CONTENTS

Cuvnt introductiv i bibliografie - Introduction and bibliography Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers 1.1 Repere teoretice Theoretical guidelines 1.1.1 1.1.2 1.1.3 1.2 Aplicaii 1.3 Teste pentru autoevaluare 1.4 Teme pentru verificare/ examen Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges 2.1 Repere teoretice Translating culture 2.1.1 Cultural models 2.1.2 Glorification of another taste 2.1.3 Europe, culture and translation 2.2 Aplicaii 2.3 Teste pentru autoevaluare 2.4 Teme pentru verificare/ examen Concluzii Conclusions Rspunsuri la teste Answers to the tests Key terms Strategies Procedures

7 7 10 12 14 22 25

28 28 31 39 42 46 49 53 54

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Introduction and bibliography

MOTTO: Fidelitatea este mai degrab tendina de a crede c traducerea e mereu posibil dac textul surs a fost interpretat cu o ptima complicitate... (Umberto Eco) Cuvnt introductiv i bibliografie Cursul universitar pe care l prefam aici dureaz un semestru i capt caracteristici de curs seminarizat pentru specializarea romn-englez, cu urmtoarele obiective: a) nelegerea activitii de efectuare a unei traduceri i ca art i ca tiin; b) evidenierea resorturilor prin care se realizeaz funciile discursului (non)literar care se cere tradus; c) analiza i exersarea latenelor expresive ale diverselor limbaje, preciznd ce obligaii i asum traductorul; d) actualizarea studiului numit translatologie prin (1) modul actual de abordare a traductibilitii, adic ferma convingere c toate manifestrile lingvistice sunt traductibile i (2) practici actuale de transfer al coninutului, ambiionnd i la o echivalare stilistic; e) concluziile privind valabilitatea activitii de traducere, dat fiind c i psihologia clasic nu pune la ndoial natura universal a conceptelor i schemelor ce reflect experiena uman. Fiecare capitol este structurat pe patru segmente, n urmtoarea succesiune: (1) elemente de teorie tehnici i metode pentru sarcini de lucru aplicat; (2) aplicaii relevante; (3) teste de autoevaluare; (4) teme pentru verificare/ examen. In esen, primul capitol se refer la descrierea teoriei, iar al doilea capitol este reetarul. Indiferent c ne lansm spre traduceri cu plcerea consumatorului de literatur sau cu acribia lingvistului, important este s fim avertizai (adic n cunotin de cauz) cu privire la mecanismele producerii i receptrii unui text pentru a gsi pe cont propriu varianta ideal de traducere. Oferim, spre investigare, o suit de teme de traducere pentru comentarii personale asupra lor, cu urmtorul orizont al ateptrilor: s se treac dincolo de latura de literaturizare spre diversitatea unor situaii de transpunere lingvistic. Iar, dac se poate broda teoretic pe marginea lor, s se fac apel nu att la teorii ale traducerii literare, ct la teorii ale culturii necesare traductorului specializat. Pentru un studiu mai amplu al tematicii, facem urmtoarele recomandri bibliografice minimale:
Austin, J. L. (2003) Cum s faci lucruri cu vorbe, trad. S. Corneanu, Bucureti: Ed. Paralela 45. Bidu-Vrnceanu, A. et al. (2005) Dicionar de tiine ale limbii. Bucureti: Nemira. Bowker, Lynne et al (eds.) (1998) Unity in Diversity? Current Trends in Translation Studies, Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Crc, I. (2003) Teoria i practica semnului. Iai: Institutul European.

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Introduction and bibliography

De Beaugrande, R. & Dressler, W. U. (1981) Introduction to Text Linguistics, London: Longman. Dimitriu, R. (2006) The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies. Iai: Institutul European. Dollerup, C. (2006) Basics of translation studies. Iai: Institutul European. Drgan, G. (2005) Modele culturale comparate. Iai: Institutul European. Eco, U. (2003/2008) Dire quasi la stessa cosa /A spune cam acelai lucru. Experiene de traducere. Trad. Al Laszlo. Iai: Ed. Polirom. Frte, Gh.-I. (2004) Comunicarea. O abordare praxiologic. Iai: Casa Editorial Demiurg. Ionescu-Ruxndoiu, L. (2003) Limbaj i comunicare, Bucureti: Editura ALL EDUCATIONAL. Irimia, M. (1995) The Stimulating Difference. Editura Universitii Bucureti. Jost, W. & W. Olmsted (eds.) (2006) A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Kohn, I. (1983) Virtuile compensatorii ale limbii romne n traducere. Timioara: Ed. Facla. Lee, D. (1992) Competing Discourses. London and New York: Longman. Levichi, L. (1975) Indrumar pentru traductorii din limba englez n limba romn. Bucureti: Editura tiinific i Enciclopedic. Maingueneau, D. (2007) Discursul literar. Iai: Institutul European. Mucchielli, A. (2005) Arta de a comunica. Metode, forme i psihologia situaiilor de comunicare. Iai: Polirom. Nash, W. (1989/1992) Rhetoric. The Wit of Persuasion. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Oprea, I. (2007) Elemente de filozofia limbii, Iai: Institutul European. Prlog, H. et al (2009) Translating the Body, Iai: Institutul European. Spencer-Oatey, Helen (ed.) (2000/2002) Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London & New York: Continuum. Thom, F. (2005) Limba de lemn / La langue de bois (Juilliard, Paris, 1987). Trad. M. Antohi. Bucureti: Humanitas. uchel, D. (2006) Sincerity. Textual Claims to Validation in Annals of the Dunrea de Jos University, Fasc. XIII, 18 (17), 108-115, Galai. uchel, D. (2008) A Few Intercultural Assumptions in Intercultural Communication and Literature, I (1), 166-173, Galai: G.U.P. uchel, D. (2008) Obfuscation of Romanianness in Lexic comun, lexic specializat, Annals of the Dunrea de Jos University, Fasc. XXIV, 1 (1), 102-115, Galai: G.U.P. uchel, D. (2009) Playful Hybrid Titles in Identity, Alterity, Hybridity, 223-232, Galai: G.U.P. Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques (2004) Filozofia imaginilor/ Philosophie des images (Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). Trad. M. Constantinescu. Iai: Polirom. *** (2006) Semiotics beyond Limits. Proceedings of the First ROASS Conference. Bacu: ALMA MATER Publishing House. *** (2007, 2008, 2009) Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views. Conference Proceedings Volumes, Galai: Europlus i G.U.P.

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Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers

Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers

1.1 Theoretical guidelines
1.1.1 Key terms Translation Studies refers to an academic discipline that covers literary and non-literary translation, oral interpreting, dubbing and subtitling. On the one hand, this discipline is understood to be theoretical and descriptive; on the other hand, it has to be concerned with practicalities such as teaching methods of translation (as part of translator training), grammars and dictionaries (translation aids, in general), reviews and critique (translation criticism). Translation training is conducted in a classroom setting and is oriented toward student products that are translations in need of criticising. Translatology is currently understood to be either a synonym for the above (a variant, closer to Romanian, is traductology) or a wider coverage for reference to all types of interlingual transmission. As it is a new word, translatology is equally a new discipline and there is no absolute agreement about its details among researchers and experts in the field. Translation can be simplified so as to mean search of specific words in a target language that should correspond to words in a source language. In this activity, there are many required adjustments especially when one finds that there is no reasonably accurate counterpart to what one is translating. One has to be qualified for a jargon variety, by the side of everyday conceivable contexts, awareness about immediate social pressures, intuitions concerning the drift of a particular message, and so on. Last but not least, the spelling and grammar of the languages one is handling should be of utmost, native-like precision. At a certain point, even dictionaries fail translators because isolated words may lack the helpful surrounding context of use. Translation can be looked upon as having specious (that is, deceptive or false) simplicity, yet it asks for educated speakers of the mother tongue with excellent command of at least one foreign language into which they translate. Interpreting is the oral mode, that is the oral rendition after the delivery in the source language (consecutive interpreting), and more or less a targetlanguage delivery at the same time with the delivery of the original (simultaneous interpreting). A word of warning: interpretation means to comment on the possibilities of understanding the message (translated or not), while interpreting means to translate the spoken words from one language into spoken words belonging to another linguistic code. In sight translation, the interpreter will orally perform on a written text (s)he has not seen before. In dubbing, an actor generally will perform vocally onto an oral source. In subtitling, the oral source text becomes a written target text. In surtitling, whatever is sung or said (in an opera or theatrical show, for instance) is shown in written form an example is a foreign opera with the lines translated and projected onto a screen above the stage. A Translators Barriers and Bridges 7

Capitolul I - Precizri eseniale Textuality is whatever helps us interpret any oral or written extract or language stretch as text. Textuality has been described by De Beaugrande & Dressler (1981) as the functional contribution of seven features or criteria: cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability (by the targeted readership), informativity, situationality (or pertinence) and intertextuality (or connections with the same type of texts). There is research (Quirk et al., 1985, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language) that restricts text to coherence, seen as made up of internal units (subject-bound) and external units (message-bound). Yet, because it seems hard to find the clearcut boundary between cohesion and coherence, textuality remains a fuzzy issue. Equivalence means that one can promote the idea of the sameness when relating to a source and its target text (Eugene Nidas theory from 1964). Formal equivalence is a literal translation, pointing proactively from source to target trying to convey all cultural features from one to the other; Retrospectively, one can assess the success of the equivalence. Dynamic equivalence ensures a cultural adaptation to the beneficiary of the translation. Peter Newmark (1981) distinguishes between semantic work in order to create equivalence and communicative focus which leads to an even better kind of transfer asserting the superiority of the target over the source. From the above, one concludes that equivalence is not a unified concept (see Dollerup, 2006:64). A wise saying spells out the fact that equivalence cannot be found, it has to be created. Adequacy strives towards the transmission of the meanings to be found in the source text into a target text in a given situation. Adequacy or its opposite, inadequacy, can be decided upon only be insiders (outsiders like Translation Studies scholars and critics have no say in the matter quoted from Dollerup, 2006:65). It is only the users, clients, senders, recipients, the parties communicating, that can determine whether this criterion is met or not (ibidem). Explicitation or the use of an explanatory tag is found useful, if not imperative, when a free rendition of the original idea occurs. The reason is that the translator believes the user of his work is not familiar with a certain element in the source culture. Actually, one comes across an expansion in the translated version, which has variable degrees of text-internal contributions. For instance, with the emperor breathing down his neck translated as cu mpratul pe cap, no explicitation occurs; but, trend setters becoming trend-setteri, un fel de guru ai gustului public (Romnia literar #35/2009, p.3) is an occasion for us to see explicitation combined left-handedly with halfway domestication and right-handedly with foreignization, both signalled by original italics. Textual categories are guidelines for translators as to the best strategy to adopt. If they work with informative texts, their manner of work will be literal to strictly communicate the content of a message that is clear, logical, matterof-fact. An expressive text is dominated by its aethetic components and its translation should reflect emotional and stylistically sophisticated parts. What is to be expected in such cases is a freer translation with obvious involvement. The operative type of texts (where propaganda, political 8 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers exhortations, sermons, advertisements can be illustrations in point) requires persuasive language and a translation that is its prolongation in appealing to the targeted audience on a personal intimate level. Loss avoidance means that three renditions at least (meanings, logical structures, emotional support) are offered in such a way as to have TL effects similar to SL effects. Beaugrande and Dressler (1981:217) look upon the translation as dedicated to expanding, reducing, or modifying in other ways the original only as far as necessary, to minimize a divergence of experience. In order to illustrate the concept of loss (implicitly, the desideratum of loss avoidance), as part of a conversational exchange in a movie, the utterance You tell me! becomes Tu s-mi spui, whereas the obvious message is Habar n-am and this latter variant would have been the right translation. We can come up with a good solution too: Its my kind of show turned into the Romanian E pe gustul meu can only be assessed as perfectly correct, though it entails a situational interpretation as well about what topic the speaker has in mind. Copyright is the intangible property right which comes into existence when an intellectual product is created (Dollerup, 2006:123) and which is tied to concept of morals. The copyright symbol is the circled C , followed by the year of the first publication of the copyrighted work. It brings protection of original products as negotiable goods. It involves the right of authors or their assignees to make copies (including translation) or otherwise use original works. The development of legalised copyright connects with the advent of mass media and is accepted today by most nations in the world. Remarkably, it has been extended to unpublished works too, that is to manuscripts. When a translation is not worked directly from the original source language, but in relay, both the original and the translation become copyright material. It does not matter whether the translator is an in-house employee, a free-lancer or working for an agency, the copyright is a must, a responsibility for an entire work or for a longer passage. The principle known under the label of fair use permits citing brief passages without the permission from copyright holders, on condition the material is used for non-commercial purposes. Outsourcing translation means that companies, firms and even states commission the work to native translators who will translate into their A language. Previously, with less world exchanges, the tendency was to produce material (especially in business, technology and trade) in the country of origin with translators working into their B and C languages a practice that still exists. Outsourcing (perhaps, in Romanian, resursare), in general means that a firm or company seeks an external provider of services, in translation work, for example, since many highly specialized texts are difficult in terms of terminology and syntax. Outside the national territory, such an exchange between institutions means doing business in a network with access to special skills; in particular, science and enginnering may be innovated when something is not developed in-house. Relay is the term useful to point to the translation which is not undertaken directly from the source language. Analysts and critics have to assess the relationship between the source language text and the effect of relay on the end-product. They also need to focus on the question whether found errors and deviations in the target can be attributed to the use of relay. When there A Translators Barriers and Bridges 9

Capitolul I - Precizri eseniale is an intermediary realization between the source language of the original and the subsequent translation in the target language, another language is interposed. If this intermediary stage has been made for an actual audience, this is relay; if it has not been made for a genuine consumer of the intermediary realization, we can use the term of support translation. The support translation involves consultation of translations into other languages than the language of the actual target text. Indirect translation implies (as terminology) that the intermediary realization is ephemeral. Relays can continue indefinitely between languages and cultures. Relay often means delay. No one today considers it strange that literature takes time to cross cultural barriers (Shakespeare was not translated into Spanish until the 18 th century). Sometimes the original no longer exists. Modern Bibles are made from relay editions using different languages. French translations served as source texts for early Spanish renditions of Shakespeares Hamlet. At the European Commission, translators are grouped according to topics, not to languages. In some groups, it logically follows that other translations are used as supports. Co-printing is the situation in which the same book appears more or less simultaneously in many languages. Think, for instance, of a publisher in one country who produces a book (as a rule, for children) with texts and illustrations. He uses the translated texts to fit these illustrations (in terms of typographical length). It is worth noting that the text of the original publisher of the co-print may have already had a translated version (that is, a relay of an original). Follow this succession of events: a recipe book is published in Romania. Its publisher advertises it internationally, for example at a book fair. Publishers in other countries are willing to have it and sell it locally. The Romanian publisher sends the text to the national publishers who commission translators working into their A-language. The local publishers see to it that every translators text fits with the pictures. Out of a wish to reduce prices, the text can be sent to a supranational publisher (to Greece or to Malaysia for example) where it is printed and then released by the associated national publishers in their respective countries. The pictures are exactly the same, but the texts are in the national languages.

