Adequate, literal and free translations

The problems of equivalence and adequacy in T.

E and A are used when we try to render the same meaning (factual and emotional) in another language. If we can't find equivalence we produce an adequate text which fulfils the same function. E of the source and TL items may be found on the level of morpheme, word, phrase, clause, sentence, paragraph and the whole text as a linguistic entity.

Functionally-oriented approach to the theory of equivalence.

Equivalence can be said to exist only between factors equally present in the source text and in the TL text. Those TL factors that are not contained in the SL can hardly be said to be equivalent because there's no textual basis of comparison. It doesn't make much sense to speak of equivalence in this cases. Here adequacy is better term. According to the theory of equivalence some scholars subdivided T into 3 groups:

1. equivalents (don't depend upon context) e.g. ill

2. analogues (adequate but not equivalent)

3. adequate substitutions (choose words or phrases that relate the same notions, but you have either to generalize or to specify the notion that exists in the SL) e.g. father-in-law, sibling

Levels of equivalents

Formal equivalents (forms coincide): The sun disappeared behind a cloud – Солнце скрылось за тучей.

Semantic equivalents (meanings coincide): Troops were airlifted to the battlefield – Войска были переброшены по воздуху на поле боя. We use addition but we render semantic meaning. The sum of semantic components is the same.

Situational equivalents is based between the utterances that differ both in linguistic devices used and in the semantic components expressed, but nevertheless, describe the same extralinguistic situation.

“to let someone pass” – уступить дорогу

Formal equivalence alone is insufficient. In fact the example given above represent two types of semantic equivalence.

Pragmatic equivalence – a close fit between communicative intent and the receptor's response, is required at all levels of equivalence. It may sometimes appear alone, without formal or semantic equivalence, as in this case.

e.g. С днем рождения – “Many happy returns of the day”

Is present in all types of T on all levels.

Adequate, literal and free translations.

Adequate T may be defined as determined by semantic and pragmatic equivalence between the original and TL text.

Cases of formal equivalence without semantic or pragmatic equivalence are usually described as literal translation.

Композитор – compositor («наборщик»)

Черри Орчард (Cherry Orchard) – «Вишневый сад»

God bless my soul – “Боже, благослови мою душу» вместо «Господи, помилуй»

Free T consists in pragmatically unmotivated additions and omissions of semantic information.

“She burst out crying” – слезы показались на глазах прелестной малютки.

Adequate T is guided by the principle of losses and their compensation. Some marginal elements of information may be lost in T some of them may be compensated for by the use of different devices, techniques and methods on different levels, sometimes in a different portion of a message. This principle is the main when you translate poetry.

e.g. но Ваше дело рисковое – you job is damn risky

подкинуть идейку – to sell the idea

Lecture 4.

The problems of lexical equivalence and lexical transformations.

Three types of lexical meaning that should be rendered in T:

1. Referential – is also call denotative or logical. It has direct reference to things or phenomena of objective reality, naming abstract notions and processes as well. It is also necessary to distinguish between primary and secondary referential meaning.

2. Emotive – has reference not directly to things or phenomena but to the feelings and emotions, associated with them. It is a connotative meaning created by connotations raised in the mind of the speaker and reader, it is inherent in a definite group of words even when they are taken out of context.

3. Stylistic – is based on stylistic stratification of the English vocabulary and is formed by stylistic connotations. Stylistic and emotive meaninigs are closely connected, as a rule, stylistically coloured words, i.e. words belonging to certain stylistic strata, except the neutral, possess a considerable element of emotive meaning.

e.g. The slang-words “mug”, “phiz” vs. “face”

Rendering referential meaning in T

1. Different vision of objects of reality by different languages and different usage:

Hot milk with skin on it – молоко с пенкой
School-leavers – выпускники школы

2. Divergences in the Semantic Structure
e.g. “gloomy” – 1. темный, мрачный; 2. мрачный, унылый

3. Different valency of collocability. Different valency is the ability of the word to appear in various combinations. Lexical valency of correlated words in different languages is not identical. Words habitually collocated tend to constitute a cliché (big mistake, high hopes, heavy sea, heavy rain, a fly stands on the ceiling, trains run).

T of monosemantic words.

Monosemantic words are comparatively few in number. Monosomy is typical of numerals, names of months, day of the week and so on.

