Translated from Russian by Margarita Marinova
Read Anna Alsufieva and Margarita Marinova’s introduction to this essay
In the specialized literature on the theory of translation one encounters the proposition that translation as art, science, or skill has its own specificity that determines its types, principles, etc. Apparently that specificity excludes the so-called “literary” translation. “Free” or “unbound” translation also does not capture its essence very well. Other restrictions apply, too. This article will attempt to demonstrate that such restrictions are dictated not by the specificity of translation as such, but by the peculiarities of different translation practices. In connection to that, it will be necessary to differentiate between what is historically mutable in translation and what constitutes its essence. Such a distinction is necessary not only for the theory of translation, but for any theory in general. In addition, it will allow for a broader, objective evaluation of the possible principles of translation work.
1. The urgency of the task of separating the essential from the accidental in the translation process is evidenced by the nature of recent publications in the field of translation theory. Despite the wide variety of available approaches, they all have something important in common. To wit, every theory of translation, every variety of a particular theory of translation (and there are several of those), no matter how wide-ranging and rich the utilized materials happen to be, always relies upon a certain type of translation activity, upon one of its specific aspects, upon the practice of literary interactions within a given (usually Indo-European) linguistic family during one (usually modern) epoch. Here are a few examples.
A.D. Schweitzer is correct to point out [1] that, in order to simplify the theoretical models in their theory of general and machine translation [2], I. I. Revzin and V. Yu. Rosenzweig disregard any social context, and therefore any type of translation, which necessitates the consideration of the social context. Yet, by advancing the thesis that the content of the translated message remains the same, and by focusing on the functional characteristics of the communicative act [3], Schweitzer himself also ignores poetic translation, where the rhythm and sound can be even more important than the content, and translations of ancient texts, where there can be no question of functional correspondence between the target and the source texts.
E.G. Etkind [4] strives to take a broader view of the translation process, and once again (with good reason) refuses to single out in that process any particular aspect of linguistic communication, preferring to study it instead “together with all other problems related to the text: poetics, stylistics, and even psychology.” But even Etkind in his stylistic theory of translation, perhaps inadvertently and unwillingly, limits the scope of his research by ignoring such [important] phenomenon of literary history as the era of independent artistic creation through translation. When Etkindt says that “translation is a secondary literary creation” (which is one of his main premises), he forgets that, for example, independent Spanish literature emerged in the XIII-XIV c. as a result of translations from Latin and French; he forgets that during certain periods all literary art is only seen as translation, even to the extent that original creations are passed off as translations. In addition, Etkind does not take into consideration the tradition, going back to antiquity, of viewing any poetic work as a kind of translation, and also does not seem to take seriously the numerous testimonies by leading translators who argue that their work is not just “secondary,” “derivative,” but creative, original in all senses of the word. Thus, what we have here is once again not a theory of translation as such, but a theory of one type of translation activity during a particular time period.
Yu. A. Naida [5] similarly offers a linguistic theory of translation, mostly reliant upon the investigation of prose texts.
One may conclude, then, that the existence of various theories [of translation] (for example, machine, general linguistic, stylistic) is not due to fundamental disparities, but to the researchers’ lack of attention to certain facts, and to differences in subject matter. If I. I. Revzin and V. Yu. Rosenzweig[6] study mostly technical, terminological, and other similar texts, then of course in their theory of translation they will certainly—as they do—arrive at conclusions that would be completely unacceptable to A.D. Schweitzer, who focuses on works about socio-political topics, and even less so to E.G. Etkind, who researches translations of poetry, etc.
