High-profile Translation from the Mother Tongue into the Foreign Language

Effective Translation Strategies and Implications for Translation Theory and Translator Training

This article was published in Lebende Sprachen 2/2004

Dirk Siepmann

1. Introduction

In this article, which is as much a how-to guide as an academic treatise, I propose to deal with translation strategies. With a topic such as this, which has been explored from so many different angles in translation studies – skopos theory, psycholinguistics, action theory - it would be difficult to add anything of substance to a general theory of translation. Instead, I wish to provide a personal perspective here, one that is grounded in introspection rather than observation of others.

My reasons for writing this article are two-fold. Firstly, it has been repeatedly claimed that ‘native speakers are needed for high-profile translation’ (e.g. Covell Waegner 2000), the implication being that it is impossible to produce high-quality translations when working from the mother tongue (or L1) into the second language (or L2). I take issue with this claim, and will proceed to show how the non-native translator can achieve satisfactory results provided she has a sound knowledge of the L2, a thorough grounding in contrastive linguistics1[1] and the ability to make judicious use of a range of data-handling tools and translation strategies. In particular, I will demonstrate how a successful translation process can be operationalised to a considerable degree, and therefore taught to students of translation. This will be illustrated mainly with examples from my own translation work.2[2]

My second reason for writing this article is that the aforementioned avenues of research, especially the psycholinguistic strand, have yielded little of use to the practising translator. This is primarily because language students were enlisted as observees. Plainly, though, there is little point in trying to learn about an activity by observing people who have seldom tackled it (Siepmann 1996: 39); the main value of psycholinguistic research into the translation process seems to lie in the accurate portrayal of students’ translation problems and of the ineffective strategies they use to overcome them. Admittedly, there have also been a few studies on the behaviour of professional translators, but all of these abstract away from actual translation problems in their search for higher-order generalities. Thus, Gerloff (1988) sets up categories

                                                            1[1] The non-native who intends to translate into English should work thoroughly and methodically through such textbooks as Smith/Klein-Braley (1985), Friederich (1969) and Gallagher (1982) (preferably in this order, which reflects an ascending scale of difficulty).

2[2] Although a native speaker of German, I regularly translate into English and French.

intended to describe particular types of strategic behaviour found in her observees. She calls these ‘inference & reasoning and text contextualization activity’. While this categorization yields the valuable insight that professional translators tend to achieve higher scores on this measure, the study lacks concrete detail on the ways in which professionals solve specific problems.

2. Preliminary Steps: Compilation of subject-specific mini-corpora

In dealing with high-profile translation assignments, non-native translators (and, to a lesser extent, native translators) have to make up for a potential lack of linguistic proficiency; they have to fill gaps in their knowledge of text types, text-type-specific syntax and lexis. A time-honoured method for doing so is the study of parallel texts, which seeks to identify lexical items and constructions which might qualify as natural translation equivalents. Today the translator can also use translation corpora and translation memories, which provide a record of previous work, but these will expose her to the danger of reproducing flawed translations (unless the translation memory contains only her own, carefully checked work). It is on the whole much safer to rely on L2 discourse belonging to the same text type, but which has been independently formulated.

In the case of rigidly conventionalised text types such as powers of attorney (see 3.3 below), it is sufficient to download a small number of sample texts. The situation is different, though, with more flexible types of writing, such as travel books, academic prose or company brochures. With these text types the translator needs a larger sample of text, from which she can extract natural textual equivalents. The snag is that the ‘manual’ collection of such sample texts and the subsequent perusal of the entire text corpus by eye may be extremely time-consuming.

An easy way out of this dilemma is to access that part of the Internet which is sometimes referred to as the ‘deep’ or ‘invisible’ web (Cloutier 2002), to download selected pages from the deep web using an off-line browser and to convert the downloaded pages, which are usually in HTML format, into TXT format. Let us go through this process step by step. For the purpose of this exercise, we will assume that the assignment we have been given is the translation from German into English of a guide to the architecture of Berlin.

1. Access one of the following ‘deep’ Web sites: www.bubl.ac.uk, www.foreignword.com/eureka/default.asp?lg=en, www.completeplanet.com, www.invisibleweb.com. At www.bubl.ac.uk (the centre for digital library research of Strathclyde University), for example, you will find a number of links to architecture-related sites. This will take you to such sites as www.greatbuildings.com, http://greatstructures.wox.org or www.architectureweek.com. Alternatively, pick out a number of complex phrases from an English text on architecture already at your disposal and type them into a search engine using inverted commas. Thus, a google search for ‘Corinthian six-column portico’ will take you to www.southbanklondon.com, and if

queried on ‘five-bay elevation’, www.yahoo.com will come up with http://www.marylandhistoricaltrust.net/ or http://www.historicrockland.org/.

2. Check whether the owners of the site allow downloads, and whether the content of the web page has been produced by native speakers of English. If this is the case, you can then use an off-line browser such as Teleport Pro (www.tenmax.com) to download the entire website or parts thereof. Usually, you will just want to download text files.

