• Teaching French>English Translation to Beginning Translators:  A Linguistic Approach. The ATA [American Translators Association] Chronicle, Jan.1999, pp.50-54.

Abstract

 To help beginning translators recognize and avoid the major pitfalls of French to English translation and steer them away from erroneous word for word translation, a linguistic approach is particularly effective. 

 Such an approach emphasizes

• the delineation of translation units, that is to say concepts beyond mere words
• the realization that words are polysemous and that the semantic range of a word will not coincide between source and target languag
• the identification of false cognates
• the recognition of semantic, structural and metalinguistic obstacles to literal translation
• along with the solutions available to counter these problems, the strategies used by professional translators: borrowing, calque, transposition, modulation, equivalence and adaptation.

Introduction

 Few people will deny that teaching translation requires methodology.  Unfortunately, a still too pedagogical practice, the "sink or swim" approach which places beginners directly in front of texts without any prior training in the recognition of the major pitfalls of translation, can prove both frustrating and elusive. Worse, students may be turned off translation for good.

The whole undertaking could be rendered much less daunting if students are first taught how to recognize problems and shown how to use the various proven techniques that are available to overcome these problems.

A science which has made great advances over the course of this century, linguistics, or the comparative study of languages and their general mechanisms, offersus an invaluable tool.. By comparing and contrasting French-English stylistics and syntax, linguists have provided the basis with which to approach the task of translating.

Translation Units

If one may be allowed to liken the translation process to a transcoding operation (when the message from one linguistic group is decoded and all of its elements transferred so as to become understandable to a different linguistic group), then the first main challenge for the pedagogue is to convince novices to give up the comfortable practice of word-for-word translation., a prevalent and deplorable habit, which at best results in non-diomatic English, and at worst in utter gibberish.  This can be accomplished by training students to recognize concepts beyond mere words, or what constitutes a so-called unit of translation, and by pointing out that one word in French does not necessarily correspond to another single word in English and vice versa, an  observation which is valid for all for all grammatical word categories.  Thus un poids lourd"is a "truck", un chef d'ochestre a "conductor", the adjectivestravailleur means "hard working",and  "mal a l'aise ,"uncomfortable" , the verb rentabiliser is "to make profitable",and  faire de la vitesse. "to speed", the prepaosition malgré means "in spite of" and the conjunction au fur et à mesure que , "as" etc.

The demonstration must also be made that a particular message is not necessarily equal to the sum total of its parts and may need to be interpreted and adapted in order to become intelligible to its intended recipients;  that for instance the proverb “Comme on fait son lit, on se couche” must be turned into a very different simile in English “As you sow, so shall you reap”, even though the message remains identical.  A translation unit (TU) has been defined as “the smallest portion of a sentence whose words cannot be translated separately without resulting in mistranslation or nonsense[1].”  But T.U.s constitute a vast category ranging from semantic or lexical units -words or groups of words whose target language counterparts can be looked up in a bilingual dictionary and therefore present no special difficulty-, to grammatical units which presuppose comprehensive bilingual grammatical knowledge on the part of the translator.  These grammatical units comprise cohesive grammatical structures which differ between the source and the target language thereby precluding word for word translation, structures such as articulated versus compound expressions (une compagnie à croissance rapide:  a fast growing company), active versus passive voice preferences (On m’a dit dit:  I was told), or verbs followed by one preposition in one language and by no preposition at all or a non-corresponding preposition in the other language (i.e. chercher: to look for; téléphoner à: to phone; commencer par: to start with).  As we have just seen in the case of the two proverbs quoted above, T.U.s can even extend to entire messages whenever socio-cultural disparities between the two languages prevent any sort of literal translation, as in the case of greetings, reflex-formulas, idioms, clichés, proverbs, public signs, references to the cultural heritage of the SL linguistic group, etc.  Proper delineation of translation units can indeed prove a tedious operation, nevertheless it is a necessary apprenticeship and a prerequisite to serious translation.  The process serves as a reminder to look to concepts beyond words and helps prevent over- or undertranslation, that is to say seeing more or fewer TUs than actually exist.  Professional translators go through it automatically.  With years of experience it has become to them second nature.

