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    History of Translation: Contributions to Translation Science in History: Authors, Ideas, Debate
    History of Translation: Contributions to Translation Science in History: Authors, Ideas, Debate
    History of Translation: Contributions to Translation Science in History: Authors, Ideas, Debate
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    History of Translation: Contributions to Translation Science in History: Authors, Ideas, Debate

    By Bruno Osimo

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    A guide to authors who have made a contribution to the theory of sense in history and, ultimately, to translation theory. The book is divided into 5 chapters: Signification, Communication, Mind, Culture, Criticism
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBruno Osimo
    Release dateDec 10, 2022
    ISBN9788898467471
    History of Translation: Contributions to Translation Science in History: Authors, Ideas, Debate

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      Book preview

      History of Translation - Bruno Osimo

      Bruno Osimo

      History of Translation

      Contributions to Translation Science in History: Authors, Ideas, Debate

      Copyright © Bruno Osimo 2022

      Bruno Osimo is an author/translator who publishes himself

      The printed version is a print on sale by Kindle Direct Publishing

      ISBN 9788898467471 for the electronic edition

      ISBN 9788831462839 for the hardcover edition

      To contact author, translator, publisher: osimo@trad.it

      Preface

      1 - Principles of signification

      1.1 Aristotle

      1.2 The Stoic Philosophers

      1.3 Cicero

      1.4 Quintilian

      1.5 Jerome

      1.6 Francis Bacon

      1.7 Thomas Hobbes

      1.8 John Locke

      1.9 George Berkeley

      1.10 Immanuel Kant

      1.11 Charles Sanders Peirce

      Table 1.1: Sign, object, interpretant.

      Table 1.2: The interpretant as sign of a new triad.

      Table 1.3: Abduction

      Table 1.4: The experience-instinct-habit triad

      1.12 Leonard Bloomfield

      1.13 Willard Van Orman Quine

      1.14 Ludwig Wittgenstein

      1.15 Roman Jakobson

      Table 1.4: Factors of communication in the translation process (Jakobson)

      1.16 Kalevi Kull

      1.17 Susan Petrilli

      1.18 Lyudskanov

      1.19 Anton Popovič

      Table 1.5 Communication scheme in translation

      1.20 Dinda Gorlée

      1.21 Peeter Torop

      2 - Principles of communication

      2.1 Plato

      2.2 Pierre-Daniel Huet

      2.3 Shannon and Weaver

      Figure 2.1 The Shannon-Weaver Mathematical Model

      2.4 Bar-Hillel

      2.5 Ferruccio Rossi-Landi

      2.6 Paul Cornea

      2.7 Wolfgang Iser

      3 - Mind

      3.1 Augustine

      3.2 William of Ockham

      3.3 Sigmund Freud

      Table 3.1 The primary translation process

      Table 3.2 From the dream to its memory: the translation process

      Table 3.3 The secondary dream translation process

      Table 3.4 The psychotherapist’s translation process

      3.4 Lev Vygotsky

      3.5 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards

      3.6 James Jerome Gibson

      3.7 Montague Ullman

      3.8 Franco Fornari

      3.9 Patrick Mahony

      3.10 Carol Schreier Rupprecht

      4 - Culture

      4.1 John Trevisa

      4.2 Leonardo Bruni

      4.3 Martin Luther

      4.4 Juan Luis Vives

      4.5 Estienne Dolet

      4.6 Friedrich Schleiermacher

      4.7 Wilhelm von Humboldt

      4.8 Edward Sapir

      4.9 Benjamin Lee Whorf

      4.10 Louis Hjelmslev

      Table 4.1 Chromatic spectrum and color naming in English and Welsh

      4.11 Mikhaìl Bakhtìn

      4.12 Roland Barthes

      4.13 Sergej Vlahov and Sider Florin

      4.14 Itamar Even-Zohar

      4.15 Gideon Toury

      4.16 Christiane Nord

      4.17 Umberto Eco

      4.18 Susan Petrilli

      4.19 Juri Lotman

      4.20 Peeter Torop

      4.21 Dinda Gorlée

      5 - Criticism

      5.1 Dante Alighieri

      5.2 Giacomo Leopardi

      5.3 Arthur Schopenhauer

      5.4 Luigi Pirandello

      5.5 Benedetto Croce

      5.6 Viktor Shklovsky

      5.7 Martin Heidegger

      5.8 Vladìmir Nabókov

      5.9 Milan Kundera

      5.10 Gregory Rabassa

      5.11 George Steiner

      5.12 Eugene A. Nida

      5.13 Yakov Iosìfovich Retsker

      5.14 James Stratton Holmes

      5.15 I. I. Revzin

      5.16 Jean-René Ladmiral

      5.17 Alexander Davidovich Shveitser

      5.18 Vilen Naumovich Komissarov

      5.19 Basil Hatim e Ian Mason

      5.20 Christiane Nord

      5.21 Dirk Delabastita

      Table 5.1 Translational relationships according to Delabastita (1993:39)

      5.22 José Lambert

      5.23 Anthony Pym

      5.24 Douglas Robinson

      5.25 Lawrence Venuti

      5.26 Theo Hermans

      References

      Notes

      Nota bio sul curatore

      Dello stesso editore

      Preface

      Many authors in history – philosophers, writers, linguists, psychologists, semioticians, anthropologists – have consciously or unawares made contributions to what we today call translation theory, translatology, translation science, or translation studies.