In that regard, it’s truly puzzling that A.V. Fedorov [7] does not broach the question of the subject of Translation Studies at all in his review article. That is even more strange in the cases where the very premises of translation theory turn out to be different depending on the kind of translation practices the researcher chooses to analyze (technical translation, free poetic translation, translation of sacred texts, translation from ancient to modern languages). Perhaps, as some might argue, the scientific theory of translation advanced by A. V. Fedorov should be viewed as concerning itself with translation in general, rather than with peculiarities arising when scholars investigate particular kinds of translation. However, that would be wrong. The fact is, as can be gleaned from Fedorov’s overall scholarly output, he also completely excludes from theoretical consideration a whole area of translation practice that is of great importance to the history of culture. We have in mind equivalent (or faithful) translation, that is, the kind of translation that forcibly imposes the syntactic, morphological, and even phonetic, not to mention semantic, structures of the source language onto those of the target language. This happens, for example, in the translation of patents, legal documents, philosophical terminology (such as “thing in itself” or “quidditas”), and complete philosophical texts (for instance, the works of the modern German philosopher M. Heidegger); equivalent translation has had an enormous impact on the development of all modern European languages through the Greek gospels’ translation into Latin, and in our times through [the translation of] the Bible into minority languages in the developing world. The very definition of the process of translation, according to A. V. Fedorov, excludes all those aspects of translation practices: “The goal of the translation process,” he writes, “is to create a linguistic product that corresponds in its semantic content and stylistic functions to the original as a semantic and aesthetic system” [8]. However, in the case of equivalent translation, the resulting linguistic product is to a great extent devoid of meaning in the target language (thanks to the many borrowings and calques), does not yet relate to anything in the real world, and is only potentially correspondent to the source language, i.e., it still needs the initial comprehension to be achieved through an engagement with a broader context. Essentially, translation that forces the target language to resemble the source language can never be truly equivalent, even though the potential for that does exist as a matter of probability. Thus, we are forced to conclude that the theory of translation offered by A. V. Fedorov is also not free of the research subject’s limitations, and is not applicable to vast areas of translation practices. Therefore, it cannot, strictly speaking, be called translation theory as such. It is simply a theory of certain kinds of socio-political and literary translation that are clearly dominant today.
It is appropriate to ask, then, what is translation in general, rather than this or that type of translation. This question cannot but interest the theorist [of translation]. Without setting ourselves the task of providing a comprehensive answer, we will nevertheless try to address the most obvious of its aspects. The first observation which presents itself here, is that translation in the proper sense of the word either has no specificity at all, or shares its specificity with other spheres of human activity.
2. It seems indisputable that the ability to translate does not emerge as a special skill, but as a development of an inborn predisposition, indistinguishable from speech in general. That is confirmed by the following observations. First, children as young as four, three, and sometimes even younger, are capable of translating if they are more or less bilingual. Second, when sometimes an oral interpreter unexpectedly hears in the flow of the foreign text a phrase in the language into which he is translating, he often simply repeats it without noticing, believing he is still translating. Third, acquiring certain information through different languages, we often cannot remember later whether we learned something by reading or hearing it in the foreign language, or in our native language. We can’t be certain if it had been necessary to accomplish any translation work, and can’t consciously differentiate between the comprehension of the original and the comprehension of the translated text. Fourth, and last, the boundaries between speech, dialect, and language are so blurred, that we can’t even say where translation proper ends and simple repetition and paraphrasing begin, which cannot be called translation anymore at all.
Let’s look at what happens in the second situation mentioned above. When the foreigner unexpectedly uses a phrase in the interpreter’s native language, and the latter, without noticing it, simply repeats it as if still translating, it is clear that the nature of the act of translation justifies this perception, and what matters in this case is that the received thought is being conveyed, not how it arrived into the interpreter’s consciousness in the first place. When the interpreter repeats the phrase spoken in his native language, he continues to believe to be performing in essence the same activity he was engaged in before, and which he called “translation.” Only we, having noticed that the thought was received in the same language the interpreter conveyed it in himself, do not call this activity “translation.”
In light of what was discussed before, we can define translation as one manifestation of a universal human ability, namely, the capability of verbal (though in some cases not only) expression. Put differently, translation in the most general sense is a phenomenon of human language, not human multilingualism.
The non-specificity of translation is reflected in its ancient Greek name: “hermeneia”—translation, interpretation, the gift of speech, speech. Thus “to translate” simply means to express, to convey.
3. The boundary between translation and other types of verbal creative activity is not only blurred, but it does not exist at all. It is similarly impossible to separate translation from independent poetry. Here we can only talk about various degrees of independence, which is once again imposing external, subjective criteria. On the one hand, the poet can be called, and is indeed often called, a translator from the language of the gods, that is, we could say, from the language of the Real to the human language. The poets themselves insist upon reminding us that they are simply intermediaries between the language of Being, and human speech. On the other hand, in some cases we call translators “poets.”
