Paper published in BABLE
(45) 4 [1999, No.4 ] 289-300
Translatability
vs. Untranslatability: A Sociosemiotic Perspective
Ke Ping
The problem of translatability or
untranslatability is closely related to man's understanding of the nature of
language, meaning and translation.
From the sociosemiotic point of view, "untranslatables" are
fundamentally cases of language use wherein the three categories of
sociosemiotic meaning carried by a source expression do not coincide with those
of a comparable expression in the target language. Three types of untranslatability, referential, pragmatic,
and intralingual ones, may be distinguished. On the understanding that the object of translation is the
message instead of the carrier of the message, language-specific norms
considered untranslatable by some linguists should be excluded from the realm
of untranslatables. And since
translation is a communicative event involving the use of verbal signs, the
chance of untranslatability in practical translating tasks may be minimized if
the communicative situation is taken into account. In a larger sense, the problem of translatability is
one of degrees: the higher the linguistic levels the source language signs
carry meaning(s) at, the higher the degree of translatability these signs may
display; the lower the levels they carry meaning(s) at, the lower the degree of
translatability they may register.
Throughout the history of translation the question "Is
translation possible or impossible?" has been repeatedly asked and debated
among philosophers, linguists as well as translators and translation
theorists. Some scholars and
artists believe that virtually everything is translatable. Newmark, for example, argues that the
"untranslatables" can be translated indirectly by transferring the
source item and explaining it if no parallel item can be found in the target
language and no compensatory effect may be produced within the same paragraph. Hence every variety of meaning in a
source language text can be translated either directly or indirectly into a
target language, and therefore everything is translatable. (Newmark, 1989:17)
Others
(von Humboldt, Quine, Virginia Woolf, Derrida, to name a few) insist that
translation is ultimately impossible.
Von Humboldt, e.g. maintains that all translations are apparently
attempts at finding a solution to some insoluble problem. (Ke, 1991:10)
Catford
(1965) distinguishes two kinds of untranslatability, that is, linguistic
untranslatability and cultural untranslatability.
Linguistic
untranslatability, according to Catford, occurs when there is no lexical or
syntactical substitute in the target language for a source language item. For example, the Danish Jeg fandt
brevet (literally "letter [I] found the") is linguistically
untranslatable, because it involves structures that does not exist in English.
Cultural
untranslatability is due to the absence in the target language culture of a
relevant situational feature for the source text. For example, the different concepts of the term for bathroom
is untranslatable in an English, Finnish or Japanese context, where both the
object and the use made of that object are not at all alike. (Bassnett-McGuire, 1980:32)
The
controversy over the problem of translatability or untranslatability stemmed
from the vagueness of the notion of meaning and a lack of consensus over the
understanding of the nature of language and translation.
For
example, Many people in ancient religious worlds were incredulous of the
validity of translating as they believed that language was sacred and mystic,
in which was hidden the will and order of God. Based on that understanding of the nature of language, they
tended to regard translation or any kind of contrived conversion of a divine
message from one language into another as no less than profanity and vice
(Steiner, 1957). II
Corinthians, for instance, contains the following passage in which the
sacramental nature of language is asserted:
And I know that such a person ¾ whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows ¾ was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be
told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. (II Cor. xii. 3-4)
我认得这人；（或在身内，或在身外，我都不知道，只有上帝知道。）他被提到乐园里，听见隐秘的言语，是人不可说的。
In
this paper, the author will attempt a reconsideration of the age-old problem of
translatability (or rather, untranslatability) from the sociosemiotic
perspective. The observations made
are based upon sociosemiotic studies of the nature of language, meaning and
translation.
A systematic study of meaning in
translation was made by the present author (Ke, 1996) in the sociosemiotic vein
and the following conclusions regarding meaning and translation were drawn:
(1) An attribute of the sign, meaning is
the relationship between a sign and something outside itself. Such a relationship is fundamentally
conventional, i.e. language-specific.
(2) Three facets or dimensions of sign
relationships may be distinguished: the relationship between signs and entities
in the world which they refer to or describe is semantic; that between
signs and their users (interpretants), pragmatic, and that between signs
themselves, syntactic.
