explanation.

This strategy is paricularly effective if the culture-specific item is repeated several times in the source text. e) Translation by paraphrase using a related word.

This strategy tends to be used when the concept expressed by the source item is lexicalized in the target language but in a different form, and when the frequency with which a certain form is used in the source text is significantly higher than would be natural in the target language.

f) Translation by a paraphrase using unrelated words.

If the concept expressed by the source item is not lexicalized at all in the target language, the paraphrase strategy can still be used in some contexts. Instead of a related word, the paraphrase may be based on modifying a superordinate or simply on unpacking the meaning of the source item, particularly if the item in question is semantically complex.

• The main advantage of the paraphrase strategy is that it achieves a high level of precision in specifying propositional meaning. A disadvantage is that the expressive or evoked meaning of the translated item is lost. It can also result in an awkward style.

• g) Translation by omission

• If the meaning conveyed by a particular item is not of vital importance to the overall message of the text, translators can and often do omit translating the word in question.

• There is inevitably some loss of meaning when words are omitted, it is thereby advisable to use this strategy only when advantages of producing a smooth, coherent translation outweigh the value of rendering a particular meaning accurately in a given context.

• h) Translation by illustration

• This is a useful strategy if the item which lacks an equivalent in the target language refers to a physical entity which can be illustrated.

• Equivalence above word level:

• Collocations

• We will focus on lexical patternings which are not rule-governed. In particular, we will address the difficulties encountered by translators as a result of differences in the lexical patterning of the source and target languages.

• Collocation

The tendency of certain words to co-occur regularly in a given language. Collocations are non-compositional, since meaning does not always account for collocational patterning.

e.g. pay a visit

make a visit

*perform a visit

• When two words collocate, the relationship can hold between all or several of their various forms,combined in any grammatically acceptable order: achieving aims, aims having been achieved, achievable aims, the achievement of an aim.

• On the other hand, it is often the case that words will collocate with other words in some of their forms but not in others, e.g.

bend rules

rules are *unbendable (inflexible)

• Patterns of collocation reflect the preferences of specific language communities for certain modes of expression and certain linguistic configurations; they rarely reflect any inherent order of the world around us.

• Every word in a language has a range of items with which it is compatible.

• Range = set of collocates

• Some words have a much broader set of collocates than others (e.g. shrug + shoulders versus run+ company, business, show, car, nose, wild, debt, bill, river, course, water etc.)

• There are two main factors that influence the range of a word:

a) The level of specificity

b) The number of senses it has. Most words have several senses and tend to attract different sets of collocates for each sense:

run ”manage”: business, company, institution

run ”operate or provide”: service, course.

• Collocational ranges are not fixed; words attract new collocates all the time. They do so naturally, by the process of analogy, or because speakers create unusual collocations on purpose, e.g.

Could real peace break out afer all? (J. le Carre, The Russia House)

• Collocation and register

Some collocations are untypical in everyday language but frequent in specific registers, e.g.

biased error (statistics)

vigorous depressions (meteorology)

dull highlights (photography)

• Collocation and meaning

A very important skill of a translator is recognizing collocations.

Compare:

dry weather

dry clothes

dry river

dry wine

dry voice („cold)

• Taking account of collocational meaning rather than substituting individual words with their dictionary equivalents is therefore crucial at the first stage of translation.

• Note that even when there appears to be a close match between collocational patterns in two languages, they may not carry the same meaning, e.g. run a car ”own, use, and be able to maintain the car financially”

• Collocations: problems in translation

a) The effect of source text pattering

It can be assumed that as long as an equivalent collocation can be found in the target language, the translator will not be confused with the structural differences between the two

• A good method of detaching oneself from the source text is to put the draft translation aside for a few hours. One can then return to the target text with a better chance of responding to its patterning as a target reader eventually would, having not been exposed to, and therefore influenced, by the source text.

• b) Misinterpreting the meaning of a source-language collocation.

• A translator can easily misinterpret a collocation in the source text due to interference from the native language. This happens when a source language collocation appears to be familiar because it corresponds in form to a common collocation in the target language.