1.1.2 Strategies
Strategy or approach conjures up an idea of rigid demands on the translator pairing languages. Nonetheless, before passing on to the flexibility and creativity implied by the cultural expectations put forth by the second chapter of this coursebook, we hope that the first chapter with its text-internal features (including punctuation, words, syntax) proves helpful in spelling out the translators control over his work. We suggest a beginning in this undertaking with the element for element strategy, the strategy of sameness: the same punctuation, layout, numbering of lines, sentence length, and paragraph division in translations as in their original. Most commonly in translatology, this basic issue is reported as the free versus literal translation; it is not uncommon to find also reference to a literal strategy, side by side with a free strategy. The theoretical imprecision comes from the actual work when a translator must find his most adequate tools as dictated by text genres or language pairs. Another difficulty for theorists is to draw the dividing line between a translation as such and a 10 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers translation as adaptation (There are schools in Translation Studies that do not hold the <original> in awe, says Dollerup, 2006:168). One expects much to be solved by translator competence according to the standards of the day: no suprise if one finds that a piece of translation worked decades ago no longer meets the standards of today. In a footnote (2006:149) to his book, Dollerup estimates that The American Declaration of Independence (1776) first, in its own century, read as an operative category of text, whereas now it reads as an informative category. This finding will result in differing strategies while translating. It is interesting perhaps for young readers to know that there are classics already published in abridged forms in their culture of origin. From Herman Melville (Moby Dick, 1851) and Jonathan Swift (Gullivers Travels, 1726), people read now relay translations abroad and coprints of these relay translations in their own countries, America or England. If length is an important criterion in deciding whether we have to do with a good direct translation or not, then we better quote from Dollerup (2006:167): The rule of thumb that books increase in size holds good for Indo-European languages, but not necessarily between other language pairs. Thus a Western text dwindles 30-70% in size when it is rendered into Chinese because Chinese characters convey more information in less space. Eventually, in our day of European Union experience, it is significant to make some reference to computerized practices in translation. The strategy currently adopted by the team of EU translators (into more than twenty Alanguages) is to get access to the Internet, primarily to terminology databases, and electronic dictionaries; they make use of Translation Memory to scour old translations, since they are allowed to help themselves to terms and phrases previously translated and circulated. Their finished product is, in its turn, stored to be recycled by future materials. Users of the Internet availabilities are particularly cautious in their search, as long as Machine Translation, after being hailed as the wonder-tool, became the butt of jokes: in its output, howlers are at home. A recent trend in translation studies is the use of corpora for empirical and descriptive studies. A comparable corpus, for instance, consists of two separate collections of texts in the same language. An ECC (English Comparable Corpus) can be created for the systematic study of the linguistic nature of translation (one set of texts has been originally written in English, and another set has been translated into English). The yardstick used for most translation teaching, criticism, and theory relates to the source text upholds Dollerup (2006:153); in his steps, we are going to focus then on the main strategies applied to SL texts. -direct transfer, a label for the situation in which the same word or expression found in the original is to be found again in the translation; -calque translation, pointing to compounds or phrases (conspicuous novel concepts) which display an element-for-element rendition (note that the Romanian vocabulary evinces American or English originals dominating the scene); -cultural adaptation, for associations of something familiar in TL to a phenomenon in SL (to make the recipients respond in the same manner); A Translators Barriers and Bridges 11

Capitolul I - Precizri eseniale -additions, when footnotes, glossaries, prefaces, forewords and postscripts are thought of as necessary, though text-external, but they are a must, considering the interests of the receiving side; -non-realization/omission, a lack of inclusion which, by accident or deliberately done, reveals that the translator has considered certain words or passages might require bothersome strategies for encoding or for decoding the text; -compensation, a notion uncovering the idea of a difficulty hard to crack and which is transfered to another place in the target, because in the source it proved inconvenient if kept in the same position of occurrence. Strategies do not enjoy any exhaustive presentation, due to ongoing research on them. They always have something to do with the translators beliefs as to what audiences may be aware of. They can also be made to listen to the Mozart method, coined by Peter Newmark (1985, The Translation of Metaphor). The musicians classical formula for his piano concerto is equally pleasing to the connoisseur and to the less learned. Thus, the method taking over his name should combine communicative and cultural translation so as to address itself to the layman and to the expert, overlooking the risks that something may not be understood by part of the consumers of culture.

1.1.3 Procedures
The most suggested procedure is as follows: a translator should first read through the entire message or text to be translated. This is done to get a good idea about the nature of the translation assignment they must carry through. They may also prepare a store of background knowledge readily at hand. They understand that every text has a context in which it exists; this context should normally be known to the translator. Every person recognizes, for instance, a page of fiction for a page of fiction, or a poem for being a poem, or a newspaper page for what it is. Next, some translators will choose to carefully stop at every unfamiliarity. The unfamiliar word in their assignment is to be looked up or marked for being checked later on. Other translators expect the meaning of such a word or phrase to become clear from the context. Still others transfer all unfamiliar source-text words to the first draft of a target text only to make a later decision about how to deal with them. It is far from infrequent the practice of having recourse either to hypernyms (the general word for the specific) and hyponyms (the specific for the general). For instance, replicate his experience translated as ref experiena lui for the former case, and the story of salvation translated as povestea mntuirii, for the latter. Careful reading (several times, if necessary) will bring out the meanings for all words, even when a familiar meaning must be reinterpreted because it means something else in the new context, It also brings out attitudes of the writer towards the source text and intentions of the text, no less than considerations about style (such as the labels <narrative & dynamic> because of the verbs, or <descriptive & static> owing to the use of adjectives, or <dialogic> due to emphasis on colloquial language, and so on). This full control over the content and characteristics of the text will allow its translator to place the text somewhere on three scales (see Peter Newmark, A Textbook of Translation, 1988): the scale of linguistic formality, from 12 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers officialise via neutral; the scale of generality, from neutral to comprehensibility only by an expert; the scale of emotional tone, from intense via factual to understatement. If detective work is an acceptable description of the translators subsequent efforts to be self-assured with sound knowldge of the target possible world, then the trip to the library is a must. Exploring its resources is a matter of much advice, such as the following, coming from C. Dollerup (2006:122): There is no need to go to the library with some specific problem in hand. On the contrary, you should pick out and carefully browse through the books, one by one, as their arcane titles catch your eye. When a text is dense or tangled for the translator to easily work upon it, there may exist a deficiency of punctuation. Defective punctuation may lead to misinterpretations of the gist as well, adding difficulties to textual processing. Natural punctuators point to the extensive use of full stops and commas. The hyphen can also play a role towards a better reading comprehension. Quirk et al. (1985) investigate successive units (managing internal relations with the respective text) versus included units (such as quotations and any parenthetical information that refers to a reality outside the text). The ideal punctuating strategy would be a combination of meaning, sound, and syntax. Anyway, writing uses more punctuation units dependent on one another than speech does and that explains perhaps why writers build more elaborate sentences than speakers. It is essential for translators to identify the rhetorical situation in which is produced the piece they are supposed to translate, the socio-temporal characterization of the context which locates it in some actual possible worlds. This is followed by a dispositional analysis, possibly a three-level organization of content in sections, moves and steps, their degree of conventionality decreasing from the first to the last. There is a permanent concern, therefore, for language as public event and as social relationship as well. The translator-analyst has cognitive capacities that will extricate such issues with quicker success than other dimensions of his task, for example the way to deal with figures of speech as demanding as metaphor, lets say. For the translator, a metaphor can be (a) modified, (b) deleted, if it is found redundant, (c) translated by a simile which retains the image, (d) reproductive of the same image, (e) replaced with a standard image that does not clash with the target culture, etc. In retrospect, translators may become aware of errors in their work. They are primarily errors of decoding, but can also comprise encoding. One cannot overlook the embarrassing fact that many source texts met in practice are not crystal-clear. There can be points and passages deliberately or accidentally ambiguous. Nevertheless, the rule is for texts submitted for translation to actually be, if not masterpieces of clarity, still perfectly comprehensible in the eyes of communicators. In this respect, we would like to quote from Dollerup (2006:118): The problem for the professional translator is, however, that if recipients know or find out that a translation is poor, they never blame the author of the source text, but automatically assume that it is the translator alone who is responsible for the poor target text. The Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (his views being taken over and adapted to translation by Andrew Chesterman, 1997) considers that knowledge scores an advance A Translators Barriers and Bridges 13

Capitolul I - Precizri eseniale when problem-solving occurs. The resulting schema is P1TTEEP2, which reads a <problem> at the outset, <tentative theory> or an attempt to solve it, followed by <error elimination>, yet not leading to a perfect result, but to the occurrence of a <new problem>. Let us state it emphatically that through error elimination we just improve a tentative hypothesis. Popper says that his schema is applicable to many phenomena in life, not only to a translation theory and practice. The present-day generation of translators has had time to assert their reliance on intuitive explanations for what they do, and they do it with a superior command of the foreign language. Whatever they achieve correctly is, in a way, in a collision with the previous procedures having things proved right by reference to external authorities such as dictionaries. Specialist literature distinguishes (for instance, J. House, C. Dollerup) between overt and covert translations. The former category heavily depends on the source (language and culture) and the target text will in all probability be considered foreign. The latter category is less language- and culturebound and may sound in translation as if originally written in that form in other words, it displays functional equivalence. Naturally, when one translates, one performs with omissions, additions and alterations. Overt translation is oriented towards the sending side; covert translation is oriented towards the receiving side and has the surface effect of a free translation. It may prove helpful at this point to quote Charles Segals (1986, Interpreting Greek Tragedy) note: The process of interpretive understanding is a shifting movement between recognizing the text in its unassimilable otherness, its ultimate strangeness, and making the text in some sense our own, something to which we can assent on the basis of our experience of what the text signifies.

1.2 Aplicaii
I. Reification as a barrier Amardo Rodriguez (2002), in his article entitled Culture to Culturing published by Journal of Intercultural Communication, claims that there many practices threatening the interplay between reifying ambiguous meanings. Arguably, one of the most serious and insidious [practices] is that of reification. Reification is the gateway to alienation and deification. It aims to limit human action by limiting ambiguity. It seduces us by limiting the anxiety that comes with ambiguity. In limiting human action, however, reification limits volition and, consequently, responsibility. It thus limits our obligation and commitment to each other and, in so doing, promotes separation and fragmentation. This is, in sum, a multiple charge of (a) harm brought to human relations, (b) blockage of interpretive processes, (c) thwarting of a living, flexible whole that is the world we inhabit. The Latin word res can be translated into English as: object, thing, matter, affair, business, concern, property. Philosophers once conceived of res extensa versus res cogitans. The former is useful for denoting the physical existence or the physical world; the latter is directed to a thinking and thoughtful being, under which conditions one may develop a selfperception called beingness. 14 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers Let us begin with the empty half of the glass, pessimistic or diffident voices about reification. Reification is on trial for a number of things that flow from its occurrence. Nonetheless, some researchers of the phenomenon we are discussing agree that reification cannot encumber the occurrence of new and different ways of understanding the world. In our world, much concerned with the opposite actions of separating and unifying, the reification of the situation into painting a wall, going to a wall, bringing down a wall, putting up a wall is very frequent. Symbolically, the wall will undercut diversity and thus damage the evolution of human relations. Let us follow its presence in the presidential career of Barack Obama. Our first notation: in a Washington Post interview, Obama speaks and warns the latter verb is the accompanying statement commentary that the newspaper uses that he will not be capable of vaunting quick results, that public trust will quickly crumble down if the populations optimistic feelings have been overacted. The metaphor of the wall, implicit here, is to be reconsidered by Obama later. The second notation: upon touring Europe, during the political campaign, Obama means to make a speech at the very Berlin spot where Ronald Reagan had uttered, marking the end of the Cold War, the famous words Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! Domnule Gorbaciov, drmai zidul! Our third notation: because the event just mentioned did not take place as meant, Obama requires that he deliver a speech to the crowd precisely where president Kennedy said in an equally famous piece of rhetoric Ich bin ein Berliner (I am a local of Berlin/ Sunt berlinez) which is the balcony of Berlins City Hall. The historical moment was John F. Kennedys speech in the wake of the Berlin Wall construction. One can consider that this reifying process in stages is the initiative of a ritual, in other words Barack Obama trying to give solid foundations to the United States once again. Rounding up this discussion about walls, we may say that the adequate transposition into Romanian is cortina de fier. Everyone will know the (historical) message. From reification, it is easy to approach the opposing tendency towards humanization. In this case, it pleases us to circulate a synonym for our basic concept, which is thingification (a term impossible to translate into Romanian!). Let us illustrate with the stylistic choices of an item of news dated May last year and issued by the Associated Press: SANTA BARBARA, Calif. Firefighters rushed to wipe out the last remnants of a wildfire that destroyed dozens of homes in the hills above this scenic coastal city, racing against winds that might whip the blaze back to life. In Romanian: Pompierii au nvlit s lichideze i ultima urm de foc slbatic care a distrus zeci de case pe dealuri, deasupra acestui ora de coast pitoresc, lundu-se la ntrecere cu vntul care ar putea sufla s redea viaa flcrilor. The translation has been performed to correspond to the following analysis. There is dynamic contamination going from humans to the elements and back, and we have consequently emphasized their alternating moves as dictated by the nature of the grammatical subject: wipe out [+ANIMATE], destroy [-ANIM], race [+ANIM], whip back [-ANIM]. If we have encounters that unnerve us, we can exclaim, I was petrified. Human hypostasis placed in a different context shifts off a human attribute (possibly a reification fallacy for logic) and installs the treatment due to a concrete thing which is a distortion of normalcy. Additionally to thingification, epistemologists may dispose of the alternative hypostatization, explained by Wikipedia as an effect of reification A Translators Barriers and Bridges 15

