This article was published in Lebende Sprachen 2/2004
Dirk Siepmann
High-profile Translation from the Mother Tongue into the Foreign Language: Effective Translation Strategies and Implications for Translation Theory and Translator Training
1. Introduction
In this article, which is as much a how-to
guide as an academic treatise, I propose to deal with translation strategies.
With a topic such as this, which has been explored from so many different
angles in translation studies – skopos theory, psycholinguistics, action
theory - it would be difficult to add anything of substance to a general theory
of translation. Instead, I wish to provide a personal perspective here, one
that is grounded in introspection rather than observation of others.
My reasons for writing this article are
two-fold. Firstly, it has been repeatedly claimed that ‘native speakers are
needed for high-profile translation’ (e.g. Covell Waegner 2000), the
implication being that it is impossible to produce high-quality translations
when working from the mother tongue (or L1) into the second language (or L2). I
take issue with this claim, and will proceed to show how the non-native
translator can achieve satisfactory results provided she has a sound knowledge
of the L2, a thorough grounding in contrastive linguistics[1] and the ability to make judicious
use of a range of data-handling tools and translation strategies. In
particular, I will demonstrate how a successful translation process can be
operationalised to a considerable degree, and therefore taught to students of
translation. This will be illustrated mainly with examples from my own
translation work.[2]
My second reason for writing this article is
that the aforementioned avenues of research, especially the psycholinguistic
strand, have yielded little of use to the practising translator. This is
primarily because language students were enlisted as observees. Plainly,
though, there is little point in trying to learn about an activity by observing
people who have seldom tackled it (Siepmann 1996: 39); the main value of
psycholinguistic research into the translation process seems to lie in the
accurate portrayal of students’ translation problems and of the ineffective
strategies they use to overcome them. Admittedly, there have also been a few studies
on the behaviour of professional translators, but all of these abstract away
from actual translation problems in their search for higher-order generalities.
Thus, Gerloff (1988) sets up categories intended to describe particular types
of strategic behaviour found in her observees. She calls these ‘inference &
reasoning and text contextualization activity’. While this categorization
yields the valuable insight that professional translators tend to achieve
higher scores on this measure, the study lacks concrete detail on the ways in
which professionals solve specific problems.
2. Preliminary Steps: Compilation of
subject-specific mini-corpora
In dealing with high-profile translation
assignments, non-native translators (and, to a lesser extent, native translators)
have to make up for a potential lack of linguistic proficiency; they have to
fill gaps in their knowledge of text types, text-type-specific syntax and
lexis. A time-honoured method for doing so is the study of parallel texts,
which seeks to identify lexical items and constructions which might qualify as
natural translation equivalents. Today the translator can also use translation
corpora and translation memories, which provide a record of previous work, but
these will expose her to the danger of reproducing flawed translations (unless
the translation memory contains only her own, carefully checked work). It is on
the whole much safer to rely on L2 discourse belonging to the same text type,
but which has been independently formulated.
In the case of rigidly conventionalised text
types such as powers of attorney (see 3.3 below), it is sufficient to download
a small number of sample texts. The situation is different, though, with more
flexible types of writing, such as travel books, academic prose or company
brochures. With these text types the translator needs a larger sample of text,
from which she can extract natural textual equivalents. The snag is that the
‘manual’ collection of such sample texts and the subsequent perusal of the
entire text corpus by eye may be extremely time-consuming.
An easy way out of this dilemma is to access
that part of the Internet which is sometimes referred to as the ‘deep’ or
‘invisible’ web (Cloutier 2002), to download selected pages from the deep web
using an off-line browser and to convert the downloaded pages, which are
usually in HTML format, into TXT format. Let us go through this process step by
step. For the purpose of this exercise, we will assume that the assignment we
have been given is the translation from German into English of a guide to the
architecture of Berlin.
|
nternal
ear and described in detail the tympanum and its relations to the osseou |
|
our
fields and finishes at the top in a tympanum which has for ornamentation a l |
|
d opening
between two smaller ones. The tympanum is surrounded on all sides by s |
|
Fidicula",
"Fistula", "Organa", "Tuba",
"Tympanum". Perhaps "Symphonia" is found |
|
lestone
church in Ewias also has a fine tympanum set in a decorated archway. Pay |
|
s of the
new plastic decoration. In the tympanum the Last Judgement is generally |
|
hurch (D)
is rightly known for its fine Tympanum and decorated chevron arch. How |
|
the
center of the horizontal bar of the tympanum is the figure of an emperor, be |
|
deep; the height of the back up to the
tympanum is three feet five and one-thir |
It is evident from this concordance that tympanum
is the more common term in English, and that tympan should be avoided.
While this is a fairly straightforward example, corpora and Internet search
engines can also be consulted on trickier points of usage than mere word
frequency. To this we now turn.
3. Strategies at the lexical, syntactic and
textual levels
For convenience of presentation, I have
established an articifial distinction between the lexical, syntactic and
textual levels. It will be seen, however, that these levels are closely
interrelated. Thus, for example, many word searches are based on a corpus
comprising only texts of a particular type.
3.1. Lexis
The corpus linguistics literature abounds in
examples of the manifold uses to which corpora can be put (a good introduction
is Sinclair 2003). In this section I will consider recurrent translation
problems and ways of solving them with the help of self-assembled corpora. My
first set of examples comes from the following autobiographical recount, which
I translated into English:
Die Tür fällt ins Schloß, der Blick auf die Kabine.