• The conflict between accuracy and naturalness

The nearest acceptable collocation in the target language will often involve some change in meaning.

Example:

Hard drink vs Arabic alcoholic drink

• Whether the translator opts for the typical Arabic collocation or tries to translate the full meaning of hard drink, will depend on whether the difference in meaning is significant in a given context. A certain amount of loss, addition, or change of meaning in translation is unavoidable, as language systems tend to be too different to allow for exact copying of meaning in most cases.

• The use of established patterns of collocation helps to distinguish between a smooth translation, one that reads like an original, and a clumsy translation which sounds foreign.

• c) culture-specific collocations:

• Some collocations reflect the cultural setting in which they occur. If the cultural settings differ, there will be instances where the source text will contain collocations which contain unfamiliar associations of ideas to the target reader.

• d) Marked collocations in the source text

• Ideally, the translation of a marked collocation will be similarly marked in the target text. This is, however, often constrained by the target language and the purpose of the translation.

• Translation Theory

• Equivalence above word level:

• Idioms and fixed expressions

• Idioms are frozen patterns of language which allow little or no variation in form and are often fully non-compositional.

• Normally, one cannot:

- change the order of words in an idiom

- delete a word from an idiom

- insert a word to an idiom

- replace a word with another word

- change the grammatical structure (e.g. passivize)

• Fixed expressions (having said that, as a matter of fact, Ladies and Gentlemen, all the best) allow little or no variation in form. Unlike idioms, they have transparent meanings.

• Idioms and fixed expressions in translation

The majority of translators cannot hope to achieve the same sensitivity that native speakers seem to have for judging when and how an idiom can be manipulated. This is why the Code of Professional Ethics of the Translators’ Guild of Great Britain states:

”A translator shall work only into the language of which he has native knowledge. Native knowledge is defined as the ability to speak and write a language so fluently that the expression of thought is structurally, grammatically, and idiomatically correct”

• The main problems that idiomatic and fixed expressions pose in translation relate to two main areas: the ability to recognize and interpret an idiom correctly, and the difficulties involved in rendering the various aspects of meaning that an idiom or a fixed expression conveys into the target language.

1. The interpretation of idioms

The first difficulty that a translator comes across is being able to recognize that s/he is dealing with an idiomatic expression. Generally speaking, the more difficult an expression is to understand and the less sense it makes in a given context, the more likely a translator will recognize it as an idiom:

• it’s raining cats and dogs

• storm in a tea cup

• food for thought

• blow someone to kingdom come

• the powers that be

• trip the light fantastic

• There are two cases in which an idiom can be easily misinterpreted:

a) Some idioms seem transparent because they offer a reasonable literal interpretation and their idiomatic meanings are not necessarily signalled by the context. Many English idioms have both literal and idiomatic meanings, e.g

take someone for a ride (”deceive someone”)

Some writers play on both meanings of such idioms.

b) An idiom in the source language may have a very close counterpart in the target language, which is structurally similar but has a different meaning.

• The ability to distinguish senses by collocation is an invaluable asset to a translator working from a foreign language. Using our knowledge of collocational patterns may not always tell us what an idiom means, but it could help us in many cases to recognize an idiom, especially one that has both a literal and a non-literal meaning.

• The translation of idioms: difficulties

a) An idiom or a fixed expression may have no equivalent in the target language.

Idioms and fixed expressions are culture-specific (e.g. Merry Christmas, say when).

b) An idiom or a fixed expression may have a similar counterpart in the target language, but its context of use may be different (e.g. they might have different connotations), e.g.

to go to the dogs (”to lose one’s good qualities”):

E: refers to a person or a place

German: refers to a person only; often means ”to die”

c) An idiom may be used in the source text in both its literal and idiomatic meaning at the same time. Often, the play on both meanings cannot be successfully reproduced in the target language.

d) The convention of using idioms in the written discourse, the context in which they can be used, and their frequency of use may be different in the source and target languages.