3. Download at least ten different sites in this way. Since off-line browsers usually include schedulers, this can be done overnight while you are asleep.

4. Once downloaded, the HTML-format webpages have to be converted into TXT format. This can be done with the help of such software packages as HTMASC (http://www.bitenbyte.com).

5. Interrogate the text corpus using a concordancer; a free concordancer (Microconcord) is available from Mike Scott’s homepage (www.lexically.net). Each screen of the program offers extensive guidance on how to use it.

6. Type in specific lexical items or constructions that are giving you trouble. For example, if you consult a specialist dictionary such as the Glossarium Artis, volume 8, on the English equivalent of German Tympanon, you will find both tympan and tympanum. To be able to ascertain the frequency of these nouns in English text, search your corpus for each of them. The result might look something like this:

nternal ear and described in detail the tympanum and its relations to the osseouour fields and finishes at the top in a tympanum which has for ornamentation a ld opening between two smaller ones. The tympanum is surrounded on all sides by sFidicula", "Fistula", "Organa", "Tuba", "Tympanum". Perhaps "Symphonia" is foundlestone church in Ewias also has a fine tympanum set in a decorated archway. Pays of the new plastic decoration. In the tympanum the Last Judgement is generallyhurch (D) is rightly known for its fine Tympanum and decorated chevron arch. Howthe center of the horizontal bar of the tympanum is the figure of an emperor, be deep; the height of the back up to the tympanum is three feet five and one-thir

It is evident from this concordance that tympanum is the more common term in English, and that tympan should be avoided. While this is a fairly straightforward example, corpora and Internet search engines can also be consulted on trickier points of usage than mere word frequency. To this we now turn.

3. Strategies at the lexical, syntactic and textual levels

For convenience of presentation, I have established an articifial distinction between the lexical, syntactic and textual levels. It will be seen, however, that these levels are closely interrelated.

Thus, for example, many word searches are based on a corpus comprising only texts of a particular type.

3.1. Lexis

The corpus linguistics literature abounds in examples of the manifold uses to which corpora can be put (a good introduction is Sinclair 2003). In this section I will consider recurrent translation problems and ways of solving them with the help of self-assembled corpora. My first set of examples comes from the following autobiographical recount, which I translated into English:

Die Tür fällt ins Schloß, der Blick auf die Kabine. Das Abteil ist klein, aber funktional eingerichtet. Auf zwei mal eineinhalb Metern ein frisch bezogenes Bett, Leuchten, eine kleine Garderobe, ein Tischchen mit Obst, Wasser und einer Tageszeitung. Nebenan die Duschkabine mit Toilette und allerlei Badezeug: Seife, Duschgel, Feuchtigkeitscreme, Handtücher, Zahnputzzeug. Sogar eine Duschhaube und ein Schuhputzschwämmchen liegen bereit. Die Dusche macht neugierig. Komisches Gefühl, nackt in einem fahrenden Zug zu stehen. Während hinter dem Fenster die Landschaft vorbeizieht, wandert die Hand mißtrauisch unters laufende Wasser. Warm. Trinkwasser kommt zwar nicht aus der Leitung, aber sonst ist an der Dusche nichts auszusetzen. (Frankfurter Rundschau)

In translating this genre, corpora of literary or newspaper language can be particularly helpful. One may either use one of the commercially available corpora and text archives, such as newspaper CD-ROMs, parts of the British National Corpus and the Library of the Future, or one may compile one’s own text archive by following the procedure outlined above. Newspaper text can be obtained from the websites of a large number of national and regional newspapers. Literary texts which have fallen into the public domain can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Some publishers also offer samples of their novels or short stories (http://www.harpercollins.com.au/books/extracts.cfm, http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/offthepage/extracts.htm, www.bloomsbury.com), and there is a rising number of ‘fan fiction’ or ‘amateur author’ sites (e.g. http://www.electricfrontiers.com/electricpen/stories.asp), some of which contain material of an acceptable standard.

To return to the above example, there are quite a few translation problems in evidence which the non-native will find difficult to solve. Let us look at just three of these:

1. The parallel construction of the first sentence: ‘die Tür fällt ins Schloss, der Blick auf die Kabine’.

2. The collocation ‘die Landschaft zieht vorbei (hinter dem Fenster)’.

3. The syntagm ‘wandert die Hand mißtrauisch unters laufende Wasser’

Let us deal with these problems in sequence:

