Shanghai foreign language education press
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| sous presse). Many more sound odd when you transfer them, and are wrong -
avec y sans supplement, le tome VII ^ 'with, without a supplement, Vol.7' ('without extra charge')- Thousands sound natural, have the same meaning, are right. (4) The appropriateness of gerunds, infinitives, verb-nouns (cf. l the establishment of, 'establishing', 'the establishing of,* to establish*). (5) Lexically, perhaps the most common symptom of unnaturalness is slightly old-fashioned, now rather 'refined', or 'elevated 1 usage of words and idioms possibly originating in bilingual dictionaries, e.g. It fit ses necessity's: 'He relieved nature.' Je m'en separe avec beaucoup de peine: Tin sorry to pan with it. 1 ErstraubtesichmitHandenundFussen: 4 He defended himself tooth and nail.' Note (a) the fact that the SL expression is now old-fashioned or refined is irrelevant, since you translate into the modern target language; (b) however, if such expressions appear in dialogue, and are spoken (typically or say) by middle-aged or elderly characters, then a correspondingly 'refined* translation 28 PRINCIPLES is appropriate; (c) naturalness has a solid core of agreement, but the periphery is a taste area, and the subject of violent, futile dispute among informants, who will claim that it is a subjective matter, pure intuition; but it is not so. If you are a translator, check with three informants if you can. If you are a translation teacher, welcome an SL informant to help you decide on the naturalness or currency (there is no difference), therefore degree of frequency of an SL expression. (6) Other 'obvious' areas of interference, and therefore unnaturalness, are in the use of the articles; progressive tenses; noun-compounding; collocations; the currency of idioms and metaphors; aspectual features of verbs; infinitives. How do you get a feel for naturalness, both as a foreigner and as a native speaker? The too obvious answer is to read representative texts and talk with representative TL speakers (failing which, representative TV and radio) - and to get yourself fearlessly corrected. Beware of books of idioms - they rarely distinguish between what is current (e.g, 'keep my head above water') and what is dead (e.g. L dead as a door nail'), There is a natural tendency to merge three of the senses of the word 'idiom': (a) a group of words whose meaning cannot be predicted from the meanings of their constituent words (e.g. dog in the manger; Spielverderber; Vempecheur de tourner en rond\ (b) the linguistic usage that is natural to native speakers of a language; -c)the characteristic vocabulary or usage of a people. {Elle avail frappe a la bonne pone. {Qa t c r estdu franqais\) when the original was merely Elie avail Irouve la solution ('She had found the solution'), which is also perfectly good French.) The danger of this procedure is that it tends to devalue literal language at the expense of 'idiomatic' language, as though it were unnatural. If anything, the reverse is the case. Certainly, idiomatic language can, being metaphor, be more pithy and vivid than literal language, but it can also be more conventional, fluctuate with fashion, and become archaic and refined ('he was like a cat on a hot tin roof) (swr des charbons ardents; wie auf glukenden Kohlen sitzen), and, above all, it can be a way of avoiding the (literal) truth. In translating idiomatic into idiomatic language, it is particularly difficult to match equivalence of meaning with equivalence of frequency. Check and cross-check words and expressions in an up-to-date dictionary (Longmans, Collins, COD)- Note any word you are suspicious of. Remember, your mind is furnished with thousands of words and proper names that you half take for granted, that you seem to have known all your life, and that you do not properly know the meaning of. You have to start checking them. Look up proper names as frequently as words: say you get Dax, cite de peiites H.L.M. - l Dax, a small council flat estate' may sound natural, but looking up Dax will show you it is incorrect, it must be 'Dax, a town of small council flats' - always assuming th at * council flat' is good enough for the reader. Naturalness is not something you wait to acquire by instinct. You work towards it by small progressive stages, working from the most common to the less common features, like anything else rationally, even if you never quite attain it. There is no universal naturalness. Naturalness depends on the relationship THE PROCESS OF TRANSI J VTING 29 between the writer and the readership and the topic or situation. What is natural in one situation may be unnatural in another, but everyone has a natural, 'neutral' language where spoken and informal written language more or less coincide. It is rather easy to confuse naturalness with: (a) a colloquial style; (b) a succession of diched idioms, which some, particularly expatriate teachers, think is the heart of the language; (c) jargon; fd) formal language. I can only give indications: (avantwut)(¥) (a) first of all (b) before you can say Jack Robinson (c) in the first instance (d) primarily plus oumoins (F) (a) more or less (b) give or take (c) within the parameter of an approximation (d) approximately tải về 2 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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