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II. Meaning is No Simple Thing
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Read the first part of the text and find an answer to the following questions:
a) What does an adequate translation reproduce?
b) What do the contemporary translators do?
c) Does an adequate translation mean an adequate understanding? Why? Why not?
d) What does the story of Jim say?
e) What does symptomatic meaning mean?
f) You go to a coffer shop. What does it mean?
g) You go to University. What does it mean?
h) What does understanding mean?
An adequate translation reproduces the meaning of an utterance made in a foreign language. That sounds straightforward enough. It corresponds entirely to the service that contemporary translators and interpreters claim to provide.
But it doesn’t provide an adequate understanding of what translation is because the meaning of an utterance is not a single thing. The fact is that utterances have all sorts of ‘meanings’ of different kinds. ‘ The meaning of meaning is a daunting topic, but you can’t really study translation if you leave it aside. It may be a philosophical can of worms – but it’s an issue that every translation actually solves.
There is obviously more to meaning than the meaning of words, and here’s a simple story to show why. Jim is out hiking with his friends. He wanders away from the group and finds himself in thick woods. He’s lost his bearings entirely. Then the smell of coffee reaches his nose. What does that mean? It means that camp is not far away. It’s a real and important meaning to Jim – but it has nothing to do with words. The kind of meaning that things have just by themselves is called symptomatic meaning. Smells, noises, physical sensations, the presence of this or that natural or manufactured object have symptomatic meanings all the time. In daily life we pick up a thousand clues of that kind every day but retain only those that endow our world with the meanings we need. In like manner, anything said also has symptomatic meaning from the simple fact of it having been said. If I go into a coffee shop and order an espresso, what does that mean?
As a symptom it means ‘I speak English, that the barista does too, and so forth.’ That’s obvious. Most of the time, the symptomatic meaning of an utterance is just too obvious to be noticed. But not always.
It is not possible to reproduce the symptomatic meaning of the use of a given language in a language other than the one being used.
Understanding anything always involves relating what is said to the meaning of its having been said. That’s the basic framework of all acts of communication. The uutrouble is that the relationship of what’s been said to what the saying of it means is unstable, and often extremely murky.
Let’s agree on the following: for translation and for us all, meaning is context.
Read the second part of the text and
1) write down two or three interesting things you like and remember.
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b) define whether these sentences are true or false, or the text doesn’t say?
1) It’s not really a big problem to translate headings. You should look up the words in a dictionary and take the proper meaning of them. __________________
2) The meaning of the words in the headline is not important. What is
important is that it works as a headline, …… ______________________
3)Headlines should be translated after reading the whole story._____________
4) The task of the translator is to translate the headline according to the rules
existing in the country of origin. __________________________
5)Headline-writing is considered to be one of the many genres. __________
Let’s look at the following example.
In the summer of 2008 the World Street Journal ran a hot story under the headline GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS.
To make sense of this you need a lot of knowledge of American political events in the run-up to the presidential election of 2008, including the conventional nicknames of the two main parties, as well as familiarity with the alphabetical games played by editors on night desks in Manhattan. Should we pity the poor translators the world over who needed to reproduce the bare bones of the story in double-quick time? Not really. The meaning of the words in that headline are not important. What’s important is that it works as a headline.
Like any headline in the English-language press, ‘GOP VEEP PICK ROILS DEMS’ is explained by the story that follows it in less compressed language.
The task of the translator is to understand the story first and only then invent an appropriate headline within the language of headlines holding sway in the target culture. The original and its translation must conform to the general conventions of headline-writing in their respective cultures, because headline-writing is a genre –
A particular kind of language use restricted to particular contexts.
Answer the following questions: 1)How many genres are there?
………………………………… 2) What is meant by “translation ‘from cold,
‘’unseen’, ‘out of blue’?
3)What is ‘a sentence’?
4) Shall translators ask about the genre of the
text they are going to work on? Why?
Why not?
How many genres are there? Uncountably many. How do you know what genre a given written utterance is in? Well, you don’t, and that’s the point. No sentence contains all the information you need to translate it. One of the key levels of information that is always missing from a sentence taken simply as a grammatically well-formed string of lexically acceptable words is knowledge of its genre. You can only get that from the context of utterance. You know what that is in the case of a spoken sentence – you have to be there, in the context, to hear it spoken. You usually know quite a lot in the case of written texts too. Translators do not usually agree to work on a text without being told first of all whether it is a railway timetable or poem, a speech at the UN or a fragment of a novel.
To do their jobs, translators have to know what job they are doing.
Translating something ‘from cold’. ‘unseen’, ‘out of the blue’ or, as some literary scholars would put it, ‘translating a text in and for itself’ isn’t technically impossible. After all, students at some universities are asked to do just that in their final examinations. But it is not an honest job. It can only be done by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are. Even if you guess right you are still only playing a game. Many genres have recognizable forms in the majority of languages and cultures. But translators do not translate Chinese kitchen recipes into ‘English
If they are translators, they translate them into kitchen recipes. Similarly, when a film tittle needs translating, it needs translating into a film title, not an examination answer.
What it comes down to is this. Written and spoken expressions in any language don’t have a meaning just like that, on their own, in themselves. Translation represents the meaning that an utterance has, and in that sense translation is a pretty good way of finding out what the expression used in it may mean.
(from Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ’ by David Bellos)
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