4. But although it is impossible or at least very difficult to talk about translation in general, it is easy to discuss historically established types of translation activity. The discussion of these historical types constitutes what we usually call translation theory. Here we must first note the change in our understanding of translation in antiquity versus our modern times. In classical Greece, thanks to its belief in its cultural exclusivity, it was unusual to pay attention to the formal characteristics of the foreign text. All non-Greeks spoke barbarian, βαρβαριστί, e.g., they were simply unintelligible. The translator’s job was to elucidate, ἑρμηνεύειν, this incomprehensible speech. However, very soon, with the beginning of the formation of the Roman version of the ancient civilization, the situation changed. There was a shift in the stance towards the foreign text in Europe: it was now perceived as a product of a culture that was superior to that of the receiving language. At the same time, there appeared a new attitude towards translation and a new term to express it: tradutio, translation per se, which implied a simple mechanical relocation, through which the original somehow became transferred in its totality into another language. As a result, attention to the external form of the text rose sharply, and there appeared literal translation, and a concern with the equivalence between the source and the target languages.
Since antiquity, literal and free translations became two opposing and irreconcilable poles in the history of European translation studies that still define the field today. Every translation theory is determined first and foremost by its relationship to those two extremes, whether it uses them as points to push against or rely upon. The theorists themselves often forget that the issue here is not so much the manner of translation, but the type of relationship with one’s own culture. The recognition of the independent value of one’s own culture, or at the very least its potential value, inevitably leans towards free translation, hermeneia. The rejection of the self-sufficient, unconditional value of one’s own language as a cultural tool, even if that rejection is unconscious, inevitably leads to translation as traductio.
5. To the extent to which with traductio we are dealing with the external form of the original, which is easy to pinpoint, there’s always the temptation to establish direct equivalences between the elements of that form and the elements of the resulting translation without any concern with meaning. When such equivalences become fixed, we have automatic translation. It does not have to be accomplished by machines only. Automatic translation is any substitution of elements from one form of expression with others. Contemporary translators use automatic translation often and widely. This can be demonstrated by the following fact. Knowing two foreign languages we can usually easily translate from one of them back into our native language and vice versa, but it is very difficult for us to begin translating from one foreign language into another if we haven’t done that before. The reason behind it is that in the process of language acquisition we have automated the associations between speech elements in the foreign and native language, whereas that’s not the case between the two foreign languages.
It is obvious that the mechanization of already existing automatic translation is a technical problem. In principle, it was solved a long time ago, for example, in Troyansky’s [9] translation machine. However, it is impossible and unethical to mechanize literary translation because it reveals an aspect of human nature. Such automation is also meaningless. After all, as the machine tries to emulate man’s creative ability, which is about self-examination (even in translation), it would have to submit to similar self-examination that would be devoid of any value for its creator.
Traductio is broader than automatic translation. Yet as a potentiality and an ideal, traductio is still a mechanical translation. Here is an example. When translating Plato in Russian following the rules of translation as traductio, the term μίμησις is always rendered, for reasons of terminological clarity, as “imitation.” As a matter of principal, the translator does not care that the word has many other meanings in ancient Greek. The only thing that matters to him is that in this particular Russian language context (style), μίμησις is always translated as “imitation.” As a result, we have a case of semantic equivalence. Indeed, how does the stylistically established choice of “imitation” in Russian differ from the Greek μίμησις? The only difference is external, in terms of form, as the meaning is the same and thus the two words are identical. This textual element is ready for automatic translation.
6. Literal, equivalent translation is capable immediately, without any preparation or need to learn another language, of immersing the reader into the foreign language’s perceptual environment. Even more, it is capable of actually changing the whole structure of a national language, or of an entire social group. This kind of reform was carried out, for example, by the translators of the Gospel into Latin or Old Bulgarian; today, the same thing happens as a result of the standardization of international terminology in various fields of science and technology. It is interesting that novice translators, who strive to transfer as fully as possible the foreign text and fetishize its peculiarities, tend to lean towards literal translation. But when the translator is unsure of his ability to recreate the style of capturing the conceptual and grammatical structure of the original’s language in his own idiolect, if not his native language as such, literal translation becomes an inexcusable absurdity.
