Universitat de València Departament Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya

Notes on translation criticism and translation commentary

sources: See Translation bibliography

House 'Quality', House Model, Munday Introducing299-307, Newmark Textbook, Toury 'Nature'

Review = comment on new translations published in journals, blogs, magazines, newspaper supplements, involving description and evaluation as to whether the new translation is worth reading and buying

Criticism = a broader activity involving analysis in detail, describing and/or evaluating both old and new translations, often assuming that readers are familiarized with the translation

Translation commentary = a kind of criticism of one's own translation, involving the description of the purpose, principles, rules, method, strategies, etc. used, and how translation problems have been solved



Translation criticism should not be a mere identification of errors, an intuitive or highly subjective appraisal judging translations as 'good', 'bad', 'faithful', etc. without qualifying these adjectives.

Similarly, reviews should

- describe the quality of a translation with more than a single adjective

- refrain from criticizing the translator's work on the basis of isolated errors


Translation criticism should take into account all the factors and elements in the process of translation :

translation is a communicative act: intention, function, cultural and social context, text type, register, strategies, principles, rules, constraints, audience

Therefore it also involves the analysis and interpretation of the Source Text, the first stage in any process of translation.

Criticism should take into account the presence of ideology in translation.

Critics may also have their own hidden ideology conditioning their criticism

A reviewer's motivation may be political, or of other nature.

For instance, in his study of Matthew Arnold's lecture 'On Translating Homer”, Venuti (1995: 118-45) has shown not only that Arnold's attack on Francis Newman's translation of the Iliad served to marginalize Newman's work, but also the extent to which a polemics about acceptable translation strategies can bu simultaneously one about cultural politics.

[Cladera 's critique of Moratín's translation of Hamlet ]

Criticism with or without evaluation:

Some critics prefer to eschew value judgements, prefer not to proclaim one translation better than another (Hatim and Mason 1990b: 1). They are rather concerned with with understanding how translated texts work (rather than with traditional concepts of quality) and seek to define the translator's method (Vilikovsky) and purpose (Newmark 1998: 75)

Discussion about whether evaluation should take into account the Source Text :

Toury notes that comparisons between translations and originals often lead to an enumeration of errors and a reverence for the original (1978: 26)

Non-comparative models

Lefevere (1981b) focus on the product of translation in the context of the target culture rather than on the translation process (see polysystem theory )

Toury (1978, 1980c): his work with translational norms suggests evaluative centred on the target system alone


The MLA adopted Guidelines for Evaluating Translations (2011):




Translation criticism (in the example of early modern English drama)

Plan

1.- Reading and analysis of Target Text in its own terms without comparison with the Source Text:

Main objective : see how natural the TT is ; could it be perceived as an original work? Is it 'translationese' or there is no interference from the presumed Source Text ?


2.- Analysis of Source Text: as in a pre-translation analysis, as if you were going to translate the ST yourself ; identify potential translation problems


­— subject matter: what is the play about ? main themes? What is the work's attitude towards the topic / themes ?

— attitudes (ideology) towards given areas of life: gender, religion, domestic relationships, : Pay special attention to 'loaded' words (e.g. 'grace', 'merit' in its Protestant and Calvinistic sense) and aspects of language such as modality

— motivation, aim, purpose (applied to target texts: skopos, see Reiss and Vermeer, Nord) 

— readership, audience :

— author : e.g is him or her a prestigious dramatist? Are expectations created because of the play's authorship ?

— mode of publication: book, critical edition, does it have an introduction ? notes ?

— genre or text type : e.g. drama, subgenre: comedy, romantic comedy, city comedy, satirical comedy

— chronolect (temporal variety of language): early modern English grammar and vocabulary (beware of intralingual 'false friends' : 'revolution' = 'change', no a 'radical change of the structures ...'

— register(s) (varieties of language according to its use): [mode, field, tenor or level of formality]:

frequency/density of register shifts. Are registers associated with other features such as characterization?

— dialects (varieties of language according to its users): are there characters that speak in dialect? what function do geographical or social dialects perform in the play?


