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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation Massimiliano Morini
University of Udine — Italy
In the following article, an outline of a new linguistic theory of translation is given that can be of use to theorists and practitioners alike. The linguistic theories of the 1950s and 1960s were too normative and a-contextual to account for all the forms and aspects of translation; while the ‘skeptical turn’ of Translation Studies has succeeded in unmasking the ideological quality of all theories, but cannot produce a ‘cybernetics’ of translation, an account of how translation is materially done. A new linguistic approach can produce such a practical account, provided that the pragmatic level of analysis is given a prominent role and that a touch of non-scientific skepticism is maintained. Keywords: translation theory, translation practice, linguistics, pragmatics, text acts, cooperation, politeness, deixis
In what follows, a practice-based, and pragmatically-oriented, linguistic theory of translation is proposed. Formulating a linguistic theory of translation is, on the face of it, as obvious an operation as writing an ichthyological description of fish: translations are linguistic objects, and all those who think about translation must inevitably do so in terms of language. Nevertheless, the recent history of Translation Studies has made such an apparently uncontroversial expression as ‘a linguistic theory of translation’ controversial, and, indeed, suspect. Therefore, a brief historical survey of the discipline is needed before a (new, practical, pragmatic) linguistic theory is outlined.
The pragmatic translator Translation Studies was born as a separate discipline in the 1950s. Though thinkers and translators had been writing about the act of translation for at least a couple Target 20:1 (2008), 29–51. doi 10.1075/target.20.1.03mor issn 0924–1884 / e-issn 1569–9986 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
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of millennia (in the west: since Cicero’s De optimo genere oratorum, around 52 B.C.E.), this corpus of theoretical pronouncements had never been assembled into anything like a coherent whole. In twenty centuries of translating, only a handful of fairly exhaustive essays can be isolated: Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta (around 1420), Alexander Frazer Tytler’s Essay on the principles of translation (1790), and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens (1813). These full-sized treatises, as well as a number of shorter works (Martin Luther’s 1530 Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, Etienne Dolet’s 1540 La maniere de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre), and a host of minor, often repetitive pronouncements, discuss the nature of translation, the methods of translating, or the requirements of a good translator in very general terms. In the 1950s and 1960s, scholars within the fields of information theory and linguistics set out, in a much more systematic manner, to define the phenomenon of translation in its entirety. Ultimately, these scientists aimed at excluding the operation of chance from the translator’s activity. The Zeitgeist is evident in Anthony G. Oettinger’s words: Placing patterns into correspondence is one major linguistic problem of machine translation; devising recipes for transforming source patterns into target patterns is another. Of the existence of some solutions to these problems there is little doubt, especially for closely related languages. A unique solution seems too much to hope for. While the study of formal linguistic patterns for their own sake interests many investigators, students of information theory in particular, the formal structure of discourse is relevant to translation only as a vehicle of meaning. Corresponding patterns, therefore, must be defined as conveyors of equivalent meanings since, whatever meaning is or means, it is generally agreed that it must be preserved in translation. (Oettinger 1959/1966: 248)
“Patterns”, “correspondence”, “recipes”, “transforming”: Oettinger’s is the language of computers and technical manuals, and other scholars employ very similar styles. In the interest of machine translation and in order to facilitate the task of human translators, linguists and computer scientists tried to define “invariance” (Oettinger 1959/1960), “formal correspondence” (Catford 1965), or “equivalence” (Nida 1964), on a descending ladder of scientific assurance.1 Gradually, these scholars came to realize that no univocal solutions could be devised for the problems of translation, and that the correspondences between even closely related languages were too variable to be definitively systematized.2 In the 1970s, a revolution took place which transformed translation theory and translation science into ‘Translation Studies’. The term itself was coined by James S Holmes, who proposed, in a 1972 paper, the use of a label that had already proved productive in the general field of humanities (Holmes 1972/1988: 70). In Holmes’ wake, a number of scholars, mainly on the “Tel Aviv-Leuven Axis” (Hermans 1999: preface), started to look at translation not in normative terms, as the
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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation
linguistic school had done, but under a descriptive light. For the first time, translated texts were viewed not only as target texts (i.e., in relation to their sources), but also as texts in their own right (cf. Even-Zohar 1978). Scholars adopting this new approach challenged the normative validity of traditional terms like ‘fidelity’ and linguistic constructs like ‘equivalence’, by claiming that far from being eternal and universal, such concepts were historically determined. Thus, translation came to be seen as a manipulative operation rather than a simple textual substitution: Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate literature to function in a given society in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation, undertaken in the service of power, and its positive aspect can help in the evolution of a literature and a society. (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990, preface)
This new outlook has produced and is still producing an impressive body of work in the field of Descriptive Translation Studies — so much so that the whole discipline today seems confined to the descriptive field. In Holmes’ seminal paper, however, descriptive translation studies was only one of several branches of what he imagined to be a very leafy tree that would sprout new boughs, as well as incorporate old ones. Holmes first distinguished between “pure” and “applied” TS: “pure” TS further branched into “descriptive translation studies” (DTS) and “translation theory” (TTh), whereas “applied” TS would ideally produce results in the areas of language learning, translator training, translation aids, translation policy, and translation criticism — in other words, it would be of use to language learners and teachers, and above all to translators and translation teachers. In Holmes’ map, translation theory is closely allied to translation description: and it is not by chance that the most influential theories of translation of the last two decades have been descriptive rather than operative (for a quasi-definitive summary of twenty years of theorizing, cf. Toury 1995). Those few scholars of the DTS field who have tried to set agendas for the translator have done so in an ideological vein, and their conclusions, as I have said elsewhere (Morini 2002–2003), do not pass the test of close logical examination (cf. Venuti 1995, when he exhorts translators to fight the ‘domesticating’ tendencies of their societies). For the rest, translation training, translation aids, translation policy and translation criticism have generally been conducted without explicit reference to a theory of translation.3 However, it is awkward for a practice-based discipline like Translation Studies to lack a practice-based theory by which practice can be illuminated. Even a theoretician like Umberto Eco freely admits that translation theory must be based on some sort of “active or passive experience of translation” (Eco 2003: 13) — i.e., on the experience of translating or having one’s writings translated. Conversely,
