Especies cercanas

According to Newmark (1988: 82f), a cultural equivalent, also called ‘substitution’ by Ivir (1987: 43), is a close, approximate, or not accurate translation where a SL cultural term or expression is translated by a TL cultural term.

According to Ivir (1987: 43), substitution can be carried out when a SL element does not correspond to an empty slot in the TL, but to a TL item that is similar to the SL element. He argues that the advantage of substitution is that the substitute would represent a total linguistic and cultural transparency, which makes it easier to understand by the TL audience. However, he argues that the procedure has the disadvantage of identifying elements which are not completely identical and eliminating the foreignness of the SL culture by treating SL elements as though they were TL elements.

The following example is taken from a speech by Fadwa Barghouti (Palestinian lawyer and wife of the renowned Palestinian political prisoner, Marwan Barghouti) and the English CCI of this speech. The event was organised by Manchester Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Manchester in September 2004. The speech is about the situation of Palestinian political prisoners in general and her husband, Marwan Barghouti, in particular in Israeli prisons. It lasted around 31 minutes including the interpreter’s output, followed by a question-and- answer session which lasted for 40 minutes. The speech was fully improvised by the speaker. In this example, the speaker, talking about the harsh treatment of Palestinian women prisoners in Israeli prisons, uses a specific SL expression to refer to a specific area in Palestine’s West Bank, but the CCIr replaces the SL expression by another TL expression to refer to that same place:

ى3'ا دا اDه لF^ د!ﺝ!و ١١٠ ء?+ ] ... [ هد!! ا!Mو تا!^ا ءaه )5ﺙ ك5هو #)&ﺡ! % ا!*$ $)ا ة); %?"+ ى3 d52ا ة3)'ا ةأ3ا e)" نأ و ،[+آ #ﺡ يf #)2H #$ر نو ةد!ا #)* [و A?ا #)2H #$ر يأ نود );او اDهو #* ت?'a 2N )* g #ﻡ ٤٨ ق!;ﺡو "7ا ق!; ق3iا jMاوو ع!M!ا اDه ةأ3* #)27ا ق!;ﺡو ;ا .

Out of the 8,000 political prisoners there are 110 women and Israel treats them with a lot of savagery, and two of these women have given birth and while they gave birth they were all the time in shackles or while they give birth and after birth and a lot of organisations, human rights organisations, inside the Green Line have carried out research on this issue and come to the conclusion that this is a breach of the child right, woman right and human right in general.

As is clear from the highlighted expressions in the original and its English interpretation, the speaker uses Arabic ‘٤٨ #;75’ (literally the region of 48 or the 48-region, where 48 is short for the year 1948) while the interpreter uses ‘inside the Green Line’. Obviously, linguistically and semantically, ‘inside the Green Line’ does not mean ‘the 48-region’ or ‘the region as existed before 1948’, but in fact historically, geographically and thus interpretively, it does in this context because whereas the SL and TL expressions are

different, they refer to one and the same thing in this context. The 48-region refers to the West Bank as was known up to the year 1948. The Green Line is the boundary of the West Bank as known up to 1948. The line was established by the 1949 Armistice between the Israelis and Arabs following the 1948 War (Microsoft Encarta Reference Library Premium 2005). This substitution can be attributed to the idea that the CCIr, aware of his audience’s cognitive environment, has decided that the ‘48-region’ is rather vague or less accessible to his audience than ‘inside the Green Line’7 as the boundary of the West Bank has come to be known for the international community in general.

In addition to illustrating a clear instance of the procedure of substitution, this example shows that CCIrs do act as intercultural mediators to further understanding between speaker and audience. Moreover, the example lends support to the principles of the CPA in that the original and its interpretation interpretively resemble each other, that is, resemble each other ‘closely enough in relevant respects’ (Wilson and Sperber 1988: 137). The CCIr has culturally mediated to his audience relevant and even more easily accessible information than the original version without compromising faithfulness to the original.

The application of substitution in this example is also successful and appropriate because the CCIr’s sole motive behind using substitution is to make it easy for his audience to understand what the speaker is referring to. This is very different from the hypothetical situation discussed in the example on literal translation above where it has been argued that using the procedure of substitution to interpret the term ‘#$د%&'ا ت)*ا’ (martyrdom operations) would have been counter-productive because in that example, there is a real need to show the difference between two, not similar, but fundamentally opposing positions on a controversial issue, which is why literal translation, not substitution, has been deemed appropriate there and why substitution is totally accepted in the current example.

6.7 Omission

This procedure can be used if the SL item to be deleted is ‘marginal to the text’ (Newmark 1981: 77) or if it is ‘redundant or not acceptable in the target discourse culture or has not even an approximate equivalent there’ (Kohn and Kalina 1996: 128). However, Ivir (1987:

7 _{This can also be used as an example of deculturalising (by substitution) since the ‘Green Line’ is an}

46) argues that this procedure is not required based on the nature of the SL element, but on the nature of the communicative situation in which such an element occurs in that the translator might decide that translating the SL element might communicatively cost him/her more than contributing to the faithfulness of the translation.