Capitolul I - Precizri eseniale which results from supposing that whatever can be named or conceived abstractly must actually exist. Essayist Andrei Pleu cites in a Dilema Veche article from a letter written by Culianu on some Western issues, Confesiuni despre experiena erudiiei aici, n Vest: Am descoperit c, de la o vreme, plcerea de a medita asupra unei teme e nlocuit de plcerea de a aduna material, iar efortul de a formula expresiv de acela de a cita exact. Amni opinia personal din scrupulul de a inventaria, doct, opiniile altora. Am cunoscut acea juvenil dilatatio animi, strnit de sentimentul cunoaterii de cri, al posesiunii suverane de detalii. [in our translation, Confessions about the experience of scholarship, over here, in the West: I have found out that, for some time now, the delight of thinking a theme over is replaced by the satisfaction of gathering materials, and the effort towards graphical expression by the accurate quotation. You put off a personal opinion out of the scruples of seeming learned while producing the inventory of other peoples opinions. I have come to know this juvenile dilatatio animi, woken up by a feeling that books are well known and details are supremely owned]. What has been achieved above is, to our mind, ontologizing lexical semantic resources for the life of mans intellect. Striving to find out what is already reified or perhaps non-reified in us Romanians, facing Europe and the world in various forms of communication, it is pehaps suggestive enough to exemplify with and comment upon a threestanza poem picked on the Internet: prin noi trec anotimpuri cenuii / animale bolnave / lsnd urme glbui, argiloase // ne-au mai rmas cuvinte doar pentru / un joc de scrabble ntr-o limb apus // doar ascultarea ne poate apropia cumva / la marginea unei gri prin care trenurile ncing / inele ca un ir de nostalgii plicticoase / depuse pe btrneile noastre de tinichea [we are crossed by grey seasons / sick animals / leaving behind some clayyellowish traces // we still dispose of words just for / a game of scrabble in a faded language // by listening only can we be somehow guided / to the edge of a station where the trains / heat the rails like a string of dull yearnings / deposited on our seniority of tin-plate] (my translation of the poem entitled Reification by our contemporary artistic co-sufferer Florin Hulubei, dated 2006-06-14). This poem suggests how the world can receive threats about remains mired in reifications. In a strange way perhaps, one can see in this poem a combination of reaching understanding as a diagnosis of reification in the Habermas style and hybridization as a diagnosis of reification in the Bakhtin style. Since there are no purposeful insertions of punctuation marks, we consider that the whole poem constitutes one utterance. This single utterance entifies existential sickness and, through inference, entifies a colour-sound-matter picture of degradation. Because the primary goal of the poet-reader dialogue involves sharing the experience of evil, the most prominent relation conveyed by the text is between an animal and its trace, in the first place, and between the train and its rail, in the second place. In midposition, man and his train of words, will imitatively degrade their relation as well. Final emphasis is on properties of inanimacy. The poem entifies multiple bearers of property, properties which are mostly inferred, and relations that are metaphorically textualized. The reified entities are given equivalent degrees of emphasis. II. Doubling through translation In a funny parallel hinting at Harry Houdinis tricks, Michael Cronin (2003: 93) writes on instances when translators, finding themselves bound 16 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers and handcuffed in periods of repression and political conflict, have become escape artists by force of circumstance. One step further in this demonstration takes us to seeing translation studies in the light of a branch of escapology. The idea is hinged upon the remark that translators produce that other double which is the translated text. Since one cannot accept an uncritical transfer of words from one language to another, let us analyze one transfer managed by a student translator in our university department. She set herself the task of producing the equivalent for the Romanian proverb inside a spoken line in a fairy tale: Imprate, paza bun trece primejdia rea. She subsequently compiled a list of four pieces of advice volunteered in direct address, which is practically the first contextualizing clue: Caution is the parent of safety, Good watch prevents misfortune, Fast bind, fast find, Fear keeps the garden better than the gardener. The student overlooked the host of connotations and put her finger on the third solution. She supplied two arguments in favour of her choice (alliteration and symmetry), to which we might add the advantages of rhyme and concision. Yet, the second solution looks a much happier double: it circumvents the academism of the first proverb, which is misplaced with an emperor of immemorial days, though, at the same time, epitomizing the message in the best way; it excludes the temptation of identifying royalty with the good worker that binds and finds or with a gardener with his occupational duties. Number two is, to our mind, the right double due to its being culturally adapted to the discourse strategies that are visible: persuasion through the use of explicit (bun vs. rea) or implicit (good vs. mis-) opposites, the implied conceptual equivalence between caution (the goal of communication) and prevention (in the word family of the English predicate), as well as the pun contained by watch in English and the Romanian paz in a similar way. If we focus longer on the relations of equivalence, we find that in ordinary language they hold between the items in a set, only one of which is chosen; thus, equivalence pre-exists translation work. A text is an original only when a double has been created for it a translation, very likely to gain an autonomous existence afterwards. That is why we can quote Dollerup with gusto, when giving a particular allowance: we do not have to uphold the original as a rigid yardstick for all discussions (2006: 94). This idea comes after fully understanding that the original author recedes in the background, as long as the reader of the translated writing no longer considers the endeavour of the author and reads in translation just because he has no knowledge of the original idiom. The double is measured for its own parameters. There are two sides of the issue: relations with other words in the language and relations with words in other languages. The Romanian speaker of today often chooses, instead of a relation of equivalence, to word his thoughts with the help of relations of combination, as if to demonstrate that it is a question of prejudice to continue thinking that an original has a different status from the translated version. Thus, in Mircea Mihies text (Romnia literar) we read about small talk-uri, harababur internetistic, computer operators refer to folder, alternatively director, or embraced in the same phrase - ecran touch screen and soluii electronice online. If an entity is one of my worldly possessions and I should have a name for it, the handiest solution is another languages proposition for that particular entity or a set of identical entities. The items are collectively nameable and this how I come to inserting duplicates in my vocabulary. On the other hand, the untranslated half discloses a tendency of authors or A Translators Barriers and Bridges 17

Capitolul I - Precizri eseniale speakers to modernize, whereas the translated half or using only the translated half reveals a concern for purifying vocabulary or preserving the tradition. Eventually, with unwillingness to translate, what seems to find more and more room in Romanian consciousness is the idea of one person with two languages. After all, Vivian Cook (in Aronoff, The Handbook of Linguistics, p. 488) interestingly remarks that monolinguals are probably in a minority in the world as a whole. In such cases as illustrated above, linguistic doubling is apparently the effect of social dealings that require contemporary man to play the role of homo loquens quite intensely. Once again, to take a simplified view of the combinatory solution of two languages in one equation, probably the most important conclusion we should reach refers to the layperson that knows what it means without extra effort. Doubling has quickened knowledge of the meaning and has highlighted value; in these cases as shown above the value is internal completeness of the message, in the long run. The spread of the double has revealed tensions between macro and micro levels of culture and not only, as long as economic structure are also involved. Another thing is eventually found true here: like in any other respect in culture, by learning about language, we have inevitably learnt about human nature and about how meanings are computed. How can things be the same and different? The answer found is that, in the light of quantitative identity, we say that the changing thing is the same. In the light of qualitative identity, we say that the thing is not the same. These are ultimately two different apprehensions of the same. Our tour of duplicative processes cannot, to our mind, reveal any other less uncontroversial conclusion than the following: public opinion in a given society is tapped through polls and surveys, whereas global public opinion is a simulacrum as long as it is wholly a media construction in the absence of global polls or other similar evidence. And then, insofar as societies do have coherent ideologies, we are likely to discover parallel duplicative ideologies for cultural matters mostly. The adoption of transnational forms and practices is to be connected with recurring circumstances, expectations and needs as well. In conclusion, doubling is an instantiation of globalization. III. The barrier of obedience Who makes of obedience a dogma? A humorous quasi-definition for obedience sounds like this (Cristian Ghinea in Dilema veche: VI, #266/ 2009): unghiue tiate/ little nails that got cut short neatly Of late, Romania has been found to go ahead as if on an automatic pilot system: E.U. would come up with the recipe, then we adopted it, making laws, setting up institutions even two of them for the same domain, if required. Odd times yet, one thing worked for sure. If we obeyed and cut nails short enough, we could be accepted. And we were, indeed. Spre deosebire de ali politicieni, de toate calibrele, avea stilul universitii, al studiului aplicat, al contemplativitii angajate. n plus - acel aer central-european care mi era att de familiar i care unifica, sub o comun mireasm, cteva figuri publice de aceeai "obedien": Vclav Havel, Arpad Gncz, Gyrgy Konrad, Adam Michnik etc. (A. Pleu about the Pole Bronislaw Geremek in DV: V, #232/ 2008). In our translation: To mark a difference from other politicians, of all calibers, he used to don the academic style, the applied-study fruits, the committed type of contemplativeness. What is more it was that central-European kind of 18 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers familiar air that brought together, with much to share, a few public figures of the same obedience: Vaclav Havel, etc. The query arising here is: why should Pleu need the salience of inverted commas round our key term? Probably, in order to take our dogmatic perception of obedience away from a routine understanding that of slavish submission, shedding its negativism and replacing it by the positive interpretation of compliance. Wikipedia assures us that compliance takes place between peers and this means a world of difference. Advocates of authority in any form of exertion will make of obedience a dogma; parents of a despotic inclination, by the side of strong-headed managers at business, or puritanical natures in relation to their self-imposed constraints. Translators vacillating between domestication (a vocative like partner sounds convincingly domesticated when becoming the informal colega in Romanian conversations) and foreignization (with a handy example, the syntagm lucrri de mentenan, as if lucrri de ntreinere could be unacceptable Romanian) have their peculiar hand to give towards dogma creation or destruction when a major culture meets a minor culture. The question to make us look for answers in this subsection is the following: in cultural matters, is obedience to authority the norm (to be preferred) or the exception (to be cultivated)? A Wikipedia line says: Humans have been shown to be surprisingly obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate authority figures. Hence, a variety of situations are apt to generate a variety of forms assumed by anyones tendency to follow orders: obedience to a spouse, to management in the workplace, to a social norm, to God, to self-imposed constraints, and so on. The cultural spectrum is wide and striving to be emphatically present in mans daily experience. Obedience is an educational matter: authority versus easygoingness. Obedience is also compliance with the imperatives of the day: the drive for making money/ goana dup bani, for instance, could be selected to reflect a strong form taken by obedience momentarily. Obedience as the cultivation of embarrassing inertia is the bad signal when progress goes back on its steps (the inspiration for this phrasing has been offered by a headline in Romanian, Cnd progresul merge invers in DV: VI, #259/ 2009). The urge to focus on obedience is the effort to rationally understand the phenomenon. Once understood, the phenomenon may no longer haunt you. By understanding, humans are on a par with things they are unable to control. Only then can they fly in the face of tradition and not put themselves to shame. Obedience can be otherwise worded as resilience of senior users of cultural values defying juniors that are mostly go-getters who need the new culture and the new language supporting it. Are successive generations trying to outdo their predecessors? Will a badly-ailing economy reshape our tastes and habits? And, by we, the reference goes to populaia neao and its newly created funny bilingualism like in the following randomly-chosen newspaper sentence: Evoluia audienei postului tv se nscrie n trendul firesc impus de public neao. The emphasized words, the Anglicism and the Romanian lexeme made to accept each other co-textually, point to slip-ups, some might say, but a different viewpoint could be that international words help show our obedience to linguistic globalization. We commit ourselves to further examples below. A Translators Barriers and Bridges 19

Capitolul I - Precizri eseniale In January last year, city mayor Oprescu had to face educational challenges with a fresh idea the introduction of a so-called buton de panic in schools, as long as students no more feel safe there and parents and students call for measures of protection, on the one hand, and measures to reduce levels of violence, on the other hand. (Then, in early September last year, butonul de panic was advertised as a matter of proud achievement for a number of schools in Cluj, in TV news). The alternative expression butonul rou de urgen sounds to us a clearer proposition for youngsters to have a handy device and in real time let the community police force know there are threatening incidents going on. Our old-day semnal de alarm probably lived its day and a button is a description closer to what may exist nowadays, whereas the twin words R. alarm/ E. panic loses the contest with the twin words R. urgen/ E. emergency. The former is a picture of the emotions and the latter a picture of the outside situation for which somebody is summoned onto the spot. Thus, the latter variant seems more correct. In transferring cultural values to better or worse effects underscored by the media, we come to the conclusion that a few of the main authority figures for regulating our contemporary fragility in cultural matters are: the welldressed socialite (upgrading the proverb The tailor makes the man), the manele musician (we are still lucky to hear from time to time about cantautori and not songsters!), the sitcom male and female leads, the popular blogger, the spa owner and fitness coach, the journalist who takes serious notice of the work of others, and so on. With all of the above, we seem to be moving in-between tendencies descriptive of an individualist culture on the one hand (a proverb teaches us that one shoe will not fit all feet), emphasizing the importance of freedom and the consequences of independence, and, on the other hand, tendencies telling of collectivist cultures, capitalizing on the preeminence of social groups (proverbially, there is no good accord where every man would be a lord). We are trying now to de-emphasize what? Firstly, by trying to emphasize the opinion that obedience is univocal, we de-emphasize the description of multivocal phenomena. Yet the truth is that it is a multi-vocal contribution when, for instance, a young Romanian film reviewer, symptomatic for his generation of highbrows, chooses to shape discourse as our excerpts pointedly reveal. The following quotation from his film review (A. Gorzo, DV: VI, #266/ 2009) speaks in an Englishmans or Americans voice with the parts in bold: Dar de ce s-au apucat englezii Daldry i Hare s fac filmul sta? Ei nu s-au ncletat ani ntregi cu aceste lucruri i, n mod previzibil (filmul fiind un medium mai asertiv mai puin bun la ezitri dect cuvntul), n-au reuit s gseasc un echivalent pentru tonul crii pentru acea presiune nencetat a interogaiei i autointerogaiei. Rather than turn into an approximation of English this wayward rhetoric, we can try and express our assumptions as to the voices subduing the young critic for every passage printed in bold. Thus, a first suspicion of clumsy transposition of an Anglo-American critical idea is found in a se ncleta, for which the dex-online paraphrase, a se lupta corp la corp cu, is somewhat far from the intended meaning rendered by a possible choice of vocabulary in English, maybe by the English verb to grapple with followed by inanimate grammatical objects (to hold fast to something). Next, the noun medium, not contained by Romanian dictionaries, has three possible paraphrases leading to distinct meanings: an agency by which something is accomplished; a person thought to have the power to 20 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers communicate with agents of another world; a surrounding environment. Apparently, the intended meaning in the Romanian review is the first one, but it might have been expressed by an exact term such as instrument for instance, to be also suitably qualified by the upcoming epithet: assertive in English happily overlaps this time with the Romanian asertiv / cu caracter de aseriune. However, we believe the use of the adjective ferm would have been a far better option, the more so as we dispose of a meaning explicitation between dashes. The parenthetical contribution proceeding with pragmatic caution to prefer less good to worse (in other words, toning down/ hedging/ litotes as stylistic device) is interesting in its second half as well: bun la ezitri is un-Romanian, so to say, but does not uncover (at least to me) the origin of its stiltedness. Eventually, autointerogaie suffers from the same artificiality: it is not mentioned in dex-online, while it strongly tells of self-questioning in English. This reference to the scrutiny of ones own motives and behavior is perhaps more correctly expressed in Romanian with the word introspecie. The ending of the review is equally hard to process, but has links with the passage reproduced above; we can continue looking out for new blunders in a hotchpotch in which the only safe element is a Faulknerian intertextual presence: Povestea nu se mai chestioneaz pe sine (ce vrea s nsemne?, pn la urm nseamn ceva?, ce emoii ar vrea s produc?, emoiile acelea snt oare adecvate?) i, pn la urm, nu mai chestioneaz nimic. Ce rmne nu-i o melodram. E clar c Daldry i Hare dispreuiesc acest gen; ei au cultul frumosului rafinat. Numai c ce neleg ei prin frumos (vezi scenele lor erotice, care snt de fapt o expoziie de nuduri de bun-gust) neutralizeaz orice interogaie, orice meditaie, la fel de sigur cum ar face-o melodrama; diferena e c n-o neac n zgomot i furie, ci o cloroformeaz. Ce rmne e o greeal. The whole of the critical text demonstrates the superiority of a book, the novel The Reader (1997) by Bernhard Schlink, over the movie (an Oscarnominated film that came out in 2008). We draw the line and ask ourselves: what, more exactly, are the voices prescribing obedience? Our answer is: a foregoing critic writing in English, German psychoanalysts, movie-makers versus fiction writers with their specific resources of graphic accounts. Secondly, if we emphasize the complete effects of obedience, we can also paradoxically de-emphasize completeness by upholding that fortunately or unfortunately, as the case stands - obedience is incomplete. For example, a theological perspective will point towards the days disjunction between piety and culture: it flaws a Christians sense of completeness in obedience. The lay forms of culture for the vulgar rich of today blur a big religious vision. Thus, piety and culture as undivided and unseparated is a utopian thought for a society of failed Christians disobedient of the Bible teachings. Obedience can also be projected as incomplete if, within an individuals axiological systems, one adopts Schwartzs model of two dimensions in culture, openness to change versus conservation and selfenhancement versus self-transcendence. It is interesting to see at least the fact that, by pushing the analysis in that direction, instead of studying obedience, one arrives at the study of permissiveness. Moreover, if we take guidance again from tapping the world of ideas in proverbs, one recalls the following: he that teaches himself has a fool for his master. Thirdly, the current view is that obedience acts like a stabilizing factor; the reverse would be that obedience can be destabilizing. The following A Translators Barriers and Bridges 21

