New Approaches to Translation
History
Anthony Pym
Intercultural Studies Group Universitat Rovira i Virgili Tarragona, Spain
Menu for morning session:
Why do it?
Quantitative research?
Systems and norms?
Intercultures?
Why do translation history?
Personal satisfaction
– So why communicate it?
Protection and glory of target cultures
– So why look at translation?
To challenge concepts of cultures?
– But there is nothing outside of cultures?
A traditional theory:
W h a t t r a n s l a t i o n i s
S O U R C E C U L T U R E S O U R C E T E X T S O U R C E M E A N I N G
T A R G E T C U L T U R E T A R G E T T E X T T A R G E T M E A N I N G
What’s missing?
Cross-cultural intertextuality
Overlaps of cultures
Positions for receivers (how many meanings?)
Positions for translators...
An alternative model:
Culture 1 Tr Culture 2
An even better alternative model:
Culture 1 Tr Culture 2
Locale 1 Locale 2
Locale 3
IC
Locale 4
What is different here?
Translation moves out from a common centre (an interculture)
It moves towards locales
There are no target texts in the interculture
What is an interculture?
Relations are professional
They have secondness with respect to monocultural communication
The agents become principles (?)
They become more independent the more technical their tasks are.
(They will one day rule the world?)
Where are
cultures?
Where are intercultures?
Which means...
Translators work in networks (of intermediaries).
Translations mark the limits of cultures
The communication borders are nodes, increasingly in cities.
Translation precedes cultural identity.
Measuring translation flows 1
0 10000 20000 30000 40000 50000 60000
1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 Books
Translations
Measuring translation flows 2
0 5 10 15 20
TRANSLATIONS FROM LANGUAGE (IN THOUSANDS)
0 50 100 150 200
BOOKS PUBLISHED IN LANGUAGE (IN THOUSANDS) FIG. 1. BOOKS TRANSLATED FROM LANGUAGE
BY BOOKS PUBLISHED IN LANGUAGE UNESCO DATA FOR 1979-1983
English
French Russian German Spanish
Japanese
Measuring translation flows 3
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
0
PERCENTAGE OF TRANSLATIONS IN LANGUAGE
50 100 150 200
BOOKS PUBLISHED (IN THOUSANDS) FIG. 2a. PERCENTAGES OF TRANSLATIONS BY BOOKS PUBLISHED IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES
UNESCO DATA FOR 1979-1983
English Spanish
Russian Japanese
German French
Portuguese Finnish, Arabic Hebrew
Polish Italian Dutch
Danish, Norwegian Albanian
Hungarian Slovak
Turkish
Measuring translation flows 4
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
0
% BOOKS PUBLISHED IN NON-NATIONAL LANGUAGES
5 10 15 20 25
% TRANSLATIONS IN ALL BOOKS PUBLISHED FIG. 3. PERCENTAGE OF TRANSLATIONS
BY PERCENTAGE OF BOOKS PUBLISHED IN NON-NATIONAL LANGUAGES UNESCO DATA FOR 1979-1983
30 Albania
Finland
Japan
Arabic-speaking countries
DenmarkNorway Israel
Netherlands Sweden
TurkeySpanish-speaking countries Italy Slovakia
Hungary BrazilPolandUSSR
Which means:
The more cultural products there are in a language, the more translations there are likely to be from that language.
A low translation percentage in a language may be due to no more than a relatively
high number of cultural products produced in that language
And...
The more cultural products a country
produces in non-national languages, the higher the percentage of translations into the national language(s) is likely to be.
(e.g. People in Sweden read in English AND read translations from English)
Thus...
This is why intercultures appear to be
central or peripheral, in accordance with the relative size and openness of the cultural
locale concerned.
So how can we read this?
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940
German to French French to German British to German
Is English-language culture hegemonic?
For 1960-1986 there were more than 2.5 times as many translations in Britain and the United States (1,872,050) than in
France (688,720) or Italy (577,950).
24% of all books in English are published outside the US or the UK.
What are norms?
‘The main factors ensuring the
establishment and retention of social order’
(Toury 1995:55).
For example...
Literal / free, longer / shorter, neologisms / archaisms, preface / none, notes / none.
How to discover norms?
Look at translations?
Compare translations with parallel texts?
Look at translation theories?
Look at translation criticism?
Look at debates between translators?
I.e. Bottom-up or top-down.
For example:
'no great novel has ever been rendered into French without cuts' (Wyzewa 1901: 599).
M. G. Conrad (1889) proposed that
German translators make more cuts as an act of adaptive protectionism against the disloyal cultural competition of French
translators.
Toury’s laws:
The textual relations of the original are increasingly ignored in favour of the options offered by the target language.
Interference happens when the translation is from a prestigious language or culture and the target language or culture is minor.
In human terms...?
The more the translator is in an interculture, the less “natural” the translation.
The bigger the receiving culture, the more marginal the interculture and the more
“natural” the translation.
... Perhaps...
Examples:
Twelfth-century translations into Latin were...
...extremely literal.
Nineteenth-century translations into French were...
...often very free...
But what of the power of the individual?
Rabbi Mose...
Henri Albert...
Ezra Pound
... Or their patrons?
The real question is:
Who makes history?
(Or are the norms and systems simply there?)
Activity
Select a translator (or group of translators)
Try to find out how they made their money.
Who did they work with / for /against?
What was the locale conditioning their work?
Can you locate any norms of that locale?