Object Image
Sense
(The translation of metaphor) (p105)
(p105)Note that one of the problems in understanding and translating an original or an adapted and, to a lesser extent, a stock metaphor is to decide how much space to allot to the criss-crossed area of sense, and further to determine whether this area is: (a) positive or negative; (b) connotative or denotative.
I use the following terminology for discussing metaphors:
Image: the picture conjured up by the metaphor, which may be universal; Object: what is described or qualified by the metaphor;
Sense: the literal meaning of the metaphor; the resemblance or the semantic area overlapping object and image; usually this consists of more than one sense component—otherwise literal language would do… Usually the more original the metaphor, the richer it is in sense components. Metaphor: the figurative word used, which may be one-word, or ‘extended’ oe any stretch of language from a collocation to the whole text.
(p106)Metonym: a one-word image which replaces the ‘object’. It may be a cliché metaphor, recently standardized or original. Metonym includes synecdoche. Many technical terms are metonyms.
Symbol: a type of cultural metonym where a material object represents a concept—thus ‘grapes’ as fertility or sacrifice.
Usually cultural metaphors are harder to translate than universal or personal metaphors. I see language not primarily as a deposit expressing a culture but as a medium for expressing universals and personality as well.
Translating metaphors (p106)
Whenever you meet a sentence that is grammatical but does not appear to make sense, you have to test its apparently nonsensical element for a possible metaphorical meaning, even if the writing is faulty, since it is unlikely that anyone, in an otherwise sensible text, is suddenly going to write deliberate nonsense… Usually, only the more common words have connotations but, at a pinch, any word can be a metaphor, and its sense has to be teased out by matching its primary meaning against its linguistic, situational and cultural contexts.
Types of metaphors
Dead metaphors (p106), viz. metaphors where one is hardly conscious of the image, frequently
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relate to universal terms of space and time, the main part of the body, general ecological features and the main human activities…They are particularly used graphically for concepts and for the language of science to clarify or define. Normally dead metaphors are not difficult to translate, but they often defy literal translation, and therefore offer choices.
(p107) Note that in English, at least, dead metaphors can be livened up, sometimes into metonyms, by conversion to phrasal words and this must be accounted for in the translation. Cliché metaphors (p107): I define cliché metaphors as metaphors that have perhaps temporarily outlived their usefulness, that are used as a substitute for clear thought, often emotively, but without corresponding to the facts of the matter. A translator should get rid of clichés of any kind (collocations as well as metaphors), when they are used in an ‘anonymous’ text, viz. an informative text where only facts or theories are sacred and, by agreement with the SL author, in public notices, instructions, propaganda or publicity, where the translator is trying to obtain an optimum reaction from readership…There is a choice between reducing the cliché metaphor to sense or replacing it with a less tarnished metaphor. (p108)Cliché and stock metaphors overlap, and it is up to you to distinguish them, since for informative text, the distinction may be important. The distinction between ‘cliché’ and ‘stock’ may even lie in the linguistic context of the same metaphor.
Stock or standard metaphors (p107): I define a stock metaphor as an established metaphor as an established metaphor which in an informal context is an efficient and concise method of covering a physical and/or mental situation both referentially and pragmatically—a stock metaphor has certain emotional warmth—and which is not deadened by overuse.
Stock metaphors are sometimes tricky to translate, since their apparent equivalents may be out o f date or affected or used by a different social class or age group. You should not use a stock metaphor that does not come naturally to you.
The first and most satisfying procedure for translating a stock metaphor is to reproduce the same image in the TL, provided it has comparable frequency and currency in the appropriate TL register.
(p109) But a more common procedure for translating stock metaphors is to replace the SL image with another established TL image, if one exists that is equally frequent within the register.
A stock metaphor can only be translated exactly if the image is transferred within a correspondingly acceptable and established collocation.
