A Textbook of Translation
Peter Newmark
Chapter 1 introduction (p3)Bear in mind, however, that knowing a foreign language and your subject is not as important as being sensitive to language and being competent to write your own language dexterously, clearly, economically and resourcefully.
(p4)A translator has to have a flair and a feel for his own language. There is nothing mystical about this ‘sixth sense’, but it is compounded of intelligence, sensitivity and intuition, as well as of knowledge. This six sense, which often comes to play during a final revision, tells you when to translate literally, and also, instinctively, perhaps once in a hundred or three hundred words, when to break all the ‘rules’ of translation, when to translate Malheur by ‘catastrophe’ in a seventeenth-century text.
(p8)A translator, perhaps more than any other practitioner of a profession, is continually faced with choices. In making his choice, he is intuitively or consciously following a theory of translation. Translation calls on a theory in action; the translator reviews the criteria for the various options before he makes his selection as a procedure in his translating activity.
Chapter 2 The Analysis of a Text
Reading the text (p11)
You have to determine its intention and the way it is written for the purpose of selecting a suitable translation method and identifying particular and recurrent problems.
Understanding the text requires both general and close reading. General reading is to get the gist. Close reading is required, in any challenging text, of the words both out of and in context. In principle, every thing has to be looked up that does not make good sense in its context.
The intention of the text (p12)
The intention of the text represents the SL writer’s attitude to the subject matter.
The intention of the translator (p12)
Usually, the translator’s intention is identical with that of the author of the SL text.
Text styles (p13)
Following Nida, we distinguish four types of (literary or non-literary) text:
(1) Narrative: a dynamic sequence of events, where the emphasis is on the verbs or, for English,
‘dummy’ or ‘empty’ verbs plus verb-nouns or phrasal verbs.
(2) Description, which is static, with emphasis on linking verbs, adjectives, adjectival nouns.
(3) Discussion, a treatment of ideas, with emphasis on abstract nouns (concepts), verbs of thought,
mental activity (‘consider’, ‘argue’, etc.), logical argument and connectives. (4) Dialogue, with emphasis on colloquialisms and phaticisms.
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The readership (p13)
On the basis of the variety of language used in the original, you attempt to characterize the readership of the original and then of the translation, and to decide how much attention you have to pay to the TL readers. You may try to assess the level of education, the class, age and sex of the readership if these are ‘marked’.
Stylistic scales (p14)
The scale of formality has been variously expressed.
Note that there is some correlation between formality and emotional tone, in that an official style is likely to be factual, whilst colloquialisms and slang tend to be emotive.
Attitude (p15)
In passage making evaluations and recommendations, you have to assess the standards of the writer. If he writes ‘good’, ‘fair’, ‘average’, ‘competent’, ‘adequate’, ‘satisfactory’, ‘middling’, ‘poor’, ‘excellent’, are his standards-- relative to the context—absolute, generally accepted in his culture, or arbitrary?
Setting (p15)
You have to decide on the likely setting: where would the text be published in the TL? What is the TL equivalent of the SL periodical, newspaper, textbook, journal, etc? or who is the client you are translating for and what are his requirements?
The three typical reader types are perhaps the expert, the educated layman, and the uninformed.
The quality of the writing (p16)
The quality of the writing has to be judged in relation to the author’s intention and/or the requirements of the subject-matter.
Chapter 3 The Process of Translating
The relation of translating to translation theory
(p19)The purpose of this theory of translating is to be of service to the translator. It is designed to be a continuous link between translation theory and practice; it derives from a translation theory framework which proposes that when the main purpose of the text is to convey information and convince the reader, a method of translation must be ‘natural’. ‘Naturalness’ is both grammatical and lexical, and is a touchstone at every level of a text, from paragraph to word,, from title to punctuation. The level of naturalness binds translation theory to translating theory, and translating theory to practice.
(p20)The theory of translating is based, via the level of naturalness, on a theory of translation. Therefore one arrives at the scheme shown in Figure 2:
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Three language functions Expressive (authoritative) Informative Vocative (directive or persuasive)
Translation theory Semantic Communicative
Translation theory frame of reference Problem Contextual factors Translation procedures
Theory of translation Textual Referential Levels Cohesive Natural
Translation practice
(A functional theory of language) (p20)
The Approach (p21)
There are two approaches to translating (and many compromises between them): (1) you start translating sentence by sentence, for say the first paragraph or chapter, to get the feel and the feeling tone of the text, and then you deliberately sit back, review the position, and read the rest of the SL text; (2) you read the whole text two or three times, and find the intention, register, tone, mark the difficult words and passages and start translating only when you have taken your bearings.
Which of the two methods you choose may depend on your temperament, or on whether you trust your intuition (for the first method) or your powers of analysis (for the second). Alternatively, you may think the first method more suitable for a literary and the second for a technical or an institutional text. The danger of the first method is is that it may leave you with too much revision to do on the early part, and is therefore time-wasting. The second method (usually preferable) can be mechanical; a translational text analysis is useful as a point of reference, but it shouldn’t inhibit the free play of your intuition. Alternatively, you may prefer the first approach for a relatively easy text, the second for a harder one.
