HUE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ------***------ NGUYEN VAN TUAN TRANSLATION 1&2 HUE - 2006 1 INTRODUCTION An increasing number of universities in Vietnam have added courses in translation to their curricula; however, the textbooks available for such courses are few. This unit has been written with these courses in mind. The unit is designed to provide the learners with some basic principles of translation which will be generally useful to translation courses in universities and colleges, to help the learners avoid some errors they may encounter when they translate a text, to provide the learners with essential English sentence patterns that could be very useful for the learners in learning and practicing translating and to provide the learners 20 assignments related to the theory they have learned. The desire of the author is to make available the principles of translation which have learned through personal experience in translation and teaching translation, and through interaction with colleagues involved in translation projects in many universities in Central Vietnam.
Since it is assumed that the students will be speakers of Vietnamese language, many of these exercises involve translating from or into their mother tongue. The material is presented in a way that it can be used in a self-teaching situation or in a classroom. An attempt has been made to keep technical terms to a minimum. When technical vocabulary is used, every effort is made to clarify the meaning of such vocabulary or to provide its meaning in Vietnamese.
This has been done so that the unit can be used by any student translator, even though his exposure to linguistic and translation theory has been minimal. This is an introductory unit. The lessons give an overview presenting the fundamental principles of translation and the rest of the unit illustrates these principles. The overriding principle is that translation is meaning-based rather than form-based.
Once the learner has identified the meaning of the source text, his goal is to express that same meaning in the receptor/target language. Many examples of cross-language equivalence are used to illustrate this principle. Since the coursebook has been written for the students to learn either by themselves in their distant learning course or in class with a teacher, there will be a coursebook and 20 assignments. By the end of the course, the students will be able to: 1.
obtain general knowledge of the principles of translation. get familiar with and effectively use the English sentence patterns in their translations. On the completion of this coursebook, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Ton Nu Nhu Huong for her encouragement.
I would also like to be grateful to Dr. Tran Van Phuoc and other colleagues of the College of Foreign Languages and the English Department for their kind help. Errors are unavoidable in this coursebook. Therefore, I appreciate and welcome any criticism on the course book.
Hue, June 24th, 2001 Nguyen Van Tuan 2 CHAPTER 1: THEORY OF TRANSLATION LESSON 1: FORM AND MEANING 1.What is translation? 1. Translation is the expression in another language (target language) of what has been expressed in one language (source language), preserving semantic and stylistic equivalencies. Translation is the replacement of a representation of a text in one language by a representation of an equivalent text in a second language. The author continues and makes the problems of equivalence very plain: Texts in different languages can be equivalent in different degrees (fully or partially different), in respect of different levels of presentation (in respect of context, of semantics, of grammar, of lexis, etc.) and at different ranks (word-for-word, phrase-for-phrase, sentence- for-sentence).
However, languages are different from each other; they are different in form having different codes and rules regulating the construction of grammatical stretches of language and these forms have different meanings. To shift from one language to another is, by definition, to change the forms. Also, the contrasting forms convey meanings which cannot but fail to coincide totally; there is no absolute synonym between words in the same language, why should anyone be surprised to discover a lack synonym between languages. Something is always „lost‟ (or might one suggest „gain‟?) in the process and translators can find themselves being accused of reproducing only part of the original and so „betraying‟ the author‟s intentions.
Hence the traitorous nature ascribed to the translator by the notorious Italian proverb: “ Traduttore traditore”. Faced by a text in a language, we are able to work out not only the meaning of each word and sentence but also its communicative value, its place in time and space and information about the participants involved in its production and reception. We might take, as a light-hearted model of the questions we can ask of the text, the first verse of a short poem by Kipling. I keep six honest serving men; (They taught me all I knew); Their names were What? And Why? And When? And How? And Where? And Who? What? is the message contained in the text; the content of the signal.
Why? orients us towards the intention of the sender, the purpose for which the text was is used. (Informing, persuading, flattering, etc.) When? is concerned with the time of communication realized in the text and setting in its historical context; contemporary or set in the recent or remote past or future. 3 Where? is concerned with the place of communication, the physical location of the speech event realized in the text. How? refers to whether the text is written in a formal or informal way.
Who? refers to the participants involved in the communication; the sender and receiver. Translation is rendering a written text into another language in a way that the author intended the text. (By Bui Tien Bao- Hanoi National University) “ Translators are concerned with written texts. They render written texts from one language into another language.
