive linguistic virtuosity. It should never be forgotten that TTs only have value in terms of a specified purpose and in relation to a specified audience. Difficulties are not there to be overcome for their own sake; a brilliant solution is only brilliant if it serves the communicative purpose. Sometimes, an ST quotation that is full of resonances for the SL reader would be completely lost on the TL reader. In such cases, the translator can either leave it out altogether, or simply translate it literally, or, if it has an important function in the ST, use some form of compensation. As an illustration of the middle course – i.e. taking the literal meaning and losing the resonances – we return to the Skoda advertisement (p. 95). Apart from the reference to other Skoda advertisements in ‘ganz schön clever’, the main eye-catching text here, ‘Edel und stark, Hilfreich und gut’, includes an allusion to Goethe’s poem ‘Das Göttliche’, which begins: ‘Edel sei der Mensch, / Hilfreich und gut!’ But this part of the advertisement also incorporates an allusion guaranteed rather wider recognition in today’s German-speaking world: the TV comedy series Edel und Starck, still running in 2005. Barring a nearmiraculous idea for wholesale cultural transplantation, no translator is likely to waste much time trying to convey this double allusion. Like the alliterative and internal-rhyming second headline, it is an interesting curiosity and little more. If the advertisement has to be translated, the four adjectives will do their descriptive job – but the sparkle of allusion will be gone. In Chapter 10 we will return in a little more detail to the problems posed for translators into English by allusiveness in German texts. There is yet a further problem with allusions. An allusion is normally something deliberate, but we often see allusions where none is intended. An accidental allusion may be more accurately called an echo. Whatever one calls it, when readers or listeners respond to intertextual features of this sort, they are real factors in the meaning and impact of the text. We know, for example, that Keats was not alluding to Donovan’s ‘They call me mellow yellow’ in ‘To Autumn’, but, for many modern readers, Donovan’s line will be a major intertext in their response to ‘mellow’ when

104


they first encounter Keats’s poem. Conversely, when Donovan first sang his song, many listeners will immediately have recalled Keats. What we do not know is whether Keats was alluding to Thomson’s ‘roving mists’, or to Wordsworth’s ‘mellow Autumn charged with bounteous fruit’, and we do not know whether his readers in 1820 responded to these and other echoes and allusions. But, for readers who do hear any of these possible echoes and allusions, they are part of the richness of Keats’s lines. Intertextual questions like these are a good illustration of why, in Chapter 2, we were reluctant to accept the notion of ‘equivalent effect’: any text will have different resonances – even different meanings – for different people and for different generations. This is truer of literary than of scientific or technical texts, but it is a crucial factor that translators cannot ignore in assessing the relevance of intertextual features. And, as ever, the translator must also be careful to avoid unintentionally introducing inappropriate intertextual features. In a recent article in The Linguist, Susan Bassnett reports reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace in English translation and finding the text, to her surprise, ‘resonant with echoes of Jane Austen’: ‘What struck me about the Tolstoy I was reading were Austenesque details of domestic relationships couched in Austenesque language.’ And she continues with the key point: ‘The question of course is whether this stylistic feature is present in Tolstoy in Russian, or whether it has been introduced through the translators’ (Bassnett 2004: 7). Bassnett goes on to emphasize that when she reads War and Peace she is not reading Tolstoy, but the translation. We make the same point elsewhere in this book (p. 22). The translator’s responsibility to the non-linguist target audience is clear. PRACTICAL 8 8.1 Discourse issues Assignment (i) You are preparing a translation of the article below for an Englishspeaking academic study group concerned with German economic and industrial affairs. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. While not ignoring other issues, indicate in particular what you see as the main issues of cohesion and coherence that you will have to tackle. (ii) Translate the text, including the title, into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail that you took. (iv) Compare your TT with a sample translation, which will be given to you by your tutor.

Discourse and intertextual issues

105

Contextual information The ST is an article by Udo Perina, published in the weekly Die Zeit on 11 November 1994 (when Bonn was still the seat of the German Federal government). We have omitted the article’s original paragraphs 3 and 4. One reported a recent study finding by the Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung in Halle that there would still be a massive shortage of jobs in 2010, both in West Germany and more particularly in the five new Bundesländer. The other noted the greater motivation of women in these Länder to seek employment, and dismissed any idea of discouraging them from so doing. ST Die Arbeitslosigkeit geht leicht zurück. Dennoch bleibt die Beschäftigungskrise.

5

10

15

20

25

TRÜGERISCHER TREND Schon Brecht hat es gewußt: So manches wird unsichtbar, indem es gewaltige Ausmaße annimmt. Etwa die Arbeitslosigkeit: Obwohl sie zu einem riesigen Problem geworden ist, scheinen sie viele Politiker gar nicht mehr wahrzunehmen. Bei den wochenlangen Koalitionsverhandlungen in Bonn jedenfalls, wo es immerhin um die wichtigsten Ziele der künftigen Bundesrepublik ging, spielte sie kaum eine Rolle. Aber ohne ein umfassendes Konzept droht die Beschäftigungskrise zum Dauerstand zu werden. Davon können auch die jüngsten Zahlen aus Nürnberg nicht ablenken. Zwar zeigt sich, daß der konjunkturelle Aufschwung auch am Arbeitsmarkt nicht spurlos vorbeigeht; vier Millionen wird es in diesem Winter wohl nicht geben. Aber daß allein aufgrund des Wachstums ausreichend Jobs entstehen, um die Situation entscheidend zu verbessern, glauben selbst die Fachleute nicht, die der Koalition nahestehen. [. . .] Eine vernünftige Politik für mehr Beschäftigung muß die Schaffung neuer, zusätzlicher Arbeitsplätze zum Ziel haben. Auch die von manchen propagierte Umverteilung vorhandener Arbeit stößt schnell an ihre Grenzen, vor allem in Ostdeutschland. Schon heute ist hier das Angebot an Teilzeitarbeitsplätzen, im Vergleich zu allen offenen Stellen, größer als im Westen. Doch nur wenige sind angesichts niedriger Löhne in der Lage, von einem halben Verdienst zu leben. Eine wirkliche Lösung verspricht deshalb nur ein beschäftigungspolitisches Konzept, in das nicht nur die gesamte Politik, sondern auch Gewerkschaften sowie Unternehmer und nicht zuletzt die Bundesbank einbezogen werden müssen. Letztere muß mit ihrer Zinspolitik Wachstum ermöglichen. Falls sich Bonn weiter blind stellt, werden die Arbeitslosendaten auch noch im nächsten Jahrtausend Monat für Monat eine Spitzenmeldung in den Nachrichten sein. (Perina 1994)

106


8.2 Discourse issues Assignment (i) You are translating the following ST for a CD booklet. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. Pay special attention to discourse issues, but do not neglect other significant features. (Remember to look for discourse features within sentences as well as between sentences.) (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took. (iv) Compare your TT with the published one, which will be given to you by your tutor. Contextual information The ST is taken from the booklet provided with a CD of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The omitted material concerns earlier recordings of the work. The ‘Aufnahme’ referred to in line 17 is Gould’s first-ever recording.

5

10

15

20

ST Der 22jährige Glenn Gould war in seiner Heimat Kanada bereits eine Berühmtheit, als er am 2. Januar 1955 in der Phillips Gallery in Washington (und neun Tage später in der New Yorker Town Hall) sein USA-Debüt gab. Dennoch war zu den beiden Klavier-Recitals mit ihrem eigenwilligen Programm (eine Pavan des englischen Virginalisten Orlando Gibbons, die Fantasia cromatica von Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, fünf dreistimmige Sinfonien und die fünfte Partita von Bach, Anton Weberns Variationen op. 27, Beethovens E-Dur-Sonate op. 109 und zum Abschluß die Sonate von Alban Berg) kaum die »erste Garde« der nordamerikanischen Musikszene erschienen – glücklicherweise nicht, muß man im Nachhinein wohl sagen: Denn so hatte David Oppenheim – Klassik-Manager der »Columbia«, der auch eher zufällig in das Konzert geraten war, um sich (auf den Rat eines Freundes hin) diesen jungen Mann anzuhören, »der leider ein wenig crazy sei, aber von geradezu hypnotischer Ausstrahlung am Klavier« – das große Glück, Gould stante pede und exklusiv für seine Firma unter Vertrag zu nehmen. [. . .] Über das Wunder dieser Aufnahme ist viel geschrieben worden: Über ihr Temperament, über das faszinierende Non-legato-Spiel fast ohne Pedal, über ihren »Swing«. Über ihren beinahe respektlosen Umgang mit einem sakrosankten Heroen der Musikgeschichte (was manche Kritiker zu dem Bonmot »Gouldberg-Variationen« animierte). Über ihre atemberaubende Virtuosität, über ihre Innigkeit und Tiefe, über ihr »Kalkül« und ihre »Ekstase« – zwei Attribute, die Gould für sich selbst in Anspruch nahm – über ihre Wirkung auf die internationale Musikwelt: Als habe jemand

Discourse and intertextual issues 25

30

107

in einem seit hundert oder mehr Jahren nicht mehr gelüfteten Raum plötzlich ein Fenster aufgerissen und frische Morgenluft hereingelassen. Aber Goulds Triumph war nicht nur ein musikalischer: Der 22jährige entsprach auf frappante und ideale Weise dem Zeitgeist. Ein »Junger Wilder« der Musik, ein angry young man, wie ihn John Osborne 1956 mit der Figur des Jimmy Porter in seinem Schauspiel Look Back in Anger (»Blick zurück im Zorn«) auf die Bühne brachte, eine Inkarnation des Holden Caulfield aus Jerome D. Salingers 1951 erschienenem Erfolgsroman The Catcher in the Rye (»Der Fänger im Roggen«). (Stegemann 1992a: 12–14)

9 Literal meaning and translation issues Having reviewed translation issues typically encountered on the six levels of textual variables, we now return to the grammatical level. In this chapter, we are going to look in more detail at major features of translation loss in the area of literal meaning. Translation is concerned with meaning. However, the term ‘meaning’ is elastic and indeterminate, especially when applied to a whole text. This is true even of literal (or ‘cognitive’ or ‘denotative’) meanings – that is, those that are fully supported by ordinary semantic conventions, such as the convention that ‘door’ refers to a panel that closes an entrance in a building or a vehicle. It is this literal meaning that is given in dictionary definitions. Yet even the dictionary definition of a word has its problems. This is because it imposes a rigidity of meaning that words often do not show in context. In any case, many words have more than one literal meaning, and the situation and/or context in which the word occurs will rule out one meaning or another. If someone brings your luggage in and says ‘Der Koffer ist aber schwer’, you will know they mean it is heavy, and the meaning ‘difficult’ will not even occur to you. Or again, in a descriptive piece with a late afternoon setting, the sentence ‘Es dämmerte schon’ will unambiguously mean that the light was fading, while in a pre-dawn context it will mean the reverse. Sometimes, utterances made up of expressions with apparently identical literal meanings can have different meanings. Compare ‘She’s not in the same league as Germaine Greer’ and ‘She’s in a different league from Germaine Greer’. The component parts of each utterance have identical literal meanings, yet the sentences generally have opposite meanings. The implication is that a good dictionary should include both expressions as discrete items, having different literal meanings. But if a dictionary listed all such nuances, it would run into several volumes. In any case, dictionaries very often differ from one another in defining literal meanings,

Literal meaning and translation issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

109

especially of words denoting abstractions. As an example for class discussion, here are the Collins and the Concise Oxford definitions of ‘anticlimax’: Collins 1 a disappointing or ineffective conclusion to a series of events, etc. 2 a sudden change from a serious subject to one that is disappointing or ludicrous. 3 Rhetoric. a descent in discourse from the significant or important to the trivial, inconsequential, etc.

Concise Oxford a trivial conclusion to something significant or impressive, esp. where a climax was expected.

We shall return to these definitions, in discussing translation of ‘anticlimax’. Given the influence of situation and context, and the differences between dictionaries, it is hard to pin down the precise literal meanings in any text of any complexity. The more literary the text, the more this is so; but it is true even of informative texts. What we want to do now is raise awareness of the translation implications of these factors. We shall do this in terms of three degrees of semantic equivalence – that is, how close given expressions are to having identical literal meanings. Some expressions will be examined out of context, because this is how most literal meanings are defined in dictionaries. The very uncertainty inherent in this will show the importance of context and situation for understanding and translating any individual expression.

DEGREES OF SEMANTIC EQUIVALENCE Literal meaning is a matter of categories into which a language divides the totality of experience. Thus, the literal meaning of the word ‘pencil’ consists in the fact that all over the world there are similar objects that are included in the category of ‘pencil’ – and all sorts of other objects that are excluded from it. It is helpful to represent semantic equivalence visually. We shall use circles to give a rough depiction of semantic equivalence. So, for instance, the expressions ‘my mother’s father’ and ‘my maternal grandfather’ can be represented as two separate circles. The two ranges of literal meaning, however, coincide perfectly: that is, in every specific instance, ‘my mother’s father’ and ‘my maternal grandfather’ include and exclude exactly the same referents. This can be visualized as drawing two circles of exactly the same size, sliding them on top of each other and seeing that they cover one another exactly, as in the figure:

110


my mother’s father

my maternal grandfather

my mother’s father my maternal grandfather

This exemplifies the strongest form of semantic equivalence, full synonymy: the two expressions are synonyms of one another, having exactly the same range of literal meaning. For practical purposes, we shall take it that comparisons of literal meaning can also be made between different languages. For example, in most contexts ‘father’ and ‘Vater’ cover exactly the same range, and are therefore fully synonymous, as visualized here:

father

Vater

father Vater

In terms exclusively of literal meaning, synonymy rarely if ever causes translation problems. Things are not so simple when it comes to connotations, as we shall see in Chapter 10. And of course, in literary contexts especially, phonic or prosodic factors can also sometimes make using a TL synonym problematic.


111

Connotations and other difficulties aside, the unfortunate fact is that even the nearest semantic equivalent for translating the literal meaning of an ST expression usually falls short of being a full TL synonym. Let us take a clear-cut example. Depending on situation or context, the English word ‘exit’ has to be translated either as ‘Ausfahrt’ or as ‘Ausgang’. The English expression is wider and more general than either of the German ones. This can be shown as follows:

exit

Ausfahrt

Ausgang

The relationship between ‘exit’ and each of the German expressions is known as hyperonymy–hyponymy. An expression with a wider, more general, range of literal meaning is a hyperonym (or ‘superordinate’) of one with a narrower and less general literal meaning. Conversely, the narrower one is a hyponym of the wider one. So ‘exit’ is a hyperonym of ‘Ausfahrt’ and ‘Ausgang’, and they are both hyponyms of the English expression. If, as is most often the case, no full TL synonym for a given ST expression can be found, the translator has to look for an acceptable TL hyperonym or hyponym. In fact, translators do this automatically, in response (ideally) to context. Thus ‘Ausfahrt’ must be translated as ‘exit’, a hyperonym. Conversely, translating from English into German, ‘exit’ necessarily translates as either ‘Ausfahrt’ or ‘Ausgang’. Each of the German expressions is narrower in literal meaning, and is therefore an example of translating an SL hyperonym with a TL hyponym. Translating by a hyperonym results in a TT expression with a wider literal meaning than the ST expression. TT ‘the exit’ is more general than ST ‘die Ausfahrt’, omitting particulars given by the ST (namely that this is an exit for vehicles). We shall call this generalizing translation, or generalization for short. Translating by a hyponym results in a TT expression with a narrower literal meaning than the ST expression. TT ‘die Ausfahrt’ gives particulars

112


not present in ST ‘the exit’ (namely that this is an exit for vehicles). We shall call this particularizing translation, or particularization for short. Generalization and particularization both entail a degree of translation loss on the grammatical level: detail is added to, or omitted from, the ST message. Where convenient, we shall refer to this mode of translation loss as lexical loss. Lexical loss often does not matter very much. Translating by a hyperonym or a hyponym is entirely unremarkable, unless it is unnecessary, inappropriate or misleading. A generalizing translation is acceptable if there is no suitable TL alternative and if the omitted detail is either unimportant or is implied in the TT context. For example, German has two standard terms for ‘to eat’: ‘essen’, used of humans, and ‘fressen’, of animals. In non-metaphorical language, these can only be translated into English with the hyperonym ‘to eat’, but this lexical loss is virtually never going to matter. Or again: German will use ‘Falter’ or ‘Nachtfalter’ where English uses ‘moth’, with one major exception. This is that in the context of holes gnawed in stored clothes, German requires the specific term ‘Motte’, while English is still content with ‘moth’. If the context does not make clear which element of a hyperonym is relevant, then a hyponym may be needed. For instance, a remark in English about the serviceability of clothes can refer to ‘moth damage’ without need to specify further; but if you present the same insect for identification, you should get the answer ‘clothes-moth’. A particularizing translation is acceptable if there is no suitable TL alternative and if the added detail does not clash with the overall context of ST or TT. Thus ‘Wann wird gegessen?’ is difficult to translate without particularizing unless one chooses a relatively stilted option like ‘What time is the meal?’. In most contexts, the natural idiomatic translation will be one of a range including ‘When do {they/we} have {their/our} {meal/ lunch/dinner}?’, ‘When are we going to have dinner?’, ‘When do they eat?’, etc., etc. Luckily, the situation or context will usually make it clear which hyponym to use. A generalizing or particularizing translation will only be unacceptable if the TL does offer a suitable alternative, or if omitting or adding the detail creates a clash with the overall context of ST or TT. Compare the German text below – the first paragraph of a concise report – with the TT that accompanied it: ST Die Ultraschallprüfung von Walzmaterial auf Inhomogenitäten ist ein wichtiges Anliegen der qualitätsüberwachenden und der stahlerzeugenden und verarbeitenden Betriebe der Stahlindustrie. (ECSC–HOESCH 1987a: 507)

TT The ultrasonic testing of rolled products is an important request for the quality assurance of steel producing and manufacturing factories of the steel industry. (ECSC–HOESCH 1987b: 507)


113

Conspicuous though the anomalous ‘request’ may be to the TL reader, it is understandable that a non-native translator should pick the wrong English hyponym for ‘Anliegen’; even the current monolingual Duden does not number its hyponyms separately. Yet an equally mechanical backtranslation of ‘request’ would produce ‘Ersuchen’ or a synonym, a wildly irrelevant idea. A more accurate TT would be: ‘Ultrasonic testing of rolled products is a major concern/priority for the quality assurance, production and manufacturing branches of the steel industry.’ (The TT’s silence with regard to ‘Inhomogenitäten’ is probably not an error but a generalizing translation in line with industry practice.) In a second example, the issue is whether particularization should be avoided altogether. A current leaflet outlining 700 years of Düsseldorf church history for visitors required strict economy of language combined with readability. Faced with the ST’s ‘Schließung der meisten Klöster’, the translator has to choose between the fussy-sounding ‘monasteries and convents’ and a vaguer rendering such as ‘religious houses’ – probably preferring the latter. In itself, generalizing or particularizing translation is unremarkable, in fact almost inevitable. But it is vital to look beyond individual words and sentences towards the text as a whole, so as to avoid needless obscurity or contradiction. It is not a case of avoiding a generalization or a particularization, but of picking the right one. Thus, for instance, ‘Verkehr’ (in Duden’s sense 1) covers both ‘traffic’ and ‘transport’; but ‘starker Verkehr’ is ‘heavy traffic’, not ‘heavy transport’. As well as synonymy and hyperonymy–hyponymy, there is a third degree of semantic equivalence. We can illustrate it from the italicized phrase in the sentence ‘deine Schuhe liegen noch da’. Without context, one can only say of ‘Schuhe’ that statistically it is more likely to correspond to ‘shoes’ in English than ‘boots’. It could mean ‘boots’ – not every kind of boot, but, say, walking or football boots. In translating the term, English particularizes to ‘shoes’ or ‘boots’, with different objects in mind. With each of the other two italicized words, particularity is lost. The English ‘your’ for ‘deine’ is a generalizing translation, because it omits the detail that the relationship between the speaker and the shoe/boot owner is either fairly close (family, close friend) or informal (young person). And while one might choose to say in English that the boots ‘are still lying here’ (or ‘standing here’), the standard casual rendering for this message is simply: ‘Your boots are still here’. This is a generalizing translation. It runs parallel to the even more standard translation of ‘Sein Auto stand vor der Tür’ as ‘His car was at the door’. Casual English is more likely to use a form of the non-specific verb ‘to be’. In the standard casual translation of ‘deine Schuhe liegen’, the TT combines particularization and generalization. This can be visualized as two partially overlapping circles as in the following figure:

114


TT adds: specific type of footwear

TT keeps: reminder about uncollected footwear

ST deine Schuhe liegen noch da

TT omits: closeness of relationship, footwear not tidily stowed

TT your boots are still here

The unshaded area, where the circles overlap, represents the material the ST and TT have in common. The shaded areas represent what is added and what is omitted in the TT. This is another category of degree in the translation of literal meaning. We shall call it partially overlapping translation, or partial overlap for short. Partial overlap is almost unavoidable in whole sentences, and usual in phrases. It is common even in single words. Sometimes this is because of differences in grammatical structure between SL and TL; sometimes it is because of purely semantic differences, the TL having no synonym, hyperonym or hyponym for the SL word. For an example in which the only issue is lexis, take the Collins dictionary’s suggestion (in the English–German section) of ‘Enttäuschung’ as a translation of ‘anticlimax’. Significantly, under ‘Enttäuschung’ in the German–English section, the same dictionary does not give ‘anticlimax’, but only ‘disappointment’ (plus ‘let-down’ in a phrase). The fact is that there is no single German word that covers exactly the same semantic range as ‘anticlimax’. The asymmetry between the two halves of the bilingual dictionary signals the likelihood of partially overlapping translation. And indeed, in terms of literal meaning, ‘anticlimax’ arguably does not denote ‘disappointment’ so much as ‘sudden outcome falling short of what was anticipated’. The Concise Oxford definition of ‘anticlimax’ thus seems closer to actual usage than the Collins (see p. 109). An anticlimax may be frustrating, trivial or comic, but it is always incongruous. That is, a turn of events is relatively objectively judged to fall short of what was expected. ‘Enttäuschung’ is different, in that a turn of events is relatively subjectively reacted to as falling short of what was desired or hoped for. So whereas ‘anticlimax’ implies expectation and rational assessment, ‘Enttäuschung’ implies hope and emotional response. Translating ‘anticlimax’ as ‘Enttäuschung’ thus seems to be at best a case of partial overlap: the TT keeps the core element of ‘turn of events


115

falls short of what was expected’, but it adds a nuance of ‘emotional reaction to the event as regrettable’, and omits the nuance of ‘objective assessment of the event as incongruous’. A partial overlap will be acceptable or unacceptable for the same reasons as apply to particularizing and generalizing translation. What is added must not clash with the ST or TT context; what is omitted must be either insignificant or recoverable from the TT context, if necessary through some form of compensation. OF CONTEXTS AND DICTIONARIES One reason we spent time over ‘anticlimax’ and some other examples was to make students aware of the potential translation pitfalls even in something as seemingly straightforward as literal meaning. Another was to encourage an attitude of constructive suspicion towards all dictionaries, monolingual as well as bilingual. Dictionaries are indispensable, but if the translator is not prepared to pause and think about the literal meanings and translations given in them, or about how the context influences the meanings, needless mistakes are going to be made. Our analyses are intended to equip students to find the best translation for an expression, not the right label for it. Is it important, after all, to find the right labels for these nuances? Does it matter that an adopted TT is, say, a generalization rather than a particularization? Not in itself, no. These analyses are a means, not an end. Doing them helps to develop the ability to work out as nearly as possible, and pretty quickly, what the ST and the draft TT are saying. It does this partly by exposing the limitations of dictionaries. As we pointed out on pp. 108–9, monolingual dictionaries often disagree among themselves over literal meanings. With abstract terms in particular, an element of subjectivity is often involved in defining literal meaning; but the same applies to many concrete terms, such as ‘dish’ and ‘bowl’, ‘pond’ and ‘pool’. Bilingual dictionaries, too, often suggest very different TL possibilities for given words or phrases. Thus, unlike the Collins, the Oxford–Duden gives for ‘anticlimax’ not ‘Enttäuschung’ but two suggestions which – depending on how you define ‘anticlimax’ in the first place – are either particularizations or partial overlaps: ‘Abstieg’ and ‘Abfall’. There is much less disagreement, naturally, over technical terms; both these dictionaries give ‘Antiklimax’ for ‘anticlimax’ in its specialized literary-rhetorical sense. Otherwise, even where dictionaries do not disagree significantly over literal meaning, they tend to present a number of TL possibilities that to the informed user will seem to be either particularizations or generalizations or partial overlaps. Clearly, it is vital to remember that, except in the case of highly specific technical terms, no dictionary can cover all the possibilities for translating a given expression. What all this means

116


in practice is that translators often need to check meanings in more than one source, including the internet as a huge resource of usage in context, and with friends, colleagues and experts – but also that the final decision is the translator’s own responsibility. The reason why dictionaries disagree over literal meanings and do not cover all possible translations for a given expression is that literal meaning is ultimately conditioned by the context in which the expression occurs. Even where the possibilities are limited, it is the context that determines, say, which particularization is best. Thus, where ultrasonic testing was an important ‘Anliegen’ of steel rolling mills, we saw that a rendering as ‘request’ looks bizarre. The most compact markers of context are the first elements of compounds, and so we can return to ‘Verkehr’ and its different senses to provide four non-technical examples of context determining the English translation (though TL collocative practice may play a role too: see Chapter 10). Thus, ‘Verkehrsverbindungen’ is ‘transport links’, but ‘Verkehrschaos’ is ‘traffic chaos’, ‘Verkehrsunfall’ is (usually) ‘road accident’, and ‘Verkehrsverein’ is ‘tourist information office’. But these are simple illustrations. Other words, just as familiar, often face translators with troublesome issues of literal meaning that are not as easy to schematize as many of the examples we have looked at. As one example of many, take the potentially problematic term ‘Arbeitsplatz’. We start from a proof-reading job on an unsatisfactory draft TT, from which the following is an extract:

5

ST Denn intelligente Kommunikationssysteme [. . .] führen zu einem Umbau der internen und externen Organisationsstrukturen der Unternehmen und öffentlichen Verwaltungen, durch den die Arbeitsplätze produktiver gestaltet werden. (BDI 2004a: 56)

TT Intelligent communication systems [. . .] change the internal and external organisational structures of enterprises and public administration that makes it possible to structure workplaces more productively. [all sic] (unpublished draft TT)

Might the ST author have been referring to the restructuring or redesign of people’s jobs, rather than of the places where they work? Faced with a lengthy translation of generally weak standard – witness the middle part of the extract – the proof-reader’s eye tends to fall swiftly on known faux amis and their even more treacherous cousins that tell lies only sometimes. ‘Arbeitsplatz’ belongs to the latter group. The collocation ‘Arbeitsplätze schaffen’, for example, should be (but is not always) translated as ‘create jobs’. A recent major bilingual specialist dictionary translates ‘Arbeitsplatz umgestalten’ as ‘to redesign a job’. But very commonly too ‘Arbeitsplatz’ means literally the place where people work

Literal meaning and translation issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 5 8 9

20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

117

(whether ‘workstation’ or ‘working environment’ more generally). For the translator learning on the job, a search engine such as Google gives valuable help in resolving doubts of this kind. A search for ‘Arbeitsplätze gestalten’ reveals an almost unanimous focus on ergonomic issues, i.e. the draft TT reproduced above is likely to be literally correct in rendering ‘Arbeitsplätze’ as ‘workplaces’. But that is not quite the end of the matter. The example illustrates yet another phenomenon that is less rare than translators might wish, namely the occasional convergence in practice of two meanings (two hyponyms of a given hyperonym) that seem sharply demarcated in their Duden definition. Still searching on Google – native speaker advice is sought later, if at all – one comes across a text reading: Jeder Landwirt ist auch Arbeitgeber und als solcher kann er Arbeitsplätze gestalten. Eine adäquate Entlohnung schafft Wohlstand, moderne Maschinen, Geräte und Gebäude stellen eine ansprechende Arbeitsumgebung dar und Naturarbeit erfordert ein motivierendes Maß an Eigenverantwortung. Arbeitsplätze in der Landwirtschaft sind zwar knapp, aber dafür zunehmend modern – zumindest dort, wo die Betriebe noch Gewinne erwirtschaften. (Hardegg 2004) Beyond any doubt, ‘working environment’ is in the writer’s mind here. But the references to motivation and individual responsibility make it clear he is also thinking of the job’s character – even before he comes to ‘knapp’, which can only apply to the hyponym meaning ‘salaried positions’. It may therefore seem, when one returns to ‘Arbeitsplätze’ as used in the BDI text, that in fact neither hyponym (i.e. neither ‘jobs’ nor ‘workplaces’) is entirely adequate. (For the record, the published TT included both terms.) Let us sum up. On the grammatical level, literal meaning is obviously of fundamental importance in translation. Yet context and subjectivity tinge even this most basic of givens with uncertainty. Thinking about the literal meaning of a given expression forces the translator to become aware as precisely as possible of what is being said. And of where and how it is being said: there are many reasons – e.g. the need for grammatical transposition or compensation or a particular style in the TT – why literal meaning might be conveyed in different places and through different parts of speech from those of the ST. Ironically, then, analysing the literal meaning of individual words and expressions obliges the translator to consider the text as a whole, which is an essential prerequisite for effective reading of any kind, including translation. Sometimes, the resulting TT will be so free that there is only an overall general correspondence in message content between it and the ST, precise details of literal meaning being either lost or drastically redistributed throughout the TT.

118


PRACTICAL 9 9.1 Literal meaning and translation Assignment (i) Study the ST and published TT here, and make a detailed analysis of examples of synonymous, generalizing, particularizing and partially overlapping translation in the TT. (ii) Where possible, give a revised TT that is a better translation, and explain your decisions. Contextual information The ST and accompanying TT come from a leaflet issued by the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg announcing an art exhibition that ran there from 6 April to 13 July 2003 under the title Lucas Cranach. Glaube, Mythologie und Moderne. The exhibition was one of a series entitled Alte Meister der europäischen Kunst.

5

10

15

ST Alte Meister der europäischen Kunst Mit einer Ausstellung zum 450. Todestag von Lucas Cranach d.Ä. wird dieser Zyklus fortgesetzt. Zu sehen sind etwa 100 Gemälde, Druckgraphiken und Bücher des großen deutschen Malers. Ihnen sind Cranach-Paraphrasen von Künstlern des 20. Jahrhunderts gegenübergestellt, darunter Picasso, Kirchner und Giacometti. In den kommenden Jahren werden weitere erstrangige Leistungen alter europäischer Kunst präsentiert: frühe Ikonen aus Nowgorod, spanische Malerei des Barock und Wolkenbilder des 19. Jahrhunderts. (Bucerius 2003: 2)

TT Old Masters of European Art This cycle continues with an exhibition commemorating the 450th anniversary of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s death. Around 100 paintings, prints and books of the great German master are on exhibit. These are compared with Cranach interpretations of 20th century artists including Picasso, Kirchner and Giacometti. In the near future, additional first-rate endeavors of old European art will be on display including early Novgorod icons, Spanish Baroque paintings and cloud paintings from the 19th century. (Bucerius 2003: 2)

9.2 Literal meaning and translation Assignment (i) For publication in the English-speaking world, you are translating the policy document from which the following ST is taken. Discuss

Literal meaning and translation issues

(ii) (iii) (iv)

119

the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this text, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. Translate the text into English. Discuss the main decisions of detail you took, concentrating on noteworthy cases of synonymous, generalizing, particularizing and partially overlapping translation. Compare your TT with the published translation, which will be given to you by your tutor.

Contextual information The ST comes from the telecommunications chapter (III.7) of Für ein attraktives Deutschland. Freiheit wagen – Fesseln sprengen, published in 2004 by the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie e.V. The document presented the German employers’ comprehensive programme for national economic recovery. Subsection headings throughout have the same grammatical structure as the § 7.1 heading, i.e. injunctions using an infinitive verb. There is an obvious misprint in the ST. The published text mentioned in (iv) above is an excerpt from the BDI’s own English version, For an Attractive Germany. Venturing Freedom – Casting Off Shackles.