— style

prose / verse

verse: predominant form in early modern drama: blank verse:

non blank verse forms: couplets (function in signalling the end of a set speech or of a scene) , songs (lyrics adapted or unadapted to given melody) , shorter lines

metaphors and imagery,

ambiguity

significant stylistic or rhetorical devices

neologisms

wordplay

— humour

— cultural elements: culturemes or culture-specific terms and concepts : identity (forms of address, honorifics, social ranks), beliefs and values (religion), environment (food, clothes, weapons, coins, flora and fauna) ;

proper names

intertextual references



3.- Analysis of the Target Text:

Once you are familiarized with the main translation problems and challenges you are in a good position to see how the Target Text has solved them

Proceed by analysing details and specific choices in order to move up to higher aspects such as translation method (literal, interpretative-communicative, free, scholarly), translation orientation (toward the Source Culture or towards the Target Culture : Toury's initial norms and Venuti's strategies), translation principles and rules


Include in your criticism or commentary the following:

— on the translator: experience of translating, of translating Shakespeare, drama or classics

— mode of publication: book, critical edition, introduction, notes

— readership/ audience

 

 — choice of text and text type: translation policy for Toury (p. 202)


— directness of translation (a preliminary norm for Toury, p. 202): direct from the Source Language or indirect through another language: e.g. direct from English or through French in Spanish translations, or through Spanish in the case of Spain's minority languages.

— degree of fullness (an operational and matricial norm for Toury, p. 202): integral or partial (mutilated, adaptation) ; with identical or different distribution of language material ; with identical or different segmentation (division into chapters, paragraphs, etc.)

— subject matter: does the translation communicate a similar attitude towards the topic / themes ?

— attitudes (ideology) towards given areas of life: gender, religion, domestic relationships,


— general assessment as to accuracy to semantic content



— motivation, aim, purpose ( skopos ) :

made explicit by the translator or inferred from close analysis of translation choices

 : e.g. for silent reading (book production), for performance in general, for a specific production (Marco Fil ) 

— translation orientation :

toward the Source Culture or towards the Target Culture (Schleiermacher) ; towards the pole of adequacy to the Source Culture or the pole of acceptability in the Target Culture (Toury 1978/ 2004, p. 201 ); foreignizing or domesticating 'strategies' (Venuti 1995).

adequacy: the translation's adherence to the norms of the source culture
acceptability: the translation's subscription to norms originating in the target culture (p. 201)

This initial norm is superordinate over norms pertaining to lower levels (201)
"Even if no clear macro-level tendency can be shown, any micro-level decision can still be accounted for in terms of adequacy vs. acceptability"
"On the other hand, in cases where an overall choice has been made, it is not necessary that every single lower-level decision be made in full accord with it" (201)

Pay attention to cultural elements, proper names, aspects of chronolect, choice of verse.

— translation method : [ = development of a translation process determined by a set of principles depending on the translator's purpose and affecting the TT on a macro-textual level (Hurtado, Traducción y traductología, p. 638)]

Categorization of methods by Hurtado, Traducción y traductología, p. 252-3:



— genre or text type : does the genre/subgenre of the Target Text match that of the Source Text? subgenre: comedy, romantic comedy, city comedy, satirical comedy

— chronolect (temporal variety of language): what temporal variety of Spanish or Catalan is used? target text in Spanish contemporary to the translator, in Golden Age Spanish, or some kind of middle way (with archaic touches) ?


— registers (varieties of language according to its use): [mode, field, tenor] : Does the frequency/density of register shifts match inthe Target Text? Are registers also associated with other features such as characterization?

— dialects (varieties of language according to its users): do characters that speak in dialect in the ST also speak in dialect in the TT? What kind of dialect ? Do geographical or social dialects perform the same function as in ST ?


— style

economy

quality

prose / verse ( See Holmes 'Forms of Verse')

verse: versification form for blank verse:

verso suelto , usually hendecasyllables,

adding lines or keeping the number of lines in a speech

rhymed verse : (if imitating Spanish Golden Age polymetry : a domesticating approach)

free verse :

non blank verse forms:

couplets,

songs (lyrics adapted or unadapted to given melody)

shorter lines

metaphors and imagery,

ambiguity

significant stylistic or rhetorical devices

neologisms

wordplay

— humour

— cultural elements: culturemes or culture-specific terms and concepts : identity (forms of address, honorifics, social ranks), beliefs and values (religion), environment (food, clothes, weapons, coins, flora and fauna) ;

proper names

intertextual references


— reception and influence (afterlife) of the translation in the target culture

 


