CO de Limba Engleza - Daniela Sorcaru (D. Tuchel)

Universitatea “Dunărea de Jos” din Galați
Departamentul pentru Învăţământ la Distanţă

şi cu Frecvenţă Redusă
Curs opţional de
limba engleză
Daniela-Maria Ţuchel
Facultatea de Litere
Specializarea:
Limba și literatura română – Limba și literatura engleză
Anul III, Semestrul 1
UDJG
Faculty of Letters
A Translator's
Barriers and Bridges
(An optional course in the English language
for 3rd year students)
Course tutor:
Associate Professor Daniela-Maria Ţuchel
Contents
CONTENTS
CUVÂNT INTRODUCTIV .................................................................................................... 5

Chapter No. 1
BREAKING COMMUNICATIVE BARRIERS ...................................................................... 7
1.1. Theoretical guidelines ............................................................................................ 7
1.1.1. Key terms .......................................................................................................... 7
1.1.2. Strategies ....................................................................................................... 10
1.1.3. Procedures.................................................................................................... 12
1.2. Aplicaţii .................................................................................................................. 14
1.2.1. Reification as a barrier................................................................................... 14
1.2.2. Doubling through translation ........................................................................ 17
1.2.3. The barrier of obedience................................................................................ 18
Teste pentru autoevaluare .......................................................................................... 22
Teme pentru verificare/examen .................................................................................. 25
Chapter No. 2
BUILDING COMMUNICATIVE BRIDGES ........................................................................ 29
2.1. Translating culture................................................................................................ 29
2.1.1. Cultural models .............................................................................................. 29
2.1.2. Glorification of another taste........................................................................ 32
2.1.3 Europe, culture and translation...................................................................... 40
2.2. Aplicaţii .................................................................................................................. 44
Teste pentru autoevaluare .......................................................................................... 47
Teme pentru verificare/examen .................................................................................. 50
CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE ART OF TRANSLATING ................................................. 55
RĂSPUNSURI LA TESTE PENTRU AUTOEVALUARE .................................................. 57
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 59
A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 3

Introduction
MOTTO: Fidelitatea este mai degrabă tendinţa

de a crede că traducerea e mereu posibilă
dacă textul sursă a fost interpretat
cu o pătimaşă complicitate... (Umberto Eco)
CUVÂNT INTRODUCTIV
Cursul universitar pe care îl prefaţăm aici durează un semestru şi capătă

caracteristici de curs seminarizat pentru specializarea română-engleză, cu următoarele
obiective:
a) înţelegerea activităţii de efectuare a unei traduceri şi ca artă şi ca ştiinţă;
b) evidenţierea resorturilor prin care se realizează funcţiile discursului (non)literar
care se cere tradus;
c) analiza şi exersarea latenţelor expresive ale diverselor limbaje, precizând ce
obligaţii îşi asumă traducătorul;
d) actualizarea studiului numit translatologie prin (1) modul actual de abordare a
traductibilităţii, adică ferma convingere că toate manifestările lingvistice sunt traductibile şi
(2) practici actuale de transfer al conţinutului, ambiţionând şi la o echivalare stilistică;
e) concluziile privind valabilitatea activităţii de traducere, dat fiind că şi psihologia clasică
nu pune la îndoială natura universală a conceptelor şi schemelor ce reflectă experienţa
umană.
Fiecare capitol este structurat pe patru segmente, în următoarea succesiune: (1)
elemente de teorie – tehnici şi metode – pentru sarcini de lucru aplicat; (2) aplicaţii
relevante; (3) teste de autoevaluare; (4) teme pentru verificare/ examen.
În esenţă, primul capitol se referă la descrierea teoriei, iar al doilea capitol este
reţetarul. Indiferent că ne lansăm spre traduceri cu plăcerea consumatorului de literatură
sau cu acribia lingvistului, important este să fim avertizaţi (adică în cunoştinţă de cauză) cu
privire la mecanismele producerii şi receptării unui text pentru a găsi pe cont propriu
varianta ideală de traducere. Oferim, spre investigare, o suită de teme de traducere pentru
comentarii personale asupra lor, cu următorul orizont al aşteptărilor: să se treacă dincolo
de latura de literaturizare spre diversitatea unor situaţii de transpunere lingvistică. Iar, dacă
se poate broda teoretic pe marginea lor, să se facă apel nu atât la teorii ale traducerii
literare, cât la teorii ale culturii necesare traducătorului specializat.