1. Any translator who reads English novels with any regularity will probably experience no difficulty with the collocation ‘die Tür fällt ins Schloss’ (= the door clicks/snaps/slides [sliding door] shut). The opposite is true of the second part of the sentence, which is really an instance of zeugma; the non-zeugmatic version would read ‘die Tür fällt ins Schloss, der Blick fällt auf die Kabine’. We may consult the corpus for verb-noun collocations based on the English noun gaze or the plural noun eyes, or, more specifically, for collocations of gaze/eyes+ verb + room; a few are shown below:

ces at BALKAN, who looks on calmly. His eyes roam along the spines of the books. she replies with a smile. I let my eyes roam over the rest of her body. Shem, smiles faintly, then lets her own eyes roam over the great sea of upturnedSpike sat back on his heels and let his eyes roam over Angel's nude form. Gods, THE GHOST HAS DISAPPEARED. Sidney's eyes roam the yard but he's nowhere. Co scar across his throat. His mocking eyes roam the church. KURGAN Kastaer was in the shadows watching her. His eyes roamed her every curve. He lookedite a pair, actually, she murmured, her gaze roaming his chest in a way that made Then I look back up at him, letting my eyes take in his perfect body as I do. Hy. Who knew? Hans' eyes take in his bare feet. MCCLANE away the sweat-soaked sheet. Her eyes take in his bare torso, and w 400. C. U. OF ED - as his horrified eyes take in the scene, then he turns tosmelling the smoke. In the process his eyes take in Sarah who has the idol cle puts his hands in his pockets and his eyes wander about the room until they fSLIVING ROOM--NIGHT Where she sits. Her eyes wander around the room and then re "Yeah, the blues are great." Faith's eyes wander around the cab of the truck.SLIVING ROOM—NIGHT Where she sits. Her eyes wander around the room and then re I really did mean 'prey'. I let my eyes wander around the room as I continu

We find that both gaze and eyes are always used with a genitive or a possessive pronoun in the relevant sense, and collocate with a wide variety of verbs; for reasons of space, not all of these can be shown in the above concordance.

We also note from close observation of the right-hand context (see below) that a literal translation would be rather ungainly. This is because the collocation eyes/gaze + fall on/to implies a single line of sight and requires a prepositional object denoting a person or a thing of limited size; it must be conceded, however, that, given the size of railway compartments, they may be taken in at one glance, so that we are here dealing with a borderline case.

a hip dance club. His eyes fall on Maria Mitchell. SERGE to come up with a plan. Then his eyes fall on the wrought iron fenced gatleads Betty up close Adam turns and his eyes fall on the beautiful face of Better. Butch glances to his right, his eyes fall on something. What he seeser is about to sit at his desk when his eyes fall on a new ghetto blasterleased, others mumbling angrily. Sikes' eyes fall on George who is gazing at himrs at the crowd... ...his eyes fall on Vanity -- his face You don't believe me? (looks around; eyes fall on kissing couple) There. Tugh the security door. Archer's eyes fall on the thumbprint scan phere. From nothing. One by one, all eyes fall on the little girl and the rs at the crowd... ...his eyes fall on Vanity -- his face BILLY BEAR His eyes fall on the rear view mirror. A whiing, he looks all around the room...his eyes fall on a tape dispenser. eal who Gandhi is. The prison officer's eyes fall on him. CITY STREET. JOHANNple passing are Jack and Buster. Jack's eyes fall on the placard and he stopsroom at shampoos, cosmetics, until her eyes fall on a poster of "Gilda" starrieally sorry.. there wasn't time. His eyes fall on an old blanket. KORBEN

Thus our translation could read as follows:

... my gaze / eyes take in / wander around / drift around / roam (around) the compartment (cabin).

One variant is to use the verbs look or glance with a personal subject but, given the impersonal wording of the source text, this would constitute a less faithful rendition.

Turning to the second problem, we note that it would probably be unwise to search for the nouns landscape or scenery alone, since these are exceedingly common in novels and newspapers. However, a combination of landscape/scenery and window within a span of 5 or 6 words might do the trick. And indeed the concordancer comes up with the following results:

d his eyes. Through a curtained window, scenery was whizzing by at dizzying speehead and fixate my eyes upon the moving scenery whizzing by the window. I stare Scully looked out of the window as the scenery passed by. She seemed to be doziimpassive profile, at the brown October landscape passing behind her outside thet the window, the rural scenery: pastures, barns, etc., the otheom the window, trying not to see the landscape reeling outside. SARAH (e stared out the window and watched the scenery roll by as they headed back intoasn't used to it. The dark forms of the landscape rolled soothingly past outside..... Her eyes fluttered open to a dark landscape rolling past the window. Therer eyes and looked out the window at the scenery rolling past. "At least the scener sat in the back seat and watched the scenery fly past the window. He had two and she takes a sudden interest in the scenery flying by outside her window. I

Our translation can be closely modelled on the above concordance, and we are spoilt for choice:

While the landscape (scenery) rolls (flies, rushes, sweeps, etc.) past the window / flies by (outside) the window, ...

The third translation problem is of the same ilk as the preceding one. It shows that reliable intuitions about English and a firm grounding in dictionary use are essential prerequisites for non-native translation, for there needs to be some initial awareness that dictionary equivalents such as suspicious or mistrustful for mißtrauisch are unacceptable in the present instance. To arrive at a suitable equivalent, the translator must key the word hand and the context word water into the concordancer. As shower scenes are a popular feature of modern novels or films, the computer will come up with a good handful of examples, among which we find the phrases ‘testing the temperature’ and ‘to test it’, which are exactly equivalent to German mißtrauisch in this case. We may also observe a number of noun + verb collocations which highlight the fact that the German animistic structure cannot be imitated in English. Simply put, from an English point of view, a hand cannot ‘do’ anything independently of its ‘owner’; the quasi-meronymic relation between person and hand has to be made explicit in English (e.g. Arthur – his hand).