(p110) further, you have to bear in mind that reducing a stock metaphor to sense may clarify, demystify, make honest a somewhat tendentious statement. Sometimes it is possible to de this naturally, where the TL has no metaphorical equivalent for a SL political euphemism…Stock metaphors are the reverse of plain speaking about any controversial subject or whatever is taboo in a particular culture. They cluster around death, sex, excretion, war, unemployment. They are the handiest means of disguising the truth of physical fact.
Stock cultural metaphors can sometimes be translated by retaining the metaphor, and adding the sense. This is a compromise procedure, which keeps some of the metaphor’s emotive (and cultural) effect for the ‘expert’, whilst other readers who would not understand the metaphor are given an explanation.
(p111) Stock metaphors in ‘anonymous’ texts may be omitted if they are redundant.
Translation of sense by stock metaphor is more common in literary texts, where it is not justified, than in non-literary texts, where it may be so, particularly in the transfer from a rather formal to a
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less formal variety of language, or in an attempt to enliven the style of an informative text…this procedure may be better applied to verbs than to nouns or adjectives since these metaphorical variants are often less obtrusive than other types of metaphors.
Adapted metaphors (p111): In translation, an adapted stock metaphor should, where possible, be translated by an equivalent adapted metaphor, particularly in a text as ‘sacred’ as one by Reagan. There are various degrees of adapted stock metaphors but since their sense is normally clear the translation should ‘err’ on the side of caution and comprehension.
Recent metaphors (p111): By recent metaphors, I mean a metaphorical neologism, often ‘anonymously’ coined, which has spread rapidly in the SL. When this designates a recently current object or process, it is a metonym. Otherwise it may be a new metaphor designating one of a number of ‘prototypical’ qualities that continually ‘renew’ themselves in language.
(p112) Recent metaphors designating new objects or processes are treated like other neologisms, with particular reference to the ‘exportability’ of the referent and the level of language of the metaphor.
Original metaphors (p112) Original metaphors is created or quoted by the SL writer. In principle, in authoritative and expressive texts, these should be translated literally, whether they are universal, cultural or obscurely subjective. I set this up as a principle, since original metaphors (in the widest sense): (a) contain the core of an important writer’s message, his personality, his comment on life, and though that may have a more or a less cultural element, these have to be transferred neat; (b) such metaphors are a source of enrichment for the target language…If an original cultural metaphor appears to you to be a little obscure and not very important, you can sometimes replace it with a descriptive metaphor or reduce it to sense.
(p113)Original or odd metaphors in most informative texts are open to a variety of translation procedures, depending, usually, on whether the translator wants to emphasize the sense or the image. The choice of procedures in expressive or authoritative texts is much narrower, as is usual in semantic translation.
Chapter 11 The Use of Componential Analysis in Translation
Introduction (p114)
Componential analysis (CA) in translation is not the same as componential analysis in linguistics; in linguistics it means analyzing or splitting up the various senses of a word into sense-components which may or may not be universal; in translation, the basic process is to compare a SL word with which has a similar meaning, but is not an obvious one-to-one equivalent, by demonstrating first their common and then their differing sense components. Normally the SL word has a more specific meaning than the TL word, and the translator has to add one or two TL sense components to the corresponding TL word in order to produce a closer approximation of meaning.
Comprehensively, a SL word may be distinguished from a TL word on the one hand in the composition, shape, size and function of its referent; on the other in its cultural context and connotations, as well as in its currency, period, social class usage and its degree of formality, emotional tone, generality or technicality and, finally, in the pragmatic effect of its sound composition.