7. Ἑρμηνεία and traductio are two legitimate historical types of translation [10]. It is wrong to think of literal and free translation as two extremes that must be avoided as a matter of principal, in favor of finding a middle ground, the so called “analogous,” “equivalent” translation. The chosen type of translation always depends on our own conscious or unconscious general cultural awareness. As for the term “analogous,” it suggests a kind of uncertainty in this regard. “Analogous” translation is supposed to be a compromise of sorts, but nobody knows what that really means. The very word “analogous” requires further clarifications. “Analogous,” that is, equal—in what? The drawback of the principal of “analogous” translation is that it leaves the translator without a positive starting point, without a strong position for making decisions, and only carries the negative meaning of avoiding multiple errors. “Analogous” translation has to take care of everything; it’s based on eclecticism, compromise, the desire to make everyone happy. The translator must take into consideration idioms, realia, logical compatibility, synonymity, word play, sound patterns, neologisms, subtext, general impact, the fluidity of the text, levels of reader comprehension, the style of the epoch in which the original was written, the peculiarities of the translated author, and much more. The timid “analogous” translator is completely overwhelmed by all these demands. There is a whole genre of half-joking evidence, which proves that fully analogous translation is impossible. For example, there’s a saying that the translator can never catch up with the author because while the latter always runs free, the former is weighed down by various dictionaries. The most interesting proof comes from Rilke. He wrote: “Several times I tried to develop the same idea in French and in German, but, to my greatest astonishment, in each language it progressed differently; this, most likely, is evidence of the artificiality of translation in general” [11].
Equivalence can serve only as an external, rather than content-based concept of translation, which is why it cannot become its principal foundation. Translation has another, more interesting principal foundation than equivalence. But here we run into the problem of the common human language.
8. The existence of different languages is one of the greatest human achievements. The diverse conceptual structures used by various peoples resemble different scientific methods utilized in the pursuit of the same goal. Every language observes the world from its own bell tower, which is why it always sees in it something new, inaccessible to others. The adoption of a universal world language would be tantamount to the standardization of human thought that would cause irreparable damage to humanity. Besides, the creation of a single global language through artificial means is impossible, because the individual physiological distinctions, as well as climate-related and other particularities would always lead to the emergence of dialects, and it would require an enormous effort to maintain the universal language.
At the same time, it is clear that mankind strives to achieve common language, that it is necessary, and would be realized at some point in the future. Here we arrive at an aporia that must be overcome in order to solve the problem of translation.
9. Like everything in nature, the internal structure of language appears to be reliant upon the combination of a certain number of repeated elements. This idea can be found in Plato, especially in the Theaetetus, where it is most clearly developed. The essences, which Plato understands logically as certain concepts of language, are made up of, as he claims, στοιχεῖα, elements, much like syllables are made up of letters; the Greek word for “letter” is also στοιχεῖα. These elements, the basic alphabet of our reality, are few in number, but they combine to form the diversity of all phenomena. The philosopher’s task, according to Plato, is to decipher that diversity, and uncover in it the few repeating elements. In our times L. El’meslev and others applied this idea to semantics. El’mslev has argued that finding the basic concepts, whose combinations create all meaning in language, would be a watershed moment in our history, comparable to that of the discovery of the basic speech sounds, which allowed for the creation of phonetic writing.
In the practice of linguistic creativity, basic linguistic images are associated with objects from our physical or social reality, which in turn connect with each other, and back to the first; the resulting complex linguistic images are secondary or tertiary formations depending on the degree of separation from the original basic elements, etc.
The translator does not have to delve deep into the level of elementary images, and compare derivative formations in different languages. However, he has the right to do so because he is aware of the common foundation of all languages. He would not be able to create his equivalences if he couldn’t appreciate the secondary nature, unruliness, historical conditioning of the exterior forms of any language. Translation and translatability are evidence of the fact that “everything could have been different,” proof that the linguistic game which created the original texts could have turned out differently, and that the material used by the original author could have been stitched together differently.
10. To the extent to which translation is a new re-play, a re-shaping of the given form according to the common human language rules, it is, in principle, just as independent as the original. It is simply that same original, only re-cast in a new form, and continuing to live in that new form. The original appears to be original only outwardly, in a temporal sense. In essence, that is, in its relation to the intrinsic possibilities of human speech, it is not more original than the translation.
