西方翻译研究方法论：70年代以后

Chapter one

An overview of Western Translation Studies before the 1970s 1. Translation in Antiquity

The first traces of translation date from 3000 BC, during the Egyptian Old Kingdom, in the area of the First Cataract（大瀑布）, Elephantine, where inscriptions in two languages have been found. It became a significant factor in the West in 300 BC, when the Romans took over wholesale many element of Greek culture, including the whole religious apparatus. (Newmark, 1982/2001:3)

Cicero is often considered the founder of Western translation theory, and the first to comment on the process of translation and offer advice on how best to undertake the task.

In his

On

the

Orator(Deoratore,55BC)，Cicero set the terms which were expanded by Horace, Pliny the Younger, Quintillian, Saint Jerome, and Catholics, Reformers and Humanists from the 14th to the 17th centuries. Cicero?s approach to translation is “sense-for-sense” and not “word-for word”. That means a translator should bear in mind the intended meaning of the SL author and render it by means of TL words or word-order which does not sound strange to the TL readers. For Cicero, “if I render word for word, the result will sound uncouth, and if compelled by necessity I alter anything in the order or wording, I shall seem to have departed from the function of a translator.” (Bassnett-McGuire, 1980:43)

Pliny the Younger practiced and propagated translating as a literary technique. For him, the most useful thing is to translate Greek into Latin and Latin into Greek. This kind of exercise develops in a precision and richness of vocabulary, a wide range metaphor and power of exposition, and imitation of the best models leads to a like aptitude for original composition. Though Pliny emphasizes the importance of translation, he unlike Cicero, prefers “word for word” translation to “sense for sense” one.

Horace argues for the revitalization of well-known texts through a style that would “neither linger in the one hackneyed and easy round; neither trouble to render word by word with the faithfulness of a translator”, not treat the original writer?s beliefs with too easy a trust, and would avoid stylistic over-sensationalism “so that the middle never strikes a different note from the beginning, nor the end from the middle.”(Robinson, 1997:15) His criticism of the faithful translator is often turned on its head to support translational fidelity to the original.

Saint Jerome, a Christian ascetic and Biblical scholar, translated the New Testament from Hebrew into the popular, non-literary Latin. His Letter to Pammachius (395AD) on the best kind of translator is the founding document of Christian translation theory. St Jerome points out that “in translating from the Greek, --I render not word for word, but sense for sense.” (Robinson, 1997:25) He criticizes the word-for-word

approach because, by following so closely the form of the ST, it produces and ‘absurd’translation, concealing the sense of the original. The sense-for-sense approach, on the other hand, allows the sense or content of the SL to be translated. In these poles can be seen the origin of both the ?literal vs free? and ?form vs content? debate that has continued until modern times. (Mnday, 2001：20) 2. Translation in Renaissance and Reformation

At the time of the Renaissance, there was a flood of translations largely from Greek. The spirit of Renaissance inspired and gave rise to numerous translations of scientific and religious texts in England and elsewhere (Nida, 1964:14). A major force behind these translations was aristocratic interest and patronage. These translations into vernaculars legitimized vernacular writings because they promised access to Latin culture. However, the translations from Latin to vernaculars reproduced the systems of containment and control that sustain the Latin academic tradition.(Copeland, 1991: 224-8)

The 16th century witnessed an ideological movement known as “Protestantism”. Though this movement spread itself throughout Europe, its overwhelming presence was felt in Germany. In the field of religion, church authorities forbade the lay people to read the Bible in their native languages.

Martin Luther, the dominant figure in the field of translation and “father of the modern German language”, translated the Bible into High German and used an ideological weapon of the Protestant movement against the Roman church. Luther?s Bible translations reveal to us how translation is used by conflicting social classes as an ideological weapon. In 1530, Luther wrote the self-promoting and nationalistic Sendbrief vom Dolmestschen(Circular Letter on Translation), in which he criticized Latin, Hebrew and other languages for being full of “stone and stumps”, in contrast to his smooth German writing. As a poet, writer and translator, Luther reformed the German language in ways that can still be felt today. He carefully and systematically worded out his seven principles of meaning-oriented translation: 1) shift of word-order;

2) employment of model auxiliaries;

3) introduction of conatives, whenever required;(可以增补必要的连词) 4) use of phrases, where necessary to translate single words in the original text;

5) shifts of metaphors to non-metaphors and vice versa;

6) careful attention paid to explanatory accuracy and textual variants.(Nida, 1964: 15)

In his 1540 manuscript The way of translating well from one language into another, Etienne Dolet postulates 5 principles of good

translation: 1)

the translator must understand perfectly the content and intention of the author whom he is translating;

2)

the translator should have a perfect knowledge of the language from which he is translating and an equally excellent knowledge of the language into which his is translating;

3)

the translator should avoid the tendency to translate word to word, for to do so is to destroy the meaning of the original and to ruin the beauty of the expression;

4)

the translator should employ the forms of speech in common usage;

5)

through his choice and order of words, the translator should be able to produce the total overall effect with an ?appropriate tone?.