Breaking Communicative Barriers
Chapter No. 1
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 target-language 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.

Precizări esenţiale
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 Nida’s 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 împăratul pe cap”, no explicitation occurs; but, “trend
setters” becoming “trend-setteri, un fel de guru ai gustului public”
(România literară #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, matter-of-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 exhortations, sermons, advertisements can
be illustrations in point) requires persuasive language and a translation
8 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

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 să-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: It’s 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 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 Shakespeare’s 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 translator’s 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 translator’s 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 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 (Gulliver’s
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 A-languages) 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);
↷-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 translator’s
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 musician’s 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 “refă experienţa lui”
for the former case, and “the story of salvation” translated as “povestea
mântuirii”, 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 “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 translator’s
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, let’s 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 when problem-solving
occurs. The resulting schema is P1→TT→EE→P2, 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 culture-bound 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 Segal’s (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. Aplicaţii
1.2.1. 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 self-
perception called ‘beingness’.
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 population’s
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, dărâmaţi 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 Berlin’s City Hall.
The historical moment was John F. Kennedy’s 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 năvălit să lichideze şi ultima urmă de foc sălbatic care a
distrus zeci de case pe dealuri, deasupra acestui oraş de coastă pitoresc,
luându-se la întrecere cu vântul care ar putea sufla să redea viaţa
flăcărilor.” 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 which
results from supposing that whatever can be named or conceived
abstractly must actually exist”.
Essayist Andrei Pleşu cites – in a Dilema Veche article – from a letter
written by Culianu on some Western issues, Confesiuni despre experienţa
erudiţiei aici, în Vest: „Am descoperit că, de la o vreme, plăcerea de a
medita asupra unei teme e înlocuită de plăcerea de a «aduna material»,
iar efortul de a formula expresiv – de acela de a cita exact. Amâni opinia
personală din scrupulul de a inventaria, doct, opiniile altora. Am cunoscut
acea juvenilă dilatatio animi, stârnită de sentimentul cunoaşterii de cărţi,
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
people’s 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 man’s 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 three-stanza poem picked on the Internet: „prin noi trec
anotimpuri cenuşii / animale bolnave / lăsând urme gălbui, argiloase // ne-
au mai rămas cuvinte doar pentru / un joc de scrabble într-o limbă apusă //
doar ascultarea ne poate apropia cumva / la marginea unei gări prin care
trenurile încing / şinele ca un şir de nostalgii plicticoase / depuse pe
bătrâneţile noastre de tinichea” [we are crossed by grey seasons / sick
animals / leaving behind some clay-yellowish 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 mid-position, 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.
1.2.2. Doubling through translation