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practice needs theory to understand itself. In a recent book in dialogue form on the practical use of translation theory, translator Emma Wagner has asked theorist Andrew Chesterman if thinking about translation can “help us to become better translators and give us a feeling of professional self-esteem”. Chesterman’s answer, while apparently questioning the general validity of Wagner’s implicit assumptions (‘Would you pose the same question of other kinds of theory, I wonder?’), essentially confirms that some such connection between translation theory and practice is indeed needed, if not inevitable: Should musicology help composers to become better musicians or composers? Should literary theory help writers and poets to write better? Should sociology help the people and groups it studies to become better members of society? Should the theories of mechanics and cybernetics help engineers and computer scientists to produce better robots? I guess your answers to these questions will not be identical: I myself would be more inclined to answer yes to the last one than to the others. To the sociology one, I might answer that it should at least help people like politicians to make better decisions. But the ones on musicology and literary theory seem a bit different; such theories seem more to help other people understand these art forms, rather than the artists themselves. In particular, such theories might help academics (theorists) to understand something better, and hence, in some abstract way, add to the sum total of cultural knowledge. (Chesterman and Wagner 2002: 1–2)
Chesterman proposes a number of theories as possible parallels with translation theory; but the various sciences he mentions could also be taken as mirror-images of different aspects of Translation Studies. While DTS provides the kind of description which is also the province of musicology and literary theory, the ‘cybernetics’ of translation can only be studied by means of a linguistic theory. Every act of translation is, in the Peircean sense, an act of interlingual interpretation (Jakobson 1959/1966: 233), and only linguistics can give us a practical understanding of language-to-language transactions, as well as the terminology we need in order to understand what we talk about when we talk about translation. The ‘skeptical turn’ of DTS has rightly questioned the validity of such linguistic concepts as fidelity and equivalence, but it has not provided adequate substitutes: as Kirsten Malmkjær points out, equivalence, or some sort of notion like it, is hard to give up in translation studies, since there must be some sort of relationship between a Target Text (TT) and a Source Text (ST) if the former is to be considered a translation of the latter; besides, the notion is essential if we are to make sense of certain types of translation and mistranslation and even, arguably, of difference and non-translation. (Malmkjær 1999: 263)
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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation
A return to linguistic Translation Studies is therefore advocated — though with none of the normative rigidity of early ‘translation science’ and Übersetzungswissenschaft. The linguistic theorists of the 1950s and 1960s aimed to create formulae and algorithms for something as fluid as language, and wanted to keep context out of such a contextual activity as translation. A new linguistic theory of translation, by contrast, will have to be operatively open (most translation situations allow for more than one choice) and contextual. In other words, a new linguistic theory of translation will have to be pragmatic. There are many possible definitions of pragmatics (cf. Levinson 1983: 1–32), but all of them somehow involve the inclusion of context into linguistic observation. Of course, a general theory of translation cannot be uniquely pragmatic, just as a translator does not work only at the pragmatic level: but the latter is the higher rung of a hierarchical ladder comprising semantics, syntax, and phonetics.4 The first decisions the translator takes are of a pragmatic nature — decisions that have to do with genre (to which genre does the source text belong? should the target text belong to the same genre? Is there a comparable genre in the target culture?), historical and geographical distance (how should a text written in Anglo-Saxon or in Farsi be translated?), register, cooperation (is the author/narrator/character following/breaching/flouting/exploiting Grice’s maxims?), politeness (what is the relationship between the author/implied author/narrator and the reader/implied reader/narratee? can/should it be reproduced in the target text?), and relevance (how is the source text, or any part of it, to be relevant in the target culture?). When these general decisions are taken, related choices follow on the other linguistic planes (not necessarily in any order: it is only the pragmatic level that consistently precedes the others). A theory of translation, i.e., a theory of what translation is, of how it works and the effects it produces, should ideally follow the same kind of hierarchy. There are many reasons why it is important to develop the pragmatic aspects of a linguistic theory of translation. First of all, pragmatics had been disregarded by the linguists who tried to create a general theory in the 1950s and the 1960s, and if we do not want their labour to have been in vain, we have to pick up where they left off. Secondly, a pragmatic theory of translation will be of greater use to translators than any semantic, syntactic, or phonetic theory: because these cannot but be incomplete and micro-linguistic; and a micro-linguistic theory of translation is ultimately impossible, while micro-linguistic practice is best left to itself or to translator trainers and teachers. Conversely, a pragmatic theory of translation has to be illustrated, and illustration necessarily involves the micro-linguistic level.5 It must be said that the project is not totally unprecedented. From the late 1960s onwards, the linguists working on translation had come to realize that certain contextual elements had to be introduced into the system to make it work.
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These linguists tried to link the methods to be used in translation with the function to be assigned to the source and the target texts. Katharina Reiß first used Bühler’s theory of linguistic functions to create a taxonomy of texts with annexed translating methods (Reiß 1969). Hans J. Vermeer realized that the target text can have a different function (he spoke of “skopos”) from its source (Reiß and Vermeer 1984/1991). These functionalist theories are epitomised in Mary Snell-Hornby’s Translation Studies: An integrated approach (1988), where a very flexible typology is elaborated which allows for the overlapping of genres and methods. This article stems from these theories, while also accepting that a theory of translation can only be normative in a very negative manner — it can dictate what cannot be done, or what should not be done, or what does not work. A new linguistic theory cannot but take into account the skeptical U-turn effected by Descriptive Translation Studies: the proven fact that the same text has been shown to have been translated in very different ways, with very different styles, and according to very different ideologies, rules out the possibility of creating translation recipes — not to mention formulae or algorithms. This is what translation theory cannot do: what it can do is show the conditions in which translators work (a task already performed by DTS), and analyze the possibilities they have in each single translating situation.
The three functions of translation When they set out to create taxonomies for the use of translators and translation scholars, the German linguists of the 1960s and 1970s (Katharina Reiß, Werner Koller, and others;6 later, Peter Newmark (1988) popularized some of their ideas for the Anglophone world) tried to define a few main textual types according to the predominance of one linguistic function or another. Drawing on Bühler’s functional model of language (Bühler 1934/1982: 24–33), Katharina Reiß distinguished between “content-centred” (predominance of the referential function of language), “form-centred” (predominance of the expressive function), and “effectcentred” texts (conative function) — different text-types calling for different translation strategies (Reiß 1969). This simplistic tripartite model was soon expanded to account for a wider spectrum of functional possibilities: Reiß herself operated a distinction between ‘text types’ and ‘varieties’ (novels, poems, manuals, recipes; Reiß and Vermeer 1984/1991: 176–179), while Werner Koller invited translators to ‘distinguish between primary and secondary text-functions’ (Koller 1979: 129). Vermeer’s Skopostheorie contemplated the possibility of functional change in the passage from source to target text, and indeed subjected the skopos of the former to that of the latter (Reiß and Vermeer 1984/1991: 100).
