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39проелемы современного осрпзоопнип
N.M. Nesterova, Yu.K. Papulova
TRANSLATION AS A SECONDARY ACTIVITY: MYTH OR REALITY?
Keywords: translation, verse translation, intertextual relationship, secondarity, type of a text, translation method, personality of a translator.
Abstract: This paper analyzes the nature of secondarity in translation. The authors argue that secondarity as an ontological property of translation is not absolute and homogeneous. It varies depending on many factors: the type of the original text, the method of translation and translator's personality - his/her translation credo. This paper focuses mainly on the type of text and studies secondarity in poetic translation. The quantitative analysis of exo-lexis in translation shows that verse translation possesses the lowest degree of secondarity compared to other genres of translation, in fact translated poems often become new (primary) poems in their own right and are not considered as translations (secondary texts). The results of this research may attract attention of translation theorists and can be integrated into Translation studies programs.
Ключевые слова: перевод, поэтический перевод, интертекстуальные отношения, вторичность, тип текста, метод перевода, личность переводчика
Аннотация: В данной статье анализируется сущность категории «вторичность» в переводе. По мнению авторов статьи, вторичность как онтологическое свойство перевода не является абсолютной и гомогенной. Степень и тип вторичности зависит от множества факторов, а именно: тип текста оригинала, метод перевода и личность переводчика — его/ее переводческое кредо. В данной статье подробно рассматривается тип текста, в частности анализируются особенности проявления вторичности в поэтическом переводе. Количественный анализ экзо-лексики в переводе показал, что поэтический перевод обладает наиболее низкой степенью вторичности по сравнению с другими жанрами перевода; фактически переводы стихотворений часто воспринимаются как новые произведения (первичные тексты), а не как переводы (вторичные тексты). Результаты проведенного исследования могут быть использованы в вузовских теоретических курсах по переводоведению.
Nothing is more serious than a translation.
J. Derrida
"Through its long history translation has never really enjoyed the kind of recognition and respect that other professions such as medicine and engineering enjoy. Translators have constantly complained that translation is underestimated as a profession " [2]. One of the reasons for this underestimation is common understanding of translation as a secondary activity and the translated text as a secondary one created on the basis of the original by means of "simple" interlanguage transcoding. This concept of translation makes its secondarity reality and allows J. Ortega y Gasset to call the translator "a shy character' and his/ her occupation "insignificant".
So it seems that we can answer the question contained in the title positively: secondarity of translation is apparently not a myth but reality, it is the ontological (essential) property of translation. However, it seems that understanding translation as a secondary activity can and should be revised once we regard secondarity as a universal text category. As we know, in the postmodernist paradigm any text is an intertext, other texts are present in it, hence any text is secondary to this or that extent. Today even writers admit that "every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. <> Every translation, up to certain point, is an invention and such it constitutes a unique text ". The words belong to Nobel Prize Laureate Octavio Paz [9].
The theories of intertextuality and secondarity allow us to understand translation not only as a cross-language process, but as a universal mechanism for generating texts. And the translation (the target text) like any text is an intertext and combines the characteristics of primary and secondary texts. Thus, we can and must distinguish between "absolute" and "relative" secondarity in translation. Their ratio in every translation act depends on subjective and objective factors. It means that we can distinguish degrees and types of translation secondarity. However, translation is a creative text production activity and any translated text is new and unique, hence, we do agree with S. Bassnett who says: "The myth that the translation is a secondary activity should be dispelled "[3].
But to dispel this myth we should analyze translation secondarity. Assuming secondarity to be the ontological (essential) property of translation we emphasize that it is not homogeneous. It is also obvious that equivalence and secondarity are closely interconnected categories because both of them characterize the intertextual relation between the original text and the translation. And both (equivalence and secondarity) are relative, not absolute categories. It is well known, that there are neither absolutely equivalent nor absolutely secondary translations. And it seems we face here not a linguistic problem but a
philosophical one.