Das Abteil ist klein, aber funktional eingerichtet. Auf zwei mal eineinhalb
Metern ein frisch bezogenes Bett, Leuchten, eine kleine Garderobe, ein
Tischchen mit Obst, Wasser und einer Tageszeitung. Nebenan die Duschkabine mit
Toilette und allerlei Badezeug: Seife, Duschgel, Feuchtigkeitscreme,
Handtücher, Zahnputzzeug. Sogar eine Duschhaube und ein Schuhputzschwämmchen
liegen bereit. Die Dusche macht neugierig. Komisches Gefühl, nackt in einem
fahrenden Zug zu stehen. Während hinter dem Fenster die Landschaft vorbeizieht,
wandert die Hand mißtrauisch unters laufende Wasser. Warm. Trinkwasser kommt zwar
nicht aus der Leitung, aber sonst ist an der Dusche nichts auszusetzen. (Frankfurter Rundschau)
In translating this genre, corpora of literary
or newspaper language can be particularly helpful. One may either use one of
the commercially available corpora and text archives, such as newspaper
CD-ROMs, parts of the British National Corpus and the Library of the
Future, or one may compile one’s own text archive by following the
procedure outlined above. Newspaper text can be obtained from the websites of a
large number of national and regional newspapers. Literary texts which have
fallen into the public domain can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Some
publishers also offer samples of their novels or short stories (http://www.harpercollins.com.au/books/extracts.cfm,
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/offthepage/extracts.htm,
www.bloomsbury.com), and there is a
rising number of ‘fan fiction’ or ‘amateur author’ sites (e.g. http://www.electricfrontiers.com/electricpen/stories.asp),
some of which contain material of an acceptable standard.
To return to the above example, there are quite
a few translation problems in evidence which the non-native will find difficult
to solve. Let us look at just three of these:
Let us deal with these problems in sequence:
1. Any translator who reads English novels with
any regularity will probably experience no difficulty with the collocation ‘die
Tür fällt ins Schloss’ (= the door clicks/snaps/slides [sliding door]
shut). The opposite is true of the second part of the sentence, which is
really an instance of zeugma; the non-zeugmatic version would read ‘die Tür
fällt ins Schloss, der Blick fällt auf die Kabine’. We may consult the corpus
for verb-noun collocations based on the English noun gaze or the plural
noun eyes, or, more specifically, for collocations of gaze/eyes+
verb + room; a few are shown below:
|
ces at
BALKAN, who looks on calmly. His eyes roam along the spines of the books. |
|
she replies with a smile. I let my eyes roam over the rest of her
body. She |
|
m,
smiles faintly, then lets her own
eyes roam over the great sea of upturned |
|
Spike sat
back on his heels and let his eyes roam over Angel's nude form. Gods, |
|
THE GHOST HAS DISAPPEARED. Sidney's eyes roam the yard but he's
nowhere. Co |
|
scar across his throat. His mocking eyes roam the church. KURGAN Kasta |
|
er was in
the shadows watching her. His eyes roamed her every curve. He looked |
|
ite a
pair, actually, she murmured, her gaze roaming his chest in a way that made |
|
Then I look back up at him, letting my eyes
take in his perfect body as I do. H |
|
y. Who knew? Hans' eyes take in his bare feet. MCCLANE
|
|
away
the sweat-soaked sheet. Her eyes take in his bare torso, and w |
|
400.
C. U. OF ED - as his
horrified eyes take in the scene, then he turns to |
|
smelling
the smoke. In the process his
eyes take in Sarah who has the idol
cl |
|
e puts
his hands in his pockets and his eyes wander about the room until they f |
|
SLIVING
ROOM--NIGHT Where she sits. Her eyes wander around the room and then re |
|
"Yeah, the blues are great."
Faith's eyes wander around the cab of the truck. |
|
SLIVING
ROOM—NIGHT Where she sits. Her eyes
wander around the room and then re |
|
I really did mean 'prey'. I let my eyes wander around the room as
I continu |
We find that both gaze and eyes
are always used with a genitive or a possessive pronoun in the relevant sense,
and collocate with a wide variety of verbs; for reasons of space, not all of
these can be shown in the above concordance.
We also note from close observation of the
right-hand context (see below) that a literal translation would be rather
ungainly. This is because the collocation eyes/gaze + fall on/to implies
a single line of sight and requires a prepositional object denoting a person or
a thing of limited size; it must be conceded, however, that, given the size of
railway compartments, they may be taken in at one glance, so that we are here
dealing with a borderline case.
|
a hip dance club. His eyes
fall on Maria Mitchell. SERGE
|
|
to come
up with a plan. Then his eyes fall on the wrought iron fenced
gat |
|
leads
Betty up close Adam turns and his eyes fall on the beautiful face of Bett |
|
er. Butch glances to his right, his eyes
fall on something. What he sees |
|
er is
about to sit at his desk when his eyes fall on a new ghetto blaster |
|
leased,
others mumbling angrily. Sikes' eyes fall on George who is gazing at him |
|
rs at
the crowd... ...his eyes fall on Vanity -- his
face |
|
You don't
believe me? (looks around; eyes
fall on kissing couple) There. T |
|
ugh
the security door. Archer's eyes fall on the thumbprint
scan p |
|
here. From nothing. One by one, all eyes fall on the little girl and the |
|
rs at
the crowd... ...his eyes fall on Vanity -- his
face |
|
BILLY BEAR His eyes fall on the rear view mirror. A whi |
|
ing, he
looks all around the room...his eyes fall on a tape dispenser. |
|
eal who
Gandhi is. The prison officer's eyes fall on him. CITY STREET. JOHANN |
|
ple
passing are Jack and Buster. Jack's eyes fall on the placard and he stops |
|
room at
shampoos, cosmetics, until her eyes
fall on a poster of "Gilda"
starri |
|
eally
sorry.. there wasn't time. His eyes
fall on an old blanket. KORBEN |
Thus our translation could read as follows:
... my gaze / eyes take in / wander around / drift around / roam (around) the compartment (cabin).