Languages such as Arabic and Chinese which make a sharp distinction between written and spoken discourse and where the written discourse is associated with a high level of formality avoid using idioms in written texts.

• The translation of idioms: strategies

• The way in which an idiom or a fixed expression may be translated into another language depends on many factors. They include, for example, the significance of the specific lexical items which constitute the idiom, as well as the appropriateness on the inappropriateness of using idiomatic language in a given register in the target language.

• The acceptability of using the strategies discussed further will then depend on the context in which a given idiom is translated.

a) Using an idiom with a similar meaning and form.

b) Using idiom with a similar meaning but a dissimilar form.

c) Translation by paraphrase

This is the most common way of translating idioms when a match cannot be found in the target language or when it is inappropriate to use idiomatic language in the target text because of differences in stylistic preferences of the source and target languages.

d) Translation by omission

The idiom may be omitted in translation either because it has no close match in the target language, or its meaning cannot be easily paraphrased, or for stylistic reasons.

e) The strategy of compensation

One may either omit or play down a feature such as idiomaticity at the point where it occurs in the source text and introduce it elsewhere in the target text. This strategy may be used to make up for any loss of meaning, emotional force, or stylistic effect which may not be possible to reproduce directly at a given point in the target text.

• Grammatical equivalence

• Grammatical features are not universal across languages: every language makes a different selection from a large set of possible grammatical distinctions such as time, gender, number, aspect, proximity, shape, animacy, etc.

• Grammar

• Grammar is a set of rules which determine the way in which units such as words and phrases can be combined in a language and the kind of information which has to be made regularly explicit in utterances.

• Languages differ widely in the range of notions they choose to make explicit on a regular basis.

• Grammar

• Grammar has two main components: morphology and syntax.

• Morphology covers the structure of words, the way in which the form of a word changes to indicate specific contrasts in the grammatical system.

• Syntax covers the grammatical structure of phrases, clauses, and sentences. The syntactic structure of a language imposes certain restrictions on the way messages may be organized in that language.

• Grammatical structures versus lexical structures

• The lexical structure of a language is open-ended.

• Grammatical categories belong to a closed set.

• Grammatical choices are typically expressed morphologically, but they may also be expressed syntactically, e.g by means of word order.

• Grammatical structures versus lexical structures

• The most important difference between grammatical and lexical choices, from the point of view of translation, is that the grammatical choices are largely obligatory, while lexical choices are largely optional.

• Grammatical structures versus lexical structures

• Languages which have morphological resources for expressing certain categories (e.g. number, tense, or gender) have to express these categories regularly. Languages which do not have morphological resources for expressing these categories do not have to express them except when they are felt to be relevant.

• Grammatical structures versus lexical structures

• For example, English nouns have to marked for singular or plural. In Chinese and Japanese number functions as a lexical rather than grammatical category; Where necessary, number is indicated in these languages by means of adding a word such as „several” or a numeral such as „one” or „five” to the noun.

• Grammatical structures versus lexical structures

• Another difference between grammatical and lexical structure is that the former is less sensitive to change. Grammatical change occurs over a much longer time scale than lexical one.

• Grammatical rules are also more resistant to conscious manipulation by speakers. Deviant grammatical structures are hardly ever accepted by speakers

• Grammatical categories across languages

• Differences in the grammatical structures in the source and target languages often result in some change in the information content of the message during the process of translation.

• The change in the information content of the message may be in the form of omitting information specified in the source text. If the target language lacks a category which exists in the source language, the information expressed by that category may have to be ignored.

• Number

• Not all languages have a grammatical category of number.

• Languages that do have the grammatical category of number may differ in terms of viewing countability.

• Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese do not inflect nouns for number.

• English inflects nouns for singular and plural (i.e. one and more than one).

• Number

• A small number of languages, such as Fijian (spoken in Fiji), even distinguish between singular, dual, trial, and plural (Robins, 1969).

• Number

• A translator working form a language which has number distinctions into a language with no category of number has two options:

a) omit the relevant information on number

b) encode this information lexically

• Number

• Gender

• Gender is a grammatical distinction according to which a noun is classified as either masculine or feminine in some languages.