5

10

15

ST 7.1 Wettbewerb und Liberalisierungserfolge langfristig sichern Der Mobilfunk ist das beste Beispiel dafür, dass sich leistungsfähige Informations- und Kommunikationssysteme am schnellsten auf wettbewerblich organisierten Märkten für Telekommunikations-Infrastruktur und bei einem wettbewerblich organisierten Angebot entsprechender Dienste entwickeln. In diesem Bereich führt der bestehende Wettbewerb (vier Infrastrukturwettbewerber und über 10 Service-Provider) zu einer marktgeleiteten Preisbildung. Für die Wahrung dieses Wettbewerbs reicht die Ex-Post-Kontrolle des allgemeinen Wettbewerbsrecht aus, um auftretenden Missbräuchen zu begegnen. Die Regulierung auch nur eines einzigen Marktes im Mobilfunk hätte weitreichende Folgen für die betroffenen Unternehmen und für die im Wettbewerb entstandene Marktstruktur. Denn zusätzlich zum dafür erforderlichen Aufbau neuer Kostenrechnungssysteme und der damit verbundenen Bürokratie würden erfolgreiche Geschäftsmodelle in Frage gestellt. Im Hinblick auf Bestrebungen nach einer Preisregulierung im Mobilfunk gilt die grundsätzliche Forderung, dass der deutsche Gesetzgeber gegenüber Regulierungsbestrebungen seitens der Europäischen Union klar Position zugunsten einer am Subsidiaritätsprinzip orientierten Ausgestaltung von Regulierungseingriffen bezieht. (BDI 2004a: 56)

10 Connotative meaning and translation issues Literal meaning is only one aspect of verbal meaning. The meaning of a text comprises a number of different layers; in most non-technical texts, the explicitly referential content is accompanied by emotional colouring, cultural, social and personal associations, cultural assumptions and so on. Intertextual references or echoes are particularly effective reminders of the multi-layered nature of texts, because they specifically recall another reading or listening experience. Finding words to convey both the lexical content of a text and its echoes and overtones is often a crucial translation issue. Whether within a single language or as between two languages, synonyms are often different in their overall semantic effects – compare ‘viper’ and ‘adder’, ‘peewit’ and ‘lapwing’, ‘Schneeglöckchen’ and ‘snowdrop’, ‘gooseberry’ and ‘Stachelbeere’, ‘Queuing traffic ahead’ and ‘Stau’ (as road signs), ‘hairdryer’ and ‘Föhn’. Each of these has overtones that differentiate it from its synonym. It is true that the momentary flash of association is suppressed when such terms are used in purely transactional language, with focus on the literal meaning. But overtones of one kind or another nonetheless play at least a subliminal role, and in most carefully written texts, author and translator know that the imagery or other associations attaching to the language used may make or mar the success of the text. We shall call such overtones connotative meanings (or connotations) – that is, associations which, over and above the literal meaning of an expression, form part of its overall meaning. Even more than literal meanings, connotative meanings are reminders that extra-textual factors – part of the situation in which the text is produced and read or heard – are crucial to the existence and communicative power of texts. Connotative meanings are many and varied, and it is common for a single piece of text, or even a single expression, to combine more than one kind into a single overall effect. However, it is useful at this learning

Connotative meaning and translation issues 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

121

stage to distinguish six major types of connotative meaning (some of them adapted from Leech 1974: 26). Learning to identify these sharpens awareness of the presence and significance of connotations both in STs and in TTs. Note that, by definition, we are not concerned here with personal connotations, but with more or less public ones. The first type is allusive meaning, created when an expression evokes a saying or quotation in such a way that the meaning of the saying or quotation becomes part of the overall meaning of the expression. Thus a reference to there being ‘too many cooks’ involved in organizing an event evokes the familiar proverb about spoiling the broth, and by this allusive meaning creates the implication that the people preparing or producing something are not working as a team. Where allusive meaning occurs in STs, the translator’s first problem is simply to spot it. The second problem is to understand the allusive meaning by reference to the meaning of the saying or quotation evoked. (This may involve considering the nature of the ST audience: is it the whole language community, or, say, a particular social grouping or interest group?) The third problem is to convey the force of the implication in the TT, ideally by using an appropriate allusive meaning based on a saying or quotation in the TL, but in practice more often through some form of compensation. There is a simple example in an advertisement for a German electrical firm, where the text contains the slogan ‘SEIN WISSEN IST IHR SANFTES RUHEKISSEN’, evidently based on an allusion to the proverbial saying ‘Ein gutes Gewissen ist ein sanftes Ruhekissen’. In an advertising text, the meaning of this proverb blends by allusion with the literal meaning of the slogan used, producing a clear suggested meaning: ‘This firm is so conscientious and reliable that the customer’s responsibility may be transferred to it without a qualm.’ To translate this advertising slogan would present considerable difficulties, since the German proverb seems to have no wellknown counterpart in English; even if there were one, weaving an allusion to it into the TT would tax the translator’s ingenuity. The most practical approach here would probably be to use compensation. Here are two possibilities: ‘SAFE HANDS MAKE LIGHT WORK’, and ‘RELAX! HE’S GOT A GOOD HEAD FOR LIGHTS!’ In both, a suitable illustration plus the firm’s name and logo create the first message, just as in the ST: here is electrical firm X recommending its services. The second element – the reassurance conveyed by the familiar word pattern – is also as in the ST. Here the ‘Safe hands . . .’ translation is closer to the ST, invoking the ‘wisdom of the ages’ preserved in a proverb. The third ST element, the suggestion of handing over responsibility yet keeping a clear conscience, is lost in its original form, but replaced in more explicit form: ‘Safe . . .’ and ‘Relax! . . .’. Finally, the ST rhyme – a typical memory aid – is replaced by a different aural trick, a pun, with the same memory aid function.

122


For the ST author, allusion is a useful shorthand. It may be casual and incidental, for instance a passing reference to a current news story. Or it may be used deliberately and pointedly, as in a barbed remark in dialogue or in book titles. Agatha Christie quotes Shakespeare in Sad Cypress, Blake in Endless Night. In Martin Walser’s Ein fliehendes Pferd, a bumptious small-boat sailor becalmed on a leaden day curses the Bodensee (Lake Constance) for its lack of challenge: ‘Das sei vielleicht was für Opas, in deren Wipfeln Ruh ist’ (Walser 1978: 106). The allusion is to Goethe’s famous lines ‘Über allen Gipfeln / ist Ruh, / In allen Wipfeln / Spürest du / Kaum einen Hauch’ – lines jumbled by Walser to underline the speaker’s savage mood. A published translation has recourse to Cardinal Newman: ‘It might be all right for old fogies for whom the fever of life is over’ (Walser 1980: 76). A notable example of allusive meaning used for impact on the reader is the title Heinrich Böll chose for a short story first published in 1950 in a collection of the same name: Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa . . . (Böll 1968). Addressing a readership that knew its German classics, and knew something about the culture of ancient Greece, Böll alludes here to a famous elegiac couplet from Schiller’s long poem ‘Der Spaziergang’ (1795). These two lines are presented in the poem context as the ancient tablet epitaph commemorating the Spartans who fell heroically at Thermopylae in 480 BC. Schiller has the memorial tablet read: ‘Wanderer, kommst du nach Sparta, verkündige dorten, du habest / Uns hier liegen gesehn, wie das Gesetz es befahl’ (Schiller 1987: 231). And, of course, there is a more general allusion, to the Spartans’ proverbial discipline and valour. The allusive meaning is clear: the pity and waste of war, as a matter for public attention and memory. But the cultural impact of Schiller, immense in German-speaking countries, barely reached a few intellectuals elsewhere. The problem facing the translator is that Böll’s story depends for its full impact on readers’ awareness of the prestige of that tradition of humanist Bildung reaching back to Schiller and his contemporaries. For the general Anglophone reader of Böll’s text, the Spartan associations have some resonance, the Schiller allusion none. Yet the latter is thematic in the story, and the translator might feel an explanatory note would serve the TT better than any attempt to compensate within the text. It is, then, a major problem for German–English translators that German literature has left a legacy of allusions embedded in later German writing, and to some extent also in everyday German discourse, which have generally no recognition value in English. There is a concomitant danger of the translator wittingly or unwittingly introducing a spurious allusion. For example, ‘Schall und Rauch’ is a Faust allusion, but probably not always recognized as such even by the user. It seems to invite translation with ‘sound and fury’, an allusion to Shakespeare. However, if the translator buys into the suitably pejorative ‘sound and fury’ for the sake of the familiar ring it will have in TL audience ears, the cost


123

will be an element of spuriousness in the allusion. The two quotations have quite different referents, for a start. If the SL quotation is merely a passing allusion, borrowed as a convenient ‘geflügeltes Wort’, then this mismatch between the two quotations would in most contexts be unimportant: an SL literary allusion is rendered by a TL one of roughly equal familiarity. Translating Faust itself, however, is a different matter. The Luke TT, for instance, shows no interest in waking this particular echo. It has: ‘[The name’s] mere noise and smoke [. . .]’ (Goethe 1987: 109). The wary translator, then, avoids importing spurious allusion. Still, it is important to keep a sense of perspective about this, by asking: ‘What are the consequences?’ The expression ‘unsere besten Pläne’ in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (Sebald 2001: 42) is translated as ‘our best-laid plans’ (Sebald 2002: 37). The echo of Robert Burns will be heard by many readers of the TT, and is not there in the ST. Yet the phrase is so integral by now to English idiom, and so fitted to its immediate context, that a bald literal TT would have been inferior. By contrast, the question about ‘consequences’ – impact on the target audience – rings warning bells when applied in a different example: a 2003 academic paper on urban and regional planning or a South Carinthian farmers’ website (to take two recent examples) will have been badly mistranslated if their value-neutral term ‘Lebensraum’ appears in an English TT as the loaded term ‘lebensraum’ (cf. p. 36). Connotations matter. Another type of connotation is attitudinal meaning, the part of the overall meaning of an expression that consists of some widespread attitude to the referent. The expression does not merely denote the referent, but also hints at some attitude to it. For instance, in appropriate contexts, ‘the police’, ‘the filth’ and ‘the Old Bill’ are synonyms in terms of referential content, but they have different overall meanings, because they connote attitudes to the police – attitudes that trigger different responses in the hearer and therefore must not be ignored by the translator. The same applies to the available German terms – ‘Bullen’ (hostile), ‘Polente’ (less hostile, becoming dated), ‘Polizei’, etc. There seems little doubt that President Bush’s reference to post-9/11 measures as a ‘crusade’ was widely seen, especially among Muslims, as having strong attitudinal significance. Translators need to tread very carefully when assessing the attitudinal connotations of demotic terms used – by given groups, in a given context – to designate perceived ‘out-groups’. What is the degree of hostility in racist terms such as ‘Kanaken’ when used by Germans, ‘Krauts’ when used about Germans? (Respectively very strong, and anything from mild to strong.) What about ‘Fidschis’? ‘Spaghettifresser’, used on television in 2004, caused considerable offence. The translator has to ask these questions, and to answer them in the light of the strategic analysis of the text, because often the words on their own only give broad guidance. Attitudinal connotations can still be important even when the referent is not a person but a system or practice or way of thinking. Take the

124


following extract from a historical account of the Nazis’ Aktion T4 euthanasia programme: Die Angehörigen erhielten nach einem ausgeklügelten Geheimhaltungssystem gefälschte Todesnachrichten, die sogenannten ‘Trostbriefe’, die eine ‘Erlösung’ der Kranken von ihrem Leid suggerierten. Dennoch kam es innerhalb der Bevölkerung zu einer erheblichen Beunruhigung wegen der Krankenmorde. (Hohendorf et al.: unpublished) The term ‘ausgeklügelt’ might be rendered by any of ‘cleverly worked out’, ‘carefully devised’, ‘sophisticated’, ‘ingenious’, ‘crafty’, ‘cunning’, etc. In terms of literal meaning, these are all hyponyms of the ST term. How do we go about choosing the best of them in terms of attitudinal meaning? It is as well to be clear first about the referent. The referent of the adjective ‘ausgeklügelt’ is simply the quality of being ‘ausgeklügelt’. The text as a whole, however, has an underlying single referent, the euthanasia programme. As in all instances of connotative meaning, context is crucial, and in selecting from a range of hyponyms, in this instance and others, the translator’s responsibility is to mirror, as faithfully as possible, the attitudinal values implicit or expressed in the text as a whole, vis-à-vis the whole-text referent. If the text as a whole is judged to be openly hostile to its referent, then where a choice exists for an individual TT term the more loaded one will be chosen, so that it can contribute to a tone in the full TT broadly similar to that of the ST. The importance of a careful reading of the full ST is clear. The tone of the Hohendorf article on the Nazi T4 programme is predominantly factual and objective, though not euphemistic. The relatively restrained tone of the ST means the translator must not introduce strong attitudinal meanings. On the other hand – to return to our six options for ‘ausgeklügelt’ – there is no case at all for introducing the weak positive attitudes implicit in the first three options; and the last two, while not excessively pejorative (they are acceptable attitudinally) have unsuitable associative meanings (see pp. 124–5). ‘Ingenious’ thus probably represents the smallest translation loss. Where the subject matter of the text is controversial or painful, TT audiences will be extremely sensitive to attitudinal meanings conveyed by the translator. Yet, as our example shows, there may be no literally accurate TL term with the right nuance; and the irony of the inverted commas round ‘Trostbriefe’ would not be so apparent for the TL audience finding inverted commas round the translated term (see p.125). The example is also a reminder that our categories of connotative meaning are only a framework to help the translator think clearly when making decisions. A word in context may have connotative meanings of more than one type. For instance, attitudinal meaning often coexists with associative meaning in a single expression. Associative meaning is that part of the overall


125

meaning of an expression that consists of expectations/assumptions widely associated (rightly or not) with the referent of the expression. For much of the UK, through the 1970s and 1980s, ‘the Falls Road’ and ‘the Shankill’ had a shared associative meaning of ‘sectarian strife’; within Northern Ireland itself, however, that association at most came to overlie pre-existing contrasted local meanings: ‘Republican’ and ‘Unionist’. A good example of a common noun with an almost universal associative meaning is ‘nurse’. Male nurses have long been a familiar sight, yet most people still automatically associate ‘nurse’ with ‘woman’. That, indeed, is why the term ‘male nurse’ has had to be coined. ‘He is a nurse’ sounds odd, even today. ‘Nurse’ is another example of an expression that combines two types of connotation. As well as the associative meaning of ‘woman’, it has a widespread attitudinal meaning of ‘trust’ and ‘gratitude’ – feelings that most people have as a result of experiencing or watching nurses at work. Among examples already cited, ‘Sparta’ involves allusions to ancient history, but also has associative meanings of ‘disciplined’, ‘frugal’, etc. In the Nazi euthanasia text quoted above, the term ‘Trostbriefe’ (literally: ‘letters of condolence’) presents little translation difficulty. However, its impact in the ST is due largely to the inverted commas, which draw the reader’s attention to the term’s associative meaning of human sympathy, and to the Nazis’ perversion of that meaning: the inverted commas trigger a connotation that might otherwise remain inactive. The reader is alerted particularly to the consolation element in the term ‘Trostbriefe’, as opposed to the broad and formal translation ‘letters of condolence’. In the same extract, ‘crafty’ and ‘cunning’ were rejected as unsuitable renderings (associatively) for ‘ausgeklügelt’. Both have the associative qualities of the fox: craft or cunning, whether used for good (occasionally) or ill, are used against the big battalions, against physically superior force. This is why they do not make suitable adjectives for Nazi methods. Clearly, associative meaning may well be a factor in translation decisions. Here is a final example, from a business context. The major BDI Gesamtreformkonzept document published in 2004 (see Practical 9.2) makes something of a theme of ‘ein schlanker Staat’, meaning that the State should intervene in social processes only where private enterprise cannot possibly fill the need. While no native English-speaker will entertain ‘slim’ – collocatively weird – it may take a little lateral thinking to realize that associative meaning must come into play too. The appropriate association is not ‘slender’ but ‘fit and without flab’; the adjective ‘lean’ therefore incurs a smaller translation loss. The fourth type of connotation is collocative meaning. Collocative meaning is given to an expression over and above its literal meaning by the meaning of some other expression with which it collocates to form a commonly used phrase. Some collocative meanings are so strong that they hardly need triggering by context. When the British Prime Minister called the Leader of the Opposition a ‘serial opportunist’ in March 2005, he was

126


(wittingly or not) invoking the inevitable collocative meaning of ‘killer’, triggered by the currently familiar expression ‘serial killer’. The term ‘chauvinism’ (literally ‘fanatical patriotism’) can hardly be used today without evoking its collocative partner, ‘male’, and in everyday speech has virtually become a synonym of ‘male sexism’. Collocative associations need not derive from specific single expressions. For instance, the gender-specific connotations of ‘pretty’ and ‘handsome’ can be said to be collocative meanings, deriving from the tendency of ‘pretty’ to collocate with words denoting females, and the tendency of ‘handsome’ to collocate with words denoting males. Here there is some interesting asymmetry with German, in that ‘ein hübscher Kerl’ is routinely used of an unambiguously masculine man, while ‘sie ist ein feiner Kerl’ seems to be repudiated by most native speakers of German, yet used by a few; it appears in the 2003 Duden. Although by no means strictly parallel with the English ‘pretty’/’handsome’ antithesis, regular collocations of both ‘lieblich’ and ‘herb’ with such disparate things as wines and landscapes (‘with a hint of sweetness’/‘astringent’ and ‘gentle’/‘austere’ respectively) permit a little cautious gender-linking: ‘ein herbes Wesen’ and ‘herbe Schönheit’ might well be attributed to a woman, but only to exclude the stereotypically ‘feminine’ qualities. Collocative clashes in translation occur most readily when SL and TL appear to have closely matching forms, as indeed German and English often do. A German comment on a car may be ‘Der Motor ist zu laut’; however, a British car salesman will only smirk if he is told ‘the engine is too loud’, while the high-class outfitter will react similarly if the check jacket he offers is ‘too noisy’. Collocative habit is not easy to predict or analyse, and does not by any means always apply. You can shut or close a door, but only close a chapter in your life, and where a German roadsign reads ‘STRASSE GESPERRT’, the translation will normally be ‘ROAD CLOSED’, not ‘ROAD SHUT’. Collocative habit can assert itself sharply in questions of magnitude and degree. In the text discussed on p. 124, about Nazi killings, a first draft TT might read: ‘Nonetheless, these murders of patients caused considerable public disturbance.’ However, this would need modification, as ‘disturbance’ in the context of social psychology collocates with a group of expressions basically related to the idea denoted in German by ‘Unruhen’, i.e. overt law-and-order breaches. The force of collocative meaning is illustrated by the fact that in rendering ‘Beunruhigung’ one could say people were seriously disturbed by the news, but not that they were disturbed people: the reason appears to be that this formulation uncomfortably echoes (e.g.) the medical collocation ‘disturbed patient’ and the lay term ‘disturbed individual’. It is precisely in such sensitive contexts that a subtle error in connotative meaning, over and above reducing the value of the translation, can most damage public relations or a delicate negotiation.


127

It often happens that an expression acquires a meaning over and above its literal meaning by the fact that its form calls to mind the completely different meaning of an expression that sounds, or is spelled, the same, or nearly the same. This type of connotation is reflected meaning. An often-cited example of reflected meaning compares the connotative difference between the synonyms ‘Holy Spirit’ and ‘Holy Ghost’ (see Leech 1974: 19). The homonymic link between ‘Holy Ghost’ and ‘ghost’ in the sense of ‘spook’ or ‘spectre’ means that that particular reflected meaning is latent in the term ‘Holy Ghost’; likewise, the ‘spirit’ element in ‘Holy Spirit’ may call to mind the use of ‘spirit’ to mean ‘distilled liquor’. The now fairly widely adopted replacement of ‘mankind’ by ‘humankind’, and the rather more ambitious attempts to replace the indefinite pronoun ‘man’ in German by something less ‘sexist’, or by ‘frau’, are not based on the literal meaning of these terms, but amount rather to a tacit judgement that reflected meaning exists and has social significance in these instances. It needs to be emphasized, however, that reflected meanings, because they come from an unrelated field, are normally latent – or dormant – associations, and are activated by context. The first line of an Easter hymn contains a reflected meaning that could be a fluke, but was probably intended: ‘Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son’. Even without the context of traditional Easter symbolism, the reflected meaning of ‘sun’ latent in its homophone ‘Son’ is triggered by the word ‘risen’. Here is another example, from a text in which the speaker ironically says how at home he feels in the alienating urban environment: ‘Ich bin zu den Leuten freundlich. Ich setze / einen steifen Hut auf nach ihrem Brauch’ (Brecht 1988: 119; our italics). The italicized phrase has in context a reflected meaning of ‘stiffly formal’; this combines with a collocative meaning (cf. ‘steifer Empfang’, ‘steif lächeln’, etc.) to form an overall connotation of ‘strait-laced formality’ – a good example of how an expression may carry more than one type of connotative meaning. Because of the random quality inherent in the definition of ‘reflected meaning’, it occurs unpredictably during translation work. In a rushed translation it is easy to overlook the fact that ‘tart’ or ‘queen’ or ‘member’, for example, can occasionally cause an unwanted innuendo. But this does not matter – there is no innuendo – unless, first, the taboo is ‘live’ for the specific target audience and, second, the TT subject matter is such as to bring the secondary sense to mind, i.e. activate the term’s reflected meaning. The final category of connotation is affective meaning, that is, an emotive effect that is worked on the reader or the person spoken to by the choice of expression, and that forms part of its overall meaning. The expression does not merely denote its referent, but also hints at some attitude of the speaker or writer to the addressee. Features of linguistic politeness, flattery, rudeness or insult are typical examples of expressions carrying affective meanings. Compare, for

128


instance, ‘Bitte, nehmen Sie doch Platz!’ with ‘Hinsetzen!’. These expressions share the same literal meaning as English ‘Sit down’, but their overall impact in terms of affective meaning is quite different: polite in the first case, peremptory in the second. The affective impact also varies according to audience: for disciplined groups (e.g. military), and in emergency situations, the infinitive form of the imperative is standard, but other than in such special circumstances someone so addressed in speech is being treated extremely brusquely. In all cases the speaker’s tacit or implied attitude produces a different emotive effect depending on the language used, though clearly body language and especially eye contact also play an important role. A special and very important affective role in almost all non-technical communication in German, written and spoken, is played by the well-established and subtle system of ‘modal particles’ (‘Modalpartikeln’), which forms the subject of Chapter 14. The feature of style that carries affective meanings is the tonal register of an utterance, the tone that the speaker/writer deliberately takes. Tonal register sometimes combines with social register, a style of expression that is not deliberately chosen but is simply typical of the sort of person the speaker/writer is. In this book, we shall use ‘register’ mainly to refer to tonal register but also, where appropriate, to denote a combination of tonal and social register. Statements and questions too can have alternative forms identical in basic literal meaning yet totally different in affective meaning. Consider this criticism (of a historical analysis): ‘Die Kollektivierung der Landwirtschaft ist insgesamt differenzierter zu betrachten.’ Reading this in isolation, one might well wonder whether the force of the comment approximates to, simply: ‘. . . should be seen as a more complex issue’. However, a reviewer making the same factual point, but wishing the comment to sting, might write: ‘. . . should be viewed in a rather less simplistic way’. A widespread and potentially important difference in affective meaning in German is associated with the choice of second-person pronoun, ‘du’ or ‘Sie’. Among older and traditional-minded people, the transition from ‘Sie’ to ‘du’ address forms signals a feeling of closeness; among many groups and the young, ‘du’ is of course conventional. But use of the ‘du’ form outside these norms can convey strong affective meaning. Inappropriate use of the ‘du’ form (e.g. to an ethnic minority resident), especially when perceived as calculated, will be furiously resented. Translators need to be sensitive to the contempt that may be conveyed by this purely formal means. For instance, if the only signal of contempt in a German ST is an inappropriate use of the ‘du’ and ‘ihr’ forms instead of ‘Sie’, it may sometimes be possible to convey this in a TT, still relatively economically, by generalizing the address forms to indicate stereotyping – ‘You lot have to appreciate we do things by the book here’; or by indicating a scathing, sarcastic emphasis on the title ‘Mr’; or by having the speaker address the


129

other person as ‘mate’ or ‘dear’. For an extended example in German, see Practical 2.2. While translators need to be sensitive to ST registers, they must also be sure not to introduce unwanted affective meanings into the TT by selecting unsuitable tonal registers. For example, after reporting someone’s arrival for a business appointment, the company receptionist routinely puts the phone down and requests: ‘Sie möchten bitte ein paar Minuten warten.’ Translating this polite request with a statement form in English (e.g. ‘You will wait a few minutes, please’) makes it sound peremptory. The tone is much closer to ‘Mr. Beck says would you mind waiting a few minutes, please?’. As we have seen, although these six types of connotative meaning are distinguishable from each other, it often happens that two or more occur together and nourish each other. In acquiring a translation method, it is useful to learn to distinguish exactly which sorts of connotative meaning are in play. Practical 10 involves detailed analysis of connotations, because it is designed to help in the acquisition of this ability. Once the ability has been acquired, however, it becomes relatively easy to respond to the sometimes complex connotations of a given piece of text without labelling every last component in the blend. All that remains then is to find a way of rendering them without too much translation loss! PRACTICAL 10 10.1 Connotative meaning Assignment (i) Taking the expressions printed in bold, categorize and discuss their connotations in the context. (ii) Bearing in mind your findings under (i), discuss the implications for the strategy to be used in translating the poem. (iii) Translate lines 1–9 into English. Contextual information Paul Celan is the pseudonym of Paul Antschel, who was born in 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania, and died in 1970. His homeland became part of the Soviet Union in 1940 and was then occupied by the Germans. His Jewish origins meant ghetto and forced labour for him and disappearance to concentration camps for his parents. ‘Todesfuge’ was said by Siegbert Prawer to confound those who would divorce modern art from actuality. Leonard Forster, in a 1971 edition, described ‘Todesfuge’ as probably the most famous poem written in German since 1945. Many would still agree.

130

5

10

15

20

25

30

35


ST TODESFUGE Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts wir trinken und trinken wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar [Margarete er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift [eine Rüden herbei er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends wir trinken und trinken Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar [Margarete Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da [liegt man nicht eng Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends wir trinken und trinken ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus [Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith (Celan 2003: 65–6)

Connotative meaning and translation issues

131

10.2 Connotative meaning Assignment (i) You have been commissioned to translate a selection of articles from the German press between 1990 and 2000 for inclusion in a textbook on politics during the period. The intention is to give the reader an idea of evolving reactions to the political scene as they were expressed at the time. The articles are to be translated as if for a quality newspaper in 1998. The ST here is taken from one of these articles. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Omitting the headlines, but using them as contextual information, translate the text into English. (iii) Discuss the main decisions of detail you took. Contextual information The ST is the first half of an article that appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau on 11 September 1998. The FR is a middlebrow daily that describes itself, fairly, as an ‘unabhängige, linksliberale und überregionale Qualitätszeitung’. The DVU is the Deutsche Volksunion; the NPD is the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands. Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) was a man of multiple talents, a notable satirist and an anti-militarist writer, a left-wing democrat who attacked not only the ‘Dolchstoß’ legend but also the inadequacies of Weimar liberalism. He left Germany for good in 1924, disaffected with political developments. Once they were in power, the Nazis quickly deprived him of his citizenship. ST Selbst linke Querdenker werden umgarnt

5

10

MIT WELCHEN METHODEN DIE RECHTSEXTREMEN PARTEIEN UM ERSTWÄHLER BUHLEN Sie sind gegen Atomkraft und für Umweltschutz; sie umgarnen „sozial Engagierte“ und „linke Querdenker“; sie liebäugeln mit Volksabstimmungen und beklagen die Verrentung der Bonner Polit-Kaste. Wer? Die Grünen? Von wegen. In diesem Wahlkampf geben sich Deutschlands Rechtsaußen jugendlich. Clever, finden Politologen – und gefährlich. Das Blättchen ist hübsch anzusehen und liest sich flockig: „Wir sollten mit gutem Beispiel vorangehen und ökologische Politik als nationale Herausforderung begreifen“, empfiehlt blau auf weiß ein gewisser „Martin“. „Die Bonner Politik hat aus Deutschland einen Rentnerstaat gemacht, in dem die Jungen nicht mehr viel zu sagen haben“, schreibt „Michael“. Nebenan lächelt wohlgefällig eine Handvoll Twens, selbst Kurt Tucholsky kommt zu Wort, und ganz hinten wird liebevoll „unser Buvo“

132

15

20

25


porträtiert. Dessen Name: Rolf Schlierer, 43 Jahre alt, Bundesvorsitzender der rechtsextremen Republikaner. „Sehr zufrieden“, sagt Parteisprecher Klaus-Dieter Motzke, sei man mit der ersten Ausgabe von Junge Deutsche, die im Mai an ebensolche verteilt wurde. Mit einer Auflage von 200 000 Stück ist soeben der Nachfolger erschienen. Auch er werde an Stellen verteilt, wo man Jugendliche eben so trifft – etwa „in und vor Schulen“. Es gelte, so Motzke zur FR, der Partei „ein anderes Gesicht zu geben“. Mit dem Wunsch stehen die Republikaner nicht alleine da. Spätestens seit der Wahl in Sachsen-Anhalt, als fast jeder vierte junge Mann der DVU seine Stimme gab, wittern die Rechtsextremen wieder Morgenluft. Anders als früher sind folgerichtig nicht bornierte Rentner und Ewiggestrige Adressaten der rechten Lockrufe, sondern junge und Erstwähler. Und so tummeln sich NPD-Aktivisten schon mal in Technotempeln, verzichtet die DVU wohlweislich auf NS-Symbolik und postieren die Republikaner Jeans- und Sonnenbrillenträger unter kessen Sprüchen wie „Deutschland für alle – nee für uns“. (Schindler 1998)

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

11 Scientific and technical translation All texts can be categorized in terms of genre. There is no a priori reason for giving special attention to any one genre rather than any other. However, since most language students are not trained in science or technology, they are often in awe of ‘technical’ texts. Yet much professional translation today is concerned with such texts. This is why we are devoting a chapter to indicating some of the main translation issues they raise. The ‘technical’ is not confined to science and technology. It is simply to avoid repeating ‘scientific and technological’ that we shall be using the term ‘technical texts’ to denote texts written in the context of scientific or technological disciplines. In fact, of course, any specialist field has its own technical terms and its own genre-marking characteristics. Nevertheless, the fact that scientific and technological texts are so very unfamiliar for many language students makes them clear illustrations of two important points in the translation of all specialist texts. First, the translator must be – or become – just as familiar with technical terms and genre-features in the TL as in the SL. Second, the problems met in translating specialist texts include almost all those met in translating in any other genre, specialized or not. A textual variable is a textual variable, a plural subject has a plural verb, whatever the genre or subject matter, and the relative merits of literal and free translation need to be considered in translating any text. Taking ‘technical’ in the narrow definition we have given it, we can say that most technical texts are relatively inaccessible to non-specialist readers. Ultimately this inaccessibility is conceptual in nature: the expert in any technical subject has, over a period of years, absorbed a mass of practical scientific and technical knowledge that has become part of the background and so does not become explicit in discussion; and, beyond this general competence, there is the knowledge of the individual speciality – knowledge shared by a much smaller class of individuals but still often

134


taken for granted when specialists talk to specialists. At both these levels – general scientific and technical education, and expert level – the conceptual problem for the non-specialist has a further and important dimension. It is not only the concepts themselves that have to be understood, but also the ‘logic’ of a discipline, its methods of argumentation, the ways in which its concepts relate to one another. New translators with a non-technical background need to be aware of the conceptual gap; ultimately it can only be filled by real familiarity with the disciplines concerned. The best place to start is the specialist terminology of the technical languages, because it is the use of technical terms that makes a technical text initially seem daunting to the novice translator. There are three sorts of lexical problem arising from the specialized use of technical terms. In illustrating them, we shall refer to two very different technical texts, the ST of Practical 11.1 (‘Tunnelauskleidung’) and this text from an ornithologist’s research paper on birdsong:

5

10

Hinweise auf Funktionstrennung bei Parus-Arten ergeben sich wie folgt: 1) Bei Territorialgesang: Bestimmte Strophentypen wurden besonders bei Auseinandersetzungen (bei Anlockung mit Klangattrappen), jedoch nicht so oft spontan gesungen (z.B. SMITH 1972, MARTENS 1975, FICKEN et al. 1978). Hier liegt also eine Funktionstrennung im Sinne von Revierverteidigung im Gegensatz zu Revierproklamation vor. 2) 씸-bezogene Strophentypen: Eine Trennung des Repertoires in 씸-bezogene und revierverteidigungsbezogene Strophentypen ist nachzuweisen (vgl. z.B. ROMANOWSKI 1978, SCHROEDER & WILEY 1983b, GADDIS 1983). (Goller 1987: 306) In looking at lexical issues, we can start with the obvious problem of terms not used in everyday, ordinary language and consequently unfamiliar to the lay translator. In the text, a term such as ‘Klangattrappen’ stands out at once as belonging only to a specialized scientific context. In this case the lay translator might be able to guess at what the term denotes, but without research will have almost no chance of coming up with the appropriate TL rendering (‘playbacks’). The second problem is that of terms whose ordinary uses are familiar to the translator, but which are manifestly used in some other, technically specialized, way in the ST. Almost any technology has such lexical pitfalls. Mining technology, for example, appropriately enough, is rich in these. No one who has lived in the Ruhr will fail to gloss ‘über Tage’ as ‘surface’, but the UK-based lay translator may find the term puzzling; likewise ‘Raubaktion’, used in the sense of ‘recovery operation’. In underground work, ‘Berge’ are loose rocks. Translators may blink to find that ‘die Strebenden’ in modern mining STs are probably not (romantically) ‘the toilers’, but (prosaically) ‘the face ends’. On the other hand, though

Scientific and technical translation 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

135

one might feel wary about translating Practical 11.1’s ‘Kaverne’ as ‘cavern’, that is in fact the TL technical term that should be used here. Third, a term may have an ordinary, everyday sense that is not obviously wrong in the context. This is the most dangerous sort of case, because the translator, if new to the field, may even fail to recognize the term as a technical term, and instead translate its ordinary sense. For example, ‘Auseinandersetzung’, in the ornithology text, is glossed in Oxford–Duden 1999, in a well-structured entry with appropriate indicators and subjectfield labels, as: ‘examination; debate, discussion; argument, dispute; clash; partition’. The label attached to ‘dispute’ links that hyponym to industrial relations. The right technical translation in animal behaviour is in fact ‘dispute’, but the translator needs experience or advice in order to select the correct term. Again, in the Practical 11.1 ST, ‘Röhre’ should be rendered ‘bore’ (rather than ‘pipe/tube/tunnel’); here, Oxford–Duden gives explicit advice, but two good competitor dictionaries do not offer ‘bore’ at all. And ‘Ausbau’ is here used not in its commonest semi-technical sense of ‘extension/development’, but to mean ‘construction’. Even in the latest specialist Bauwesen dictionary, ‘Angriffspunkt’ is translated as ‘application (point)’, but what the professional translator finds in TL specialist literature is ‘break(ing)-out or cutting-out (point)’. On such an item, generalist bilingual dictionaries cannot be expected to help. As these examples show, access to up-to-date specialist dictionaries and databases is essential for technical translators – even if not always a sufficient safeguard, as scientific and technological fields and terminology are constantly developing. As our notes suggest, even the best reference material does not always give a single unambiguous synonym for a particular technical term. This means that the normal caveats concerning use of dictionaries also apply to technical translation. Translators often have to make an informed choice between alternatives. They can only do this if they have a firm grasp of both the textual context and the wider technical context. There are two complicating factors. A minor one is that even established technical terms are occasionally used loosely or informally in technical texts, in which case it may be misleading to render them by their technical TL synonyms. An English–German example is apposite here. The term ‘psychosomatic’, used of an illness, often has a precise, literal technical sense: ‘of psychological origin’, but it is also sometimes used, by one specialist to another, colloquially and pejoratively, to mean ‘imaginary’. A translation into German would need to read the intention correctly, and would probably have to make any irony explicit. Analogous difficulties are created, though in a quite different way, for the non-botanist translator by the following headings and extracts from a caption intended for an exhibition: ‘Botanischer Name Iris germanica L. / Familie Iridaceae / Botanische Beschreibung der Art / Die Deutsche Schwertlilie ist der Prototyp einer Iris, die als Gattung der ganzen Familie den Namen gegeben hat. [. . .] Die flache, längliche „Schwertform“ der Blätter veranlassten

