Shanghai foreign language education press
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- Điều hướng trang này:
- THE REFERENTIAL LEVEL
| THE TEXTUAL LEVEL
Working on the text level, you intuitively and automatically make certain 'conversions 1 ; you transpose the SL grammar (clauses and groups) into their 'ready 1 TL equivalents and you translate the lexical units into the sense that appears immediately appropriate in the context of the sentence. Your base level when you translate is the text. This is the level of the literal translation of the source language into the target language, the level of the trans-lationese you have to eliminate, but it also acts as a corrective of paraphrase and the parer-down of synonyms. So a part of your mind may be on the text level whilst another is elsewhere. Translation is pre-eminently the occupation in which you have to be thinking of several things at the same time. THE REFERENTIAL LEVEL You should not read a sentence without seeing it on the referential level. Whether a text is technical or literarv or institutional, you have to make up your mind. summarily and continuously, what it is about, what it is in aid of. what the writer's peculiar slant on it is: say, L'albumine et ses interactions medicamenteuses (It.: Ualhumina e le sue interazioni medicamentose) - it may be the action of drugs on blood, the need to detect toxic effects, the benefits of blood transfusion. Say, La pression quantitative - the large number of pupils in schools, the demand for better-quality education, the need for suitable education for all. Say, Recherches sur un facteur diureuque d'origine lymphatique - the attempt to find a substance in the body fluid that promotes urine production, the disorders that inhibit the formation of the substance, the attempts to isolate the substance. Always, you have to be able to summarise in crude Jay terms, to simplify at rhe risk of over-simplification, to pierce the jargon, to penetrate the fog of words. You get an abstraction like Ce phenomene s'avere; ce phenomene r exact pour cellules et fibres - referring to a tumour becoming so large that it compresses the parenchyma next to it. Usually, a more specific reference is desirable in the translation: the tumour's swelling, deterioration. etc. Thus your translation is some hint of a compromise between the text and the facts. For each sentence, when it is not clear, when there is an ambiguity, when the writing is abstract or figurative, you have to ask yourself: What is actually happening here? and why? For what reason, on what grounds, for what purpose? Can you THE PROCESS OF TRANSLATING 23 see it in your mind? Can you visualise ii? If you cannot, you have to 'supplement 1 the linguistic level, the text level with the referential level, the factual level with the necessary additional information (no more) from this level of reality, the facts of the matter. In real life, what is the setting or scene, who are the actors or agents, what is the purpose? This may or may not take you away temporarily from the words in the text. And certainly it is all LOO easy to immerse yourself in language and to detach yourself from the reality, real or imaginary, that is being described. Far more acutely than writers wrestling with only one language, you become aware of the awful gap between words and objects, sentences and actions (or processes'.. grammar and moods (or attitudes). You have to gain perspective {distacco, recul'Aa stand back from the language and have an image of the reality behind the text, a reality for which you, and not the author (unless it is an expressive or an authoritative text), are responsible and liable. The referential goes hand in hand with the textual level. All languages have polysemous words and structures which can be finally solved only on the referential level, beginning with a few multi-purpose, overloaded prepositions and conjunctions, through dangling participles ('reading the paper, the dog barked loudly') to general words. The referential level, where you mentally sort out the text, is built up out of, based on, the clarification of all linguistic difficulties and, where appropriate, supplementary information from the 'encyclopaedia' - my symbol for any work of reference or textbook. (Thus in pour le passage de Flore, you find that Flore/Flora was an Italic goddess of flowers and gardens. As it is in Claudel you translate: 'for the goddess Flora to pass' and leave the rest to the reader.) You build up the referential picture in your mind when you transform the SL into the TL text; and, being a professional, you are responsible for the truth of this picture. Does this mean, as Seleskovitch claims, that l the (SL) words disappear' or that you l deverbalize the concepts' (Delisle)? Not at all, you are working continuously on two levels, the real and the linguistic, life and language, reference and sense, but you write, you 'compose 1 , on the linguistic level, where your job is to achieve the greatest possible correspondence, referentially and pragmatically, with the words and sentences of the SI- text. However tempting it is to remain on that simpler, usually simplified layman's level of reality (the message and its function^ you have to force yourself back, in as far as the readership can stand it, into the particularities of the source language meaning- tải về 2 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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