In the last quarter of the 20th century translation studies turned its attention to philosophical issues, though the most "philosophical" work was written much earlier - in 1923. This is W. Benjamin's famous essay "The task of the Translator". This work gained recognition only half a century later and led to the philosophical turn in translation studies.
"The Task of the Translator" was variously interpreted by philosophers and theorists of translation. Among them is Jacque Derrida who formulated the philosophy of the intertextual relationship between the original and the translation in his famous "The Tower of Babel". Both Benjamin and Derrida emphasized secondarity of the translation regarding secondarity as the second stage in the development of the original. According to Benjamin, "the original depends on the translation to come into full bloom" [4]. For Derrida, the original is "the first debtor, the first petitioner; it begins by lacking and by pleading for translation" [5]. It means that the original requires translation, it lives on in the translation gaining new meanings, building intertextual relationship with the translation and other texts and becoming a "strong" text in the intertextual space.
The theory of secondarity shifts the relation between the original and the translation. It liberates the translation, the translation as a secondary text does not need to be faithful or equivalent to the original anymore. Moreover, the difference between primarity and secondarity as well as between the original (a primary text) and the translation (a secondary text) becomes obscure because as we have already said all texts are primary and secondary at the same time, all texts are originals and translations. This approach to translation deprives the original text of its dominant position and makes the translated text part of the target-language culture. Thus, after H. Vermeer we may talk about «dethroning of the source text» [10].
Hence, the analysis of different approaches to the intertextual relation between the original and the translation reveals that this relation has never been considered simple or straightforward and it depends on many factors, including the genre (type) of text, a translation tradition, a country, an era, the personality traits of the author and of the translator. That is why it seems necessary to carry out a profound theoretical and experimental analysis of secondarity as a controversial property of the translation and the translation discourse in general. To perform this research we need to define a set of relevant parameters that would conventionally "rank" the secondarity of translation. The parameters of translation secondarity can be the following: 1) the type of a text, 2) the method of translation, and 3) a specific act of translation, i.e. the personality traits of a translator and his work at a particular moment.
As it has been mentioned above, secondarity is not homogeneous. We may distinguish different types and degrees of secondarity. We suppose that the degree of secondarity is a quantitative variable characteristic and can be "counted" (described numerically). This degree mostly depends on the type of the text and the personality of the translator. As for the type of secondarity, it is manifested in the typological or discursive similarity or difference between the original and the translation. In fact we mean interdiscursive translation. The type of secondarity depends on the method of translation. It can be prose translations of verse or translations adapted to the specialized audience. In Russian history of literary translation the adapted translation of A. Milne's "Winnie the Pooh" made by V. Rudnev is an example of interdiscursive translation. V. Rudnev titled his book "Winnie the Pooh and the philosophy of ordinary language". It was first published in 1994 and gained immediate recognition among philosophers. Unlike well-known B. Zahoder"s translation, it is not a fairy tale but a philosophical and philological analysis of Milne's book and has nothing to do with children's literature.
In this paper, we will mostly focus on the degree of secondarity of translation. To determine the degree of secondarity we will use a quantitative method based on A.I. NovikoVs technique which he employed in his studies of text and its perception, particularly, he carried out a comparative analysis of so-called exo-lexis and endo-lexis contained in a primary text and in a secondary text [7]. In relation to translation, we regard endo-lexis as "expected" translation "equivalents" and exo-lexis as "unexpected" translation "equivalents". We assume that the ratio between exo-lexis and endo-lexis in the translation determines its degree of secondarity. The more endo-lexis in the target text, the higher the degree of its secondarity and on the contrary — the more exo-lexis in the translatum, the lower its secondarity.
проелемы современного осрпзоопнип
It is obvious that different translations contain different ratios of primarity and secondarity, especially written translations of art and science which Fr. Schleiermacher, in his famous lecture "On the different methods of translation", calls 'true' translation, translation in the proper sense [11]. However, let us repeat that the degree of secondarity of the translation depends not only on the type of the original but also on the method of translation and a particular act of translation, i.e. the personality traits of a translator and his work at a particular moment. These factors are inherently variable, so they allow us to "rank" secondarity. Let us describe each factor in detail and show how these factors affect the type and degree of secondarity of translation.