136


[sic] den deutschen Gattungsnamen [. . .].’ The flower described is the iris or flag; the German ‘Gattungsname’ (as opposed to the Latin generic name) must be ‘Schwertlilie’. Yet it proved difficult to devise a TT not liable to confuse English-speaking visitors to the exhibition. After all, ‘sword lily’ in English is not an iris but a gladiolus. The solution actually offered for the final fragment quoted was: ‘The flat, elongated, “swordlike” shape of the leaves, which inspired the German generic name (literally “sword lily”), [. . .].’ The second complicating factor is inherent in the very project of acquiring expertise in technical translation, and brings us back from lexical issues to the underlying conceptual problems facing arts-based translators of technical texts. Before looking at how trainee translators can acquire the expertise, we will look at the conceptual problems. The knowledge gaps may concern the facts known and taken for granted – and so never spelt out – by specialists in a given discipline. Or they may be to do with the discipline’s logic, its way of working, in particular the relationship between concepts; this too tends to be simply taken for granted, a part of the culture, only coming to the surface if a dispute arises. To take the ‘facts’ gap first: we have already (p. 112) seen how the ‘testing of steel for homogeneity’ – explicit in the German ST – could become simply ‘testing of steel’ in the English TT, because the industry practice in the UK is to take the purpose for granted when referring to this process. A more critical decision is called for by a (needless) ambiguity in our ornithology text. In the sentence ‘씸-bezogene Strophentypen: Eine Trennung des Repertoires in 씸-bezogene und revierverteidigungsbezogene Strophentypen ist nachzuweisen’, the phrase ‘ist nachzuweisen’ is potentially ambiguous. Purely syntactically, it may be construed either as ‘needs to be demonstrated’, i.e. ‘remains to be demonstrated’, i.e. ‘we don’t know’ or as ‘can be demonstrated’, i.e. ‘someone has proved this and can do it again’, i.e. ‘we know’. The translator’s position is awkward. In this particular case the decision happened to be difficult even for animal biologists, and it took a birdsong specialist to resolve the issue in favour of ‘remains to be demonstrated’. In many other cases the wrong choice would be obvious to technically literate readers and harm the reputation of the translator, possibly that of the ST author as well. To illustrate the importance for the translator of understanding how the concepts of a discipline relate to one another, we can use the unaltered abstract of an article published in a German-language medical journal in 1992. The abstract appears at the head of the article, alongside the English translation that we print below. Spellings are as found. We omit the headings. Das Ginkgo-biloba-Extrakt wird aus grünen Blättern des Ginkgobiloba-Baumes gewonnen. Präparate mit diesem Wirkstoff werden u. a. zur Behandlung von Hirnleistungsstörungen und arteriosklerotischen

Scientific and technical translation

5

10

5

137

Erkrankungen genutzt. In In-vitro- und In-vivo-Studien wurden Radical Scavenger- und PAF (platelet activating factor)-antagonistische Wirkungen beschrieben. In dieser Arbeit konnte eine konzentrationsabhängige Superoxiddismutasenaktivität des Ginkgo-biloba-Extraktes rökan-flüssig nachgewiesen werden. Code: Gingko biloba – Superoxiddismutasenaktivität – freie Sauerstoffradikale The Ginkgo biloba extract is obtained from green leaves of the Ginkgo biloba tree. Preparations with this active substance are among others used for the treatment of disturbances of the cerebral function and arteriosclerotic diseases. In in-vitro- and in-vivo studies antagonistic effects of radical scavenger and PAF (platelet activating factor) were described. In this study a concentration-depending superoxide dismutase activity of the Gingko biloba extract rökan® liquid could be made evident. Code: Ginkgo biloba – superoxide dismutase activity – free oxygen radical (Diwok et al. 1992: 308) Apart from errors in handling ‘u. a.’ (ST l. 2) and ‘konnte . . . nachgewiesen werden’ (ST ll. 6–8), the TT goes seriously wrong on the crucial issue of the research results (TT ll. 4–5). The problem has arisen in the compounding of terms. While the hyphenation – always a key indicator in German STs – has been punctiliously observed in the ST, ambiguity is caused by the close coupling of the two named types of effect observed. It is easy to see how a lay translator could imagine ‘antagonistische’ to mean ‘directed against radical scavengers and PAF’. This does not mean the ambiguity is a negligence in the ST: it is hard to see how anyone medically qualified could have so little understanding of the terms as to pull out ‘antagonistische’ from its exclusive link with ‘PAF’ and recycle it aimlessly elsewhere, producing the misleading TT that was published. The hyphen following ‘Scavenger’ points in fact to ‘Wirkungen’, and the TT sentence should read: ‘A number of in-vitro and in-vivo studies have described free radical scavenger and PAF-antagonist effects’. It should be clear, then, that the attempt to translate unfamiliar technical material even into the mother tongue, and even with the current array of terminological reference help, takes the translator onto thin ice, with unknown depths beneath: the translator without relevant training may not only not understand key concepts but also may not even be aware of their existence. Yet many linguists from a non-scientific background do of course develop into fully proficient technical translators. Having so far outlined the fundamental considerations, we will now look at a few practical and detailed points specific to technical translation, before going on to consider different approaches to training and skills development.

138


Scientific and technical language has special characteristics that need to be borne clearly in mind by students whose first- and second-language experience has been general and/or literary. Scientific and technical language is impersonal: in principle at least, it does not use connotations or ‘suggestion’. It is clear, it is precise and it is compact. From this it is obvious enough that the prime virtues of a translation are accuracy and clarity. It also follows that consistency is important: we will return to this point. Some further implications are perhaps less immediately obvious. For instance, the stakes are generally higher here than in literary translation. It is not that literary translators are not held responsible for their work, but the implications of mistranslation are generally more serious in technical translation, where a simple error can cause financial loss or even endanger structures and lives. Supplying a text on which people will rely for operating machinery or prescribing medicines involves responsibility for ensuring accuracy in detail. In a literary text, the translator may be accustomed to a certain trade-off between literal accuracy and other qualities such as mellifluousness or an associative echo; even in the partly technical language of business and finance, the importance in that field of subjective factors may warrant a flourish of rhetoric in STs and TTs (cf. Practical 4.1), but exact science and technology allow no latitude. Even though the translator will take every precaution to ensure the accuracy of the TT – an explicit professional commitment – it is often necessary to attach a legal disclaimer to the TT. Here is an example: While every due care has been taken in the preparation of the work accompanying this, neither [agency name], nor its staff, consultants or translators can accept legal liability for any damage or loss arising from error therein, howsoever caused. The spectre of legal liability is a reminder that even a minute error of detail on any level of textual variables is typically magnified in a technical text. The reason lies mainly in the compactness (or concision) of the language used. Whether you are a trained chemist or not, you have to be precise about prefixes and suffixes in chemical names. Consider some of the combinations available for attaching to the root ‘sulph’, for example: per-/bi-/di-/hypo-/hydro- + -sulph- + -ate/-ite/-ide/-onate. The slightest error in affixation here will be a serious factual error – whereas, in non-technical language, affixation may sometimes be a matter of style. Stylistic whim, personal expression and disregard for detail can all be useful in the right place, even in some types of translation. But in technical translation they are potentially dangerous. Although we have naturally focused so far on difficulties that are peculiar to technical translation, the additional challenges should not reduce alertness to the kind of translation problems and pitfalls that can lurk in any German text. Errors are made, and sometimes go on record. There


139

are examples in the ‘Ginkgo-biloba’ text quoted earlier. The much-used abbreviation ‘u. a.’ (‘unter anderem’) tends to wreak a certain amount of havoc among translators, and things have gone wrong here. The published translation is so phrased as to suggest to the TL reader that the ginkgo biloba extract is one of several preparations used for the stated purpose. The German ST says no such thing. In the same text, the ‘Code’ TT makes the elementary mistake of translating plural as singular. It may be as well to add at this point a very few representative examples of simple ‘cultural’ adjustments (see Chapter 3) which, if not actually technical, are nevertheless required more frequently in technical texts than elsewhere. For instance, the translator needs to be clear about what Germans mean by a ‘Milliarde’ and a ‘Billion’ respectively, but also about the American ‘billion’ and the (changing) British ‘billion’. In technical texts for consumers, ‘litres per 100 km’ needs to be converted to ‘mpg’, but (in Britain) almost all other metric data can be left in metric form. Above all, the translator needs to know from very early on that German numerical expressions have a comma where the Anglophone countries have a decimal point. However, for tackling the fundamental problems of making a start on technical translation without a scientific or technical background, good German and due care are still not sufficient qualifications. Non-specialists have no alternative to making themselves specialists as rapidly as possible. Payment by commission generally means very intensive study of a single aspect within a broader discipline, so that a text relating to that aspect – tunnelling, pipe-laying, birdsong, aviation safety – may be adequately translated. The specific focus topic is determined by the fluke of the client’s needs, and few technical translators can afford to offer their services over a spectrum narrower than, say, medicine, construction engineering or information technology. For trainee translators in technical subjects (as well as the other factual disciplines such as law and commerce), the advantages of working in-house are obvious. They have to learn the concepts of the field in which they wish to translate, and the way to do this is in practice very often the hard way of translating texts against a deadline, researching as one goes: learning on the hoof. The need for specific translation decisions ensures that the research remains focused. Working in an agency or for a large firm, the translator has access not only to an appropriate collection of reference sources, but also to guidance on the most efficient internet searches, and, usually, and most valuable of all, has the chance of close consultation with experts. Freelancers work largely independently, but have functioning networks that provide peer advice. No technical translator, inhouse or freelance, can afford to ignore the golden rule, which is in truth a good one for all translators: never be too proud or embarrassed to ask for help or advice. For freelancers seeking to earn a living, the necessary combination of translation and research is stressful, but is the only way forward. Useful sources of information include monographs, abstracting and indexing

140


journals, periodicals, yearbooks, textbooks, encyclopedias, standards and trade literature, and occasionally theses and dissertations. For specific projects, it is important to find and to familiarize oneself with SL and TL material of a similar type, which will serve both as a key source of information and as a stylistic model. (For instance, a professional translator tackling the Practical 11.1 text would regard it as essential to refer in detail to at least one of the following resources: (1) a description of an actual tunnel or project under construction (internet or paper), i.e. a parallel text; (2) a specialist publication of the Institution of Civil Engineers or the British Tunnelling Society; or (3) an expert.) By now the quantitatively most important resource of all, the internet is an essential tool for fast access to up-to-date information. Major firms and organizations often maintain their own glossaries containing centrally agreed translations of technical expressions. The European Commission’s multilingual ‘Eurodicautom’ was expected at November 2005 to remain online until replaced in a few months by the IATE facility. Naturally, these databases are continually added to, and translators are expected to conform to the agreed renderings, in the interests of organization-wide consistency and clarity. Consistency is a more important requirement than non-technical translators might imagine. However, if one reflects that manufacturers and developers worldwide are constantly updating their products, it can be easily seen that there has to be a parallel process of updating the operating instructions, descriptive literature, etc. in all relevant languages. This implies that features in the 2006 model that are not new must be described in the same terminology that was used in 2005. Technical translation is in fact often exceedingly repetitive. And this is where – most obviously – translation memory software comes in. To describe the current state of the art in translation memory would go beyond the scope of this book, and any comments would rapidly date. It suffices to say that several systems had by 2005 reached a level of sophistication and usefulness that had competent technical freelancers jostling for familiarization courses, if not already using one or other system; most in-house translators bring the skills and/or receive training. While human vigilance is still important, it is clear that translation memory has benefited technical translators and their clients in two respects: it goes far towards solving the problem of terminological consistency, and it greatly reduces the human involvement in purely repetitive work. With the practicals in view, we now offer a few notes on the characteristics of technical texts in English and German. First, the language is usually informative, and often includes expressions denoting purpose or role, and explanations of method or process. Second, in English-language accounts of experiments or research programmes, the passive is used extensively, which keeps the style impersonal. This is also true of German technical texts, notably so in the ornithological and medical examples and Practicals 11.1 and 11.2; however, German sentences have other resources


141

besides the passive for giving ‘front focus’ to particular items (see Chapter 16). The German passive often appears in the concealed form of which ‘ist nachzuweisen’ in the birdsong passage is an example. In Practical 11.1, it should be noted, the finite passive verbs mark the text as essentially descriptive in nature; explicit instructions for the contractors would normally use either plain infinitive verbs, or the ‘ist/sind zu’-plusinfinitive form, which in such contexts is usually unambiguous. A third typical feature of technical texts is the frequent (by English standards) use of compound nouns (e.g. ‘website design’, ‘fine-coal dewatering centrifuge’, ‘stability problems’): few real problems here for translators from German. The fourth and last feature to be mentioned here is the related one of nominalization in general. By nominalization we mean the use of a noun that, in the same language or in a TT, could be replaced by an expression not containing a noun. Not notable in isolated instances, nominalization is notably prevalent in technical language. In German as in English, it is a routinely used device for avoiding complicated verb constructions (and facilitating ‘Stichwort’ listings), but it involves the supply of a colourless ‘function’ verb to link the nominalized concepts: for example, ‘the marriage of A and B will take place in private’ replacing ‘A and B will be married in private’. A German example is to be found in the opening sentence of the ‘Tunnelauskleidung’ passage used as Practical 11.1. While nominalization does tend to be a shared feature of technical language in English and German, this instance would probably be best translated with a passive verb. One further important topic remains. What is the translator to do if the source text appears to be flawed? In non-acute form, this might be a case of a badly written or ungrammatical ST: should the flaws be reflected in the TT? The question applies to all translation, of course. In technical translation, such flaws can be safely regarded as unintentional. While the translator is not (in our view) responsible for ‘improving’ an ST felt to be defective, the duty of clarity remains one of the paramount requirements. An imprecise or ‘sloppy’ formulation should not be mimicked for its own sake. However, the problem becomes acute where there is serious ambiguity or an apparent error in the ST. For instance, a recent business translation dealing with world trade featured statistics generally expressed in millions. At one point, where the document’s internal logic made it seem grossly anomalous, the term ‘Milliarden’ was used. Where, in the translator’s judgement, such a slip or misprint is likely to cause a misunderstanding, let alone significant harm, it should be reported to the client, the employer or the ST author as the case may be. A serious ambiguity likewise calls for consultation, perhaps with a subject expert, as in our birdsong example. Always, the overriding concern should be for factual accuracy. A perhaps unexpected problem for trainee translators is the frequency of typographical and other slips in technical texts; not all are thoroughly

142


edited. For reasons mentioned earlier (density of information), small ST errors can have significant effects. If plausible, they can pass unnoticed into the TT. In other cases, they can make an ST perplexing for an inexperienced translator – who has to guard against the dangerous ready assumption that ‘the ST must be wrong’, but nonetheless will inevitably encounter occasional errors.

PRACTICAL 11 11.1 Scientific and technical translation Assignment (i) The ST is from a specification of works issued by a government agency for trunk road construction and aimed at prospective contractors. For a study visit by British planners and engineers, you are asked to provide an English translation. Bearing in mind the information supplied in Chapter 11 with reference to this ST, discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (Cf. also Practical 5.3.) (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail that you took. (iv) Discuss the professionally prepared TT that will be given to you by your tutor. Contextual information The target audience, like the ST’s users, should be thought of as professionals fully conversant with the technology and terminology of tunnelling. In addition to guidance given in the body of Chapter 11, the following terminology should be noted: ‘Schalwagen’ – jumbo; ‘Zuluftstollen’ – air intake adit; ‘Abluftkamin’ – ventilation shaft. ST Tunnelauskleidung

5

Die Herstellung der Abdichtung und der Innenschale erfolgt abschnittsweise zwischen den jeweiligen Angriffspunkten Nordportal – Kehltal – Flößgraben – Südportal. Mit dem Ausbau der Innengewölbe der zweiten Röhre wird umgehend nach dem Durchschlag des jeweiligen Abschnittes begonnen. Nach Betonierung der 2. Röhre wird der Baustellenverkehr umgelegt und die 1. Röhre betoniert. Mit dem Einsatz von 2 Schalwagen wird eine Betonierleistung von rund 500 m/Mo erreicht, sodaß die Innenschale der beiden Röhren in den Abschnitten Nordportal – Kehltal und Kehltal – Flößgraben nacheinander

Scientific and technical translation 10

15

143

betoniert werden kann. Im Abschnitt Flößgraben – Südportal werden die Innenschalen der beiden Röhren gleichzeitig betoniert. Gleichzeitig mit dem Betonieren der Innenschale erfolgt der Ausbau der Kaverne Kehltal und anschliessend der Kaverne Flößgraben mit den zugehörigen Zuluftstollen, Zuluftbauwerken und der rund 20 m hohen Abluftkamine, des Hochbehälters im Kehltal sowie der Betriebsgebäude am Nord- und Südportal einschließlich Portalbauwerke. (DEGES 1998) 11.2 Scientific and technical translation Assignment (i) The manufacturer’s descriptive literature for a new servo amplifier has been drafted in German, but is to be issued simultaneously in English. You are responsible for the English version. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail that you took. (iv) Discuss the published TT (Startup and Diagnostic Software for Inline Servo Amplifiers), which will be given to you by your tutor. Contextual information Servo amplifiers are typically used to control small electric motors, e.g. in vehicle braking systems. The ST is taken from Phoenix Contact’s Application Note 704000 (dated March 2004), a 13-page document. The first section is headed ‘Funktionsbeschreibung’, and its first two paragraphs are reproduced below for translation. The ST has one misprint.

5

10

ST Der Inline-Servoverstärker IB IL EC AR 48/10A von Phoenix Contact kann neben der Abwicklung der Funktionen „Drehzahlregelung“ und „Momentenregelung“ auch nach Empfang eines Positions-Sollwertes selbstständig die Positionierung eines Antriebs durchführen. Als Motor dient hierbei ein bürsten- oder elektronisch kommutierter Gleichstrommotor bis ca. 400 Watt. Die Fahrt des Antriebs beim Positionieren besteht dabei aus den Segmenten „Beschleunigen“, „Fahren“ und „Bremsen“. Die Zeiten der einzelnen Segmente werden vom IB IL EC AR 48/10A aus der Fahrtstrecke sowie u. a. aus den Parametern für Beschleunigungsrampe, Geschwindigkeit und Bremsrampe errechnet. Diese errechneten Werte stellen Geschwindigkeits- oder Lageführungsgrößen dar. Die geräteinternen Geschwindigkeits- oder Lageregler haben nun die Aufgabe, die Istposition über der Zeit der Führungsgröße anzupassen. (Phoenix Contact 2004a: 1)

144


11.3 Scientific and technical translation Assignment (i) The ST comes from an article published online in 2001 by Die Welt. You are asked to translate it for an equivalent-quality Englishlanguage newspaper. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail that you took. Contextual information The article’s opening section explains that malaria is on the increase worldwide, and that for over 30 years scientists have been struggling in vain to find an effective vaccine. The extract has two linguistic errors.

5

10

15

ST Jetzt will eine kolumbianisch-schweizerische Forschergruppe um den Immunologen Manuel E. Patorroyo einen viel versprechenden Ansatz entdeckt haben. Ausgangspunkt für den neuen Impfstoff war die Beobachtung, dass die Parasiten eine Art molekulare Achillesferse haben. Um in die roten Blutkörperchen einzudringen, in denen sie sich vermehren, benötigen die Einzeller ein MSP-1 genanntes Eiweiß, dass sie wie ein Schlüssel auf ihrer Oberfläche tragen. Dieser öffnet das zugehörige „Schloss“ in der Membran der roten Blutkörperchen, so dass der Parasit eindringen kann. Den Forschern ist es gelungen das MSP-1-Proteinmolekül im Reagenzglas nachzubauen und die so genannte Bindungsstelle – also den alles entscheidenden „Schlüsselbart“ – so zu modifizieren, dass ein ringförmiges Peptid entstanden ist. Ein solch zyklisches Molekül hat eine bestimmte räumliche Struktur und wird von Eiweiß abbauenden Enzymen nur sehr langsam verdaut. Beides Merkmale, die für die Wirksamkeit eines Impfstoffs ausgesprochen günstig sind. Tatsächlich ließ sich im Tierversuch zeigen, dass das künstliche dreidimensionale Peptid Antikörper in hoher Konzentration erzeugt, die sich an die MSP-1-Moleküle heften und somit den Eintrittsschlüssel wirkungslos machen. Ob sich aus diesem Ansatz einmal ein Impfstoff herstellen lässt, bleibt abzuwarten. (Feldmeier 2001)

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

12 Translating consumeroriented texts All texts, including translations, are produced for a purpose. The purpose is always a major factor in deciding a strategy. Translating consumeroriented texts makes the importance of purpose especially clear. This, together with the fact that many translators earn their living with these sorts of text, is why we are giving them a chapter to themselves. By ‘consumer-oriented texts’, we mean texts that try to persuade the public to buy something, or tell purchasers how to use what they have bought, or advise on commodities that might be bought or on courses of action that might be taken. The range thus includes advertisements, tourist brochures, user manuals, consumer magazines, recipe books, CD booklets, public notices, information leaflets, etc. – even propaganda can be classified under this heading. Consumer-oriented texts may therefore fall into the category either of prescriptive or of empirical genres, or both. Often, they have literary, religious or philosophical genre-features as well. Sometimes, they are so specialized that they are given to technical translators; even then, the translator has to keep consumerist criteria in mind (compare e.g. ‘If the battery goes flat’ and ‘In the unlikely event of your battery going flat’). The most extreme instance of consumer-oriented translation is translating advertisements. This is often as much a question of writing original copy as of translation. In fact, big firms are likely to ask an agency to produce a tailor-made advertisment for the target culture. But it is not rare for translators to be asked to translate advertisements, and intra-trade publicity is commonly translated. Many multinationals, keen to ensure a distinctive brand image worldwide, either have all their translating done in-house, in close co-operation with other departments (e.g. marketing), or commission all their translations from one agency, with which they work closely in ensuring presentational norms of all kinds. This co-operation is in fact often two-way: in order to avoid potential difficulties posed by the varying

146


requirements of different target cultures, and thus to ensure quicker and more efficient translation, the agency draws up its own style sheet and presentational recommendations, and urges companies to produce STs that conform with these. For our needs in this course, translating advertising material is certainly a good way of focusing attention on the dimension of purpose in textual genre. If you did not do Practicals 4.1 or 6.2, we recommend that you at least look at them for this chapter. This chapter, like others, emphasizes that part of the translator’s preparation must be to study examples of appropriate TL texts, so as to become familiar with the requirements of the genre that is intended for the TT. It is just as important, of course, to be aware of stylistic features and cultural assumptions that are not characteristic of the intended TL genre. Even intralingually, if the style of the Brownie Cookbook were used in Delia Smith, her readers would be insulted, and would not take her seriously. Conversely, Delia’s style might be too adult for the Brownie. Either option would be commercial suicide. Translating advertising material also obliges the translator to consider carefully the central question of cultural differences between SL public and TL public: probably no other genre makes it so brutally clear how inter-cultural differences can make literal translation unwelcome, even where it is possible. Different cultures value different things, have different taboos and stereotype consumers differently. These sorts of differences are just as important in consumer handbooks as in advertisements. Many handbooks are not just user instructions but have an important publicity function as well, flattering purchasers and trying to cement their loyalty to the brand (‘Congratulations! Now that you are the proud owner of . . .’, etc.). Linguistic and cultural mistakes – mistakes, that is, in terms of target audience norms – threaten that loyalty. Apart from such cultural factors as religion, race, diet, attitudes to sex, etc., it is also vital to choose the right style both in STs and in TTs. For instance, while the language of consumerism is relatively relaxed today in the West, the degree of formality observed between customers and traders varies from country to country. While serious comparisons are difficult without large-scale sampling, translators should not assume that the relaxed style now predominant in American and British consumer texts is universal; some continental European cultures may still be relatively resistant to chirpy informality in such texts. Where this is the case, it implies that a fairly faithful translation into English might come across as over-careful or too ornate, while a similar approach in translation out of English might alienate TL customers by an appearance of flippancy. The appropriate language for selling upmarket shoes or downmarket sofas is conditioned by a combination of social and broad cultural expectations specific to the product range on offer. As with technical texts, therefore, the translator needs to have made close comparisons of the language used by at least a representative sample of SL and TL product literature.

Translating consumer-oriented texts 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

147

Exoticism does of course have its place – depending on marketing policy for the product concerned. However, even to strike a new, appealingly fresh note, it is essential to know what counts as normality. Continental manufacturers and tourist authorities often economize by employing in-house staff to translate copy into English as a second language; this means a high risk of unintended exoticisms. No mother-tongue TT will appeal to Englishspeaking visitors, as did the Deutsches Pferdemuseum in Verden a few years ago, by way of a leaflet front page featuring laughing young people on an antique rocking horse, under the words, in enormous print: ‘Hold yourself tight . . .’. And yet the use of translators working into their own language is no guarantee of a successful sales-related translation. It is often clear in advertising copy and product literature that the translator has been constrained – whether through inexperience or haste or by the client’s insistence on ‘accuracy’ – to import foreign linguistic structures or cultural assumptions from the source material. If such foreign features are not to be seriously counter-productive, there are only two ways of proceeding. Either they must be avoided altogether, so that the copy reads as truly ‘native’; or else they must be consciously and skilfully designed – by copywriters totally conversant with the target culture – to appeal to that culture’s perceptions of desirable/interesting foreignness (perhaps with a lacing of humour and irony, depending on market sector). A notable UK example of a success on these principles was the Renault car TV advertising campaign featuring Nicole and her Papa. The response to Audi’s ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ campaign in Britain has been more equivocal. Genre idiosyncrasy and cultural differences are among the considerations that will apply in Practical 12. It is, however, also important to remember that many changes in structure, vocabulary and register result from standard differences between languages rather than from genre-specific cross-cultural differences. This is the case with our next example, from an attractively produced and profusely illustrated brochure offered to visitors to Celle in the mid-1990s. The brochure was also available in English translation, with identical graphic layout, i.e. identical space for the texts. ST (i) and TT (i) below include all the page headings, generally one heading per double-page spread. The brochure is so designed that the initial headline ‘Wir in Celle’/‘Here in Celle’ (on a fold-out inside-front page) remains visible on the left as the reader turns over the other pages to show the successively following headlines. All pages have several colour photographs; all but the last have themed text. ST (ii) and TT (ii) reproduce about two-thirds of the ‘. . . stark auf dem Markt’ text and of its English counterpart. Bearing in mind the constraints imposed on the translator by the fixed graphic layout, and paying attention also to phonic issues, compare ST (i) and TT (i) in class, making detailed notes on how they resemble and differ from one another. Then extend the exercise with a similar comparison of ST (ii) and TT (ii). Finally, if time allows, draft a strategy and formulate an appropriate English TT for part or all of the ST.

148

5

10


ST (i) Wir in Celle . . . Wir in Celle sind mehr . . . . . . als die Fachwerkstadt! . . . zeigen Geschichte – aus 7 Jahrhunderten . . . verführen zum Bummeln . . . kunterbunt in Kunst und Kultur . . . aktiv auch in der Freizeit . . . stark auf dem Markt . . . natürlich!

TT (i) Here in Celle . . . Here in Celle we’re more . . . . . . than just a town of halftimbered buildings! . . . we can show you 7 centuries of history! . . . we invite you to come for a stroll! . . . we offer a medley of art and culture! . . . activity is our keyword, even in leisure hours! . . . we’re successful in the business world! . . . we’re close to nature!

ST (ii) . . . stark auf dem Markt Fordern Sie uns heraus . . . wirtschaftlich bleibt Celle keine Antwort schuldig. Als Standort erfolgreicher Unternehmen haben wir traditionelle und zukunftsorientierte Märkte im Inund Ausland erschlossen. Energie. Wir fördern Erdöl und Erdgas. Verarbeitende und produzierende Industrie sind stark unter unserem Dach, tragen unseren Namen in die Welt. High Tech. Wir zeigen Biß in der Entwicklung marktgerechter Ideen, sind ein Zentrum für Forschung, Management und Produktion, wichtige Tagungsstätte und Kongreßstadt. Handwerk. Wir handeln und bewahren. Messe, wie Alltag, unsere Wirtschaft ist Schaufenster stolzer Zunft und moderner Vielfalt.

TT (ii) . . . we’re successful in the business world! Challenge us . . . and you’ll find that as far as the economy is concerned Celle has all the answers. As the location of various successful companies we have been able to tap traditional and potential future markets both at home and abroad. – Energy. We produce crude oil and natural gas. Processing and manufacturing industries are strongly represented here and have carried our name to the far corners of the world. – High technology. We have shown great determination in the development of ideas which are in conformity with market trends. Our town is a centre for research, management and production and an important venue for conferences and congresses. Manufacturing trades. We trade and at the same time preserve the old craft traditions. Trade fairs are an everyday occurrence, our economy a showpiece of proud craftmanship and modern diversity.

15

5

10

15

20

25


149

Clearly, one of the major difficulties facing the Celle translator was the distinctly crisp, concise style of the ST. Given the importance to the German economy of both tourism and business visits from Britain and the United States, it is not surprising that texts of this genre are constantly being produced and translated. Here is another example – posing difficulties of a rather different type. The well-illustrated leaflet this time is about Schloss Augustusburg in Bonn. We print the middle third of the text from both German ST and official translation, printed sic.

5

10

15

20

25

ST Bis [. . .] 1768 wirkten hier namhafte Künstler von europäischem Ruf. Beispielhaft sei Balthasar Neumann genannt, der den Entwurf für das Prunktreppenhaus anfertigte, ein Bravourstück, eine hinreißende Schöpfung voller Dynamik und Eleganz. Durch die Zusammenführung von Architektur, Plastik, Malerei und Gartenkunst entstand ein Gesamtkunstwerk des deutschen Rokoko von höchstem Rang. Die UNESCO würdigte dies 1984 durch die Aufnahme des Schlosses Augustusburg – zusammen mit Schloss Falkenlust und den Brühler Gärten – in die Liste des Weltkulturerbes der Menschheit. Ab 1949 wurde Schloss Augustusburg viele Jahrzehnte lang als Repräsentationsschloss des Bundespräsidenten und der Bundesregierung genutzt.

TT Famous artists known throughout Europe worked on the palace until [. . .] 1768. One of the most noteworthy of these was Balthasar Neumann, who designed the ceremonial staircase. This exceptional creation is both elegant and innovative. By bringing together architecture, ornamentation, painting and horticulture, a comprehensive work of art was created which is a fine example of the German rococo period. This was taken into consideration by UNESCO in 1984. Since then Augustusburg, the Hunting Lodge Falkenlust and the palace gardens were added to this organisation’s cultural world heritage list. For many decades after 1949, Augustusburg was used for representational purposes by the Federal Republic of Germany.

While this TT has its successes (e.g. the free but idiomatic, and sufficiently accurate, rendering of the Balthasar Neumann reference), it misleads at one point, and also runs into difficulties of a type often met in texts about architecture. Architecture often – as here – has to be described in terms that hover somewhere on the complex interface between technical language (including that of aesthetics) and consumer-oriented language

150


addressed to the visiting public. The kind of discourse that has established itself in German texts of the genre – ‘Dynamik’, ‘Plastik’, ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’; ‘Repräsentation’ for a building’s function – brings translators up against a cultural gap less easily bridged than e.g. differences involving metrication. Of these four ST terms, perhaps ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has least of the ‘faux ami’ about it; to use that German term in English as a loanword is often (and in music certainly) the best solution. Here, though, it is problematic, as not every likely TL reader will make the necessary extrapolation from music; even then, it has a strong associative meaning of ‘Wagnerian opera’. In this context, ‘total work of art’ is perhaps the nearest to a conventionally accepted rendering. On the other hand, these difficulties are to some extent recognized by people who visit foreign cultural treasures, and even factual errors (like line 19, ‘were added to’ for ‘have been on’) are generally less damaging in tourist literature than in, say, a user manual for a precision product.

PRACTICAL 12 12.1 Consumer-oriented translation Assignment (i) You are translating a section of the owner’s handbook for the Volkswagen Touran, which is to be marketed in the UK. The extract reproduced here is the complete set of instructions entitled ‘Glühlampen in der Rückleuchte auswechseln’. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the ST into English for the UK edition. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail that you took. (iv) Compare your translation with the published TT, which will be given to you by your tutor. Contextual information In the original German-language handbook, the ST is located in section 3.2 (general title ‘Rat und Tat’), as one item in a subsection entitled ‘Selbsthilfe’. Between the ST’s individual heading and the text, two illustrations are provided. ‘Abb. 34’ has the caption ‘Rückleuchte: Verkleidung abnehmen’; it shows a right-hand rear light, seen from the rear, with a single left-pointing arrow. ‘Abb. 35’ is captioned: ‘Rückleuchte: Lampenhalter entriegeln’. It shows the inside of the rear-light assembly, with three arrows indicating the release bolts. Assume that for your TT similar illustrations will be provided. The ST has two misprints.


151

ST Zum Abnehmen der Rückleuchte benötigen Sie den Drahtbügel und den Schraubendreher aus dem Bordwerkzeug => Seite 59.

5

10

15

20

Rückleuchte abnehmen 1. Öffnen Sie die Heckklappe. 2. Stecken Sie den Drahtbügel in die kleine Bohrung in der Verkleidung der Rückleuchte, drehen Sie den Bügel zur Fahrzeugmitte und Ziehen Sie diese etwa 1 cm in Pfeilrichtung ab => Abb. 34. 3. Ziehen Sie die Verkleidung zuerst unten, dann oben nach hinten ab. Hinter der Verkleidung werden zwei Schrauben sichtbar. 4. Drehen Sie die Schrauben mit der flachen Klinge des Schraubendrehers heraus. 5. Drücken Sie die Rückleuchte etwas nach außen und nehmen sie sie ab. Die Rückleuchte ist nun von hinten zugänglich. 6. Entriegeln Sie den Lampenhalter und ziehen Sie ihn ab => Abb. 35. 7. Wechseln Sie die defekte Glühlampe aus. Rückleuchte anbringen 8. Stecken Sie den Lampenhalter wieder auf. Achten Sie darauf, dass er einrastet. 9. Stecken Sie die Rückleuchte von außen in ihre ursprüngliche Position und schrauben Sie sie wieder fest. 10. Stecken Sie die Verkleidung zunächst unten, dann oben in die ursprüngliche Position. Stellt sich heraus, dass alle Glühlampen heile sind, kann auch die entsprechende Sicherung durchgebrannt sein.