Take it, quickly! Arthur dips his hand under the water and grasps the hilttops, fascinated. CLOSE UP of Amy's hand under the surface of the water. Thened the tap for the shower and held her hand under the running water. Unlike the jaw.Fucking martyr.He pushed a hand under the streaming water, testing the tempcamp. CAMILLE Here, you put your hand under the water and I'll pump fhe switched on the shower and stuck her hand under the flow of water. The warm wd. He's crouched by the tub, naked, one hand under the flow of water from the tawater’s cooling, anyway." He dipped his hand in the water to test it. Barely r you. She pumps and DAVID puts his hand under the cool, flowing water -- camp. CAMILLE Here, you put your hand under the water and I'll pump fcamp. CAMILLE Here, you put your hand under the water and I'll pump furning on the cold faucet, he stuck his hand under the stream of water. He stare

We can now complete our translation of the sentence in question:

While the landscape (scenery) rolls (flies, rushes, sweeps) past the window / flies by (outside) the window, I dip (put, stick) my hand under (into, in) the running (flowing, flow of) water to test it / to test the temperature.

The second example I want to cite is from an estate agent’s brochure advertising a luxury apartment in Mallorca. In this case, the obvious thing to do is to compile a corpus of similar brochures in English. It then becomes fairly easy to spot text-type-specific equivalents such as the following:

(estate agent) German search for (estate agent) English Eigentumsanlage apartment apartment community ... bietet höchstes Wohngefühl feeling, living, feeling + living ... creates a true feeling of luxurious

livingdie Wohnung ist als neuwertig zu bezeichnen

as new/as good as new + apartment -> no results; condition + apartment

the apartment has been maintained in pristine condition

... und einem unverbaubaren und spektakulären Blick über das Mittelmeer ...

view an unobstructable and spectacular view of the Mediterranean

With the exception of the noun + adjective collocation spectacular + view, which can be found in Oxford Collocations, none of the above equivalents have been recorded in the available dictionaries, and dictionary searches would indeed lead one astray, suggesting, as they do, equivalents such as owner-occupied flat for Eigentumswohnung or as (good as) new for neuwertig. While these equivalents might be used in a classified ad for a cheap holiday flat, they would clearly be inappropriate in a glossy brochure featuring an apartment worth 3 million euros.

Internet searches can be used for similar purposes. Three major strategies that non-native translators can avail themselves of are worth mentioning, viz. a) intelligent guessing, b) Boolean searches and c) searching for negative evidence of non-occurrence:

a) Intelligent guessing: it usually pays to have a healthy mistrust of the dictionary. Thus, I was not happy with the equivalents the dictionaries had to offer for Jachthafen (marina) or Pilgerstadt (place of pilgrimage), and surmised that yacht harbour or pilgrimage town would be more acceptable in the relevant contexts.3[3] Assuming that one’s second language is British English, the procedure to follow in such cases is to access a search engine such as yahoo.co.uk, select the options ‘UK only’ or ‘Ireland only’, to type in ‘yacht harbour’ in inverted commas and to check the results for relevance by accessing

                                                            3[3] See table below. Pilgerstadt was used in a caption (Maria X., Floristin in der Pilgerstadt Kevelaer) underneath a photograph. A rendering that made use of the dictionary equivalent would have read rather awkwardly (*in the place of pilgrimage of Kevelaer).

websites. Here are a few more examples of this kind of intelligent guessing, which can also be resorted to when the dictionary fails to provide any help:

German original Dictionary equivalents Intelligent

guess

English translation

Nach Palma und dem berühmten Jachthafen Puerto Portals

marina yacht harbour the famous yacht harbour of Puerto Portals

die Pilgerstadt Kevelaer

place of pilgrimage pilgrimage town the pilgrimage town of Kevelaer

weltweiter TV-Empfang

- worldwide TV reception worldwide TV reception

Eingangsbereich - entrance area entrance area

b) Boolean searches: these make use of operators such as ‘and’, ‘or’ or ‘near’. Suppose you had to translate the following sentence into English: Die Nachbarschaft ist international. Nach Palma und dem berühmten Jachthafen Puerto Portals sind es jeweils nur etwa 3 Minuten mit dem Auto. The keywords which can be combined in a search are 3 minutes and car (or train, rail, etc.). Yahoo.co.uk will come up with a host of examples containing the phrase 3 minutes by car, which gives us Palma and the famous yacht harbour of Puerto Portals are only three minutes by car. (or: It is only three minutes by car from Palma and the famous yacht harbour of Puerto Portals.)

c) Negative evidence of non-occurrence: if the translator wants to be 100 per cent certain that a literal rendering of ‘bietet höchstes Wohngefühl’ by means of ‘offers a feeling of high living’ may not fit the bill, the Internet can provide negative evidence of non-occurrence. It is sufficient to type ‘offers a feeling of high living’ (or some such phrase) into a search engine, which will probably come up with no examples at all, or else alert the translator to differences in meaning between high living and luxurious living.