Capitolul I - Precizri eseniale illustration is a small-scale destabilizing occasion, but it serves our point. In substance, recent Romanian snobbery dictating the shopping spree that compels customers to step into malls has been bitterly painted in an article (DV #313/ 2010) entitled God save the(m) (m)all! In form, this textual presentation is very likely to destabilize the reader who is not conversant with (1) English grammar, to produce one reading, God save them all, and a second one, God save the mall, sapping the meanings separately; (2) rebusgames to unpuzzle the destabilizing form of this message; (3) culture patterned according to the trend known as foreignization, particularly in translatology. By way of conclusion to this subsection of applications, we must say that we have worked along the lines of cultural obedience understood as uncritical adoption - almost without adaptation - of the foreign cultural element. Owing to the illustrations given above, we can round up the discussion by saying: cultural obedience is not always a slap in the face of conservative natures, and thus we can now make the final statement. It holds good or it is true on condition voices rising in favour of (temporary) obedience will follow a certain reasoning course. It may run like this: if we eliminate cultural obedience, we allow for no growth, no evolution, no promise for us to be part of an open and vibrant system in cultural terms.

1.3 Teste pentru autoevaluare

Identificai rspunsurile corecte. 1. The ideal translator and the perfect translation are A. acts of manipulation; B. elusive ideals; C. normal claims; D. instances of professionalism 2. Translation as approximation means A. logical rendition; B. easy translation work; C. the use of figures of speech; D. acceptable imperfections 3. Before you translate a piece of discourse, what do you do? Do you ...? A. check how ideas materialize into discourse; B. contact the author of the source text; C. obtain the copyright; D. improve the original punctuation. 4. Punctuation is ... A. a decoding competence; B. an encoding competence; C. a codifying skill; D. a level of general English. 5. To whom does the following idea belong: when we translate, we modify things only minimizing differences from the original? A. philosophers; B. sociolinguists; C. logicians; D. semanticists 6. How can one describe the work of a translator? A. predictive; B. uncritical; C. strategic; D. intuitive 7. How is the beneficiary of a translation? A. detached in attitude; B. strategic in action; C. susceptible of error; D. heuristic in action 22 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers 8. What do we currently understand by a faulty translation? A. the situation of not comprehending; B. the situation of not liking the sound of it ; C. the disagreement with its author; D. the dialogue with its critics 9. Where do you identify the truth of a translation? A. in the relation between its paragraphs; B. in the conscious behavior of the communicators; C. in persuasive techniques; D. in contextualization upon production and reception 10. What informativity devices do you take into account when you translate? A. markers of textual closure; B. markers of semantic continuity; C. syntactic length as a cause of high or low readability; D. relationships of synonymy through comma use 11. Students and scholars knowledge of translation strategies is A. exiguous B. exacting C. exigent D. extraneous 12. Suppose a translator is busy with texts in a special field (lets say, finance). What matters most in his/her work? A. whether s/he is concerned with budgets, financial statements, letterwriting each such compartment necessitating translations; B. whether s/he is working in an A-language (and in the culture of the original); C. whether s/he is working in a B-language (and in the culture of the beneficiary); D.whether s/he is on the receiving (using translation) or the sending side (producing translation) 13. Omission in translated texts means: A. an adaptive process; B. a literal approach; C. the translators negligence; D. deliberate non-realization in the textual surface 14. A textual category spells for us, consumers of translation, A. a particular type of text; B. a problem of style; C. the purposes for which the source text exists; D. the main difficulty encountered by the translator 15. What is a philological approach to the task of translating? A. the analysis of the text facing the the translator; B. the classification of the text as intensely emotional or neutral; C. the delineation of the text as intending to inform or not; D. a greater fidelity in the translation of literature 16. The Tales of the brothers Grimm were initially published in 1812-1815 in German. In 1823 an English translation by Edgar Taylor achieved success in England. This book provided source texts for numerous translations into other languages. What do you call this situation? A. delayed interpreting; B. delayed relay; C. relayed delay; D. support translation 17. How does a support translation differ from a relay translation? A. Translators dont check the translations into other languages than their own. B. Translators want to see whether their colleagues have found A Translators Barriers and Bridges 23

Capitolul I - Precizri eseniale satisfactory solutions. C. Translators find passages which prove problematic to all translators who preceded them in work. D. In relay, translators use the totality of other translated texts. In support translation, translators use isolated fragments. 18. What assertion is wrong? A. The relationship between content and language is quite different in the original and in the translation. B. Translation, like art and artistic products, cannot claim permanence for its own products. C. All translation is only a provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of language. D. Fidelity and freedom in translation have traditionally been regarded as conflicting tendencies. 19. Philosophical approaches have frequently associated their reflections on the nature of translation to ... A. the Scriptures; B. the notion of idiolect; C. the Biblical myth of the Babel Tower; D. the standard language used by the media 20. A translation which is a refraction ... A. is a reflection of the original; B. no longer is a reflection of the original; C. is a transparent product; D. is a distorted product 21. What contributes to the need for re-translation? A. linguistic change; B. cultural change; C. social change; D. lack of any change at all 22. The most influential thinking about translation since the Middle Ages is considered to have taken place in ... A. America; B. Europe; C. The United States; D. Canada 23. What discussion is not carried out in Translation Studies? A. the relationship between the source text and its translation in a modern context; B. the evaluation of a translation; C. the improvement of a translation; D. the translators role in society 24. What is the question one is unlikely to ask? A. What specific language pairs have been involved in the interviews you have carried out? B. What specific language pairs have been involved in the books you have read? C. What specific language pairs have been involved in the films you have watched? D. What specific language pairs have been involved in the television shows you have seen? 25. What does Machine Translation presuppose? A. the use of dictionaries and thesauri B. the use of electronic tools C. computers with the intervention of a human translator D. computers without the intervention of a human translator 24 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter I Breaking Communicative Barriers 1.4 Teme pentru verificare/ examen What do you understand by source language versus target language? What are some of the basics of various modes of information transfer called translation and interpreting? The notion of perfect translation presupposes that (a) two languages are comparable in every respect and all respects, (b) languages and cultures are symmetrical, (c) languages are stable or static. What is your opinion? How many types of equivalence can you mention? State your opinion about the following: (a) Errors in translation can always be avoided. (b) Nobody is perfect. Both are quoted from Dollerup (2006:64). Explore in your own way the idea of the omniscient translator. If you accept the idea that translators must struggle with both standard and non-standard punctuation in the source text, can you find examples for each of these situations? Translate into Romanian (adding a conjunction, if necessary) these English phrases that may require the use of commas (decide where): corrupt local governments small white hats for hot humid summers healthy intelligent children expensive chrome furniture Read the quotes below. Where do you believe you can develop a counterargumentation? In a translated text, many, if not all, of the language- and culturespecific features of the source text must disappear (S. BassnettMcGuire, 1980) Translation can be an enriching factor in the development of a culture, not as it is often maintained, a dangerous external influence <polluting> the language and the culture (J. Martin, 1991) The literary work of art is like a many-facetted diamond and so any assessment model based solely on one or two facets of that diamond must be considered inadequate (J. M. Dodds, 1994) Translators in small countries have a higher status in their respective societies than translators in large countries. The reason is that the recognition of the importance of communicating with the surrounding world is more obvious to people in small nations (C. Dollerup, 2006) Food for thought: any cultural transposition is much more than a mere substitution. Find relevant illustrations for each of the three forms of artistic translation which R. Jakobson (1963) listed as intralingual (reformulations), intersemiotic (a sign system rendered through another sign system) and interlingual (one language transposed into another). Explain the following: a translational strategy may look at the sending side; alternatively, it looks at the receiving side. A Translators Barriers and Bridges 25

Capitolul I - Precizri eseniale Define and illustrate the use of hypernyms and of hyponyms, putting side by side the original and its version, in examples you can find on your own. Do you agree to this idea which looks like a paradox? Users of translations are those who cannot obtain the original or who would never be able to understand it. If you agree, say why; if you dont agree, say why as well. Explain the differences between re-translation and relay translation. Remember that linguistic and cultural change contribute to the need for just one of the two. Explain the differences between relay translations and support translations. Draw the differences between overt and covert translations. State your personal opinion about the following viewpoints concerning the mastery of translators: -In relation to a language that is not his mother tongue, a translator in terms of command will move from zero to perhaps ninety percent in the course of a lifetime, even though he continues to learn as long as he lives. -In matters of ability and competence, a translator is assessed by insensitive clients and society, not by avuncular teachers (avuncular affection an uncles love is characterized by indulgence, kindness, tolerance). Explain the following information: until the middle of the nineteenth century, the beneficiaries of translation were the affluent and the educated; before the twentieth century, synchrony and near-synchrony between the source-text production and its translation were relatively rare.

26

A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii

CHAPTER II Building Communicative Bridges

2.1 Translating culture 2.1.1 Cultural models
It is only reasonable to consider, together with Dollerup (2006:127ff) and others, that the size of a country influences the importance played by translation work and also that translation is always prompted by a societal need, no matter whether it is ultimately requisitioned by the target culture or imposed by the source culture. Similarly to what a communicative or functional type of recent grammar aims at, functional or cultural approaches to translation are understood as cultural mediation, as the enactment of a skopos theory the theory that brandishes the Greek word for aim or purpose, as long as the target text is brought into focus and its users are carefully consulted about the needs of the receiving community. The skopos theory is developed by Hans Vermeer together with Katharina Reiss (1978), gets a characteristic profile through the emphasis on situational factors in translation, although not promoting an absurd independence of the target from the source. It is fairly described as having a capacity to fine-tune the target text towards specific recipients (Dollerup, 2006:156). A conclusion and an effect is that translators can deliberately use their expertise as cultural vectors. What is a cultural translation? In all probability one that is apt to solve the phenomenon called <cultural gap>. One example: after translating a theatre play of the Greek antiquity into a modern language, the translator also has to manage an adaptation to contemporary thinking and tastes. This process is actually a second sort of <translation>, this time of a significant mythic structure from the premises of one cultural frame to another in a way analogous to the translation of a text from one language to another. How are translators to deal with cultural gaps? According to some researchers, the choice of features indigenous to T- language and culture, rather than features rooted in S- language and culture, is what solves the problem. Permanently, in fact, there is a decision to be made about down-playing or up-playing features a process which will be amply illustrated in the discussions of subsection 2.1.2. Basically, for the cultural appropriateness, the analyst makes two assessments: 1. of personality; 2. of stance. For the persons/authors image, one takes into account speech, role, charisma, etc. In our day, personalities are highly image-conscious and less self-critical. We hope we are not insulting in generalizing, but it has been noted that as a result of the media explosion in the global village, that is how personalities have been reshaping themselves. As for the stance, one is the observable stance of the author (attitudes to himself, attitudes to the audience, attitudes to ones subject), the other is the observable stance of the audience, practically a response which 28 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges can be classified as positive, negative or indifferent. All of these factors must be taken into account while translating culturally speaking. Internet information spells out that cultural translation theories came on scene during the 1990s, going on along this last decade. <Cultural translation> is opposed in theory to <linguistic translation> and springs from awareness about differences between cultures. These differences emerge through anonymous contributions of the population of natives. Human interaction, and particularly free negotiations between market force, result in the aforementioned spontaneous causes and effects. The status of translators a variable from culture to culture points to the weight their work carries for conationals and for the rest of the world. If we start sketching the model in their case, it is easier to turn our attention first to the length and the quality of their formal training. The cause is schooling, the effect is (high) remuneration. Top translators are credited for international organizations. Yet, there are many contexts in which translators will never be credited in public for their good work, as long as recognition is also linked with physical visibility. It is like in world politics: a photo at top level conferences and summit meetings pushes interpreters into the background, mixed with the rest of the staff, not with the protagonists of the event. On the other hand, it is essential for our translator sketch to remember that usually the source text in the source culture is called so only because it has been subjected to translation while not being intended for translation at all. The job of translating then can be explained with one of two fundamental aims in view: undertaking the task as a labour of love or undertaking the task as an assignment for a client. Cultural models have been found to frame experiences, to supply the interpretation of those experiences, and eventually to supply inferences about cultural similarities and differences. Culture should not be understood as a unified domain of practices. A national identity built culturally is cross-cut by variables such as class, gender, age, education, income, profession. Then, there are difficulties arising from the cultural stereotypes, simplified options that one resorts to when there is nothing else to fall back on. The stereotype, to a great extent generated by politeness and etiquette, is sometimes a valid point of reference, at other times it may cause offence. When our conationals are not able to pinpoint a person accurately through guesswork, they can be taught strategies (developed by experts) to narrow down the field of error. This is so because, when two people from different cultures, for example a Turk and a Romanian business executive, meet, they have no capacity (especially early in their relation) to quickly assess each others cultural positioning. False assumptions would be excluded only by a deep knowledge of the other persons culture. Students are briefed, at the same time with the foreign language they are taught, how to find means of influencing others without damaging the interpersonal relationship. When questions arise trying to place the subject man in our days cultural context, one cannot stop asking oneself: has modern culture, unlike previous cultures, ceased to strive for an ideal of human perfection? Does one witness a debased quality of culture, on the whole? Do the younger generations prepare themselves any longer to supersede the limits of human nature? A Translators Barriers and Bridges 29