25

! Vorsicht Lassen Sie die ausgebaute Rückleuchte nicht auf die Karosserie fallen. (Volkswagen 2003a: § 3.2, 76–7) 12.2 Consumer-oriented translation Assignment (i) You are translating material for an in-flight magazine, including the ST here. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Discuss the main decisions of detail you took. (iv) Compare your TT with the published one, which will be given to you by your tutor.

152


Contextual information The ST appeared side by side with the official TT in the March 2004 edition of Lufthansa’s in-flight magazine. They formed part of a promotion encouraging passengers to register for the Lufthansa air miles scheme. ST AUTOS MIT STIL, PRESTIGE UND PRÄMIENMEILEN – DANK MILES & MORE

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Unterwegs Prämienmeilen sammeln – Mit vier großen Mietwagenpartnern Wo immer Lufthansa Sie hinfliegt – einer unserer Mietwagenpartner wartet bereits auf Sie. Mit Avis, Europcar, Hertz und Sixt als Partner von Miles & More können Sie an nahezu jedem Ort der Welt das Auto Ihrer Wünsche nicht nur am Flughafen mieten – und kommen stets komfortabel, günstig und sicher an Ihr Ziel. Aber Flexibilität und Mobilität sind nicht Ihre einzigen Vorteile. Bei allen vier Mietwagenpartnern sammeln Sie bei der Anmietung eines Fahrzeugs Prämienmeilen – im gesamten Netzwerk der Mietwagenpartner. Und besondere Aktionen ermöglichen Ihnen darüber hinaus, in regelmäßigen Abständen ein Vielfaches der üblichen Prämienmeilen zu sammeln. Die aktuellen Sonderaktionen finden Sie immer im Internet unter www.miles-and-more.com Prämienmeilen z.B. gegen automobile Träume tauschen Sie können aber auch Ihre gesammelten Meilen bei Avis, Europcar, Hertz und Sixt gegen das Auto Ihrer Träume eintauschen und mit ihm ein Wochenende oder sogar den Urlaub genießen. Oder Sie lösen Ihre Prämienmeilen in attraktive Flug-, Reise-, Erlebnis- oder Sachprämien ein. Sie sehen, die Teilnahme an Miles & More lohnt sich! Detaillierte Informationen zu den Miles & More Mietwagen- und allen weiteren Partnern, Prämien und Privilegien erhalten sie unter www.milesand-more.com Meilen sammeln und Prämien genießen – Mit Miles & More Miles & More ist das führende Vielfliegerprogramm in Europa. Dank über 30 Partner-Airlines steht Ihnen ein weltumspannendes Netzwerk mit idealen Flugverbindungen zur Verfügung, auf dem Sie Meilen sammeln können – in der Business Class sogar doppelte und in der First Class dreifache Meilen. Außerdem lassen unsere Hotel- und Mietwagen-Partner sowie zahlreiche weitere Partner am Boden Ihr Meilenkonto wachsen. Die gesammelten Meilen können Sie dann in attraktive Flug-, Upgrade-, Reise-, Erlebnis- oder Sachprämien eintauschen. Mehr Informationen zu allen Partnern, Prämien und Privilegien von Miles & More finden sie unter www.miles-and-more.com. Am besten gleich hier anmelden und direkt Ihre ersten Meilen sammeln. (Miles & More 2004: 70–1)


153

12.3 Consumer-oriented translation Assignment (i) You have been commissioned to translate a catalogue presenting the full Spring/Summer range of a lingerie manufacturer. This extract comprises the introductory blurb and the presentation of ‘SHIMMER’ and ‘BEAUTY lift’, two of the ranges in the collection. Discuss the strategic decisions that you have to take before starting detailed translation of this ST, and outline and justify the strategy you adopt. (ii) Translate the text into English. (iii) Explain the main decisions of detail you took. (iv) Compare your translation with the professionally supplied TT, which will be given to you by your tutor. Contextual information The ST was published in early 2004, and refers to the Spring/Summer collection from the corsetier Felina. Consulting catalogues at the local lingerie shop would be useful preparation for the translation. The ST has one minor misprint. ST Felina informiert: NEWSLETTER FRÜHJAHR/SOMMER 2004 Themen: SHIMMER, Transparenz und eine glatte Optik BEAUTY lift, Funktionalität fein verpackt 5

10

15

20

Der Trend für Frühjahr/Sommer 2004 zeigt betont weibliche Formen, mit Busen, Po und Hüfte. Rundungen sind angesagt. Mit mehr Mode und femininen Details. Die Funktionalität ist zwar vorhanden, aber in eine Dessous-Optik verpackt. Die BHs wirken graziler und leichter. Es gibt tiefere Dekolleté-Ausschnitte und neue Materialentwicklungen. Neu ist der Balconnet-BH mit abnehmbaren Trägern oder mit transparentem TrägerEinsatz. SHIMMER mit der kühlen, glasigen Optik und einer transparenten Tüllstickerei macht diese Serie ganz besonders geeignet um wieder mit weiblichen Reizen zu locken. Die BHs sind stärker unterfüttert für eine perfekte Passform bis zum F-Cup. Die Modelle in der Kollektion SHIMMER umfassen einen Balconnet-BH mit abnehmbaren Trägern, einen BügelBH, ein BH-Hemd, Slip und String. Die Farben sind: vanille, weiß, und schwarz. BEAUTY lift verbindet das funktionale Versprechen mit einer BeautySerie im Dessous-Stil. BEAUTY lift korrigiert angenehm und verspricht

154

25

30


einen flachen Bauch, eine schlanke Taille und einen schönen Po. Viele reizvolle Details unterstützen die Verbindung von Funktion und Beauty. Eine neue dezente Mehrfarbigkeit gibt der Stickerei einen dreidimensionalen Eindruck und eine sehr hohe Wertigkeit. BEAUTY lift ist eine optische Kosmetik für Ihren Körper. Sie dürfen wieder ganz Frau sein, mit allen Vorteilen Ihrer Rundungen. In der Serie BEAUTY lift gibt es einen Balconnet-BH mit abnehmbaren Trägern, einen Mittelträger-BH, einen Bügel-BH bis zum F-Cup, einen Einteiler ohne Bügel, ein leichtes Wäsche-Hemd, einen Slip mit Stickerei, Panty und String. In den Farben: pacific, weiss und schwarz. (Felina 2004)

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

13 Revising and editing TTs Throughout the course, we have considered translation sometimes as a process, and sometimes as a product. The assessment of existing TTs has been an important feature in practicals. This chapter looks exclusively at the final stage of translation as a process – the stage during which the proposed TT is actually examined as a near-finished product. Any form of post-translation process is an operation carried out in writing on a pre-existent text. Revision is concerned with ensuring accuracy by eliminating errors and inconsistencies. Errors of accuracy can be relatively minor, such as spelling mistakes or punctuation, but they can also include ungrammatical or misleading constructions. And it is not only the language of the TT that may be wrong or unsuitable: the concepts themselves may have been distorted in transmission. The TT’s quality depends not only on a translator’s ability in the two linguistic systems concerned, but also on the translator’s competence to handle the subject matter in question. So, for example, a translator may be equipped linguistically to tackle a text on computer software, but not have the expertise necessary to make the right terminological and practical decisions, thereby undermining the TT’s authoritativeness. In this chapter we shall refer to revision where the task concerns checking a TT against the ST for accuracy, and to editing where the TT requires ‘polishing’ after the revision process. The two overlap to some extent, especially where TT peculiarities are not so much errors as features of style. As a preliminary exercise, it will be useful to assess the quality of the translation reproduced here and point out where the faults lie. The ST and TT were issued in parallel by the government-supported Inter Nationes organization as ‘Special Topic’ information leaflets. This note and its English translation appeared in 1996, and the ST’s title is ‘Privatisierung und Deregulierung in Deutschland: Der Fall Telekom’. We here print two extracts from early in the document:

156

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40


ST Die Privatisierung verschiedener deutscher Unternehmen, die sich bisher im Besitz des Staates befanden, erfolgt aus prinzipiellen Gründen: Die deutsche Bundesregierung will den Staat auf seine Kernaufgaben zurückführen. Im Vordergrund stand und steht der ordnungspolitische Ansatz, den Staat aus der Wirtschaft zurückzuziehen. Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl hat diese Überzeugung in seiner Regierungserklärung so formuliert: „Eine Wirtschaftsordnung ist um so erfolgreicher, je mehr sich der Staat zurückhält und dem einzelnen seine Freiheit läßt. Wir wollen nicht mehr, sondern weniger Staat.“ Und Bundesfinanzminister Theo Waigel, in dessen Ressort die Verwaltung und Privatisierung der Bundesunternehmen fällt, ergänzt: „Privatisierung bedeutet für uns Investition in Wettbewerb, Effizienz und Innovation zur Sicherung des Wirtsschaftsstandortes Deutschland.“ Deshalb ist nach den erfolgreichen Privatisierungen der fünfziger und sechziger Jahre, als sich der Bund von einem Teil seines Aktienbesitzes an den Firmen VW, VEBA, und Preussag trennte, in den achtziger Jahren eine neue Privatisierungswelle eingeleitet worden. [. . .] Der genaue Preis für die T-Aktie wird in einem Bieterverfahren erst kurz vor dem Börsenstart festgelegt. Zunächst wird eine Preisspanne veröffentlicht. Interessenten können Angebote machen, nach denen der Ausgabepreis ermittelt

TT The privatization of various German concerns which until now were in State ownership, is occurring for principle reasons; the German Government intends to take the State back to its core functions. In the forefront firmly stands the political disposition, to roll the State back from the economy. The Federal Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, formulated this conviction in his 1983 government statement so, ‘An ordered economy is all the more successful, the more the State holds itself back and allows individuals their freedom. We want not more, but less State’. And the Federal Finance Minister, Theo Waigel, in whose portfolio the administration and privatization of Federal business concerns lies, expands, ‘Privatization means for us investment in competition, efficiency, and innovation, to safeguard Germany’s position as a major economic power’. That is why, after the successful privatizations of the 50’s and 60’s, as the Federal Government shed a part of its share ownership of the companies VW, VEBA, and Preussag, a new wave of privatizations has been initiated. [. . .] The exact price of the Telekom shares will be fixed in a bid-process shortly before opening on the stock exchange. To begin with, a price margin will be made public. Interested parties can make offers after the issue price has been determined. The discount price for private investors will also be determined shortly before the sale.


45

50

wird. Auch der Preisnachlaß für Privatanleger wird erst kurz vor dem Verkauf festgelegt. Bislang haben sich rund anderthalb Millionen Interessenten in einem eigens dafür eingerichteten „Aktien-Informations-Forum“ registrieren lassen. (Zawadsky 1996a: 1–2)

157

Until now around one and a half million interested parties have registered with an especially set-up ‘Share Information forum’. (Zawadsky 1996b: 1–2)

To translate a German business text into a fluent, natural-sounding and accurate target text is very time-consuming work, and the economics of translation seldom allow luxuries such as long reflection or multiple redrafts. Except in the case of clear factual errors, it is much easier to criticize someone else’s work than to produce a good version under pressure of time. But the published TT reproduced above leaves little doubt that the chances of a good version are much better if the TL is the translator’s mother tongue, and better still if the translator is conversant with the discipline involved. Here the second issue is obscured because the English of the TT is conspicuously awkward and unidiomatic. It also has a number of notable mistranslations. This is in spite of the fact that the ST is written in language distinctly more lucid and accessible to the layman than many German business texts; the Practical 9.2 ST is a more representative sample in that respect. Many of the more obvious weaknesses in the ‘Privatisierung’ TT concern lexis: l. 4 ‘principle’ does not exist as an adjective; the nearest feasible rendering is ‘reasons of principle’. l. 9 It is hard to envisage any State being ‘rolled back from the economy’. This TT seems to have been prompted by the ST formulation, but it is difficult to see a British analyst going further than to speak of rolling back State intervention in the economy. l. 13 English ‘so’ is not an option for this use of German ‘so’; rephrase to read: ‘In his 1983 government statement, . . . expressed this conviction when he said [. . .]’. l. 13 ‘ordered economy’ mistranslates ‘Wirtschaftsordnung’, though, given the context, ‘economy’ alone would serve to translate the term here; it means a particular economic order or set-up, the economy of a given country. l. 22 ‘expands’ is unfortunate in conjunction with a personal subject when not followed by a complement such as ‘on the subject’, ‘on the point’, etc.; without these it does not mean ‘comments further’, but simply ‘gets larger’. l. 29 For the TL reader, the conjunction ‘as’ in relation to past events is equivalent to ‘während’, not to ‘als’. Substitute ‘when’.

158


ll. 36–7 In context, ‘shortly before opening on the stock exchange’ is confusing for the reader; the point would be better made by referring to ‘stock market flotation’. l. 38 ‘a price margin’ is confusing, as in economics and business texts a margin is usually either a safety buffer or (euphemistically) a profit. It would be more useful to speak of a ‘price range’, but probably better still to be fully explicit and refer to the announcement of maximum and minimum prices for the shares. l. 44 The ST’s ‘bislang’ is more idiomatically rendered as ‘so far’. Word-order, syntax and verb tense present almost as many errors: l. 3 Though a minor error, preterite ‘were’ is less suitable than present perfect ‘have been’ for reporting conditions that have obtained up to the present moment. ll. 7–8 The utterly un-English (and not quite German!) word order of ‘In the forefront firmly stands . . .’ may perhaps represent an attempt to reproduce the hammered-home rhetorical effect of the ST ‘stand und steht’. An important part of what the ST author wrote has of course simply been lost. Reformulate as ‘was and is’. ll. 22–3 In the translation of Waigel’s remark, ‘for us’ has been left in one of the standard German positions, between verb and object; in English, the sequence used here is possible in spoken language – most plausibly in a speech, with appropriate pauses and voice control; however, there is no sign in the ST that Waigel wanted to give ‘für uns’ special emphasis. This is a concise example of a problem we discuss in Chapter 16. Here it is perhaps best handled by expanding the remark to a pseudo-cleft structure: ‘What privatization means for us is . . .’. l. 33 German and English choices of preterite and present perfect run parallel in many situations, but not here. The TT’s present perfect ‘has been initiated’ suggests to the reader that the ‘initiation’ is fresh news – a false suggestion reinforced by the failure to render the ST’s ‘in den achtziger Jahren’ at all. Change to ‘a new wave of privatizations was initiated in the 1980s’. l. 39–40 What is said here contradicts the remark in lines 35–6 that the share price will be fixed ‘in a bid-process’. In fact what the ST here says is that the issue price will be determined on the basis of the offers, or rather bids, that have been made. For once this is a mistake suggestive of a translator whose native language is not German. This decoding error is probably also the most serious misstatement anywhere in the extract. The translation wrongly says ‘can make offers after the issue price has been determined’, where it should in fact say ‘can make offers on the basis of which the issue price will be determined’. ll. 40–2 The TT should read: ‘The discounted price [. . .] will likewise not be determined until shortly before the sale.’ ST ‘erst’ was lost in translation.


159

For obvious reasons, the examples we use in this chapter tend to be translations that raise plenty of points to discuss; although they are not exceptional, they should not be regarded as collectively representative of the general level of professional translation, even at the pre-revising stage. Much revising and editing work is done on high-quality TTs involving complex subject matter and often complex typography, in which errors may well be rare and unobtrusive. In scientific and technical texts, of course, unobtrusive errors can be major errors (see Chapter 11, p. 138). That there will be some TT errors for the final check to find is almost certain, and this is why many translation agencies make it a rule that the work of every translator, no matter how experienced, is passed to another of the team for further revising and editing with a fresh eye. Before handing over, though, each translator scrutinizes his or her own work carefully, both as a professional obligation and in order not to be caught out. Our negative examples are representative of work produced by under-qualified translators. Unfortunately there is no shortage of such products, translation being expensive; companies often economize by using amateur translation, in many cases without use of a TL native speaker. In our text about telecommunications deregulation, it was hard to tell whether the TT deficiencies lay in the command of English only, or in technical knowledge as well. Here now is an example of a text (published 1998) that simply needed editing by a native speaker of English familiar with the jargon of recruitment advertisements. The advertisement’s four headings said: ‘Dynamic, growing company / Sales Manager / Great Britain/ German machine-tool manufacturing’, with ‘Sales Manager’ in much bigger print.

5

10

15

Have you been selling machine tools successfully for several years now, or are you a consultant in the field of these products, which are distinguished by a great need for explanation? Did you obtain the knowledge necessary for this via a well founded technical education – perhaps even in the field of chip cutting – and could, ideally, expand this knowledge into the commercial sector? Do you speak German in addition to your national language, and are you less than 45 years of age? Are you now looking for a highly demanding and fascinating sales position with a major advisory role and a great deal of responsibility? Then read on: Our company was founded over 15 years ago. We are successful and recognised as people who solve customer-specific problems. Furthermore, our customers appreciate us for our products, which, on close inspection, offer value for money and correspond with the stateof-the-art, as well as for our competent, high grade and advice tailored to individual customer needs. As a medium-sized German company independent of any group, we can guarantee the necessary flexibility, speed and punctuality. For this reason, we are expanding at an aboveaverage rate.

160


This text vividly illustrates one of the points made in the small guide to translation services jointly produced, for business use, by CILT and the British and French professional translators’ and interpreters’ organizations in 2003: Even if you regularly negotiate successfully in French, German or Spanish, and spend lots of time in the countries where those languages are spoken, 99 times out of 100 your written command of a foreign language will be immediately recognisable as ‘foreign’. (ITI/CILT/SFT 2003: 8) This problem with the written language is perhaps a special danger for German-native users of English, precisely because many Germans are highly competent in spoken English in professional contacts. A native speaker of English would almost certainly want to make a number of changes to the advertisement. For instance, ‘Great Britain’ has for some years been less in use than ‘UK’, whereas ‘Großbritannien’ is still widely used in German-speaking countries. The relative clause at the end of the first sentence, ‘which are distinguished . . .’, is clumsy to the point of inviting ridicule. It is clumsy not only syntactically, but also because the ‘products’ are ‘distinguished’ not, as one might expect, by some special excellence they possess, but by ‘a great need for explanation’. It is hard to imagine this point being successfully put across except by a new sentence referring to the sophistication of the products and the consequent need for up-to-date knowledge of the relevant branch of the industry, together with first-rate presentational skills. ‘Furthermore’ (l. 12) has died out of standard English (as opposed to legal and perhaps academic parlance) and its use – particularly in isolation at the head of the sentence – marks the text as ‘foreign’ (cf. our comment on over-use of ‘therefore’ on p. 101). ‘For this reason’ is not a dated expression, but its placing is faintly unidiomatic. The hyphenated ‘state-of-the-art’, by contrast, certainly belongs to the genre’s current characteristic lexis, but in that form is used adjectivally, never as a noun. The text also has an incoherence (l. 14) that will detract still further from the company’s image. The effort put into revising and editing must of course be kept in perspective. In spite of the criticisms made above, the only actual mistake is the one in line 14, and almost certainly it would have been spotted with more careful editing. Does the stiltedness of the English really warrant the expense of a mother tongue reviser/editor? It is highly unlikely, after all, that in this case the right potential sales manager was deterred from applying. The effort has indeed to be proportionate to the return. But then the effort here need not have amounted to more than an hour or so’s revising and editing by an in-house native speaker of English – or an hour’s pay for a TL-native professional. That would have removed much of the quaintness of the style. As ITI/CILT/SFT point out with reference to what they

Revising and editing TTs 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

161

call ‘accurate yet unpolished work’: ‘if you are trying to sell or persuade, or if image is important to you, it will probably not be enough’ (2003: 7). There are many different situations that can necessitate extensive revision and editing work. The translator may be working into his or her native language – which avoids the idiom pitfalls of our last two examples – yet lack experience of the technical discipline concerned. In a purely factual text, such as a set of industrial standards, idiomatic problems will be secondary, provided that they do not interfere with the clarity of the translated instructions. What does matter is that any English-speaking contractors or other users dependent on the translation should find in it the terminology they are accustomed to in their own working context. On the same principle, it goes almost without saying that even a carefully checked TT intended for UK industrial use could not be issued to (for example) US contractors without first being scrutinized for conformity with US terminological practice in that particular trade. Following up on what we said in Chapter 11 about translators needing to continue learning on the hoof, it is worth emphasizing here that highly experienced professionals do not necessarily know all the answers that a new assignment poses, indeed they probably do not. Perhaps, next to depth of knowledge, and expertise in terminological research, the third most important asset conferred by long experience is simply the acquired reflex that tells the translator when the ‘obvious’ translation is to be distrusted and therefore specifically researched. Of course, it is one thing to criticize a translation, but another thing entirely to revise and edit it. How does one go about such a complex task? The revision and editing process comprises several activities, which broadly speaking fall into two stages. The first is checking the TT for adherence to the ST in terms of accuracy: the reviser focuses on errors, omissions, additions, names and titles, figures and tables, etc. The second stage focuses on the end-user of the TT, and attempts to achieve the ‘optimum orientation of the translated text to the requirements of the target readership’ (Graham 1983: 104). At the revision or checking stage, greater emphasis is usually placed on accuracy than on style. The objectivity of the reviser should ensure that any ambiguities or unclear phrasing are dealt with before passing on to the editing stage. For editing, there are no hard and fast rules, though critical factors are certainly appearance, appeal, impact, harmony, taste, register and style. If revision is concerned with the ‘bare bones’ of the TT, the editing process will perform ‘remedial surgery’ (Graham 1983: 103), which should consist of ‘upgrading the terminology, clarifying obscurities, reinforcing the impact, honing the emotive appeal to suit the target reader’. A final ‘cosmetic’ stage should be to ensure that the appearance and layout of the TT respect the client’s requirements. A tricky issue is style, as style and language-use vary from one translator to another. In literary translation, the TT is a new piece and the

162


translator’s own – to be judged, of course, in terms of the stylistic character of the foreign ST. Most commercial, legal and technical texts are not primarily concerned with style, provided that the TT is written in language appropriate for the genre and the users. In technical texts, as long as the message is accurate and clear, both reviser and editor will as far as possible leave the style to look after itself. But this will not apply in the case of translations commissioned by or for the leading scholarly journals and other prestigious publications. The Getty Research Institute, to mention only one instance, sends its translators detailed and lengthy style sheets and expects them to comply. Some texts are passed on to an editor before publication, and although some institutions do consult the translator or reviser about changes to the TT, they are the exception rather than the rule. An editor may wish to prune what are considered to be irrelevancies from the TT, or to reduce the length of the text due to typographical or impagination constraints. This is a common factor in editing. In effect, the editor is responsible to the translator for any changes made to the TT, whether or not the translator is consulted about them. If the TT is subsequently judged defective in some way by readers, it is the translator who will automatically be held responsible by readers or reviewers, rather than the author, the editor or the printer. Translators should therefore never forget that revision and editing are part of the ‘quality control’ procedure that they should implement on completing their translation (or during and after translating, depending on how the translator works). The lesson is that, whether or not the TT will be revised and edited by a third party, it is essential for translators to have their own system for careful assessment of completed work and to ensure that, even on a rush job, no translated text leaves their hands without scrupulous checking for errors and omissions. (Excellent advice on checking can be found in Anderson and Avery 1995 and in Mossop 2001.)

Revising and editing TTs 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

163

PRACTICAL 13 13.1 Revising and editing Assignment (i) You have been asked to revise the following TT. Discuss the main types of revision challenges it poses. (ii) Revise the TT, or a part of it. (iii) Report on your revisions, saying what criteria you adopted for assessment of the TT, and explaining the main changes you made. (iv) Exchange the revised text for another student’s, and edit that. (v) Explain your edits. Contextual information The texts are taken from the information leaflet ‘Privatisierung und Deregulierung in Deutschland: Der Fall Telekom’, an earlier extract from which was discussed in the body of Chapter 13.

Turn to p. 164

164

5

10

15

20

25


ST 1995 sind 15 Milliarden DM an Schulden getilgt worden; für 1996 ist ebenfalls eine Verringerung in zweistelliger Milliardenhöhe geplant. Zusammen mit einem weiteren Personalabbau bis zum Jahr 2000 von derzeit über 200.000 auf 170.000 Mitarbeiter und dem Ende der hohen Investitionen in Ostdeutschland läßt diese Sanierung steigende Gewinne erwarten. Die Privatisierungspolitik ist auch für den Bund erfolgreich. Denn die Bundesregierung hat über zehn Milliarden DM aus dem Verkauf des staatlichen Unternehmensbesitzes eingenommen. Rund ein Drittel davon haben die VW-Stiftung und die Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt erhalten. Über sechs Milliarden DM aus dem Privatierungserlös sind in den Bundeshaushalt geflossen. Hinter der Telekom wartet eine Reihe weiterer Privatisierungskandidaten des Bundes. So wird über den Verkauf der Postbank bereits verhandelt; auch die Deutsche Siedlungs- und Landesrentenbank soll verkauft werden. Die Tankstellen und Rasthäuser an den Autobahnen will der Bund ebenso privatisieren wie die Brief- und Paketpost, staatliche Wohnungsbaugesellschaften und Flughäfen sowie eine Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft und das Regierungs-Gästehaus Petersberg bei Bonn. Das Ziel ist der schlanke Staat, der sich auf das konzentriert, was durch private Initiative nicht zu leisten ist. Indem der Staat nicht länger unternehmerisch tätig ist, erweitert er die wirtschaftlichen Handlungsfelder für die Bürger, die als Unternehmer in aller Regel dynamischer und erfolgreicher sind als der Staat. Damit ist die Privatisierung aber nicht nur für die privaten Unternehmer und Investoren von Vorteil, sondern sie ist wegen der privatwirtschaftlich zu erzielenden Effizienzsteigerungen, Wettbewerbszunahmen und Innovationen für die Volkswirtschaft insgesamt ein Gewinn. (Zawadsky 1996a: 4–5)


5

10

15

20

25

165

TT During 1995, fifteen thousand million DM’s of debt were repaid; for 1996 an eleven figure debt reduction is also planned. With a further work force reduction from presently over 200,000 down to 170,000 by the year 2000, together with the end of the high investment levels in Eastern Germany, this restructuring will allow climbing profits to be expected. The privatization policy has also been a success for the Federal Government, as the Federal Government has had takings of over ten thousand million DM’s out of the sale of State company property. About one third of which has gone to the VW Foundation and the German Federal Foundation for the Environment. More than six thousand million DM’s of privatization proceeds have flowed into the coffers of the Federal budget. Behind Telekom further Federal privatization candidates are waiting in line. Negotiations over the sale of Postbank are already in progress; the Deutsche Siedlungs- und Landesrentenbank (German housing, credit, and finance, bank) should also be sold. The Federal Government wants to privatize the petrol stations and service stations on the motorways, as well as the letter and parcel post, State housing-construction companies and airports, also an accounting company, and the government’s Petersberg guest house near Bonn. The objective is the slim State, which concentrates upon that which cannot be managed through private enterprise. In so far as the State is no longer active in business, it expands the business manœuvrability of the citizen, who as business people are usually more dynamic and successful than the State. Privatization is not just advantageous for private business people and investors, but rather, through the increases in efficiency, competition and innovation, which can be achieved by private business, it is a gain for the national economy as a whole. (Zawadsky 1996b: 4–5)

166


13.2 Revising and editing Assignment (i) You have been asked to revise the following TT. Discuss the main types of revision challenges it poses. (ii) Revise the TT, or a part of it. (iii) Report on your revisions, saying what criteria you adopted for assessment of the TT, and explaining the main changes you made. (iv) Exchange the revised text for another student’s, and edit that. (v) Explain your edits. Contextual information The texts are from the June 1995 issue of Holiday, the client magazine of the upmarket Swiss timeshare company Hapimag, and is part of a long illustrated feature on a new Hapimag holiday village that opened that summer in the Algarve. The magazine is published in German and English editions. At Hapimag’s request we edited out one minor (outdated) detail from ST and TT.

5

10

15

ST Wir spazieren auf einer ersten Besichtigungstour durch die Anlage. Wohnhäuser, wohltuend niedrig, nur zweistöckig gehalten, verteilen sich auf dem 11 Hektar grossen Gelände, das sich gegen das Meer und die Küste hin neigt: eine Reverenz an die für viele Reisende schönste Küste unseres europäischen Kontinents. Locker verteilt stehen die Wohnhäuser, die 9 bis 26 Wohnungen umfassen. Insgesamt sind es 196 Partnerwohnungen, aufgeteilt auf 30 Studios, 137 Zwei- und 29 DreizimmerFerienwohnungen. Alles in allem teilen sich 13 Wohnhäuser und das Hauptgebäude das grossflächige Grundstück: da bleibt für alle reichlich Platz. Der Resort Manager begleitet uns. Ein kreisrunder Platz zu unserer Linken, erkennbar alt, irritiert. Lachend klärt uns der Resort Manager auf: wir befinden uns auf einem ehemaligen Landgut, die Fläche sei der damalige Dreschplatz und bleibe erhalten. Ebenso wie eine Zisterne, aus ockerfarbenen Steinen gefügt. Knorrige, verwachsene Feigenbäume wurden nicht gefällt, werden im Herbst, wohl zur Freude der Kinder, ihre süsse Frucht tragen. Gegen die Tennisplätze hin fällt das Gelände steiler ab, ein Olivenhain säumt die aus groben Steinen gemauerte Stützwand, vereinzelte Mandelbäume stehen in Blüte, das Meer immer in Sichtweite. (Hapimag 1995a: 7)


5

10

15

167

TT We take a first tour of inspection through the village. Pleasantly low buildings, just two storeys high, spread over the 27 acre grounds that incline themselves to the sea and coastline in reverence to a coast that by many travellers is considered the most beautiful on our European continent. The buildings, consisting of 9 to 26 apartments, are loosely scattered. In all there are 196 Member apartments, divided into 30 studios, 137 two-room and 29 three-room holiday apartments. All in all the extensive grunds are shared by 13 apartment buildings and the main building, so there’s enough room for everyone. We are accompanied by the resort manager. To our left, a circular patch, obviously old, sticks out conspicuously. The resort manager laughingly explains we are on an old country estate and this is the former thrashing spot which will remain intact, as will the ochre coloured stone well. Gnarled, stunted fig trees have not been felled, but left to bear their sweet fruit in autumn, to the certain delight of the children. In the direction of the tennis courts the terrain slopes more steeply, an olive grove lines a coarse stone retaining wall and the odd almond tree is in blossom with the sea in the background. (Hapimag 1995b: 7)

Contrastive topics and practicals: Introduction

The next three chapters deal with a selection of topics from the ‘contrastive linguistics’ of German and English. Each is self-contained and can be used as the basis of a practical at whatever stage of the course is most useful. The aim is to sharpen awareness of certain typical difficulties in translating certain types of construction from German into English, and to increase awareness of the range of options in translating these constructions. Two of the topics, modal particles and sequential focus, are hard to treat summarily, being particularly dependent on full-sentence examples; we devote a chapter to each. Chapter 15 also deals with a wholesentence issue, the tendency of German to ‘pack’ meaning into single clauses, as against the tendency of English to diffuse it by using more than one verb. Here the implications concern not so much individual sentences as the impact of a stretch of text. In making our somewhat arbitrary choice, we have picked three major sources of translation difficulties, each illustrated through a variety of classroom exercises. The contrastive exercises differ from the other practicals in two ways. First, students translate sentences out of context, so that attention is focused on the contrastive problems themselves – problems that, in context, are often blurred by questions of style or genre. This does not mean that context is less important than we have insisted, but that learning to make strategic decisions implies developing a contrastive awareness of available translation options; this awareness is sharpened by taking sentences out of context. Second, we often ask students to translate from English into German. This brings into the open certain possibilities in English that are easily overlooked in translating from German. Many of the English STs here contain constructions that cannot go into German without grammatical transposition. These are examples of those idiomatic English

Contrastive topics and practicals 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

169

constructions that it is easiest to overlook as possible options when translating from German, particularly when the ST structure can be replicated in English. Having stumbled over these structures in translating into German, students will be more aware of their availability as options in translating from German.

14 Contrastive topic and practical: The function of modal particles This chapter constitutes the material for all or part of a practical. It deals with a practical problem that has important implications for translation between German and English, namely the difference between the two languages with regard to the use of modal particles – sentential markers whose function is to nuance the illocutionary impact of sentences. The problem is more obvious in translating from German to English, because of the difficulties the translator may experience in finding appropriate ways of rendering modal particles that are evidently functional, i.e. meaningful, in the German ST. On the other hand, the problem is more insidious in translating from English to German, mainly because the translator may overlook the need to supply modal particles in a German TT where there are no such particles in the English ST. The result is often a TT that copies the propositional content of the sentences of the English ST, but feels subtly unidiomatic in German, owing to the lack of modal particles. German sentences tend to contain a greater number and range of sentential particles than English. Where such particles would be appropriate in a German TT – which is not always, but often – the cumulative effect of their absence will be an impression of oddness, even foreignness. There is also a risk in such texts of quite serious errors in the tonal register of the TT. It is commonplace for German modal particles to disappear when their surrounding text is translated into English. This is not only routine practice but also readily understandable practice in view of the elusive, partly variable and often faint semantic content of true modal particles. Very often, where an English TT offers no explicit reflection of a given ST modal particle, there can be no reasonable challenge. And yet the very frequency with which the ‘no counterpart’ option is taken up is itself a

The function of modal particles 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

171

reason for the high degree of uncertainty among English-speaking learners of German about the nature and function of modal particles. Consider the following examples of spoken language, attempting to define how far each is individually coloured by the modal particles: ST Kommen Sie doch herein!

TT Come in!

Wie heißt du denn?

What’s your name?

Sagen S’ mal . . .

Tell me, . . .

Ich komm’ doch schon!

I’m coming!

Das ist ja fein.

That’s great/lovely.