      Here are some of these contributions, with my comments.

      Any such selection is necessarily manipulative. I declare that my selection tends to emphasize contributions that stress the psychological, individual component of the translation process. My point of view shares the conception of Peircean semiotics and of Lotman’s semiotics of culture. Consequently, I tend to see in the authors’ text what most interests me: concepts that foreshadow Peirce’s interpretant or Lotman’s semiosphere, for example.

      My terminology stems from Popovič: the original and the translated text are called prototext, and metatext, respectively. Moreover, I try to avoid words that don't have a definite, scientific meaning like faithful, literal, close, equivalent, and so on.

      Readers can send their remarks to the addressosimo@trad.it.

      Deiva Marina, 17 December 2022

      Bruno Osimo

      1 - Principles of signification

      Theories of signification implicitly underpin theories of translation, similar to the way operating systems underpin applications in a computer. For example, if you believe in a two-way correspondence theory, like Saussure’ssignifiant-signifiéview, consequently you will think of translation in terms of ‘equivalence’. A given word in English is equivalent to a given word in, say, Italian. According to this view, there are only two types of relation between words: equivalence and difference. A word, all itssynonyms(in the same language) and all its equivalents (in other languages) are ‘the same’. All other words are ‘different’, ‘something else’. Consequently, in translation you will look for equivalents and you will think that the metatext you will produce will be satisfying as long as it is ‘equivalent’ to the prototext.

      On the other hand, if you believe in a triadic theory, like Peirce’s sign-interpretant-object theory, in which the interpretant is a subjective, time-sensitive variable, you will think of translation in terms of difference, and you will be satisfied when your metatext is different from the original in a way that, in your opinion, according to the standards that you set yourself, is fit for the receiving languaculture.

      This is the reason why this chapter is at the beginning of the book. A few theories of sense and signification (i.e., the way sense is formed) are explained and commented on, trying to explain why the one that I have chosen for my personal view of translation is Peircean semiotics.

      1.1 Aristotle

      In his workPoetics(Peri poietikes, 350 BCE), Aristotle analyzes the different types of nouns: they can be either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly-coined, or lengthened, or contracted, or altered (XXI). In every text there are both common words and words that, one way or another, can be considered as marked. He suggests a codification of the different types of markedness: Strange words are foreign words commonly used in one’s own language, i.e. barbarisms. However, he does not use this term in a derogatory sense since its expressive usefulness is given a high degree of consideration: […] by deviating in exceptional cases from the normal idiom, the language will acquire distinction; while, at the same time, the […] conformity with the usage will add clearness (XXII). Authors are implicitly asked to use both elements properly according to the dominant of the text and to their model reader, as it is called today. The word metaphor is perceived in a very broad sense and consists in changing, by analogy, the name of the object to which that name usually refers to by another one, from the gender to the species and vice versa. Newly-coined words created by the author can be classified as neologisms, or as a sort of idiolect ahead of its time.

      Furthermore, Aristotle makes an important reference to Ariphrades who fought against the practice of tragedians filling their works with phrases which no one would employ in ordinary speech (XXII). Ariphrades was apparently a forerunner of the modern stylists since he addressed the problem of dialogue credibility in literary works; contrary to Ariphrades, Aristotle still clung to the idea that tragedies were attempts at the embellishment of the language and as works made to narrate thegesteof persons who are above the common level (XV) and therefore in search of phrases […] that […] give distinction to the style (XXII).

      In On Interpretation (Peri hermeneias), Aristotle sketches a conception of the sign that is not so different from the modern one[1].

      Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men do not have the same writing, so all men do not have the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences which these directly symbolize are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images(I).

      Not only does he introduce the concept of sign, but he considers it as a mediating entity between the subjective mental experiences (psihè pathematon) and interpersonal communication.

      InMetaphysics, the Greek philosopher writes about polysemous words. They are not considered as a possible literary contrivance or as a way to express ambiguity and artistic ambivalence: they are, above all, potential sources of misunderstanding. Their meaning has to be clearly defined and has to be extremely precise:

      every word must be intelligible and indicate something, and not many things but only one; and if it signifies more than one thing, it must be made plain to which of these the word is being applied(V).