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii In the contemporary stage of human thinking, one belief has been formed and strengthened, and that one states: life, which was for old philosophers a mode of being, has gradually turned into a mode of saying, in other words an existential formula revealing a philosophy depending on words (philosophia garrula, according to Dumitriu 2000: 219). Hence, the particular importance of foreign language classes in young peoples education, because they get trained in having a way with words. Next, they train themselves to answer, little by little, with small steps, the fundamental question What is Man? Basically, we have the socialite in mind; for instance, attention is being paid to how children meet children and grown-ups, greet and introduce themselves; how they establish relationships with institutions, and also with the enlarged family to the point of placing themselves in a family tree. This particular Man has mobility, visits countries on the map, plans weekend trips, and so on. Then, social life makes us display a stronger interest in a more self-centered Man, lost in dreams, lost in a library among his beloved classics, focused on healthy diets, and some such. We show a propensity for running along the halls of museums and the pages of history books, even along the corridors of an envisaged future for Europe. Man is bent on exploring the abstract notion of fame and then its substantiation into famous places, famous people, famous events. In an effort to determine the forma mentis that is being induced by these philosophers, our conclusion is that more importance is granted to a technical civilization than to a traditional understanding of what culture presupposes, namely a delight in the arts above everything else. Where is the artistic bias? Probably it got diminished by an exaggerated desire for physical comfort, expanding today to the detriment of the act of culture in general. It is also clearly true that neither the United States nor Europe coincide with the New or the Old Worlds any more. The so-called Old Worlds are probably part of the imaginary construction of societies on the basis of given cultural models. It is obvious that updating the study of culture(s) is an imperative today. One cannot overlook the language component in the establishment of cultural identities. However, what we put into a central position in our research is the old or new cultural value passed down through translations and the sort of axiological and moral attitude thus created. Those who move from Eastern to Central Europe to pick a simple case experience language as one of their first difficulties. Foreign-language competence is taken much more seriously nowadays than at the beginning of the previous century. If one language could ever be sufficient, why then would most nations spend a heavy budget on foreign-language training? Training courses for adults are booming and the number of languages involved is even higher than in the traditional school system. Civil servants are supposed to be bilingual. The most spectacular and official shift is the language policy of the European Union. Societies have been obliged to adapt their language policy to new goals, situations, and needs. This has consequences for what we achieve with the very young learner, first of all, prefiguring his needs for later in life and career. One of our certainties is that from early childhood we are given the keys to open cultural doors. We cope with new issues, for instance, does one still 30 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges read culture on a computer? The dominant role of verbal, especially written, communication is weakened by new competitors, such as visual communication. The logo of a given company, its colours and favurite icons weaken the authority of written or printed canons. Will the traditional worlds (very intensely present, after all, in our schoolbooks) be affected by the new idea of culture? Maybe the very development of virtual worlds out of the traditional ones is already an indication that this shift is forever and that old things will never come back again in their original environment.

2.1.2 Glorification of another taste

What is looked upon as quite modern in a certain geographic and spiritual area may become unacceptable and outmoded in another area characterized by a different tradition and outlook and vice versa. To this fact, one can apply a pseudo-law of literary perspectivity: the historical sphere of the concept of being modern shows the tendency to decrease, to contract itself by measure literary history advances faster and faster towards the present day. However, all this occurs while modern consciousness has suffered a fertile assimilation of general progress so that continuity and discontinuity display a capacity for mutual solidarity. A play upon words says, public taste means taste publics (cf. Curran & Gurevitch 1997: 170) ultimately, a host of social characteristics, such as age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, etc. will decide upon what is acceptable or not on arbitrary impulses, even in lexical decision-making. There is an abuse in the loan of English words, particularly in the Romanian mass media, and we have often discussed it with our students. We become globalized by adopting foreign words under the pretext of untranslatability; mostly Anglicisms are found useful, especially when speakers deal with a highlighted experiential domain. Alternatively, there is an attraction for whatever proves to be culturally salient. Let us deal with a few items that our speakers resort to, under the excuse of untranslatability. a) What does the Romanian term of impresar lack to be now constantly replaced by agent? Is it that the facility of circulation lies in the homomorphy of the word in English and Romanian and its etymology from Latin for all modern idioms? We need, like in every other case debated below, to examine things from both international and intranational viewpoints. The Romanian agent suited indeed the espionage more than the artistic field, and we still use it primarily for a criminal or non-criminal investigator. It inspires us with a thought about forces of order and the outgroups, and it is only in the second place that we use it for someone who acts on behalf of a client. Impresar, defined as the person who acts towards organizing shows, concerts, etc., is of Romance origin (French, Italian) and lost ground owing to snobbishness: agent is a federal detective, with undisputed priority because it is on the lips of Americans. We will hear now with resignation that a certain singer has an agent and not impresar. Nobody loses, as long as the idea of official representation of someone is maintained. Agent turistic (travel agent) and agent imobiliar (real estate agent) indeed seem to have their rightful occurrence. Thus, I have sketched here the ideal image the lexical item agent suggests, beyond a text, because it refers to common knowledge for all cultures. For the fun of it, here is a quotation from Barry (1995: 51), a sentence that can alter the cultural code of brisk efficiency, inserting instead A Translators Barriers and Bridges 31

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii the interpretation of bungling incompetence: Agent A. was the kind of man who sometimes arrives at work in odd socks. b) A Romanian exclaiming cool will alternatively exclaim E tare! or, less slangy, Excelent! and, in all probability, many other possibilities of translating enthusiasm via this fashionable exclamation, which makes the overuse of the English term useless. Yet, its vogue has gone a long way to generate the rewriting of a Romanian syllable so as to play upon words: COOLmea distraciei (a show on the national tv channel) or COOLtura (a show on the Cultural Channel), both instances being related with the cultural activities of teenage students or very young artists. The treatment of cool and the fashion set up by this word can make one think again of national brands and more or less successful propositions of how to forge them. Cool is already a Romanian noun, a newcomer in DOOM (2005, second edition, p. 98). Here is an example of what being cool signifies for Romanians. Nowadays it is very cool to put forth a successful brand. In our country, a personal brand is dependent upon exposure to the media, and, inside the media, exposure on television; brands are needed to the extent people want to be identified with objects (or things) and subjects (or themes). One knows that by means of actors, make-up, and set decorations, any advertising clip has for a goal the symbolic association of a brand with a certain category of people. A new specialisation has emerged: consultant de imagine (impossible to translate as such, it probably corresponds to expert in personal branding). Cezar Paul-Bdescu (D. V. no. 197/2007, p. 19) is of opinion that there are tv channels proven helpless when it comes to their own brand cnd vine vorba de propriul brand so the term is already well settled in usage even though DEX ignores it. It has started its family of words, for instance relansare, rebranding, planuri mree (D. V. no. 198/2007, p. 19). To create a brand and to see it ingrained is hard enough: it is an informational leap onto a newly assumed level of consciousness. We are reminded of a television talkshow (Inapoi la argument, H.R.Patapievici face-to-face with Sorin Alexandrescu) when there was an attempt to answer the question ce suntem noi cu adevrat, in other words the face and the mirror, an image versus real life, the identification with an object or maybe a slogan. Is the Gallic rooster a genuine French symbol? Do all Dutch wear wooden shoes or sabots? Do they also keep tulips in every vase? Seized by panic not to fail a brand or to propose an uninspired or unpopular formula, many nations are admitted to have scored failures, and one such false step was proved to be Cool Britannia it simply did not catch. Finally, a word about cool Americans: the vogue of cool started in America, in a country where being different has the prestige of a virtue and is in fact the equivalent of being cool. Funny thing: American higher-education graduates seem to be still nourishing a feeling of inferiority (an inferiority complex) towards Europe, the Old World, so to them Europe is a cool place. It is surprising that in Albu (2006: 159, Dicionar de sinonime comentate ale limbii engleze, Editura Universitii Al. I. Cuza, Iai) or Nichifor, G. (2004/2008 Dicionar romn-englez englez-romn, Meteor Press, Bucureti), one should find only the traditional interpretation of this epithet without any updating for the seme trendy, excellent with which even non-speakers of English in our parts use the adjective. Albus dictionary sorts out positive connotations in line with a judicious, unhasty style or attitude, as apart from the negative implications of lack of enthusiasm. Consequently, the positive exploitation of the epithet is recorded with a long synonymic series (composed, self32 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges possessed, collected, quiet, dispassionate, unruffled, etc.) with appended comments for each. The ignored sense of today (implicitly, an ignored young generation of speakers worldwide) betrays the antiquated spirit of the cited reference book. c) Here are a few notes about grant. In MDA (2002(vol. II: 566, Micul dicionar academic. Vol. I, II. Academia Romn. Institutul de lingvistic Iorgu Iordan-Al. Rosetti. Bucureti: Editura Univers Enciclopedic), grant is simply explained as subvenie and indicated with etymology from the English language. From the translations in Cozma (2007: 247, Dicionar de afaceri englez-romn. Oradea: Tipografia RomFlair. SC Imprint Com SRL), it comes out as polysemantic: 1. donaie, dar; 2. eliberare a unui patent; 3. burs de studii; 4. subvenie, alocaie, compensaie; 5. cesiune; 6. concesionare a unui teren. It is also interesting to see that a grantee or a donee can be granted many things, for the direct objects accepted by the transitive verb again make a long list: to grant a bonus, funds, a licence, an overdraft, a credit, a subsidy, a loan, a scholarship. Someone allocates grants and another is awarded a grant. In the academic world, it is known that a grant is money oriented to certain fields: health, human rights, education, humanitarian causes. The beneficiaries are NGOs (in Romanian, ONG-uri) and universities. The main activities can be synthetically indicated as development aid, dissemination of information, teaching and training. It is important also to retain the following feature of a grant: it is a support to organisations for which geographically or thematically specific financing does not exist. In the end, everyone understands that grant is preferably untranslatable for Romanians because it signals with one short word many possibilities. Additionally, two kinds of reinforced respect can be discerned: on the one hand, for the rights of minorities (such as gypsies); on the other hand, for indigenous peoples and their human rights all over the world. We have already been critical of a particular lexicological work (Albu 2006: 350) where our entry is stipulated with plenty of synonyms just for the giving area, namely: donation, benefaction, contribution, gift, present, offering, charity, gratuity, largesse, alms, boon. We remark once again on the neglect to update terms, despite well-meant specifications in the preface of this dictionary intended to promote modern thinking in ways conditional upon a cultural and even linguistic training. d) Let us make reference to hobby. The spare time recreational pursuits denoted by this international term are understood as such worldwide. Maybe in Romania the term is simplified when DEX defines it as favourite occupation outside a profession. It is relevant that hobbies for some people may be professions for others. It is easy to exemplify with cooking for a gourmand or a gourmet versus cooking for the chef of a restaurant. Westerners are careful to point out that there is personal fulfilment in the aims followed and there is no financial reward expected, at least theoretically. Two notions come out as triggers of hobbies: on the one hand, someones intellectual interest; on the other hand, someones sheer enjoyment of it. What can contradict such initial emotions? It is frequent and understandable that your hobby may seem trivial or boring to me and my hobby may seem non-entertaining and time-consuming to you. Romanians enjoy hobbies that belong to artistic pursuits, sports and collecting. Upon reflection, one may see a wider preoccupation of Romanians in our day with animal-related hobbies (keeping pet animals and even keeping show animals), amateur A Translators Barriers and Bridges 33

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii science-related hobbies (astrology) and do-it-yourself (interior repairs and design). Abroad, the range is vaster, unexpectedly going under the umbrella term of adult education or, to give another example of expansion, under the label political commitment. That is why it is significant enough to remember that hobbies may very well develop into other ventures. The Internet gives us an example in point. In older times, interest in nature was not believed or perceived to be a hobby. However, when this became the germ of the conservation movement that flourished in Britain, first of all, from 1965 onwards, within a generation, the credibility of this hobby increased to the point of turning it into a global political movement. As a result, we already have a long list of synonyms for these hobbyists: greens, environmentalists, conservationists, preservationists, nature-lovers, eco-activists, etc. Investigating the quality of Romanian spare time, the conclusion reached by an institute (Institutul de Cercetare a Calitii Vieii) a few years ago was that, when compared to other European nations, the Romanians have less free time (work is on the increase) with fewer pursuits and poorer ideas about diversifying them. The causes for that might not be so much a low lifestyle as their customs and frame-of-mind. Asked what their wishes might be if they were to dispose of more leisure, 31% of respondents claimed hours for a good rest. They also wanted to dedicate themselves more to family and friends, as simple as that. I reproduce from the final sentence of an article in Dilema Veche (no. 178/2007, p. 11): [] nu prea mai ai, de fapt, timp liber (numai al tu), nici mcar la sfrit de sptmn, fiind prea ocupat cu teambuilding-uri, training-uri, workshop-uri, party-uri aniversare i alte asemenea delicii corporatiste, toate cu denumiri de import. From the concept of indulging in a hobby, a Romanian will easily reconsider the necessary activity of shopping as falling under this title; we will further expand on this fake hobby to some length, as long as shopping mania is a vice asumed by our conationals with airs of self-indulgence and the mall is a favourite destination for hobby-adepts. Mall in WEUD (1996, Websters Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. New York: Gramercy Books) is only explained as a large area, usually lined with shade trees and shrubbery, used as a public walk or promenade (p. 868). ODT (2001: 787, Oxford Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Wordpower Guide. Catherine Soanes (ed.), Oxford University Press) indicates it to be a large, enclosed shopping area from which traffic is excluded and this explanation suits better the application given to this term by Romanians who casually speak about a merge la mall. One further gets to know that in the city of X a mai aprut un mall pe piaa de retail (!) and un mall pentru amenajarea cruia s-au cheltuit [] a fost deschis la []. There is also a possibility to be informed that there has come a new mall online (translatable as magazin virtual), in a word one can safely equate for Romanians the word mall with the syntagm shopping centre. We Romanians have the promenade inside the multi-storey building, and trees or traffic are inappropriately invoked in a local definition of mall. Grammatically, the plural malluri is accepted and recommended (mall is a newcomer in DOOM, second edition, p. 462). Relatedly, shopping (sometimes misspelt for neglecting the double consonant) is a provider for tv titles. In an odd way, the creators of some titles seem to have felt that two words in English is overdoing it. So, we exemplify with Shopping-ul, pasiunea mea (Euforia channel) and we wonder that one cannot equally use Cumprturile, hobbyul meu. One understands that, in Romanian circulation, the dictionary entry does not cover basic shopping needs, but an extravagant activity of examining high-quality goods, with much enthusiasm, dedication and 34 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges expertise! In this case, shopping could become in Romanian (yet it does not) febra cumprturilor de fie, whereas shopping around is a lua pulsul pieii (Gheorghioiu A., 1996: 165, Dicionar englez-romn de verbe cu particul adverbial, Bucureti: Teora). Mania is already a clue about a diseased mind, although the English use refers to excitement. The intriguing fact about the root shop is that it comes out from DEX (1998) as the carrier of an outdated communist application of meaning, namely magazin n care se vnd mrfuri cu plata n valut. It is outrageous that one decade after the anticommunist upheaval and in full free-market policies, the reference to the restrictional currency trade should survive! In close connection with the topic under discussion, let us consider the Romanian expression la mna a doua, by the side of another one, de ocazie, both having been quickly replaced by the English version: second-hand. The invariable adjective second-hand is a newcomer in DOOM, second edition, p. 715. Maybe what helped in the process was the quick understanding occasioned by a seconda/ a secunda with the gloss a ocupa locul doi n ierarhie (MDA IV, 2003: 417): in ownership, the present purchaser succeeds a former (perhaps the very first) owner. It seems to me that ocazia referred to by the Romanian speaker is the full half of the glass, whereas the second hand, referred to by an Englishman, is the empty half. e) There is much to say about tv-viewers enriched vocabulary. For the English noun crawl, the media have found a specialized application. The translation burtier may be adopted by some tv specialists, but the word, in spite of a difficult spelling, has begun a career in Romanian texts (plural crawluri!). The news crawl is definable as a moving line at the bottom (sometimes on top) of the screen, practically a text that seems to carry an urgency about it, since it catches the eye and the attention of viewers. Sometimes the crawl is a text originated by viewers; hence, it is extremely informative about the levels of literacy in the country and philologists can help themselves to very useful examples of linguistic developments. Eventually, one must say that mesaje scrise on the television screen can be subclassified into titrri and crawluri; the difference between them is scored by immobility versus movement of the text. At the same time, there can be two or three crawls displaying different speeds and informing on different issues; this complex arrangement is a challenge to viewers, who thus learn that there is a layered process in the vertical dimension, side by side with a horizontal segmentation. The screen is not a monotonous field but a visual fancy with a key of its own, and the pictorial image suffers embedding of the language of news discourse, not necessarily, and most often not at all, referring to one and the same topic. In the highly competitive environment of telecasts, the way in which news is framed and presented is obviously changing. Live coverage in broadcast news is not by far associated with a diminishing role for scriptic parts. f) Playback means the replaying of recorded media, so that one should discriminate between nregistrare and mimare acum pe nregistrare din trecut. It is already a Romanian noun, a newcomer in DOOM (second edition, p. 607) and also in the first edition of the dictionary. Because this act of reproducing recorded sound or pictures after recording (immediately or with a delay) gives a degree of comfort to performers, it is frequently resorted to nowadays. Live (transmisiune n direct) has not entered dictionaries of Romanian either. The National Council of the Audiovisual has issued a norm A Translators Barriers and Bridges 35