The fact that many modal particles are communicatively learnt and used, because they belong to standard transactional language, makes no difference to the generic uncertainty. If ‘Wie heißt du denn?’ and ‘Kommen Sie doch herein!’ are found to be communicative equivalents of ‘What’s your name?’ and ‘Come in!’ – and most learners do have this experience – then it is understandable that these particles tend to be regarded as dispensable for purposes of German–English translation. Many tutors have heard the ready reply: ‘Modal particles? Oh, those are those little words in German that you leave out when you translate!’ This chapter has a threefold aim: to peg back that assumption, to suggest some patterns discernible within the shimmering wealth of practical usage, and to identify some translation tactics appropriate for particular circumstances. As a first step towards the first broad aim – of demonstrating that modal particles are in fact functional – consider the following examples, examining in particular the appropriateness of the TTs offered: ST Kommen Sie rein!

TT Come in!

Kommen Sie mal rein!

Would you come in for a minute?

Kommen Sie doch rein!

(Do) come in!/Come on in!

Kommen Sie ruhig rein!

Come on in!

Kommen Sie bloß endlich rein!

Will you come in!/For goodness’ sake come in!

Was wollen Sie denn von mir?

What can I do for you?

Was wollen Sie eigentlich von mir?

What are you after?

Was wollen Sie überhaupt von mir?

I wish you’d leave me alone.

Das geht zu weit.

That’s going too far.

172


Das geht doch wohl zu weit.

I think that’s going a bit far.

Das geht eigentlich zu weit.

That’s going too far, you know.

Das geht denn doch zu weit.

(No,) that’s going too far.

Wir müssen jetzt langsam fahren.

We’ll need to go slow here.

Wir müssen jetzt langsam gehen.

It’s about time we were going.

Analysis of these short examples leaves no doubt that even when shorn of context the normally unobtrusive modal particles may influence the communication decisively. In requests/commands, they modulate the ‘Do this!’ message across an emotive range from gentle coaxing to peremptory and even angry orders. In yes/no questions (Entscheidungsfragen), they can suggest innocence or incredulity. In questions requiring an expository answer, such as the three used in the list (Ergänzungsfragen or whquestions), they can likewise suggest anything from innocence to a readiness for serious confrontation. In statements, what is said can be nuanced by modal particles in any of a vast number of ways, and with widely varying degrees of impact. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to do more than merely suggest the potential expressive contribution of modal particles to those areas of German discourse where they are used. Two further short observations should be made on the basis of the sets of examples given. The first is that where in German a modal particle can be used, its non-use will be significant. The second is the point made by the last pair of examples, which introduce adverb and modal particle lookalikes (‘langsam’). Most modal particles are in fact adverb homonyms. The striking example is chosen to show how the modal particle characteristically has (1) sentential function and (2) a meaning that is both related to that of its adverb lookalike and yet also significantly different. The translator has to be relatively green to translate the second ‘langsam’ as ‘slowly’; later examples will show the greater risk of mistaking adverbial use of (say) ‘schon’ or ‘mal’ for modal particle use. At this point it seems appropriate to offer a general description of German modal particles and their function, and a note on their habitat. What class of signifiers is it that can include, at one extreme, an ‘etwa’ capable of provoking an ordinary German to fury, and at the other extreme, a whole range of usages that make it into modern monolingual dictionaries, only to be glossed, in some at least, as ‘ohne eigentliche Bedeutung’? Modal particles, whether derived from adverbs or not, have, like the so-called ‘sentence adverbs’ (‘leider’, ‘glücklicherweise’), the function of modalizing the whole sentence and not the verb alone. Thus they may indeed be called sentential particles. They individually or collectively, even through their very frequency or infrequency, indicate the tenor, atmosphere, climate of the communicative interaction in progress. Modal particles are in fact indissolubly identified with the idea of communicative


173

interaction – as opposed to one-way communication. In this they are true illocutionary particles. In genuinely impersonal communications (for example, scientific, legal, official) the frequency of modal particles approaches nil. The same, of course, applies if the communicator has a reason to seem objective or non-committal. These observations point to the essential function of modal particles as lying outside the factual content of what is said: they ‘nuance’ the message, not directly and selectively as an adverb does, but indirectly and generally, perhaps by indicating the speaker’s attitude to what is said, and/or by conveying to the listener a hint as to the type of response expected. Particles such as ‘denn’, ‘ja’, ‘mal’, ‘doch’ and ‘eben’ are in fact like a simultaneous commentary or decoding instruction that tells the recipient how to read the basic factual communication. Consider the following examples, identifying the particular ‘spin’ imparted by the italicized modal particle. Er weiß ja, wie es bei dir aussieht. Er weiß doch, wie es bei dir aussieht. [identifying someone passing down the street] Das ist ja Harry! Das ist doch Harry! Das hast du aber fein gemacht! Das hast du eigentlich fein gemacht! Ich will nur eben mal raus. Ich will nur überhaupt raus. (Note that here the modal particles respectively suit very different propositional contents, hence they signal that as well.) Wollen Sie eigentlich behaupten, wir hätten das nicht richtig angefasst? Wollen Sie etwa behaupten, wir hätten das nicht richtig angefasst? Ist das nun dein Ernst? Ist das vielleicht dein Ernst? Modal particles generally mark the speaker’s attitude not just to the content of the discourse but also to the interlocutor(s). In particular instances, examination will even suggest that modal particle choice is related to the response of the person(s) addressed. Where such a relationship exists, it is a complex one: part diagnosis, part manipulation. The point may be illustrated by the following simple examples: ST Ich weiß ja, dass du nichts dafür konntest.

TT I know you couldn’t do anything about it.

174


Characteristically (though not always) a ‘consensus’ particle, the ‘ja’ forestalls the defensive response by establishing common ground – sympathy – between speaker and listener. Similarly: ST Fahr doch selber hin!

TT (Why don’t you) go yourself!/ Why not go yourself?

The tone of this ST command is almost inescapably rude – a point, incidentally, which can be made about only one of the three TTs offered. The adversative particle ‘doch’ diagnoses and challenges the (perceived) contrary intention, that is, the unwillingness to make the trip. Contrast the following formulation: ST Fahr doch mal selber hin!

TT Why don’t you go yourself!/ Why not pop over yourself?

In commands, ‘mal’ is always disarming, and consequently the ‘doch’ in this example says no more than that the idea proposed is a fresh one. The illocutionary approach here is therefore much less confrontational. Modal particles may be said to have their natural role, their home, in spoken dialogue. There is evidence for this in the frequency of ‘lookalike’ and near-‘lookalike’ sentences in the examples provided so far in this chapter. In many cases voice inflection and pitch are crucial to correct understanding. By the same token a third component, body language, must be taken into account. The point may be illustrated through one of the rare cases where English appears to have a modal particle usage closely analogous to a German one. In German it is standard among children and young people to ask: ‘Wie heißt du denn?’ The ‘denn’ is the modal particle that goes with the most open, innocuous type of question. English does not have a counterpart – except perhaps in such a situation as a crowded airport lounge where someone else’s four-year-old comes to stare at you: ‘What’s your name then?’ is a fairly stock response. Similarly: ‘Was hast du denn?’ translates as: ‘What’s the matter with you (then)?’ The ‘then’ has no temporal function, and only a very tenuous logical one. But is that question belligerent? Sympathetic? The printed words alone do not tell us. Facial expression, eye contact, body distance, etc. may, and intonation certainly will, help convey not only the basic question but also the illocutionary data that may well play the major role in influencing the recipient to fraternize, fight or flee. These generalizations apply to both languages (though of course there are differences in detail). In this area, the interesting difference between German and English from the translator’s point of view is that intonation and body language, the two physical components of the core message’s ‘packaging’ (or one might say ‘subtext’),


175

are in German very much more richly supplemented by textual data, particularly those sentential particles that are the subject of this chapter. In practice, modal and other particles do not necessarily play a much larger role, relative to acoustic and visual signals, in German dialogue than in English, but they are certainly capable of doing so: for instance, given the right circumstances, the ‘vielleicht’ of ‘Ist das vielleicht dein Ernst?’ will sting like a bee. Universally used and responded to by native Germanspeakers, they constitute a very substantial commentary on attitudes and perceptions underlying any text in which there is an element of real or implicit dialogue. The implications for written texts, whether reporting or suggesting dialogue, are obvious: the nuancing of the text is readable from the printed page on the basis of much more copious evidence than is afforded by English. The implications for translation of written texts are likewise obvious. The translator from German to English basically has to choose between close matching, omission and compensation. The first option, where possible at all, risks over-marking the English TT; omission, in the long run, under-marks; compensation may require a well-planned strategic approach. In translation into German, the ‘understating’ tendency of English written STs means that the translator must be not only alive to the inflections and implications latent in the English text, but also familiar with the rich possibilities of German modal particle usage. The problem is that the modal particle system is not readily transparent to the non-native learner and cannot be tackled as systematically as standard lexical items on a word-by-word basis. The best approach is the long-term one of familiarization with the routine modal particles of everyday speech through modern communicative language-teaching and native speaker contact. We now move from the general characteristics and functions of German sentential particles to focus instead on the ways in which individual particles are used. The most compact way to present this information is in the form of examples with indicative translations and brief commentary. Working with a representative sample of modal particles, we shall suggest broad functional categories to which individual particles may be assigned, and consider translation problems in relation to this essentially pragmatic categorization. If we are to sort modal particles by function, the initial step must be to categorize under the headings of ‘imperative’, ‘interrogative’ and ‘statement’. The reason – interesting in view of the semantic elusiveness, already mentioned, of many of the particles – is that their usage is very sharply differentiated between commands/requests, questions and statements (for an overview, see Helbig and Buscha 2001; Durrell 2002a; Durrell 2002b). In the context of our contrastive approach, there is a case for a secondstage, rough-and-ready sorting of modal particle usage by affective value. This groups like with like, makes it possible to set up scales of forcefulness (one of the few useful parameters available) and also, in focusing

176


first on overall force and then on the details of a range of expressive possibilities, accords with our general principle that analysis of translation problems should work from strategic considerations to points of detail. However, the subgroupings we suggest within the three major categories should be regarded as informal, aiming simply to organize and facilitate discussion in the practical. 1 IMPERATIVES 1.1 Playing down 1.1.1 mal ST Könnten Sie schnell mal Verbandzeug holen? [standard polite request using question form]

TT Could you get some bandages quickly, please?

Gib mal her! [Compared with Gib her! this is just as forceful, but less rude.]

Let’s have it./Hand it over.

Thomas, lauf mal schnell zu Oma und sag ihr, . . .

Thomas, (will you) run quickly over to Grandma’s and tell her . . .

Lassen Sie das mal eben übersetzen.

(Just) get that translated, will you?

The modal particle ‘mal’ tends to be identified rather too uncritically by German learners of English with the TL ‘just’. In statements this indeed often works, with ‘Ich geh kurz mal raus’ being rendered as ‘I’m just going out for a moment/minute’. But in commands the terms diverge – in spite of the last example above. ‘Mal’ is so automatic with simple commands in German (‘Guck mal!’; ‘Kommen Sie mal!’) that it signifies little more than casualness, and is in part a mere prosodic filler. That is precisely where ‘just’ will not do in English. For these last two brief examples, ‘Just look’ and ‘Just come’ as they stand are not remotely accurate: the ‘just’ is closer to SL ‘nur’. The translator can opt instead for either ‘Look!’ and ‘Come over here!’ or for alternatives such as ‘(Just) take a look at this!’ and ‘Can you (just) come here a minute?’. 1.1.2 doch mal ST Mach doch mal Rühreier, es soll ja schnell gehen!

TT Why not make scrambled eggs? We’re in a hurry.

Here, ‘doch’ at most blends in the nuance of a new thought. Cf. 1.2.1.


177

1.2 Insisting or contradicting 1.2.1 doch ST Mach doch Rühreier, es soll ja schnell gehen!

TT Just make scrambled eggs, we’re in a hurry!

[sharply] Warten Sie doch!

Will you please wait/be patient!/Here, hang on a minute!

[child, plaintively, to schoolmates running ahead] Wartet doch mal!

Wait for me!

As in statements, ‘doch’ is a reliable marker of at least some adversative element: perhaps as mild as a change of tack or fresh idea (cf. 1.1.2), perhaps as strong as a perceived clash of wills over the command. The child’s plea above says (doch) they are not waiting, but (mal) it’s not much to ask. English tends not to mark this group specifically: most TTs are straight imperatives. However, the first example of the set is sharper than its counterpart at 1.1.2, and so suggests a suspicion that the cook’s intentions are already formed. 1.2.2 nur; (regional) man ST Nur Ruhe, nur Ruhe!

TT Let’s have some peace and quiet!

Bleiben S’ nur hübsch zu Hause und warten S’ ab.

Just you stay put at home and wait.

Geh du man hin.

(You can) just go yourself.

Red man nicht so viel.

Oh, don’t keep on about it.

These two modal particles are used to press a request, but usually in a lowkey way, without the note of sharpness or irritation signalled by some uses of ‘doch’ and by most uses of ‘schon’, ‘bloß’ and ‘endlich’ (see 1.2.3). 1.2.3 schon; endlich; bloß; stressed ja ST Nun, mach schon!

TT Come on, get a move on!

Nun, komm schon, wir kaufen dir eine neue Puppe.

Now come on, calm down, we’ll buy you a new doll.

178


Sag ihm bloß nicht, dass ich auch dabei war!

For goodness’ sake don’t tell him I was there too.

Geht mir ja nicht zu nah ans Wasser ran!

Whatever you do, don’t go near the water!

Ja, Kinder, hört endlich auf!

Come on children, that’s enough!

These four particles (except for one-offs like ‘Sag bloß!’) are at the top end of the scale of forcefulness in commands, but the associated situations differ. ‘Schon’ implies resistance, and may be coaxing, or simply impatient. ‘Bloß’ may in appropriate situations express impatience – but elsewhere is synonymous with stressed ‘ja’ and the top end of the ‘nur’ range, i.e. simply a strong adjuration as to conduct. English TT possibilities for the stronger particles include those shown earlier, also e.g. ‘Above all’, ‘Make sure you . . .’ and simple strong emphasis on the operative word or phrase.

EXERCISE Propose and discuss appropriate translations for the following sentences, paying special attention to the role of modal particles. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Why don’t you try getting up a little earlier? Throw discretion to the winds and be your own person! Whatever you do, don’t ask after his health. Please replace your handset. Komm, gib schon her! Waren Sie diesen Monat schon im Haxen-Grill? Wenn nicht, dann besuchen Sie uns doch mal! Jetzt hört doch endlich zu! Hör doch bloß auf mit deiner ewigen Quengelei! Wollen Sie bitte mal ein bisschen weiterrücken! Lass dir ja nichts von dem weismachen!

2 INTERROGATIVES Modal particles are by no means an automatic garnish for questions in German. The informal categories given here suggest conditions in which given particles tend to be used. If the conditions do not apply, no particle is used. Even where they do apply, successive sentences are rarely marked in the same way (cf. 3.3.2).


179

2.1 Innocent (The tone suggests the person asked has all the answers.) 2.1.1 denn ST [hotelier to guest] Was wollen Sie denn morgen tun?

TT What are your plans for tomorrow?

[landlady to guest] Was möchten Sie denn zum Frühstück?

What would you like for breakfast?

[one friend to another] Warum ist deine Mutti nicht mitgekommen?

Why didn’t your Mum come too?

Even within the main category of interrogatives, ‘denn’ can be observed to have distinct functions depending on the type of question. Compare the examples given in 2.1 (all whquestions) with those in 2.2. Wh- questions lacking the ‘denn’ will sound more purposive, businesslike; with it, they are more chatty and relaxed. In the set of three examples in 2.1.1, the use or non-use of ‘denn’ will mark register or circumstances or both. If the landlady is short-staffed, and late with the orders, the breakfastmenu question is unlikely to have a ‘denn’. The third question, being of a more intimate and searching nature, is likely to take either no particle, or an ‘analytical’ one, probably ‘eigentlich’. Length of sentence is probably also a factor in particle choice, but the illocutionary point remains. 2.2 Analytical 2.2.1 denn (in yes/no questions) ST Haben Sie unser Zimmer eigentlich schon vergeben? – Nein. Wollen Sie denn noch etwas länger bleiben?

TT Has anyone else taken our room for tonight? – No. Did you want to stay on?

The function of ‘denn’ is included in the loose grouping called ‘analytical’ because, when attached to a yes/no question, it reliably signals a response, as opposed to an opening gambit. The response may, of course, be to no more than a facial expression. 2.2.2 eigentlich ST Wie lange arbeiten Sie eigentlich schon bei Großmanns?

TT How long have you been working for Grossmann’s?

Ist da eigentlich was draus geworden?

Did anything ever come of it?

180


Was willst du denn eigentlich werden?

What do you want to be when you grow up/leave school (etc.)?

[Title of article by Jörn Albrecht] Wie übersetzt man eigentlich eigentlich?

How does one translate ‘eigentlich’?

The modal particle ‘eigentlich’ is not far in sense and function from the English modal particle ‘actually’, but neither is a reliable translation for the other. The German modal particle is used far more frequently than its English counterpart. It is unstressed, used almost as an unconscious linguistic reflex, and in questions suggests that the enquiry (however trivial) is not perfunctory, there is an interest in getting to the heart of the matter. Yet, as the third example suggests, it can be used alongside ‘denn’ without any sense of clash. 2.2.3 auch ST Und bist du auch glücklich?

TT And are you really happy?

Wirst du auch bestimmt hingehen?

You really will go, won’t you?

Und ist er auch gekommen?

And did he come in the end?

In questions, ‘auch’ seems to relate to the function of ‘(denn) auch’ in statements, which itself marks a sense of expectation duly fulfilled. The force it has in questions tends to be one of anxious or solicitous enquiry, perhaps because it connotes the follow-up to a narrative. The translator needs to be aware of this rather elusive modal particle function of ‘auch’, if only to avoid confusions with the adverbial homonym meaning ‘additionally/also’. 2.2.4 überhaupt ST Ich habe noch gar nicht gefragt, mögen Sie überhaupt klassische Musik?

TT I’m sorry, I never asked you, you do like classical music, don’t you?

Wer sind Sie denn überhaupt?

May I ask who you are exactly?

Ist das überhaupt wahr?

(But) is that true?

Wie kann sowas überhaupt passieren?

(But) how could it happen?

The modal particle ‘überhaupt’ – it too has a closely related adverb homonym – betokens a sense of sweeping details aside in favour of first


181

principles or overriding general considerations. English renderings to consider include ‘at all’, ‘anyway’, ‘in the first place’, verbs of judgement, and simple emphasis for intensity. 2.2.5 doch wohl; doch hoffentlich ST Die Arbeit werden Sie doch wohl inzwischen abgeschlossen haben?

TT I take it you’ve finished the essay by now?

Dein Mann ist doch hoffentlich nicht krank?

I do hope your husband’s not ill or anything?

These combinations belong to the more deliberate modal particle usages, expressing an assumption subject to some doubt, and as questions (in statement form) are often used ironically. The most useful stock translations are as shown. 2.3 Making more of it 2.3.1 bloß; nur ST Was ist denn bloß passiert?

TT What (can have) happened?

Was hat er bloß?

Whatever’s the matter with him?

Was sollen wir nur tun?

What are we to do?

These correspond fairly straightforwardly to stock TL expressions, or to very strong emphasis, e.g. on ‘What happened?’. 2.3.2 schon ST Wer braucht mich schon?

TT What use am I anyway?

Was kann ich denn schon dafür?

What am I supposed to do about it?

The use of ‘schon’ dramatizes and heightens certain questions. Here there is no close adverbial cognate. English may use strong speech inflection or an approximating communicative translation.

182


2.4 Tentative/mock tentative 2.4.1 etwa; vielleicht ST Sind Sie etwa der Herr, der vorhin Frau Meyer sprechen wollte?

TT Are you the gentleman who was looking for Frau Meyer?

War das etwa Ihr Mann, der eben verunglückte?

That wasn’t your husband in the accident, was it?

Könnten Sie mir vielleicht Feuer geben?

Could you give me a light?

Both these modal particles are used frequently as an apologetic formula to accompany an enquiry that may prove to be misdirected or sensitive. While English marks these situations with formulae such as ‘Are you by any chance . . .?’ or ‘I say, that wasn’t your husband . . .?’ – but not usually with ‘perhaps’ – the translator needs to bear in mind that in German the same two particles are often used ironically or tauntingly and then allow a rather wider range of TL renderings. ST Soll das vielleicht ein Witz sein?

TT Was that meant to be funny?

Ist das vielleicht dein Ernst?

You’re not serious?/You’re joking!

EXERCISE Propose and discuss appropriate translations for the following sentences, paying special attention to the role of modal particles. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Gentlemen, you’ve heard the arguments. Who is for the proposal? Did he marry her in the end? Before you invite him on your chalet party, find out if he can ski! Why do you want to do Medicine? What on earth’s he up to? You need to think seriously about where you’re going to live. Hast du vielleicht zehn Euro bei dir? War’s schön? – Gut! – Wo wollt ihr denn morgen hin? Sie räumte Tassen aus dem Schrank und sah mich fragend an. ‘Wie viele sind wir eigentlich?’ 10 Was soll denn das überhaupt? 11 O Gott, das war doch nicht etwa dein Chef vorhin? 12 [from Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, 1779] Nun, wo ist es denn? Es ist doch wohl nicht etwa gar gestorben?


183

3 STATEMENTS 3.1 Playing down (Acknowledges the obvious or the agreed; or is placatory.) 3.1.1 ja ST Gehen wir lieber zu Fuß, wir haben ja Zeit.

TT Let’s walk, we’ve got time.

Wollen Sie nicht lieber so lange warten, er kann ja jeden Augenblick kommen.

Wouldn’t you like to wait? He should be here any minute.

Das ist ja gut und schön, aber . . .

That’s all very well, but . . .

Sie wissen ja alle, um was es geht.

You all know why we are here.

The modal particle ‘ja’ and the more emphatic ‘schließlich’ and ‘ja schließlich’ are all used to accompany statements of the obvious. In this role ‘ja’ is one of the most frequently and unthinkingly used modal particles of all, much more so than its English near-equivalent ‘of course’, so it is a curiosity that it is also sometimes used in exclamatory statements (see 3.2). Like ‘of course’, but less obtrusively, ‘ja’ may be used ironically. 3.2 Making more of it (‘This is something exceptional.’ Or to add excitement.) 3.2.1 ja ST Das ist ja herrlich!

TT Oh, that’s wonderful!

Das ist ja wunderschöne Arbeit!

But that’s lovely!

[as visitors arrive] Da sind sie ja!

There they are!

3.2.2 doch ST [sudden, unexpected recognition] Das ist doch dein Bruder!

TT Look! It’s your brother!

3.2.3 schon ST Du wirst schon sehen.

TT You’ll see (all right/in due course).

Das bringt schon was ein.

It’s quite a good earner/It pays off.

Wenn schon, denn schon.

In for a penny, in for a pound/ Don’t spoil the ship . . .

184


Even as a modal particle, ‘schon’ has widely varying senses. The one we focus on here is that of strong reassurance. (This should be distinguished from the possibly related use of ‘schon’ in the coupling ‘schon . . . aber’, which is close to ‘zwar . . . aber’.) Affirmative ‘schon’ is a natural particle with (though not confined to) statements about the future. 3.2.4 aber; vielleicht ST [adult to child ] Du bist aber gewachsen!

TT I say! Haven’t you grown!

Das hast du aber fein gemacht!

That’s beautifully done!

Das war vielleicht ein Reinfall!

What a disaster/That was a disaster and no mistake!

These two particles are both used in dialogue rather like an audible exclamation mark. However, there are register differences (social and arguably tonal). ‘Aber’ belongs on the whole to genteel usage; ‘vielleicht’ is earthier. 3.3 Adversative (Perceived disagreement or inconsistency; or a fresh thought.) 3.3.1 eigentlich ST Ich würde das eigentlich lieber so formulieren . . .

TT I’d prefer to put it like this . . .

As a basically ‘analytical’ particle, ‘eigentlich’ can be used adversatively with demurring or tempering effect, that is, as a tactfully disguised contradiction. Apart from this, ‘eigentlich’ in statements seems close to English ‘actually’ and has few really distinctive modal particle characteristics. 3.3.2 doch ST Da hat doch der Arzt gewohnt.

TT [revisiting town] Oh! That’s where the doctor used to live! [arguing] No, it was the doctor who lived there [not e.g. the solicitor].

Wo ist denn die Karin? Sie wollte doch kommen.

Where’s Karin? I thought she was coming.

Es tut mir leid, ich kann wirklich nicht, ich muss doch für die Kinder das Essen kochen.

I’m sorry, I really can’t, I’ve got to see to the children’s supper.


185

The ‘adversative’ subgroup is dominated by ‘doch’, certainly one of the three or four most frequently used modal particles of all. The salient point is simply that ‘doch’ is triggered extremely readily and will be found marking statements that have only the faintest trace of (for instance) surprise, irony or argumentative value – as well as others that are strongly loaded. A balanced study of ‘doch’, as of other particles, is only possible on the basis of discourse extended over several sentences. Like others, it is used to nuance a point or convey an attitude, and is then typically not used again in the next two or three sentences. In German STs, the frequency of ‘doch’ correlates closely with the degree of agitation, contumaciousness or hostility of the speaker. The following example from Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (1973) is a quite exceptional case, suggesting an extremely disputatious state of mind. The eponymous hero remarks about Goethe’s fictional character Werther: ST Das war noch lange kein Grund, sich zu durchlöchern. Er hatte doch ein Pferd! Da wär ich doch wie nichts in die Wälder. Davon gab’s doch damals noch genug.

TT That was no sort of reason to blow his brains out. He’d got a horse, hadn’t he? I’d have cleared off into the woods, straight off. Plenty of those around then, weren’t there?

3.4 Analytical/reflective 3.4.1 ja; (ja) schließlich; nun einmal; eben; [regional] halt ST Nein, wo Ihr Schirm geblieben ist, weiß ich nicht. Das Haus ist schließlich kein Fundbüro.

TT No, I don’t know where your umbrella is. I’m not running a lostproperty office.

Nein, diesmal bin ich dran. Ich will schließlich auch mal ausspannen.

No, it’s my turn. I want some time off too.

Ihr Vater ist nun einmal über achtzig Jahre alt. Sie dürfen nicht zu viel von ihm verlangen.

Remember, your father is over eighty. Don’t expect too much of him.

Du, per Bahn kostet die Reise 200 Euro pro Person! – Gut, dann fahren wir eben mit dem Bus.

It’s going to be 200 euros each if we go by train! – OK, we’ll just go by bus then.

Any of the above modal particles can have an explanatory nuance. ‘Ja’ is easily the least obtrusive; the others usually impose a fairly explicit nuance of generalization or truism to support and underline a contention. ‘Schließlich’ and its adverb lookalike can occasionally cause confusion.

186


The particle ‘nun einmal’ (colloquially ‘nun mal’) likewise goes with statements of the obvious, differing from ‘(ja) schließlich’ perhaps in tending more strongly to go with truisms delivered in a sententious or even didactic tone. English may use voice inflection only, or a tagged-on ‘you know’, or even something as obtrusive as ‘the fact is that . . .’. As a modal particle, ‘eben’ has two related but distinct functions. First, it is a near synonym for ‘schließlich’ and ‘nun einmal’, though rather less pompous. Second, in its ‘summing up’ character, it also marks a much more limited, pragmatic and practical conclusion, as in the train-versusbus example. Regionally, ‘halt’ is used similarly in both aspects. 3.4.2 auch ST Der hat auch nie was getaugt.

TT He never was any good.

[Die Sondermarken sind leider schon ausverkauft.] – Die wollen wir auch nicht.

That’s OK, it’s not them we want.

In statements, the modal particle ‘auch’ is like its adverb counterpart in referring back to something mentioned already. The sense is not so much of an additional point as of a rejoinder that matches and fulfils an expectation implicit in the prompt. Hence it features frequently in dialogue, but (particularly in the expanded form ‘denn auch’) is also a connector in narrative (see Chapter 8, pp. 100–1). 3.4.3 langsam ST Wir müssen langsam gehen.

TT It’s about time we were going.

Das wird langsam unerträglich.

This is getting unbearable.

Der geht mir langsam auf den Wecker.

He’s beginning to get on my nerves.

‘Langsam’ is analytical in that it comments on an observed process. Its true reference is back to the speaker. It makes a formal show of polite temporizing, and often it means no more than that. But it can also be used in a palpably understating, ironic way, so that the illocutionary effect is to lend force by suggesting that the proposition’s validity is steadily rising. ‘Langsam’ is closer than most modal particles to its homonymic adverb counterpart, but still distinct. The English translation typically requires a present participle or a communicative rephrasing.


187

3.5 Attitudinal/permissive 3.5.1 ruhig ST Wir möchten ein paar Freunde einladen, habt ihr was dagegen? – Könnt ihr ruhig machen.

TT We want to ask a few friends in, is that OK? – Yes, go ahead.

Du hättest ihr ruhig schreiben können.

It wouldn’t have hurt you to write to her.

Das kann ruhig warten.

Let it wait/That won’t take any harm from waiting.

[Baby crying] Lass ihn ruhig schreien.

Just let him cry!

As a modal particle, ‘ruhig’ is untypical in having a unique function, and in being relatively easily described and delimited. It is typical, however, in having an adverbial cognate, in conveying information about mood – the speaker’s mood – and in needing a communicative rather than a literal translation. Attached to permissions, it can accompany a welcoming, a tolerant or an indifferent attitude. In other contexts, as the second example shows, it can convey a reproof. EXERCISE Propose and discuss appropriate translations for the following sentences, paying special attention to the role of modal particles. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Boys will be boys. – That’s no excuse! You know, this is starting to look serious. What counts at the end of the day is customer satisfaction. He’s asking a bit much, when you come to think about it. Is that all you have? I’d have liked a seat nearer the front. Wir sind doch keine Untertanen mehr, wir sind Demokraten. Das konnte ich doch nicht wissen! Du hättest es mir eigentlich sagen können. [Book title, collection of light humorous essays by H. Spoerl] Man kann ruhig darüber sprechen. Sie können ruhig ‘du’ zu mir sagen. Aber der Peter kann ja doch bei uns übernachten! Guckt euch das mal an! Die Elke hat eine Eins! Die wird sich vielleicht freuen!

15 Contrastive topic and practical: Concision and the adverb in German This chapter constitutes the material for all or part of a practical. If possible, the following exercise should be handed in before the practical. It should in any case be completed before going on to the material in the rest of the chapter.

PRELIMINARY EXERCISE Translate the following sentences, using only a monolingual German dictionary. 1 Meanwhile, I continued occasionally to see something of Quiggin, though I came no nearer to deciding which of the various views held about him were true. 2 He has come to appreciate that money alone is not the answer to his problems. 3 I’d be interested to know whether he got his information here inhouse. 4 There, without bothering to light the lamp that stood ready with its box of matches, I tried one key after another in the door until I had found the right one. 5 Signs of tension were beginning to show. 6 But that wasn’t how he went about it. What he did was to write to Mr Smith asking for more time. 7 What he really enjoyed was drinking cups of coffee at odd times of day.

Concision and the adverb in German 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

189

8 It was in the light of these considerations that your Board decided to terminate the discussions with the X Group. 9 It was all they could do to shift the boulder. 10 Er bestellte nur noch Kaffee. 11 Du siehst deine Zukunft ja ganz positiv. 12 [. . .] die Paradiesvögel [. . .] hatten ihn anfangs an die Chinoiserien auf frühen Meißener Kannen erinnert, bis allmählich die Liebenden des ‘Yun Yu’ aus den Seidengründen dämmerten [. . .] Following a chapter that illustrated the relatively explicit marking of German texts by modal particles, it may seem odd that the present chapter argues German to be, in a different but important respect, more concise than English. But there is no paradox. Good modern written German is syntactically much simpler than popular myth will have it; simpler, indeed, than English. This relative syntactic simplicity derives in part from the strength of adverbial and particle function. That German syntax tends to be more concise than English is due in part to differences between the two languages in the ways they articulate clauses. The issue can be conveniently approached by focusing on certain English constructions with verbs. For instance, the middlebrow British public is used to being offered such formulations as: ‘Both parties insist that if they are returned to power they will reduce taxes without cutting services.’ Trying to translate this kind of material would soon show that there are problems of adjustment between such ‘nesting’ clauses and the conventions of German syntax. Occasionally, wholly informal language will turn up an even more involved structure, such as: ‘Can we now get back to the economy, which is what you said you wanted to talk about?’ Readily transparent to an SL audience, the relative clause in this sentence is an extreme – but not rare – example of structural incompatibility between English and German. It may even be that word order constraints in formal German have encouraged economy, relative to English, in the use of subordinating verbs. Several factors are involved. In newspaper-type reports and commentary – to stay near the initial example – subjunctive markers can replace verbs denoting verbal communication (see pp. 83–4). An important further contribution to simple clause construction (relative to English) is made by formulae such as ‘nach Ansicht Merkels’ or ‘laut Merkel’ (adverbial) or ‘so Schröder’ (interjection). Other possibilities, called for by the second example, would include the use of ‘angeblich’. It needs to be said at once that such formulae belong mainly to relatively formal written language or to the language of broadcasting and public debate. Informal language is less shy of simple successions of noun clauses, and finds its own ways of dealing with the types of complexity illustrated earlier. The contrastive concern of this chapter is with the preference of more formal German for compactness of utterance. The tendency is attested to by such features as the familiar encapsulated participial phrases preceding

190


the noun, another phenomenon we looked at in Chapter 7. As Practical 7.1 may have indicated, this construction is by no means confined to serious and scholarly texts. Then there is the morphological precision that in the last four words of the following example permits an impressive density of information: ‘Alles began bei uns 1979: ein Ehepaar, beide Partner mit abgeschlossenem Hochschulstudium, er promoviert, sie promovierend.’ This chapter’s specific focus is on comparisons of verb–adverb constructions on the German side with syntactically more complex verb-on-verb constructions and a range of other constructions in English including cleft structures (for example, in discussion of a job offer, ‘It’s the travel that appeals to me’) and pseudo-cleft structures (‘What appeals to me is the travel’). In so far as German tends to prefer verb–adverb constructions, while English tends to prefer verb-on-verb constructions, the two cleft structures and subordinate clauses, there is a discrepancy between the two languages that is of major importance to translators. Yet for those working into English this rarely calls attention to itself. There is usually little sense of ‘translation resistance’ as one translates a verb–adverb combination from German into the same structure in English. Consider sentence 12 in the preliminary exercise, and a parallel, simpler example: ST [. . .] bis allmählich die Liebenden [. . .] aus den Seidengründen dämmerten.