One variant is
to use the verbs look or glance with a personal subject but,
given the impersonal wording of the source text, this would constitute a less
faithful rendition.
Turning to the second problem, we note that it
would probably be unwise to search for the nouns landscape or scenery
alone, since these are exceedingly common in novels and newspapers. However, a
combination of landscape/scenery and window within a span of 5 or
6 words might do the trick. And indeed the concordancer comes up with the
following results:
|
d his
eyes. Through a curtained window, scenery was whizzing by at dizzying spee |
|
head and
fixate my eyes upon the moving scenery whizzing by the window. I stare |
|
Scully looked out of the window as the
scenery passed by. She seemed to be dozi |
|
impassive
profile, at the brown October landscape passing behind her outside the |
|
t the
window, the rural
scenery: pastures, barns, etc., the othe |
|
om
the window, trying not to see the
landscape reeling outside.
SARAH ( |
|
e stared
out the window and watched the scenery roll by as they headed back into |
|
asn't used
to it. The dark forms of the landscape rolled soothingly past outside |
|
..... Her
eyes fluttered open to a dark landscape rolling past the window. There |
|
r eyes
and looked out the window at the scenery rolling past. "At least the
scen |
|
er sat in
the back seat and watched the scenery fly past the window. He had two |
|
and she takes a sudden interest in the
scenery flying by outside her window.
I |
Our translation can be closely modelled on the
above concordance, and we are spoilt for choice:
While
the landscape (scenery) rolls (flies, rushes, sweeps, etc.) past the window /
flies by (outside) the window, ...
The third translation problem is of the same
ilk as the preceding one. It shows that reliable intuitions about English and a
firm grounding in dictionary use are essential prerequisites for non-native
translation, for there needs to be some initial awareness that dictionary
equivalents such as suspicious or mistrustful for mißtrauisch
are unacceptable in the present instance. To arrive at a suitable equivalent,
the translator must key the word hand and the context word water
into the concordancer. As shower scenes are a popular feature of modern novels
or films, the computer will come up with a good handful of examples, among
which we find the phrases ‘testing the temperature’ and ‘to test it’, which are
exactly equivalent to German mißtrauisch in this case. We may also
observe a number of noun + verb collocations which highlight the fact that the
German animistic structure cannot be imitated in English. Simply put, from an
English point of view, a hand cannot ‘do’ anything independently of its
‘owner’; the quasi-meronymic relation between person and hand has to be made
explicit in English (e.g. Arthur – his hand).
|
Take it, quickly! Arthur dips his hand under the
water and grasps the hilt |
|
tops,
fascinated. CLOSE UP of Amy's hand
under the surface of the water. The |
|
ned the
tap for the shower and held her hand under the running water.
Unlike the |
|
jaw.Fucking martyr.He pushed a hand under
the streaming water, testing the temp |
|
camp. CAMILLE Here, you put your hand under the water and I'll pump f |
|
he
switched on the shower and stuck her hand under the flow of water.
The warm w |
|
d. He's
crouched by the tub, naked, one hand under the flow of water from the ta |
|
water’s
cooling, anyway." He dipped his hand in the water to test it.
Barely |
|
r
you. She pumps and DAVID puts his
hand under the cool, flowing water -- |
|
camp. CAMILLE Here, you put your hand under the water and I'll pump f |
|
camp. CAMILLE Here, you put your hand under the water and I'll pump f |
|
urning on
the cold faucet, he stuck his hand under the stream of water. He stare |
We can now complete our translation of the
sentence in question:
While
the landscape (scenery) rolls (flies, rushes, sweeps) past the window / flies
by (outside) the window, I dip (put,
stick) my hand under (into, in) the running (flowing, flow of) water to test it
/ to test the temperature.
The second example I want to cite is from an
estate agent’s brochure advertising a luxury apartment in Mallorca. In this
case, the obvious thing to do is to compile a corpus of similar brochures in
English. It then becomes fairly easy to spot text-type-specific equivalents
such as the following:
|
(estate
agent) German |
search
for |
(estate
agent) English |
|
Eigentumsanlage |
apartment |
apartment
community |
|
... bietet höchstes Wohngefühl |
feeling,
living, feeling + living |
...
creates a true feeling of luxurious living |
|
die Wohnung ist als neuwertig zu bezeichnen |
as
new/as good as new + apartment ->
no results; condition + apartment |
the
apartment has been maintained in pristine condition |
|
... und einem unverbaubaren und spektakulären
Blick über das Mittelmeer ... |
view |
an
unobstructable and spectacular view of the Mediterranean |
With the exception of the noun + adjective
collocation spectacular + view, which can be found in Oxford
Collocations, none of the above equivalents have been recorded in the
available dictionaries, and dictionary searches would indeed lead one astray,
suggesting, as they do, equivalents such as owner-occupied flat for Eigentumswohnung
or as (good as) new for neuwertig. While these equivalents might
be used in a classified ad for a cheap holiday flat, they would clearly be
inappropriate in a glossy brochure featuring an apartment worth 3 million
euros.
