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,
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
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!”你好，表哥, 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
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
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
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.
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Ke Ping was born in