The textual level (p22)
Your base level when you translate is the text. This is the level of the literal translation of the source language into the target language, the level of the translationese you have to eliminate, but
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it also acts as a corrective of paraphrase and the parer-down of synonyms.
The referential level
(p22)For each sentence, when it is not clear, when there is an ambiguity, when the writing is abstract or figurative, you have to ask yourself: What is actually happening here? And why? For what reason, on what grounds, for what purpose? Can you see it in your mind? Can you visualize it? If you cannot, you have to ‘supplement’ the linguistic level, the text level with the referential level, the factual level with the matter.
(p23)For more acutely than writers wrestling with only one language, you become aware of the awful gap between words and objects, sentences and actions (or processes), grammar and moods (or attitudes). You have to gain perspective, to sand back from the language and have an image of the reality behind the text, a reality for which you, and not the author (unless it is an expressive or an authoritative text), are responsible and liable.
You are working continually on two levels, the real and the linguistic, life and language; reference and sense, but you write, you ‘compose’, on the linguistic level, where your job is to achieve the greatest possible correspondence, referentially and pragmatically, with the words and sentences of the SL text.
The cohesive level
(p23)Cohesive level links the textual level and the referential level; it follows both the structure and the moods of the text: the structure through the connective words linking the sentences, usually proceeding from known information (theme) to new information (rheme); proposition, opposition, continuation, reiteration, opposition, conclusion—for instance—or thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
(p24)The second factor in the cohesive level is mood. Again, this can be shown as a dialectical factor moving between positive and negative, emotive and neutral.
The cohesive level attempts to follow the thought through the connectives and the feeling tone, and the emotion through value-laden or value-free expressions, is, admittedly, only tentative, but it may determine the difference between a humdrum or misleading translation and a good one.
The level of naturalness
(p25)Natural will usually depend on the degree of formality you have decided on for the whole text.
When you are faced with an innovatory expressive text, you have to try to gauge the degree of its deviation from naturalness, from ordinary language and reflect this degree in your translation. Thus in translating any type of text you have to sense ‘naturalness’, usually for the purpose of reproducing, sometimes for the purpose of deviating from naturalness.
(p26)You have to bear in mind that this level of naturalness of natural usage is grammatical as well as lexical and, through appropriate sentence connectives, may extend to the entire text.
In all ‘communicative’ translation’, whether you are translating an informative text, a notice or and advert, ‘naturalness’ is essential.
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(p28)Naturalness is not something you wait to acquire by instinct. You work towards it by small progressive stages, working from the most common to the less common features, like anything else rationally, even if you never quite attain it.
There is no universal naturalness. Naturalness depends on the relationship between the writer and the readership and the topic or situation. What is natural in one situation may be unnatural in another, but everyone has a natural, ‘neutral’ language where spoken and informal written language more or less coincide.
Combining the four levels (p29)
Summarizing the process of translating, I am suggesting that you keep in parallel the four levels—the textual, the referential, the cohesive, the natural: they are distinct from but frequently impinge on and may be in conflict with each other. Your first and last level is the text; then you have to continually bear in mind the level of reality, but you let it filter into the text only when this is necessary to complete or secure the readership’s understanding of the text, and then normally only within informative and vocative texts. As regards the level of naturalness, you translate informative and vocative texts on this level irrespective of the naturalness of the original, bearing in mind that naturalness in, say, formal texts is quite different from naturalness in colloquial texts. For expressive and authoritative texts, however, you keep to a natural level only if the original is written in ordinary language; if the original is linguistically or stylistically innovative, you should aim at a corresponding degree of innovation, representing the degree of deviation from naturalness, in your translation—ironically, even when translating these innovative texts, their natural level remains as a point of reference.
The unit of translating (p31)
Since the sentence is the basic unit of thought, presenting an object and what it does, is, or is affected by, so the sentence is, in the first instance, your unit of translation, even though you may later find many SL and TL correspondences within that sentence. Primarily, you translate by the sentence, and in each sentence, it is the object and what happens to it that you sort out first. Further, if the object has been previously mentioned, or it is the main theme, you put it in the early part of the sentence, whilst you put the new information at the end, where it normally gets most stress.
You should bear in mind, however, that if long sentences and complicated structures are an essential part of the text, and are characteristic of the author rather than of the norms of the source language, you should reproduce a corresponding deviation from the target language norms in your own version.
The translation of lexis
(p33)Many common nouns have four types of meaning: (a) physical or material, (b) figurative, (c) technical, (d) colloquial.
Most nouns, verbs or adjectives can be used figuratively and therefore can have figurative meanings—the more common the word, the more contagious and accessible the figurative meanings.
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