The Challenge of Polysemous Words

Another challenge is making beginners realize that words are polysemous and that semantic units rarely coincide one hundred per cent between SL and TL.  For example a word like oeil and what is generally given as its English counterpart, eye, have semantic ranges which only coincide in the concrete meaning of both words, leaving their figurative and idiomatic meanings unmatched:  if “to have a sharp eye” may be translated as “avoir l’oeil vif”, expressions such as “the eye of a needle” or “to be in the public eye” have to be rendered by some other word, “le chas d’une aiguille” and “être en vue”.  In fact one of the most prevalent problems a translator must face is the one caused by polysemy, which looms as one of the major stumbling blocks in the progress of machine translation:  artificial intelligence often just cannot recognize the appropriate meaning of a particular word in light of its context.  An extreme example may be offered with this clip from the Wall Street Journal deriding a new translation application:  the program translated Chancellor Kohl of Germany as Chancellor “Cabbage” (the English word for Kohl) failing to detect that it referred to a family name[2].   Polysemy is also often the culprit for faulty amateurish translations which sometimes result in unintentional puns such as the one seen on a sign posted on an out-of-work Bucharest elevator:  “We regret that during the time of repair clients will be unbearable.”  In short, words cannot be translated out of context and it is the context which highlights one of their various meanings, whether concrete, figurative, idiomatic, or a specialty meaning.  Thus une poire may mean a pear in standard French as well as a sucker in slang; or le torchon, the rag, but in theatrical jargon the curtain.  Only the context, the situation, the public targeted will be the determining factors for the choice of the right TL equivalent.

Deceptive Cognates

Deceptive cognates, which French linguists refer to as faux amis, constitute another translation trap big enough to warrant the publication of dozens of dictionaries addressing the problem.  The term designates words with a seemingly identical etymology in both languages but whose meanings are either totally unrelated or have evolved over the course of time to the point of covering very different realities, words such as achever (to finish)  and to achieve (accomplir) or “actuellement (at present) and actually (en réalité).  Partial faux amis add to the translator’s confusion, since in polysemous words one of the meanings may be a false friend while the others are not, i.e. réaliser may mean to realize as in English in one context but also to achieve, a false cognate, in another.  Adversaries of Franglais have bemoaned the current unprofessional tendency in the French media to retain the English meaning of some false cognates in words such as site, romance, or opportunité for instance, compounding the problem of invasion of English words into the French language.

Borrowings, Claques  and the Creation of New Words

One complication in translation arises from the fact that certain concepts may exist in the source language but not in the target language.  When a particular culture is either more creative culturally or more technologically advanced than another, it will create new concepts and new words, still unknown in the T.L.  When confronted with such concepts and to make up for the lack, the T.L. may then borrow them along with the terms to designate them in their original form, or else opt to copy them by translating them as semantic or structural calques for a more “native” touch.  Thus the Anglo-Saxon concept of week end has been borrowed as such by the French, while it has been adopted in the guise of a semantic calque by French Quebec as une fin de semaine.  A semantic calque respects the syntactical characteristics of the target language whereas a structural calque adopts even the syntactical characteristics of the source language.  As examples of structural calques the French have accepted the compound word surprise partie, which runs counter to French grammatical usage, and the Anglo-Saxons have secretary general with an adjective placed after the noun, French style.