In a funny parallel hinting at Harry Houdini’s tricks, Michael Cronin
(2003: 93) writes on instances when translators, finding themselves
“bound 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: “Impărate, paza bună 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 (bună 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 ‘pază’ 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 Mihăieş’s text (România literară) we read about
“small talk-uri, harababură internetistică”, computer operators refer to
‘folder’, alternatively ‘director’, or - embraced in the same phrase - ‘ecran
touch screen’ and ‘soluţii electronice online’. If an entity is one of my
worldly possessions and I should have a name for it, the handiest solution
is another language’s 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 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.
1.2.3. 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): unghiuţe tăiate…/ 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 alţi politicieni, de toate calibrele, avea stilul
universităţii, al studiului aplicat, al contemplativităţii angajate. În plus - acel
aer central-european care îmi era atît de familiar şi care unifica, sub o
comună mireasmă, cîteva figuri publice de aceeaşi "obedienţă": Václav
Havel, Arpad Göncz, György Konrad, Adam Michnik etc. » (A. Pleşu 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
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 Pleşu 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 ‘lucrări de mentenanţă’, as if ‘lucrări de
întreţinere’ 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
anyone’s 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 man’s daily experience.
Obedience is an educational matter: authority versus easy-
goingness. Obedience is also compliance with the imperatives of the day:
“the drive for making money”/ goana după 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, “Când 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 “populaţia neaoşă” and its newly created funny bilingualism like in the
following randomly-chosen newspaper sentence: “Evoluţia audienţei
postului tv se înscrie în trendul firesc impus de public neaoş”. 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.
In January last year, city mayor Oprescu had to face educational
challenges with a fresh idea – the introduction of a so-called “buton de
panică” 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 panică” was advertised as a matter of
proud achievement for a number of schools in Cluj, in TV news). The
alternative expression “butonul roşu de urgenţă” 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 alarmă” probably lived its day and a button is a
description closer to what may exist nowadays, whereas the twin words R.
alarmă/ E. panic loses the contest with the twin words R. urgenţă/ 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
well-dressed 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 Englishman’s or American’s voice with the parts in bold:

« Dar de ce s-au apucat englezii Daldry şi Hare să facă filmul ăsta? Ei nu
s-au încleştat ani întregi cu aceste lucruri şi, în mod previzibil (filmul fiind
un medium mai asertiv – mai puţin bun la ezitări – decît cuvîntul), n-au
reuşit să găsească un echivalent pentru tonul cărţii – pentru acea presiune
neîncetată a interogaţiei şi autointerogaţiei. » 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 încleşta”, 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 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
aserţiune. 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 ezitări” is un-Romanian, so to say, but does not
uncover (at least to me) the origin of its stiltedness. Eventually,
“autointerogaţie” 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 one’s own motives and behavior is perhaps
more correctly expressed in Romanian with the word ‘introspecţie’.
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 chestionează pe sine (ce
vrea să însemne?, pînă la urmă înseamnă ceva?, ce emoţii ar vrea să
producă?, emoţiile acelea sînt oare adecvate?) şi, pînă la urmă, nu mai
chestionează nimic. Ce rămîne nu-i o melodramă. E clar că Daldry şi Hare
dispreţuiesc acest gen; ei au cultul „frumosului rafinat“. Numai că ce
înţeleg ei prin „frumos“ (vezi scenele lor erotice, care sînt de fapt o
expoziţie de nuduri de bun-gust) neutralizează orice interogaţie, orice
meditaţie, la fel de sigur cum ar face-o melodrama; diferenţa e că n-o
îneacă în zgomot şi furie, ci o cloroformează. Ce rămîne e o greşeală. »
The whole of the critical text demonstrates the superiority of a book,
the novel The Reader (1997) by Bernhard Schlink, over the movie (an
Oscar-nominated 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 day’s
disjunction between piety and culture: it flaws a Christian’s 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
individual’s axiological systems, one adopts Schwartz’s model of two
dimensions in culture, openness to change versus conservation and self-
enhancement 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 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) rebus-games 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.
Teste pentru autoevaluare

Identificaţi răspunsurile 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
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 (let’s say, finance). What
matters most in his/her work?
A. whether s/he is concerned with budgets, financial statements, letter-writing –
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 translator’s 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 don’t check the translations into other languages than their own. B.
Translators want to see whether their colleagues have found 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 translator’s 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
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 counter-
argumentation?
 In a translated text, “many, if not all, of the language- and culture- specific features
of the source text must disappear” (S. Bassnett-McGuire, 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.
............................................................. ........................
..........................................................................................
..........................................................................................
..........................................................................................
► 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 don’t 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 uncle’s 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.
............................................................. ........................
..........................................................................................
................................................... .......................................
..........................................................................................

Building Communicative Bridges
Chapter No. 2
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 person’s/author’s
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 one’s subject), the other is the observable stance of the
audience, practically a response which can be classified as positive,

Momentul actual al retoricii
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 1990’s, 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 other’s cultural positioning.
False assumptions would be excluded only by a deep knowledge of the
other person’s 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 day’s
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?

