Shanghai foreign language education press

26
PRINCIPLES
blue eyes
1
. Again Si le regard du pasteur se promenait sur la pelouse, etait-ce pour jouir de 
la parfaite plenitude verte ou pour y trouver des idees (Drieu la Rochclle) is translated as 
something like: Tf the pastor's gaze ran over the lawn, was it lo enjoy its perfect green 
fullness, or to find ideas
1
, rather than 'Whenever the pastor cast a glance over the lawn it was 
either to enjoy its perfect green richness, or to find ideas in it\
Again, son visage etait mauve, 'his face was mauve, sein Gesicht v:ar mauve 
imalvenfarhen) are virtually precise translation equivalents. 'Mauve* is one of the few 
secondary colours without connotations l though in France it is the second colour of 
mourning, 'his face was deathly mauve' would be merely comic), and normally, like 'beige', 
associated with dress - compare a mauve woman, a violet woman {'shrinking violet
1
?), but a 
scarlet woman is different. In the 'mauve
1 
example, a retreat from the unnatural 'mauve' to 
the natural 'blue
1
would only be justified if the SL text was both 'anonymous
1
and poorly 
written.
You have to bear in mind that the level of naturalness of natural usage is grammatical 
as well as lexical (i.e., the most frequent syntactic structures, idioms and words that are 
likely to be appropriately found in that kind of stylistic context), and, through appropriate 
sentence connectives, may extend to the entire text,
In all 'communicative translation', whether you are translating an informa^ tive text, a 
notice or an advert, 'naturalness' is essential. That is why you cannot translate properly if the 
TL is not your language of habitual usage. That is why you so often have to detach yourself 
mentally from the SL text; why, if there is time, you should come back to your version after 
an interval. You have to ask yourself for others): Would you see this, would you ever see 
this, in The Times, The Economist (watch that Time-Life-^ piegel style), the British Medical 
Journal, as a notice, on the back of a board game, on an appliance, in a textbook, in a 
children's book? Is it usage, is it common usage in that kind of writing? How frequent is it? 
Do not ask yourself: is it English? There is more English than the patriots and the purists and 
the chauvinists are aware of.
Naturalness is easily defined, not so easy to be concrete about. Natural usage 
comprises a variety of idioms or styles or registers determined primarily by the 'setting
1
of 
the text, i.e. where it is typically published or found, secondarily by the author, topic and 
readership, all of whom are usually dependent on the setting. It may even appear to be quite 
'unnatural
1
, e.g, take any article in Foreign Trade Moscow): 'To put it figuratively, foreign 
trade has become an important artery in the blood circulation of the Soviet Union's economic 
organism', or any other exariple of Soviet bureaucratic jargon; on the whole this might 
occasionally be tactfully clarified but it should be translated 'straight
1
as the natural language 
of participants in that setting.
Natural usage, then, must be distinguished from 'ordinary language
1
, the plain 
non-technical idiom used by Oxford philosophers for (philosophical explanation, and 'basic' 
language, which is somewhere between formal and informal, is easily understood^ and is 
constructed from a language's most frequently used syntactic structures and words - basic 
language is the nucleus of a language produced naturally. All three varieties - natural, 
ordinary and basic - are

THE PROCESS OF TRANSLATING
21
formed exclusively from modern language. However, unnatural translation is marked 
by interference, primarily from the SL text, possibly from a third language known to 
the translator including his own, if it is not the target language. 'Natural
1 
translation can 
be contrasted with 'casual' language (Voegelin), where word order, syntactic structures, 
collocations and words are predictable. You have to pay special attention to:
(1) Word order. In all languages, adverbs and adverbials are the most mobile 
components of a sentence, and their placing often indicates the degree of 
emphasis on what is the new information (rheme) as well as naturalness. They 
are the most delicate indicator of naturalness:
He regularly sees me on Tuesdays. (Stress on ^regularly
1
.)
He sees me regularly on Tuesdays. (No stress.)
On Tuesdays he sees me regularly. (Stress on 'Tuesdays',)
(2) Common structures can be made unnatural by silly one-to-one translation from 
any language, e.g.:
(a) Athanogore put his arm under that of {sous celuide) the young man: ('under 
the young man's
1
), 
(b) After having given his meter a satisfied glance {apres avoir lance): ('after 
giving
1
). 
Both these translations are by English students.
(c) The packaging having {etant muni de) a sufficiently clear label, the 
cider vinegar consumer could not confuse it with , . . : ('as the packaging 
had. . .').
(3) Cognate words. Both in West and East, thousands of words are drawing nearer to 
each other in meaning. Many sound natural when you transfer them, and may still 
have the wrong meaning: 'The book is actually in print' (Le livre est actuellement 

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