Abraham Cowley advocates freedom in translation and treats word-for-word translation as one mad man translating another. His defense of free imitation provides Dryden with his primary foil.

John Dryden is often seen as the first systematic translation theorist in the West. Like his contemporaries, he is engaged in the gentlemanly search for secular principles of translation. For him, ‘gentlemanly’largely means ‘amateurish’, means refusing to put

on scholarly airs and means resisting the temptation to write lengthy knit-browed treatises on the subject. In the preface to his translation of Ovid?s Epistles in 1680, he reduced all translation to three categories:

Metaphrase, “turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into another”, which corresponds to literal translation;（词译 或逐词翻译）

Paraphrase, “turning with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense,” which corresponds to his sense-for-sense translation;（释译）

Imitation, “where the translator assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both occasions; and taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the groundwork, as he pleases” (Munday, 2001:25) , which corresponds to Cowley?s very free translation and is more or less adaptation.（拟译）

Dryden criticizes translators who adopt metaphrase as being a “verbal copier”, ( Robinson, 1997:172 )Similarly, he rejects imitation, for “the imitation of an author is the most advantageous way for a translator to show himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead.”(ibid.) “Imitation and

verbal (literal) version are, in my opinion, the two extremes which ought to be avoided” (ibid.) and therefore, he proposes “the mean betwixt them”, i.e. paraphrase. The triadic model proposed by Dryden exerts considerable influence on later writings on translation. (Munday, 2001: 25 ) Although his three “new” terms for translation are from new, he remains an attractive and accessible popularizer of this long tradition.

An important work relating to translation studies in the 18th century was Alexander Fraser Tytler?s The Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791). Rather than Dryden?s author-oriented terms to be that “in which the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another language as to be as distinctly apprehended, as strongly felt, by a native of the country to which that language belongs as it is by those who speak the language of the original work.

According to Tytler, there are three general principles: 1)

the translation should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original work;

2)

the style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of the original;

3)

the translation should have all the ease of the original composition.

Tytler?s first principle refers to the translator having a

perfect knowledge of the original, being competent in the subject and giving a faithful translation of the sense and meaning of the author. His second principle deals with the style of the author and involves the translator both identifying the true character of this style and having the ability and correct taste to recreate it in the TL. The third principle talks of having all the ease of composition of the ST. Tytler regards this as the most difficult task and likens it to an artist producing a copy of a painting. He himself recognizes that the first 2 principles represent the 2 widely different opinions about translation. They can be seen as the poles of faithfulness of content and faithfulness of form, or even reformulations of the sense-for-sense and word-for-word diad of Cicero and St. Jerome. (Munday, 2001: 26-7) 3. Romanticism in translation Studies

While the 17th century had been about imitation and the 18 the century about the translator?s duty to recreate the spirit of the ST for the reader of the time, the Romanticism of the early 19th century discussed the issues of translatability and untranslatability. (Munday, 2001: 27). At the beginning of the 19th century, a second, more philosophical and less empirical, tradition began to open within translation studies. This tradition is connected, on the one hand, with the rise of philology as a university discipline, and on the other hand,

with the literary movement of Romanticism. It exalts the translator “as a creative genius in his own right, in touch with the genius of his original and enriching the literature and the language into which he is translating.”（Bassnett-McGuire, 1980:65）

Novalis provides a significant twist to Dryden?s triadic division when he speaks of grammatical translation (“translations in the ordinary sense of the word”), transformative translations (“authentic body forth the sublimest poetic spirit), and mythic translations (“translations in the noblest style”, which “reveal the pure and perfect character of the individual work of art”) (Robinson, 1997:213)

Similarly, Schlegel writes that, in translating Homer, it is necessary “to get away from the notion of literal precision so commonly associated with fidelity”, because “truth must be the translator?s highest, indeed virtually his only, mandate. ” (ibid.: 217) And Goethe comments on Wieland?s translation of Shakespeare: “I honor meter and rhyme, for that is what makes poetry, but the part that is really, deeply, and basically effective, the part that is truly formative and beneficial, is the part of the poet that remains when he is translated into prose. This residue is the pure, complete substance, which a dazzling external form can simulate, when it is lacking, or conceal, when it is present.” (ibid. : 222)