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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation
These functional theories are a creditable attempt to leave the swamp of acontextual Übersetzungswissenschaft behind, and to establish a connection between language and world, text and context. Nevertheless, their interpretation of the term ‘function’ is somewhat restrictive, even when flexibly applied (cf. SnellHornby 1988). In the end, ‘function’, for all these scholars, is the same as, or closely related to, ‘genre’: a way of ‘functioning’ in certain ostensive ways which are commonly associated with given classes of texts. While maintaining that affiliation to ‘genre’ or ‘text-type’ is one of the ways texts have of acting in and upon the world, I insist that it is not the only one or even the most important. A pragmatic theory of translation must incorporate genre into a wider and more systematic framework. My definition of ‘function’, accordingly, incorporates all the (inherently pragmatic) ways in which texts ‘function’ in the world. If one were asked to define the epistemological province of pragmatics, one could say that it is about the ‘where and when’ of people’s talk (deixis), about the way people relate to one another through language (implicature, presupposition, politeness), and about what people ‘do’ to each other and the world when they speak (speech acts). Since here we are concerned with the pragmatics of written rather than spoken language, we could conceive of a ‘text pragmatics’ studying the where and when of texts, the way texts interact with people (rather than other texts), and what texts do or try to do. In view of this tripartite definition, three main metatextual categories can be envisaged which I propose to call ‘functions’: the ‘locative’, the ‘interpersonal’, and the ‘performative’ function. Since each of these functions defines a number of means by which texts take place in the world, interact with the contexts they evoke, create, and are produced in, one would almost be inclined to call them ‘metafunctions’ — but this, together with the use of ‘interpersonal’ for the second of my three functions, would create confusion with Halliday’s grammatical system (Halliday 1985). If not intended, however, this confusion is not totally unmotivated: just as Halliday’s grammar tries to explain how speakers and writers use language as a creative, interactive, and organizational bridge between themselves and the world, a pragmatic theory of translation aims at explaining how bi-texts7 create, interact with, and (try to) modify and organize the world outside their paper borders.
The performative function: Text acts When J.L. Austin refuted the “descriptive fallacy” of traditional linguistics in his famous 1955 William James Lectures, he observed that words are used not only to ‘state’ or ‘describe’ a state of affairs, but also to ‘do’ things, to change the speaker’s
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world. Austin observed that every ‘speech act’ has a locutionary content, an illocutionary force and a perlocutionary effect — i.e., that every utterance (or ‘sentence’, in Austin’s somewhat dated terminology) aims at achieving something and achieves something, intended and real effects not necessarily being equal. His ground-breaking observations were mainly confined to oral speech and to the limited scope of the single ‘sentence’ — though the analysis of the ‘felicity conditions’ to be satisfied for the ‘performative act’ to be successful ensured that there was some connection between the single ‘sentence’, the co-text, and the context of situation. Since 1955, however, the ‘performative’ dimension of language has been investigated in relation to written as well as oral language, and it has been pointed out that very few illocutionary acts are understandable at the level of the single sentence or the single utterance.8 It is evident, for instance, that in a conversational interaction like the following, a sort of ‘continuous’ illocutionary act is performed by both speakers (roughly, the protagonist/narrator is trying to obtain a worried reaction from Sachiko, and Sachiko is more or less covertly telling her to mind her own business): Sachiko turned and waited for me to catch up. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked. ‘I’m glad I found you’, I said, a little out of breath. ‘Your daughter, she was fighting just as I came out. Back there near the ditches.’ ‘She was fighting?’ ‘With two other children. One of them was a boy. It looked a nasty little fight.’ ‘I see.’ Sachiko began to walk again. I fell in step beside her. ‘I don’t want to alarm you,’ I said, ‘but it did look quite a nasty fight. In fact, I think I saw a cut on your daughter’s cheek.’ ‘I see.’ … ‘As a matter of fact,’ I continued, ‘I’d meant to mention this to you before. You see, I’ve seen your daughter on a number of occasions recently. I wonder, perhaps, if she hasn’t been playing truant a little.’ … ‘It’s very kind of you to be so concerned, Etsuko,’ she said. ‘So very kind. I’m sure you’ll make a splendid mother.’ (Ishiguro 1982: 14)
On a bigger scale, it can be observed that even entire texts certainly ‘do’ something, in the sense that they modify, or aim at modifying, the status quo of the world — they aim at achieving ‘contextual effects’ on real people in real situations. This is most evident with the text types that Reiß calls ‘operative’ and ‘informative’ (instruction manuals, advertisements; Reiß and Vermeer 1984/1991: 206); but it can be argued that all texts, whether published or not, aim at performing something and may, or may not, perform something (the purpose of a novel, for instance, may be to entertain, or to renovate the English language, or both: if nobody reads the novel, both purposes are frustrated).
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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation
The intentional/performative value of a text has been defined in various ways by translation scholars, text linguists, and pragmatists. As has been seen, translation scholars have listed a number of ‘functions’ of texts in connection with the main function of language within the texts. Text linguists have spoken of the ‘intentional’ dimension of texts, whose very nature it is to reach receivers and produce an effect on them (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981). Recently, certain pragmatists have tried to identify the ‘evaluative pattern’ (the ‘point’) expressed by and through a text (Thompson and Hunston 2000; cf. also Labov 1972). These are all ways of looking at the impact of texts upon an existing state of affairs. More generally, it can be said that when a text is written and/or published, a ‘text act’ is performed that has an illocutionary force and may have perlocutionary effects on the world (cf. Hatim 1998: 73). A pragmatic theory of translation cannot do without a theory of text acts, because translators and theorists have to look at the intended and real effects of source texts and bi-texts in order to re-produce or analyse them. If a translator aims at ‘doing what the source text does’ in the target language — with all the obstacles posed by linguistic and cultural barriers — he/she must translate a ‘text act’ rather than a mere text; and translation scholars must consider translations in this light if they want to understand how they change or aim at changing an existing ‘state of affairs’. Of course, illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect are to be kept separated in theory as well as in practice. For the translator, the illocutionary forces inscribed in the text (rather than ‘the author’s intentions’) are generally more important than its perlocutionary effects: in the past, many translators and linguists have spoken of an ‘equivalence of effect’ to be obtained in the passage from source to target language; but while it is very difficult to gauge real effects on real readers, the source text can be analysed for the ‘potential readings’ it contains — i.e., for its illocutionary forces.9 Being bound by no practical considerations, the theorist is freer than the practitioner in his/her pragmatic analysis of the bi-text: a translation critic can study the illocutionary differences between a source and a target text, whereas a historian of translation may be interested in the perlocutionary effects of certain target texts in a given place at a given time. (One of the great achievements of DTS has been the realization that translations, i.e., target texts, can be and must be considered as texts in their own right as well as reflections or refractions of their sources.) Inevitably, the illusory simplicity of theoretical definition conceals a wealth of analytical and practical difficulties. For translator and translation scholar alike, it is not at all easy to define each single ‘text act’ exhaustively, except in the abovequoted cases (advertisements, manuals), in which the text has a very straightforward function (persuading to buy something, instructing in the use of something). Usually, though, both the illocutionary forces and the perlocutionary effects of a