Corresponding to the three types of semiotic relationships are three
categories of sociosemiotic meaning: (a) referential meaning, (b) pragmatic
meaning (including identificational, expressive, associative, social or
interpersonal, and imperative or vocative meanings), and (c) intralingual
meaning (which may be realized at phonetic and phonological, graphemic,
morphological/lexemic, syntactic, and discoursal/textual levels and is termed
accordingly).
(3) Style in both its broad sense (features
of situationally distinctive uses of language, i.e. the variations of regional,
social, and historical dialects; or even such intralingual peculiarities as
plays on words, acrostic poems, and rhythmic units) and in its strict
linguistic sense (linguistic representations of the relations among the participants
in an event of verbal communication, chiefly level of formality) may be reduced
to identificational, expressive, social, and intralingual meanings for
transference.
(4) Referential meaning, pragmatic meaning,
and intralingual meaning are all parts of an organic whole. They combine to make up the total
meaning of an expression or a discourse.
But in different contexts the three categories of sociosemiotic meaning
may carry different weight or show different degrees of prominence.
(5) Since the spectrum of sociosemiotic
meanings carried by a linguistic sign in one language rarely forms a one-to-one
correspondence to that of a comparable sign in another language, the
translator, when striving to communicate the maximum number of meanings an
expression or discourse carries in a given context, usually has to give
priority to the most prominent or important one(s) of them, ensuring its/their
correct transference in whatsoever circumstances and, if no other alternative
being available, at the expense of the other meanings of the sign.
From the sociosemiotic point of view, untranslatability is an
undeniable reality, at least so far as the base units of a language are
concerned. Basically there are two
causes underlying untranslatability:
(1) The concurrence or combination of
referential meaning (RM), pragmatic meaning (PM), and intralingual meaning (IM)
in a linguistic sign in different languages is a matter of convention. The three categories of sociosemiotic
meaning carried by an expression in one language will often not coincide with
those of a comparable expression in another language.
And
quite contrary to the traditional belief that the referential or cognitive
content is always the most important one in a verbal message,
communication and sociosemiotic
theories have indicated that any aspect of the message carried by a linguistic
sign, be it referential, pragmatic, or intralingual, may figure prominently in
a communicative event.
These
two facts combined render it frequently difficult for the translator to find in
the target language a specific linguistic unit which corresponds to the source
language item on all the three levels of sociosemiotic meaning, i.e.
referential meaning, pragmatic meaning, and intralingual meaning (when it is
foregrounded or salient). The
Chinese greeting “Nihao, Biaoge!”, for instance, can not be rendered into English with both its
referential meaning (one's male-cousin-on-mother's-or-paternl-aunt's-side-elder-than-oneself)
and its pragmatic meaning (its phatic function as a form of address) accurately
transferred. After all, we would
not greet in English a cousin of ours with something like "Hello, my male-cousin-on-my-mother's-
or-paternal-aunt's-side-elder-than-myself!" since the minute difference
the Chinese language makes between the children of one's uncles and aunts
against such parameters as male/female, paternal/maternal, and senior/junior is
simply not lexicalized in English.
(2) Annotation, which is capable of
elucidating virtually any kind of linguistic or cultural peculiarities, cannot
be unrestrictedly employed, at least not in most literary works, for the
practical reason that it would make the translation longwinded and cumbersome.
(Just consider the case of movie translation, where annotation or other forms
of explanation are usually not possible owing to the time limit).
According to the property of the untranslatable element(s) in a
source item, we may distinguish three types of sociosemiotic untranslatability,
i.e. referential untranslatability, pragmatic untranslatability, and intralingual
untranslatability.
Referential untranslatability occurs when a referential element in
the source message is not known or readily comparable to a particular item in
the target language. The Chinese
language, for example, has different names for several different kinds of
stuffed wheaten food: baozi, jiaozi, and huntun. But to the English speaker, all these
have but one name ¾ dumpling (a small piece of dough,
boiled or baked, often enclosing meat, fruit, etc.): the contrasts between
these different kinds of stuffed food are not lexically represented in
English. Of course circumlocution
or description may often help bridge the lexical gap. Jiaozi, for one instance, may be "boiled
dumpling with meat and/or vegetable stuffing"). But awkward situation may still emerge sometimes, as is
evidenced in the following case:
In a translation into an Indian language of
Latin America, ass, was translated as "a small long-eared
animal". The effect was to
suggest that Jesus entered Jerusalem riding on something which closely
resembled a rabbit. (Crystal,
1987:345)
Pragmatic untranslatability arises where some pragmatic meaning
encoded in a source item is not encoded likewise in a functionally comparable
unit in the target language, or where the exact pragmatic meaning(s) carried by
the source sign is/are unclear or indeterminable due to historical reasons or
to the intentional equivocation on the part of the author (as may be found in
some theological and mystic writings).