These statements seem to be reworking of the classical Latin theories of rhetorical freedom. In fact, they represent a major challenge to them because the re-working they seek privileges the reproduction of the foreignness of the ST and not its domestication. The fullest expression of the strategy may be found in Freidrich Schleiermacher?s “On Different Methods of Translating” (1813), which is described as “the major document of romantic translation theory, and one of the major documents of Western translation theory in general” (ibid.:225)

Friedrich Schleiermacher is recognized as the founder of modern Protestant theology and of modern hermeneutics (诠释学). He begins with a reflection on generalized translation: there is translation everywhere where we have to interpret a discourse, whether it be a foreigner speaking to us in a language which is not our own, a peasant calling out to us in a dialect, an unknown person speaking words we can barely understand, or whether we examine words we uttered previously. In all these cases, we are lead to an act of translation—and the most difficult one is not necessarily the one concerning a foreign language. Schleiermacher distinguishes this generalized translation from restricted translation, i.e. translation between languages. Nevertheless, not every act of translation between languages is necessarily translation. A second distinction

must be made between translator and interpreter. And this has to be done on the following grounds: Interpreting would be more concerned with “business matters”, translation more with the domains of ?science? and ?art? (i.e. of philosophy and literature). This distinction is confirmed by another one: interpreting is essentially oral, translation essentially written. These distinctions depend on mere common sense, and he attempts to base them on another, more essential distinction: the distinction of the objective and the subjective. Everywhere the author appears as the mere servant of an objective content, there is interpreting--oral or written. Everywhere he tries to express himself, in the field of ?science? or ?art?, there is translation.

It is the responsibility of the translator to transmit those works of science and art that make up the historical life of a language. He puts forward 2 methods to do translation: either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.

His preference is for the former, moving toward the writer: “If the target-language readers are to understand, they must grasp the spirit of the language native to the author, they must be able to gaze upon the author?s imitable patterns of thinking and meaning; but the only

tools that the translator can offer them in pursuit of these goals are their own language, which nowhere quite corresponds to the author?s, and his own person, his own inconsistently clear understanding of, and vacillating admiration for, the author.” (ibid.: 228-9)

His influence on translation studies is enormous. Munday (2001:28) notes the statement of Kittel and Polterman that “practically every modern translation theory—at least in the German language area—responds, in one way or another, to Schleiermacher?s hypotheses.”

W. von Humboldt, a great figure of German classicism but in touch with all the tendencies of his time, devotes his whole life to an activity that borders on philosophy, literature and philology, but that can only be defined as a constant concern with language. The ideas introduced into Germany and, at least, a complementary document to his works on linguistic theory.

The first fact of which he becomes aware in his experience as a translator is the difficulty and even the impossibility of establishing equivalence between two languages, however closely related these may be. No word of any language is totally equivalent to the corresponding word in the other, for a fundamental fact of linguistic connotation is expressed in one language and hardly reproduced or translated into another language. Only words which denote objective

realities can establish any kind of equivalence. Humboldt is so convinced of this ?impossible? situation that he even postulates the aporetical nature of the basic virtue in the spiritual matrimony into which the translator enters with the text: fidelity. The more the translator strives to force the text into a mathematically calculated accuracy in establishing equivalence, the more he diverges from this intended fidelity.

For him, he aims and uses of translation are : 1)

to make known the original to those who lack the relevant linguistic knowledge;

2) 3)

to acquire an in-depth knowledge of the text; to enter into the spirit of the work once one has mastered the words of same.

Of all these uses, the last is the most important, for the best translation s the one which destroys itself. The quality of a translation will depend on each of the above-mentioned aims to which one gives primacy. The translation that merely endeavors to make the work known to the reader will demand an adaptation to the linguistic levels of the latter, which will in certain cases entail a deviation from strict fidelity to the original text. When a knowledge of the text prevails, the translator must be governed by literal fidelity,

and in the third case, he will have to sacrifice fidelity to meaning.

4. Western Translation Studies in Modern Times

The 20th century witnessed a radical change in Western translation studies. In fact, 5 developments have had a significant effect on the theory and practice of translation during the 20th century:\\ 1) rapid development of structural linguistics;

2) application of methods in structural linguistics to deal with special problems of translation;

3) the United Bible societies, which conducted international conference of translation and began publishing a quarterly journal (Bible translation), for which they were in close contact with linguists;

4) publication of “Babel”, which helps translators get to know about new tools and aids and become aware of the changing conditions; 5) the development of various projects on machine translation which has progressed through different phases and provided us with important insights into semantic theory and of structural design.