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text are multiple, complex, and difficult to isolate with any certainty: ultimately, the weight of performative analysis rests on the translator’s or on the theorist’s shoulders, and though interpretations may differ in degree of correctness and precision, more than one reading is possible, and Spitzer’s ‘philological circle’ (Leech and Short 1981/1983: 13) cannot be evaded (we make theoretical predictions and verify them in practice, but our very predictions influence our verification procedures). Though there is no way out of epistemological uncertainty in ‘soft sciences’ such as Translation Studies, a route must be chosen, and the most a theorist or a practitioner can do is explain and justify his/her choice. By explaining the premises and conclusions of his/her actions, the translator gives his/her readers an idea of the relationship between the ‘source-text act’ and the ‘target-text act’. In producing an Italian translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset song (Gibbon 1932/2005) — a novel set in the Scottish countryside, written in a mixture of English and Scots — I have tried to isolate the illocutionary forces inscribed in the text, as well as the perlocutionary effects produced by the appearance of this experimental Scottish novel in the British book market and cultural milieu of the 1930s (and of today). Gibbon did not use Scots for sentimental purposes, but because he wanted to give it the literary dignity and prestige of other European languages: this is made evident by the fact that both the characters and the narrator speak in a harmonic blend of English, Scots, and Anglicized Scots (while novels by earlier ‘northern’ authors confronted an educated English-speaking narrator with rough Scotsspeaking peasants). This linguistic choice is therefore ideologically central to the book — it is a consequence of what the book ‘wants to do’ in the world. Inevitably and ironically, the strong ‘national’ tinge of Sunset song has led to its being perceived as having only ‘local’ relevance in the English-speaking world: while stylistically comparable texts such as Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses are today catalogued as modern classics, Sunset song is mostly unknown, a literary curiosity for Scottish initiates. In my Italian version, I have tried to give a textual account of the forces and effects embodied in the source text (a reproduction was impossible, because the context of situation was radically different): in my reading, the linguistic/nationalistic issue was crucial to a deep understanding of Sunset song as a work of imaginative literature — therefore, I tried to fashion a ‘synthetic Italian’, made up of a number of Italian dialects, to reproduce the Scots words, phrases, and constructions used in Gibbon’s original. As this example shows, the illocutionary forces inscribed in the source can never be exactly reproduced in the target text: while Sunset song is, amongst other things, an act of cultural/political defiance, Canto del tramonto is an account of that act, as well as an attempt at popularizing Scottish literature in Italy; and other strategies might have been used by other translators to obtain similar or different
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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation
effects. Pragmatic barriers are, after all, as insurmountable as phonetic or syntactic ones: and as Vermeer understood more than twenty years ago (Reiß and Vermeer 1984/1991), the skopos of a text never remains exactly unchanged in the languageto-language transition. Analysis at the pragmatic level orientates the lower-level choices and observations of translator and theorist: but both translator and theorist must know that no faithful pragmatic copy is possible, because contexts vary just like phonemes, morphemes, and syntactic constructions — and the pragmatic forces encoded in different grammatical systems are never exactly the same, though in cognate languages they may reach a very high degree of similarity. This pragmatic indeterminacy is inherent in the very act of translation, though it can be masked in modern times by the translator’s tendency to (paradoxically) appear ‘invisible’ in order to present a ‘fluent’ version which can pass as a ‘faithful copy’ of the ‘original’ — indeed, the original itself (Venuti 1995). However, DTS has taught us that translation is never innocent, that it always implies some sort of ‘rewriting’ of the source. Even when the translator has no explicit ‘ideological’ vision to impose upon the target text, his/her ideology is brought to bear on his/her work: in Gideon Toury’s terms, the ‘translation norms’ of the translator’s society influence his/her work in one sense or another. It is revealing to study the bi-texts of former ages as alignments of sourcetext and target-text acts: from this kind of operation, we can learn a lot about the norms of past societies as well as about the performative indeterminacy of translation. In the numerous translations produced in the European Renaissance, for instance, it is quite often the case that the target text is invested with performative forces which are only partially present in, or even totally absent from, the source: Sir John Harington’s version of Orlando Furioso has a serious epic, ‘Virgilian’ quality that is totally absent in Ariosto’s original; Philemon Holland’s translations of Roman and Greek classics invested the target texts with English nationalistic fervour. In the Middle Ages, such pragmatic transformations are even easier to detect in the translators’ attempts to turn Pagan masterpieces into pieces of Christian or moral instruction — as in the famous fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé (cf. Morini 2006). To go back to modern times, however, even the translator’s impulse to subtract his/her signature from the translation is linked to a norm dictating what the target text ‘has to do’ in the target culture: the translator must be invisible because readers (or so the commonplace goes) want to read a ‘primary’ text, and a translation would obtain less attention and have a weaker impact if it was presented as ‘secondary’. All these historical and contemporary examples show that the ‘translation norms’ of any given society are in their essence pragmatic/performative: they primarily dictate what a translation ‘has to do’ — all stylistic choices at all levels being both personal and subordinate to performative function. Therefore, the
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‘performative function’ of translation, though not primary in an epistemological hierarchy, takes logical and chronological precedence over the interpersonal and locative functions in theory as well as in practice; because the translator, or the translator scholar, first has to understand what the source text or the bi-text ‘does’ — and that understanding guides his/her choices or intuitions as far as the other pragmatic functions and the other linguistic levels of translation are concerned.