Internet searches can be used for similar
purposes. Three major strategies that non-native translators can avail
themselves of are worth mentioning, viz. a) intelligent guessing, b) Boolean
searches and c) searching for negative evidence of non-occurrence:
a)
Intelligent
guessing: it
usually pays to have a healthy mistrust of the dictionary. Thus, I was not
happy with the equivalents the dictionaries had to offer for Jachthafen
(marina) or Pilgerstadt
(place of pilgrimage), and surmised that yacht harbour or pilgrimage
town would be more acceptable in the relevant contexts.[3] Assuming that one’s second language
is British English, the procedure to follow in such cases is to access a search
engine such as yahoo.co.uk, select the options ‘UK only’ or ‘Ireland only’, to
type in ‘yacht harbour’ in inverted commas and to check the results for
relevance by accessing websites. Here are a few more examples of this kind of
intelligent guessing, which can also be resorted to when the dictionary fails
to provide any help:
|
German original |
Dictionary equivalents |
Intelligent guess |
English translation |
|
Nach Palma
und dem berühmten Jachthafen Puerto Portals |
marina |
yacht
harbour |
the
famous yacht harbour of Puerto Portals |
|
die Pilgerstadt Kevelaer |
place
of pilgrimage |
pilgrimage
town |
the
pilgrimage town of Kevelaer |
|
weltweiter TV-Empfang |
- |
worldwide
TV reception |
worldwide
TV reception |
|
Eingangsbereich |
- |
entrance area |
entrance
area |
b)
Boolean
searches: these
make use of operators such as ‘and’, ‘or’ or ‘near’. Suppose you had to
translate the following sentence into English:
Die Nachbarschaft ist international. Nach Palma und
dem berühmten Jachthafen Puerto Portals
sind es jeweils nur etwa 3 Minuten mit dem Auto.
The keywords which can be
combined in a search are 3 minutes and car (or train, rail,
etc.). Yahoo.co.uk will come up with a host of examples containing the phrase 3
minutes by car, which gives us
Palma and the
famous yacht harbour of Puerto Portals are only three minutes by car. (or: It
is only three minutes by car from Palma and the famous yacht harbour of Puerto
Portals.)
c)
Negative
evidence of non-occurrence: if the translator wants to be 100 per cent certain that a literal
rendering of ‘bietet höchstes Wohngefühl’ by means of ‘offers a feeling of high
living’ may not fit the bill, the Internet can provide negative evidence of
non-occurrence. It is sufficient to type ‘offers a feeling of high living’ (or
some such phrase) into a search engine, which will probably come up with no
examples at all, or else alert the translator to differences in meaning between
high living and luxurious living.
Corpus and Internet searches may also be
combined. Consider the following sentence:
Die Anlage liegt inmitten
eines wunderschön angelegten Parks mit großem Außenpool und Liegeflächen.
The plural noun Liegeflächen will be
hard to find in any available dictionary. Two strategies can be pursued to
locate a natural equivalent: a) type ‘swimming pool and’ into the corpus or the
search engine or b) perform a Boolean search on ‘swimming pool and’ and
‘luxury apartment’, and scan the results for an appropriate rendering of Liegeflächen,
such as sun terraces.
Needless to say, Internet or corpus-based
strategies can be fruitfully combined with traditional strategies. A few
illustrations follow:
An der Südseite vor dem
Salon, dem Hauptschlafzimmer und einem der Gästezimmer befindet sich eine sehr
große überdachte Terrasse.
The dictionary equivalent given under the
headword überdachen is roof over. The non-native translator
should now check this equivalent against Internet evidence; on yahoo.co.uk she
will find just one example of the past participle roofed-over in
attributive use, and no native-speaker evidence of the collocation roofed-over
+ balcony/terrace (terraces are at ground floor level). This suggests
that a rendering such as ‘roofed-over balcony’ - which, incidentally is highly
common in Internet advertisements by non-native speakers - would be of doubtful
acceptability. The next step, then, is to consult a dictionary of synonyms,
where roof over will be mentioned in conjunction with its hyperonym cover.
The collocation balcony + covered can then be checked against the
Web, where a host of native-speaker examples will be found. Thus, the following
translation can be proposed:
Facing south in front of the living room, the master bedroom and one of the guestrooms is a very large covered balcony.
A similar strategy can be used to translate a
phrase such as automatische Lichtsteuerung bei Bewegung. This will
remind the translator of the near-synonym Bewegungsmelder, whose English
equivalent (passive infrared detector alarm, or PIR for short),
if unknown, can be looked up in a dictionary. It can then be keyed into a
search engine and will lead the translator to a number of sites whose owners,
apart from producing PIRs as security devices, also offer other light-saving,
sensor-operated gadgetry. She can then translate the phrase as sensor-operated
lighting which registers movement or presence detection system (for
lighting management).
The following expression prompted a similar
search:
dreidimensionale Künsterglastüren im Hauptbad
The compound noun Künstlerglass may
cause a comprehension problem. It is absent from the 10-volume Duden and from
the website of the research project on German vocabulary (http://wortschatz.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/inhalt.htm).