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 people’s 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 ‘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 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 distracţiei (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-
Bădescu (D. V. no. 197/2007, p. 19) is of opinion that there are tv
channels proven helpless when it comes to their own brand – „când 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 măreţe” (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 adevărat”, 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, Dicţionar de sinonime
comentate ale limbii engleze, Editura Universităţii „Al. I. Cuza”, Iaşi) or
Nichifor, G. (2004/2008 Dicţionar român-englez englez-român, Meteor
Press, Bucureşti), 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. Albu’s

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, self-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
dicţionar academic. Vol. I, II. Academia Română. Institutul de lingvistică
„Iorgu Iordan-Al. Rosetti”. Bucureşti: Editura Univers Enciclopedic), grant
is simply explained as subvenţie and indicated with etymology from the
English language. From the translations in Cozma (2007: 247, Dicţionar
de afaceri englez-român. Oradea: Tipografia RomFlair. SC Imprint Com
SRL), it comes out as polysemantic: 1. donaţie, dar; 2. eliberare a unui
patent; 3. bursă de studii; 4. subvenţie, alocaţie, compensaţie; 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, someone’s intellectual interest; on the other hand, someone’s
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 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 Calităţii Vieţii)
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 tău), nici
măcar la sfârşit de săptămână, fiind prea ocupat cu team-building-uri,
training-uri, workshop-uri, party-uri aniversare şi 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, Webster’s
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 apărut un mall pe piaţa de retail (!)” and „un mall
pentru amenajarea căruia 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 „Cumpărăturile, hobby-ul 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 expertise! In this case, shopping could
become in Romanian (yet it does not) „febra cumpărăturilor de fiţe”,
whereas shopping around is „a lua pulsul pieţii” (Gheorghiţoiu A., 1996:
165, Dicţionar englez-român de verbe cu particulă adverbial, Bucureşti:
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 în care se vând mărfuri cu plata
în valută”. 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 mâna 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 în 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 burtieră 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 titrări 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 „înregistrare” and „mimare acum pe
înregistrare 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 în
direct”) has not entered dictionaries of Romanian either. The National
Council of the Audiovisual has issued a norm 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 (şi nu numai) să invite …etc.”.
Here it is, even neighbours with its lexical rival within the same text:
„Audienţa talk-show-urilor a scăzut drastic şi e invers proporţională cu
inflaţia lor […], ratingurile emisiunilor de dezbateri politice, sociale sau
economice depăşesc etc.” (D. V. no. 196/2007, p. 19). Surprisingly
enough, the term is not included in DEX, and its older relative „audienţă” is
listed with just two meanings – 1. întrevedere … etc.; 2. acceptare
entuziastă …etc. Tudorel Urian in România Literară (no. 49/2007, p. 14)
supplies another instance of perfect integration of the term, first in the title
(Supuşii regelui rating), then in the body of the article („Trăim într-o
societate care funcţionează după o singură regulă: a spectacolului,
măsurabilă în rating TV.”) The most recent dictionary among our reference
books (Nichifor 2008: 835) gives only the third meaning of rating as
„(procentaj de) audienţă la public”, although our choice of bracketed words
would have been the last two and not the first two. Anyway, the much-
invoked 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 maximă audienţă