The interpersonal function: Cooperation, politeness, interest If a text ‘does’ something, if it modifies and/or aims at modifying an existing state of affairs, it cannot do so directly: a text only has an impact upon the world through the influence it exercises upon its readers (though that primary impact is not necessarily the only one: one need only think of what Rushdie’s Satanic verses and its translations mean to a large number of people who never read it in the first place). A pragmatic description of the bi-text for translational purposes, therefore, cannot but take into account the ways in which the bi-text enters into communication with its (source and target) readers. Grice’s theory of cooperative communication (Grice 1967/1991), Brown and Levinson’s and Leech’s studies of politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987; Leech 1983), and Sperber and Wilson’s notion of ‘relevance’ (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) can help the translator to understand the interpersonal relationships inscribed in and presupposed by the source text, and the translator scholar to analyse bi-textual links on the interpersonal level. (Once again, we must look for potential relationships realized in the text(s) rather than actual relationships with real people.) All the theories of communication evolved by pragmatics from the 1970s onwards represented an attempt to expand the ‘code model’ of classical linguistics, according to which a message is encoded and sent from a sender to a decoding receiver through a channel (air, in the case of human speech) which may or may not be disturbed by noise. While this model describes the passage of linguistic signals from a sender to a receiver, it does not explain how receivers use contextual information to interpret messages which are often less than completely explicit; neither does it account for all those parts of human speech which are not strictly functional in communicative terms. Grice first expanded the code model by noting that all speakers intuitively recognize a ‘cooperative principle’ the maxims of which (quantity, quality, relation, and manner) they can choose to follow, exploit, or flout. Sperber and Wilson tried to simplify Grice’s theory by insisting that the maxim of relation (relevance, in their definition) was really the only one at work in human interaction (hearers extract information by coupling speakers’ utterances with relevant contexts). Brown, Levinson and Leech studied all the polite,
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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation
‘communicatively unnecessary’ efforts humans make in order to maintain good relationships with one another — to maintain, in Brown and Levinson’s terms, each other’s ‘face’. While an account of what a text communicates to its readers will be primarily semantic (though very little communication is non-contextual), an account of how a text communicates with its readers, of the balance between explicit and implicit information, of the relationship between text (author, implied author, persona, narrator) and readers, will necessarily be pragmatic. The pragmatic theories of Grice, Sperber and Wilson, Brown and Levinson, and Leech were initially conceived for face-to-face interaction — but textual activity also involves interpersonal contact, and the practical difference between face-to-face and textual exchanges (textual communication is more unidirectional and less fluid) does not detract from their essential similarity. As Basil Hatim points out, texts behave more or less like people: More specifically, Hoey … focuses on the means by which writers establish a dialogue with their readers, anticipating their reactions and building this into the constitution of their texts. It is this dialogic nature of the written text which has particularly caught the attention of Literary Pragmatics: of course, speech is more personally evaluative than writing, but some speech can be as analytic and objective as any written text designed with these communicative aims in mind. By the same token, it is argued, writing can be casual and unceremonial and always capable of interacting with human beings more fundamentally than any writing … (Hatim 1998: 86)
This dialogue between text and reader(s) can be conducted in many different ways, the degrees and styles of cooperation and politeness varying along the axes of culture, genre, individual personality. First of all, texts address their readers in a variety of ways, either directly or indirectly: advertisements, for instance, often address the receiver directly, whereas scientific articles usually adopt a more impersonal stance which conceals, but does not cancel, the relationship between text and reader. In literary texts, a number of fictional figures (implied author, narrator, poetic persona, narratee) mediate between the text, or its originator, and the reader. The collision between text and reader, however, is not confined to those instances in which the reader is openly mentioned and addressed, or covertly evoked; on the contrary, it permeates all texts of whatever description, for writing and publishing a text means establishing a contact with one or more than one (actual, potential) readers. The quality of the relationship is defined, on the interpersonal axis, by how the text chooses to tell its readers what it wants to tell them: one must look at the ratio between explicit and implicit communication (presuppositions, implicatures, implicitures, subplicit meanings, etc.),10 at the degree of evidence with which relevant information is signaled and distinguished from irrelevant
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details, and generally at the order in which information is given (in a scientific article, an abstract sums up the main argument or hypothesis, whereas in a detective story or in Jane Austen’s novels, crucial details are withheld until the denouement). Cooperation/relevance and politeness interact in unpredictable ways, and no two readers will feel involved by and ‘included’ in a text to the same degree: in certain cases, if the text is clear and explicative, readers will feel included; the reverse may be true on other occasions, because extreme clarity can be felt as offensive (readers may feel that their decoding abilities are being undervalued) or boring (in a literary work of art, but also in a newspaper article, one must not give away one’s goods too soon). Theoretically, one would tend to assign a positive value to clarity and perspicuity: but the changeableness of the principle of politeness and of Leech’s ‘interest principle’11 reminds us that no linguistic quality is perceived in the same manner by all people on all occasions. At this juncture of cooperation/relevance, politeness and interest, the translator acts as a pragmatic mediator: the task is neither innocent nor simple, and requires knowledge of the norms regulating cooperation and politeness in different cultures. Once again, perfect ‘interpersonal’ equivalence is impossible to obtain — if only because languages and cultures (as well as people) vary in the things they say explicitly or implicitly. In a perceptive article on “Presumption and translation”, Peter Fawcett has noted how the Informationsangebot of a text can never be the same when grafted onto another language/culture. If the translator does not take into account ‘interpersonal’ as well as phonetic, semantic, and other pragmatic differences, he/she does so at the risk of offending or alienating his/her readers: We need presupposition, of course, because without it we would not get out of the house in the morning; but it poses acute problems in translation. Most Hungarians do not have to be told that Mohács was the site of a military defeat, just as most French people do not have to be told about a certain military difficulty at Alésia. A writer in these languages can call up powerful complexes of knowledge and feeling very economically. Transfer these to another culture, however, and the presupposed supply of information may not be there. The problem then becomes one of assessing the likely state of affairs and the possible solutions, with each step of the way fraught with difficulties. (Fawcett 1998: 120)
Even apart from these interlingual differences, translation as a communicative activity seems to display cooperation and politeness principles of its own. Research in the field of corpus linguistics has recently shown that translators from and to all languages tend to simplify, clarify, make explicit what is implicit in the source text (cf. Laviosa 2002: 18). This is probably because while translators are commonly seen as only partially responsible for the Informationsangebot of the target text, any oddities in the latter are frequently attributed to them rather than to
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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation
the source authors — a translated text, to be credible as the ‘copy’ of the source, must be readable and ‘fluent’ (cf. Venuti 1995). Now, while in certain textual types (e.g. instruction manuals) simplification, clarification, etc. may be acceptable and, indeed, desirable, on other occasions simplification may be equated with corruption (though that too cannot hold as a general rule; teachers of literary translation traditionally say that one must not simplify or disambiguate what is complex or ambiguous in the original). Innumerable historical and contemporary examples demonstrate that translators tend to be more cooperative and polite than original authors. Once again, the translators of the past tend to be more open and straightforward in their actions, and their bi-texts can be used more conveniently as illustrations. Sir John Harington’s above-mentioned version of Orlando Furioso, besides cutting many stanzas which the translator thought useless or irrelevant for his English readers, exhibits a curious kind of cooperative politeness which transforms Ariosto’s mocking narrator into a more collaborative and reassuring figure. Ariosto frequently disappoints readerly expectations by jumping unexpectedly from one narrative line to another, or by cutting narration short in the thick of action. Harington seems to feel that this is treating readers unfairly, because he adds side-notes which direct the reader to the textual loci in which a scene is continued or concluded (“This post overtakes Bradamant, 2 Booke, st. 62”, “He follows it in the 10 booke, staffe 62”; Harington 1591, I. 70; VIII. 24). And when Ariosto jokingly admits that he is only decreeing the end of a canto because his sheet is full on both sides and he himself is tired of writing, Harington seems to find that politer measures are required: Ma prima che più inanzi io lo conduca, Per non mi dipartir dal mio costume, Poi che da tutti i lati ho pieno il foglio, Finire il Canto, e riposar mi uoglio12 (Ariosto 1584: XXXIII. 128) But more of this hereafter I will treat, For now this booke begins to be to great (Harington 1591: XXXIII. 118)
A rather rude interruption is turned into a rational explanation followed by a promise for more action to come; and while modern translators rarely allow themselves such microtextual deviations from their sources as Harington did, very few of their works, if looked at in detail, would turn out to be totally devoid of similar polite and cooperative additions. In his bi-textual analysis, the scholar must look at the interpersonal function as it transforms itself in the passage from the source to the target text; while the translator can take advantage of an understanding of the interpersonal aspects of the source text, as well as of an awareness that translation often displays interpersonal norms of its own.
