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 mans 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 whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows 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 (ones
male-cousin-on-mothers-or-paternl-aunts-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-mothers-or-paternal-aunts-side-elder-than-myself! since the
minute difference the Chinese language makes between the children of ones
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 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 (drent) and
under-translated in German (ganz, vielleicht) 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 Im 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 ࠼span class=GramE>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: Its 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 Computers) 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 Computers 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 Shaws 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
The Clerk: That isnt
what I mean. Can you see a female?
Augustus: Of course I can see a
female as easily as a male. Do you suppose Im blind?
The Clerk: You dont seem to follow
me somehow. Theres 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 Im 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 Catfords
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 the maximum equivalence
of the translation to the source text (Ke, 1995:50) 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). Benjamins 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:
Wuren bi wo hao (Nobody is my
superior.)
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 Translators 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 Translators Handbook. (2nd ed.). London: Aslib, The Association
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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.