has some hidden drawback since television experts keep up the English
terminology untranslated. However, in România literară 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 şase
posturi de radio şi douăsprezece posturi TV în transmisiuni de la ore de
vârf” („Televiziunile şi gramatica”).We can further presume that the
evening period (anyway, it is striking how often the English say night
where Romanians say and 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 varietăţi în care
rolul principal este susţinut de un actor sau de o formaţie 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 (România literară no.
40/2007): „[…] înstăpânindu-se pe un buget şi trecând din talkshow în
talkshow cu un sentiment accentuat al propriei importanţe” (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 ‘People’s
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 adevărul” - 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 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 destăinui”, 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 storyteller’s 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 southerner’s extroversion: a se
băga în vorbă / ciorbă, 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 potenţial de
cumpărători (“a sales target”). Its replaceability by public-ţintă 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 români […] nu constituie un
target pentru mesajele comerciale” (D. V. no. 196/207, p. 19). (2) „Dacă
mai adăuga şi nişte copii, căţeluşi sau pisici, ieşea o comedie targetată pe
familişti.” (România literară 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 cercetătorului”,
p. 9), the very last statement reads: „Le rămâne ofertanţilor sarcina să se
orienteze profitabil spre categoria–ţintă ideală.” 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 („bărbaţii
se uită 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% ‘microbişti’, sports
shows, games, action movies); soap-viewers (7% ‘telenoveliste’, soaps
and all ‘romance’ products) and so on - data carefully processed by
sociologist Marius Lazăr (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-ţi seta imaginaţia 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-ţi folosi imaginaţia. 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 îndemna. For this last shade of meaning, I found nothing fit in
Cozma’s dictionary, but it can perfectly substitute for a seta which makes
the discussion now (ceva îţi îndeamnă imaginaţia). What is noticeable is
an incongruity between the verb and the noun in the construction a-ţi seta
imaginaţia: 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 citizen’s 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 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 generation’s 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 translator’s 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 student’s 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.
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 România literară, 10/2009) is “cu privire la
revenirea etniei rome la vechea denumire de ţigan” (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 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’ (non-
adapted 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 ‘ţigan’. 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’, ‘bohémien’, ‘ţigan’ etc. In conclusion,
‘rom’ is a neologism in Romanian, with a neutral precise meaning that
cannot replace ‘ţigan’ in all contexts. Of course, etnonyms have a symbolic
value, and fear of the foreigners’ puzzlement over ‘rom’ and ‘ţigan’ 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 învăţat de
cînd trăiesc în mijlocul Europei civilizate – unde e dreptate la tribunale
fiindcă este şi pe stradă – şi între toate una mai ales, că omul trebuie să
spună europeneşte, nu greco-ţigăneşte, ceea ce crede.” This becomes in
English: “It’s so much that I have learnt since living in civilized mid-Europe
– where justice rules the court-rooms 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. Aplicaţii
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 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 Dollerup’s 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 text-external 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 publisher’s 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 full-page pictures for this text:
Eddie’s off to find his teddy.
Eddie’s teddy’s name is Freddie.
He lost him in the woods somewhere.
It’s dark and horrible in there.
“Help!” said Eddie. “I’m 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 d’Eddie, a disparu.
Eddie part à sa recherche.
Fred est perdu quelque part dans le bois.
Plus Eddie s’avance, plus il fait sombre.
„Au secours! crie Eddie. J’ai 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:
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 boy’s
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 author’s or the boy’s?
In French it is simultaneously the boy’s 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 ursuleţul de pluş in Romanian, whereas nounours is
a mere ursuleţ 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 child’s 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. Eddie e pe drum după ursuleţ. I.
2. Ursuleţul are nume: Doruleţ.
3. S-a pierdut în codru,
4. Unde-i decor sumbru.
5. „Săriţi, zise Eddie. Mor de frică!
6. Eu cu Doru vrem acasă”, apucă să zică.