A yahoo search, however, yields a number of results, some of which suggest an
association with companies such as Rosenthal. A Boolean search on Rosenthal
and glass will then reveal that stained glass or even art
glass may be used to render the somewhat cryptic German compound.
Another traditional strategy worth mentioning
is to consult dictionary entries for words of the same word family. Gallagher
(1982: 116) uses this strategy to find acceptable equivalents for the following
sentence:
Kein Zyklus gleicht
dem anderen.
Gallagher comments:
The
dictionary equivalents given under the catchword gleichen are
unacceptable in this particular instance. In some dictionaries, however, workable
equivalents may be found under the catchword gleich:
(i)
No two have been alike. (W/H.)
(ii)
No fingerprint is exactly like another. (O-HSG-ED)
(iii)
No two fingerprints are exactly alike. (ibid.) (underlines mine)
All three equivalents can be used to render the
German sentence. To arrive at this rendering, Gallagher was able to explore his
linguistic intuitions about his native language, a possibility not open to many
non-native translators. The latter therefore have to take the intermediate step
of checking the dictionary equivalents found at both gleichen and gleich
against corpora and the Internet.
I adopted Gallagher’s procedure in translating
the following sentence from an image brochure:
Der Kreis Borken
gehört zu den geburtenstärksten im Lande.
Since there is no single English adjective
which can render German geburtenstark, I had to resort to another
element of the same word family, namely the noun birth figures (or birth
rate). The next step consisted in finding suitable collocations, such as high
+ figures and boast + figures, leading to the
following translation:
The district of Borken boasts some of the highest birth figures in Northrhine-Westphalia. (or: the district of Borken boasts [has] one of the highest birth rates in Northrhine-Westphalia).
Lastly, definitions in monolingual dictionaries
or encyclopaedias, which may be regarded as concise parallel texts, may be exploited
to retrieve suitable translation equivalents.
3.2 Syntax
In recent years the Saussurean dichotomy
between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ has rapidly been losing ground in the face of new
evidence from corpus linguistics. Especially problematic is the structuralist
assumption that lexis and syntax are neatly distinct and autonomous systems
which do not impact on one another other than through the operation of general
semantic rules and regularities. Lexico-grammars such as Francis, Hunston and
Manning (1996, 1998) provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary: there is,
in fact, a high degree of interdependence between communicative, lexical and
syntactic choices or, more simply put, between sense and syntax.[4]
Corpus and Internet enquiries as well as the above-mentioned
lexico-grammars enable the translator to compare lexico-syntactic subsystems
across languages at a hitherto unimagined degree of delicacy, and they allow
the translator trainer to operationalise the translation process to a very
considerable degree. This is particularly true with pragmatic texts such as
newspaper articles, treaties or manuals, and only slightly less so with
literary texts (to the extent that novelists or poets defamiliarize language
use).
An example from my own translation work
may serve to illustrate how contrastive analysis can be operationalised at the
sentence level; the source and target texts are excerpts from the website of a
German photographer:
|
German original |
English translation (D.S.) |
|
Für Journalisten
bieten wir einen umfassenden Service, der sich schon oft arbeitserleichtend
bewährt hat: |
We provide a comprehensive service for journalists,
which has often contributed to lightening their work load: |
Fig. 5: German original and English translation of a
website
The last sentence of this excerpt is not easy
to translate into idiomatic English, and the superficial difference in
structure and length between the source and target versions might suggest that
the English translation is merely a matter of intuition. It is of course true
that, in practice, the experienced translator’s accumulated savoir-faire
or, to put it in cognitive-psychological terms, her ‘linguistic and procedural
knowledge’ will lead her to automatically transpose the noun Zeitverluste to a verb.
Yet such a strategy can be operationalised in
terms of lexico-syntactic subsystems. The translator has to convey the concept
of ‘Zeitverlust’ in neutral English style. The central lexical items available
for this purpose are noun + verb collocations, notably waste time, lose time and
squander time, rather than the highly
formal compound noun time loss[5]; of these noun + verb collocations,
waste time is the most common. The
lexico-syntactic subsystem containing the verb waste in this sense is described in Francis, Hunston and Manning
(1996: 289-290). There the translator learns that verbs concerned with passing
time in a particular way typically enter the colligational pattern verb + noun
phrase + -ing -clause; she therefore
has to construct her target sentence around this pattern, so that the
prepositional phrase wegen
Ortsunkenntnis, Taxi, Mietwagen, Hotelbuchung, Übersetzer has to be converted into an –ing- clause and the compound nouns have
to be translated by means of verbs. The translator may now consult a corpus or
the Internet for the construction under discussion, and will find the German
meaning expressed as follows:
Plan
the storage of your equipment so that you will not waste time unnecessarily in
looking around for them.
Firms
spend half their time dealing with lawyers ...
Your
effects unit really saved me from lounging around and wasting time unnecessarily.
We
should not spend our time worrying about the future ...
Don’t
spend too much time shopping ...
But
before Mr Major and Mr Blair waste more time trying to double-guess them ...
...
waste management time dealing with such a challenge
it
does not waste much time worrying about its pride being hurt
...
skilled reserves who can jump back in without losing time learning a routine
This leaves her with possible chunks such as
waste
time (unnecessarily) / spend too much time / lose time (unnecessarily) ...
worrying about / dealing with / looking for / trying to ...