Newmark (1988:114) notes that jolly in jolly good is
mainly pragmatic, a slight middle-class intensifier, which can only be
over-translated in French (drôlement) and under-translated in German (ganz,
vielleicht) ¾ both languages missing the connotation
of social class.
Bassnett-McGuire
argues that even a concept supposed to be universal or
"international" may be untranslatable on some occasions, as is the
case of the loose translation of the sentence I'm going home spoken by
an American resident temporarily in London into French as "Je vais chez
moi". The English sentence
could either imply a return to the immediate "home" or a return
across the Atlantic, depending on the context in which it is used, a distinction
that would have to be spelled out in French. In the latter case, the French translation should be
something like "Je vais à mon pays". Moreover the English term home, like the French foyer
("hearth, furnace") has a range of associative meanings that are
not translated by the more restricted phrase "chez moi" (Bassnett-McGuire,
1980:33).
By intralingual untranslatability we mean any situation in which the
source expression is apparently not transferable due to some communicatively
foregrounded linguistic peculiarity it contains. It differs from "linguistic untranslatability" as
defined by Catford in that instead of including those conventionally
followed rules of the language, it pertains only to those linguistic features
that are foregrounded somehow in the context. Intralingual untranslatability accounts for a majority of
cases of untranslatability.
Semantically
prominent phonetic and phonological elements (known with some scholars as
"phonaesthetic morphemes"), e.g. alliteration ("kith and kin",
"time and tide", "might and main",
etc.) and rhyme, are frequently untranslatable. That is perhaps one reason why Robert Frost asserts that
"Poetry is what gets lost in the translation." One case of phonological
untranslatability may be found in homophonous puns, e.g. the advertisement put
up by a tire manufacturer: "It's time to retire".
Graphemic
meaning, which may be found across the smallest units or forms of the writing
system of a language, is usually untranslatable, too. For example, the Chinese proverb Bazi hai
meiyou yi pie ne "Not even the first stroke of the character ba
[八 "eight"] is in sight
yet" is used to denote a situation wherein there has not yet been the
slightest sign of the beginning of something referred to, because the Chinese
character ba is composed of two strokes (the left-falling stroke "丿", and the right-falling stroke
"し") . One has to set on
paper the first, left-falling stroke before drawing the second, right-falling
one, and thereby spelling out the whole character.
Difficulties
may occur with the translation of morphological meaning and lexemic meaning (or
morpheme-level and lexis-level intralingual meanings). A few years ago, the Apple Computer set
up a division called "Apple PIE". The PIE in the name is really the acronym of "(Apple
Computer's) Personal Interactive Electronics" (Personal
Computer World, Nov., 1993, p.286).
Although this name may be put into Chinese as "(Pingguo Jisuanji
Gongsi de) Geren Jiaohushi Dianzi Shebei Bu" (Apple Computer's Personal
Interactive Electronics Division), the punning effect of the acronym PIE would still be lost.
A
much quoted example of intralingual untranslatability at the lexical level is
derived from Shaw's play Augustus Does His Bit:
The Clerk (entering): Are you engaged?
Augustus: What business is that of yours? However, if you will take the trouble to read the society
papers for this week, you will see that I am engaged to the Honorable Lucy
Popham, youngest daughter of ¾
The Clerk: That isn't what I mean.
Can you see a female?
Augustus: Of course I can see a female as easily as a male. Do you suppose I'm blind?
The Clerk: You don't seem to follow me somehow. There's a female downstairs: what you might call a
lady. She wants to know can you
see her if I let her up.
Augustus: Oh, you mean am I disengaged. Tell the lady I'm busy. (My emphases)
The comic effect of the dialog derives from the "witty
puns" (puns in which both members of the word-pun bear meaning in the
context) used by Shaw: "engaged" means both "busy" and
"under a promise to marry somebody", and "see" means both
"meet" and "discern".
It is very difficult or flatly impossible to find Chinese expressions
which may suggest the same meanings as carried by the two English words in this
context.