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii that televisions are supposed to put the words playback or live on the screen. So these terms are known for their meaning by all Romanians (though only the first is in a dictionary of the Romanian language) and the interlingual transfer is not performed. Subjectively, the viewing public is not perfectly happy with the first solution (playback), yet delights in live broadcasts. Whatever can be witnessed by countless numbers around the world, be they a cataclysm, an international crisis, a sports event or something artistic, is priceless because, without exaggeration, one can say that the whole world is watching. Another Anglicism, replay, is preferred to the Romanian reluare. A city square, or other sites from where an event is transmitted live, has become a global stage. In co-temporality, the viewers are absent from the event which is unfolding or has unfolded in real space. If the coverage is, at times, non-live, with replay of significant bits from previous happenings, commentators are still in direct exhortation to the audience, for instance, mediating their personal view of a past situation. To see something live is no more authentic than seing it on the screen; each slice of reality is as real or as unreal as the image. And the camera can be said to be an agent of misrepresentation because it cannot lie or, on the contrary, it does nothing but lie. The dilemma, then, stays: is the playback as good as the live concert? g) The term rating is now familiar to the Romanian public to the extent of admitting of inflectional endings, for instance prizoniera unui format care o obliga, de dragul ratingului (i nu numai) s invite etc.. Here it is, even neighbours with its lexical rival within the same text: Audiena talk-showurilor a sczut drastic i e invers proporional cu inflaia lor [], ratingurile emisiunilor de dezbateri politice, sociale sau economice depesc etc. (D. V. no. 196/2007, p. 19). Surprisingly enough, the term is not included in DEX, and its older relative audien is listed with just two meanings 1. ntrevedere etc.; 2. acceptare entuziast etc. Tudorel Urian in Romnia Literar (no. 49/2007, p. 14) supplies another instance of perfect integration of the term, first in the title (Supuii regelui rating), then in the body of the article (Trim ntr-o societate care funcioneaz dup o singur regul: a spectacolului, msurabil n rating TV.) The most recent dictionary among our reference books (Nichifor 2008: 835) gives only the third meaning of rating as (procentaj de) audien la public, although our choice of bracketed words would have been the last two and not the first two. Anyway, the muchinvoked concept of rating has taught Romanians that the entertainment industry is built upon one unshakeable principle: give the public what the public will buy (cf. Curran & Gurevitch 1997: 98). h) The syntagm prime time is a newcomer in DOOM (second edition, p. 637), defineable as the evening broadcasting hours, generally between 8 and 11 p.m., considered to draw the largest available audience (WEUD, 1143). We presume the translation into ore de maxim audien has some hidden drawback since television experts keep up the English terminology untranslated. However, in Romnia literar no. 50/dec. 2007 (pp. 16-7), we read the Report of the National Audio-Visual Council drafted by the Institute of Linguistics so as to represent monitorizarea a ase posturi de radio i dousprezece posturi TV n transmisiuni de la ore de vrf (Televiziunile i gramatica).We can further presume that the evening period (anyway, it is striking how often the English say night where Romanians say and 36 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges understand evening), during which television has its largest number of viewers, differs slightly from culture to culture. i) As for talkshow, despite frequency of use nowadays, not included in DEX or MDA (nonetheless, talkie-walkie, much less used or necessary in casual talk, is an Anglicism recorded and explained). The word show alone in MDA (IV: 467) is first explained as spectacol de varieti n care rolul principal este susinut de un actor sau de o formaie cu renume, which actually is a narrowing down of the ways in which the term is used in our country. Informed users of the word show can adjust it correctly to texts in Romanian, like Marius Chivu (D. V. no. 199/2007, p.15): Prezentul volum este un one man writing show, dar rareori despre sine. A talk-show, whether on television or on the radio, corresponds to nothing in the MDA definition given above, but ironically it seems to accept what MDA explains in the second place: in colloquial contexts, show is read as scandal. A gossipy or vehement feature is apparently present in every talk-show, or this is the direction for most of our performances, because participants become passionate about their arguments and the show may develop into an argument. One negative contribution to the generation of inimical feelings is the impatience interlocutors and most of all moderators of shows display, overlooking their obligations as polite listeners once a question is launched. Frequent interruptions become frustrating not only for the guests, but also for viewers who regret not having enjoyed the reception of a statement to its end. Romanians turn such meetings into quarrelsome events almost always, forgetting about self-restraint and respect for others. I further reproduce (translating into English) from an intelligent commentary on Forum Roportal issued on 29 April 2006: talk-show moderators would do better to take the model of their homologues abroad. At home, there is a stupendous lack of communicative skills, missing knowledge of when best to pause, an annoying way of never-ending narcissistic monologues, while often betraying the fact that their background reading has been rather meagre. By the side of moderators, guests in their turn receive their own amount of criticism, for example the manner in which they pass from one talk-show to the next basking in their egotistical self-love (Romnia literar no. 40/2007): [] nstpnindu-se pe un buget i trecnd din talkshow n talkshow cu un sentiment accentuat al propriei importane (p. 6). In the end, I would like to quote from a professor of journalism in the States (Curran & Gurevitch, 1997: 129) : [] the experiences and opinions of ordinary people are being aired more often and they are encouraged to discuss social and political problems in a number of new formats. These include call-in programmes, electronic town meetings, mock Peoples Parliaments, extended interviews with call-in segments and, especially, television and radio talk shows. In the USA these developments have been dubbed Talk Show Democracy [] and are being celebrated as having released discourse about civic issues from a constricting straitjacket. The most ambitious project in a talkshow can be pointed out as being the fact of a spune adevrul - the translation for to go public in a movie line, without doubt correct circumstantially. Private space and public space are projected in this case as desirably merged for ethical purposes. With ancient Greeks, the ability to go public and be effective best guaranteed access to public life; they needed to cover (go beyond) the gap between probability and conviction and they could also go on the other side of an issue. In our day, going public means covering the gap between uninformativity and informativity. (It is very interesting to examine the power A Translators Barriers and Bridges 37

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii of fictionalized truth over life itself or the power of talkshows over a sense of facts. Numbers are still wondering in our country: has the policeman killed Elodia or not?) Rather than the translation which I indicated for going public (and which was correct in its context, in the movie), I would translate the verb phrase into either a face cunoscut or a se destinui, which seem to me to be better choices for the deictic go, in a dynamic situation oriented outwardly. Unfortunately, in our life, there is still an unpleasant confusion between things private and things public, with possible illustrations in a variety of fields where ownership is double (health units, school network, television stations, etc.). Here I mean to focus my comment on communication in general. While socialising, our conationals sometimes look hasty in crossing the decent borderline: they soon begin confessions and spill out intimate data to strangers from what could be either naivety to trust unconditionally or a degree of eccentricity, a wish to shock. Foreigners may wonder at Romanian conduct upon occasion. Here is a true story (the incident is narrated by I. Popovici, D.V. no. 184/2007, p. 17): the storytellers brother-in-law coming from Australia noticed a fellow of about fifty addressing a little girl in the marketplace at Sinaia. He happened to know her: she was the grandchild of the housekeeper at the villa where he had put up. The Australian instantly pigeonholed the case to be pedophilia. He refused to accept explanations that this outgoing manners (going public) can happen in our country without criminal implications, just as a southerners extroversion: a se bga n vorb / ciorb, namely to volunteer to take part in a conversation unasked and uninvited but with perfectly honest intentions. j) Target is not included (yet) in DOOM. Still, it gets inserted in a more recent print (Cozma, 2007: 507), with two basic meanings: 1. obiectiv managerial (a production target) and 2. grup potenial de cumprtori (a sales target). Its replaceability by public-int in most of its contexts of use nowadays cannot do away with this foreign presence (culture more than business), so Romanian speakers might do better assimilating it! Let us exemplify with two such cases of use, one nominal (1) and one verbal (2) presentation in which we observe the paradigmatic inclusion into our vocabulary: (1) Pensionarii romni [] nu constituie un target pentru mesajele comerciale (D. V. no. 196/207, p. 19). (2) Dac mai aduga i nite copii, celui sau pisici, ieea o comedie targetat pe familiti. (Romnia literar no. 10/2006). A special issue of D. V. (no. 194/2007) is dedicated to the ways culture gets to the public and in the article entitled Cultural tastes under the magnifying glass of the researcher (Lucian Dobraca, Gusturile culturale sub lupa cercettorului, p. 9), the very last statement reads: Le rmne ofertanilor sarcina s se orienteze profitabil spre categoriaint ideal. My underlining by italics puts forth the best, though long enough, explicit translation for target. As for research on consumer tastes, the conclusions sadly point to a low demand of cultural products. There is a wish to go beyond stereotyped appreciations such as males watch games, females watch soaps (brbaii se uit la meciuri, iar femeile la telenovele, art. cit.). It may be instructive to compile a list of identified Romanian targets (classes of people with a potential for receiving cultural products on the market): ethnocentric traditionalists (15% of the respondents, in love with folk music, historical movies, home affairs, news); Internet-addicted (9%, access to culture beginning with www.); metropolitans (7%, book readers, museum visitors, concert-goers etc.); football / other sports fans (6% microbiti, sports shows, games, action movies); soap-viewers (7% telenoveliste, soaps and all 38 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges romance products) and so on - data carefully processed by sociologist Marius Lazr (art. cit.). These are a few targets that can constitute the happiness or frustration of Romanian marketing specialists. What has been attempted in the guise of analysis in this research may be dubbed, with a recent phrase, a-i seta imaginaia on bilingual usage. This is exactly what a young speaker brought up with a computer under his eyes might say when a perfectly authentic expression for a Romanian is nothing simpler than a-i folosi imaginaia. The verb a seta is recorded in DOOM (second edition, p. 722). According to Cozma (2007: 468), the English verb to set can get the following translations and be used with the following direct objects: a pune (e.g., to set a term); a regla (e.g., to set a value); a ajusta (e.g., to set a high price); a stabili (e.g., to set an hour); a ndemna. For this last shade of meaning, I found nothing fit in Cozmas dictionary, but it can perfectly substitute for a seta which makes the discussion now (ceva i ndeamn imaginaia). What is noticeable is an incongruity between the verb and the noun in the construction a-i seta imaginaia: it is something like a failure to create the marriage between the computer world and the poetic world. English-based computerese in Romanian can dominate the scene more than it does, in some near future. The contemporary generations have been raised on the visual media of photography, cinema, television, videos; our contemporaries accept due to them existential fragmentation as a normal condition, so they are far from rejecting linguistic fragmentation caused by the interference of foreign languages.

