The Horrors

Although practitioners of translation claim that they have come to fully understand the terrible "miseries" of translation only after reading what theorists had to say on the subject, sometimes a single passage in a book can sow various fears in the heart of the translator.

The greatest among the fears is that of untranslatability. It happens when the target language has no corresponding words, tenses, phonetic or grammatical entities that occur in the source language, or when the target language and its culture lack a relevant situational feature for the source language text (allusions, symbols, puns).

Translators apply various strategies to cope with untranslatability. They can resort to:

• adaptation - when social or cultural reality of the source text with reality taken from the culture of the target language;
• borrowing - when the translator uses the word or phrase of the original, usually in italics;
• calque - when the translation of an expression is rendered word-for-word;
• compensation - when the translator adds elements to the target texts to make up for their absence in the target language;
• paraphrase - when a word of the source text is replaced, in the target text, by a whole group of words that explain a non-existent notion in the target language;
• translator's note - when the translator breaks the flow of the text by an annotation that compensates the untranslatability.

Whatever the strategy, it is always the choice of the lesser evil.

Readings:

Willis Barnstone, "Problems and Parables", The Poetics of Translation, 15-51, 265-271.

George Steiner, After Babel, ix-xviii, 1-50.

Jaques Derrida, "From Des Tours de Babel." Rainer Schulte, John Biguenet (eds), Theories of Translation, 218-227.

Walter Benjamin, "The task of the translator." Rainer Schulte, John Biguenet (eds), Theories of Translation, 218-227.

© Jan Rybicki 2005