Corpus and Internet searches may also be combined. Consider the following sentence:

Die Anlage liegt inmitten eines wunderschön angelegten Parks mit großem Außenpool und Liegeflächen.

The plural noun Liegeflächen will be hard to find in any available dictionary. Two strategies can be pursued to locate a natural equivalent: a) type ‘swimming pool and’ into the corpus or the search engine or b) perform a Boolean search on ‘swimming pool and’ and ‘luxury apartment’, and scan the results for an appropriate rendering of Liegeflächen, such as sun terraces.

Needless to say, Internet or corpus-based strategies can be fruitfully combined with traditional strategies. A few illustrations follow:

An der Südseite vor dem Salon, dem Hauptschlafzimmer und einem der Gästezimmer befindet sich eine sehr große überdachte Terrasse.

The dictionary equivalent given under the headword überdachen is roof over. The non-native translator should now check this equivalent against Internet evidence; on yahoo.co.uk she will find just one example of the past participle roofed-over in attributive use, and no native-speaker evidence of the collocation roofed-over + balcony/terrace (terraces are at ground floor level). This suggests that a rendering such as ‘roofed-over balcony’ - which, incidentally is highly common in Internet advertisements by non-native speakers - would be of doubtful acceptability. The next step, then, is to consult a dictionary of synonyms, where roof over will be mentioned in conjunction with its hyperonym cover. The collocation balcony + covered can then be checked against the Web, where a host of native-speaker examples will be found. Thus, the following translation can be proposed:

Facing south in front of the living room, the master bedroom and one of the guestrooms is a very large covered balcony.

A similar strategy can be used to translate a phrase such as automatische Lichtsteuerung bei Bewegung. This will remind the translator of the near-synonym Bewegungsmelder, whose English equivalent (passive infrared detector alarm, or PIR for short), if unknown, can be looked up in a dictionary. It can then be keyed into a search engine and will lead the translator to a number of sites whose owners, apart from producing PIRs as security devices, also offer other light-saving, sensor-operated gadgetry. She can then translate the phrase as sensor-operated lighting which registers movement or presence detection system (for lighting management).

The following expression prompted a similar search:

dreidimensionale Künsterglastüren im Hauptbad

The compound noun Künstlerglass may cause a comprehension problem. It is absent from the 10-volume Duden and from the website of the research project on German vocabulary (http://wortschatz.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/inhalt.htm). A yahoo search, however, yields a number of results, some of which suggest an association with companies such as Rosenthal. A Boolean search on Rosenthal and glass will then reveal that stained glass or even art glass may be used to render the somewhat cryptic German compound.

Another traditional strategy worth mentioning is to consult dictionary entries for words of the same word family. Gallagher (1982: 116) uses this strategy to find acceptable equivalents for the following sentence:

Kein Zyklus gleicht dem anderen.

Gallagher comments:

The dictionary equivalents given under the catchword gleichen are unacceptable in this particular instance. In some dictionaries, however, workable equivalents may be found under the catchword gleich:

(i) No two have been alike. (W/H.)

(ii) No fingerprint is exactly like another. (O-HSG-ED)

(iii) No two fingerprints are exactly alike. (ibid.) (underlines mine)

All three equivalents can be used to render the German sentence. To arrive at this rendering, Gallagher was able to explore his linguistic intuitions about his native language, a possibility not open to many non-native translators. The latter therefore have to take the intermediate step of checking the dictionary equivalents found at both gleichen and gleich against corpora and the Internet.

I adopted Gallagher’s procedure in translating the following sentence from an image brochure:

Der Kreis Borken gehört zu den geburtenstärksten im Lande.

Since there is no single English adjective which can render German geburtenstark, I had to resort to another element of the same word family, namely the noun birth figures (or birth rate). The next step consisted in finding suitable collocations, such as high + figures and boast + figures, leading to the following translation:

The district of Borken boasts some of the highest birth figures in Northrhine-Westphalia. (or: the district of Borken boasts [has] one of the highest birth rates in Northrhine-Westphalia).

Lastly, definitions in monolingual dictionaries or encyclopaedias, which may be regarded as concise parallel texts, may be exploited to retrieve suitable translation equivalents.