2.1.3 Europe, culture and translation

The newcomer to Cultural Studies, the Functional School, has had significant implications so far in redirecting the thinking about translation. It has been found that in Europe, as an overall tendency, one witnesses greater and greater fidelity (the utopian <perfection>in translation work), more and more direct translation (the so-called <direct transfer strategy>), fewer and fewer footnotes (the main body of the translated piece clarifies all aspects). For the German audience, for example, Heidrun Witte (cited by Dollerup, 2006) has investigated the status of the bi-culturally competent translator and has reached the following conclusion: the translator should convey an image of the source culture that corresponds to the image the source culture would claim for itself. It seems this is the clue (even if temporary) to the success of a cultural translation. It is also stated that the functional perspective cultivated nowadays displays a proactive view, which means that, before undertaking an assignment, translators should be aware of all the implications carried by the decisions they are going to take. As one example of how work has changed for most translators after the middle of the last decade of the twentieth century, think of the many interlingual moves and translations that happen when a European Union citizen addresses a European Union institution. The rule is to answer in the citizens language. We are working out an illustration in point. A Romanian writes a letter (in his mother-tongue); a decision is made that the staff working in French is to answer; a native French translator works at the letter and turns it into French; the staff answers the letter in French; this answer is translated into Romanian by a native Romanian translator; the Romanian citizen receives the answer in his mother-tongue. Mention must be made that complex procedures of this kind take place very frequently, as a resolution in A Translators Barriers and Bridges 39

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii international organizations, a directive in the European Union, etc. are to be discussed by national governments, are to be translated into national languages, and in that way complex operations are initiated and carried out. In European countries, translators are subject to contingent liability, which means they have responsibility for the consequences of the errors they might commit. The undesirable situations that must be circumvented are, among others, (1) to be brought to court and to have to pay damages to clients or commissioners; (2) to have the translations withdrawn from the market when there are angry reports from the receiving culture. It is wonderful when a translator is able to hear the way a page speaks to and from other cultures, but in practice it can prove quite hard to hear ... The European states have embraced the idea of a cultural progression with every generation of translators for a long time now. Dollerup (2006:186-8) even manages an overview of generalized features about how teaching traditions span at least three or four generations up to the present age of globalization. At first, with reliance on grammar books and dictionaries, translators were formed to reach the conscious level of the need to learn foreign languages. The second generations training introduced the idea of learning them to perfection, nothing less. A third generation understood that the study in the foreign language and with the living <tool> who is the native speaker could bring the most meaningful connection between individual experience and professional work. Nowadays, nobody is prepared to let go of the props offered by computerized translational facilities, because there are dissatisfactions with both traditional and non-traditional tools. The huge inventory of knowledge at a translators disposal via the Internet cannot be neglected. The category of the contemporary is one essential way for us, young and older, to understand human experience. Following the dialectics of cultural identity for both individuals and communities, cultural studies will define their historical age through expressions of both continuity and discontinuity in human experience. There are two basic questions, then, we need to ask when we examine what is being taught in schools: (1) are students books axiologically marked in a convincing way? (2) are the selfsame books instrumentally useful, as well, in preparing cultured adults for the general welfare of society? English teachers like to believe that culture and science in the form of grammar are not two distinct spheres in their dealings. Culture and science in teaching and learning English should be understood at their interface as a dialogue across disciplinary boundaries or as cultural worlds and scientific practices linked in the best way possible. Some literature may be taken on board (we discuss the matter later in this research paper), not because it is valuable in itself, but rather because the language in it is considered good and because a bit of culture is still regarded as a prestigious thing to own, if consumed in small doses. Teachers should take best advantage of the fact that, at present, the status of this foreign language is very high, for English has very firmly and irreversibly established itself as the first language of international communication. Concomitantly, the process known as informalization (cf. 40 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges Goodman & Graddol 1996: 142-6) has to be considered because it influences schoolbook style in a manifest way. The claim that English is becoming increasingly informalized for the whole planet means to say that formal English tends to be forgotten and conversational English gains, though not excessively colloquial in nature, for it is still regulated by rules of address and the variety of situations with their own conventions. Familiar and polite forms at the same time will be discussed again in our pages devoted to the model of the polite interlocutor. Books for our learners have adopted a casual tone as opposed to the formal style first of all, short units of delivery in syntax and brief units of thought in informing. A study (see The European English Messenger, Vol.VIII/1, spring 1999, p. 3) once showed that many beginning students (like ours in the fifth and sixth grades) have trouble understanding a sentence of more than eleven words! More and more in the last decade, our students have been made aware of a European Union concept. School has made it clear to them that the European world is the sum total of distinct peoples that are born and active in the geographic area of the continental plateau West of the Urals reaching to the Atlantic. This world offers a contradiction: a marked cultural and linguistic diversity is combined with a particular spiritual unity. Both diversity and unity are meant to be preserved and even amplified. Diversity can be accounted for by the historic life of each community; unity is given by a foundation achieved in communication in a transfer of elements from one ethnic group to another. The interchange of cultural values results in new conceptual and interpretive homogenization. Nowadays, there is an increased awareness about the fact that a local cultural change is not totally random, but usually fits into a more general, long-range drift. What scientists like to call local changes operate over two or three generations. There are also what might be called global changes, which manifest themselves over centuries, sometimes even millennia. These eventually result in new structural designs with markedly different general properties. There seem to be culture-internal forces which play a big role yet. For pedagogic purposes, it is important to dwell on the conscience of being a European. The main components of this conscience were rooted in ancient Greece and were developed by the cultural and linguistic focal points, ancient and modern: the Roman world, the Western Roman world, the Germanic world. Under those circumstances, one may identify elements that through communication became general European assets. Cultural diversity is an asset that needs to be preserved, no matter what it takes. Yet one particular development of late has troubled the Romanianness in us: the politically-colored association, if not intentional confusion, of Romanian and Roma populations. Apparently, the identity of sound and spelling has caused trouble. An online request addressed to our Parliament (cf. R. Zafiu in Romnia literar, 10/2009) is cu privire la revenirea etniei rome la vechea denumire de igan (to the effect that the Roma population should return to the old name of tzigan). Cool-headed commentators will say that, no matter how many precautions these initiators of linguistic reform take, the intention of ushering in or out an etnonym for a minority is an aggressive and xenophobic act. The hyperbolizing motivation cannot be either the inferiority of the Other/alter or the horror of being mistaken for the Other. The hostile feeling is sometimes accounted for with the idea that gypsies have always A Translators Barriers and Bridges 41

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii assigned themselves names referring to other ethnic or national groups who practically allowed them to find this hiding-place. In our country, there is vacillation between the form rom (adapted from a loan) and rrom (nonadapted form, graphically preferred for noting a retroflex uvular long r, in all a very unusual spelling for a Romanian word). The reasons for the latter variant are extra-linguistic, to clearly mark a differentiation from what is included in the lexical family of igan. The transpositions of rom (opposed to gadjo) for self-designation are the mere preference of militants for emancipation because they avoid the negative connotations of traditional terms such as gypsy, bohmien, igan etc. In conclusion, rom is a neologism in Romanian, with a neutral precise meaning that cannot replace igan in all contexts. Of course, etnonyms have a symbolic value, and fear of the foreigners puzzlement over rom and igan can only betray an unbalance in collective psychology. In our world, commercial, cultural and political border crossings define so many lives that they have also started to define so many idiolects. We Romanians have a new name for a new phenomenon: Romglish or perhaps Ronglish (on the pattern of Franglais). The new identity of Romanians can be read in the continuous mixture of the words spoken or written so as to generate new linguistic realities. Ion Luca Caragiale, our prominent playwright and prose writer, ruefully stated, tongue-in-cheek, something of remarkable topicality: Multe am nvat de cnd triesc n mijlocul Europei civilizate unde e dreptate la tribunale fiindc este i pe strad i ntre toate una mai ales, c omul trebuie s spun europenete, nu grecoignete, ceea ce crede. This becomes in English: Its so much that I have learnt since living in civilized mid-Europe where justice rules the courtrooms just as it rules the streets and best of all one particular thing, namely that a guy has to speak up Europe-wise, and not Greek or Roma dialects. The expression that merges aboriginal and alien elements makes this connection between native and foreign idioms (sooner American than anything else) look playful. Yet, this is not by far a rare case in our polyglot society of upstarts. By this stage, we are clear-headed enough to realize that we are not Europe and if we are going to produce useful things for Europe (as Europe itself expects from us), we need to consult a wide range of experts, scholars or whatever their respected name is, with expertise in different areas.

2.2 Aplicaii
I. Technical instructions or specifications are undoubtedly a territory of increased activity which nowadays requires a redefinition of adaptive processes. Here is an illustrative situation. A German audience for the brochure instructing them how to use a lawnmower is shown to have expectations different from a British audience for the use of the same machine. In Technical Translation and Related Disciplines, G. Kingscott (2002) offers this example starting from the idea of having a book to know how to assemble a lawnmower. German love to see an introduction for the overall picture of what they will do. British instructions are put forth in the absence of an introduction. In a translation from German into English, the experienced translator proceeds without the introductory 42 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges lines. The British are reputed among translation critics for being more pragmatic, after all. Anyway, from the one to the other, the translation has changed its focus. And what is more, if it were to be in reverse order, the original British and the translation German, the translator might have to work out the mentioned introduction the reader of the translation must feel at ease, after all. This is what the translator of the functional school is sure to know. II. In Cay Dollerups views (2006:164), the model that can combine several merits of older cultural models for approaching the translational procedures is as follows: the operations on four text-internal layers plus two textexternal layers. You can read them below. - Structures (the structural layer): textual order of elements, paragraphs/passages, episodes. - Linguistic aspects: words and phrases, repetitive processes, sound and style, including assonance, alliteration, euphony. - The very content of communication: main points in the layers above, capable of forwarding an interpretation. - The intentional layer: more than the previous kind of understanding, a meta-understanding related to universal human experience. - The paratextual layer: the relations to pictures, graphical illustrations, the publishers requests of all sorts, etc. - The chronological axis, represented by the relation between the time of the source text (its production, more exactly) and the time of the target text (the moment it reaches its audience). Dollerup (ibidem) exemplifies his model for textual analysis with a story in rhyme written in the United States in 1992 by J. Alborough. There are fullpage pictures for this text: Eddies off to find his teddy. Eddies teddys name is Freddie. He lost him in the woods somewhere. Its dark and horrible in there. Help! said Eddie. Im scared already! I want my bed! I want my teddy! Here is a translation into French by I. Finkenstaedt, the text being published in France: Fred, le nounours dEddie, a disparu. Eddie part sa recherche. Fred est perdu quelque part dans le bois. Plus Eddie savance, plus il fait sombre. Au secours! crie Eddie. Jai peur! Je veux mon lit! Je veux mon nounours! The most obvious loss is the rhyme in the original, ultimately this device making the text a very memorable piece for children. By translating, the whole of the linguistic layer is altered. For the structural layer, it is enough to consider the first two lines: they introduce Eddie-teddy-Freddie in English and Fred-nounours-Eddie in French. Hence, Fred is pushed into the foreground, playing a greater role in French for half of the story. The second half is dedicated to the boy, Eddie, and his misadventure in both texts. Briefly, Dollerup who has suggested this application notices the following, upon which we choose to make our own comments: A Translators Barriers and Bridges 43

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii 1. the larger role played by Fred in the beginning (it holds for the first three lines, so the remark actually covers one half, as we mentioned) 2. Eddie is more active in the translation (that determines us to count his actions: one, starting the search; two, advancing into the unknown; three, calling out his grief. What does he do in English? One, he begins his journey; two, he previously lost his toy; three, he calls for help. We get a result of numerical equality!) 3. The causal connection is noted in French between the boys advance into the woods and the sinister character of the woods (it is true: the original has no trace of the French double comparative; instead, it offers a description and we can ask whose it is the authors or the boys? In French it is simultaneously the boys impression and blame). 4. The translation reads smoothly yet it proposes the problematic <le nounours> (where the problem is, is not clear to us). The MT says that teddy-bear becomes ursuleul de plu in Romanian, whereas nounours is a mere ursule in Romanian. Without a completion, the single Romanian diminutive may manage a reference to the live cub, whereas both English and French patently refer to a childs toy. 5. The overall intentionality, preserved in the two languages, is found to be the following demonstration: once our (?) teddy bear has been recovered, Eddie also forgets the surprises in the woods. 6. The paratextual accompaniment is found to be largely the same: the illustrations maight be somewhat reduced in French because of finance complications. 7. Eventually, the chronological axis is hardly worth considering since the books appeared shortly one after the other. For the undergraduates in our philological department we have set the task of a translation into Romanian of the rhyme they got acquainted with in English and French. We pick several solutions for comments. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Eddie e pe drum dup ursule. Ursuleul are nume: Dorule. S-a pierdut n codru, Unde-i decor sumbru. Srii, zise Eddie. Mor de fric! Eu cu Doru vrem acas, apuc s zic. I.

7. I-a disprut ursul lui Eddie, 8. Ursule pe nume Freddy. 9. L-a pierdut printr-o pdure 10. Fr fragi i fr mure. 11. Ajutor! strig micuul. 12. Imi vreau ursul i ptuul! 13. Eddie l-a pierdut pe Freddie. 14. Freddie e ursul lui Eddie. 15. E speriat n pdurice, 16. Parc are tremurici. 17. Strig dup ajutor, 18. Vreau acas, c mi-e dor! 19. Freddy, ursuleul lui Eddie, a disprut. 44

II.

III.

IV.

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Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges 20. Eddie pleac n cutarea micuului pierdut. 21. S-a pierdut undeva prin pdure. 22. Intunericul el trebuie s-l ndure. 23. Ajutor! Deja mi-e fric! 24. Vreau n ptu cu al meu ursulic. 25. I-a disprut ursul lui Eddie, 26. Ursuleul pe nume Freddie. 27. S-a pierdut prin pdure 28. Intr-un col umbros 29. Pe unde de mult Eddie n-a mai fost. 30. - Ajutor, mi-e fric! 31. Vreau n ptu i pe ursulic! V.

III.
Comments like in the preceding section can be made on other choices of officially accepted and published translations this time, not only on comparative approaches for didactic reasons. Before you get on your own, with cases you dig up, here is one more analysis of multiple versions (like a musical theme with variations). A Japanese poem called haiku is century-old and famous for shortness, a real change from the rhythm and rhyme the stanzas above strove more or less to achieve. Haiku has been compared to a photo or a picture that captures an artistic, emotional fleeting moment in what is happening to unrelated things (only an appearance of unrelatedness, though). The traditional haiku should have a total of seventeen syllablesdivided into three lines, five plus seven plus five. If the intention of the poem is primarily to leave a strong impression of meaningful depth upon reading, the number of syllables becomes less of a constraint. A proof of it is the following case: three translations for one and the same haiku, however hard it is to believe it. 1. The autumn gloaming deepens into night; Back gainst the slowly-fading orange light On withered bough a lonely crow is sitting. (Walsh, 1916) 2. On a bare branch A rook roosts: Autumn dusk. (Bowans, 1964) 3. Barren branch; balancing crow; autumn dusk. (Cohen, 1972) The three translators share a semantic arrangement: the coming together of evening, bird and tree branch. We recognize the imposition of three lines and the neglect of syllable counting. We do not read Japanese, but we can guess that the three presentations cannot reflect the original typographical set-up. We check the order of items being introducing onto the scene and it is kept up by the last two translations: the branch / the rook / the dusk. They similarly push into the backgrounded position of modifiers other three ideas, those of barrenness, of the birds stance and of the season. Number two and number three are careful to find sound effects of alliteration. The first, uncanonical and un-Japanese-like translation, begins with the season (rhetorical prominence due to initial position), explores matters of light for most of the text and finishes with every other foregrounded notions by the other A Translators Barriers and Bridges 45

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii translations branch alias bough and bird alias crow (rhetorical prominence due to end position in discourse). Thus, we find out there is a blend of fidelity and infidelity which is the strongest in this first and oldest version. We dare speculate on the dates of the translations as signifying a progression from verbosity (unspecific to haiku) to simplicity (the very effect pursued by the subgenre) and the climactic renunciation to a finite verb and a sentential form in the third translation. The closest in time to us is the most mysterious recreation of a felt emotion and, as such, we deem it is the most successful of the three. An element that links the three, rather differing, translations is the element of surprise about the occurrence of barrenness and solitude in autumn; seasonal darkening and loss is the cultural symbolism announced by any crow in winter time maybe this very idea, of premature sadness, is the revelation which as already mentioned is expected to be the artistic gift of a haiku.

2.3 Teste pentru autoevaluare

1.The functional school argues that a translator ... A. should recognize the relevance of cultural aspects; B. should see what undermines traditional translation thinking; C. should read translation criticism first; D. should redefine his radical approach In which of the following translations do you find the concept of adequacy applied? He disputed the managements decisions. A. a contestat deciziile conducerii. B. a anulat ce a hotrt directorul C. a dezminit decizia ntreprinderii. D. a creat o disput despre ce a decis managerul. The newcomer to the gang blabbed to the police. A. In gang, nou-venitul i-a turnat poliiei. B. Banda n frunte cu noul membru au vorbit poliiei. C. Pe noul venit n band l-a luat gura pe dinainte la poliie. D. Omul nou din band a ndrugat ceva poliitilor. He testified to the mans innocence. A. Au depus mrturie mpotriva omului. B. A testat inocena brbatului. C. A depus mrturie c e vinovat. D. A depus mrturie n favoarea nevinoviei omului.
2.