TT (a) [. . .] until the lovers [. . .] gradually became visible in the silken depths. (b) [. . .] until the lovers [. . .] began to materialize out of the silken depths.

Seine Besuche wurden allmählich (a) His visits gradually grew less seltener und hörten zuletzt ganz auf. frequent and eventually stopped altogether. (b) His visits began to grow fewer, and eventually stopped altogether. While the TTs marked (a), taken individually, are not particularly ‘strange’ in English, and are not mistranslations, they do not take up an option that in spontaneous English is used readily and often: the double-verb construction. That is to say, the STs’ ‘allmählich’ + finite verb combination might have been replaced by ‘begin’ + infinitive, as in the (b) translations. Are the (b) versions less good? Or just less likely to be suggested by the ST’s syntactic structure? There is a possible danger here for the translator working into English, and we shall return to it. But first the discrepancy between the two languages needs to be demonstrated. We shall do this first through a further illustration of an ‘easy’ German–English translation, then through illustrations of English–German translations that seem ‘difficult’, that is, require grammatical transpositions.


191

On an individual level, literal translation of ‘allmählich’ as ‘gradually’ may limit the scope for translating surrounding text. In the following sentence, for instance, the ST verb ‘sich abzeichnen’ offers the translator a choice of renderings. Some, for instance ‘emerge’, are a collocative match for the adverb ‘gradually’; others are not. Should this adverb be allowed to determine the choice of TL verb for ‘sich abzeichnen’? Why limit the choice? TT (b) shows an alternative way: ST Eine neue Gefahr zeichnete sich allmählich ab.

TT (a) Gradually, a fresh danger became/was becoming apparent. (b) A fresh danger began/was beginning to loom.

The constraints arising from the use of ‘gradually’ in this example suggest that, in certain adverbs, apparent ‘equivalences’ should be mistrusted. The reason for avoidance of ‘begin’ in translating ‘allmählich’ may be euphony in some cases (for instance, avoidance of ‘begin to become’), or it may be unconscious retention of ST structures, but there is clearly at least a risk that a translator working fast may unintentionally favour the verb–adverb structure in English simply because it is closest to the German ST structure – at the expense of TT alternatives. That there is indeed a disparity between the two languages, with English favouring many more two-verb structures, is sharply apparent to translators working into German. Here, certain frequently used English structures require grammatical transposition. Some of the most frequent are illustrated by the following examples from the preliminary exercise. In sentence 6 (from a court judgment), it is hard to envisage a remotely literal translation for ‘What he did . . .’. It would be better to simplify the syntax and introduce a cohesion marker to replace ‘What he did’ as the inter-sentence link: ST But that wasn’t how he went about it. What he did was to write to Mr Smith asking for more time.

TT Diesen Weg hat er jedoch nicht gewählt. Er schrieb vielmehr an Herrn Smith und bat um mehr Zeit.

Sentence 2 poses difficulties over combining the verbs ‘come’ and ‘appreciate’. The most straightforward solution is to report, not the completed ‘journey’ (‘has come’), but the new position arrived at (‘now appreciates’): ST He has come to appreciate that money alone is not the answer to his problems.

TT Er sieht inzwischen ein, dass seinen Problemen nicht mit Geld allein beizukommen ist.

192


This translation points to the significant potential of adverbs of time, such as ‘schon’, ‘noch’, ‘nicht mehr’, to convey ideas of change, continuation and cessation often covered in English by verbs such as ‘begin’, ‘go on’, ‘give up’. Sentence 4 would present major problems in literal translation. The sentence is already complex, and translations involving ‘sich die Mühe geben’ are unwieldy and implausible here: they miss the point that ‘without bothering to’ is a stock formulation that modalizes the negative much as a German modal particle might: ST There, without bothering to light the lamp that stood ready with its box of matches, I tried one key after another in the door until I had found the right one.

TT Dort, ohne die samt Streichholzschachtel bereitstehende Lampe erst anzuzünden, probierte ich. . .

Sentence 1 in the preliminary exercise presents two separate verb-onverb combinations, ‘continued . . . to see’ and ‘came no nearer to deciding’. The first finds a grammatical counterpart in German in ‘fuhr fort . . . zu sehen’, and thus could tempt the translator towards a stylistically infelicitous TT. The second is patently resistant to literal translation, and thus may guide the translator, usefully, to the underlying principle: namely that in German this is adverb territory. A solution covering both problems might be: ST Meanwhile, I continued occasionally to see something of Quiggin, though I came no nearer to deciding which of the various views held about him were true.

TT Ich hatte auch weiterhin noch gelegentlichen Kontakt zu Quiggin, nur stand ich so ratlos wie eh und je vor der Frage, welche der verschiedenen Ansichten über ihn denn eigentlich zuträfen.

Further examples for discussion are provided later in the practical. But it should already be becoming clear from the contrastive examples that there may be a submerged problem for German–English translators in the general SL preference for verb–adverb structures over the English alternatives.


193

TRANSPOSITION TO ENGLISH CONSTRUCTIONS INVOLVING TWO VERBS Expressions of starting, continuing and ceasing In this subsection we shall look at English double-verb constructions in which the grammatical subject (actual or implied) is the same for both verbs. These are usually infinitive or gerund constructions. The examples we shall focus on are concerned with the starting, continuing and ceasing of activities. On the German side, in this and the following two subsections, we shall look both at literal equivalents (that is, verb constructions) and at adverbial formulations. None of the first set of English examples given here present any serious difficulties in translation. In general a case exists for a literal translation with, say, ‘anfangen’, ‘fortfahren’, ‘aufhören’, though its appropriateness may vary sharply from case to case. Here, as later in the practical, it can be instructive to compare the two-verb TTs with others built on adverbs. For instance, to use ‘fortfahren’ in the crying baby example seems quaintly old-fashioned. For STs involving ‘beginning’, a translation with ‘allmählich’ could be considered. The further examples here offer scope to explore in class discussion the adverbial uses of ‘schon’, ‘weiter(hin)’, ‘noch’, ‘nicht’, ‘nicht mehr’ and ‘neuerdings’, in one or two cases amplified by further adverbs such as ‘unverdrossen’, ‘unbeirrt’: It’s beginning to get dark. He just went on sawing. The baby continued to cry. He failed to understand. It has stopped raining. He has stopped writing to us. She has begun to spend a lot of her time reading. The next three examples bring further translation issues to the fore. Working into German, replacement of English verb-on-verb by German adverb and verb may be neat, but is not a recipe for unthinking translation. Discussion of these next examples will show that the choice of construction in the German TT may also be influenced by register, and by the collocative possibilities of the ‘literal-equivalent’ TL verbs – here ‘aufhören’ and ‘fortfahren’: Poetry ceased to concern itself with serious things. May we continue to count on your support? He continued to manipulate events to his own advantage.

194


Expressions of perception, cognition and volition This subsection deals with verb-pairs on the English side, in expressions of perception, cognition and volition. These are often, but not always, cases where the two verbs have different grammatical subjects. English constructions vary (for instance, ‘I believe it to be true’, ‘I believe that it is true’). In the first pair of examples here there is a clear choice between using ‘gern’ and finding a more particularizing TT. While ‘gern’ is more readily thought of in the second example (explicit liking), the stronger case for it is in the first: ST He tends to stray from the point.

TT Er schweift gern ab.

He was keen on meeting people he felt were important.

Er war erpicht darauf, gesellschaftlich mit jenen Menschen zu verkehren, die er für wichtig hielt.

The next two examples involve German modal verbs but have little else in common. The first again illustrates the need for lateral rather than literal thinking in translation. The second needs context: the speaker is referring to a projected trip that still lies ahead. On that basis, ‘Perhaps we want . . .’ is unidiomatic, and the assessment of probability is better rendered by ‘We might want . . .’: ST I meant it to hurt.

TT Es sollte auch verletzen.

Vielleicht wollen wir auch ein Jahr drüben bleiben.

We might want to stay over there for a year.

In sentence 3 of the preliminary exercise, working from English to German, the apparently literal equivalents ‘to interest’ and ‘interessieren’ prove not to match exactly: ST I’d be interested to know whether he got his information here in-house.

TT (a) Mich interessiert, ob er das hier im Hause erfuhr. (b) Ich möchte gern wissen, ob er das hier im Hause erfuhr.

Still in the field of perception and cognition, German has a whole range of adverbs, for instance, ‘bekanntlich’, ‘vermutlich’, ‘wohl’, ‘voraussichtlich’, ‘hoffentlich’, which in some cases have direct equivalents in the form of English adverbs, but which all allow TT restructuring on the lines illustrated here:


ST Die Gespräche werden voraussichtlich zwei Tage dauern.

195

TT (a) The talks are expected to last two days. (b) It’s expected the talks will last two days.

Parallel examples may be identified, and alternative solutions found, for ‘schätzungsweise’, ‘lieber’, ‘wissentlich’ and ‘geflissentlich’. As a surprised rejoinder to a statement, ‘Im Ernst?’ may be translated either communicatively (‘Do you mean that?’) or with a straightforward adverb. The group denoting expressions of opinion (such as ‘laut’ + dative, ‘nach Ansicht’ + genitive and ‘meines Erachtens/m.E.’) are regularly used to bypass ‘dass’ clauses, especially where a degree of terseness is wanted. In many cases English offers a similar choice: for instance, between ‘I consider (that) . . .’ and ‘in my view’. But such parallels can be specious: depending on register, English is usually more ready than German to use the ‘I think (that) . . .’ form. German adverbials and English syntactic complexity The material in this third subsection is more heterogeneous, being intended to show something of the wide range of English TT constructions that may correlate with a ‘concise’ adverbial construction in German. The common factor in the English versions is a degree of syntactic complexity, in constructions that are often felicitous in English whether or not a simpler adverbial construction is available. For focus or emphasis, English often uses a construction of the type shown here; while German most often uses the syntactically simpler structure shown in TT (a), examples of the English-type emphasis shown in (b) are also found: ST What annoys me most is that they never even say hello.

TT (a) Am meisten ärgert mich, dass sie niemals grüßen. (b) Was mich am meisten ärgert, ist, dass sie niemals grüßen.

Though legitimate, the German construction in (b) is probably more frequent in translations from English than in native texts. The pseudo-cleft wh- construction is not only very frequent in English but sometimes very emphatic, as in sentence 7 of the preliminary exercise: ‘What he really enjoyed was drinking cups of coffee at odd times of day.’ Even here, it needs to be considered whether significant translation loss is incurred by rendering the emphasis adverbially: ‘Am liebsten trank er . . .’

196


German compactness is well illustrated in the next two examples, of which the first is from a newspaper report and the second is literary. . . . sagte George Bush dann in einer der wohl stärksten Reden, die ein amerikanischer Präsident über den Nahen Osten gehalten hat. [Referring to the Danube region] Der Raum Norditaliens, Südpolens bereichert durch geistige Impulse die ohnehin satte Mischung. In the first, ‘wohl’ can hardly be translated without expansion: ‘. . . in what was probably one of the toughest . . .’. In the second, the option of a single-word near-literal translation for ‘ohnehin’ is open: ‘the already rich mixture’. But how often in a text can this type of structure be copied in English without introducing a note of foreignness to the TT? The following examples can introduce discussion of the treatment of emphasis in the two languages, including the role of cleft and pseudocleft structures in English. The first example includes sentence 10 of the preliminary exercise. Später setzte man sich zu andern, die ihn nicht kannten; vielleicht wurde er deswegen still. Er bestellte nur noch Kaffee. The most you could say was that it was an honourable defeat. The first thing they did was to tie him to a chair. It was in underestimating his opponent’s ability that he made his one serious error. Finally, in order to consolidate the chapter’s central theme of German adverb use and its English renderings, it is helpful to evaluate the translations offered for the three miscellaneous sentences given here and consider the respective cases for grammatical transposition. The first two examples come from a newspaper interview with a young shop-girl, the third is based on sentence 9 in the preliminary exercise. ST Du siehst deine Zukunft ja ganz positiv.

TT You view your future very positively, don’t you?

Auf jeden Fall will ich Geld verdienen.

(a) In any case I want to make some money. (b) I definitely want to make some money. (c) Whatever happens, I want to make some money.


Erst nach wiederholten Kraftanstrengungen konnten sie den Felsbrocken wegrollen.

197

(a) They had to heave and strain for a long time before they could shift/succeeded in shifting the boulder. (b) It took a lot of heaving to shift the boulder. (c) It was all they could do to shift the boulder.

The main thrust of Chapter 15 has been to suggest that in a number of ways English usage (in all registers) embodies constructions that, in literal translation into German, would lead to TTs unacceptably cluttered with verbs and/or ‘nested’ clauses, and that German on the other hand tends much more strongly to concentrate meaning in a single arch or span. The bridge metaphor, though not exactly new, is helpful; the image is of a single large span, perhaps heavily loaded with adverbial qualifiers. For translation in the other direction, the implications are different, and less obvious. To the extent that meaning in German is typically more concentrated in the way suggested, in simple syntactic structures, it may be inferred that literal translation of German STs into English will on the one hand seldom present really serious structural difficulties, yet, on the other hand, will produce TTs that consistently lack the characteristic English diffusion of meaning between verbs, and are thus subtly unsatisfying as English texts. The chapter’s examples are intended to illustrate this general argument. On a case-by-case basis, many of them also suggest how easily, in translation into English, a ‘just acceptable’ TT calqued on the German structure can deflect a hurried translator’s attention away from the availability of something differently structured, but more idiomatic.

16 Contrastive topic and practical: Word order and emphasis in German This chapter constitutes the material for all or part of a practical. If possible, the following exercise should be handed in before the practical. It should in any case be completed before going on to the material in the rest of the chapter. PRELIMINARY EXERCISE Translate the following texts into German, paying attention particularly to the syntax of your translations. 1 [After an earthquake, a young girl has rescued her baby from a convent] The Abbess was there, clasping her hands above her head, and Josephe was on the point of collapsing into her arms when a falling gable-end of the building, most dreadfully, struck and killed the Abbess and almost all of her nuns. 2 [A boy at boarding school is writing to his new girlfriend] ‘Beloved!’ – I kept on in that kind of style. – ‘Van Tast is to come out for a minute!’ – A kitchen tap was dripping. Flattered, I worked at it for a couple of hours and then followed the others to bed. I found my fountain pen the next morning where I had left it – but not the letter I’d started. Then a notice appeared on the wooden post-box where we left our letters for posting. It said: ‘Outgoing letters are subject to censorship. Envelopes must be left unsealed.’ I was livid. 3 He was the general who had defeated the cream of the French army and scattered the untamed Turkish hordes; he was the statesman who had contrived to bring the war in the West to an honourable conclusion, that in the East to a glorious one; and all Europe was united in its admiration for this man.

Word order and emphasis in German 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

199

The main aims of this chapter are: first, from the standpoint of the native speaker of English, to illustrate some distinctive characteristics of German syntax; second, to investigate the handling of focus and emphasis in German; third, to look more specifically at some examples of inversion; and fourth, to note the implications for translators of the syntactic differences discussed. In modern descriptions of German word order (e.g. Durrell 2002a, 2002b), it is demonstrated that German word order has both a flexibility unachievable in English and also certain fixed structural features. This combination of flexibility and patterning is one of the features that gives the German language, written and spoken, its highly distinctive character. In what follows we shall use some of the terminology of Durrell’s basic sentence analysis, in particular the two useful concise German terms ‘Vorfeld’ and ‘Mittelfeld’, and we shall be looking at the two features known collectively in English as the verbal bracket (henceforth simply ‘bracket’), which play an important role in the management of sequential focus (see pp. 87–8). Following Durrell (2002b) and others, and simplifying considerably, we may regard the ‘bracket’ as consisting of either: 1 the finite verb (opening bracket) and any remaining part of the verb (closing bracket), or 2 a conjunction (opening bracket) and the complete verb (closing bracket). The bracket structure so fundamental to German discourse – and so foreign to English or French – has interesting implications for the dynamics of reading and listening to German, implications that the translator in either direction needs to understand. To keep the discussion focused, we shall neglect imperatives and interrogatives, even though they too essentially conform to the bracket pattern. We shall be concentrating on three types of structure: (1) complete constructions with subject and verb, as in the first three examples given here; (2) subordinate clauses with finite verb, as in the fourth example; and (3) non-finite clauses with participle or ‘zu’ + infinitive, as in the last example: Initial element (‘Vorfeld’)

Opening bracket

Central elements (‘Mittelfeld’)

Closing bracket

Wir

sind

extra seinetwegen nach Rom

gefahren.

In seiner Antwort

wich

er meinen Fragen

aus.

Der Donnerstag

war

trüb und neblig.

dass

er sofort damit

aufhören solle.

um

ungestört

arbeiten zu können.

200


The bracket model allows us to show how sequential focus works in German. Except for the opening and closing brackets themselves, which occupy second and last places respectively, there is considerable flexibility in the placing of the elements of a statement. While the grammatical subject is often placed first (in the ‘Vorfeld’), it may for emphasis be replaced in that position by almost any other element. Indeed, even the conventional ‘closing bracket’ itself may for purposes of emphasis be uprooted and moved to the ‘Vorfeld’: for instance, the sentence ‘Du kannst erst morgen schlafen’ would fit the ‘neutral’ bracket pattern, but the idea it conveys is more plausibly expressed in the form: ‘Schlafen kannst du erst morgen’. We shall look at this idea later in the context of ‘optional’ emphasis. This analytical presentation of the ‘bracket structure’ may now be illustrated with some very simple examples. Reading or listening to German, we encounter a finite form of ‘haben’ or ‘sein’ that points to a past participle or infinitive to come. A form of ‘lassen’, ‘können’ or other modal verb points to an infinitive to come. A finite verb may not point beyond itself – but it will if, say, it is a verb of indeterminate motion. For instance, ‘bewegte sich’ or ‘rollte’ or ‘schritt’ can only signal a generalized alert to the reader until the anticipated directional expression is provided: say, ‘. . . die Straße hinunter auf uns zu’. The same logic applies when the reader encounters a conjunction such as ‘wenn’ or ‘dass’, or a relative pronoun. Opening bracket implies closing bracket; and until the waited-for ‘endmarker’ is reached, the reader remains in suspense. There is a certain tautness in the syntactic structure, a stretched line that is quite alien to most forms of English. For this reason the grammatical ‘bracket’ might well be complemented by a more pragmatic metaphor involving tension, such as ‘bridge’ or ‘arch’. It is failure to supply this tension that underlies the curiously limp effect created by many otherwise competent English–German translations. Consider the following examples: You still get bears in the Pyrenees. I had a good day yesterday. Swiss French, even with the best will in the world, find the language problem difficult. The first two could in theory be translated with their elements retaining the ST order. Such translations would in theory be acceptable as simple statements on the pattern of ‘Der Donnerstag war trüb’, lacking a closing bracket. But these adverbial elements, particularly ‘gestern’, are so weak, and German so strongly requires a substitute for the missing bracket, in the form of a firm accented end to the sentence, that ‘in den Pyrenäen’ and ‘gestern’ are unthinkable in final position except as an explicit afterthought. The third example illustrates another English speech-habit that runs counter to the ‘stretched’ or ‘arched’ character attributed above to the German sentence. A word-for-word translation into German of ‘Swiss French, even


201

with . . .’ fails to put the opening bracket in place, and the sentence hangs fire instead of taking its momentum from the verb. In all three of these examples, the adverbial can fit naturally in the ‘Vorfeld’. In the first two it can also easily fit in the ‘Mittelfeld’. Among the many translation possibilities are: In den Pyrenäen gibt’s noch Bären. Gestern hatte ich einen guten Tag. Auch beim besten Willen haben die Welschschweizer mit dem Sprachproblem einen schweren Stand. The perspective needs to be widened, for a moment, beyond the limits of the individual sentence. Something analogous to the bracket structures described (and to the metaphors of arch or bridge that we applied to German syntax) is seen also in the wealth, relative to English, of cohesion markers pointing forward, both intra- and inter-sententially: not only ‘zwar’ (signalling an ‘aber’ to come), but, in formal texts, elaborate concessive constructions with ‘während’ or ‘mögen’. When a Times theatre reviewer claimed (apparently without facetious intention) that German actors were no good at improvisation because the verb had to come at the end of the sentence, he could at least be said to have noticed the typically more tightly organized nature of German discourse. Here is a compact illustration: ST Das macht zwar nichts ungeschehen, hat aber viele von ihnen veranlasst, sich dem friedlichen Gebiet der Biophysik und Molekularbiologie zuzuwenden.

TT That can’t undo what was done, but it did persuade many of them to turn to peaceful research in biophysics or molecular biology.

For translators working into German, the difference illustrated in this example highlights an acute problem. Logical links left implicit in the reasoning of an English ST are more likely to be explicitly marked in German, and the syntactic organization normally needs to be tight. A backtranslation of the English TT above as ‘Das macht nichts ungeschehen, aber es hat viele . . .’ would be felt to be relatively ill-considered, even sloppy. In the patterning of German sentences, the correspondence between opening bracket and closing bracket (or analogue) seems, in the spoken language, to provide an acoustic parallel to the overt logical linking. Working into English, the translator will have no difficulty in losing the ‘bracket’ structures, but needs to consider how many of the cohesion markers of the German ST should disappear too (cf. pp. 94–101). A last comment on the topic of internal linking and ‘anticipation’ is provided by the first text of the preliminary exercise. All three English

202


texts used there are themselves translations of German STs, which we reproduce in this discussion so that their syntactic organization can be studied alongside the TTs produced in the exercise. The original ST for sentence 1 runs as follows: Sie wollte der Äbtissin, welche die Hände über ihrem Haupt zusammenschlug, eben in die Arme sinken, als diese, mit fast allen ihren Klosterfrauen, von einem herabfallenden Giebel des Hauses, auf eine schmähliche Art erschlagen ward. This text, from Kleist’s Das Erdbeben in Chili (c.1806), illustrates how the structural feature of the closing bracket can be used for dramatic suspense. This is an extreme example of a device still sometimes used in modern German. For translation into English, it would clearly pose major problems and probably require compensation of some kind. Even in standard discourse free from engineered suspense effects, modern German in most genres tends to pack a lot of material into a single bracket structure (see Chapter 15). In the syntax of German statements, the relationship between anticipation, emphasis and inversion is a close one, but not straightforward. One reason for this is that there are three points in the sentence at which the question of emphasis has to be considered: the ‘Vorfeld’, the ‘Mittelfeld’ and the closing bracket. We shall not concern ourselves here in detail with the arrangement of the elements in the ‘Mittelfeld’, which is dealt with extensively and helpfully by existing sources (e.g. Durrell 2002a: 470–1, 480–91). The essential point is a clear tendency for the focal elements to gravitate to the end of the ‘Mittelfeld’: ST Uwe ist gestern mit der neuen Maschine leider zu tief geflogen.

TT Unfortunately, Uwe flew too low yesterday in the new machine.

While a given German construction may be dominated by an emphasis of this kind within the ‘Mittelfeld’, our concern here is with the importance of the concept of the closing bracket. Even when the position of the closing bracket is not formally filled (by a verb or verb part), the need for it is felt, and German speakers tend to accent the end of the sentence with voice stress. This bracket patterning is so pervasive as to create a regular focal point at the end of each bracket structure. The writer or speaker can thus reckon on emphasis conferred by anticipation: that is, emphasis derived from positioning at the anticipated close of the bracket. This type of emphasis in particular is distinctively German. Like the recognized ascending order of elements within the ‘Mittelfeld’, it might be called ‘structural’ emphasis. There is a requirement here that translators from English (with its often anticlimactic sentence endings) ignore at their peril.


203

The term ‘inversion’ needs to be handled with a little caution. As an inflected language, German is, like Latin, understood analytically, so that the grammatical form of the leading word(s) – ‘ich’, ‘dem Feldherrn’, ‘gefragt’, ‘dass’ – and the awareness of predictable fixed points to come give the listener the necessary broad orientation. While the simplest definition of inversion in statements is that it puts the subject after the verb and replaces it before the verb with another element, the facility is so much an unthinking part of the way people use German that it is often not perceived as ‘inversion’ in the sense of a stylistic feature. Although the following German sentences conform to the narrow definition of ‘inversion’ given here, they do not feature inversion as a stylistic ploy. ST Gleich haben wir’s geschafft!

TT Nearly there!

Morgen will sie nach Bonn.

She’s going to Bonn tomorrow.

Im Brief steht doch, dass . . .

But the letter says . . .

Inversions meeting our syntactic definition occur on every point of a scale from virtually negligible (like the last three examples) to very striking. The challenge to the German–English translator is clear. While there can be no clear categorization of scale, our discussion will move progressively from the everyday to the most arresting examples. If we now turn to the ‘Vorfeld’, what we are dealing with is the emphasis associated with the main area of flexibility within the overall patterning of German. Placing material at the beginning of the statement gives it emphasis of the kind we called ‘structural’ – i.e. emphasis purely through positioning. Such emphasis is of course not confined to German. However, still at the same point in the sentence, the writer or speaker may introduce an additional emphasis, which we shall call ‘optional’ emphasis. The writer/speaker regulates the strength of this ‘optional’ emphasis principally through choice of the syntactic element that is to occupy the leading position in the statement. The more unusual the choice (in purely statistical terms), the stronger the emphasis will be. Emphasis depends on referential content as well as on syntactic and stylistic factors. The immediately following examples illustrate how, with fairly evenly balanced sentence elements, mild emphasis can be conferred through ‘Vorfeld’ position. They present some translation difficulties, partly because of limitations in the English TT on what can occupy the initial position, partly because the emphases are not particularly strong. ST Über zehntausend Mark spendete unsere Gemeinde zu Weihnachten für Wohltätigkeitszwecke.

TT A total of over 10,000 marks was donated by . . .

204


Für Wohltätigkeitszwecke spendete unsere Gemeinde zu Weihnachten über zehntausend Mark.

Charity donations in our community at Christmas totalled. . .

Zu Weihnachten spendete unsere Last Christmas our community Gemeinde für Wohltätigkeitszwecke donated . . . über zehntausend Mark. In sentences of this length and type, English seems to give mild emphasis likewise through initial position. More interesting, perhaps, is the German use of initial position in short sentences in dialogue: [The boy has pleaded to be given milk rather than water. The mother replies:] ST Milch kriegst du in den Kaffee.

TT You’ll get milk in your coffee.

[From a radio play] A: Du hast geträumt. B: Kann mich nicht erinnern. Geträumt . . . kann sein. A: Laut geschrien hast du.

A: You were dreaming. B: Can’t remember. Dreaming . . . maybe. A: You {were really/weren’t half} yelling.

These two cases are different from each other. The clear inversion in the first is sentential marking, a standard German dialogue pattern in which the reply uses the ‘Vorfeld’ position to indicate the point of focus selected from the triggering remark (the boy’s request). It is not necessarily informal, though it is here. In English this response is usually (as here) handled through voice inflection, a procedure so standard that the written form would have no special marking. The second example is not sentential, but a more strongly marked emphasis, one perhaps found more in informal register. A is very interested in B’s nightmare, highlights the unusual feature and lingers over the words. In grammatical terms, his ‘Laut geschrien’ represents the closing bracket. As suggested earlier, the impact of this inversion is directly related to its unusualness, and that in turn can only be assessed on the basis of experience of the language. (Most speakers would probably regard it as moderately unusual, not exceptional.) Here the translation raises some interesting issues. ‘Yelling (your head off), you were’ is possible – but arguably not as natural as the ST. In this spoken text the simple ‘You were yelling’ could be inflected to convey the interest behind the ST emphasis. But probably the best TTs reinforce in another way, as shown in the example. English has a variety of focus devices, the commonest of which are much less concise than German sequential focus. In particular, English


205

makes much more use than German of cleft and pseudo-cleft structures (see p. 190). Only very much more rarely than in German is the grammatical object placed first for focus. For example, the warning ‘Das Bier lässt du schön stehen!’ typically becomes ‘Don’t you touch that beer!’. Sequential focus hardly ever produces an object-first sentence in English, except in spoken language. For instance, in a small shop an instruction such as ‘The plastic ones you can mark down right away’ would be commonplace in spoken form, but if written down would be almost automatically recast, either with a simple imperative or with standard subject– verb–object word order and a passive verb. Here is a further trio of German ST examples to illustrate the variety of emphasis marking in English: ST Pass auf, in der Schachtel sind doch Eier!

TT (a) Look out, there are eggs in that box! (b) Look out, that box’s got eggs in it!

Pass auf, in der Schachtel sind doch die Eier!

Look out, that’s the box with the eggs in it!

Und in dem Haus da wohnen meine Schwiegereltern.

And that’s (the house) where my parents-in-law live.

In TTs (a) and (b), ‘eggs’ is in middle position yet clearly highlighted. German as always has the emphasis points at start and end. In the next variation a minor wording change in the ST produces a new formulation in English, one which becomes the familiar cleft structure when extended by a verb in the third example. Yet a further, much used, English option is the passive. German often uses a passive to give the structural emphasis deriving from front position, but is almost as likely to lead with an accusative or dative object: ST Ihnen blieb nicht erspart, was für den Reisenden mit der Fähre die Regel ist.

TT They were not spared the procedure that any ferry passenger has to undergo.

In short sentences, then, it may be helpful to distinguish between two communicative situations tending to trigger conspicuous inversion in German: the picking up of a ‘Stichwort’ in dialogue, and a sense of strong emphasis. The former situation is perhaps most often covered in English translation by voice inflection only (as in the ‘You’ll get milk in your coffee’ example); the rendering of strong emphasis may require any of a range of approaches – voice inflection only; cleft and pseudo-cleft

206


structures; passive constructions; and constructions that change the relation of the elements, such as: ST In dem Fleisch sind ja Maden!

TT This meat’s got maggots in it!

The original German text of which the second passage in the preliminary exercise is a translation illustrates the natural use – unexceptional in any register – of simple inversions in sentence linking:

5

‘Geliebte!’ – In diesem Sinne fuhr ich fort. – ‘van Tast soll mal rauskommen!’ – In der Küche ging ein Wasserkran nicht mehr zu. Geschmeichelt bastelte ich zwei Stunden und folgte den anderen ins Bett. Meinen Füllfederhalter fand ich am nächsten Morgen noch auf demselben Platz. Den angefangenen Brief aber nicht! Und dann hing an unserem hölzernen Postkasten, in den wir unsere Briefe warfen, eine Papptafel: ‘Abgehende Briefe stehen unter Zensur. Die Briefumschläge sind offen zu lassen.’ Ich kochte. In the remainder of the chapter we shall look briefly at some relatively deliberate and striking uses of inversion for emphasis of a type found often (though not exclusively) in formal expository and literary texts. First, from literary criticism, a short sentence inverting subject and seinpredicate: ST Eine ausschließlich politische Tragödie ist das Drama nirgendwo.

TT At no point can the play be described as a purely political tragedy.

To reproduce the emphasis of the ST, the English translation has to use its own inversion, a different one, and perhaps voice stress; we show just one possibility. Second, and strictly speaking an inversion only from the Englishspeaker’s point of view, is the practice, common in German academic writing, of leading the sentence with a noun clause, which can be subject or object of the sentence’s main verb, and can occasionally be significantly longer even than the examples we reproduce here: ST Dass alle diese Deutungen in die Zeit einer idealistisch orientierten Germanistik fielen, relativiert allein schon ihre Aussagekraft.

TT These readings would be more persuasive if allowance did not have to be made for the context from which they sprang, which was the period of idealist bias in Germanistik.


Dass diese Auffassung den tatsächlichen Funktionen des Staates [. . .] nicht entspricht und [. . .] vermutlich noch nie entsprochen hat, wird dabei verkannt.

207

They fail to realize that this view does not describe the true functions of the State [. . .] and [. . .] probably never has.

While technically there is no inversion in the STs, a sense of logical inversion is created by the fact that the analytical findings precede the principal statement. German could, and English usually would (as in our TTs), remove the inversion. Third, a true inversion may occasionally be given ‘added value’ by a process of delaying the subject, which thus becomes an unusually strongly marked substitute for the closing bracket. From a description of the ‘Berolina’ figure in Berlin: ST Den Oberkörper umschmiegt, bis zu den Hüften, knapp anliegend, ein Schuppenpanzerhemd.

TT The trunk is clad in a closely moulded suit of scale armour reaching to below the hips.

Of the ST, it might be said that the stylistic means are out of proportion to the end. In any case, translation via an English passive presents no serious problems. But the delayed subject has a pedigree in serious poetic diction. Hölderlin in particular uses expectation and delayed fulfilment, sometimes in combination with intricate syntax, to achieve emotional charge – a major challenge for translators. Fourth, the relatively high-profile tactic of placing the past participle first (and thereby also sending a new element for structural emphasis to the end of the sentence) can be found in widely varying contexts and registers: e.g. personal communications, consumer information, feature journalism, serious expository texts. Special sequential focus, as in a remark like ‘Geschlafen wurde nur zwischendurch’, highlights the word conspicuously removed from its supposedly standard position at the end of the clause. But the conspicuousness here is only relative. Translators with English mother tongue come to appreciate that fronting a statement in German with the past participle is simply part of another conventional pattern, with a particular communicative purpose; it is distinctive, but certainly not outlandish. Thus part of a personal e-mail, certainly not styled to show off linguistically, could read: ‘Ich habe gut geschlafen [. . .]. Aufgewacht bin ich allerdings wieder mit heftigen Kopfschmerzen.’ It would be difficult to concentrate focus so neatly at beginning and end in an idiomatic English sentence; a compromise TT here might begin: ‘But when I woke up . . .’. In the closing exercise (p. 209), a number of sentences led by the past participle are grouped together for discussion and translation. Given that

208


in formal German, at least, this construction owes its impact to its relative infrequency, it is striking stylistically that the last three sentences in the exercise were found within a few lines of each other in four paragraphs of the same piece of upmarket journalism. Those three sentences should therefore be regarded as linked: the translator has to decide whether the recurrence is intentional structuring or an unconscious quirk. Fifth, the positioning of ‘nicht’ in Feuchtwanger’s account of a manipulated court hearing is against standard preferences and correspondingly heavy in impact: [. . .] da griff Dr. Hartl ein, da war eine Mauer. Nicht erfuhr das Gericht, wie Ratzenberger zuerst ganz unbestimmt ausgesagt hatte [. . .]. Nicht erfuhr man, wie da Fäden gingen von der Polizei zu den Justizbehörden, von den Justizbehörden zum Kultusministerium. A published translation recognizes the weight of these inversions with the formulations: ‘The court was not to learn [. . .] They were not to learn . . .’. Sixth and last, and the original of sentence 3 in the preliminary exercise, is a representative example of a historian’s carefully measured analytical style: ST Dem Feldherrn, der das französische Eliteheer überwunden und die ungestümen türkischen Massen zertrümmert hatte, dem Staatsmann, der es verstanden hatte, den Krieg im Westen zu einem ehrenvollen und den im Osten zu einem glorreichen Abschluss zu bringen, gehörte die Bewunderung Europas.