3.2 Syntax

In recent years the Saussurean dichotomy between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ has rapidly been losing ground in the face of new evidence from corpus linguistics. Especially problematic is the structuralist assumption that lexis and syntax are neatly distinct and autonomous systems which do not impact on one another other than through the operation of general semantic rules and regularities. Lexico-grammars such as Francis, Hunston and Manning (1996, 1998) provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary: there is, in fact, a high degree of interdependence between communicative, lexical and syntactic choices or, more simply put, between sense and syntax.4[4]

                                                            4[4] This clearly undermines the Sausurrean dichotomy (cf. Sinclair 1991): in the absence of an independent syntactic core of language, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to specify the essence of an abstractly conceived language system; at best, we may assume a large number of heterogeneous lexico-syntactic subsystems or patterns4[4] or, as Sinclair (1991: 105) has it, an ‘integrated sense-structure complex’. The only unifying feature would be the notion of pattern as such, as described in Hunston and Francis (2000) and Hunston (2001). Given the impossibility of generalizing across instances of language use to arrive at a unifying theory, the distinction

Corpus and Internet enquiries as well as the above-mentioned lexico-grammars enable the translator to compare lexico-syntactic subsystems across languages at a hitherto unimagined degree of delicacy, and they allow the translator trainer to operationalise the translation process to a very considerable degree. This is particularly true with pragmatic texts such as newspaper articles, treaties or manuals, and only slightly less so with literary texts (to the extent that novelists or poets defamiliarize language use).

An example from my own translation work may serve to illustrate how contrastive analysis can be operationalised at the sentence level; the source and target texts are excerpts from the website of a German photographer:

German original English translation (D.S.)

Für Journalisten bieten wir einen umfassenden Service, der sich schon oft arbeitserleichtend bewährt hat: Terminplanung vor der Anreise Flughafenabholung Separate Gästewohnung mit Terrasse Übersetzungen Internetzugang ADSL und LEONARDO PRO Fahrdienst – Inselscout…. … und natürlich Fotografie. So ersparen Sie sich unnötige Zeitverluste wegen Ortsunkenntnis, Taxi, Mietwagen, Hotelbuchung, Übersetzer etc.

We provide a comprehensive service for journalists, which has often contributed to lightening their work load: time scheduling prior to arrival collection from airport separate guest flat with roof garden translation service Internet access ADSL and LEONARDO PRO chauffeur service – island scout ... ... and, of course, photography. This will save you from wasting time unnecessarily trying to find your way around and looking for taxis, hire cars, hotels, translators, etc.

Fig. 5: German original and English translation of a website

The last sentence of this excerpt is not easy to translate into idiomatic English, and the superficial difference in structure and length between the source and target versions might suggest that the English translation is merely a matter of intuition. It is of course true that, in practice, the experienced translator’s accumulated savoir-faire or, to put it in cognitive-psychological terms, her ‘linguistic and procedural knowledge’ will lead her to automatically transpose the noun Zeitverluste to a verb.

                                                                                                                                                                                                

between ‘langue’-centred contrastive linguistics and ‘parole’-centred translatology becomes blurred accordingly.4[4] The time is thus ripe for a paradigm shift which will considerably widen the scope of contrastive linguistics. (see also the conclusion of this article)

Yet such a strategy can be operationalised in terms of lexico-syntactic subsystems. The translator has to convey the concept of ‘Zeitverlust’ in neutral English style. The central lexical items available for this purpose are noun + verb collocations, notably waste time, lose time and squander time, rather than the highly formal compound noun time loss5[5]; of these noun + verb collocations, waste time is the most common. The lexico-syntactic subsystem containing the verb waste in this sense is described in Francis, Hunston and Manning (1996: 289-290). There the translator learns that verbs concerned with passing time in a particular way typically enter the colligational pattern verb + noun phrase + -ing -clause; she therefore has to construct her target sentence around this pattern, so that the prepositional phrase wegen Ortsunkenntnis, Taxi, Mietwagen, Hotelbuchung, Übersetzer has to be converted into an –ing- clause and the compound nouns have to be translated by means of verbs. The translator may now consult a corpus or the Internet for the construction under discussion, and will find the German meaning expressed as follows:

Plan the storage of your equipment so that you will not waste time unnecessarily in looking around for them.

Firms spend half their time dealing with lawyers ...

Your effects unit really saved me from lounging around and wasting time unnecessarily.

We should not spend our time worrying about the future ...

Don’t spend too much time shopping ...

But before Mr Major and Mr Blair waste more time trying to double-guess them ...

... waste management time dealing with such a challenge

it does not waste much time worrying about its pride being hurt

... skilled reserves who can jump back in without losing time learning a routine

This leaves her with possible chunks such as

waste time (unnecessarily) / spend too much time / lose time (unnecessarily) ... worrying about / dealing with / looking for / trying to ...

                                                            5[5] An alternative, stylistically less satisfying rendering may be based on the noun + participle collocation lost time: this will help you avoid lost time (+ -ing-clause / from + noun phrase).