4 main groups:

1. Rendering of Antroponyms. Transliteration and transcription.
e.g. Mary – Мэри, Jack – Джек
Some “telling names” in fiction are translated:

Slap-Dash – Тяпкин-Ляпкин
Humpty-Dumpty

2. Rendering of Geographical names. Render according to the usage of earlier days.
Texas – Техас, Hull – Гулль
in some cases they are transcribed: Virginia – is now Вирджиния, not Виргиния
extended names – often translated:
The Cape of Good Hope – Мыс Доброй Надежды

3. Names of institutions, Periodicals, Hotels, Streets, etc.
Usually transcribed.
“Telling names” of old inns and names of streets in historical novels and translated:
The Red Lion – гостиница «Красный Лев»
“Tailors lived in Threadneedle street” – портные жили на улице «Иголка с ниткой»

4. Terms.
Calorie – калория, equator – экватор
different meanings:
e.g. line: 1. конвейер, поточная линия, 2. трубопровод

Words of terminological nature (names of animals, plants, birds):

Translation of pseudo-international words.

When we speak about international words they have more or less similar phonetic form and carry the same meaning.

e.g. algebra, electronics.

Pseudo-international words differ in meaning from language to language either completely (complexion, commutator) or partially (elevator).

Rendering contextual meaning

A contextual meaning arises in the context. It should not be regarded as part of semantic structure of the word. Every word possesses an enormous potentiality for generating new contextual meanings and a contextual meaning possible in one language is impossible in another.
e.g. In an atomic was women and children will be the first hostage – первыми жертвами в атомной войне будут женщины и дети.

Difference in the transfer of info between languages.

Words may have secondary meanings which are dependent on the context. Second language will practically always have the equivalent of the primary meaning but the translator should be very careful as far as matching the secondary meaning.

e.g. Родители – is the interaction of the words “parents” and “ancestors”. It's the case of metonomy which appears in many languages but not every language will have exact equivalent in the other.

The kettle is boiling (but it's the water!) – чайник кипит

плавать на экзамене – to get lost at the exam

Lexical items may also reflect attitudes, emotions in attitudes to purely factual info:

inquisitive vs. curious (любопытный; любознательный)

Each word has different collocational possibilities and a collocational range of equivalent words between languages will not be identical especially in secondary meaning.

e.g. tailor, dressmaker, seamstress.
Handsome man but beautiful woman.

A pack of wolves, a school of fish, a flack of birds.

Sometimes a preposition may change the meaning of the whole structure.

Anxious about, anxious for.

It's not enough for the translator to learn isolated words and phrases. We should know words in contexts and collocations. Only 4% of language units are phraseological. Collocations challenges are far greater in number. So, the translator should learn the most frequently used patterns.

Colour+ emotion: red with anger, blue with cold.

But when we speak about collocations we should assume that they don't coincide in different languages:

слабые успехи – poor progress, правильные черты лица – regular features.

Collocations in different languages use different prepositions

Confident of himself, jump with joy, meet somebody.

Sometimes a shade of meaning may represent a certain difficulty.

e.g. We should do our best do prevent a riot.
e.g. I should do my best to prevent my sister from dating this man.

Sometimes every shade of meaning may have a collocation of its own.

Started smoking. Started to smoke.
He is a free man. He is free of money.

I'm mad about the movie. I'm mad of his tone.

The translation of non-equivalents.

The so-called non-equivalents are the words from the SL which either have no equivalent in the TL or no equivalent denotator in the TC. They may be divided into 2 main groups:

1. realia – words denoting things, objects, features of national life, customs, habits and so on.
e.g. The House of Commons
Fain
Cricket

2. words, which for some linguistic reason have no equivalent in the TL (conservationist).

T of non-equivalents

by direct borrowing (transliteration or transcription)

impeachment, thane, mayor, know-how

by translation loans – House of Commons, brain-drain, backbencher

by descriptive or interpreting translation

landslide, a stringer, wishful thinking

Lexical transformations

1. Concretization – the most frequent device in T from E into R. there's a large group of E words of wide semantic volume and these words belong to different parts of speech. e.g. the nouns (thing, stuff), verbs (go, come, move), etc. As the meaning of such words is relatively vague, they can be used in absolutely different contexts and their valency is therefore extremely broad. A context (microcontext) is necessary to determine their meaning.

e.g. he came in sigh of the lodge, a long, frowning thing of red brick.
e.g. The rain came in torrents.
e.g. two of the shipwrecked seamen died of exposure.
Not infrequently concretization is resorted to as correlated generalizing words in R and in E have different usage.
e.g. “child” has a wider usage in E than in R.

2. Generalization – the device reverse to concretization. There's a tendency in E for differentiation while R uses a more general word.
e.g. “рука” - hand and arm.
In some cases although there's an equivalent in the TL at the same level of abstraction generalization may be necessary for purely stylistic reasons.
e.g. Since the shooting of Robert Kennedy five days ago about 90 Americans have been shot dead.
G is sometimes used in rendering non-equivalents: summary court is translated as дисциплинарный суд.