1. Type of the text (its genre, its language, etc). We assume that secondarity of translation depends on such parameters as the "softness"/ "hardness" of the language and the text, the genre which determines the stylistic characteristics of the language and the text, the information the text contains.
Our experimental research has confirmed this statement. The research was carried out with third-year students studying translation as their future specialty. We asked students to translate five texts (particularly, technical, commercial, scientific, advertising and literary texts) from English into Russian. The results of this experimental translating indicated that literary translations contained the highest percentage of exo-lexis while there was almost no exo-lexis in technical translations. The percentage of exo-lexis in advertising, scientific and commercial translations was somewhere in the middle. Thus, we may conclude that technical translations contain the highest degree of secondarity, they adhere closely to the original and greatly depend on it. In contrast, literary translations possess the lowest degree of secondarity, they depart significantly from the original and are more independent. These results should have been expected because literary translation is often regarded as art or a form of creative art activities. However, the degree of secondarity of different literary texts can vary as well. Literary texts have several layers of meaning -explicit and implicit. The more implicit meanings the text contains, the more ingenuity is required from the translator to convey all the hidden meanings and the further the target text departs from the original. We expect that the translation contains a high percentage of exo-lexis and possesses a low degree of secondarity if the original is filled with numerous hidden, implicit meanings.
2. The method of translation. It seems that free translation is primary, whereas literal translation is secondary. But interlinear translations made by V. Nabokov and V. Rudnev cannot be considered absolutely secondary. Firstly, literal translation requires much ingenuity from the translator, perhaps, even greater than free translation. Secondly, literary translation inevitably results in a loss of some meanings and a gaining of new ones. In fact, it becomes a serious scholarly endeavor, a research revealing implicit meanings of the foreign text. For this reason, a text translated literally is undoubtedly a new text containing more implicit meanings than the original. In this case, it is more correct to talk about the type of secondarity rather than about its degree. The type of secondarity of translation depends on the method of translation. Free translation reads fluently and seems transparent. It assimilates the target-language culture and becomes part of a new intertextual space. A free translation is perceived as the original text. In this case, we may talk about the degree of secondarity. A literal translation is a text of a different type, of a different genre. This is a specific "unreadable" metatext due to its strained and unnatural language. Thus, the method of translation determines discursive affinity or divergence between the original and the translation. It means, as J.Ortega y Gasset notes, that "translation doesn't belong to the same literary genre as the text that was translated" and it is not the original, it is only "a path" toward it" [8].
3. Personality traits of a translator. As it has already been mentioned, secondarity of translation depends on the personality traits of a translator, more specifically on the translator's ""visibility""/ ""invisibility"". As S. Averintsev has remarked, there are two types of translators, the translator of the first type becomes the vassal of the original reproducing in the translation whatever features of the foreign text, whereas the translator of the second type becomes the independent-minded master of the original deviating from it in decisive ways [1]. Most of the translators rarely stick to these extreme positions. The translated text is a place where both the source-language culture and the target-language culture are manifested. Some translators seek to preserve the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text while others are oriented toward conformity with the target-language cultural values and linguistic norms. For example, M.
Lozinskii and B. Pasternak, two famous translators of "Hamlet" into Russian, belong to different types of translators. B. Pasternak points out that the translation made by M. Lozinskii adheres closely to the original both in terms of the meaning and modes of expression. His translation can be regarded as a book for reading, a play-script for performing it on the stage and even as an English textbook that gives a complete transcript of the original owing to its painstaking accuracy, word-for-word precision and attention to detail. Concerning his own translation, B. Pasternak, a poet-translator, notes: "From the translation of individual words and metaphors, I turned to the translation of thoughts and scenes. My translation should be regarded as a Russian original drama, because apart from accuracy, equilinearity, etc. it has more of the deliberate liberty without which there is no way of approaching great things" [6]. "Literary translation is impossible, it is doomed to failure from the start because a literary text stands out for its originality and uniqueness. On the other hand, literary translation is possible since a translated text should be a work of art as unique as the original it is based on " [12]. B. Pasternak's and M. Lozinskii's translations, the masterpieces of English literature in Russian translation, are often compared with each other because they employ two different approaches to translation. In relation to creativity in translation, Yu.A. Sorokin, in his controversial work "Does literary translation exist?", points out that owing to his great creativity Pasternak imposes a rhythm and stylistic manner on the foreign text whereas M. Lozinskii shows creativity and ingenuity by retaining the initial modes of expression of the foreign text [13].