Translation Commentaries

From J. Munday, Introducing Translation Studies p. 299-307

A commentary should take into account several common factors, which include the analysis of translation purpose (skopos), method and readership in order to establish the norms that are followed in the TT (p. 299)

These factors can be described in the "translation specification" of the text

Translation specification sheet

External features of the ST

Constraints on features of the TT

1. External features of ST

Extralinguistic information needed by the translator in order to contextualize the ST and to decide on an overall translation strategy in the TL (p. 301)

(Elements in the translation specification sheet are similar to C. Nord's analysis of the ST)

Language variety: register analysis (chapter 6.2, J. House's model)

Genre and text type: (Reiss's schema in chapter 5.1)


Readership

Constraints of the TT: general extralinguistic factors that guide or dermine some of the translator's decisions about the macro-level characteristics of the TT and the overal translation strategy while leaving the translator some freedom to determine micro-level procedures (p. 302).

In professional contexts, these constraints are generally formulated by the commissioner of the TT, and set out in the translation brief (Nord, section 5.4) (p. 301)

Selection of an overall strategy or orientation of strategies [target-oriented, source-oriented]: decision determined by purpose (skopos) of the translation, intention of the translation commissioner, and readership; it may be influenced by the ideology or ethical stance of the translator (chapters 8 and 9) , e.g. a feminist translation of Emily Dickinson (p. 304)

2. Micro-level intratextual analysis of the TT

Models: Nord's intratextual factors (section 5.4) or register and discourse analysis (House, Baker, Hatim and Mason, Munday, chapter 6) "where functional meaning if lined to variable of (1) Field, (2) Tenor and (3) Mode and their corresponding lexicogrammatical realizations" (p.305).

Note: The use of precise "metalanguage" of translation (e.g. procedures, borrowing, calque, etc.) is essential to ensure precision of argumentation (p. 305)

(1) part of Field: culture-specific terms, semantic field, proper names

(2) part of Tenor: writer-readership relationship : modality

(3) part of Mode: cohesion (holds the text together, creating 'texture' and contributing to the overall coherence of the argument), lexical chain of synonyms; word order and thematic structure (theme - rheme)

Such as "Register profile" (see House, chapter 6) would help in the decision-making of of the TT, taking into account the typical conventions of that genre in the TL. The commentary might discuss the different options available to the translator and the constraints placed on translation by the differences in languages (p. 307)




Criteria for the evaluation of translation


They depend on one's view of or approach to translation, on one's theory of translation.

Communicative approach:

They focus on determining the 'dynamic equivalence' (Nida 1964) between source and translation

'dynamic equivalence'= the manner in which receptors of the translated text respond to it must be equivalent to the manner in which the receptors of the source text respond to the source text

Nida postulated three criteria for an optimal translation

-general efficiency of the communicative process

-comprehension of intent

-equivalence of response

For House ('Quality'), these criteria prove to be as vague and non-verifiable as those by the intuitive-anecdotal approach.

A functional-pragmatic model

A model that attempts to avoid anecdotalism, reductionism, programmatic statements and intuitively implausible one-sided considerations of the ST and TT alone


House ('Quality', Revisited ): a model based on pragmatic theories of language.

Analysis of linguistic-situational particularities of the source and target texts

A comparison of the two texts

An assessment of their relative match

The basic requirement for equivalence is that the translation

should have a function which is equivalent to that of the original, (function = consists of an ideational and an interpersonal functional component, in Halliday 's sense

[ideational function: involves the speakers' choice of linguistic units to produce meanings about the world and about their experience (in fact, “to construe a theoretical model of their experience” (Halliday 2003, 3 :15), and to establish logical-semantic relationships between units of language

interpersonal function: involves the speakers' linguistic choices to act out their personal relationship with others, with their addressees (choices mainly of mood and modality)

textual function: linguistic choices to make their utterances coherent (texts that cohere within themselves and with their context) and cohesive (substituion, ellipsis) ]

should also employ equivalent pragmatic means for achieving that function

Initial analysis of the original according to a set of situational dimensions, for which linguistic correlates are established

The resulting textual profile of the original characterizes its function

The function is the norm against the which the translation is measured

Analogous analysis on the translation

From this analysis derives the textual profile and function of the translation

Comparison of both the original's and the translation's textual profiles and functions.