3. Antonymic T – both lexical and grammatical transformation which substitutes an affirmative construction by a negative or VS. it is usually accompanied with some lexical change usually substituting the antonym for the original word.
e.g. keep the child out of the sun – не оставляйте ребенка на солнце.
It's the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

4. Metonymic T – lexical transformation based on the substitution of contiguous concepts.
e.g. the advantages of sound have nowhere been better understood or utilized than on the Third Programme. (преимущество радио)
e.g. London in July with the sun for once continually shining had become a mad place, stiffing, enclosed, dry. (сухим)

5. Paraphrasing – rendering of the meaning of some idiomatic phrase in the SL by a phrase in the TL consisting of non-correlating lexical units.
e.g. good riddance – скатертью дорога
e.g. in for a penny, in for a pound – назвался груздем...

Lecture 5.

Grammatical equivalence.

The elements of the grammatical structure such as affixes, forms of inflexions and derivation, syntactic patterns, word order, functional words and so on serve to carry meanings which are usually referred to as grammatical (structural) as different from lexical meanings. Grammatical forms of different languages only very seldom coincide fully as to the scope of their meaning and function. As a rule there's only partial equivalence, it means that a meaning of a grammatical form, though seemingly identical in different languages coincide only in 1 part of their meaning and differ in other parts.
e.g. the category of noun in E and R. number – coincide partially (exception – pluralium and singularium tantum).
The category of gender. R – 3 genders. R genders are formally expressed in the following way:
1. through agreement.

2. by the inflectional forms of the noun itself.

3. By means of pronominal substitution.

In R a choice between 2 genders is necessary.

In all all languages there exist the so-called grammatical universals that is categories without which no language can function as a means of communication. They are so-called deep grammatical categories. They usually express process, quality, relation, doer of the action, goal, instrument, cause-fact relations an so on. Forms in which they are manifested differ. The translator's task here is:

1. to assign the correct meaning of the category

2. find an appropriate form in the TL to express the same meaning there taking into account various factors.

a) The meaning inherent in the grammatical form itself: стол (sg, m) — table.
b) The lexical character of the word or word-group used in this or that form: workers of all industries (рабочие всех отраслей промышленности).

с) the factor of style. e.g. at the station John was met by his brother – на вокзале Джона встретил брат.

d) frequency of use – more or less automatic matching.

Grammatical transformations.

1. Transpositions
– is a change in the order of linguistic elements such as words, phrases, clauses and sentences. We resort to it because typical word order in R and E differ. We use it to preserve theme-rheme relations in both languages. In R this division of the sentence is usually expressed by the word-order. What is new is placed at the end of the sentence, theme – at the beginning. In the E we may on the one hand through the word order, but in this case what in new will come at the beginning of the sentence. In E theme and rheme relations are also expressed with the help of articles.
A boy came in – вошел мальчик.
The boy came – мальчик вошел.
Within a complex sentence a similar tendency is observed. In R the first place in occupied by that part of the sentence (main or subordinate clause) which must logically proceed the second. In E the position of both clauses though not quite fixed is in most cases governed by purely syntactical rules and namely in most cases the main clause precedes the subordinate one.
He trembled as he looked up - взглянув наверх, он задрожал

2. Replacements
– are the most common type of grammatical transformation. They effect practically all types of linguistic units.
a) replacement of word form: a novel about the lives of all common people – роман о жизни простых людей.
b) replacement of parts of speech: it's our hope that... мы надеемся, что...
с) replacement of sentence elements – it is sometimes referred to as syntactic restructuring of the sentence in the process of translation. It consists of changing the syntactic functions of words in a sentence, a process very close to transpositions.
He was met by his sister – его встретила сестра.
d) replacement of sentence types – very common transformation of a simple sentence by a complex one and vs. thus, while translating into R it often becomes necessary to render E structures with non-finite verbal forms by means of subordinate clauses, thus turning a simple sentence into a complex one.
e.g. I want you to speak E – я хочу, чтобы ты говорил по-английски.

Unification – when one or more sentences are combined into one complex or compound.

Division – splitting a compound sentence into two or more simple ones.

e) replacement of types of syntactic relations. Both E and R have such types of syntactic relation as coordination and subordination. However, subordination is more characteristic of spoken R and it's often necessary or desirable to replace subordination by coordination while translating from E into R.
e.g. he had a new father whose picture was enclosed.

3. Additions

– are necessitated by what we may call lexical incompleteness of certain word groups in the SL. In E in many cases words are omitted but they can be easily restored from the context while in R their actual presence in the word is necessary.
e.g. gun license – удостоверение на право ношения оружия.

Sometimes additions are required to compensate for the lack of grammatical forms in the TL.
e.g. workers of all industries.

4. Omissions
– reversed to additions, are used to ensure a greater degree of compression and to ….

e.g. summer rains in Florida may be violent, while they last.

Direct Translation techniques:

borrowing

loan translation (calque)

Literal T

Oblique:

transpositions

modulation (sense development)

reformulation of equivalence

adaptation