Translators are required to translate texts which arrange from simple items including birth certificates or driving licences to more complex written materials such as articles in journals of various kinds, business contracts and legal documents. Translation, by dictionary definition, consists of changing from one state or form to another, to turn into one‟s own or another‟s language. Translation is basically a change of form. When we speak of the form of a language, we are referring to the actual words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc.
The forms are referred to as the surface structure of a language. It is the structural part of language which is actually seen in print or heard in speech. In translation the form of the source language is replaced by the form of the receptor/target language. But how is this change accomplished? What determines the choices of form in the translation? The purpose of this lesson is to show that translation consists of transferring the meaning of the source language into the receptor language.
This is done by going from the form of the first language to the form of the second language by a way of semantic structure. It is meaning that is being transferred and must be held constant. Only the form changes. The form from which the translation is made will be called the source language and the form into which it is to be changed will be called the receptor language.
Translation, then, consists of studying the lexicon, grammatical structure, communication situation, and cultural context of the source language text, analyzing it in order to determine its meaning, and then reconstructing this same meaning using the lexicon, grammatical structure which are appropriate in the receptor language and its cultural context. Let us look at an example. Assume that we are translating the Vietnamese sentence ‘‘ C¸m ¬n b¹n ®· gióp ®ì t«i tËn t×nh. This Vietnamese sentence has the verb ‘gióp ®ì tËn t×nh’, but to convey the same meaning in English one would use a noun phrase: „ your kind help‟.
To do effective translation one must discover the meaning of the source language and use the receptor language forms which express the meaning in a natural way. It is the purpose of this unit to familiarize the learners with the basic linguistic and sociolinguistic factors involved in translating a text from a source language into a receptor language, and to give them enough practice in the translation process for the development of skills in cross-language transfer. Characteristics of language which affect translation There are certain characteristics of languages which have a very direct bearing on principles of translation. First, let us look at the characteristics of meaning components.
Meaning components are packaged into lexical items, but they are packaged differently in one language than in another. In most languages there is a meaning of plurality, for example the English -s. This often occurs in the grammar as a suffix on the nouns or verbs or both. In Vietnamese, however, plurality is expressed in an isolated word ‘ nh‚ng/c¸c’.
Many times a single word in the source language will need to be translated by several words. For example, a projector was called the thing that shows pictures on the wall by the Chipara Bolivia. Second, it is characteristic of languages that the same meaning component will occur in several surface structure lexical items. In English, the word „sheep‟ occurs.
However, the words „lamb‟,‟ ram‟ and „ewe‟ also include the meaning „sheep‟. They include the addition meaning components of young (in „lamb‟, adult and male in „ ram‟ and adult and female in „ewe‟. In Peru, „lamb‟ would need to be translated by „sheep its child‟, „ram‟ by „ sheep big‟ and „ewe‟ by „sheep its woman‟. Third, it is further characteristic of language that one form will be used to represent several alternative meanings.
This again is obvious from looking in any good dictionary. For example, the Reader‟s Digest Great Encyclopedic Dictionary gives 54 meanings for the English word „run‟. Most words have more than one meaning. There will be a primary meaning-the one which usually comes to mind when the word is said in isolation-and the secondary meaning- the additional meanings, which a word has in context with other words.
In English, we can say „ the boy runs‟, using „run‟ in its primary meaning. We can also say „ the motor runs, the river runs, and his nose runs‟, using runs in its secondary meanings. This principle is not limited to lexical items for it is also true that the same grammatical pattern may express several quite different meanings. For instance, the English possessive phrase „my house‟ may mean „the house I built‟, „ the house I rent‟, „the house I live in‟, or the house for which I drew up in my plans.‟ Only the larger context determines the meaning.
Notice the following possessive phrases and the variety of meanings: my car ownership my brother kinship my foot part-whole my singing action my book ownership or authorship ( the book I own, or, the book I wrote) my village residence ( the village where I live) my train use 5 (the train I ride on) Whole sentences may also have several functions. A question form may be used for a non- question. For example, the question: “ Mary, why don‟t you wash the dishes?” has a form of a question, and may in some context be asking for information, but it is often used with the meaning of command rather than a real question. A simple English sentence like “ He made the bed.” May mean either “He made (as a carpenter would make) the bed”, or “ He put the sheets, blanket, and pillows in neat order on the bed.” Just as words have primary and secondary meanings, so grammatical markers have their primary function and often have other secondary functions.
The preposition „on‟ is used in English to signal a variety of meanings. Compare the following uses of „on‟ with the corresponding form used in Vietnamese. John found the book on the floor.