The degree to which the textual profile and function of the translation match the profile and function of the original is the degree to which the translation is adequate in quality

In this comparison, some mismatches will occur. Two kinds of mismatches

Dimensional mismatches : pragmatic errors that have to do with language users and language use

Non-dimensional mismatches : in the denotative meanings of original and translation elements and breaches of the target language system at various levels

The final qualitative judgment consists of a listing of both types of errors and of a statement of the relative match of the two functional components


&bnsp;

Newmark ( Textbook chapter 17 “Translation Criticism”)

Criteria :

-accuracy, economy, both according to the translator's standards and to the critic's standards,

-without reference to the SL: smoothness, naturalness, easy flow, readability, absence of interference


Plan :

1. analysis of ST stressing its intention and functional aspects

1. analysis of ST :

- author's purpose, his attitude toward the topic

- characterisation of the readership

- category and type of text

- quality of the language to determine the translator's degree of licence

informative text -> clichés [metaphor that have perhaps temporarily outlived their usefulness, that are used as a substitute for clear thought, often emotively, but wihout corresponding to the facts of the matter, set trends , a jewel in the crown , ] are reduced to neutral language

authoritative texts -> clichés are retained

- state the topic or themes

(don't discuss author's life, works, general background, unless they are referred to in the text)

[underline particular problems posed by ST: title, structure, level of language, metaphors, cultural words, proper names, insitutional names, neologism, 'untranslatable words, technical terms, ambiguity, meta-language, puns, sound effects,

2. analysis of

-the translator's interpretation of the SL text's purpose,

– you should understand (not criticise) why he has used procedures for a specific aim

Is he deliberately antiquating the language? moderating the figurative language? livening up simple sentences with colloquial and idiomatic phrases?

Is he trying to counter the under-translating tendency of all translations by deliberately over-translating?

To what exent has the TT been deculturalised, or transferred to the TL culture?

It is too easy to pounce on a translation's howlers, listing them one after the other:

-false friends, stretched synonyms, stiff or old-fashioned structure, anachronistic colloquialisms, literal translations of stock metaphors

If you do so, you have to provide reasons why

-his translation method

-the translation's likely readership

3. selective but representative detailed comparison of ST and TT

[A translation critic determines the general properties -first of ST, and then of TT- and uses the underlined words (see Last reading p. 17 ) as a basis for a detailed comparison of the two texts

underlined words: neologisms, metaphors, cultural words, and institutional terms peculiar to the SL, proper names, technical terms and 'untranslatable words' (the ones with no ready one-to-tone equivalent)]

how the translator has solved the particular problems posed by ST

group problems under general heads:

title, structure, shifts, metaphors, cultural words, translationese, proper names, neologism, 'untranslatable' words, ambiguity, level of language, meta-language, puns, sound-effect

discuss problems and do not prescribe a correct or better translation

4. evaluation of the translation (a) in the translator's terms, (b) in the critic's terms

- assess the referential and pragmatic accuracy of the TT by the translator's standards

Is the TT successful in its own terms)

- assess the referential and pragmatic accuracy of the TT by your standards

assess the quality and extent of the semantic deficit in the TT. Was it inevitable, was it because of the translator's deficiencies

- assess the TT as a piece of writing, independently of the ST:

in personal or authoritative text, has the translator captured the idiolect of the original?

5. where appropriate, an assessment of the likely place of the translation in the TL culture or discipline

was it in fact worth translating?

what kind of influence will it have on the language, literature, the ideas in its new melieu?


Quality in translation

A good translation fulfils its intention

informative texts -> it conveys the facts acceptably

vocative text -> it has its purposed effect

expressive text ->

judged 'adequate' if explains what the text is about (cf. many Penguin Plain Prose translations)

judged 'good' if it is 'distinguised, if the translator was exceptionally sensitive

as “form is almost as important as content, there is often a tension between the expressive and the aesthetic functions of language and therefore a merely 'adequate' translation may be useful to explain what the text is about (cf. many Penguin Plain Prose translations), but a good translation has to be 'distinguised' and the translator exceptionally sensitive; for me, the exemplar is Andreas Mayor's translation of Proust's Le Temps retrouvé - 'Time Regained (p. 192)



Examples of translation criticism in Part II, Text 10 to Text 13,