The Process of Translation

The Relation of Translating to Translation Theory

The purpose of the theory of translating is to be of service to the translator. It is designed to be a continuous link between translation theory and practice.

The  Approach

There are two approaches to translating (and many compromises between them): (1) you start translating sentence by sentence, for say the first paragraph or chapter, to get the feel and the feeling tone of the text, and you deliberately sit back, review the position, and read the rest of the SL text; (2) you read the whole text two or three times, and find the intention, register, tone, mark the difficult words and passages and start translating only when you have taken your bearings.

Which of the two methods you choose may depend on your temperament, or on whether you trust your intuition (for the first method) or your powers of analysis (for the second). Alternatively, you may think the first method more suitable for a literary and the second for a technical or an intitutional text. The danger of the first method is that it may leave you with too much revision to do on the early part, and is therefore time-wasting. The second method (usually preferable) can be mechanical; a translational text analysis is useful as a point of reference, but it should not inhabit the free play of your intuition. Alternatively, you may prefer the first approach for relatively easy text, the second for a harder one.

The Textual Level

Working on the text level, you intuitively and automatically make certain ‘conversions’, you transpose the SL grammar (clauses and groups) into their ‘ready’ TL equivalent and you translate the lexical unit into the sense that appears immediately appropriate in the context of the sentence.

Translation is pre-eminently the occupation in which you have to be thinking of several things at the same time.

The Referential Level

You should not read a sentence without seeing it on the referential level. Whether a text is technical or literary or institutional, you have to make up your mind summarily and continuously, what it is about, what it is in aid of, what the writer’s peculiar slant on it is.

The Cohesive Level

Beyond the second factual level of translating, there is a third, generalised, level linking the first and the second level, which you have bear in mind. This is the ‘cohesive’ level, it follows both the structure and the moods of the text

The Level of Naturalness

For vast majority of texts, you have to ensure: a) that your translation make sense; b) that it reads naturally, that it is written in ordinary language, the common grammar, idioms and words that meet that kind of situation. Normally, you can only do this by temporarily disangaging yourself from the SL text, by reading your own translation as though no original existed.

You have to make that passage sound natural, which will usually depend on the degree of formality you have decided on for the whole text.

You have to bear in mind that the level of naturalness of natural usage is grammatical as well as lexical (i.e., the most frequent syntectic structures, idioms and words that are likely to be appropriately found in the kind of stylistic context), and, through appropriate sentence connectives, may extend to the entire text.

In ‘communicative translation’, whether you are translating an informative text, a notice, or an advert, ‘naturalness’ is essential. That is why you cannot properly if the TL is not your language of habitual usage. That is why you so often have to detach yourself from the SL text, if there is time, you should come back to your version after an interval. You have to ask yourself for others; Whould you see this, whould you ever see this.

Naturalness is easily defined, not so easy to be concrete about.

Natural usage, then, must be distinguished from ‘ordinary language’. However, unnatural translation is marked by interference, primarily from the SL text, possibly from a third language know to the translator including his own, if it is not the target language. ‘Natural’ translation can be contrasted with ‘casual’ language (Voegelin), where word order, syntactic strutures, collocations and words are predictable. You have to pay special attention to:

•        Word order. In all languages, adverbs adn adverbials are the most mobile components of a sentence, and their placing often indicates the degree of emphasis on what is the new information (rheme) as well as naturalness. They are the most delicate indicator of naturalness.

            He regularly sees me on Tuesdays. (Stress on ‘regularly’)

            He sees me regularly on Tuesdays. (No stress)

            On Tuesdays he sees me regularly. (Stress on ‘Tuesday’)

 

•        Common structures can be made unnatural by silly one-to-one translation from any language, e.g.:

•        Cognate words

•        The appropriateness of gerunds, infinitive, verb-nouns