Note that such corpus-based analysis throws up
a far greater variety of equivalences than intuition, precisely because it is
based on a comparison of lexico-syntactic subsystems. The last step is to
ferret out an English equivalent for the German collocation Zeitverlust + ersparen, such as save (s.o.)
from wasting time, help (s.o.) avoid wasting time or stop (s.o.) [from] wasting time. Thus, we arrive at the following
variants:
|
This |
will
save |
you |
from |
|
These
services |
will
stop |
you |
(from) |
|
|
will
help you (to) avoid |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
wasting
time |
(unnecessarily) |
(in) |
|
losing
time |
(unnecessarily) |
(in) |
|
spending
too much time |
|
(in) |
|
trying
to find your way around |
and
looking for ... |
|
having
to find your way around |
and
worrying about ... |
|
finding
your way around |
and
dealing with (such matters as) |
In a way such an analysis exemplifies the
interplay between the open-choice principle and the idiom principle (Sinclair
1991). Each ‘open’ choice of a particular variant entails specific lexical and
syntactic constraints on the surrounding discourse, the central open choices in
the present example being the verbs stop/save
and waste/spend. An alternative
corpus search could start with the concept of ‘problem avoidance’, yielding
less faithful but functionally equivalent translations such as this will save you the hassle / the trouble
of finding your way around Mallorca ..., these services will save (you) hours of searching for ..., these services will save hours of research
time for journalists, etc.
My second example comes from a textbook of translation (Lozes and Lozes 1994):
|
English original |
French translation |
|
A
silver lining to antiques fair in Dublin As
long as I can remember, the Irish Antiques Dealers’ Fair, which opens next
Monday in the Mansion House in Dublin, has been preceded by groans of despair
from the antique trade. This year, the 27th year of the event is
no exception. |
Eclaircie sur le Salon
des Antiquaires de Dublin Aussi loin que je me
souvienne, le Salon des Antiquaires irlandais, qui ouvre ses portes lundi
prochain à Mansion House à Dublin, est précédé de pleurs et de gémissements
de la part des gens de la profession. Cette année, vingt-septième
anniversaire de cette manifestation, ne fait pas exception. |
Fig. 1: An excerpt from a textbook of translation
(Lozes and Lozes 1994: 42-43)
For the inexperienced translator, both the
English original and the French translation may at first glance appear to
contain a large number of ‘creative’, one-off occurrences. As a
corpus-linguistic investigation shows, nothing could be further from the truth.
Leaving aside the headline for the moment, we can see that the English text
begins with a fixed expression (as long
as I can remember), which can be rendered by means of a small number of
equally fixed French equivalents (d’aussi
loin que je me souvienne, aussi loin
que je me souvienne). Here the relevant English and French lexico-syntactic
subsystems resemble each other perfectly.
It is somewhat different with the
lexico-syntactic subsystem comprising the subject and the verb of the relative
clause. This pattern can be glossed as follows:
|
Event/Public Place (trade fair, museum, shop, ...) |
Verb Expressing Start of Event |
|
The
Irish Antique Dealers’ Fair |
opens |
Fig. 2 : A lexico-syntactic subsystem
In Francis, Hunston and Manning (1996: 8) this
pattern is subsumed under a more general pattern termed the ‘”Begin” and “Stop”
Group”. Other typical members of this group include:
|
The
talks |
began |
|
The
negotiations |
ended |
Fig. 3: Examples of a lexico-syntactic subsystem
comprising verbs denoting ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’
It is fairly easy to locate the same
lexico-syntactic subsystem in newspaper French; one then finds that the verb ouvrir is not normally used on its own
in this pattern:
|
Event/Public Place (trade fair, museum, shop, ...) |
Verb Expressing Start of Event |
|
le musée de l’Aventure
Peugeot |
ouvre ses portes |
|
le Salon de
l’agriculture |
ouvrira ses portes |
Fig. 4 : A segment of the French lexico-syntactic
subsystem noun (event) + verb (expressing start of event)
A trawl through a newspaper-based corpus also
reveals that an indirect object is often appended to the phrase ouvrir ses portes, a variant which Lozes
and Lozes (1994) fail to mention. This indirect object commonly takes the form aux visiteurs or au public.
In their commentary Lozes and Lozes
(1994: 43) describe their rendition of open
by ouvrir ses portes as an instance
of ‘étoffement’ (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958: 9), or syntactic augmentation. It
thus appears as if they have used a text-specific translation procedure which
falls outside the scope of contrastive linguistics, especially since the
target-language syntagm differs in structure and length from the
source-language syntagm. However, as our corpus investigation has shown, the
augmentation in question might equally well be regarded as a regular
equivalence amenable to contrastive analysis. Similar analyses could be made
for all the other translatorial choices evident in the above texts. This is
because, as corpus linguists (Gross 1988, Stubbs 1997, Altenberg 1998) have
demonstrated, up to 80 per cent of all text is made up of habitual word
associations, while the remaining 20 per cent consists of language of regular
composition or slight deviations from the collocational norm.