7. I-a dispărut ursul lui Eddie, II.

8. Ursuleţ pe nume Freddy.
9. L-a pierdut printr-o pădure
10. Fără fragi şi fără mure.
11. „Ajutor! strigă micuţul.
12. Imi vreau ursul şi pătuţul!”
13. Eddie l-a pierdut pe Freddie. III.
14. Freddie e ursul lui Eddie.
15. E speriat în pădurice,
16. Parcă are tremurici.
17. Strigă după ajutor,
18. „Vreau acasă, că mi-e dor!”
19. Freddy, ursuleţul lui Eddie, a dispărut. IV.
20. Eddie pleacă în căutarea micuţului pierdut.
21. S-a pierdut undeva prin pădure.
22. Intunericul el trebuie să-l îndure.
23. „Ajutor! Deja mi-e frică!
24. Vreau în pătuţ cu al meu ursulică.”
25. I-a dispărut ursul lui Eddie, V.
26. Ursuleţul pe nume Freddie.
27. S-a pierdut prin pădure
28. Intr-un colţ umbros
29. Pe unde de mult Eddie n-a mai fost.
30. - Ajutor, mi-e frică!
31. Vreau în pătuţ şi pe ursulică!
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 bird’s 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 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 re-
creation 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.
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
2. In which of the following translations do you find the concept of adequacy
applied?
• “He disputed the management’s decisions.”
A. a contestat deciziile conducerii. B. a anulat ce a hotărât directorul C. a dezminţit decizia
întreprinderii. D. a creat o dispută despre ce a decis managerul.
• “The newcomer to the gang blabbed to the police.”
A. In gang, nou-venitul i-a turnat poliţiei. B. Banda în frunte cu noul membru au vorbit
poliţiei. C. Pe noul venit în bandă l-a luat gura pe dinainte la poliţie. D. Omul nou din bandă
a îndrugat ceva poliţiştilor.
• “He testified to the man’s innocence.”

A. Au depus mărturie împotriva omului. B. A testat inocenţa bărbatului. C. A depus

mărturie că e vinovat. D. A depus mărturie în favoarea nevinovăţiei omului.
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:
“There’s a Mrs Lanoline, too,” Helen yawned. “So dull.”
„Ah, Enache, ce delicios se mănâncă la „Enache”! suspină 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:
“He may not have noticed her… He bellowed gleefully.”
„De ce se miorlăie în loc să vorbească în loc să vorbească 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
one’s 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. 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 one’s 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
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 „romgleză” 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 şi un baby-sitter pentru copilul familiei.
.....................................................................................
..........................................................................................
..........................................................................................
..........................................................................................
.............................................................................. ............
► Find one source text of no more than 150 words. Translate it, first word-for-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 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 sfârşit, fiind sfruntată, de la obraz, gogonată, fiind generalizată şi colectivă,
minciuna este totodată atotcuprinzătoare: toată lumea minte şi minte în toate direcţiile. Se
minte „cât vezi cu ochii”, de la indicatorii economici şi până la sentimentele care îi animă
pe oameni, de la ziare, radiouri şi televiziuni şi până la felul în care se face literatură, se
pictează sau se compune (G. Liiceanu, Despre minciună, Bucureşti, 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. jeanşi - pantaloni. In portul Genoa din Italia, marinarii şi docherii, hamalii şi alţi
lucrători obişnuiau să poarte pantaloni de lucru, groşi, durabili, de culoare albastră. Ceva
mai târziu, în California, un emigrant din Bavaria, pe nume Strauss, se apucă să fabrice
pantaloni de lucru pentru căutătorii de aur şi mineri. Materialul folosit şi de unii şi de alţii
era fabricat în Franţa, la Nîmes. Era ţesut din fire groase, de bumbac şi vopsit apoi în
culoarea albastru-indigo. După modelul pantalonilor marinăreşti din Genoa (în franceză,
Genes), în 1850 Strauss fabrică pantaloni de lucru Levi denim şi în 1873 îi cedează
patentul unui oarecare Jacob Davis din Carson City – Nevada, care dă acestor pantaloni
o anumită linie. Aşa s-au născut pantalonii pe care astăzi îi îmbracă milioane de oameni.
După război, a contribuit la asta modelul lui James Dean şi al unui întreg star-sistem,
definitiv cucerit de farmecul democratic al unei ţinute blue jeans. Un pantalon tip jeans se
fabrică în 4 ore şi presupune 45 de operaţii tehnologice, în care intră: croirea, coaserea,
spălarea, decolorarea şi călcarea. Ca să arate prespălat un pantalon sau orice alt obiect
vestimentar tip blue jeans se învârte timp de 3 ore într-o maşină specială, în apă, cu nisip
sau fragmente de piatră ponce, încălzită la 40 de grade (D. Berchină, Moda pe înţelesul
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 dicţionar enciclopedic (1978) figurează trei sensuri pentru “iluzie”: 1)
percepţie falsă care, spre deosebire de halucinaţie, are loc în prezenţa obiectului; 2) faptul
de a lua o aparenţă sau o ficţiune drept realitate; înşelare, amăgire; 3) speranţă
neîntemeiată. Dicţionarele şi enciclopediile consemnează uzul tipic al cuvintelor, dar îl şi
impun sau, oricum, îl influenţează şi consolidează. Nu există însă un izomorfism perfect
între conţinuturile terminologice aşa cum apar ele în sursele oficiale şi înţelesurile
acordate de agenţii vorbitori în practica de zi cu zi. Desigur, trebuie avut în vedere faptul
că vorbitorii aceleiaşi limbi au competenţe lingvistice foarte diferite, dincolo de diferenţele
individuale contând în cel mai înalt grad nivelul de şcolaritate. Am întreprins o anchetă cu
privire la înţelesul cuvântului “iluzie” în rândul a 300 de studenţi din anii I-II de la mai multe
secţii ale Universităţii “Babeş-Bolyai” din Cluj. Am considerat că acest segment
populaţional are în chestiunea investigată o oarecare reprezentativitate teoretică pentru
toată populaţia ţării. Din analiza de conţinut a răspunsurilor primite, a rezultat că iluzia de
percepţie psihosocială apare în proporţie de 62,7%, faţă de 20,7% a iluziei de percepţie
fizică. Iluzia cu dimensiunea “speranţe deşarte” apare şi în diverse combinaţii lexicale între
vis, dorinţă, aşteptare, impresie, utopie, himeră, neîntemeiat, fals, ideal etc. Dat fiind
contextul în care utilizează cuvântul, peste 50% din subiecţi chestionaţi au declarat că cel
mai des apelează la sensul din “a nu-ţi face iluzii” (P. Iluţ, Iluzia localismului şi 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
(adresă însoţitoare) 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.
.............................................................. .......................
..........................................................................................
..........................................................................................
..................................................... .....................................
...................................................................................... ...
..........................................................................................
..........................................................................................
..........................................................................................
..........................................................................................
..................................................................................... .....



