In the previous unit, speaking about intertextual translation, we were led to widen the object of our analysis to the whole semiosphere, to the whole cultural universe, the environment in which cultural influences interact.
As we said, there are no texts rising from nowhere, independently of the context,
from outside the semiosphere system. Consequently, when an author writes a text, a part of what
she writes is a product of outer influences, while another part is a product of her own
personal contemplation. The author's creativity, however, is not shown only in the part of
the work deriving from her personal creation, but also in her ability to choose and synthesize
what others have written or said.
When an author assimilates material - in an explicit or implicit, conscious or
unconscious way -coming from others' texts, she makes an intertextual translation,
and the assimilated material is called intertext 1.
At this stage of our exposition, we are not yet interested in defining whether the other's
material is originally written or pronounced in the same code as the metatext or in another.
For the moment, we need only define whether it is a quotation and, if so, if it is an
explicit or implicit one. If, on the other hand, it is an allusion, we need to know how
difficult it is for the reader to understand it. Otherwise, the author can also unwillingly
echo elements she has absorbed from the semiosphere system.
Torop makes an important point here: «The author and the translator and the reader
all have a textual memory» 2.
This synthesizing comment has many repercussions on the act of practical translation. This
means that, beyond the author's memory, allowing her to insert other's texts in her text,
the translator must - if she wants to do a good job - realize the presence of the other's
text and make it recognizable to the reader of the metatext.
If, for example, an author "quotes" a passage by someone else without using
quotation marks or other graphic devices to indicate the beginning and end points of the
quotations, it is very important for the translator to catch the citation and
convey it to the reader of the metatext. In every single case the translator must decide how
to do that, for instance whether within or outside of the translated text.
It is also very important to remember that the reader has a textual memory,
because that determines the possibility to grasp the presence of other's text (intertext)
within the declared author's text.
Whenever the reader's textual memory or her encyclopedic ability are insufficient
to grasp said intertextual links, the damage is limited to the fruition of this reader and of
those who are going to receive information about that text from her. On the other hand, when
the reader is the translator - i.e. when the translator's textual memory (or competence) is
insufficient - the problem is more complex, because the risk is to be unable to convey in the
metatext the mark of other's language (of other's word, in Bakhtinian terms). Such missing
links have repercussions not only on one single reader, but on all possible metatext readers.
As to intratextual translation, all that was said about intertextual
translation is true, with the exception that, in some way, we have to deal with "inner
quotations", of links of the author to herself, from a passage of her work to an
other one: it is, therefore, the interweaving of the author's poetics. While the intertext
has the semiosphere as a reference system, "intratext" refers to the microsystem of the
author's text.
Extratextual translation concerns the intersemiotic translation described
by JAkobson. In it, the original material - prototext - is generally verbal text, while metatext
is made, for example, of visual images, still, or moving as in film. It can also work the other
way round, with a prototext made of music, images and so on, and a verbal metatext.
| Every art's language has its own articulation; its composing elements can
be completely different. At the same time, however, natural language can be used as a language
to describe all of them (metalanguage). Art criticism is actually a description of visual and
linguistic art works by means of the natural language 3. |
In every art, expressive devices are different, and each art provides expressive
capabilities that the other arts may not possess. In cinema, it is the director's creativity
that allows her to choose and combine the expressive capabilities available and may be missing
in other kinds of codes. Torop gives us a very interesting example of creativity in the choice
of cinematographic devices:
| [...] in Buñuel's last film That Obscure Object of Desire, where the aged
man's incapacity to understand a young woman (later his wife) is rendered - in the psychological
space - using two distinct actresses for the role of the same character. In the topographic
chronotope, therefore, the lines of the plot see the hero meet two women, that in the
psychological chronotope is one concrete and well defined woman in each scene, while in the
metaphysical chronotope they are a mysterious and unappreciated woman 4. |
In literature, this kind of artistic device would be unfeasible, because what in the film is
rendered by an image (the viewer suddenly sees another actress on the screen, but he realizes
that she represents the same character as the other), in terms of natural language that would
be rendered very clumsily owing to the lengthy and difficult verbal explanation. The writer
would need an additional artistic device.
Such reflections have important consequences when we must translate a written
text into a film, because the equivalence principle is far from being present, and we must work
instead on the different expressive potential of all the codes involved. The analysis of this
kind of problems falls within the framework of the analysis of translation in a broad sense, of
total translation.
What we said about the various kinds of translation suggests that a solely linguistic
approach to translation studies in inadequate in itself because it "doesn't cover the whole
range of translation problems" 5.
The methodological contribution of semiotics is necessary because semiotic metalanguage is more
open, on one hand, to the different codes or sign systems, and, on the other hand, to the cultural
aspects of the translation reception 6.
The core of translation studies must be a universal model of the translation process
applicable to all of the various kinds of translation we have talked about. And, on the basis of
this model, we must try to describe, without any evaluative purpose, how the translation process
works. This because "a science that has as a purpose to describe translation as a process should
not be prescriptive, it should be theoretical" 7.
Bibliographical references
EVEN-ZOHAR I. Polysystem Studies. Poetics Today, 11, n. 1, 1990.
GORLÉE, D. L. Semiotics and the problem of translation with special reference to the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce. Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1994.
REVZIN I., ROZENCVEJG V. Osnovy obshchego i mashinnogo perevoda [The bases of general and automatic translation], Moskvà, 1964.
TOROP P. La traduzione totale. Ed. by B. Osimo. Modena, Guaraldi Logos, 2000. ISBN 88-8049-195-4. Or. ed. Total´nyj perevod. Tartu, Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus [Tartu University Press], 1995. ISBN 9985-56-122-8.
TOURY G. In Search of a Theory of Translation, Tel Aviv University, The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1980.
1 Torop 2000, p. 223-304.
2 Torop 2000, p. 31.
3 Torop 2000, p. 316.
4 Torop 2000, p. 326.
5 Torop 2000, p. 188.
6 Gorlée 1993; Even-Zohar 1990; Toury 1980.
7 Revzin, Rozencvejg 1964, p. 21.
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ON THE NET
(english)
TOROP P.
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