Even such apparent deviations,
however, can usually be elucidated and translated by recourse to the relevant
lexico-syntactic subsystem. A pertinent example is provided by the headline of
the above article. As Lozes and Lozes note, we are dealing with an imaginative
reworking of the proverb every cloud has
a silver lining (the obvious implication being that the antique trade is in
the doldrums at the moment of writing, but that the future does not look all
too bleak); even such seemingly creative reworkings of common metaphors
frequently become a standard part of media language, as the following headlines
and text excerpts show:
Silver lining for Patriarch
in Irish Derby
Silver lining for Eddery and
Dunlop
Nationalism’s Silver Lining
there may be a silver lining
to this particular censorious cloud ...
the silver lining to rail
privatisation is that ...
Although Lozes and Lozes (1994)
implicitly suggest that their rendition of silver
lining by éclaircie rests on
their translatorial intuition, it could be shown that the French meteorological
term éclaircie and the English
compound noun silver lining occupy
much the same position within a metaphorical subsystem or ‘thought metaphor’
that could be glossed as follows: ‘pleasant or unpleasant events or situations
can be likened to pleasant or unpleasant weather conditions’. The following
French newspaper headlines lend evidence to this:
Eclaircie sur les valeurs de
l’habillement
Eclaircie sur la ligne
Paris-Alger
Eclaircie sur le front de
l’emploi aux Etats-Unis
This shows that Lozes’ and Lozes’
rendition is particularly fortunate because they have hit upon a close
equivalent in the same lexico-syntactic subsystem.
3.3 Text Type
We have already seen that lexis is, to a
certain extent, text-type specific. Thus, whereas as new may be a
perfectly good rendering of neuwertig in normal conversation, it would
have an air of infelicity in a glossy brochure featuring a 3-million-euro
apartment, where a phrase like in pristine condition seems more
appropriate. As demonstrated above, such text-type-specific lexis can be
located with comparative ease in subject-specific corpora.
Sometimes, however, it is not necessary to have
recourse to an entire corpus, as in the case of highly stereotyped text types
such as powers of attorney, where the download of two or three sample texts
will usually do the trick. To translate the following German power of attorney
into French, I started by searching for French samples of this text type on the
Internet (see, for example, http://www.guidesocial.ch/Documents/1/1_68.htm
or www.staffeurs.org/pouvoir.pdf
) and then followed the traditional procedure of close textual analysis. The
other translation problems evident in the German text were solved by means of
the procedures outlined in sections 3.1 and 3.2:
German
original
|
French translation |
|
V o l l m a c h t Hiermit bevollmächtigen
wir, Peter Mustermann, geboren
1.7.1890 und Maria Mustermann, geboren
1.7.1890 beide wohnhaft
Mustermannweg 8, Braunschweig, Deutschland, Frau Marie Dubois, geboren
1.7.1890 wohnhaft Pétaouschnock in unserem Namen die
behördlichen Angelegenheiten wahrzunehmen, die im Zusammenhang stehen mit der
Errichtung der Remise am bisher bestehenden Gebäude – Cadastre 4341 – in
Pétaouschnock. Diese Vollmacht umfasst
ausschließlich das Vertretungsrecht gegenüber der zuständigen Baubehörde oder
den staatlichen Stellen, die für die Baugenehmigung, -überwachung und
–abnahme zuständig sind. Weitergehende Rechte sind
mit dieser Vollmacht nicht verbunden. Der deutsche Text ist nur als Grundlage der französischen Übersetzung zu sehen. Bei Meinungsverschiedenheiten über deren Auslegung ist ausschließlich der französische Text maßgebend. |
Pouvoir (F) / Procuration
(CH) Les soussignés: Monsieur Peter Mustermann et Madame Maria Mustermann, demeurant /
domiciliés Mustermannweg 8, Braunschweig, R.F.A donnent pouvoir, par la présente, à Madame Marie Dubois, demeurant / domiciliée Pétaouschnock d’effectuer en leur nom les démarches administratives ayant trait à la
construction de la remise attenante au bâtiment déjà existant (cadastre 4341)
situé ... La présente procuration se limite au pouvoir de représentation auprès de
la direction départementale de l’Equipement ou auprès des autres
administrations compétentes en matière de permis de construire ainsi que de
contrôle et réception des travaux. Aucun autre droit n’est accordé au titre de la présente. En cas de différend sur l’interprétation de la présente, seul le texte français (et non pas le texte-source allemand) fera foi. |
4. Conclusion
From what has been said two
important conclusions emerge, one of which concerns translation practice and
translator training, while the other touches upon translation theory.
1.
It has
been shown that non-native translators with an excellent command of the L2 can
reliably carry out highly demanding inverse translations provided that they are
familiar with a range of corpus- or Internet-based translation strategies.
These strategies, as well as the linguistic research on which they are based
(notably pattern grammar), should become part of the stock-in-trade of any
professional translator intending to work into the L2, and of any language
student struggling to translate difficult pragmatic or literary texts. To this
end, translator trainers and modern language department staff must develop a
more detailed, step-by-step guide to the strategies in question.
2.