Conclusions about art of translating
CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE ART OF TRANSLATING
Comunicarea obişnuită este comuniunea cu celălalt,

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.

Răspunsuri la teste pentru evaluare
Răspunsuri 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
translator’s/commissioner’s options.

Răspunsuri la teste pentru evaluare

Bibliography
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Austin J. L. (2003) Cum să faci lucruri cu vorbe, trad. S. Corneanu, Bucureşti: Ed.
Paralela 45.
Bidu-Vrânceanu A. et al. (2005) Dicţionar de ştiinţe ale limbii. Bucureşti: Nemira.
Bowker Lynne et al (eds.) (1998) Unity in Diversity? Current Trends in Translation
Studies, Manchester: St Jerome Publishing.
Cârâc I. (2003) Teoria şi practica semnului. Iaşi: Institutul European.
De Beaugrande R. & Dressler, W. U. (1981) Introduction to Text Linguistics, London:
Longman.
Dimitriu R. (2006) The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies. Iaşi: Institutul European.
Dollerup C. (2006) Basics of translation studies. Iaşi: Institutul European.
Drăgan G. (2005) Modele culturale comparate. Iaşi: Institutul European.
Eco U. (2003/2008) Dire quasi la stessa cosa /A spune cam acelaşi lucru. Experienţe
de traducere. Trad. Al Laszlo. Iaşi: Ed. Polirom.
Fârte Gh.-I. (2004) Comunicarea. O abordare praxiologică. Iaşi: Casa Editorială
Demiurg.
Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu L. (2003) Limbaj şi comunicare, Bucureşti: Editura ALL
EDUCATIONAL.
Irimia M. (1995) The Stimulating Difference. Editura Universităţii Bucureşti.
Jost W. & W. Olmsted (eds.) (2006) A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical
Criticism. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Kohn I. (1983) Virtuţile compensatorii ale limbii române în traducere. Timişoara: Ed.
Facla.
Lee D. (1992) Competing Discourses. London and New York: Longman.
Leviţchi L. (1975) Indrumar pentru traducătorii din limba engleză în limba română.
Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică.
Maingueneau D. (2007) Discursul literar. Iaşi: Institutul European.
Mucchielli A. (2005) Arta de a comunica. Metode, forme şi psihologia situaţiilor de
comunicare. Iaşi: Polirom.
Nash W. (1989/1992) Rhetoric. The Wit of Persuasion. Cambridge: Blackwell
Publishers.
Oprea I. (2007) Elemente de filozofia limbii, Iaşi: Institutul European.
Pârlog, H. et al (2009) Translating the Body, Iaşi: 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. Bucureşti: Humanitas.
Ţuchel D. (2006) “Sincerity. Textual Claims to Validation” in Annals of the Dunărea
de Jos University, Fasc. XIII, 18 (17), 108-115, Galaţi.
Ţuchel D. (2008) „A Few Intercultural Assumptions” in Intercultural Communication
and Literature I (1), 166-173, Galaţi: G.U.P.