In the following example from Barghouti’s speech introduced above, the speaker draws a comparison between what the Israelis claim and what they actually do, using the term ‘the oasis of democracy’, and the CCIr uses omission but for a different reason:

نآ دا اDه و ٤٥٠ Nأ 5)7?* "H ١٨ زوA$ W3 n2ا ك5ه A+ 5)7?* "H ث+ 5)ﺡ و م ١٢ A?ا ^اد د!ﺝ! م 'ه (ﻡ )*!ﺕ ﺱو,ا قا ./ 0ایا ﺡاو ﻥ3 .4ﺕ .ا 5اﺱإو ، ١٢ د4 كهو م4 :آ . #ا ^اد ﺝا!أو آ $0 هرأ *ا ل"Hا 3)2آ د [$أر ١٢ %)إ #%ﺝ!ا %ا [+آو م ن)ﺡا n و #5H!?ا e$3H J* p; #'ر ن!*$ #'ر وأ #5H!?ا e$3H J* ل05 ن!5?$ %+f ?ا ،ت5H!?ا WDه J* ةرAﺡ ا!;*$ )5H!?ا تار)' 3 5)ﺡ J5 و %: - Mارأ %)Mارأ تD^أ ا ت5H!

ءaه J* 3Aﺡ J;أ + "7ا اDه qN$و %'راو %ز5 ق3H او3$و %!) )5H!?ا ءaه %)*

05 اوD^أ $Dا .

Out of these prisoners, there are 450 children under 18 year old, and when I say under 18 year old, some of them are 12 year old, and as a lawyer, I saw cases of children who are in prisons who are not over than 12 year old. Their their charge is that they live in a house which is on the main road or they are they go to school which is on the main road which is used by the settlers and stone throwing take [sic] place from the school or from the area near the house and all the children of that area will be arrested as a result of that, so this is a grave injustice because those settlements are built on lands which are taken from these people’s fathers and grandfathers and they are illegitimate and when the children very innocently throw stones on those people who [took] their grandfather’s land and father’s land, they are punished in this savage way.

It is clear from the above that all the highlighted part (a complete sentence) in the Arabic original is missing from the interpreter’s version. The missing information reads as follows:

[…] and Israel which claims to be the oasis of democracy in the Middle East imprisons a large number of 12-year olds […] (my translation).

While the speaker refers to 12-year olds being detained by the Israelis three times, the interpreter refers to them twice. Thus, the reference to 12-year olds in the missing sentence is still an instance of omission. In any case, a complete idea is missing in the interpretation, that the Israelis claim one thing (oasis of democracy in the Middle East), but behave differently (imprison a big number of 12-year olds just for throwing stones at the settlers).

Instances of omission in interpreting can occur due to different reasons (2.2.2.1.5.2 Error analysis). They might occur due to a processing overload (Gile 1991: 19f; 1997: 200f) which results in a situation where the interpreter cannot catch up with the speaker and is

thus forced to omit some information or because of a LTM or STM failure. Omission might also be used by the interpreter as a cultural mediation procedure when realising, for example, that the interpretation of some cultural information would do more harm than good if it was interpreted into the TL language by obscuring the meaning rather than making it clearer or easier to understand by the TL audience.

In this instance, it can be argued that the omission of this information by the CCIr is not an error but a procedure used strategically by the interpreter although this missing clause is vital for the proposition the speaker has been trying to build. The speaker has been trying to convince the audience that the Israelis claim that they are a democracy, but they still imprison 12 year olds only for throwing stones at the settlers. Since this information is essential for the meaning, the question is why the interpreter should choose to omit this vital information. Although the chunk of speech is rather long, the CCIr did not seem to be under pressure so that he did not catch up with the speaker because the missing information is near the beginning of the chunk (the second sentence), and it has been clear from watching the video that the interpreter was taking abundant notes. In a sense, the reason behind this omission cannot be attributed to a processing overload in the STM, but possibly to a LTM failure: the interpreter simply could not retrieve the term ‘oasis’ and his strategic response has been to omit this information probably in order not to cost him the loss of other subsequent parts of the speech if he invested more time and attention trying to retrieve ‘oasis’, the equivalent of Arabic ‘#ﺡاو’. This will have a significant implication for the applicability of procedures during the communication process (6.10 Results).

Omission of vital information is not tolerated by either the CPA or any other theoretical framework because not only there is no cultural transfer (Ivir 1987: 38), but also there is zero-resemblance or no communicated information at all, which in some cases could prove detrimental to the communication process (cf. Altman 1990: 23). It can therefore be argued that the instance of omission in the current example cannot be considered as a cultural mediation procedure as such because, as argued above, it is only a response to a problem, that problem being the ‘difficulty in finding the correct contextual equivalent for a given lexical item’ (Altman 1994: 34), a problem that is inherent in the interpreting process which imposes certain constraints on what interpreters can do under certain circumstances, but not inherent in this or that theoretical framework. Had the missing information been irrelevant

(such as a non-intentional repetition) or found to have been deemed irrelevant by the interpreter, one could have argued that the interpreter has strategically decided to omit this irrelevant information, thus using omission as a cultural mediation procedure, but the missing information is very important for what the speaker has been trying to say, and on two occasions the interpreter has compensated for this loss by supplying the missing information where appropriate (see below), and he has been successful. What points to the CCIr’s success in his task is that in the question-and-answer session following the speech, all members of the audience who asked questions seemed to have grasped the speaker’s message fully, and no misunderstanding has been detected.