Translation criticism, literal and idiomatic translation. Foreigning and domesticating. Translationeses (translatees).

From P.Newmark (Chapter 17):

Translation criticism is an essential link between translation theory and its practice; it is also an enjoyable and instructive exercise, particularly if you are criticising someone else's translation or, even better, two or more translations of the same text. (See Part II, especially Texts 10-13.) You soon become aware not only of the large 'taste area', but that a text may be differently translated, depend- ing on the preferred method of the translator. For example:

Cette rue, cette place ressemblent a la rue, a la place d'alors: elles ne sontpas les memes, el, les autres, je puts avoir 1'impression qu'elles existent encore.

(Jacques Borel, L'Adoration)

translated by N. Denny as

Those places look as they did then, but they are not the same; and as for the others, I

have the feeling that they still exist.

The point here is not how good this is as a translation or why it was not more closely translated, perhaps into: This street, this square are like the street, the square of those times; they are not the same, and as for those others, I may feel that they still exist...', but why Mr Denny wanted to make an emotional, dramatic utterance into a calm, natural statement. Thus there are various aspects of translation criticism: you can assess the translation by its standard of referential and pragmatic accuracy, but if this is inappropriate and rather futile, because there is so much to

'correct', you can consider why the translator has apparently transposed or changed the mood so drastically; whether any translator has the right to change en mime temps immobile et comme entre... dans une espece d'eiemiti to 'unchanging and fixed in a sort of eternity'. How far is a translator entitled to get away from the words, to devote himself to the message, the sense, the spirit?

I think there are absolute values of accuracy and economy as well as relative values but these absolute values (like translation) must be continually reconsidered and rediscussed in various cultural contexts; they cannot be taken for granted. (This resembles the argument for God.) Up to now, translation has mainly followed the prevailing and sometimes the countervailing ideology of the time: thus classic- ism (balance, noble expression, Pope), romanticism (richness of folk language, local colour, Tieck, Schlegel), art for art's sake (re-creation, Dowson), scientific realism (transference, James Strachey) all to some extent find their reflection (Niederschlag) in translation. The challenge in translation criticism is to state your own principles categorically, but at the same time to elucidate the translator's principles, and even the principles he is reacting against (or following). In this sense, good translation criticism is historical, dialectical, Marxist. In proposing my own two translation methods, 'semantic' and 'communicative', I tend to think of the first as absolute, the second as relative, but I am (pathetically) aware that both methods are to some extent reactions to or against Nida, Nabokov, Rieu and others. Nevertheless I think there is a new element in translation now, as it becomes a profession. The introduction of a 'scientific' method, the testing of any hypothesis or generalisation (itself arising from translation examples) by a series of further data or translation examples, tends not to eliminate but at least to reduce the range of choices, the extremes of ideology in translation. At the grossest level, the evidence of the 'group loyalty factor' so brilliantly detected by Ivars Alksnis in several numbers of Paralleles (Geneva), showing the variations of nationalist and sex prejudice in a large number of published translations of novels, would, if it were widely disseminated, make the extremes of ideology, political and even literary, more difficult. Nida's 1964 title to this fine book Towards a Science of Translating was prophetic: translation (and translating) is not and never will be a science, but as the discipline that treats (behandelt) it advances, translation's scientific frame of reference will be more generally acknowledged.

Translation criticism is an essential component in a translation course:

firstly, because it painlessly improves your competence as a translator; secondly, because it expands your knowledge and understanding of your own and the foreign language, as well as perhaps of the topic; thirdly, because, in presenting you with options, it will help you to sort out your ideas about translation. As an academic discipline, translation criticism ought to be the keystone of any course in com- parative literature, or literature in translation, and a component of any professional translation course with the appropriate text-types (e.g., legal, engineering etc.) as an exercise for criticism and discussion.

A translation may be evaluated by various authorities (Instanzen): (a) the reviser employed by the firm or the translation company; (b) the head of section or of the company (this may be described as 'Quality Control', if translations are sampled; the term is at present being overused and broadened); (c) the client; (d) the professional critic of a translation or the teacher marking one; and (e) finally by the readership of the published work. Ironically, as Nabokov pointed out, many reviewers of translated books neither know the original work nor the foreign language, and judge a translation on its smoothness, naturalness, easy flow, read- ability and absence of interference, which are often false standards. Why should a translation not sometimes read like one, when the reader knows that is what it is? Here, however, I am assuming that the evaluation, whether in the form of a critique or a graded assessment, is done by way of a comparison between the original and the translation. What is required at the present time is a reconsideration of many of the translations that have most influenced indigenous cultures, of the kind that has been signally performed by Bruno Bettelheim in his criticism of the authorised English version of Freud's work.