(p115) Sense components have been variously called semantic features or semes. Any SL and TL
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word pair that you are analyzing will show some common and some distinguishing or diagnostic components. Many words also have supplementary, figurative or technical components which become diagnostic in certain contexts: thus for ‘mule’—‘stubborn’, ‘obstinate’. In ‘spinning machine’ the technical replaces the other components. The more common components are sometimes contrasted at two ends of a scale: e.g. ‘+/-young’, ‘+/-long’, ‘+/-loud’, etc. or, rather artificially, ‘+/-having legs’, ‘+/-made of wool’, etc. In translation, the polar ‘+/-’ distinction is only useful when a SL lexical set is being distinguished through componential analysis: Material Length Finish Softness (silk/cotton, etc.) velvet + _ plush + _ + velours + + CAs in linguistics are often presented as tree diagram, matrix diagrams or scalar diagrams. In translation, matrix diagrams are useful for SL lexical sets and scalar diagrams for SL lexical series, but most CAs can be presented as equations or performed mentally.
If one thinks of translation as an ordered rearrangement of sense components that are common to two language communities then the value of CA in identifying these components vecomes clear. Further, CA attempts to go far beyond bilingual dictionaries; all CAs are based on SL monolingual dictionaries, the evidence of SL informants, and the translator’s understanding of his own language. The only purpose of CA in translation is to achieve the greatest possible accuracy, inevitably at the expense of economy. However, it is a technique that is more precise and limiting than paraphrase or definition. In practice, you are picking out characteristics in their order of importance.
Lexical words (p117)
The first and most obvious use of CA is in handling words that denote combinations of qualities, or combinations of actions and qualities, that appear to show up a lexical gap in the target language.
Cultural words (p119)
The second use of a componential analysis is in translating cultural words that the readership is unlikely to understand; whether the CA is accompanied by an accepted translation (which must be used in all but the most informal texts), transference, functional equivalent, cultural equivalent and so on will depend, firstly, on the particular text-type; secondly, on the requirements of the readership or the client, who may also disregard the usual characteristics of the text-type; and thirdly, on the importance of the cultural word in the text. The above considerations will affect the degree of detail of the CA, but normally you should include at least one descriptive and one functional component.
Synonyms (p120)
CA can be used to differentiate SL synonyms in context. Frequently, such synonyms are used for emphasis only, and can be translated by using a verb with an adverb or adverbial group as an intensifier.
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Sets and series (p121)
CA can be used to distinguish the meanings of SL cultural sets or series, when their TL ‘equivalents’, even if they have transparently similar names, have widely different functional and or descriptive (substantive) components. This goes back to the origins of CA which was concerned with kinship terms which, being more numerous in developing than in industrialized societies, are most conveniently described through CA.
Conceptual terms (p121)
Note that if a concept-word becomes a key word, i.e., if it is central to a professional non-literary text, it may be useful to analyze the concept componentially in a footnote at its first mention, scrupulously repeating the word at all later citations.
Neologisms (p122)
CA is useful in translating neologisms, whether these are new words naming newly invented or imported objects or processes, or new expressions that suddenly fill one of the innumerable gaps in a language’s resources for handling human thought and feeling at some level of formality.
Words as myths (p123)
CA is used for the words that have become symbols of untranslatability and cultural consciousness.
The Application of Case Grammar to Translation
Introduction (P125)
As translators, we are interested in grammar only as a transmitter of meaning…Yet most writers on translation who use case grammar are only concerned with the normal sequence of ,say, participants, process and circumstance, in each language, contrasting the different valencies in each case.
The translation of missing verbs, i.e., verbal force
(p126)I define case grammar as a method of analyzing a sentence, a clause, or a verbless compound in a manner that demonstrates the central position of the verb or the word that has verbal force within the word sequence. This word may be an adjective, an adverb, noun, a collective noun, a common noun, or an adverbial in a verbless sentence where a verb is implied. (p129) Note that it is not difficult to ‘derive’ missing verbs from statements since, in contrast to nouns, the number of basic verbs is limited. The number of nouns is infinite, but new verbs can only be created on the basis of combining a few fundamental human actions with new objects; the vast majority of verbs consist of one or more of a few meaning components combined with an object or quality.
The translation of case-gaps
(p129)A more common, if perhaps less important, aspect of case grammar applies to case-gaps in the SL text.
(p130)Mandatory case-gap filling: this is basically syntactical. Here the translator automatically
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