TT (a) As the general who had defeated the cream of the French army and scattered the untamed Turkish hordes, as the statesman who had contrived to bring the war in the West to an honourable conclusion, that in the East to a glorious one, he was the focus of all Europe’s admiration. (b) All Europe admired him as the general who had . . .

It is debatable whether an English TT can successfully reproduce the ‘periodic’ style of the ST without reversing the order of the ideas, that is to say, putting the subject and main verb first, as shown in TT (b). Lacking the precise grammatical control announced in the German ST from the start (‘Dem . . .’), English makes heavier weather of controlling the syntax, and that in turn makes it difficult to translate the last four words of the ST without producing an effect of bathos. As an alternative to the spacedout English version offered for back-translation in the preliminary exercise, one could consider a more faithful translation such as TT (a). But the


209

third possibility – TT (b) – might be more congenial to an English-speaking audience, because less deliberate in structure, more conventional in TL terms. The choices faced here are among those that the translator of the book would face at the strategic level. EXERCISE Assess the position and strength of emphasis in the following sentences, and suggest suitable English translations. (Note that the last three sentences featured in a single 500-word article.) 1 [ fares brochure, after explaining first introduction of off-peak fares] Erreicht werden soll damit, dass es im Berufsverkehr etwas mehr Platz gibt. 2 Gekonnt sein will auch das Auftragen von Speisen. [. . .] Beim Abräumen trägt ein Butler nie mehr als zwei Teller auf einmal: gefragt ist Souveränität, nicht Akrobatik. 3 In der Vergangenheit blockierten sich die fünf ständigen Mitglieder des Sicherheitsrates durch ihr Veto meist gegenseitig. Gewählt wurde dann regelmäßig ein Verlegenheitskandidat, der sich allerdings in der Folge durchaus als starke Persönlichkeit entpuppen konnte. 4 Zu diesen Verhältnissen beigetragen hat eine Linke, die hilflos die alten Antifa-Rituale der 30er Jahre wiederbelebte, energischen Widerspruch gegen Le Pens These, die Immigrantenflut werde die französische Identität ruinieren, aber nicht aufbrachte. 5 Unterstützt wird diese Argumentation von Politologen, die die sozialen Probleme der Immigration in einen bloß politischen Konflikt umdeuten, dessen Ursache sie in Rassismus und Ausländerfeindlichkeit sehen. 6 Beachtet werden muss endlich, dass das In-Szene-Setzen traditioneller Antifa-Rituale, so echt die Wut der Beteiligten auch sein mag, auch unbeabsichtigte Auswirkungen hat.

17 Summary and conclusion The only conclusion necessary to Thinking German Translation is a summing up of what it is the translator is supposed to be thinking about. The first thing to remember is that, whatever revision or editing the TT has undergone, it is the translator who is ultimately responsible for it. ‘Thinking’ translation implies a clear-sighted acceptance of this responsibility, but it also implies reducing the element of chance in how the TT will be received. If responsibility entails making decisions, taking the approach presented in this book will enable the translator to make them intelligently enough and imaginatively enough to be confident of what the overall impact of the TT will be. This is why we have stressed throughout the course the need for a clearly formulated initial strategy, and for clearly formulated decisions of detail rationally linked to the strategy. One thing we hope to have shown is that no strategy can be assumed a priori. Formulating an appropriate strategy means assessing the salient features of a particular ST and relating them to the purpose of the TT. A crucial question then is: ‘How do I decide which features are salient?’ What we have tried to do is equip the student translator with a way of answering this question, whatever the nature of the ST. For our purposes, the salient features of a text can be said to be its most relevant ones, those that have significant communicative function. Devising a strategy means prioritizing the cultural, generic, formal, semantic and stylistic properties of the ST according to two things: their relative textual relevance, and the amount of attention they should receive in translation. The aim is to deal with translation loss in as rational and systematic way as possible. This implies being prepared, if necessary, to lose features that have little or no textual relevance in a given ST (e.g. alliteration in a technical text on mining), sacrificing less relevant textual details to more relevant ones. And, of course, it implies using compensation to restore features of high textual relevance that cannot be more directly rendered (e.g. a significant play on words in a publicity text).

Summary and conclusion 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

211

‘Textual relevance’ is thus a qualitative measure of how far particular properties of a text are responsible for its overall impact. Textually relevant features are those that stand out as making the text what it is. Since it is the translator who decides what is textually relevant, the decision is inescapably subjective. But not necessarily damagingly so. A relatively objective test of textual relevance is to imagine that a particular textual property is omitted from the text and to assess what difference this would make to the overall impact of the text. If the answer is ‘little or none’, the property in question has little textual relevance. But if omitting it would imply a loss in either the genre-representative or the individual character of the text, then it has high textual relevance. So, for example, phonic features are irrelevant in ‘Kapitalkostensatz’ in a financial statement, but relevant in ‘und wallet und siedet und brauset und zischt’ in a poetic evocation of a maelstrom. Developing a translation strategy by assessing textual relevance in an ST entails scanning the text for every kind of feature that might be relevant to producing a TT fit for its purpose. For this scanning to be effective, it is vital to have in mind a systematic set of questions to ask of the ST. These questions correspond to the checklist of kinds of textual feature introduced in the schema of textual matrices on p. 5. The successive chapters of Thinking German Translation tackle the sorts of translation issue lying behind the questions that need to be asked of texts. The idea is that the translator learns to ask the questions systematically, one after the other. As students working through the book will have found, it only takes a bit of practice to be able to do this quickly and efficiently. Some comments are called for on aspects of the relation between the schema of textual matrices and the book as a whole. First, the ‘cultural’ matrix is different in focus from the others. Unlike the others, it does not list types of feature that may in themselves be salient in the ST before the translator starts forming a strategy. Corresponding to Chapter 3, it lists types of feature whose relevance can only be decided when the translator starts to form a strategy. That is, it draws attention to features that force the translator to choose between source-culture bias and target-culture bias. As such, it does invite the translator to assess how far the culturespecificity of ST features is textually relevant – this is why we have included it in the schema of textual matrices. The other matrices are more straightforward reminders of what sorts of thing to look for when asking what the relevant features of a text are. Chapter 5, corresponding to the ‘genre’ matrix, gives a set of parameters to apply in identifying textual genre preparatory to translation. Chapters 6–8 correspond to the ‘formal’ matrix, introducing translation issues raised by the formal properties of texts. Chapters 9 and 10 correspond to the ‘semantic’ matrix; the translation issues addressed here are the ones most typically raised by literal and connotative meaning. Chapters 11 and 12

212


then give a brief taster of the many sub-genres from which professional translators will normally choose their speciality. Some vital topics in the book do not figure as such in the schema of matrices. This is because they either apply universally from top to bottom of the schema, or concern a translation operation, not a textual feature. Grammatical transposition, for example, is introduced in Chapter 2 but is of central relevance in every chapter and every practical. There is a case to be made for including it in the cultural matrix, but it is so all-pervasive that it is not useful to identify it as a discrete element in the matrix. It is in fact so important that Chapters 14–16 are given entirely to it – and there could have been many more than these three. The topic of grammatical transposition would have been altogether too big for Chapter 3. Another important topic, introduced as such in Chapter 4 but potentially relevant everywhere, is compensation. More than anything else, successful compensation exemplifies the combination of imagination and rigorous analysis that is the mark of a good translator. However, even though compensation very often involves cultural and/or grammatical transposition, it is a translation operation, not a textual feature. So too are revising and editing, which are introduced as such in Chapter 13, but are an integral part of the translation process and figure in many of the chapters and practicals. One pre-eminent translation issue is neither a textual feature nor a translation operation. This is the translation brief – why the text is being translated, on whose behalf, and for what audience. As we suggest in Chapter 5, it is useful, for practical translation needs, to see the purpose of a text as very closely linked with its genre. Genre, of course, is a textual feature, and as such figures at the head of the schema on p. 5. The reason why it is placed at the top is precisely that it shares a prime importance with purpose: the translation process will result in a translation product, a text having specific features, and produced in order to meet a communicative demand. This demand, formulated by the work-provider, is the translation brief. As the brief is neither a process nor a textual feature, it does not have a chapter to itself. But it has decisive importance, and that is why we have everywhere stressed its role as a parameter in assessing the relevance of ST and TT textual features, and why, in practicals, students have been asked to produce their TTs as if in response to a specific commission. It should be remembered that the schema of matrices can be used to analyse any text, not just an ST. It can be applied to draft TTs, their features being systematically compared with those of the ST so as to see which details will be acceptable in the final version. Published TTs can also be evaluated in the same way. But whatever the text that is analysed by this method, never forget that the watchword is . . . thinking translation. This course encourages a methodical approach based on reasoned analysis of textual features and the translation problems they pose. But ‘methodical’ is not synonymous with ‘mechanical’ or ‘automatic’. As we

Summary and conclusion 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

213

said in the Introduction, good translators know what they are doing: for thinking translation, there has to be a thinker, an individual person using flair and rigour to take creative, responsible decisions. To sum up, then, we have tried to do two things in this course. Our first aim has been to help the student ask and answer the strategic questions we listed on p. 6: ‘What is the purpose and intended audience of my translation? What is the purpose of this ST? What genre does it belong to, and what audience is it aimed at? What is its message content? What are its salient linguistic features? What are its principal effects? What are the implications of all these factors? If a choice has to be made among them, which ones should be given priority in ensuring that the TT is fit for its purpose?’ And our second aim has been to help students use intelligent, creative techniques for the translation operation, the battle with the problems of syntax, lexis, etc. that has to be fought in translating particular expressions in their particular context.

Postscript: A career in translation? Having completed the course, you may feel you wish to know more about becoming a translator. This final section aims to provide some preliminary information and advice for those seeking entry to the profession. It is necessarily British-oriented, but a contact address for the United States is given. An organization that can advise translators anywhere in the world is FIT, the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (www.fit-ift.org). Translators are usually either ‘in-house’ or ‘freelance’. The in-house translator is employed by a business, or a translation company or agency, to provide translations in the workplace, on either a permanent or a fixedterm basis. The advantage of being in-house for a newcomer to the profession is the opportunity to gain experience quickly, in an environment where mentoring and feedback are usually supplied. Though it may take time to find a placement or post, this kind of experience is extremely valuable. A good place to find companies that offer placements or posts in-house is the ITI Bulletin (details later). Quality newspapers publish job vacancies, and your local ‘Yellow Pages’ directory will list at least some of the translation companies or agencies operating in your area. Many of the job opportunities involve working abroad: for the European Commission, for instance, or for a big company like SAP AG in Germany, who currently employ about 150 translators. Some translators, once established, have taken a career pause of a few months to add a further language. Setting up as a freelance is more complex. Generally speaking, offers of work are only made to translators with a ‘track record’ and a specific qualification in translation, such as the Diploma in Translation of the Institute of Linguists (IoL), which can be considered the first step on the professional ladder, or membership of the ITI, which is gained by examination and experience. The exams for the IoL Diploma of Translation are held every January, and a number of institutions offer courses, whether on site or by distance learning. For details of these exams, do

Postscript: A career in translation? 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

215

not write to us or to Routledge: contact the IoL and the ITI at the addresses given later. The optimal freelance translator will need to be able to offer two or possibly more foreign languages at a very high level of experience. Moreover, experience and knowledge of a number of subject specialities are required. Most translators concentrate either on technical translation (e.g. IT, engineering or construction) or on what is called ‘general translation’; for freelancers this usually includes legal, financial and business texts. Few translators cover a very wide range of subjects. In addition to such skills, the freelancer must possess suitable equipment, including a computer with broadband (internet searches are vital, and virtually all translation is sent back to the work-provider by e-mail these days), a printer (preferably laser), a scanner and a fax machine. Translation memory software also has to be considered. Making the right decisions on equipment at the outset – right for the individual and the available budget – is a difficult business, in which the advice of experienced translators is virtually indispensable. An excellent introduction to the whole field of electronic resources for the translator is provided by Austermühl (2001). Working as a freelance means being self-employed, and it is important to find out before taking this step what self-employment entails. All translators have to grapple with taxation, pensions contributions, accounts, grants and subsidies, training, marketing and legal issues at some point. Help is at hand, though, from bodies like Business Link, which exist throughout the United Kingdom and can provide information and advice (usually free of charge) about these matters. The Inland Revenue has offices in all towns and cities, as does the DSS. Your local Chamber of Commerce may also be able to provide you with useful information, and sometimes they have their own lists of translators available for work, which you may be able to join. The most important single step, however, is qualifying for membership of one of the relevant professional bodies, either the ITI, which addresses itself specifically to the concerns of translators and interpreters, or the more generalist IoL. For a start, this is the best answer to the great problem of working freelance from home: isolation. However, membership brings much more than that. A body like the ITI offers a valuable lifeline to associates and members by providing a whole range of services. These include guidance for new entrants to the profession (including specially designed seminars or workshops at regional and national meetings), training and professional development (also in conjunction with universities and professional institutions), information and workshops on other issues (e.g. equipment, terminology, running a small business), the promotion of professional standards of competence through the Codes of Conduct and Terms of Business, and help in arranging professional indemnity insurance. Like the IoL, it operates an online directory of members offering translation and interpreting services.

216


Fully qualified membership of ITI is gained by assessment or examination only. Full-time students aged 18 and over, and registered for and attending a full-time course, at first degree or postgraduate level, with a substantial element of translation or interpreting or both, may apply for Student Associate Membership; on completion of their courses they may be invited to become Associates. The Associate Membership category is also open for application by interested non-students fulfilling certain requirements. Student and Associate subscription rates are much lower than those for fully qualified members. All categories may attend ITI events, join the Peer Support Group, and take advantage of the ITI’s Continuing Professional Development scheme. The Bulletin, published by ITI every two months, contains useful articles and tips, job offers and a calendar of events. This is an excellent way of keeping abreast of developments in the field of translation. Networking is also important. At the time of writing, the ITI has 15 regional and 19 special interest network groups supporting members; for new freelancers, this is perhaps the most valuable help of all, a source of moral support as well as of practical advice. Queries on translation problems and business practice are circulated and discussed by e-mail; meetings and workshops for regional groups several times a year are not only enjoyable socially but lead to personal contacts with translators who have built up experience in particular specialized fields. Some new entrants to the profession are offered their first job through networking. An excellent book giving detailed advice for aspiring and practising translators is Samuelsson-Brown (1993). Useful contacts: The Institute of Translation and Interpreting Fortuna House, South Fifth Street Milton Keynes MK9 2EU Tel: 01908 325250 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.iti.org.uk The Chartered Institute of Linguists Saxon House, 48 Southwark Street London SE1 1UN Tel: 020 7940 3100 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.iol.org.uk

Postscript: A career in translation? 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

217

In the United States, every American state has its own translators/ interpreters association, affiliated to the American Translators Association (ATA): American Translators Association 225 Reinekers Lane, Suite 590 Alexandria, VA 22314 USA Tel: (703) 683–6100 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.atanet.org If you do decide that you want to make a career in translation, bear in mind that you need not just enthusiasm, but the motivation and self-belief to carry you through difficult patches. Freelancing, in particular, is not for the faint-hearted. Work flows are usually erratic, at least until you become established and have several work-providers. In the first two years or so, there may be periods with no work. While these, if they happen, should be seized on for improving your product – extending or deepening your language and/or business skills – it would obviously be wise not to abandon the nine-to-five office job for translation unless you have enough funds to see you through at least the first difficult year or two. However, if you can become successfully established and acquire competence in your field, you are unlikely to want to return to a routine job: there can be real interest in the endlessly varied real-life or imaginative material that passes through your hands, and real delight in using language to earn your living.

Glossary of terms used accentuation

see stress

affective meaning a type of connotative meaning, affective meaning is the emotive effect worked on the addressee by using one particular linguistic expression rather than others that might have been used to express the same literal message. alliteration the recurrence of the same sound or sound-cluster at the beginning of two or more words occurring near or next to one another; not to be confused with onomatopoeia. allusive meaning a type of connotative meaning; in a given linguistic expression, allusive meaning consists in evoking the meaning of an entire saying or quotation in which that expression figures. Note: If a saying or quotation appears in full, that is a case of citation: e.g. ‘The darling buds of May are just beautiful this year’; allusion occurs where only part of the saying or quotation is used, but that part evokes the meaning of the entire saying or quotation: e.g. ‘Brrr . . . No darling buds yet awhile, I’m afraid’. anaphora

see grammatical anaphora and rhetorical anaphora.

associative meaning the connotative meaning of a linguistic expression that takes the form of attributing to the referent certain stereotypically expected properties culturally associated with that referent. assonance the recurrence of a sound or sound-cluster within words occurring near or next to one another; not to be confused with onomatopoeia. attitudinal meaning the connotative meaning of a linguistic expression that takes the form of implicitly conveying a commonly held attitude or value judgement in respect of the referent of the expression.

Glossary 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

219

back-translation translation of a TT back into the SL; the resulting text will almost certainly not be identical to the original ST. calque a form of cultural transposition whereby a TT expression is closely modelled on the grammatical structure of the corresponding ST expression; a calque is like a moment of exoticism, although exoticism proper is a feature of whole texts or sections of texts. Note: Calque is different from cultural borrowing, which imports the ST expression verbatim into the TT. cleft structure a structure that resembles a simple sentence that has been split into two clauses, each with its own verb; e.g. compare the simple sentence ‘We need a new car’ with the cleft structure ‘It’s a new car that we need’ and the pseudo-cleft structure ‘What we need is a new car’. coherence (adj. coherent) the tacit, yet intellectually discernible, thematic or affective development that characterizes a text, as distinct from a random sequence of unrelated sentences. cohesion (adj. cohesive) the explicit and transparent linking of sentences and larger sections of text by the use of overt linguistic devices, such as conjunctions or grammatical anaphora, that act as ‘signposts’ for the coherence of the text. collocative meaning the connotative meaning lent to a linguistic expression by the meaning of some other expression with which it frequently collocates, e.g. ‘social intercourse’ almost inevitably acquires an association of ‘sex’ from the common collocation ‘sexual intercourse’. communicative translation a mode of free translation whereby ST expressions are replaced with their contextually/situationally appropriate cultural equivalents in the TL, i.e. the TT uses situationally apt targetculture equivalents in preference to literal translation. compensation a technique of mitigating translation loss: where any conventional translation (however literal or free) would entail an unacceptable translation loss, this loss is mitigated by deliberately introducing a less unacceptable one, important ST features being approximated in the TT through means other than those used in the ST. Note: Unlike e.g. an unavoidable, conventional grammatical transposition or communicative translation, compensation is not forced on the translator by the constraints of TL structures – it is a conscious, careful, free, one-off choice. connotation

see connotative meaning.

220

Glossary

connotative meaning (or connotation) the implicit overtones that a linguistic expression carries over and above its literal meaning. Note: The overall meaning of an expression is compounded of its literal meaning plus these overtones and its contextual nuances. context (adj. contextual) the rest of the text in which a given linguistic expression or stretch of text (e.g. lines, paragraph, chapter, etc.) occurs; the immediate context is a crucial consideration in making any decisions of detail. cultural borrowing taking over an SL expression verbatim from the ST into the TT; the borrowed term may remain unaltered in form, or it may undergo some degree of transliteration. Note: Cultural borrowing differs from calque and exoticism, which do not use the ST expression verbatim, but adapt it into the TL, however minimally. cultural transplantation the highest degree of cultural transposition, involving the wholesale deletion of source-culture details mentioned in the ST and their replacement with target-culture details in the TT. cultural transposition any departure from literal translation that involves replacing SL-specific features with TL-specific features, thereby to some extent reducing the foreignness of the TT. decisions of detail translation decisions taken in respect of specific problems of lexis, syntax, etc.; decisions of detail are taken in the light of previously taken strategic decisions, although they may well in their turn lead the translator to refine the original strategy. discourse level the level of textual variables on which whole texts or sections of texts are considered as coherent or cohesive entities. editing the final ‘polishing’ of a TT, following revision, and focusing on matching TT style and presentation to the expectations of the target readership. exegetic translation a style of translation in which the TT expresses and comments on details that are not explicitly conveyed in the ST, i.e. the TT is an explication, and usually an expansion, of the contents of the ST. exoticism the lowest degree of cultural transposition, importing linguistic and cultural features wholesale from the ST into the TT with minimal adaptation; exoticism generally involves multiple calques. Note: Exoticism is different from cultural borrowing, which does not adapt ST material into the TL, but quotes it verbatim.

Glossary 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

221

faithful translation a translation that is more idiomatic than a literal translation, but still does not sound completely natural in the TL. free translation a style of translation in which there is only an overall correspondence between units of the ST and units of the TT – e.g. a rough sentence-to-sentence correspondence, or an even looser correspondence in terms of even larger sections of text. generalization see generalizing translation. generalizing translation (or generalization) rendering an ST expression by a TL hyperonym, e.g. translating German ‘Revolver’ as ‘gun’ (which could also translate ‘Gewehr’, ‘Kanone’, etc.). The literal meaning of the TT expression is wider and less specific than that of the corresponding ST expression, i.e. a generalizing translation omits detail that is explicitly present in the literal meaning of the ST expression. genre (or text-type) a category to which, in a given culture, a given text is seen to belong and within which it is seen to share a type of communicative purpose with other texts; that is, the text is seen to be more or less typical of the genre. gist translation a style of translation in which the TT deliberately expresses only the gist of the ST; it is usually shorter than a balanced translation would be. grammatical anaphora the replacement of previously used linguistic expressions by simpler and less specific expressions (such as pronouns) having the same contextual referent, e.g. ‘I dropped the bottle and it broke.’ grammatical level the level of textual variables on which are considered words, the decomposition of inflected, derived and compound words into their meaningful constituent parts, and the syntactic arrangement of words into phrases and sentences. grammatical transposition translating an ST expression having a given grammatical structure by a TT expression having a different grammatical structure containing different parts of speech in a different arrangement. hyperonym a linguistic expression whose literal meaning includes, but is wider and more general than, the range of literal meaning of another expression, e.g. ‘vehicle’ is a hyperonym of ‘car’. hyperonymy–hyponymy the semantic relationship between a hyperonym and a hyponym; a lesser degree of semantic equivalence than synonymy.

222

Glossary

hyponym a linguistic expression whose literal meaning is included in, but is narrower and less general than, the range of literal meaning of another expression, e.g. ‘car’ is a hyponym of ‘vehicle’. idiom a fixed figurative expression whose meaning cannot be deduced from the literal meanings of the words that constitute it, e.g. ‘football’s a different kettle of fish’, ‘she’s so stuck up’. idiomatic an idiomatic expression is one that, in its context, is unremarkable, ‘natural’, ‘normal’, completely acceptable. Note: ‘Idiomatic’ is not synonymous with ‘idiomizing’. idiomizing translation a relatively free translation that respects the overall ST message content, but typically uses TL idioms or phonic or rhythmic patterns to give an easy read, even if this means sacrificing some semantic details or nuances of register. Note: ‘Idiomizing’ is not synonymous with ‘idiomatic’. illocutionary particle a discrete element that, when added to the syntactic material of an utterance, tells the listener/reader what affective force the utterance is intended to have, e.g. ‘dammit!’, ‘alas’. interlinear translation a style of translation in which the TT provides a literal rendering for each successive meaningful unit of the ST (including affixes) and arranges these units in the order of their occurrence in the ST, regardless of the conventional grammatical order of units in the TL. intertextual level the level of textual variables on which texts are considered as bearing significant external relationships to other texts, e.g. by allusion or imitation, or by virtue of genre-membership. intonation the variations in vowel pitch and modulation that make up the ‘melody’ of an utterance and always occur in combination with voice stress; compare e.g. ‘She’s not coming tonight?’ with ‘She’s not coming tonight!’ lexis (adj. lexical) the totality of the words in a given language. linguistic expression a self-contained and meaningful item in a given language, such as a word, a phrase, a sentence. literal meaning the conventional range of referential meaning attributed to a linguistic expression. Note: The overall meaning of an expression in context is compounded of this literal meaning plus any connotative meanings and contextual nuances that the expression has.

Glossary 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

223

literal translation an SL-oriented, word-for-word, style of translation in which the literal meaning of all the words in the ST is taken as if straight from the dictionary, but the conventions of TL grammar are respected. modal particle a sentential marker, a subset of illocutionary particles, usually included within the sentence, whose function is to nuance the illocutionary impact of the sentence, e.g. the italicized words in the following: ‘Danke, wir kommen schon klar’; ‘Der war vielleicht sauer!’ nominal expression a linguistic expression that either consists of a noun or has a noun as its nucleus, e.g. ‘with blistering speed’ vs ‘blisteringly fast’; ‘that’s within anyone’s capability’ vs ‘anyone can do that’. nominalization the use of a nominal expression that could be replaced by a linguistic expression not containing a noun, e.g. ‘easy of access’ vs ‘easy to get to’. onomatopoeia a word whose phonic form imitates a sound; not to be confused with alliteration or assonance. partial overlap see partially overlapping translation. partially overlapping translation (or partial overlap) rendering an ST expression by a TL expression whose range of literal meaning overlaps only partially with that of the ST expression, e.g translating ‘Ausgeschlafen?’ as ‘Slept well?’: the literal meaning of the TT expression retains something of the ST literal meaning (‘having slept’), but also adds some detail not explicit in the literal meaning of the ST expression (‘quality of sleep’) and omits some other detail that is explicit in it (‘sufficiency of sleep’); partially overlapping translation thus simultaneously combines elements of generalizing and particularizing translation. Note: This combination of particularization and generalization in no way undermines the status of ‘Slept well?’ as an acceptable communicative translation of ‘Ausgeschlafen?’. particularization

see particularizing translation.

particularizing translation (or particularization) rendering an ST expression by a TL hyponym, e.g. translating ‘gun’ as ‘Revolver’ (and not, say, as ‘Gewehr’, ‘Kanone’, etc.). The literal meaning of the TT expression is narrower and less general than that of the corresponding ST expression, i.e. a particularizing translation adds detail to the TT that is not explicitly expressed in the ST.

224

Glossary

phonic/graphic level the level of textual variables on which is considered the patterned organization of sound-segments in speech, or of letters and layout in writing. prosodic level the level of textual variables on which are considered ‘metrically’ patterned stretches of speech within which syllables have varying degrees of prominence (e.g. through stress and vowel-differentiation), varying degrees of pace (e.g. through length and tempo) and varying qualities of pitch. pseudo-cleft structure

see cleft structure.

reflected meaning the connotative meaning given to a linguistic expression by the fact that its form (phonic, graphic or both) is reminiscent of an expression that sounds or looks the same or nearly the same but has a different literal meaning, e.g. in its context of mechanized urban culture, Brecht’s reference to skyscrapers as ‘die Gehäuse des Eilands Manhattan’ carries a connotation of housing as ‘heavy machinery’ by virtue of a reflected meaning in ‘Gehäuse’ of ‘casing’ or ‘shell’. register used in this book to refer to tonal register or sometimes, where appropriate, to a combination of tonal register and social register. revision checking a TT against the ST to eliminate errors and inconsistencies; compare editing. rhetorical anaphora the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive or closely associated clauses or phrases. rhyme rhyme occurs when, in two or more words, the last stressed vowel and all the sounds that follow it are identical and in the same order. sentence a complete, self-contained linguistic unit capable of acting as a vehicle for communication; over and above the basic grammatical units that it contains, a sentence must have sense-conferring properties of intonation or punctuation, and may in addition contain features of word order and/or illocutionary particles, which contribute to the overall meaning, or ‘force’, of the sentence. Note: In this definition, a sentence does not necessarily contain a verb. sentential level the level of textual variables on which sentences are considered. SL see source language.

Glossary 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

225

social register a style of speaking/writing from which relatively detailed stereotypical information about the social identity of speakers/writers can be inferred (cf. e.g. ‘you can tell he’s a teacher/politician/petrol-head from the way he talks’). source language (or SL) the language in which the ST is expressed. source text (or ST) the text requiring translation. ST see source text. strategic decisions the initial decisions that constitute the translator’s strategy; strategic decisions are taken, in the light of the requirements of the TT and the nature of the ST, as to which ST properties should have priority in translation; decisions of detail are taken in the light of these strategic decisions. strategy the translator’s overall ‘game-plan’, consisting of decisions taken after an initial read-through of all or part of the ST before starting to translate in detail – e.g. whether and when to give literal meaning a higher priority than style, to address a lay readership or a specialist one, to maximize or minimize foreignness in the TT, to use formal language or slang, prose or verse, etc. stress (or accentuation or voice stress) the emphasis given to a syllable by speaking it more loudly than surrounding ones, as in ‘syllable’ and ‘surrounding’. synonym (adj. synonymous) a linguistic expression that has exactly the same range of literal meaning as one or more others. Note: Synonymous expressions usually differ in connotative meaning, and are therefore unlikely to have identical impact in context. synonymy the semantic relationship between synonyms; synonymy is the highest degree of semantic equivalence. syntax (adj. syntactic) the branch of grammar that concerns the arrangement of words into phrases and sentences. target language (or TL) the language into which the ST is to be translated. target text (or TT) the text that is a translation of the ST. text any stretch of speech or writing produced in a given language (or mixture of languages) and assumed to make a coherent whole on the discourse level.

226

Glossary

textual variables all the demonstrable features contained in a text, and which could (in another text) have been different, i.e. each textual variable constitutes a genuine option in the text. TL see target language. tonal register a style of speaking/writing adopted as a means of conveying an affective attitude of the speaker/writer to the addressee. The connotative meaning of a feature of tonal register is an affective meaning, conveyed by the choice of one out of a range of expressions capable of conveying a particular literal message, e.g. ‘Excuse me, please’ vs ‘Shift your butt’. translation loss any feature of incomplete replication of the ST in the TT; translation loss is therefore not limited to the omission of ST features in the TT: where the TT has features not present in the ST, the addition of these also counts as translation loss. In any given TT, translation loss is inevitable on most levels of textual variables, and likely on all. Note: The translation losses only matter if they prevent the successful implementation of the translator’s strategy for the TT. transliteration the use of TL spelling conventions for the written representation of SL expressions. TT see target text. voice stress

see stress.

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Works cited Adler, L. 1927. ‘Siedlung in Berlin-Britz’, Wasmuths Hefte für Baukunst, Vol. 11, No. 10. Anderson, A. and Avery, C. 1995. ‘Checking comes in from the cold’, ITI Bulletin, February. Audi 2004a. Geschäftsbericht 2003. Ingolstadt: Audi AG. Audi 2004b. 2003 Annual Report. Ingolstadt: Audi AG. Austermühl, F. 2001. Electronic Tools for Translators. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Baker, M. 1992. In Other Words. London: Routledge. BASF Aktiengesellschaft 2004a. Finanzbericht 2003. Ludwigshafen: BASF. BASF Aktiengesellschaft 2004b. Financial Report 2003. Ludwigshafen: BASF. Bassnett, S. 2004. ‘Translating Style’, The Linguist, Vol. 43, No. 1. BDI (Bundesverband der deutschen Industrie) 2004a. Für ein attraktives Deutschland. Berlin: Bundesverband der deutschen Industrie e.V. BDI (Bundesverband der deutschen Industrie) 2004b. For an Attractive Germany. Berlin: Bundesverband der deutschen Industrie e.V. Bell, A. 2002. ‘Translating W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz’, The Linguist, Vol. 41, No. 6. Biermann, W. 1977. ‘Kunststück’, in Wolf Biermann: Poems and Ballads, Gooch, S. (trans.). London: Pluto Press. Böll, H. 1968. Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa . . . Munich: DTV. Bosch n.d. KGU . . . Gebrauchsanweisung/Instructions for Use. Household Appliances. Robert Bosch Hausgeräte GmbH. Brecht, B. 1988. ‘Großer Dankchoral’ and ‘Vom armen B. B.’, in Werke, Vol. 11. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Bucerius c.2003. Bucerius Kunst Forum. Vorschau 2003/04. Hamburg: Bucerius Kunst Forum gGmbH. Celan, P. 2003. Der Sand aus den Urnen. Mohn und Gedächtnis. HistorischKritische Ausgabe, 2./3. Band, 1. Teil. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. DEGES 1998. ‘Tunnelauskleidung’ (Rennsteigtunnel). Berlin: Deutsche Einheit Fernstraßenplanungs- und -bau GmbH. Diwok, M., Kuklinski, B. and Ernst, B. 1992. ‘Superoxiddismutasenaktivität von Ginkgo-biloba-Extrakt’, Z. gesamte Inn. Med., Vol. 47. Stuttgart: Georg Thieme Verlag. Duden 1998. Grammatik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache, Vol. 4, 6. Auflage. Mannheim: Dudenverlag.