      Many aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy – even those concerning language and signification – were of utmost importance throughout the Middle Age.

      1.2 The Stoic Philosophers

      The Stoic current of thought is named after the Stoa Poikile building situated near the Agora in Athens. In 300 BCE, Zeno started to impart his philosophical knowledge to his disciples in that location. His interest in various topics closely connected with language is probably due to his personal story. Cypriot by birth, his mother tongue was Phoenician and this may have contributed to his metalinguistic awareness of the Greek context (Pohlenz 1967:60). According to Zeno,logosare substances that are used as signs to identify well-defined objects, whereas words are the forms in whichlogosare displayed.

      It has to be noted that three – and not only two – elements make up the signification system: namely, the object, and two other elements, the words (vocal signs) and thelogos(significant voice coming from one’s own thoughts – commonly called the interpretant nowadays).

      Zeno did not make any distinction between thought and words yet, but he could differentiate the meaning (element belonging to logic) from the object (external element belonging to nature). As a further development of Zeno’s speculations, the Stoic philosophers identified two kinds oflogos:logos endiathetos(internallogos) andlogos prophorikos(utteredlogos). The former is the so-called inner speech; the latter is the external speech that is expressed through one’s voice. This early distinction still lies at the basis of present debate (Pohlenz 1967:61).

      1.3 Cicero

      Greek culture considered all the non-Greek peoples as barbarians and, by virtue of the extremely advanced state of their civilization, seemed to have very little interest in accepting external influences. By contrast, Roman culture considered itself as a satellite of the Greek one and even their writing and thinking patterns were implicitly of Hellenic influence. All this resulted in a new interest in translation and in the possible ways to proceed with it. From the outset the debate over translation has been focused on the dialectic relationships between cultures, with the dialectics between languages playing the role of a secondary by-product. Over the centuries, this culture-centred approach has had its ups and downs, but is still considered fundamental when dealing with the subject of translation in depth.

      InOn the Best Style of Orators(De optimo genere oratorum), written in the last century BCE, Cicero writes about translation in a fairly precise way[2].

      In this excerpt, Cicero explains that he did not translate as a literal interpreter (i.e. in a philological way, in order to shed light on the technical peculiarities of the prototext). By contrast, he devoted his attention to the naturalness of the metatext: as an orator does during theelocutio(style), i.e. the juxtaposition of words – and sentences – suitable for theinventio(discovery of arguments): elocutio est ideoneorum verborum [et sententiarum] ad inventionem accomodatio ([e]locution is the adaptation of suitable words and sentences to the [invention]; Cicero,About the composition of arguments: chapter VII). He is concerned with custom (consuetudo) – i.e. the dominant canon of the receiving culture – and the readability of the metatext in the case of oral performance. In the last part of this passage, he uses the verbappendere(give all their weight) suggesting, as opposed toadnumerare(render the precise number), a careful consideration of the whole text rather than of its individual words. Here the myth of the semantic correspondence between the signs of the prototext and those of the metatext is already destroyed and the concept of text as the smallest sense unit starts to gain ground, at least for translation purposes.

      The prevailing stylistic pattern is the Greek one. Nonetheless, it does not imply lexical and semantic calques on the Greek, but rather a translation whose dominant lies on the readability of the text. When words are in conflict with their common usage in the receiving languaculture, the practice of translating by sticking to […] words is not useful. Even if the possibility is not excluded that a language influences the other one, that the cultural and linguistic influences also result in the way a text is translated, there exists a threshold that cannot be crossed: local customs (mos).

      1.4 Quintilian

      An essential role in the history of translation is played by the attention devoted to the reasoning required to interpret and translate a text. Such reasoning takes place both in the case of translation in the narrow sense of the term, and in the case of personal, subjective reading – translation consists here in the decoding of the prototext into one’s own mental knowledge. In hisInstitutes of Oratory(first century CE) Quintilian addresses various topics and questions and in particular, the reliability of signs. They are divided into necessary and unnecessary signs (signa necessariaandsigna non necessaria). The former inevitably lead to a conclusion; the latter does notnecessarilyinvolve one single conclusion and allow other parallel speculations, as in the following example[3]:

      Even if Quintilian’s argumentation is not focused on the specific topic of translation, the remark quoted above is of great value in the field of translation studies as well. The existence of ‘unnecessary signs’ prompts us to think about the ambiguity of signs and about the role that translators play in this respect. According to whether such an ambiguity is interpreted as the author’s conscious choice or as a communication deficiency, translators must decide whether to maintain or to disambiguate it. A situation that is regularly encountered in translations is the tendency to make the implicit content of the prototext explicit in the metatext. Sometimes this leads to the – not always conscious – transformation ofsigna non necessariaintosigna necessaria. By doing so, translators carry out a function that goes beyond mere cultural intervention – they carry out a logical mediation – and (implicitly) compensate for the – by them supposed – poor interpretative resources of their model reader.