Bibliography
Ţuchel D. (2008) “Obfuscation of Romanianness” in Lexic comun, lexic specializat,

Annals of the Dunărea de Jos University, Fasc. XXIV, 1 (1), 102-115, Galaţi: G.U.P.
Ţuchel D. (2009) “Playful Hybrid Titles” in Identity, Alterity, Hybridity, 223-232, Galaţi:
G.U.P.
Wunenburger Jean-Jacques (2004) Filozofia imaginilor/ Philosophie des images
(Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). Trad. M. Constantinescu. Iaşi: Polirom.
*** (2006) Semiotics beyond Limits. Proceedings of the First ROASS Conference.
Bacău: ALMA MATER Publishing House.
*** (2007, 2008, 2009) Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views.
Conference Proceedings Volumes, Galaţi: Europlus şi G.U.P.

CO de Limba Engleza - Daniela Sorcaru (D. Tuchel)

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

CO de Limba Engleza - Daniela Sorcaru (D. Tuchel)

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Universitatea “Dunărea de Jos” din Galați

Departamentul pentru Învăţământ la Distanţă

CUVÂNT INTRODUCTIV .................................................................................................... 5

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 3

MOTTO: Fidelitatea este mai degrabă tendinţa

Cursul universitar pe care îl prefaţăm aici durează un semestru şi capătă

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 5

1.1. Theoretical guidelines

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 7

Textuality is whatever helps us interpret any oral or written extract or

8 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

that is its prolongation in appealing to the targeted audience on a personal

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 9

language of the original and the subsequent translation in the target

10 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

translation as such and a translation as adaptation (“There are schools in

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 11

↷-cultural adaptation, for associations of something familiar in TL to a

12 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

<narrative & dynamic> because of the verbs, or <descriptive & static>

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 13

14 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

harm brought to human relations, (b) blockage of interpretive processes,

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 15

the elements and back, and we have consequently emphasized their

16 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

1.2.2. Doubling through translation

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 17

The Romanian speaker of today often chooses, instead of a relation

1.2.3. The barrier of obedience

18 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 19

20 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

speaks in an Englishman’s or American’s voice with the parts in bold:

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 21

Secondly, if we emphasize the complete effects of obedience, we

Teste pentru autoevaluare

22 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

A. logical rendition; B. easy translation work; C. the use of figures of speech; D.

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 23

24 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

D. computers without the intervention of a human translator

Teme pentru verificare/examen

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 25

► Translate into Romanian (adding a conjunction, if necessary) these English

26 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 27

-In matters of ability and competence, a translator is assessed by insensitive clients

28 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

2.1. Translating culture

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 29

negative or indifferent. All of these factors must be taken into account

30 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

In the contemporary stage of human thinking, one belief has been

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 31

one still ‘read’ culture on a computer? The dominant role of verbal,

2.1.2. Glorification of another taste

32 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 33

dictionary sorts out positive connotations in line with a judicious, unhasty

34 A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges

me and my hobby may seem non-entertaining and time-consuming to you.

A Translator’s Barriers and Bridges 35