• In most languages that have a gender category, the masculine term is usually the dominant or the unmarked form of the noun. In effect, this means that the use of feminine forms provides more specific information than the use of masculine forms. It rules out the possibility of masculine reference, while the use of masculine forms does not rule out the possibility of feminine reference.

• Gender

• Gender disctinction are in general more relevant in translation when they concern human referents. Gender distinctions in inanimate objects and in animals are sometimes manipulated in English to convey expressive meaning, but they normally do not pose problems in non-literary translation.

• Person

• The category of person relates to the notion of participant roles. In most languages, pasrticipant roles are systematically defined through a closed system of pronouns.

• The most common distinction is that between the first person (the speaker), second person (the addressee), and third person (other than the speaker and the addressee).

• Some languages spoken in North America have fourth person, which refers to „a person or thing distinct from one already referred to by a third person form” (Robins, 1964). (compare the Polish swój, as in On spotyka swojego nauczyciela)

• Person

• A large number of European languages have a formality/politness dimension in their person system. In such languages, usu. The second- or third-person plural pronoun is used with a singular addressee to express politeness or non-familiarity (German Sie as opposed to du, Russian vy as opposed to ty)

• Person

• In translating pronouns from English to Russian, German, French, Italian, Greek, Spanish or Polish decisions may have to be made along such dimensions as gender, degree of intimacy between participants, etc. This information may or may not be readily recoverably from the context.

• Translating in the other direction will frequently involve loss of information along the dimensions in questions.

• Grammatical equivalence 2

• Tense and aspect

• Tense and aspect are grammatical categories in a large number of languages.

• The form of the verb in these languages usually indicates two main types of information: time relations and aspectual differences.

• Time relations have to do with locating events in time (usu. past, present, and future)

• Aspectual differences have to do with the tempral distribution of an event (completion, non-completion, continuation, momentariness)

• Tense and aspect

• There are differreces across languages with respect to how they make distinctions in temporal location or distribution.

• Some languages do not have the formal category of tense and aspect (Chinese, Malay). The form of the verb in these languages does not change to express temporal or aspectual disctinctions. If necessary, time reference may be indicated by using various particles and adverbials.

• Tense and aspect

- Time as the optional category in Chinese; reliance on context

• Tense and aspect

• Although the main use of the grammatical categories of tense and aspect is to indicate time and aspectual relations, they do not necessarily perform the same function in all languages.

• For example, in Hopi languages, the main function of tense system is to signal modal meanings (certainty, possibility, obligation).

• Tense and aspect

• Even apparently similar tense system might have subtle differences; for example, both English and Japanese have quite a similar system of tense marking (in Japanese the suffixes –ru and –ta mark non-past and past respectively). However, not every past tense verb in English can be translated as a past tense in Japanese. This is because non-past is often used in japanese to express personal judgement.

• Tense and aspect

• Voice

• Voice is a grammatical category that defines the relationship between a verb and its subject. In active clauses, the subject is the agent of the action; in passive clauses, the subject is the affected entity.

• Languages which have a category of voice do not always use the passive with the same frequency. German uses the passive much less frequently. The same is true of Russian and French where reflexive structures are used more often to indicate passive meanings.

• In English, passive voice is much more common than in other languages (inc. Polish). Scientific and technical writing in English relies heavily on passive structures to give the idea of objectivity and distance.

• Voice in translation

• Rendering a passive structure by an active structure in tanslation can affect the amount of information given in the clause, the linear arrangement of semantic elements (i.e. agent and the affected entity), and the focus of the message. On the other hand, the overuse of passive structure in the target text may result in stylistic awkwardness.

• The most important thing to bear in mind as far as the voice is concerned are:

- The frequency of use of the active, passive, and similar structures in the source and target languages,

- Their respective stylistic value in different text types

- The function(s) of the passive in each language

• The idea is not to replace an active form with an active one and a passive form with a passive one; it is always the function of a category rather than the form it takes that is of great importance in translation.