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The locative function: Time, place, and text deixis As a pragmatic subject and a performative agent, in order to act and to exercise an influence upon its readers, the text must be situated in time and space. However, the ‘locative function’ of a text is no easier to identify than its performative and interpersonal functions. A text ‘acts’ and ‘communicates’ within, and by connecting with, various contexts of situation: first of all, the context of production, which may or may not be indicated within the text itself (a legal will must contain calendrical reference to the time and place of writing, while a fantasy novel will probably be set in the distant past of some northern country), but is usually betrayed by style and lexicon (even a fantasy novel will bear the marks of its literary period); secondly, the context (or the contexts) the text evokes or constructs, which may or may not coincide with the context of production (think of the difference between a historical essay, an instruction manual, and a science fiction novel); thirdly, the context(s) in which the text is published and read, endlessly changing with every single reader and every new edition. All these contexts have a bearing on the way a text acts upon readers and non-readers, and must be taken into account (or, are implicitly considered) when a bi-text is studied or created. Furthermore, unlike flesh-and-blood speakers, texts act and communicate in a further dimension which we could call textual, or intertextual: whether or not it alludes to other similar or different texts, every text is inherently intertextual, because it is built upon a knowledge of how other texts are built (genre is one of the most evident intertextual traits). This third dimension of the locative function is less material but not less important than the other two: as T.S. Eliot well knew (Eliot 1919/1975) — though his insights were limited to literary creation — every new text enters into a living relationship with all other existing texts, which it modifies and is modified by. When a text is translated into another language and a bi-text is created, the locative function (which cannot be identified with absolute precision in the first place) cannot be kept intact. By being grafted onto another temporal, spatial, and textual plane, the text acquires, evokes and creates new contexts, and these contexts make it act and communicate in novel ways. When Orlando Furioso is translated into English by Sir John Harington, it is also translated into England (as sixteenth-century translation theorists well knew): an Italian courtly romance and a sophisticated long poem is turned into an English epic made up of wooden endstopped lines and references to Queen Elizabeth. Italian landscapes are made to look much like the English countryside, and many English readers will find locative references to English places, events, and texts (intertextually, many passages of the English Furioso, as well as of the Liberata in Edward Fairfax’s 1600 translation, remind one of Spenser rather than Ariosto or Tasso).
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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation
It may be objected that this is a borderline case, and that modern translators do not take the same liberties with the source text that Harington or Fairfax did. Borderline cases, though, are used in mathematics to demonstrate the general validity of a hypothesis: when conditions are less extreme, the application of the rule is less evident but the rule is equally valid. In our time, when a recently-written text is translated from a European language to another (cognate) European language, say from English to German, or from French to Italian, the illusion is created that nothing changes in the locative function — but the changes are there all the same. These changes become more evident, their treatment more crucial for the translator and the translator critic, when the source text and the target text belong to contexts which are very distant either temporally, spatially, or textually. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Morini 2005), the problems involved in translating a source text written in the Middle Ages are analogous to those one has to face in bringing a text from Australia to Italy: the same difficulties are created when no textual tradition exists in the target culture which can be compared with the tradition (genre, text-type) of the source text. It is perhaps not surprising that the problems connected with locative transference have been studied mainly by translation scholars whose specialized research field is literary language. In his 1975 Translating poetry, André Lefevere observed that the translator’s freedom (what he calls, curiously enough, the “freedom of the theme”) is “inevitably circumscribed by the concentric circles of language, time, place, and tradition” (Lefevere 1975: 19). Lefevere’s main interest is practical: he wants to provide translators with a series of strategies to come to terms with linguistically and culturally alien source texts. What is of interest here, though, is his intuition that while language as a translational barrier can be taken for granted and therefore need not be taken into consideration at all (his idea of language is semantic/grammatical; I would say that language ‘contains’ all aspects of a text), time, place and tradition can be grouped together in a single definition (‘tpt elements’). Temporal, spatial and intertextual distances are to all interests one and the same thing for the translator and the theorist. Though his solutions are less convincing than his exposition of the problem, Lefevere does try to list a series of techniques and strategies. More or less in the same vein, a better and more efficient set of strategies is provided by James S Holmes in his essay on “The cross-temporal factor in verse translation” (Holmes 1971/1988). Holmes observes that in turning temporally distant source texts into another language, the possibility of translating ingenuously and a-theoretically is ruled out by the fact that even choices which would appear as neutral in other cases (e.g. writing into the standard contemporary version of the target language) impose one interpretation or another (if I translate Beowulf into standard contemporary Italian, I cancel a great part of its temporal strangeness). With such
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texts, therefore, the translator must decide whether to create a ‘historicizing’ or a ‘modernizing’ version in the target language, on the ‘linguistic’, ‘socio-cultural’, and ‘literary or poetic’ levels (Holmes 1971/1988: 37). Though the focus here is on time, the same could be said of space: when a text is translated, an effect of ‘locative’ estrangement is automatically created which can be reduced or left untouched by the translator. Once again, there is no single solution to the problems posed by locative transference. Speaking of temporal distance (which seems to interest the literati much more than geographical or textual distance), Ezra Pound understood as early as 1919 — in one of those brilliant essays in which his native cunning was not blocked by the axes he had to grind — that ultimately each translator must choose a way of alerting his/her readers to the temporal otherness of the original, and that each translator’s choice will be guided by the textual elements that strike him/her as primary and substantial. Pound’s choice of language in translating Guido Cavalcanti was pre-Elizabethan English, because he thought this the only way of maintaining Guido’s unique musical quality (Pound 1919/2000: 32); but he was well aware that his choice was not definitive, and that many other possibilities could have been envisaged by other individuals working with the same source text.