If
referential and pragmatic untranslatabilities are relative, intralingual
untranslatability is usually "absolute", since languages differ from
each other more in their structure (which, as we have come to see, may generate
intralingual untranslatables if deliberately manipulated by the language user)
than in the communicative functions they may be employed to perform.
According to sociosemiotics, language is a signifying system which
uses audio-vocal signs for human communication; and translation is a
communicative event involving the use of verbal signs and taking place across
linguistic and cultural boundaries.
Just like any other sort of communication, translation has its own
purpose. The process of translation is therefore dynamic instead of
static. The thing to be carried
over in translation is the message, not the carrier of the message, i.e. the
linguistic elements served as functional units in the transmission of a
message. This understanding leads
to several relevant conclusions about the problem of translatability and
untranslatability:
(1) Many elements considered untranslatable
just do not need to be translated.
These are items at the lower levels of linguistic description. Basically they belong to the norms of a
language, which are conventionally followed so that the message (the
referential and pragmatic meanings) may be transferred; they themselves are
generally not foregrounded in meaning (unless the speaker or writer intend them
to be so. The French numeral soixante-dix,
for example, is formed of morphemes different from those that its English
counterpart "seventy" is formed, but that does not prevent the two
words from being inter-translatable, because they share the same referential
meaning. After all, it is the
message these base elements carry instead of these elements themselves that are
the objects of translation.
Grammatical
forms, which differ from language to language, are in most cases obligatorily
used. Their meaning is normally
predictable and hence not at all salient.
The structure of the Danish sentence Jeg fandt brevet, to take
Catford's example, follows the norm of the Danish grammar that the definite
article is postposited. But this
syntactic feature is not the object of translation; what is to be translated is
the meaning of the sentence. Since
the same meaning may well be conveyed by different grammatical devices in
different languages, this sentence may be translated into English as "I
found the letter" with an adjustment made to the postpositive definite
article brevet in Danish to conform to English grammatical norms. The English translation is a perfect
one, without any loss of the meanings intended by the author. This so-called
"untranslatable" (according to Catford) linguistic feature just does
not need to be translated. Thus at
least part of the "untranslatables" which Catford and other theorists
place under the category of linguistic untranslatability simply do not exist.
(2) Since in each specific context some
part(s) of the message or some type(s) of the three categories of sociosemiotic
meaning may carry greater weight
than the others, the fundamental communicative purpose for the occasion
will be largely fulfilled so long as the most important part(s) of the messages
or the most salient meaning(s) are properly transferred. This means that the number of
untranslatable elements will be pragmatically minimized when the communicative
situation is taken into account.
The aforementioned Chinese greeting “Nihao, Biaoge!” , e.g. can be
adequately rendered into English as "Hello, Cousin!" because the
phatic or social meaning (instead of the cognitive or referential meaning) of
the phrase is the most important one in this situation of greeting. Its correct transference is sufficient
for the establishment or maintaining of the required social relationship in
this situation. It is for this
reason that Newmark (1989:14) argues that the translator has to establish
priorities in choosing which varieties of meaning to transfer, depending on the
intention of the translated text and his or her own intention.
(3) Those who claimed the impossibility of
translation were wrong in their understanding of the nature of translation,
which they regard fundamentally as, in Newmark (1988:225)'s words, a
"state"; what they are trying to deny is actually the possibility of
perfect translation. But
translation (or, to be exact, translating) is more of a process than of a state
(Just consider the practice of translating and re-translating famous literature
throughout the ages!). Only a
state can be perfect. translation
is but a process in which the perfect or, to be more exact, the optimal solution
¾ the maximum equivalence of the translation to the source text (Ke,
1995:50) ¾
is (and should be) ever pursued by the translators.
A
quite distinctive opinion of translatability and untranslatability related to
the above observations is provided by the German language philosopher Walter
Benjamin (1892-1867), who proposes that the translatability of a text rests
ultimately with the intrinsic value of the text. We cannot assert, Benjamin claims, that a text is
untranslatable just because it has not been successfully translated. The question is whether there is
anything in it that is worth translating.
If there is, the work will, despite its present untranslatability, be
translatable some day in the future (Tan, 1991:220). Benjamin's view of "future translatability" throws
light on the problem we are discussing from an angle not unlike that of
sociosemiotics. After all,
translation means communication; the need or necessity of communicating a message
hinges upon the relevance or worth of the message. Efforts will be made to crack the hard nuts of
"untranslatables" (or apparent untranslatables) if they appear
worthwhile.
