I. The history of the word ‘translation’. The role of words.

A. Read the first paragraph and answer the questions below:

1) What is the paragraph about?

2) What is hidden in the word ‘candidates’? –translators or words?

3) Does translation really exist?

Like speech and communication, words and things don’t fill exactly the same space. But there is worse to come. Not all words have a meaningful relationship to things at all.

C.K. Ogden, the co-author of The Meaning of Meaning believed that much of the world’s troubles could be ascribed to the illusion that a thing exists just because we have a word for it. He called this phenomenon ‘Word Magic’. Candidates for the label include ‘ levitation’, real existing socialism’ and ‘safe investment’. These aren’t outright fictions, but illusions licensed and created by the lexicon.

In Ogden’s view, Word Magic is what makes us lazy. It stops us from questioning the assumptions that are hidden in words and leads us to allow words to manipulate our minds. It is in this sense that we ask: ‘does translation exist? ’ That is to say, is ‘translation’ an actual thing we can identify, define, explore and understand – or is it just a word?

B. Read the second paragraph to find out:

1) how many meanings the word ‘translation’ has

2) the difference between the two words – ‘translation’ and ‘a

translation’

3) the origin of the words ending in -tion

In English and many other languages the word for translation is a two-headed beast. ‘A translation’ names a product – any work translated from some other language; whereas ‘translation’, without an article, names a process – the process by which ‘a translation’ comes to exist. This kind of double meaning is not a problem for speakers of languages that possess regular sets of terms referring both to a process and to the product of that process as do most Western European languages.

More specifically, words derived from Latin that ends in –tion nearly always name a process and a result of that process: ‘abstraction’ (the process of abstracting something), alongside ‘ an abstraction’, ‘construction’ (the business of building structures) alongside ‘a construction’ (something built) and so on. Handling the different meanings of ‘translation’ and ‘a translation’ is therefore not a real problem. We should only keep in mind that they are not the same thing and always be wary of taking one for the other.

C. Read the third paragraph and mark the sentences T (true) or F(false).

1) There is no difficulty with translation. ______________

2) Nowadays different kinds of text are habitually considered to be examples of ‘a translation’. ______________

3) Many professionals from different countries think that there are no differences in translating prose or poems, or manufacturer’s catalogue. _________________

4) The English language has only one word to name ‘a translation’.

_________________

5) The word ‘translate’ comes from the Greek words, ‘trans’ meaning ‘across’ and the past form of the verb ‘ferre’. _________________

6) The term ‘translate’ is given the meaning of ‘bring across.

_________________

7) Translation is more than the transfer of meaning from one language to another. _________________

The difficulty with ‘translation’ is different. Many diverse kinds of text are habitually identified as instances of ‘a translation’: books, real estate contract, car maintenance manuals, poems, plays, philosophical tomes, CD notes and website texts, to list just a few. What common property do they have to make us believe that they are all instances of the same thing that we label ‘a translation’? Many language professionals will tell you that translating a manufacturer’s catalogue is utterly different from translating a poem. Why do we not have different words for these different actions? There are languages that have no shortage of separate words to name the many things that in English all go by the name of ‘a translation’.

(for example, Japanese: a complete translation, a new translation, a retranslation,

a standard translation, a co-translation etc.)

‘Translation’ is not an invented, technical or borrowed term like ‘hydrogen’ or ’megabite’. It’s a common noun and an ordinary unmarked term available for general use. What exactly does it mean?

The conventional way of tackling this question is to have recourse to etymology, the history of the word itself. ‘Translate’ comes from two Latin words, trans meaning ‘across’, and the past form latum of the verb ferre, ‘to bear’.

The result of the word history is to give the term ‘translate’ the meaning of

‘bear across’ or ‘bring over’. Several European languages have similar words from similar roots, such as Russian ‘переводить’ (to lead across).

So we may say that translation is the transfer of meaning from one language to another though ‘meaning’ is not the only component of an utterance’.

(from ‘Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ’ by David Bellos)