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I. What is a Translation?






Read the first part of the text and answer the following questions:

a) What is a translation in the writer’s opinion?

b) Is it true that any text has no one translation? How many translations of any text may be?

c) What are the reasons for the variability of translations?

 

A. Once Douglas Hofstadter took a great liking to a short poem by the sixteenth-century French wit Clement Marot.

He sent a copy of it to a great number of his friends and acquaintances and asked them to translate it into English.

Hofstadter, a scientist at Indiana University, got many dozens of responses over the following months and years. Each one of them was different, yet each one of them was without doubt a translation of Marot’s poem. By this simple device he demonstrated one of the most awkward and wonderful truths about translation. It is this: any utterance of more than trivial length has no one translation. All utterances have many acceptable translations.

You get the same results with ordinary prose as you do with a poem. Give a hundred competent translators a page to translate, and the chances of any two versions being identical is close to zero. This fact about interlingual communication has persuaded many people that translation is not an interesting topic – because it is always approximate, it is just a second-rate kind of thing. That’s why ‘translation’ isn’t the name of a long-established academic discipline, even though its practitioners have often been academics in some other field.

The variability of translation is a good evidence of the limitless flexibility of human minds. There can hardly be a more interesting subject than that.

What is it that translators really do? How many different kinds of translating are there? What do the uses of this mysterious ability tell us about human societies, past and present? How do the facts of translation relate to language use in general – and to what we think a language is? Those are the kinds of questions to be explored.

 

B. Read the second part of the text and answer the question put in the heading.

 

Is Translation Avoidable?

Translation is everywhere – at the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization and many other international bodies that regulate fundamental aspects of modern life. Translation is part and parcel of modern business, and there’s hardly a major industry that doesn’t use and produce translations for its own operations. We find translations on the bookshelves of our homes, on the reading lists for every course in every discipline taught at Universities. How could we do without translation? It seems pointless to wonder what world we would live in if translation didn’t happen all the time at every level.

But we could do without it, all the same. Instead of using translation, we could learn the languages of all the different communities we wish to engage with; or we could decide to speak the same language; or else adopt a single common language for communicating with other communities.

But the refusal of translation, by one or more of the means described, is probably closer to the historical norm on this planet than the culture of translation which seems natural and unavoidable around the world today.

( from the book “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The amazing adventure of translation”

by David Bellos)

 

C. Read the text written by a Russian translator and find the answer to the following questions:

a) What definition of the word ‘translation’ is given?

b) What does ‘a target language’ mean?

c) What does ‘a source language’ mean?

d) Are the target text and the original source text the same or different?

e) What is meant by ‘an adequate translation’?

f) Why are the source text and its translation different? How different are they?

g) How to preserve the meaning structure of the original in its translation?

h) Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: the equivalence achieved in translation is usually relative’.

 

As a means of interlingual communication, translation is transfer of meaning across cultures. More specifically, translation is the process and result of creating a text in a target, or translating language (переводящий язык) which has approximately the same value as the corresponding text in the source language (исходный язык).

The target text (текст перевода) or translation that is created by the translator never reflects, either in meaning or tone, the original source text. (текст оригинала). The form and content of the original and its translation i always differ. This is because of the formal and semantic differences between the source language and the language in the translation. Nevertheless, the users of the translation usually accept it as the functional, structural and semantic equivalent of the original. An accurate translation is often called “adequate translation” in Russian translation studies.

Even a very simple translation illustrates the formal and semantic differences between the original and its translation. The English sentence “The student is reading a book” can be translated as “Студент читает книгу”. On a grammatical level, the Russian sentence is devoid of the meaning of the articles and the present continuous tense. In other words, the Russian sentence does not contain any indication that a specific student is reading an unspecified book. Nor does it indicate that the process of reading is most likely taking place at the moment of speaking.

On a semantic level, the Russian sentence contains some information absent from the English sentence. It is clear from the Russian translation that the student is male and a college or university undergraduate while the English sentence may refer to a grade or high school student or even a scholar. Some of the information may be lost or added in the process of translation. It is important to understand that equivalence achieved in translation is relative.

How to preserve the meaning structure of the original in its translation?

“Structure” means the arrangement of and relations between the parts of something complex. Any discourse is a complex structure of meaning which -is realized at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and complete texts in a particular sociocultural environment. The ultimate challenge for any translator is to preserve as much of this complex meaning structure in their translation as possible.

( from “ Translating Culture-2. Sentence and paragraph

Semantics” by A.L. Burak)

 

Wordlist.

1) interlingual communication …………………………………………………

2) transfer of meaning ………………………………………………………….

3) a target language …………………………………………………………….

4) the source language …………………………………………………………

5) the target text ………………………………………………………………..

6) the original source text ……………………………………………………..

7) the formal and semantic differences ………………………………………...

8) a grade or high school student ………………………………………………

9) to preserve the meaning structure …………………………………………...

10) a discourse ………………………………………………………………….






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