At the start of the 20th century, Schleiermacher and Humboldt?s ideas were rethought from the vantage point of modernist movements which prized experiments with literary form as a way of revitalizing

culture. And the main trends in translation studies in the next tow decades were also rooted in German literary and philosophical traditions,

in

romanticism,

hermeneutics,

and

existential

phenomenology. Translation theories at this time assumed that since language is not so much communicative as constitutive in its representation of thought and reality, translation is seen as an interpretation which necessarily reconstitutes and transforms the foreign text. Translation is a focus of theoretical speculation and formal innovation.

5. Development since the 1970s

According to Bassnett (1998:108-11), one simple way of understanding the changes and developments in translation studies during the last three decades of the 20th century is through the application of keywords to specific periods. The keyword of the 1970s is history; in 1980s culture and in 1990s visibility

In fact, the surge in translation studies since the 1970s has witnessed different areas of Holmes? map come to the fore.(Munday,2004:14) The linguistic-oriented ?science? of translation has continued strongly in Germany, but equivalence-based theories gradually have come under attack and begun to give way to function-oriented translation research, which nowadays takes into

account the wider context within which translation takes place in the receiving culture. The Hallidayan influence of discourse analysis and systemic functional grammar has been predominant in the circle of translation studies, esp. in Germany. The late 1970s and 1980s also saw the rise of a descriptive approach that had its origins in comparative literature and Russian Formalism.

The growth of translation studies as a separate discipline is a success story of the 1980s. the subject has developed in may parts of the world and brings together work in a wide variety of fields, including linguistics, literary study, history, anthropology, psychology, and economics (Bassnett, 1993: i-ii) At the same time, translation studies have achieved institutional authority, manifested by and unprecedented proliferation of academic training programs, professional associations, publications and conferences.

The greatest achievement gained in the 1980s is the cultural turn, which looks at translation from the cultural studies angle. Translation Studies has begun to move closer to Cultural Studies, as it is increasingly incorporating ethnographical and anthropological methods.

The 1990s saw the incorporation of new schools and concepts, with Canadian-based translation and gender research led by Sherry Simon, the Brazilian cannibalist school promoted by Else Vieria, postcolonial translation theory with the prominent figures of ht Bengali scholars

Tejaswini Niranjana and Gayatri Spivak and the cultural-studies-oriented analysis of Lawrence Venuti, who concerns the visibility of the translator is linked not only to economic changes, to increased globalization and hence greater need for information that can cross linguistic and cultural frontiers, but to a change in the status of translation itself.

Globalization has become a “buzz word” in debates of social sciences and in the media. It is not just a word, but it denotes very real developments in today?s world, and even more so in the world of the 21st century. Since knowledge and methods from other disciplines have been integrated into translation studies, translation studies are increasingly recognized as an interdiscipline par excellence. Although most scholars today do agree that translation studies isn?t a sub-discipline of (applied linguistics), the questions ‘where do we stand’and ?where do we go?? are being discussed more and more vigorously.

In spite of that, we see two opposing directions of globalization and localization, which are equally related to what is going on within the discipline of how we deal with these different strands within our discipline. The ongoing linguistic versus cultural studies debate, which in not solved until the end of the last century and may be brought into the 21st century, seems to show that different approaches defend their comer and criticize other approaches, up to now, we are far from developing more and more agreement within

the discipline. Notes:

1. Western translation studies refer to those outside East-Asian countries, especially those from European countries.

2. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-143BC) is probably the most famous Roman rhetor and rhetorician. His formulation of what has come to be known as ?Ciceronian Rhetoric? has dominated Western thinking on the subject.

3.

Pliny the Younger (61/62-113) is largely known for the ten books of

private letters he published on a wide variety of subjects. His Letter to Fusus Salinator (84CE?), written almost 150 years after Cicero?s books on the orator, adds two new ingredients to Cicero?s theory. The first is the nudging value of translating in both directions, an exercise Cicero never imagined; the second is open competition with the original writer, a kind of one-upmanship whose ultimate aim is the amassing of expressive capital.

4. 5.

Horace, was one of the greatest of all Roman lyric poets and satirists. St. Jerome (347-419), born to a wealthy Christian family in

Yugoslavia, was revered throughout the Middle Ages and well into the modern era as the ?official? translator of the Bible, the author of the Vulgate Latin translation that in matters of doctorial dispute took

precedence over all Hebrew and Greek texts until the 16th century and beyond.