3. Look closely at the following two (English and Romanian) examples from works of fiction and choose the description of the inadvertency they contain and which will probably be correctly kept up when translating: Theres a Mrs Lanoline, too, Helen yawned. So dull. Ah, Enache, ce delicios se mnnc la Enache! suspin romantic doamna Alexandrescu ... A.These examples contain written dialogue that has been shortened to one line by one speaker. B.These examples contain, instead of verbs of speaking, verbs describing non-verbal activities. C. These examples contain hints about the literary characters moods. D. These examples contain direct speech parts and indirect speech parts. 4.Do the same for the following examples: 46 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges He may not have noticed her He bellowed gleefully. De ce se miorlie n loc s vorbeasc n loc s vorbeasc cum trebuie? A. These examples contain verbs that describe speed and articulation of sound. B. These examples contain verbs that can only be used intransitively. C. These examples contain verbs referring to pitch and intensity of sound while speaking. D. These examples contain extra words to make us remember animals. 5. To be proactive means to think ahead, to have in view future circumstances so as, at best, to avoid unpleasant events. What will a proactive translator do? A. He will reject technical translations as hard to perform. B. He will ask for a realistic deadline for his work. C. He will accept to translate what is within the limits of his knowledge. D. He will find it relevant to know what his translation is to be used for. 6. To be proactive for a client who chooses a translator for a commission is ... A. to be willing to find a top-notch translator; B. to try not to waste money on translations whose fee is exaggerated; C. to avoid translation agencies because they charge excessively; D. to set no deadline for the translation 7. To be retrospective for anyone is to look back, to check the past, or direct ones actions to a revalorization of things done; for a translator it means ... A. to postpone evaluating the translation received; B. to control and evaluate the translation as soon as it is done; C. to dispose of the translation before it can be checked; D. to turn to a bilingual person to redo it 8. To be retrospective for a client who commissions a translator means ... A. to proofread the translation or find someone to do it; B. to be persuaded about the quality of the work; C. to pay no fee if it is not asked; D. to withdraw the translation from the market 9. Who or what is subject to contingent liability? A. the commissioner of a translation; B. the damage-paying agencies; C. translators responsible for the consequences of the errors in their work; D. the reports from receiving sides 10. Why do we need translation classes? A. because it is unlike literature classes or grammar classes; B. because professional translation requires training; C. because teachers and students must cooperate in their effort; D. because a class is a controlled environment 11. What else can you call an error in translation? A. blunder; B. misinterpretation; C. misapplication; D. howler 12. A freelance translator is one who ... A. has no professional assignment; B. has a self-managed career; C. has set his price himself; D. has been an autodidact 13. Ranking a translation means ... A Translators Barriers and Bridges 47

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii A. establishing its relative quality; B. improving it; C. commenting on the source; D. revising and proofreading 14. A translation should not ... A. jar on the ears of native readers; B. misrepresent the source text; C. contain awkward phrasing; D. fail the integration into the target culture 15. A translation reviser is ... A. the publisher of the translated text; B. the analyst of the translated text; C. the reviewer of the translated text; D. the commissioner of the translated text 16. Translation criticism ... A. improves the work already done; B. improves the quality of future work; C. matches source and target cultures; D. draws a textual profile 17. What is relativistic and, as such, difficult to find agreement about criteria? A. the source language culture; B. the target language culture; C. the translator-critic relationship; D. the translator-publisher relationship 18. Opaqueness in the target text is considered, as a rule, ... A. a deficiency; B. a literary achievement; C. a symbol of literacy; D. an intended effect by the author of the original 19. According to what school is a translation successful in the target culture in view of the intended skopos? A. the written translation school; B. the direct transfer school; C. the descriptive school; D. the functional school 20. A non-professional translation may display ... A. wrong collocations; B. a broad spectrum of realizations; C. ideology related to equivalence; D. rendition of standard language 21. Culture-specific images can contain references to A. humour; B. time details; C. politics; D. black-and-white movies 22. Re-translation means A. the use of slang; B. the use of specialized lexicons; C. language-internal revision; D. updating of language 23. The scene of Translation Studies will ... A. look different in ten years from now; B. stay unchanged for a decade; C. run counter the tradition; D. allow for easier translation in future 24. The information necessary to a cultural translation must not come from ... A. publication policies; B. international organizations; C. individuals who do not want to be cited; D. individuals who are not employed by the ministry of culture 25. If one translates ones national hymn into English ... A. it does not have to rhyme; B. it does not have to be singable; C. it has to rhyme; D. it has to be singable

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Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges

2.4 Teme pentru verificare/ examen

Explain your standpoint while reading the following mutually exclusive rules for translation work (apud Dollerup, 2006:19-20): 1.a. A translation must give the words of the original. 1.b. A translation must give the ideas of the original. 2.a. A translation should read like an original work. 2.b. A translation should read like a translation. 3.a. A translation should reflect the style of the original. 3.b. A translation should possess the style of the translator. 4.a. A translation should read as a contemporary of the original. 4.b. A translation should read as a contemporary of the translator. 5.a. A translation may add to, or omit from the original. 5.b. A translation may not add to, or omit from the original. 6.a. A translation of verse should be in prose. 6.b. A translation of verse should be in verse. Think back on your own improvement as a translator. Would there be moments or courses which were particularly pertinent to your development? Are you a supporter of the romglez craze, in other words are you an anglomaniac? Show how you might translate perhaps losing the rhetorical effect the ideas of a psychologist explaining two significant functions of television as follows: Televizorul este un chewing-gum pentru ochi i un baby-sitter pentru copilul familiei. Find one source text of no more than 150 words. Translate it, first wordfor-word/ literally, then freely. What differences do you find in (a) the process, (b) the product? Look for a magazine or review article. Translate it while targeting it in turn (a) to an audience of specialists in the field, (b) to an audience that knows nothing about the subject matter. Are there perceptible differences? Do you consider the targeting successful in each case? Skim (read quickly) each of the texts below. What are they about? (take them in turn). Extract the main idea(s). Then, read carefully and and evaluate the text according to its readability (what did you find most difficult to understand?) And last of all, translate into English or into Romanian, as the case stands, commenting on the difficulties you have had to work out while translating. A. It is a truism that cannot be repeated too often that most texts produced in the world are not meant for translation. Nevertheless, it is also a fact of translation activity that sometimes it is not clear why a translation should be 49 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Capitolul II - Momentul actual al retoricii made. There may be considerable discrepancy between what the sender and the client, who actually orders a translation, have in mind. And there may be a glaring difference between the ambiguous and muddled statement or writing produced by an engineer, and the clarity with which he himself understands it (C. Dollerup, Basics of Translation Studies, 2006). B. In sfrit, fiind sfruntat, de la obraz, gogonat, fiind generalizat i colectiv, minciuna este totodat atotcuprinztoare: toat lumea minte i minte n toate direciile. Se minte ct vezi cu ochii, de la indicatorii economici i pn la sentimentele care i anim pe oameni, de la ziare, radiouri i televiziuni i pn la felul n care se face literatur, se picteaz sau se compune (G. Liiceanu, Despre minciun, Bucureti, Humanitas, 2006). C. I used to work for a baseball team, and my first assignment was to go into the clubhouse, where a press conference was going on, and move a bunch of boxes into the players lockers. I rushed in and got started, but when I bent down to pick up the first pile, my khakis ripped right over my butt. The players burst out laughing, so the photographers turned around to see what was going on ... and proceeded to take a few snapshots of me in my ruined pants. Those photos haunted me the rest of my time at that job. (Cosmopolitan, Sept. 2010) D. jeani - pantaloni. In portul Genoa din Italia, marinarii i docherii, hamalii i ali lucrtori obinuiau s poarte pantaloni de lucru, groi, durabili, de culoare albastr. Ceva mai trziu, n California, un emigrant din Bavaria, pe nume Strauss, se apuc s fabrice pantaloni de lucru pentru cuttorii de aur i mineri. Materialul folosit i de unii i de alii era fabricat n Frana, la Nmes. Era esut din fire groase, de bumbac i vopsit apoi n culoarea albastru-indigo. Dup modelul pantalonilor marinreti din Genoa (n francez, Genes), n 1850 Strauss fabric pantaloni de lucru Levi denim i n 1873 i cedeaz patentul unui oarecare Jacob Davis din Carson City Nevada, care d acestor pantaloni o anumit linie. Aa s-au nscut pantalonii pe care astzi i mbrac milioane de oameni. Dup rzboi, a contribuit la asta modelul lui James Dean i al unui ntreg star-sistem, definitiv cucerit de farmecul democratic al unei inute blue jeans. Un pantalon tip jeans se fabric n 4 ore i presupune 45 de operaii tehnologice, n care intr: croirea, coaserea, splarea, decolorarea i clcarea. Ca s arate presplat un pantalon sau orice alt obiect vestimentar tip blue jeans se nvrte timp de 3 ore ntr-o main special, n ap, cu nisip sau fragmente de piatr ponce, nclzit la 40 de grade (D. Berchin, Moda pe nelesul tuturor, 1999) E. Miller divides critics into canny and uncanny: the former, Socratic, theoretical, confident in the rational and the rationalisable nature of their activity, with an unshaken faith that logic can penetrate the abysses of being, happy positivists within the realm of the human sciences (and he names Genette, Barthes, Jakobson); the latter, Apollonian in their rigour, sanity and rationality, yet Dyonisian, tragic because the thread of their logic leads them into the regions of the alogical, of the absurd (C. Macsiniuc, Towards a Poetics of Reading Poststructuralist Perspectives, 2002) F. In Mic dicionar enciclopedic (1978) figureaz trei sensuri pentru iluzie: 1) percepie fals care, spre deosebire de halucinaie, are loc n prezena 50 A Translators Barriers and Bridges

Chapter II Building Communicative Bridges obiectului; 2) faptul de a lua o aparen sau o ficiune drept realitate; nelare, amgire; 3) speran nentemeiat. Dicionarele i enciclopediile consemneaz uzul tipic al cuvintelor, dar l i impun sau, oricum, l influeneaz i consolideaz. Nu exist ns un izomorfism perfect ntre coninuturile terminologice aa cum apar ele n sursele oficiale i nelesurile acordate de agenii vorbitori n practica de zi cu zi. Desigur, trebuie avut n vedere faptul c vorbitorii aceleiai limbi au competene lingvistice foarte diferite, dincolo de diferenele individuale contnd n cel mai nalt grad nivelul de colaritate. Am ntreprins o anchet cu privire la nelesul cuvntului iluzie n rndul a 300 de studeni din anii I-II de la mai multe secii ale Universitii Babe-Bolyai din Cluj. Am considerat c acest segment populaional are n chestiunea investigat o oarecare reprezentativitate teoretic pentru toat populaia rii. Din analiza de coninut a rspunsurilor primite, a rezultat c iluzia de percepie psihosocial apare n proporie de 62,7%, fa de 20,7% a iluziei de percepie fizic. Iluzia cu dimensiunea sperane dearte apare i n diverse combinaii lexicale ntre vis, dorin, ateptare, impresie, utopie, himer, nentemeiat, fals, ideal etc. Dat fiind contextul n care utilizeaz cuvntul, peste 50% din subieci chestionai au declarat c cel mai des apeleaz la sensul din a nu-i face iluzii (P. Ilu, Iluzia localismului i localizarea iluziei, 2000) This second chapter has pointed out the role of an expert intercultural mediator played by a translator, our contemporary. We reproduce below the exemplification chosen by Cay Dollerup (2006:158) and we expect you to add up with your own findings about the signaled development in translation practice. When the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark entered the European Union in 1973, covering letters would end: Please, sir, receive these expressions of the high esteem in which you are held. This (French, even Romanian-style) finishing flourish is wide off the mark in a covering letter (adres nsoitoare) which in the three countries listed would rather be Sincerely yours or some other simple closure. Quite importantly, these endings have over the years become adapted to the target audiences. Explain, in your own words, this simple fact: starting with the nineteenth century, it seems that Europe has been convinced about translation being one with foreign-language acquisition. Do you admit that systematic teaching and training in translation take place in institutions that represent education in any civilized state? Identify the role(s) of translation in culture and cultural politics. Speak about communities in a global environment, home and host cultures, space and time, centre and periphery, class, opportunities, money and new communication technologies.

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51

Conclusions

Conclusions about the art of translating

Comunicarea obinuit este comuniunea cu cellalt, arta este comuniunea cu ceea ce realizezi. (I. Oprea, 2007: 96) Two languages under scrutiny here, English and Romanian, display differing dimensions, constants already outlined by linguists for each language. Beyond the perception of difference or equivalence, there are means and rules regulating the near-perfect translation. Translation problems vary from very simple ones, caused by the word order typical of each language, to more complicated ones, caused by lexical gaps in the target language or by the absence in the target language equivalent of some semantic feature present in one of the terms of the source language collocation. Throughout our course, we have shown that interaction works both between various signs within texts and between the producer of these signs and the intended receivers. At the same time, the relation between linguistic form and aesthetic function rests, to a great extent, on the intuition and personal judgement of the receivers or readers. There are varying degrees of success in translating. George Steiner, in his famous and influential After Babel (1975) comes to the conclusion that translation is possible but it is impossible to find a systematic methodology for it. Yet, one cannot deny the fact that there is an accountable activity of contrasting several translations to one single original; then, one dismisses some as bad while praising others for their fidelity. Eventually, if reputed professionals claim that there is no such choice as between a literal and a free translation, but between a good and a bad translation, one reaches a likely certainty: translation is a science possessing its own techniques, and an art once it has assimilated these techniques. It is extremely important that translation as an activity is held in high esteem in any society and this esteem is practically shown by how much money a society is ready to spend on the teaching of translation. Thus, development occurs from amateurism to professionalism to specialization within many fields of intercultural exchange.

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Rspunsuri la teste pentru evaluare

Rspunsuri la teste pentru autoevaluare

Test I (cap. I): 1. B; 2. D; 3. A; 4. A,B and C; 5. D; 6. A, C and D; 7. B and D; 8. A and B; 9.none in particular; 10. A, B and C; 11. none at all; 12. A; 13. D; 14. A and C; 15. A; 16. B; 17. B and D; 18. B; 19. C; 20. B and D; 21. A and B; 22. B; 23. no answer; 24. A; 25. B and D.

Test II (cap. II): 1. A and B; 2. A; C; D; 3. B; 4. C; 5. B, C and D; 6. A and B; 7. B; 8. A; 9. C; 10. A and B; 11. A and D; 12. B and C; 13. A; 14. all answers; 15. no answer; 16. B; 17. no answer; 18. A; 19. D; 20. A; 21. A and C; 22. D; 23. A; 24. no answer; 25. any answer according to the translators/commissioners options.

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