Shanghai foreign language education press

THE PROCESS OF TRANSLATING
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Translation is for discussion. Both in its referential and its pragmatic aspect, it has an 
invariant factor, but this factor cannot be precisely defined since it depends on the 
requirements and constraints exercised by one original on one translation. All one can do is 
to produce an argument with translation examples to support it- Nothing is purely objective 
or subjective- There are no cast-iron rules. Everything is more or less. There is an 
assumption of 'normally* or 'usually' or 'commonly
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behind each well-established principle; 
as I have stated earlier, qualifications such as "always
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, 'never', 'must
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do not exist-there are 
no absolutes.
Given these caveats, I am nevertheless going to take vou through my tentative 
translating process.
There are two approaches to translating (and many compromises between them): (1) 
you start translating sentence by sentence, for say the first paragraph or chapter, to get the 
feel and the feeling tone of the text, and then you deliberately sit back, review the position, 
and read the rest of the SL text; (2) you read the whole text two or three times, and find the 
intention, register, tone, mark the difficult words and passages and start translating only 
when you have taken your bearings.
Which of the two mernods you choose may depend on your temperament, or on 
whether you trust your intuition (for the first method) or your powers of analysis (for the 
second). Alternatively, you may think the first method more suitable for a literary and the 
second for a technical or an institutional text. The danger of the first method is that it may 
leave you with too much revision to do on the early part, and is therefore time-wasting. The 
second method (usually preferable) can be mechanical; a transiational text analysis is useful 
as a point of reference, but it should not inhibit the free play of your intuition. Alternatively, 
you may prefer the first approach for a relatively easy text, the second for a harder one.
From the point of view of the translator, any scientific investigation, both statistical 
and diagrammatic (some linguists and translation theorists make a fetish of diagrams, 
scbemas and models), of what goes on in the brain (mind? nerves? cells?) during the process 
of translating is remote and at present speculative. The contribution of psycholinguistics to 
translation is limited: the positive, neutral or negative pragmatic effect of a word (e.g. 
affecter, 'affect
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, 'brutal', befremden, drame^ comedie, favoriser, denouement■> 
extraordinaire', 
'grandiose
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, 
grandioznvi, 
'potentate
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, 
pontiff 
'pretentious', 
* 
arbitrary/arbitration', proposer^ exploit^ hauteur^ 'vaunt') e.g. Osgood's work on semantic 
differentials is helpful, since the difference between 'positive' and 'negative
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(i.e. between the 
writer's approval and his disapproval) is always critical to the interpretation of a text. The 
heart of translation theory is translation problems (admitting that what is a problem to one 
translator may not be to another); translation theory broadly consists of, and can be defined 
as. a iarge number of generalisations of translation problems, A theoretical discussion of the 
philosophy and the psychology of translation is remote from the translator's problems. 
Whether you produce a statistical survey through questionnaires of what a hundred 
translators think they think when they translate, or whether you follow what one translator 
goes through, mental stage by mental stage. 1 do not see what use it is going to be to anyone 
else, except perhaps as a corrective

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PRINCIPLES
of freak methods - or ideas such as relying entirely on bilingual dictionaries. substituting 
encyclopaedia descriptions for dictionary definitions, using the best-sounding synonyms for 
literary translation, transferring all Graeco-Latin words, continuous paraphrasing, etc. But 
there is never any point in scientifically proving the obvious.

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