Concerning a translator's personality, we may conclude that the degree of secondarity of translation depends on the translator's ego investment in the translated text. The major difference between translators is the intensity with which they force the author out of the text. The main evaluation criterion is not an abstract unchangeable translation norm but the correspondence between the translated text and the strategy which best suits the translation purpose [12].
Once again, we distinguish three main parameters that determine the degree of secondarity of translation. In this paper, a focus of attention is on the type (genre) of the text, particularly on poetry and its translation. One should agree with A. Shveytser who underlines that a poem is much more of an art and one cannot always determine if a translated poem is primary or secondary [12]. In other words, verse translation seems to possess the lowest degree of secondarity compared to other genres of translation.
To show it clearly and statistically we have analyze Shakespeare's sonnets 87 and 90 and their numerous translations into Russian. We have analyzed 11 translations of sonnet 87 and 16 translations of sonnet 90 made by well-known translators (S. Marshak, A. Finkel, N. Gerbel, M. Chaykovskii and S. Stepanov) and less familiar translators (A. Kuznetsov, B. Leivi, B. Kushner, etc.). The existence of multiple translations makes it possible to compare different translations of each sonnet from the perspective of their secondarity. The analysis reveals that apart from the type of the text the degree of secondarity of translation also depends on the personality traits of the translators and the translation methods they choose. Translators show significant originality in the choice of expressions to render the author's thoughts and ideas, attitudes and feelings, the author's stylistic manner. This agrees with Dalloz's view that "the variety in modes of expression for a single thought demonstrates, with the possibility of choice, that the task of translation gives room for manifestations of personality" [5].
As has been remarked, our technique is based on A.I. NovikoVs method. Like A.I. Novikov we have divided the original into concept units (lexical words, groups of words and phrases) and tried to find their "equivalents" in the translation. Then, we analyzed the relation between the concept units of the original and their translation variants. We assume that concept units can be expressed by the use of endo-lexis ("expected" translation "equivalents") and exo-lexis ("unexpected" translation "equivalents").
The analysis indicates that Shakespeare's sonnets are rich in metaphors and the concept units that compose sonnets 87 and 90 often represent legal, financial and war metaphors. The analysis of the sonnets and their translations also displays that translators often omit and substitute metaphors used by the author or add new ones.
First let us consider sonnet 87 and its translations. Sonnet 87 expresses the sense of loss, regret and wretchedness that overwhelms the poet when he thinks about a separation from his friend and tries to find reasons for saying goodbye to him. Throughout the poem W. Shakespeare has equated the failure of
провлсмы современного осппзоппнип
their relationship with the cancelation of a contract. However, most translators of sonnet 87 omit legal and financial metaphors frequently used by the poet and neglect one of the meaning of multiple meaning words: estimate, charter, worth, releasing, bonds, determinate, riches, patent, swerving, misprision, hold, granting, gift, cause, and matter. Only S. Stepanov, T. Shchepkina-Kupernik, S.I. Turukhtanov, A. Kuznetsov, and S. Marshak use legal and financial terms. Moreover, some translations contain additional typical love poetry metaphors.
On the whole, the analysis of the sonnet translations shows that the translations by S. Stepanov (86%), T. Shchepkina-Kupernik (79%) and S. Turukhtanov (79%) possess the highest degree of secondarity whereas the translations by N. Gerbel (29%), V. Mikushevich (36%) and I. Fradkin (50%) possess the lowest degree of secondarity2. The analysis also reveals that the translation by N. Gerbel contains more additional concept units (8) than other translations while the translation by T. Shchepkine-Kupernik contains no additional metaphors.