Actually,
absolute "untranslatables" are very few in the vast sea of
translatables and relative translatables, for "as anthropologists have
frequently pointed out, there is far more that unites different peoples in a
common humanity than that which separates them into distinct groups."
(Nida & Reyburn, 1981:28) In comparison with the intelligent lives in the
other parts of the Universe (there should be some of them somewhere in this
infinitely great cosmos which we happen to find ourselves in), we human beings
on the planet of Earth must be more alike to than different from each other.
As
a matter of fact, even for those apparently untranslatable base units, an
ingenious translator may come up with a clever translation, which fully and
naturally transfers the peculiar meanings of a source item, as is evidence by
the following example:
As WWII just ended, a visiting U.S. warship
sailed with much pomp and glory into a port in Britain. High on its flagpole was a pageant on
which was written "Second to None". A few days later, a dingy British gunboat was found to be moored by the American warship. There was but one word on its pageant:
"None". This typically
English humor taught the arrogant Americans a lesson. The pun was translated successfully into Chinese as:
¾ "Wuren bi wo hao" ("Nobody is my
superior.")
¾ "Wuren" ("Nobody.")
(Feng, 1997:186)
Hence,
viewed from the sociosemiotic vantage point, translatability or
untranslatability is more of a problem of quantity than of one of quality. The higher the linguistic levels the
source language signs carry meaning(s) at, the higher the degree of
translatability these signs may display; the lower the levels they carry
meaning(s) at, the lower the degree of translatability they may register. And from a long-term point of view, the
more meaningful, interesting, or worthy a source expression or text is, the
more translatable it is or will be.
Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. 1980. Translation
Studies. London & New York: Methuen. xii+159pp.
Catford, J.C. 1965. A Linguistic Theory
of Translation. London: Oxford University Press.
Chan, Sin-wai & David E. Pollard.
(Eds.). 1995. An Encyclopedia of Translation and Interpretation. Hong
Kong: The Chinese University Press. xvii+1149pp.
Crystal, David. 1987. The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. vii+472pp.
Feng, Qinghua. 1997. Shiyong Fanyi
Jiaocheng (A Practical Coursebook of Translation). Shanghai:
Shanghai Waiyu Jiaoyu.
ix+586pp.
Holy Bible.
1995. (new revised standard version & Chinese union version in one volume).
China Christian Council.
1464+432+xxivpp.
Ke, Ping. 1995/1996. Yinghan yu Hanying
Fanyi Jiaocheng (English-Chinese and Chinese English Translation).
Taibei: Bookman. vii+268pp/277pp.
__ 1996. A Socio-semiotic Approach to
Meaning in Translation. In Babel, 42, 2. 74-83.
Newmark, Peter. 1988. A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall.
xii+291pp.
__. 1989. Introductory Survey In C. Picken.
(Ed.), The Translator's Handbook. London: Aslib.
Nida, Eugene & William Reyburn. 1981. Meaning
Across Cultures. American Society of Missiology Series, No. 4. New York:
Orbis Books. vi+90pp.
Picken, Catriona. (Ed.) 1989. The
Translator's Handbook. (2nd ed.). London: Aslib, The Association for
Information Management.
Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel. aspects
of language and translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
viii+136pp.
Tan, Zaixi. 1991. Xifang Fanyi Jianshi (A
Short History of Western Translation). Beijing:
Commercial. ix+324pp.
Ke Ping was born in
Nanjing, China, and was educated at Nanjing University, where he read English
Language and Literature and obtained his M.A. in 1987. From 1987 to 1990 he was with the
English Faculty of Peking University, teaching English-Chinese Translation and
Chinese-English Translation. Since
1990 he has been teaching and doing research at Nanjing University. In 1993-94 he studied linguistics as a
Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He has published over 20 papers in the fields of translation
theory, linguistics and English literature. His work A Textbook of English-Chinese and
Chinese-English Translation (Beijing: Peking University Press. 1991,
1993.), which adopts a sociosemiotic approach to translation and represents a
major effort toward systematizing translation studies, has been well received
in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hongkong.
He is now Associate Professor of English, teaching Translation,
Contrastive Linguistics and some other courses. The projects of study he is presently engaged in include
translation theory and cultural history of translation.