      1.5 Jerome

      In 390 CE Jerome translated part of the Bible from Greek, an edition that has gone down in history under the name ofItalaorVulgate. Rufinus blamed him for having done a bad translation. Jerome defended his work through an interesting argumentation contained in hisLiber de optimo genere interpretandi. Not only did he consider one of Cicero’s excerpts which we examined in this book as his guideline, but he also addressed what today is called translation criticism: he divided the possible alterations of the prototext into three main groups: modifications, additions, and omissions. This classification is still helpful, even if the current trend moves towards further differentiations within the modification category.

      In order to refute the accusation of unfaithful translation, Jerome explained that he did not translate the single words of the prototext but the whole sense of the text. He also reproved the word-for-word translations by stating that highbrows would refer to them by using the Greek wordkakozelìa, i.e. bad imitation. By contrast, Jerome advocated a type of translation capable of locking in the author’s thought and carrying it triumphantly into the receiving languaculture in a fashion somewhat similar to the end of a successful war.

      The importance of Jerome’s position for the dialectic relationships among cultures in the field of semiotic and cultural studies is explained in the following chapters. One of the mainstays of such a debate is just how foreign (alien) elements are present in one’s own culture. Jerome was firmly convinced that the other’s thought needs to be imported undamaged into the receiving languaculture, i.e. without being scarred by the alterations that the linguistic transplant may imply (let’s remember that the other’s thought he had to translate was nothing short of the one contained in the Bible, i.e. – for a staunch believer as he was – God’s thought). According to this approach, all the elements coming from the outside of one’s own cultural system have to be highlighted and not homogenised since their roots from the other’s cultures must necessarily be preserved.

      1.6 Francis Bacon

      The main reason why we take into consideration the contribution of the empiricist philosopher Francis Bacon is his 1605 treatise On The Advancement of Learning (De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum), in which he deals with the difference between two sorts of signs. He distinguishes between indexes and icons – as modern semiotics calls them – which have a partial resemblance to the object, and symbols, which have an exclusively conventional sense relationship with the object. But we must pay attention to the terms Bacon uses as he refers to indexes and icons with the term ‘symbols’ and to symbols with the term ‘characters real’:

      [t]hese notes of cogitations are of two sorts: the one when the note hath some similitude or congruity with the notion; the otherad placitum, having force only by contract or acceptation. Of the former sort are hieroglyphics and gestures. For as to hieroglyphics [...] and as for gestures, [...] they have evermore [...] an affinity with the things signified. [...]Ad placitum, are the characters real before mentioned, and words: [...] words are the tokens current and accepted for conceits (Bacon 1605: XVI 3).

      As stated in the above excerpt, gestures are usually ‘indexes’, because they indicate something that can be guessed, but not precisely, although their meaning is not completely conventional. Hieroglyphs, by contrast, are icons, because they expressly represent the forms of the objects in question.

      1.7 Thomas Hobbes

      Thomas Hobbes devoted a section of his 1651 Leviathan not specifically to translation, but to language and the functions of signs. In the fourth chapter he presented a theory of speech, in which he assumes that words are not only a way to transfer our mental discourse into verbal, but they are also notes of remembrance for such thoughts, that may again be recalled by such words as they were marked by. Another function of words is to express what people think of objects, what they want, what they fear, etc. And for this use they are called signs..

      In the sixth chapter he anticipated 20thcentury semiotics stating that body language and other non-verbal expressions were also signs.

      The best signs of passions present are either in the countenance, motions of the body, actions, and ends, or aims, which we otherwise know the man to have.

      Moreover, he makes a distinction between two kinds of conventional signs: expressed or by inference.

      Express are words spoken with understanding of what they signify [whereas] Signs by inference are sometimes the consequence of words; sometimes the consequence of silence; sometimes the consequence of actions; sometimes the consequence of forbearing an action (Hobbes 1651:XIV).

      These are therefore nonverbal signs, since they are presented as consequences of actions or silence. They are obviously personal reactions to external facts; or they may be thoughts – mental signs created by some given phenomena that affect an individual.

      1.8 John Locke

      In his 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke explicitly addresses the doctrine of signs that he considers one of the three main types in which science in general can be divided. In his view, human understanding encompasses: 1) the nature of things that is part of the so-called physica (physiké); 2) all the means useful to achieve practical purposes – especially happiness – that are part of the so-called practica (praktiké); and 3) the way and means to achieve and convey the knowledge deriving from both physiké and praktiké: semeiotiké, or "the doctrine of

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