The original is lost, imprisoned in its private form. Translatability rescues it from those constraints. It reveals the fundamental, even if only potential opportunity of the original to exist in any form. Translatability shows that while the original may have been written in Japanese or Abkhazian, it was also first written in the common human language. But, having liberated the original from its individual form, the translator now must breathe into it a new life in his native speech, recognizing and affirming in the process the universality of his own native tongue.
Thus, the mode of existence of the common human language enables the translatability of individual languages [12]. The universal language is also our native language, insofar as we discover and realize its ability to be an instrument of universal human thought.
11. This does not mean that translation must directly enrich the [translator’s] native language with new concepts, images, constructions, etc. Translation cannot set itself such a dubious task. The images and constructions of the foreign language should not interest us in and of themselves; they might be accidental and unnecessary. The concern with reproducing images for their own sake is a sickness of translation, that maims and confounds the [target] language. The translator is not a representative of any one language; he is a writer who connects with the universal language even as he creates in his own. No matter what the specific language he happens to work in, by using it he confirms it as a world language too.
12. The problem of finding suitable correspondences between various languages is related to translation practices. A proper theory of translation cannot but address the question of the differences between human languages in general, while at the same time strive to overcome those differences. The true foundation of translation activity then will turn out to be not this or that method of translation, but the art of liberating the common human language from the shackles of the particular.
1973
First published in The Translator’s Notebooks, #10, Moscow, 1973, pp. 3-14. Later the article appeared in the edited volume Word and Event, Moscow: URSS, 2001; second edition, Moscow: Dmitry Pozharsky University, 2010.
Translated and published in Reading in Translation with the permission of Olga Lebedeva.
[1] A.D. Schweitzer, “On the Problem of the Linguistic Study of the Translation Process.” Topics in Linguistic Study #4, Moscow, 1970, p. 30.
[2] I. I. Revzin, V. Yu. Rosenzweig, Fundamentals of General and Machine Translation, Moscow, 1964.
[3] A.D. Schweitzer, ibid., p. 39.
[4] E.G. Etkind, “Literary Translation: Art and Science.” Topics in Linguistic Study #4, Moscow, 1970, p. 18.
[5] Yu. A. Naida. “The Science of Translation.” Topics in Linguistic Study #4, Moscow, 1970, p. 3.
[6] I. I. Revzin, V. Yu. Rosenzweig, Fundamentals of General and Machine Translation, Moscow, 1964.
[7] A. V. Fedorov. “On the Relationship Between the Fragment and the Whole in the Process of Translation as Art,” Topics in Linguistic Study #6, Moscow, 1970, p. 27.
[8] Ibid. p. 31.
[9] See Collected Materials on a Translation Machine for Translating from One Language into Another, Proposed by P.P. Troyansky, 1933. Ed. by D. Yu. Panov. Moscow: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1959.
[10] A good, if brief review of the history of translation can be found in M. P. Alexeev’s Problems of Literary Translation, Irkutsk, 1931.
[11] Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in The Art of Translation #76, Moscow: Soviet Writer, 1970, p. 482.
[12] W. Benjamin. Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers Schriften. Frankfurt, 1955, p. 40–54.
Margarita Marinova is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Christopher Newport University, Virginia. She has published five books: Transnational Russian-American Travel Writing (Routledge, 2011, 2019); Mikhail Bulgakov’s Don Quixote (MLA, 2014); Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973 (Bucknell University Press, 2019), Russian Modernism in the Memories of Survivors (Toronto University Press, 2021), and The Art of Translation in Light of Bakhtinian Re-accentuation (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), as well as many articles about Russian and Soviet literature and culture, Cervantes and Mark Twain in Russia and Bulgaria, contemporary Bulgarian literature, women’s literature, and travel studies in scholarly collections and journals.
Vladimir Veniaminovich Bibikhin (1938-2004) was a Russian philosopher, translator, and philologist. During the 1970s and 1980s, Bibikhin established himself as a prominent translator in Russian of the most complex philosophical, theological, and literary texts, and as a widely respected humanitarian scholar of a rare and extensive erudition. His translations were remarkable not only as philological, but also as philosophical achievements, as they aggressively revised the principles of text interpretation, typical of the Russian tradition of philosophical translation. Among the philosophers and writers whose works he translated in Russian were Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Jung, Hannah Arendt, Wilhelm Dilthey, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, García Lorca, and Heinrich Böll.