Conclusion Pound’s idea of personal responsibility anchored to textual evidence is central to translation and translation theory in general: given the pressures and blandishments exercised and offered by his/her society, each translator will be attracted to different qualities in the source texts he/she works with, and will render those qualities in idiosyncratic ways. Any translation theory, whether ‘cultural’ or ‘linguistic’, must take that element of personal responsibility into account if it does not want to be lured into the old traps of exhaustiveness and scientificity. Descriptive Translation Studies has avoided those traps by insisting on the ideological pressures attending translation and, at the same time, on the individuality of the translational activity; but being a descriptive discipline, it has not and it could not have produced a unified theory of translation (though many insights of DTS are invaluable to anyone who wants to set up such a theoretical building). A general linguistic theory of translation can be of more immediate relevance to practitioners as well as theorists, but in order to be credible it has to keep in mind that not even phonetics, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics united can explain or foresee what has taken or will take place in any single act of translation. Ultimately, apart from those cases in which a machine does all or almost all the work (machines are good at working with standardized languages and text-types), translation is
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Outlining a new linguistic theory of translation
performed by one or more unpredictable humans working with that most unpredictable of human products — language. Though theory can observe practice and extract general rules out of it, it will never be able to open the little black box that will keep translation and the other secrets of the human brain locked until the brain’s doomsday.
Notes 1. Certain studies of these years, above all those produced by German Übersetzungswissenschaft, today look like monuments to epistemological presumption (e.g. Kade 1968). 2. The 1965 ALPAC report, commissioned by the US government and claiming that machine translation was not cost-efficient, contributed to creating a certain disillusionment. 3. One could mention a number of general translators’ handbooks (Samuelsson-Brown 1993; Sofer 1996; Owens 1996; Robinson 1997; Osimo 1998; Landers 2001) and guides to using electronic tools (Trujillo 1999; Austermühl 2001; Bowker 2002) in which the description of strategies, aims, social and economic conditions, and translation aids is either unaccompanied by an explicit theoretical framework, or held together by a net of outdated and/or fragmentary theories. There are obviously exceptions to this rule: corpus linguistics, when applied to Translation Studies and translator training, usually provides a firm connection between theory and practice (cf. Aston 1999, Laviosa 2002); my own manual La traduzione: Teorie. Strumenti. Pratiche (Morini 2007) is an attempt at using practice to illuminate theory and applying theory to the criticism of practice. 4. This is, of course, a pragmatician’s view of the linguistic world (cf. Carnap 1938). My definition of ‘semantics’, in particular, is of a pragmatic nature — semantics being seen as concerned with a-contextual meaning, whereas pragmatics takes the context of situation into account. As Levinson (1983: 32) writes: “The most promising [definitions of pragmatics] are the definitions that equate pragmatics with ‘meaning minus semantics’ or with a theory of language understanding that takes context into account, in order to complement the contribution that semantics makes to meaning”. 5. An attempt to teach translation at all levels is Zacchi and Morini (2002), where the decisions of real translators are shown and illustrated on a top-down principle. 6. Albrecht Neubert can also be mentioned as one of the earliest translation scholars to link text functions and translation methods. In his article on “Pragmatische Aspekte der Übersetzung” (Neubert 1968/1981) he listed four translational categories according to the (actual or potential) functional distance between source and target texts: while in the case of scientific literature that distance is minimal, fiction creates or presupposes a wider gap, and such textual genres as local press articles or advertisements are specifically source-directed. 7. I use the term ‘bi-text’ as defined by Brian Harris. According to Harris (1988: 8), for the translator and the scholar, “a bi-text is not two texts but a single text in two dimensions, each of which is a language”. My theory studies bi-texts as ‘double units’, in the sense that it can be applied to
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48 Massimiliano Morini the whole bi-text, to the relationship between the two halves of the whole, or to the source/target text in isolation. Accordingly, my illustrative examples will be applied to the writer’s or the translator’s sides of the translational divide, or to the whole transaction. 8. Cf. Hervey (1998: 13): “Implicit in what has been said so far is that illocutionary function is a property of ‘utterances’; this, however, instantly raises the question: utterances of what? In so far as greeting refers to a particular type of illocutionary function (differently conceived and differently performed in different cultures), and because greetings vary in extent from the monosyllabic ‘Hi!’ in English to the multi-turn exchanges in Wolof …, it follows that illocutionary function may pertain to a variety of various sizes of linguistic unit. Some of these units clearly consist of a succession of sentences while others appear to fall below what would be consensually recognised by linguists as a ‘complete sentence’”. Cf. also Ferrara (1980) for a definition of “speech-act sequence”. 9. Of course, perlocutionary effects of source texts can influence the way translators work: the fact that a source text has been censored, for instance, can lead the translator to sanitize parts of it. One should also mention that some pragmatists (reproducing an ambiguity already present in Austin’s seminal lectures) tend to blur the barrier separating the illocutionary and perlocutionary levels by distinguishing between ‘real’ and ‘potential’ effects. Leo Hickey writes: “In studying perlocution in translation, let us keep in mind that a translator is not concerned with real effects (if any) produced on real readers (if any), of the TT, but only with the potential effects” (Hickey 1998a: 218). 10. Bach (1994) calls ‘implicitures’ all those inferences triggered by the lack of a (syntactic, semantic) element which has to be supplied by the receiver. Bertuccelli Papi (2000: 147) defines as ‘subplicit’ all those implicit meanings which “may glide into the mind of the hearer as side effects of what is said or not said”. 11. Once again, Leech formulates this principle to account for certain ‘uncommunicative’ features of conversation, but the definition can be easily adapted to the written word: “I shall tentatively propose … an Interest Principle, by which conversation which is interesting, in the sense of having unpredictability or news value, is preferred to conversation which is boring and predictable” (Leech 1983: 146). 12. “But before I lead him further on / so as not to stray from my habits / Since my sheet is full on all sides / I want to stop it here, and have a rest”.
References Ariosto, Ludovico. 1584. Orlando Furioso di m. Lodouico Ariosto: nuouamente adornato di figure da Girolamo Porro padouano. Et di altre cose che saranno notate nella seguente facciata. Venice: Francesco de Franceschi senese e compagni. Aston, Guy. 1999. “Corpus use and learning to translate”. Textus 12:2. 289–313. Austermühl, Frank. 2001. Electronic tools for translators. Manchester-Northampton (MA): St Jerome. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to do things with words. New York: Oxford University Press. Bach, Kent. 1994. “Conversational impliciture”. Mind 9. 125–162.