In
cases where two texts are designed to assume the same, or closely similar
functions in two cultures (‘Funktionskonstanz, or “functional invariability”,
as skopos’, cf. Reiß and Vermeer
1984), corpus-based contrastive analysis can supply objective criteria for the
discovery and assessment of any translation solution, thereby providing a more
‘scientific’ basis for translation criticism and laying the foundations for a
fusion of contrastive linguistics and translatology. In this view translation
solutions, rather than being one-off, parole-based
occurrences, turn out to be instantiations of sense-structure complexes
existing in more than one language; the translator’s task is to identify the
key semantic concepts contained in the text to be translated, to study
target-language lexico-syntactic subsystems encoding these concepts and to
build the target text around the patterns of colligation, collocation and text
grammar found in these subsystems. In the rare event, however, that the client commissions
a translation whose function differs from that of the source text, contrastive
linguistics and translation science must part company. The relevance of this
latter type of translation situation has been somewhat overstated by
translation theorists (cf. Schmitt 1990 and 1999 on translation practice), and
this has led to a similar overstatement of the differences between contrastive
linguistics and translation studies.
Altenberg,
Bengt (1998) ‘On the phraseology of spoken English: the evidence of recurrent
word combinations’ in Cowie, Anthony P. (ed.), Phraseology: Theory, Analysis
and Applications, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 101-122.
Cloutier, Yvan (2002) ‘Searching the Internet
in the Age of Globalization – the Deep Web’. Terminology Update 35/4:
12-16.
Covell Waegner, Cathy (2000) ‘Company brochures in German and English or, Why native speakers are still needed for high-profile translation: Interactive Exercise’, in: Forner, Werner (ed.), Fachsprachliche Kontraste oder: Die unmögliche Kunst des Übersetzens. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 83-96.
Francis, Gill, Susan Hunston and Elizabeth Manning (ed.) (1996) Collins Cobuild Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs. London: HarperCollins.
Francis, Gill, Susan
Hunston and Elizabeth Manning (ed.) (1998) Collins
Cobuild Grammar Patterns 2: Nouns and Adjectives London: HarperCollins.
Friederich, Wolff (1969) Technik
des Übersetzens. Englisch und Deutsch. Munich: Hueber.
Gallagher, John D. (1982) German-English
Translation. Texts on Politics and Economics. Munich: Oldenbourg.
Gerloff, Pamela A. (1988) A look at the
translation process in students, bilinguals and professional translators.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University (unpublished PhD thesis)
Gross, Maurice (1988) ‘Les limites de la phrase figée’ Langages 90: 7-22.
Hunston, Susan and Gill Francis (2000) Pattern Grammar. A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of
English. Amsterdam:
Benjamins. (Available: http://shop.ebrary.com)
Hunston, Susan (2001) ‘Colligation, Lexis, Pattern and Text’ in Scott,
Mike and Geoff Thompson (eds.) (2001) Patterns of Text. In honour of Michael
Hoey. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 13-34. (Available:
http://shop.ebrary.com)
Lozes, Jean and Moniques Lozes (1994) Version anglaise / Filière LEA.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Reiß, Katharina and Hans-Jörg Vermeer (1984) Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Schmitt, Peter A. (1990) ‘Die Berufspraxis der Übersetzer: Eine Umfrageanalyse’ in Mitteilungsblatt für Dolmetscher und Übersetzer, Special Issue, February 1990.
Schmitt, Peter A. (1999) ‘Marktsituation der Übersetzer’, in Snell-Hornby, Mary et al. (eds.), Handbuch Translation, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 5-13.
Siepmann, Dirk (1996) Übersetzungslehrbücher:
Perspektiven für ihre Entwicklung. Bochum: Brockmeyer.
Sinclair, John (1991) Corpus, Concordance,
Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, John (2003) Reading Concordances.
Edinburgh: Pearson.
Smith, Veronica/Klein-Braley, Christine (1985) In other words. Arbeitsbuch Übersetzung. Munich: Hueber.
Stubbs, Michael
(1997) ‘Eine Sprache idiomatisch sprechen: Computer, Korpora, kommunikative
Kompetenz und Kultur’, in Mattheier, Klaus J. (ed.), Norm und Variation
Frankfurt: Lang, 151-167.
Vinay, Jean and Darbelnet, Jean (1958) Stylistique comparée du français
et de l’anglais. Méthode de traduction. Paris: Didier.
[1] The non-native who intends to
translate into English should work thoroughly and methodically through such
textbooks as Smith/Klein-Braley (1985), Friederich (1969) and Gallagher (1982)
(preferably in this order, which reflects an ascending scale of difficulty).
[2] Although a native speaker of
German, I regularly translate into English and French.
[3] See table below. Pilgerstadt
was used in a caption (Maria X., Floristin in der Pilgerstadt Kevelaer)
underneath a photograph. A rendering that made use of the dictionary equivalent
would have read rather awkwardly (*in the place of pilgrimage of Kevelaer).
[4] This clearly undermines the
Sausurrean dichotomy (cf. Sinclair 1991): in the absence of an independent
syntactic core of language, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to specify
the essence of an abstractly conceived language system; at best, we may assume
a large number of heterogeneous lexico-syntactic subsystems or patterns[4] or, as Sinclair (1991: 105) has it,
an ‘integrated sense-structure complex’. The only unifying feature would be the
notion of pattern as such, as described in Hunston and Francis (2000) and
Hunston (2001). Given the impossibility of generalizing across instances of
language use to arrive at a unifying theory, the distinction between
‘langue’-centred contrastive linguistics and ‘parole’-centred translatology
becomes blurred accordingly.[4] The time is thus ripe for a
paradigm shift which will considerably widen the scope of contrastive
linguistics. (see also the conclusion of this article)
[5] An alternative, stylistically less
satisfying rendering may be based on the noun + participle collocation lost time: this will help you avoid lost
time (+ -ing-clause / from + noun phrase).