New Approaches to Translation History

Anthony Pym

Intercultural Studies Group

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Tarragona, Spain

Menu for morning session:

Why do it? Quantitative research? Systems and norms? Intercultures?

Why do translation history?

Personal satisfaction – So why communicate it?

Protection and glory of target cultures– So why look at translation?

To challenge concepts of cultures? – But there is nothing outside of cultures?

A traditional theory:

W h at tran s la tion is

S O U R C E C U L TU R ES O U R C E TE X T

S O U R C E M E A N IN G

TA R G E T C U L TU R ETA R G E T TE X T

TA R G E T M E A N IN G

What’s missing?

Cross-cultural intertextuality Overlaps of cultures Positions for receivers (how many

meanings?) Positions for translators...

An alternative model:

Culture 1 Culture 2Tr

An even better alternative model:

Culture 1 Culture 2TrLocale 1 Locale 2

Locale 3

IC

Locale 4

What is different here?

Translation moves out from a common centre (an interculture)

It moves towards locales There are no target texts in the interculture

What is an interculture?

Relations are professional They have secondness with respect to

monocultural communication The agents become principles (?) They become more independent the more

technical their tasks are. (They will one day rule the world?)

Where are cultures?

Where are intercultures?

Which means...

Translators work in networks (of intermediaries).

Translations mark the limits of cultures The communication borders are nodes,

increasingly in cities. Translation precedes cultural identity.

Measuring translation flows 1

0

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990

Books

Translations

Measuring translation flows 2

0

5

10

15

20

TRAN

SLAT

ION

S FR

OM

LAN

GU

AGE

(IN T

HO

USA

ND

S)

0 50 100 150 200BOOKS PUBLISHED IN LANGUAGE (IN THOUSANDS)

FIG. 1. BOOKS TRANSLATED FROM LANGUAGEBY BOOKS PUBLISHED IN LANGUAGE

UNESCO DATA FOR 1979-1983

English

FrenchRussian

German

SpanishJapanese

Measuring translation flows 3

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

0

PER

CEN

TAG

E O

F TR

ANSL

ATIO

NS

IN L

ANGU

AGE

50 100 150 200

BOOKS PUBLISHED (IN THOUSANDS)

FIG. 2a. PERCENTAGES OF TRANSLATIONSBY BOOKS PUBLISHED IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES

UNESCO DATA FOR 1979-1983

English

Spanish

Russian

Japanese

GermanFrench

Portuguese

Finnish, ArabicHebrew

Polish

Italian

Dutch

Danish, NorwegianAlbanian

Hungarian

Slovak

Turkish

Measuring translation flows 4

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

0

% B

OOKS

PUB

LISHE

D IN

NON

-NAT

IONA

L LAN

GUAG

ES

5 10 15 20 25

% TRANSLATIONS IN ALL BOOKS PUBLISHED

FIG. 3. PERCENTAGE OF TRANSLATIONSBY PERCENTAGE OF BOOKS PUBLISHED IN NON-NATIONAL LANGUAGES

UNESCO DATA FOR 1979-1983

30

Albania

Finland

Japan

Arabic-speaking countries

DenmarkNorway

Israel

Netherlands Sweden

TurkeySpanish-speaking countries

Italy Slovakia

Hungary

BrazilUSSRPoland

Which means:

The more cultural products there are in a language, the more translations there are likely to be from that language.

A low translation percentage in a language may be due to no more than a relatively high number of cultural products produced in that language

And...

The more cultural products a country produces in non-national languages, the higher the percentage of translations into the national language(s) is likely to be.

(e.g. People in Sweden read in English AND read translations from English)

Thus...

This is why intercultures appear to be central or peripheral, in accordance with the relative size and openness of the cultural locale concerned.

So how can we read this?

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940

German to French

French to German

British to German

Is English-language culture hegemonic? For 1960-1986 there were more than 2.5

times as many translations in Britain and the United States (1,872,050) than in France (688,720) or Italy (577,950).

24% of all books in English are published outside the US or the UK.

What are norms?

‘The main factors ensuring the establishment and retention of social order’ (Toury 1995:55).

For example... Literal / free, longer / shorter, neologisms /

archaisms, preface / none, notes / none.

How to discover norms?

Look at translations? Compare translations with parallel texts? Look at translation theories? Look at translation criticism? Look at debates between translators? I.e. Bottom-up or top-down.

For example:

'no great novel has ever been rendered into French without cuts' (Wyzewa 1901: 599).

M. G. Conrad (1889) proposed that German translators make more cuts as an act of adaptive protectionism against the disloyal cultural competition of French translators.

Toury’s laws:

The textual relations of the original are increasingly ignored in favour of the options offered by the target language.

Interference happens when the translation is from a prestigious language or culture and the target language or culture is minor.

In human terms...?

The more the translator is in an interculture, the less “natural” the translation.

The bigger the receiving culture, the more marginal the interculture and the more “natural” the translation.

... Perhaps...

Examples:

Twelfth-century translations into Latin were...

...extremely literal. Nineteenth-century translations into French

were... ...often very free...

But what of the power of the individual? Rabbi Mose... Henri Albert... Ezra Pound

... Or their patrons?

The real question is:

Who makes history?

(Or are the norms and systems simply there?)

Activity

Select a translator (or group of translators) Try to find out how they made their money. Who did they work with / for /against? What was the locale conditioning their

work? Can you locate any norms of that locale?