6.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was the founder of the 16th century

reformation. He was born and raised in the linguistic area of East Middle Germany where a normative language, a literary language of some sophistication, had already developed. His use of this East Middle Germany variant of literary German for his translation of the Bible encourages the further establishment and standardization of this form. 7. Etienne Dolet (1509-1546) a French humanist printer, translator and scholar, is often considered as the first martyr of the Renaissance, and specially as the first martyred translator。（多雷）

8. Abraham Cowley(1618-1667) is an English poet hugely admired in his own day as adapter of the Pindaric ode(品达尔体颂歌) to English poetry. 9.John Dryden (1631-1700) is the predominant English literary figure of his day; poet, dramatist, translator and critic. His reputation today as the first translation theorist reflects a movement in his remarks toward system.

10.Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813) is a Scottish historian best known for his accessible syntheses of other people?s work. His Essay on the Principles of Translation is bland, inoffensive, unoriginal, but extremely accessible, and is often cited as the last expression of the Enlightenment spirit in the theory of translation.

11. Goethe (1749-1832）is one of the greatest of all German writers and the major figure in German Romanticism. His fragmentary, aphoristic remarks on translation may be found in his autography “Poetry and Truth”.

12. Jeremy Munday, a senior lecturer in Spanish in Department of Linguistic, Cultural and translation Studies and deputy of Center for Translation Studies (CTS), University of Surrey, UK, got his PhD at the University of Bradford, which he had been teaching there until he came to Surrey in 2000. his research interests are in DTS, style and ideology in translation, corpus-based translation studies, history of literary translators in the 20th century and interaction between the visual and written words in translation. His major publications include Introducing Translation Studies: theories and application (2001) and Translation: an advanced resource book (with Basil Hatim 2004) 13. James Holmes(1924-86) , poet, translator and one of the founding fathers of Translation Studies as an academic discipline, was born and raised on a farm in central Iowa, USA. He was educated at William Penn College, Haveford, and Brown University. In 1949, he went to Holland as a Fulbright exchange teacher to teach English at an international Quaker college. In 1950, he moved to Amsterdam, where he began to work as a freelance editor and translator of Dutch poetry. In 1956, he became the first non-native speaker of Dutch to be

awarded the Matinus Nijhoff Prize, the leading Dutch award for translation. In 1964 he became a literary lecturer, and later a senior lecturer, in Translation Studies at the University of Amsterdam. In 1978, he co-founded a new discipline, Dutch Gay Studies (Homostudies). He helped to launch numerous academic and non-academic gay emancipation initiatives. His workshops on gay literature at the General Literary Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam gained much renown. He retired in 1985 and died from Aids-related illness on the following year.

14. Eugene. A. Nida(1914-) received his BA in 1936 from the University of California at Los Angeles. Having earned his degree in Greek, he enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics（SIL）. Then he pursued a MA in Greek New Testament at the University of Southern California. In 1941, he began a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Michigan and completed it in two years. In 1943, he was ordained in the Northern Convention, and joined the staff of the American Bible Society(ABS) as a linguist. He was made Associate Secretary for Versions from 1944-46, and from then until he retired in the 1980s, he was Executive Secretary for Translations. Upon joining the ABS staff, he set on a series of field trips in Africa and Latin America. On these visits he worked with missionary translators on linguistic problems and searched for potential indigenous translators, often using his SIL

connections. These site visits led him to see that his most important role for ABS Translations? interests would not be limited to checking translation for publication, but of educating translators, and providing them with better models, resources, training, and organization for efficiency. This he managed to do through onsite visits, teaching and training workshops, and through building a translations network and organizational structure that became the global United Bible Societies Translation Program. At the same time, Nida was determined to produce a theory that would foster effective communication of the Good News across all kinds of cultural and linguistics barriers. His books Toward a Science of Translating(1964) and the Theory and Practice of Translation (with C. R. Taber1969) were his first efforts to expound his theory on what he called dynamic equivalence translation. How significant, revolutionary, and convincing this new approach proved to be can be seen in the fact that hundreds of Bible translations hve now been effectively carried out with this methodology. His From One Language to Another (with Jan de Waardn1986) is the summative explication of functional equivalence translation. As a scholar, teacher, leader, influencer, conceptualizer, innovator, and influential theoretician, Nida is very possibly unsurpassed in the history of the Bible Society movement in terms of global impact. His work, his organization, his ideas and the organization he put into place represent

a wastershed for the movement and for Bible translation. Thanks to him, the world of Bible translation and translation studies has been enriched and challenged into an exciting field of study and discourse. In 2001, the American Bible Society salutes Nida?s contribution to the Bible cause at a Translation and Similarity Conference in NY city and names its Eugene A. Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship in his honor. His other major publications include Language Structure and Translation (1975), Translating Meaning (1982), Language, Culture and Translating (1993) and The Sociolinguistics of Interlingual Communication (1996)

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