Note that such corpus-based analysis throws up a far greater variety of equivalences than intuition, precisely because it is based on a comparison of lexico-syntactic subsystems. The last step is to ferret out an English equivalent for the German collocation Zeitverlust + ersparen, such as save (s.o.) from wasting time, help (s.o.) avoid wasting time or stop (s.o.) [from] wasting time. Thus, we arrive at the following variants:

This will save you from These services will stop you (from) will help you (to) avoid

wasting time (unnecessarily) (in)losing time (unnecessarily) (in)spending too much time (in)

trying to find your way around and looking for ...having to find your way around and worrying about ...finding your way around and dealing with (such matters as)

In a way such an analysis exemplifies the interplay between the open-choice principle and the idiom principle (Sinclair 1991). Each ‘open’ choice of a particular variant entails specific lexical and syntactic constraints on the surrounding discourse, the central open choices in the present example being the verbs stop/save and waste/spend. An alternative corpus search could start with the concept of ‘problem avoidance’, yielding less faithful but functionally equivalent translations such as this will save you the hassle / the trouble of finding your way around Mallorca ..., these services will save (you) hours of searching for ..., these services will save hours of research time for journalists, etc.

My second example comes from a textbook of translation (Lozes and Lozes 1994):

English original French translationA silver lining to antiques fair in Dublin

As long as I can remember, the Irish Antiques Dealers’ Fair, which opens next Monday in the Mansion House in Dublin, has been preceded by groans of despair from the antique trade. This year, the 27th year of the event is

Eclaircie sur le Salon des Antiquaires de Dublin

Aussi loin que je me souvienne, le Salon des Antiquaires irlandais, qui ouvre ses portes lundi prochain à Mansion House à Dublin, est précédé de pleurs et de gémissements de la part des gens de la

no exception. profession. Cette année, vingt-septième anniversaire de cette manifestation, ne fait pas exception.

Fig. 1: An excerpt from a textbook of translation (Lozes and Lozes 1994: 42-43)

For the inexperienced translator, both the English original and the French translation may at first glance appear to contain a large number of ‘creative’, one-off occurrences. As a corpus-linguistic investigation shows, nothing could be further from the truth. Leaving aside the headline for the moment, we can see that the English text begins with a fixed expression (as long as I can remember), which can be rendered by means of a small number of equally fixed French equivalents (d’aussi loin que je me souvienne, aussi loin que je me souvienne). Here the relevant English and French lexico-syntactic subsystems resemble each other perfectly.

It is somewhat different with the lexico-syntactic subsystem comprising the subject and the verb of the relative clause. This pattern can be glossed as follows:

Event/Public Place (trade fair, museum, shop, ...)

Verb Expressing Start of Event

The Irish Antique Dealers’ Fair opens

Fig. 2 : A lexico-syntactic subsystem

In Francis, Hunston and Manning (1996: 8) this pattern is subsumed under a more general pattern termed the ‘”Begin” and “Stop” Group”. Other typical members of this group include:

The talks beganThe negotiations ended

Fig. 3: Examples of a lexico-syntactic subsystem comprising verbs denoting ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’

It is fairly easy to locate the same lexico-syntactic subsystem in newspaper French; one then finds that the verb ouvrir is not normally used on its own in this pattern:

Event/Public Place (trade fair, museum, shop, ...)

Verb Expressing Start of Event

le musée de l’Aventure Peugeot ouvre ses portesle Salon de l’agriculture ouvrira ses portes

Fig. 4 : A segment of the French lexico-syntactic subsystem noun (event) + verb (expressing start of event)

A trawl through a newspaper-based corpus also reveals that an indirect object is often appended to the phrase ouvrir ses portes, a variant which Lozes and Lozes (1994) fail to mention. This indirect object commonly takes the form aux visiteurs or au public.

In their commentary Lozes and Lozes (1994: 43) describe their rendition of open by ouvrir ses portes as an instance of ‘étoffement’ (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958: 9), or syntactic augmentation. It thus appears as if they have used a text-specific translation procedure which falls outside the scope of contrastive linguistics, especially since the target-language syntagm differs in structure and length from the source-language syntagm. However, as our corpus investigation has shown, the augmentation in question might equally well be regarded as a regular equivalence amenable to contrastive analysis. Similar analyses could be made for all the other translatorial choices evident in the above texts. This is because, as corpus linguists (Gross 1988, Stubbs 1997, Altenberg 1998) have demonstrated, up to 80 per cent of all text is made up of habitual word associations, while the remaining 20 per cent consists of language of regular composition or slight deviations from the collocational norm.

Even such apparent deviations, however, can usually be elucidated and translated by recourse to the relevant lexico-syntactic subsystem. A pertinent example is provided by the headline of the above article. As Lozes and Lozes note, we are dealing with an imaginative reworking of the proverb every cloud has a silver lining (the obvious implication being that the antique trade is in the doldrums at the moment of writing, but that the future does not look all too bleak); even such seemingly creative reworkings of common metaphors frequently become a standard part of media language, as the following headlines and text excerpts show:

Silver lining for Patriarch in Irish Derby

Silver lining for Eddery and Dunlop

Nationalism’s Silver Lining

there may be a silver lining to this particular censorious cloud ...

the silver lining to rail privatisation is that ...