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Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere, eds. 1990. Translation, history & culture. London-New York: Pinter. de Beaugrande, R.-A. and W.U. Dressler. 1981. Einführung in die Textlinguistik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Bertuccelli Papi, Marcella. 2000. Implicitness in text and discourse. Pisa: Edizioni ETS. Bowker, Lynne. 2002. Computer-aided translation technology: A practical introduction. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Brower, Reuben A., ed. 1959/1960. On translation. New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bühler, Karl. 1934/1982. Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart-New York: Gustav Fischer. Carnap, Rudolf. 1938. “Foundations of logic and mathematics”. Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap and Charles W. Morris, eds. International encyclopedia of unified science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I. 1938. 139–214. Catford, John C. 1965. A linguistic theory of translation: An essay in applied linguistics. London: Oxford University Press. Chesterman, Andrew and Emma Wagner. 2002. Can theory help translators?: A dialogue between the ivory tower and the wordface. Manchester: St Jerome. Eco, Umberto. 2003. Dire quasi la stessa cosa: Esperienze di traduzione. Milano: Bompiani. Eliot, T.S. 1919–1975. “Tradition and the individual talent”. Selected prose of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1919–1975. 37–44. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1978. “The position of translated literature within the literary polysystem”. Papers on poetics and semiotics 8. 21–27. Fawcett, Peter. 1998. “Presumption and translation”. Hickey 1998. 115–123. Ferrara, Alessandro. 1980. “An extended theory of speech acts: Conditions for subordinate acts in sequences”. Journal of pragmatics 4. 233–252. Gibbon, L.G. 1932/2005. Canto del tramonto (Sunset song). Varese: Giano. Grice, Paul. 1967/1991. “Logic and conversation”. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, Mass.London: Harvard University Press, 1967/1991. 22–57. Halliday, M.A.K. 1985. An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Harington, John. 1591. Orlando Furioso in English heroical verse. London: R. Field. Harris, Brian. 1988. “Bi-tex: A new concept in translation theory”. Language monthly and international journal of translation 54. 8–10. Hatim, Basil. 1998. “Text politeness: A semiotic regime for a more interactive pragmatics”. Hickey 1998. 72–102. Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translating in systems: Descriptive and system-oriented approaches explained. Manchester: St Jerome. Hervey, Sandor G.J. 1998. “Speech acts and illocutionary function in translation methodology”. Hickey 1998. 10–24. Hickey, Leo. ed. 1998. The pragmatics of translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, Hickey, Leo. 1998a. “Perlocutionary equivalence: Marking, exegesis and recontextualisation”. Hickey 1998. 217–232. Holmes, James S. 1971/1988. “The cross-temporal factor in verse translation”. Holmes 1988. 34–44. Holmes, James S. 1972/1988. “The name and nature of Translation Studies”. Holmes 1988. 67–80.
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Massimiliano Morini Holmes, James S. 1988. Translated!: Papers on literary translation and Translation Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, Ishiguro, Kazuo. 1982. A pale view of hills. London: Faber and Faber. Jakobson, Roman. 1959/1966. “On linguistic aspects of translation”. Brower 1959/1966. 232–239. Kade, Otto. 1968. Zufall und Gesetzmässigkeit in der Übersetzung. Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie. Koller, Werner. 1979. Einführung in die Übersetzungswissenschaft. Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Landers, Clifford E. 2001. Literary translation: A practical guide. Clevedon-Buffalo-TorontoSydney: Multilingual Matters. Laviosa, Sara. 2002. Corpus-based Translation Studies: Theory, findings, applications. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi. Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of pragmatics. London-New York: Longman. Leech, Geoffrey N. and Michael H. Short. 1981/1983. Style in fiction: A linguistic introduction to English fictional prose. London-New York: Longman. Lefevere, André. 1975. Translating poetry: Seven strategies and a blueprint. Assen-Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malmkjær, Kirsten. 1999. “Translation and linguistics: What does the future hold?”. Textus 12:2. 263–273. Morini, Massimiliano. 2002–2003. “Come traduciamo: il traduttore umile e il traduttore invisibile”. Quaderni dell’Associazione culturale Italia-Inghilterra 1. 23–34. Morini, Massimiliano. 2005. “Translating Scottish poetry”. Babel A.F.I.A.L. 14. 5–21. Morini, Massimiliano. 2006. Tudor translation in theory and practice. Aldershot: Ashgate. Morini, Massimiliano. 2007. La traduzione: Teorie. Strumenti. Pratiche. Milano: Sironi. Neubert, Albrecht. 1968/1981. “Pragmatische Aspekte der Übersetzung”. Wolfram Wilss, ed., Übersetzungswissenschaft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968/1981. 60–75. Newmark, Peter. 1988. A textbook of translation. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall. Nida, Eugene A. 1964. Toward a science of translating, with special reference to principles and procedures involved in Bible translating. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Oettinger, A.G. 1960. Automatic language translation: Lexical and technical aspects, with particular reference to Russian. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Oettinger, A.G. 1959/1966. “Automatic (transference, translation, remittance, shunting)”. Brower 1959/1966. 240–267. Osimo, Bruno. 1998. Manuale del traduttore: Guida pratica con glossario. Milano: Hoepli. Owens, Rachel, ed. 1996. The translator’s handbook. London: Aslib. Pound, Ezra. 1919/2000. “Guido’s relations”. Lawrence Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies reader. London-New York: Routledge, 2000. 27–33 Reiß, Katharina. 1969. “Textbestimmung und Übersetzungsmethode”. Ruperto-Carola. Zeitschrift der Vereinigung der Freunde der Studentschaft der Üniversität Heidelberg 20:46. 69–75. Reiß, Katharina and Hans J. Vermeer. 1984/1991. Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
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Robinson, Douglas. 1997. Becoming a translator: An accelerated course. London-New York: Routledge. Samuelsson-Brown, Geoffrey. 1993. A practical guide for translators. Clevedon-PhiladelphiaAdelaide: Multilingual Matters. Snell-Hornby, Mary. 1988. Translation Studies: An integrated approach. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sofer, Morry. 1996. The translator’s handbook. Rockville (MD): Schreiber Publishing. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford-Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Thompson, Geoffrey and Susan Hunston, eds. 2000. Evaluation in text. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Trujillo, Arturo. 1999. Translation engines: Techniques for machine translation. London: Springer. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. London: Routledge. Zacchi, Romana and Massimiliano Morini, eds. 2002. Manuale di traduzioni dall’inglese. Milano: Bruno Mondadori.
Résumé L’article présente les contours d’une nouvelle théorie linguistique de la traduction susceptible d’orienter tant les théoriciens que les praticiens. Les théories linguistiques des années 1950 et 1960 étaient trop normatives et décontextualisées pour rendre compte de toutes les formes et aspects des traductions ; parallèlement, si le “tournant sceptique” des Translation Studies a permis de démasquer la part idéologique de toutes les théories, il n’a pas été en mesure de produire une “cybernétique” de la traduction, une explication de la manière dont la traduction se déroule dans la réalité. Une nouvelle approche linguistique peut fournir une telle explication, à condition d’accorder un rôle important à l’aspect pragmatique de l’analyse et de conserver une pointe de scepticisme non savant.
Author’s address Massimiliano Morini Università di Udine Dipartimento di Lingue & Letterature Germaniche e Romanze Via Mantica 3 I-33100 Udine Italy e-mail:
[email protected]
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