Translation, Linguistics, Culture

A French-English Handbook

By Nigel Armstrong

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2005 Nigel Armstrong
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85359-805-0

Contents

Acknowledgements, viii,
Abbreviations, ix,
1 The Linguistic Bases of Translation, 1,
2 Approaching a Text, 22,
3 Translation Issues at the Word Level, 49,
4 Words in Combination, 82,
5 Translation Issues at the Syntactic Level, 111,
6 Translation Types and Procedures, 142,
7 Some Miscellaneous Issues, 183,
Concluding Remarks, 211,
References, 214,

CHAPTER 1

The Linguistic Bases of Translation

Purpose of this Book

This book is intended both for students of French who need to do translation as a part of their degree course, whether undergraduate or postgraduate, and for students of translation who are interested in the problems posed by the rendering of French into English. The purpose of the book is to make the reader aware of some of the procedures that translators use. The rationale of the book is that an increased awareness of these operations will help to improve translation skills; clearly, this is a practical aim.

At the same time, this book aims to discuss theories of language as they impinge upon translation, and it seems worth stating at the outset why such theories are necessary. Is it not sufficient, one might wonder, to state quite simply that, leaving aside intangibles such as talent, a good translator needs minimally to have very good knowledge of the two languages of interest? In the present case, this will include educated native-speaker competence in English, and knowledge of French that derives in most cases from a study of French literature and other media, and a year spent in a francophone country. This is a likely case, as professional translation is done customarily into the translator's mother tongue, and often by graduates of French. Since language is in large part a cultural practice, very good knowledge of the two languages in question implies also a high degree of general knowledge, or acquaintance with the two cultures; including knowledge of how to find this knowledge. There is a further element of subtlety here, as good general knowledge will include a recognition of where one's general knowledge ends, and hence when a reference tool is required.

These remarks concerning general knowledge apply crucially also to linguistic knowledge, since linguistic problems, being 'structural' and hence built into a text, may be less visible, and capable therefore of inducing a lack of awareness in the translator that a problem is being posed. What do we mean when we say a linguistic problem is structural? Language is hard to think about, partly because, in order to do so, we are using the very system we are thinking about. We examine in further detail below what we mean by saying that a language has a structure, but when we look at a stretch of language, our response is so intuitive – language is 'hard-wired', we are born with a genetic language endowment that seems simply to grow, as our limbs do – that we can find it hard to see the formal structure of that piece of language. This is reflected in a widespread impatience with linguistic enquiry: 'language is for talking about something, not something to be talked about'. From this perspective language is primarily a tool for communication rather than an object of study in its own right. This attitude is a grave shortcoming in any serious student of language, or of any subject closely connected with it, like translation. It has been suggested that the goal of linguistics is 'to present in a precise, explicit and rigorous form facts about language which those who speak it as a native-speaker know intuitively' (Lodge et al., 1997: 2). This goes back to what was said in the first paragraph above about our intention to raise consciousness. Awareness of some of the operations that translators use means explicit knowledge about linguistics, among other things.

This last qualification is important: we do not wish to imply that knowledge of linguistics can improve every aspect of the translator's competence. Leaving aside the obvious fact that general and specialised knowledge are of great importance too, one way of expressing this reservation is to say that translation is as much an art as a science, and that while linguistics, to the extent that it is a science, can provide a rigorous and explicit way of looking at certain translation problems, there are in practice problems beyond the scope of the discipline. This is not necessarily to say that no translation problem is unconnected in principle with linguistics; rather, we would have to be capable of including in a theory of linguistics much more than we can at present, to the extent in fact of having a 'theory of everything'. The resources of linguistics are limited, so that we are not in a position to test in a rigorous way statements about certain differences between French and English. For example, it is often stated that French is a more 'nominal' language than English; that is, French has a tendency to use nouns where English uses other parts of speech. In principle, one could test this impression; in practice, the collection and analysis of enough corpora in the two languages would be a formidable task indeed. So as long as the resources available for systematising every translation problem are lacking, we are obliged to say things like 'English seems to prefer this way of expressing it'. This is a problem of practice, not of principle. At the same time it is a relatively simple problem. Others, such as the analysis of stylistic differences between the two languages, shade into aesthetics and hence are beyond the scope of rigorous theory.

What is required therefore, to the extent that it is possible, is a systematisation of the translator's art; a body of knowledge about translation procedures that might result from a debriefing session aiming to ask an expert to explain the issues that need to be borne in mind when rendering a text into English from French. As the title of this book states, the focus here is upon the cultural and linguistic issues that arise. This may seem obvious; how can a book about translation ignore such issues? The question should seem uncontroversial. Clearly, language is central both to thought and to cultural identity, and the serious student of French, and of French translation, will seek a deeper understanding of how the language works. The double sense of the term 'linguist' is pertinent here: a student of French is clearly a linguist in the polyglot sense of knowing more than one language. At the same time, students of French at any advanced level need also to be linguists in the linguistician sense – the sense of being intensely interested in, and aware of, the structure of the language, and of how it works as a means of cultural expression. The systematic or linguistic approach to the study of language offers therefore a means of understanding, beyond the superficial level, how French people think about themselves and their culture; and what distinguishes French from other languages. As was suggested above, non-linguists are in general uninterested in the form of language, being content so long as the content is received loud and clear. Let us emphasise one last time that the microscopic approach to language adopted by the linguistician is necessary for adequate translation.

We can see from this brief discussion of what is required in a good translator, that a...