Shanghai foreign language education press
CONNOTATIONS AND DENOTATIONS
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| CONNOTATIONS AND DENOTATIONS
Bear in mind that whilst all texts have connotations, an aura of ideas and feelings suggested by lexical words (crudely, 'run' may suggest 'haste', 'sofa 1 may suggest 'comfort'), and all texts have an 'underlife' (viz. as much of the personal qualities and private life of the writer as can be derived from an intuitive/analytical reading of a text), in a non-literary text the denotations of a word normally come before its connotations. But in a literary text, you have to give precedence to its connotations, since, if it is any good, it is an allegory, a comment on society, at the time and now, as well as on its strict setting. From a translator's point of view this is the only theoretical distinction THE ANALYSIS OF A TEXT 17 between a non-literary and a literary text. In fact, the greater the quantity of a language's resources (e.g. polysemy, word-play, sound-effect, metre, rhyme) expended on a text, the more difficult it is likely to be to translate, and the more worthwhile. A satisfactory restricted translation of any poem is always possible, though it may work as an introduction to and an interpretation of rather than as a recreation of the original. THE LAST READING Finally, you should note the cultural aspect of the SL text; you should underline all neologisms, metaphors, cultural words and institutional terms peculiar to the SI. or third language, proper names, technical terms and Untranslatable' words. Untranslatable words are the ones that have no ready one-to-one equivalent in the TL; they are likely to be qualities or actions - descriptive verbs, or mental words -words relating to rhe mind, that have no cognates in the TL, e.g. words like 'fuzzy', 'murky 1 , 'dizzy', l snug\ l snub'; many such English words arise from Dutch or from dialect. You underline words that you have to consider om of as well as within context, in order to establish their semantic range, their frontiers; unlike Humptv, you cannot normally decide to make any word mean what you want, and there are normally limits to the meaning of any word. The purpose of dictionaries is to indicate the semantic ranges of words as well as, through collocations, the main senses. I should say here whilst the meaning of a completely context-determined word may appear to be remote from its no n-con textual (core) meaning there must be some link between the two meanings. Thus it might appear to be beyond reason that the French word communication could possibly mean 'fistula 1 , but it can be translated as such if the fistula is a way of communication between the aorta and the pulmonary artery. Sometimes the link is a secret code. I am not claiming that you should carry out this analysis on every part of the text; much of it may be intuitive or unnecessary in the case of a particular text. Underline only the items where you see a translation problem, and bear in mind that it is often helpful to study such an item first in context, then in isolation, as though it were a dictionary or an encyclopaedia entry only, and finally in context again. tải về 2 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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