发布时间 : 星期二 文章翻译理论与实践(2008)更新完毕开始阅读646feb08bb68a98271fefa93
Translation (Workbook)
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Translation theory and practice
? 翻译中的内容与载体的关系
(翻译中的内容及其载体的选择，《上海科技翻译》2002，3。)
1 )翻译中形式和意义的关系
原文和译文之间的联系是意义上的联系，发生变化的仅仅是形式。内容和载体的问题跟词汇意义、语法意义和语用意义有关。在整体交际过程中它们之间的特点如下：
(1) 词汇意义载蓄于以词为单位的符号形式中。
(2)词与语法之间存在着密不可分的关系。索绪尔(2001: 112-113)认为词的价值即体现在它所代表的概念上，又体现在它与其他词的关系上。
(3)词与语境有密切的关系，是语篇的有机组成部分。Leech(1987) 就语境和语义学的关系指出：假若从思想、概念或者内在的思想来讨论意义，那么意义便被置于科学观察的范围之外；因此，人们应该根据情景、用法和语法来研究意义，也就是根据语言行为表面的和可以观察到的相互关联的事物来研究意义。语境不仅为语言活动提供一定的背景，而且决定语言活动的性质。语境特征一方面与语义有对应关系，另一方面又体现一定的社会文化系统。(转引自俞如诊，金顺德，1994)这段话说明词义涉及到语法、语篇和语用几个层面，一个词在这几个层面上与其他词发生联系，才能体现出其整体交际价值。 2) 句法和词汇意义的关系
(1)He flew to the south.(He moved through the air to the south by plane.)
(2)The bird flew to the south. (The bird moved with its wings through the air to the
south.)
(3)Her hair was flying about. (Her hair was moved about by the wind.) 3) 语境与话语意义的关系
(5)My father was a nice man. I miss him a lot. (6)I don?t like my father, but he was a nice man. (7)Is this place taken?
(8)Is there anyone sitting here?
(9)May I sit here?( Larson,1997：9) 4) 翻译中的形式和意义
(10)He has been pursued, day by day, and year by year, by a most phenomental astonishing luckiness.
(11)I marveled at the relentless determination of the rain. (12)He discussed greatness and excellence. (13)I approached her very hesitantly. “Want to come and play?”
Piquette looked at me with a sudden flash of scorn. “I ain?t a kid,” she said.
Wounded, I stamped angrily away… (The Loons) (14)Would you like a lift into town? Yes, please. 5) 等值和激活框架－框架模式
(15) I once heard someone shout, “Look out!” I put my heard out of a window and
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a bucket of water fell on me. It seems that “look out ”may mean “don?t look out.” (16) The fair breeze blew,
The white foam flew,
The furrow followed free.
(17) In Hollywood a marriage is success if it outlasts milk. (18) A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
(19) Q: What is the thinnest book in the world?
A: What Men Know about Women.
Q: What is the thickest book in the world? A: What Men Think They Know About Women. (20) Q: Why won't sharks attack lawyers?
A: Professional courtesy. ? Catford
Linguistic translation and translation shifts
Catford's approach to translation equivalence clearly differs from that adopted by Nida since Catford had a preference for a more linguistic-based approach to translation and this approach is based on the linguistic work of Firth and Halliday. His main contribution in the field of translation theory is the introduction of the concepts of types and shifts of translation. Catford proposed very broad types of translation in terms of three criteria:
The extent of translation (full translation vs partial translation);
The grammatical rank at which the translation equivalence is established (rank-bound translation vs. unbounded translation);
The levels of language involved in translation (total translation vs. restricted translation).
Translation shifts: defined as 'departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the SL to the TL' (ibid.:73) Catford argues that there are two main types of translation shifts, namely level shifts, where the SL item at one linguistic level (e.g. grammar) has a TL equivalent at a different level (e.g. lexis), and category shifts which are divided into four types:
Structure-shifts, which involve a grammatical change between the structure of the ST and that of the TT;
Class-shifts, when a SL item is translated with a TL item which belongs to a different grammatical class, i.e. a verb may be translated with a noun;
Unit-shifts, which involve changes in rank;
Intra-system shifts, which occur when 'SL and TL possess systems which approximately correspond formally as to their constitution, but when translation involves selection of a non-corresponding term in the TL system'. For instance, when the SL singular becomes a TL plural.
Translatability
There are essentially two points of view from which translatability has been traditionally approached: the universalist one and the monadist one. Supporters of the former approach claim that the existence of linguistic universals ensure translatability.