Sonnet 90 continues the theme of the breakdown of the relationship between the young man and the poet. The poet insists that his friend leave him now rather than later. He argues for immediate rather than extended pain. Throughout the sonnet the poet employs the imagery of a war to express his feelings concerning losing his love in addition to all the troubles that already plague him: do not drop in, Come in the rearward of a conquer'd woe, a purposed overthrow, But in the onset come. Nevertheless, only T. Shchepkina-Kupernik, M. Chaykovsky, V. Mikushevich and S. Stepanov use military metaphors, although not as often as W. Shakespeare does. At the same time, most translations retain typical love poetry metaphors. Moreover, translators add new commonplace metaphors.
The analysis of the sonnet translations demonstrates that the translations by T. Shchepkina-Kupernik (82%), A. Finkel (77%) and M. Chaykovskii (71%) possess the highest degree of secondarity, whereas the translations by R. Badygov (29%), N. Gerbel (41%), S. Marshak (47%), and A. Kuznetsov (47%) possess the lowest degree of secondarity. The analysis also shows that the translation by T. Shchepkine-Kupernik contains no additional metaphors while the translations by R. Gerbel (5) and N. Badygov (5) contain more irrelevant additions than other translations.
If we compare the translations of two sonnets, we will notice that the translations of sonnet 90 contain much more additional concept units than the translations of sonnet 87 presumably due to the dominance of figurative language in sonnet 90 and the dominance of objective information in sonnet 87. Particularly, sonnet 90 proposes a sequence of different metaphors for the same idea whereas sonnet 87 employs metaphors to characterize and analyze the situation faced by the poet. As a consequence, the translations of sonnet 90 possess a lower degree of secondarity (the average degree of secondarity is 57% and the maximum degree of secondarity is 71%) and the translations of sonnet 87 possess a higher degree of secondarity (the average degree of secondarity is 62% and the maximum degree of secondarity is 86%).
On the whole, the analysis of Shakespeare's sonnets 87 and 90 and their translations has demonstrated that verse translation has a rather low degree of secondarity (57-62%). The analysis of randomly chosen sonnets 35, 60, 66 and their translations has proved this statement: the average degree of secondarity of the translations is just a bit above 50% (52-61%) as well.
In sum, we are very much in agreement with post-structuralists' statement that any text is primary and secondary at the same time. From this perspective any text can possess a low or high degree of secondarity. Translated texts differ from other secondary texts in their function: they replace the foreign text in the target language and the target-language culture. For this reason, translations aim to follow the original text and are defined as second-order representations of the foreign text. So, it could be said that the secondarity of translation is reality. However, translation can never be completely adequate to the foreign text. It can adhere to the original text or depart from it to a greater or lesser extent. Hence, secondarity of translation varies as well. Many factors determine it. Among them is the type of the foreign text. Technical, scientific, legal, diplomatic and commercial translations possess a high degree of
2 a percentage of exo-lexis.
secondarity, whereas literary translation usually possesses a low degree of secondarity. At the same time, secondarity of literary translation is also relative. Our analysis has confirmed that verse translation possesses the lowest degree of secondarity compared to other genres of translation, in fact translated poems often become original (primary) texts and are not considered as translations. For example, LermontoVs translations of J. Goethe's "Wanderer's night song" ("Gornyi vershiny") and H. Heine's "The Pine and the palm" ("Na severe dikom") are considered unsatisfactory but as Russian poems they command high respect. It means that degree of secondarity is much influenced by a translator's personality and the translation method he/she chooses. The difference in translations of the same original text reveals the artistic nature of translation activity making us agree with J.Derrida who states that "translation is more than any not second or secondary" [5] and with S. Bassnett concluding that secondarity of translation is a myth that needs to be dispelled [3].
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