228

Works cited

Duden 2003. Deutsches Universalwörterbuch, 5. Auflage. Mannheim: Dudenverlag. Durrell, M. (ed.) 2002a. Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage. London: Arnold. Durrell, M. 2002b. Using German: A Guide to Contemporary Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ECSC–HOESCH Hüttenwerke (BR Deutschland) 1987a. ‘Ultraschallprüfung von Walzmaterial unter Verwendung elektrodynamischer Wandler’, in Euroabstracts Section II, Vol. 13, No. 8. Luxembourg: Commission of the European Communities. ECSC–HOESCH Hüttenwerke (BR Deutschland) 1987b. ‘Ultrasonic examination of rolled products using electrodynamic transducers’, in Euroabstracts Section II, Vol. 13, No. 8. Luxembourg: Commission of the European Communities. Europäische Gemeinschaften 2002. ‘Beschluss des Rates vom 28. November 2002’, Amtsblatt der europäischen Gemeinschaften No. L 349, 24 December. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. European Communities 2002. ‘Council Decision of 28 November 2002’, Official Journal of the European Communities No. L 349, 24 December. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. Farr, M. 2001. Tintin. The Complete Companion. London: John Murray. Feldmeier, H. (2001) ‘Neuer Impfstoff bremst Vermehrung von Malaria-Erregern’, Die Welt. Online. Available at: www.welt.de/data/2001/07/16/506281.html (accessed 6 March 2005). Felina 2004. Felina informiert: Newsletter Frühjahr/Sommer 2004. Mannheim: Felina GmbH. Goethe, J.W. von 1985. Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Goethe, J.W. von 1987. Faust Part One, Luke, D. (trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goller, F. 1987. ‘Der Gesang der Tannenmeise (Parus ater): Beschreibung und kommunikative Funktion’, J. Orn., Vol. 128. Gradmann, C. 2003. ‘The role of animal experiments in Robert Koch’s medical bacteriology’, Futura, Vol. 18, No. 2 [see p. 87]. Stuttgart: Hippokrates Verlag in MVS Medizinverlage Stuttgart GmbH & Co. KG. [Only published in English; German ST remains unpublished.] Graham, J.D. 1983. ‘Checking, revision and editing’, in C. Picken (ed.) The Translator’s Handbook. London: Aslib. Grass, G. 1966. Cat and Mouse, Manheim, R. (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Grass, G. 1995. Katz und Maus. München: DTV. Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman English Language Series. Hapimag 1995a. Auszug aus: Holiday, June. Online. Available at: www.hapimag. com. Hapimag 1995b. Excerpt from: Holiday, June. Online. Available at: www.hapimag. com. Hardegg, M. 2004. 05.05.04 Soziale Gerechtigkeit. Online. Available at: www.hardegg.at/aktuell.html (accessed December 2004). Helbig, G. and Buscha, J. 2001. Deutsche Grammatik. Ein Handbuch für den Ausländerunterricht. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie/Langenscheidt. Hermans, T. 1999. Translation in Systems. Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Hervey, S. 1992. ‘Registering registers’, Lingua, Vol. 86, Nos. 2–3. Hohendorf, G., Rotzoll, M., Richter, P., Eckart, W. and Mundt, C. 2003. ‘The victims of the National Socialist “T4” euthanasia programme’, Futura, Vol. 18,

Works cited 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

229

No. 1 [see p. 24]. Stuttgart: HippokratesVerlag in MVS Medizinverlage Stuttgart GmbH & Co. KG. [Only published in English; German ST remains unpublished.] IBM Deutschland c.1996. Advertisement (supplied direct by IBM). ITI/CILT/SFT 2003. Translation: Getting it Right. Milton Keynes/Paris/London: ITI/CILT/SFT. Jakobson, R. 1971. Selected Writings, Vol. II. The Hague: Mouton. Keats, J. 1958. The Poetical Works of John Keats, Garrod, H.W. (ed.). 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Klugmann, U. (ed.) 1989. HB Bildatlas Südlicher Schwarzwald. Hamburg: HB Verlags- und Vertriebs-Gesellschaft mbH. Kultureller Tonbanddienst n.d. Deutsche Dialekte. Bonn: Inter Nationes. Leech, G. 1974. Semantics. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books. Liedtke, K. 1988. ‘Stehen Sie auf der richtigen Seite?’ Stern, 7 July. Lotz, W. 1927. ‘Wohnen und Wohnung’, Die Form. Manufactum 2003a. Warenkatalog Nr. 16. Waltrop: Manufactum. Manufactum 2003b. Catalogue No. 2. London: Manufactum Ltd. Miles & More 2004. Advertisement in Lufthansa Magazin, March. Hamburg: Lufthansa. Mörike, E. 1975. Gedichte. Stuttgart: Reclam. Mossop, B. 2001. Revising and Editing for Translators. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Neander, J. 1937. ‘Der Lobende. Psalm 103:1’, Schwund- und Kirchenbarock, Barocklyrik, Vol. 3, Cysarz, H. (ed.). Leipzig: Philipp Reclam. Nena 2005. ‘99 luftballons/99 red balloons’ 2004. Online. Available at: www.80smusiclyrics.com/artists/nena.htm (accessed 13 July 2005). Nicholson, R.A. 1987. Translations of Eastern Poetry and Prose. London: Curzon Press; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Nida, E. 1964. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill. Perina, U. 1994. ‘Trügerischer Trend’, Die Zeit, 11 November. Peterson, R., Mountfort, G. and Hollom, P.A.D. 1974. A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, 3rd edn. London: Collins. Phoenix Contact 2004a. EC AR SW TOOL. Blomberg: Phoenix Contact GmbH & Co. KG. Phoenix Contact 2004b. EC AR SW TOOL. Blomberg: Phoenix Contact GmbH & Co. KG. Plenzdorf, U. 1973. Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. Rostock: VEB Hinstorff Verlag. Remarque, E.M. 1930. All Quiet on the Western Front, Wheen, A.W. (trans.). London: Putnam & Co. Remarque, E.M. 1955. Im Westen nichts Neues. Berlin: Ullstein. Remarque, E.M. 1994. All Quiet on the Western Front, Murdoch, B. (trans.). London: Cape. Rennsteigportal (2005) Rennsteigtunnel. Online. Available at: www.rennsteigportal.de/rennsteigtunnel.html (accessed 27 April 2005). Samuelsson-Brown, G. 1993. A Practical Guide for Translators. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Schieder, M. 2006. ‘Between grâce and volupté. Boucher and religious painting’, in Rethinking Boucher, Hyde, M. and Ledbury, M. (eds). Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. [Only published in English; German ST remains unpublished.] Schiller, F. 1987. Sämtliche Werke, Vol. I. München: Hanser. Schimmeck, T. 2003. ‘Cover Story Kapstadt’, Lufthansa Magazin, August. Hamburg: Lufthansa.

230

Works cited

Schindler, J. 1998. ‘Selbst linke Querdenker werden umgarnt’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 September. Schlink, B. 1997. Der Vorleser. Zürich: Diogenes. Schlink, B. 2003. The Reader, Janeway, C.B. (trans.). London: Phoenix. Schumann 1995a. ‘Wilhelm Furtwänglers Strahlkraft’ (CD notes), Schubert, Symphonie No. 9. Haydn, Symphonie No. 88. Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft (447 439–2). Schumann 1995b. ‘Wilhelm Furtwänglers Legacy’ (CD notes), Whittal, M. (trans.). Schubert, Symphonie No. 9. Haydn, Symphonie No. 88. Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft (447 439–2). Sebald, W.G. 2001. Austerlitz. München: Hanser. Sebald, W.G. 2002. Austerlitz, Bell, A. (trans.). London: Penguin. Stegemann, M. 1992a. ‘Der Marlon Brando des Klaviers’ (CD notes), The Glenn Gould Edition. J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations etc. Sony (SMK 52 594). Stegemann, M. 1992b. ‘The Marlon Brando of the Piano’ (CD notes), Spencer, S. (trans.). The Glenn Gould Edition. J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations etc. Sony (SMK 52 594). Stern, S. 1996a. Die soziale Integration von Behinderten in Deutschland. Bonn: Inter Nationes. Stern, S. 1996b. The Social Integration of People with Disabilities in Germany. Bonn: Inter Nationes. Tilgner, W. 1988. ‘Frühlingskonzert im Auwald’ (LP notes). Mainz: Natural Sound/Wergo, Record no. SM 9003. Volkswagen 2003a. Ihr Bordbuch: Touran. Wolfsburg: Volkswagen AG. Volkswagen 2003b. Your Vehicle Wallet: Touran. Wolfsburg: Volkswagen AG. Walser, M. 1978. Ein fliehendes Pferd. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Walser, M. 1980. Runaway Horse, Vennewitz, L. (trans.). London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited. Wilson, M. 1988. ‘Early spring (April) in Riverain Forest’ (LP notes). Mainz: Natural Sound/Wergo, Record No. SM 9003. Zawadsky, K. 1996a. ‘Privatisierung und Deregulierung in Deutschland: Der Fall Telekom’. Bonn: Inter Nationes. Zawadsky, K. 1996b. ‘Privatization and deregulation in Germany: the Telekom case’. Bonn: Inter Nationes. Zehetmair, H. 1996a. ‘Kulturelle Vielfalt in Europa’, speech, 9 May. Zehetmair, H. 1996b. ‘Cultural diversity in Europe’, translated text of speech (trans. anon.), 9

1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Index Bold type denotes a term that figures in the glossary, and the page where it is first defined. accentuation 69, 200, 202, 218, 225; see also stress adjective, adjectival 18, 81, 103, 124, 125, 157, 160 Adler, L. 40 adverb, adverbial(s) 93, 172–3, 180, 181, 185, 186, 188–97, 200–1 advertisement, advertising 2, 19, 49, 54, 66, 73–4, 84, 95–6, 102, 103, 121, 145–50, 151–2, 159–61; see also persuasive genres A Farewell to Arms 97 affective meaning 127–9, 218, 226 affixation 78, 79–81, 138 Aktion T4 124 alliteration 22, 43, 48, 65–9, 78, 103, 210, 218, 223 allusion 10–11, 22, 103–4, 121–3, 125, 218, 222; see also allusive meaning, echo allusive meaning 121–3, 218; see also allusion ambiguity in ST 136, 141 ambiguity in TT 24, 88, 98 American terminology 139 American Translators Association 217 anaphora see grammatical anaphora, rhetorical anaphora Anderson, A. 162 ‘anticlimax’ 109, 114–15 Arabic 33

‘Arbeitsplatz’ 116–17 association 31–2, 45, 47, 67, 120–32, 219; see also associative meaning, overtone associative meaning 124–5, 150, 218; see also association assonance 43, 65–9, 78, 218, 223 attitudinal meaning 123–4, 125, 218 Audi 25–6, 48–9, 147 ‘ausgeklügelt’ 124, 125 Austen, J. 104 Austerlitz 35, 41–5, 54, 84, 123 Austermühl, F. 215 Avery, C. 162 Bach, J.S. 106–7 back-translation 21, 113, 201, 208, 219 Baker, M. 52 balanced (SL/TL) translation 17–18, 48, 221 BASF Aktiengesellschaft 58–9 Bassnett, S. 104 BDI 116–17, 119, 125 Bell, A. 34 Bible 13 Biermann, W. 48, 50–1, Blake, W. 122 Bliss, F. 98 body language 128, 174 Böll, H. 122

232

Index

Bosch 68 Boucher, F. 100–1 bracket structure 199–202; see also word order Brecht, B. 76–7, 102, 103, 105, 127 brief see translation brief Bucerius 118 Bundesverband der deutschen Industrie see BDI Burns, R. 123 Buscha, J. 175 Bush, G.W. 123 calque 33, 34–5, 37, 97, 197, 219, 220 Cape Town 90–1 Celan, P. 129–30 Celle 147–8 Chinese 32 Christie, A. 122 Churchill, W. 96 CILT 160 citation (vs allusion) 218 cleft sentence see cleft structure cleft structure 88, 190, 196, 205–6, 219; see also pseudo-cleft structure cliché 36 cognitive meaning see literal meaning coherence, coherent 88, 93, 94, 96, 104, 219, 220, 225; see also discourse level cohesion, cohesive 93, 94, 95, 97, 104, 219, 220; see also discourse level, grammatical anaphora cohesion marker 70, 94, 95, 101, 191, 201; see also connector Collins English Dictionary 109, 114 Collins German Dictionary 114, 115 collocation, collocative 45, 116, 125, 191, 193; see also collocative meaning collocative meaning 125–6, 127, 219 communicative purpose 22, 52, 66, 70–1, 86–8, 103, 200, 207, 221; see also function of textual features communicative situation 8, 19, 20, 36, 45, 46, 80, 83, 84, 86, 108, 109, 112, 120, 128, 174, 178, 182, 205, 219

communicative translation 19, 33, 36–7, 40, 41, 171, 181, 186, 187, 219, 223 compensation 2, 3, 22, 34, 35, 37, 40–51, 55, 103, 115, 117, 121, 175, 202, 210, 219 compound, compounding 14, 78, 79, 80, 116, 137, 141, 221 Concise Oxford Dictionary 109, 114 conjunction 157, 199, 200, 219 connector 94–101, 186; see also cohesion marker connotation 16, 36, 42–5, 47, 54, 63, 66, 67, 79, 110, 120–32, 138, 219, 220, 224; see also association, overtone connotative meaning 2, 23, 43, 67–9, 120–32, 211, 218, 219, 220, 222, 224, 225, 226; see also connotation constraint (vs compensation) 41, 47 consumer-oriented texts 2, 32, 145–54, 207; see also advertisement, persuasive genres context, contextual 6, 8, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 25, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 44–5, 47, 48, 66, 67, 70, 79, 80, 82, 88, 99, 100, 101, 108–17, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 134, 135, 141, 150, 157, 158, 168, 172, 187, 194, 207, 213, 219, 220, 221, 222, 225 contrastive linguistics 3, 168 contrastive topics 168–209 Cranach, L. 118 cultural borrowing 33, 35–6, 43, 219, 220 cultural factors 2, 10–11, 21, 23, 31–9, 63, 81, 120, 122, 139, 146–7, 150, 210, 211, 218, 219, 220 cultural transplantation 32, 33–4, 103, 220 cultural transposition 31–7, 212, 219, 220 Cyrano de Bergerac 34 ‘Das Göttliche’ 103 decisions of detail 6, 8, 210, 220, 225 DEGES 143 denotative meaning see literal meaning ‘denn auch’ 100–1, 186

Index 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Denn der Wind kann nicht lesen 100 Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui 103 Der Besuch der alten Dame 34 derivation 78, 79, 221 ‘Der Spaziergang’ 122 ‘Der Taucher’ 67 Deutsches Pferdemuseum 147 dialect 34 dictionary 1, 3, 16, 20, 78–9, 80, 108, 114, 115–17, 135, 223; see also Collins, Concise Oxford, Duden, Oxford–Duden Die Blechtrommel 22 Die Leiden des jungen Werther 102 Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. 102–3, 185 Die Welt 144 Die Zeit 105 discourse level 93–102, 220, 225 Diwok, M. 137 Donovan 104 double-verb construction 190–7 drama 54, 66, 201; see also play ‘du/ihr’ vs ‘Sie’ 11–12, 128–9 Duden Deutsches Universalwörterbuch 3, 81, 113, 117, 126 Durrell, M. 81, 175, 199, 202 Dürrenmatt, F. 34 dynamic equivalence 20 echo (vs allusion) 103–4 ECSC–HOESCH 112 Edel und Starck 103 editing 2, 3, 155–67, 210, 212, 220, 224 Ein fliehendes Pferd 91–2 emphasis 69, 82, 88, 95, 128, 158, 178, 181, 195–6, 198–209, 225; see also accentuation, stress empirical genres 53, 54, 56, 145; see also scientific texts, technical texts Entscheidungsfrage 172 ‘Enttäuschung’ 114–15 equivalence 19–25; see also equivalent effect, semantic equivalence equivalent, communicative see communicative translation

233

equivalent effect 20–1, 104; see also equivalence Ergänzungsfrage 172 error in ST 75, 84, 141–2, 144 Eurodicautom 140 Europäische Gemeinschaften 85 European Communities 86 exegetic translation 7, 10, 22, 42, 43, 45, 46–7, 48, 220 exoticism 33, 34, 35, 37, 84, 147, 219, 220 extended attributive phrase 81–2 faithful translation 17–18, 146, 208, 221 Farr, M. 34 Faust 103, 122–3 Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs 214 Feldmeier, H. 144 Felina 98, 153–4 Feuchtwanger, L. 208 financial texts 25, 53, 58–9, 211, 215 financial translation see financial texts foreign, foreignness 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 42–3, 147, 160, 170, 196, 220, 225; see also exoticism formal properties of texts see textual variables Forster, L. 129 Frankfurter Rundschau 131 free translation 16–17, 18–19, 46, 117, 133, 219, 221, 222 freelance translator 139–40, 214–15, 216 front focus 141, 205, 207 function of textual features 24, 35, 40, 63, 65, 66, 67, 70, 76, 94–5, 96, 99, 100, 101, 103, 121, 170–87, 189, 210, 223 Furtwängler, W. 56–8 gender-marking 79–80, 81 generalization see generalizing translation generalizing translation 111–15, 221, 223

234

Index

genre 2, 3, 6, 41, 48, 52–62, 66, 70, 74, 85, 86, 97, 102, 133, 145–7, 149, 150, 160, 162, 168, 211–12, 213, 221, 222 gerund 193 ‘Gesang zu zweien in der Nacht’ 67 Getty Research Institute 162 gist translation 7, 8–10, 11–12, 22, 221 Goethe, J.W. von 11, 102, 103, 122, 123, 185 Goller, F. 134 Google 117 Gould, G. 106–7 Gradmann, C. 82 Graham, J.D. 161 grammatical anaphora 94, 97–8, 219, 221 grammatical features 16–18, 24, 33, 34, 45, 48, 70–1, 78–86, 87–92, 93, 98, 114, 119, 168, 219, 222, 224; see also grammatical anaphora, grammatical level, grammatical transposition grammatical inflection 78, 79, 221 grammatical level 78–86, 108, 112, 117, 221 grammatical rearrangement 80, 87–8, 93; see also grammatical transposition grammatical transposition 17–18, 41, 47, 71, 84, 117, 190, 191, 193–7, 212, 219, 221; see also grammatical rearrangement grapheme 65; see also phonic/graphic level graphic features see phonic/graphic level, textual layout, typography graphic level of textual variables see phonic/graphic level Grass, G. 61–2, 102 ‘Großer Dankchoral’ 76–7 Halliday, M.A.K. 94 Hapimag 166–7 Hardegg, M. 117 Hasan, R. 94 Haydn, J. 56–7 HB Bildatlas 89–90

Helbig, G. 175 Hemingway, E. 97 Hergé 32, 34 Hermans, T. 20 Hervey, S. 3, 52 Hitler, A. 103 Hohendorf, G. 124 Hölderlin, F. 207 Hunsrück 10 Hymes, D. 52 hyperonym 111–12, 114, 117, 221 hyperonymy–hyponymy 111–17, 221; see also generalizing translation, particularizing translation hyponym 36, 111–13, 114, 117, 124, 135, 221, 222, 223 IATE 140 IBM Deutschland 73–4 idiom 17, 19, 222 idiomatic, idiomaticity 17, 18, 34, 80, 81–2, 84, 87, 97, 99–101, 112, 147, 157, 158, 160, 161, 168, 170, 194, 197, 207, 221, 222 idiomizing translation 17, 18, 19, 71, 222 illocutionary effect/impact 82, 170–87; see also illocutionary particle illocutionary particle 87–8, 94, 97, 173, 222, 223, 224; see also imperative particle, modal particle imitation 102, 222; see also parody, pastiche Im Westen nichts Neues 11–12, 22, 27–30 imperative forms 9, 128, 176–8, 199 indirect speech 9; see also reported speech inflection (grammatical) see grammatical inflection inflection (voice) see voice inflection in-house translation 139, 140, 145, 147, 160, 214 Institute of Linguists 214–17 Institute of Translation and Interpreting 161, 214–16 inter-semiotic translation 7 interlinear translation 16, 222

Index 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Inter Nationes 39, 155 internet 2, 116–17, 139, 140, 215 intersentential 93–102, 191; see also discourse level intertextual level, intertextuality 2, 63, 102–4, 120, 222 intonation 22, 63, 69–71, 87–8, 97, 174–5, 222, 224; see also voice inflection intralingual translation 7–10, 11, 12–13, 34 inversion 199, 202–9 IoL see Institute of Linguists ITI see Institute of Translation and Interpreting Jakobson, R. 7 journalistic text 2, 35, 36, 66, 81, 83, 96, 102, 207, 208 Kapstadt 90–1 Katz und Maus 61–2, 102 Keats, J. 66–7, 78, 79, 86, 94, 98, 103–4; see also ‘To Autumn’ Kleist, H. von 202 Klugmann, U. 90 Koch, R. 82 Kultureller Tonbanddienst 39 Latin 203 layout of text see textual layout ‘Lebensraum’ 36, 123 Leech, G. 121 legal texts 46–7, 53, 56, 84, 99, 162, 173, 215 legal translation see legal texts levels of textual variables see textual variables lexis, lexical 23, 34, 78–81, 86, 87, 112, 114, 120, 134–6, 157–8, 160, 175, 213, 220, 222; see also vocabulary Liedtke, K. 96 Linguist, The 104 linguistic expression (defined) 222 literal meaning 2, 16, 19, 21, 22, 23, 36, 37, 42, 43, 63, 67, 78, 79, 99, 103, 108–19, 120, 121, 124, 127, 128, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225

235

literal translation 16–17, 22, 31, 34, 37, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 146, 187, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, 219, 220, 221, 223 literary genres see literary texts literary texts 2, 11, 22, 41, 54, 56, 70, 83–4, 96, 97, 100, 102, 104, 109, 110, 138, 145, 161–2, 196, 206 literary translation see literary texts loan-words 22–3, 35–6, 42–3, 150 Lotz, W. 36 Lufthansa 90, 152 Luke, D. 123 lyrics see song ‘Mädchen ohne Singular’ 33 Mann, T. 6 Manufactum 9, 15 Mason, R. 100 matrix see textual matrix Miles & More 152 ‘Mittelfeld’ 199–203 modal particle 70–1, 100, 168, 170–87, 189, 192, 223; see also illocutionary particle Mörike, E. 67 Mossop, B. 162 My Fair Lady 34 names 10, 31–3, 161 Neander, J. 76–7 Nena 74–6 Newman, J.H. 122 Nicholson, R.A. 33 Nida, E. 20–1 ‘99 Luftballons’ 74–6 nominal expression 223 nominalization 141, 223 noun 23, 31, 79–80, 81, 125, 141, 160, 189, 223; see also nominalization noun clause 189, 206 object-first sentence 205; see also word order onomatopoeia 68, 218, 223 oral text (vs written text) 22, 53, 55, 65, 70, 74–7, 87–8, 97; see also spoken text

236

Index

overtones 37, 44–5, 86, 120, 220; see also association, connotation, connotative meaning Oxford–Duden German Dictionary 115, 135 parody, parodist 56, 102–3; see also imitation, pastiche partial overlap see partially overlapping translation partially overlapping translation 114–15, 223 participle, participial 81–2, 97–8, 186, 189, 199, 200, 207–8 particularization see particularizing translation particularizing translation 98, 112–15, 116, 194, 223 passive 17, 140–1, 205–6, 207 pastiche 76; see also imitation, parody Perina, U. 105 persuasive genres 54, 56; see also advertising philosophical genres 53–4, 56, 145 Phoenix Contact 143 phoneme 63 phonic features 17, 22–3, 24, 63, 86, 110, 147, 211, 222, 223; see also phonic/graphic level phonic/graphic level 2, 31, 65–9, 71–7, 78, 147, 224 pitch 87, 174, 222, 224 place-names see names play 55, 70, 76, 97, 102, 204; see also drama Plenzdorf, U. 102–3, 185 poetry, poetic 54, 66–8, 70, 76–7, 104, 122, 129–30, 207; see also verse prefix 80–1, 138 preposition 80, 199 present perfect 158 preterite 158 pronoun 23, 93, 127, 128, 200, 221 propaganda 54, 145 prosodic features 87–8, 110, 176; see also prosodic level prosodic level 69–77, 224 proverb, proverbial 19, 36, 40, 121

pseudo-cleft structure 88, 158, 190, 195, 196, 205–6, 219, 224; see also cleft structure punctuation 63, 71, 76, 88, 155, 224 purpose of ST or TT 2, 6, 18, 22, 33, 35, 42, 48, 52–3, 54, 55, 56, 66, 67, 102, 145, 146, 210, 211, 212, 213 purpose, communicative see communicative purpose Pygmalion 34 quotation 102, 103, 121, 123, 218, 220; see also allusion, allusive meaning, citation reflected meaning 127, 224 register 2, 99, 101, 128, 129, 147, 161, 184, 193, 195, 197, 204, 206, 207, 222, 224; see also social register, tonal register relative (clause, pronoun) 81, 82, 95, 97, 160, 189, 200 relevance 104, 210–11, 212; see also communicative purpose, function of textual features religious genres 54, 56, 145 Remarque, E.M. 11–12, 27–30; see also Im Westen nichts Neues Renault 95, 147 Rennsteigportal 59–61 Rennsteigtunnel 59–61, 142–3 rephrasing 12 reported speech 12, 46, 82–4; see also indirect speech revision, revising 2, 3, 155–67, 210, 212, 220, 224 rhetorical anaphora 96–7, 224 rhyme 22, 48, 65, 66, 69, 121, 224 rhythm, rhythmic 17, 22–3, 24, 48, 50, 67, 70, 75, 76, 222 Romeo and Juliet 34 Rostand, E. 34 Roxanne 34 Russian 32 Samuelsson-Brown, G. 216 Schieder, M. 100–1 Schiller, F. 67, 122 Schimmeck, T. 91

Index 1111 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 922 1011 1 2 3111 4 522 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Schindler, J. 132 Schlink, B. 46–7 Schloss Augustusburg 149 Schubert, F. 56–8 Schumann, K. 57–8 scientific texts 53, 81, 84, 99, 104, 133–44, 159, 173; see also empirical genres, technical texts Sebald, W.G. 35, 41–5, 123; see also Austerlitz semantic equivalence 109–19, 191, 221, 225 sentence 18, 42, 43, 47, 48, 54, 63, 69, 70–1, 78, 81, 82, 84, 86–92, 93–102, 106, 108, 113, 114, 160, 168, 170–87, 199–209, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225; see also sentential level sentence adverbs 172 sentential level 86–92, 93, 170–87, 199–209, 224; see also sentence sequential focus 87–8, 101, 168, 198–209 SFT 160 Shakespeare, W. 122 Shaw, G.B. 34 ‘Sie’ vs ‘du/ihr’ 11–12, 128–9 situation, communicative see communicative situation; see also context Skoda 95–6, 103 SL see source language SL bias 16–17, 21, 52 Smith, D. 146 ‘so’ (German connector) 97, 99 social register 128, 184, 224, 225; see also register software 2, 215 song 2, 48, 50–1, 55, 70 sound-symbolism 66–8 source language (defined) 6 source text (defined) 6 Spoerl, H. 33, 187 spoken text 55, 70, 87–8, 94, 128, 158, 160, 171, 174, 199, 201, 204, 205; see also oral text ST see source text statement particles 172, 175, 183–7 Stegemann, M. 106–7

237

stereotype, stereotyping 33, 126, 128, 146, 218, 225 Stern 96 Stern, S. 11 strategic decision 6, 48, 69, 168, 220, 225 strategic factor 52, 55, 123, 175, 176, 209, 213 strategy 2, 6, 7, 22, 42, 52, 63, 145, 147, 210–11, 220, 225, 226 stress 66, 69–71, 87–8, 97, 177–8, 180, 202, 206, 222, 224, 225; see also accentuation, emphasis style, stylistic 2, 19, 40, 48, 54, 70, 99, 104, 117, 128, 138, 140, 146, 149, 155, 161–2, 168, 192, 203, 206, 207, 208, 210, 220, 225, 226 subjunctive 45–7, 82–4, 189 suffix 138 superordinate see hyperonym syllable 69, 224, 225 synonym, synonymous 22, 110–11, 113, 114, 120, 123, 126, 127, 135, 178, 186, 225 synonymy 79, 110–11, 221, 225 syntax, syntactic 6, 78, 79, 82, 84, 136, 158, 160, 189–97, 198–209, 213, 220, 221, 222, 225 target language (defined) 6 target text (defined) 6 technical texts 2, 20, 41, 53, 65, 104, 115, 116, 120, 128, 133–44, 145, 146, 149, 159, 161, 162, 211; see also empirical genres, technological texts technological texts 53, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139; see also technical texts text (defined) 6 textual layout 25, 69, 147, 161, 224; see also graphic features textual matrix 5, 211–12 textual variables 2, 52, 63–107, 108, 138, 220, 221, 222, 224, 226 theatre see drama Thomson, J. 104 Tilgner, W. 73 Tintin 32; see also Hergé TL see target language

238

Index

TL bias 16–17, 21, 52 ‘To Autumn’ 66–7, 78, 86, 93–4, 103–4; see also Keats Tolstoy, L. 104 tonal register 128, 170, 184, 224, 226; see also register tourist literature 2, 9, 32, 59–61, 145, 147, 150 translation brief 2, 6, 18, 22, 23, 25, 212 translation loss 19, 21–5, 31, 40–1, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 63, 67–8, 69, 70, 78, 79, 80, 84, 101, 108, 112, 125, 129, 195, 210, 211, 219, 226 transliteration 32, 220, 226 TT see target text two-verb construction see double-verb construction typography, typographical 141, 159, 162 Tucholsky, K. 131 ‘Über allen Gipfeln’ 122 unidiomatic see idiomatic verb 17–18, 45–7, 80–1, 82–4, 86, 95, 141, 158, 168, 172, 181, 189–97, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 224; see also double-verb construction, verb–adverb construction verb–adverb construction 190–7 verbal bracket see bracket structure

verse 93, 225 ‘vielmehr’ 99–100 Visit, The 34 vocabulary 6, 18, 147; see also lexis voice inflection 174, 175, 181, 186, 204, 205; see also intonation voice stress see stress Volkswagen 150–1 ‘Vorfeld’ 199–200, 201, 202, 203–9 Walser, M. 91–2, 122 ‘Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa . . .’ 122 West Side Story 34 wh- question 172, 179 Wind Cannot Read, The 100 word formation 78–81 word order 63, 158, 198–209, 224; see also bracket structure, cleft structure, inversion, ‘Mittelfeld’, pseudo-cleft sentence, sequential focus, subject-first sentence, ‘Vorfeld’ Wordsworth, W. 104 written text (vs oral text) 12, 53, 55, 65, 69, 70–1, 74, 81, 87–8, 97, 128, 160, 175, 189, 199, 204, 205 yes/no question 172, 179 Zawadsky, K. 157, 164 Zehetmair, H. 38 ‘zwar’ 99, 201

eBooks – at www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk

A library at your fingertips!

eBooks are electronic versions of printed books. You can store them on your PC/laptop or browse them online. They have advantages for anyone needing rapid access to a wide variety of published, copyright information. eBooks can help your research by enabling you to bookmark chapters, annotate text and use instant searches to find specific words or phrases. Several eBook files would fit on even a small laptop or PDA. NEW: Save money by eSubscribing: cheap, online access to any eBook for as long as you need it.

Annual subscription packages We now offer special low-cost bulk subscriptions to packages of eBooks in certain subject areas. These are available to libraries or to individuals. For more information please contact [email protected] We’re continually developing the eBook concept, so keep up to date by visiting the website.

www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk

Related titles from Routledge

THINKING FRENCH TRANSLATION Sándor Hervey and Ian Higgins The new edition of this popular course in translation from French into English offers a challenging practical approach to the acquisition of translation skills, with clear explanations of the theoretical issues involved. A variety of translation issues are considered, including: • • • •

cultural differences register and dialect genre revision and editing

This edition features material from the fields of business and law alongside literary texts. The course now covers texts from a wide range of sources, including: • • •

journalism and literature commercial, legal and technical texts songs and recorded interviews

Thinking French Translation is essential reading for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students of French. The book will also appeal to a wide range of language students and tutors through the general discussion of the principles, purposes and practice of translation.

Pb: 0-415-25522-8 Hb: 0-415-25521-X Available at all good bookshops For ordering and further information please visit: www.routledge.com

Thinking German Translation

Thinking Italian Translation: Teacher's Book (Thinking Translation)

Thinking Translation: A Course in Translation Method

Thinking Italian Translation: A Course in Translation Method: Italian to English (Thinking Translation)

Thinking Arabic Translation: Tutor's Handbook: A Course in Translation Method: Arabic to English (Thinking Translation)

Thinking Chinese Translation: A Course in Translation Method: Chinese to English (Thinking Translation)

Thinking French Translation Student Book: A Course in Translation Method: French to English (Thinking Translation)

A Basis for Scientific and Engineering Translation: German-English-German

Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought

Translation

Metareasoning: Thinking about Thinking

Thinking Arabic Translation: A Course in Translation Method: Arabic to English

Thinking Arabic Translation. A Course in Translation Method : Arabic to English

Thinking Teams Thinking Clients

Postcolonial Translation Theory (Translation Studies)

Metareasoning: Thinking about Thinking

The German Criminal Code: A Modern English Translation

On Translation:

Translation Spectrum

Translation Planes

On Translation

Rough Translation

Translation History Culture: A Sourcebook (Translation Studies)

Paragraphs on Translation (Topics in Translation, 1)

More Paragraphs on Translation (Topics in Translation)

Rough Translation

On Translation

Paragraphs On Translation (Topics in Translation ; 1)

Translation - Translation, History, Culture; A Sourcebook

Translation Power Subversion (Topics in Translation, 8)

Thinking Teacher's Toolkit: Critical Thinking, Thinking Skills and Global Perspectives

Thinking German Translation

Thinking Italian Translation: Teacher's Book (Thinking Translation)

Thinking Translation: A Course in Translation Method

Thinking Italian Translation: A Course in Translation Method: Italian to English (Thinking Translation)

Thinking Arabic Translation: Tutor's Handbook: A Course in Translation Method: Arabic to English (Thinking Translation)

Thinking Chinese Translation: A Course in Translation Method: Chinese to English (Thinking Translation)

Thinking French Translation Student Book: A Course in Translation Method: French to English (Thinking Translation)

A Basis for Scientific and Engineering Translation: German-English-German

Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought

Translation

Metareasoning: Thinking about Thinking

Thinking Arabic Translation: A Course in Translation Method: Arabic to English

Thinking Arabic Translation. A Course in Translation Method : Arabic to English

Thinking Teams Thinking Clients

Postcolonial Translation Theory (Translation Studies)

Metareasoning: Thinking about Thinking

The German Criminal Code: A Modern English Translation

On Translation:

Translation Spectrum

Translation Planes

On Translation

Rough Translation

Translation History Culture: A Sourcebook (Translation Studies)

Paragraphs on Translation (Topics in Translation, 1)

More Paragraphs on Translation (Topics in Translation)

Rough Translation

On Translation

Paragraphs On Translation (Topics in Translation ; 1)

Translation - Translation, History, Culture; A Sourcebook

Translation Power Subversion (Topics in Translation, 8)

Thinking Teacher's Toolkit: Critical Thinking, Thinking Skills and Global Perspectives

Recommend Documents