Although Lozes and Lozes (1994) implicitly suggest that their rendition of silver lining by éclaircie rests on their translatorial intuition, it could be shown that the French meteorological term éclaircie and the English compound noun silver lining occupy much the same position within a metaphorical subsystem or ‘thought metaphor’ that could be glossed as follows: ‘pleasant or unpleasant events or situations can be likened to pleasant or unpleasant weather conditions’. The following French newspaper headlines lend evidence to this:

Eclaircie sur les valeurs de l’habillement

Eclaircie sur la ligne Paris-Alger

Eclaircie sur le front de l’emploi aux Etats-Unis

This shows that Lozes’ and Lozes’ rendition is particularly fortunate because they have hit upon a close equivalent in the same lexico-syntactic subsystem.

3.3 Text Type

We have already seen that lexis is, to a certain extent, text-type specific. Thus, whereas as new may be a perfectly good rendering of neuwertig in normal conversation, it would have an air of infelicity in a glossy brochure featuring a 3-million-euro apartment, where a phrase like in pristine condition seems more appropriate. As demonstrated above, such text-type-specific lexis can be located with comparative ease in subject-specific corpora.

Sometimes, however, it is not necessary to have recourse to an entire corpus, as in the case of highly stereotyped text types such as powers of attorney, where the download of two or three sample texts will usually do the trick. To translate the following German power of attorney into French, I started by searching for French samples of this text type on the Internet (see, for example, http://www.guidesocial.ch/Documents/1/1_68.htm or www.staffeurs.org/pouvoir.pdf ) and then followed the traditional procedure of close textual analysis. The other translation problems evident in the German text were solved by means of the procedures outlined in sections 3.1 and 3.2:

German original French translation

V o l l m a c h t

Hiermit bevollmächtigen wir,

Peter Mustermann, geboren 1.7.1890

und

Maria Mustermann, geboren 1.7.1890

beide wohnhaft Mustermannweg 8, Braunschweig, Deutschland,

Frau Marie Dubois, geboren 1.7.1890

wohnhaft Pétaouschnock

in unserem Namen die behördlichen Angelegenheiten

wahrzunehmen, die im Zusammenhang stehen mit der Errichtung der

Remise am bisher bestehenden Gebäude – Cadastre 4341 – in

Pétaouschnock.

Diese Vollmacht umfasst ausschließlich das Vertretungsrecht

gegenüber der zuständigen Baubehörde oder den staatlichen Stellen,

die für die Baugenehmigung, -überwachung und –abnahme zuständig

sind.

Weitergehende Rechte sind mit dieser Vollmacht nicht verbunden.

Der deutsche Text ist nur als Grundlage der französischen

Übersetzung zu sehen. Bei Meinungsverschiedenheiten über deren

Auslegung ist ausschließlich der französische Text maßgebend.

Pouvoir (F) / Procuration (CH)

Les soussignés:

Monsieur Peter Mustermann et Madame Maria Mustermann,

demeurant / domiciliés Mustermannweg 8, Braunschweig, R.F.A

donnent pouvoir, par la présente, à

Madame Marie Dubois, demeurant / domiciliée Pétaouschnock

d’effectuer en leur nom les démarches administratives ayant trait à la

construction de la remise attenante au bâtiment déjà existant

(cadastre 4341) situé ...

La présente procuration se limite au pouvoir de représentation auprès

de la direction départementale de l’Equipement ou auprès des autres

administrations compétentes en matière de permis de construire ainsi

que de contrôle et réception des travaux.

Aucun autre droit n’est accordé au titre de la présente. En cas de différend sur l’interprétation de la présente, seul le texte français (et non pas le texte-source allemand) fera foi.

4. Conclusion

From what has been said two important conclusions emerge, one of which concerns translation practice and translator training, while the other touches upon translation theory.

1. It has been shown that non-native translators with an excellent command of the L2 can reliably carry out highly demanding inverse translations provided that they are familiar with a range of corpus- or Internet-based translation strategies. These strategies, as well as the linguistic research on which they are based (notably pattern grammar), should become part of the stock-in-trade of any professional translator intending to work into the L2, and of any language student struggling to translate difficult pragmatic or literary texts. To this end, translator trainers and modern language department staff must develop a more detailed, step-by-step guide to the strategies in question.

2. In cases where two texts are designed to assume the same, or closely similar functions in two cultures (‘Funktionskonstanz, or “functional invariability”, as skopos’, cf. Reiß and Vermeer 1984), corpus-based contrastive analysis can supply objective criteria for the discovery and assessment of any translation solution, thereby providing a more ‘scientific’ basis for translation criticism and laying the foundations for a fusion of contrastive linguistics and translatology. In this view translation solutions, rather than being one-off, parole-based occurrences, turn out to be instantiations of sense-structure complexes existing in more than one language; the translator’s task is to identify the key semantic concepts contained in the text to be translated, to study target-language lexico-syntactic subsystems encoding these concepts and to build the target text around the patterns of colligation, collocation and text grammar found in these subsystems. In the rare event, however, that the client commissions a translation whose function differs from that of the source text, contrastive linguistics and translation science must part company. The relevance of this latter type of translation situation has been somewhat overstated by translation theorists (cf. Schmitt 1990 and 1999 on translation practice), and this has led to a similar overstatement of the differences between contrastive linguistics and translation studies.

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