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Those who endorse the latter approach maintain that each linguistic community interprets reality in its own particular way and this jeopardises translatability. Some theorists have oscillated between the extremes represented by universalism and monadism and some have attempted to combine aspects of both perspectives. There is a third, more recent approach to translatability: that of the Deconstructionists, who question the notion of translation as transfer of meaning.
Von Humboldt: All translation seems to me simply an attempt to solve an impossible task. Every translator is doomed to be done in by one of two stumbling blocks: he will either stay too close to the original, at the cost of taste and the language of his nation, or he will adhere too closely to the characteristics peculiar to his nation, at the cost of the original. The medium between the two is not only difficult, but downright impossible (Wilss, 1982: 35). He proposes to explain the possiblity of comunication across cultures. To apparent untranslatability, which results from structural incompatibilities between languages, one can respond with potential translatability, with the possibility of expressing the concepts of human experience in any human language (see Wilss, 1982: 35 ff.).
Nida and Charles R. Taber pronounce: \that can be said in one language can be said in another, unless the form is an essential element of the message\
According to Catford, in order for textual equivalence to exist, source language and target language elements must have some essential features in common. A text is more or less translatable. He proposes the following definition of translatability: Linguistic untranslatability: Translation fails---or untranslatability occurs---when it is impossible to build functionally relevant features of the situation into the contextual meaning of the TL text. Broadly speaking, the cases where this happens fall into two categories. Those where the difficulty is linguistic, and those where is is cultural.
Linguistic untranslatability occurs when two or more distinct grammatical or lexical items are expounded in one and the same phonological or graphological form. (1) The workers can fish.
(2) Judge: “What makes you think that you could park your car here?” Tourist: “Well, there was a big sign that read: Fine for parking!”
(3) “It?s everybody?s right, right?” Majetich said in a quick rebuff, “You think all
your right is right?”
(4) A Farewell to Arms
The second type of linguistic ambiguity is due to what would usually be called polysemy; that is, not to the fact that two or more items have the same exponent, but that one single item has more than one meaning. Strickly speaking, the term of polysemy is misleading. “It is not a case of one item having several meanings, but of one item having a wide or general contextual meaning, covering a wide range of specific situational features.”
(5)“Can you see a female.”
“Of course, I can see a female as easily as a male.”
Cultural untranslatability arises \for the SL [source language] text, is completely absent from the culture of which the
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TL [target language] is a part\ For instance, the names of some institutions, clothes, foods and abstract concepts, amongst others.
(6) The president-elected is a typical baby-kisser.
(7)Bright red costumes, with hats, shoes and stockings to match, are to be all the craze in the spring. Smart women will have to be careful not to yawn in the streets in case some short sighted person is on his way to post a letter.
? 意义取向的翻译
1．符号的语义图式
(1) The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon.
(2) Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them.
“What now, Lord?” I asked, sitting in the church. My life stretched out before me as an empty abyss. (3) Big storms sometimes pull water from the ocean up into huge, spinning columns called waterspouts…Waterspouts stretched from the sea all the way up to the clouds. (4) Later, people made lighter boats by stretching animal skins around sticks. (5) No stretch of imagination could visualize anything half so lovely. (6) His ideas stretched throughout the centuries. 2. Basic types of meaning 1) Types of meaning
(1) Referential (sense) -----dictionary meaning----The meaning of a given word is governed by the external object or idea that particular word is supposed to refer to. This type of meaning, i.e., the meaning of reference, is often referred to as the \meaning(sense), the \meaning, the \meaning, or the \lexical item. The conceptual meaning of a word is the type of meaning which could be mainly deduced in isolation from any other linguistic or even non-linguistic context.
(2) Contextually referential meaning----The meaning of a given word or set of words is best understood as the contribution that word or phrase can make to the meaning or function of the whole sentence or linguistic utterance where that word or phrase occurs. The meaning has to be derived from the context of the utterance. (3) Pragmatic meaning----The meaning of a given word is governed not only by the external object or idea that particular word is supposed to refer to, but also by the use of that particular word or phrase in a particular way, in a particular context, and to a particular effect. Pragmatic meaning is the logical meaning that is different from the lexical reference of a particular word, and the types of associated meaning. The meaning has to be derived from the context of the utterance.
(4) Associated meaning---- There is a distinction between conceptual meaning, on the hand, and connotative(including cultural meaning) stylistic, affective, reflected, and collocative types of meaning on the other hand. Thus, we classify the last five types of meaning under one general category of associated meaning. The meaning
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