Structural Obstacles to an Idiomatic Transaltion and  the Use of Transposition

Sometimes the obstacles in the way of an idiomatic translation are not semantic but structural.  When this is the case, the technique known as transposition may be the answer.  A transposition is a process which involves a switch in grammatical categories between the S.L. and the T.L. without in any way affecting the contents of the message.  In other words a noun need not be translated as a noun but may be rendered as a verb for instance, or a verb as an adverb, an adjective as a preposition etc.  The possibilities are many.  When there is no other idiomatic way of translating a message, transpositions will be compulsory, as in maison à vendre: house for sale (transposition verb-noun), or they may be optional when only an alternative to literal translation, as in réduction de 25% sur tous les articles: 25% reduction on all merchandise (literal translation), or 25% off all merchandise (transposition noun-preposition).  However, in the latter case, there will be a difference stylistically: the literal translation will usually be more literary and the transposition more colloquial.

An interesting off-shoot of transposition, known as cross-transposition, points to disparities between French and English when it comes to apprehending reality for concepts involving an action along with the means or manner of performing that action, or a situation along with the cause or reason for that situation.  If we examine the following two sentences in French “J’ai descendu l’escalier à la hâte” and “Ils sont morts d’ennui” we soon realize that a literal translation: “I went down the staircase hastily” and “They are dead of boredom” falls very short of being idiomatic.  On the other hand, a transposition coupled with a cross-pattern switch in word order answers our particular problem: “I ran downstairs” (transposition verb-adverb and adverb-verb) and “They are bored to death” (transposition passive verb-noun and noun-passive verb).  This switch in word order points to a different stylistic pattern between the two languages, and allows the linguist to make the observation that French tends to favor the intellectual and more abstract sequence of result first, means or manner second, while English prefers the visual and logical order of things: means or manner first, result second[3].

Shifts in Thinking Patterns and the Use of Modulation

Whereas transposition involves a change in grammatical categories, modulation, the second non-literal translation technique, involves a change in ways of thinking, in categories of thought.  How does a modulation work?  If one can visualize a circle representing a concept and two arrows pointing to it from different directions, each arrow representing one language and its particular way of approaching the concept, one can get a good idea of what modulation is about.  Like translation units, modulations occur at the word level, the grammatical level and the message level.  A classic example of a word modulation is Vinay and Darbelnet’s choice of the pair pompier-fireman to illustrate the divergent approaches of the two languages in apprehending one concept: the French word chooses to emphasize the first part of the task and function of the man, pumping the water, and English the latter part, attacking the fire.  Word modulations do not pose any particular challenge to the translator, since they are set in the language and therefore can be found in bilingual dictionaries, but a study of their various categories provides an interesting insight into their mechanism.  Here are a few representative selections of how French speakers and English speakers view the same reality:  (in the concrete to abstract category) des vacances de neige, a winter vacation; (abstract to concrete) un tableau d’affichage, a bulletin board; (means-result) en venir aux mains, to come to blows; (result-means) un cours de rattrapage, a remedial class; (cause-effect) un bourreau de travail, a workaholic; (effect-cause)  une maladie mortelle, a life threatening disease; (part-whole) une maison-mère: a parent company; (whole-part) le billet vert, the green back; (part for other part) une brûlure d’estomac, a heart burn; (different images) une pomme de discorde, a bone of contention; (different sensorial perceptions) broyer du noir, to have the blues; (different intellectual perceptions) une chance sur deux, a fifty-fifty chance; (opposites) une assurance-maladie, health insurance; (learned popular) un infarctus du myocarde, a heart attack.  We find many word modulations in lexical units working as affinity groups, i.e. in verbal expressions (avoir lieu: to take place, poser une question: to ask a question etc.); in nominal expressions (la fourchette des prix: the price range; une tranche d’imposition: a tax bracket); adjectival expressions (une mauvaise réponse: a wrong answer, des rapports étroits: a close relationship); and even in adverbial expressions (à fond: thoroughly). Grammatical modulations, which affect grammatical structures, work in the same way.  Those involving prepositions are particularly interesting, although very often overlooked.  We find modulations in prepositions tied to a noun, as in marcher sous la pluie: to walk in the rain, boire dans un verre: to drink out of a glass, apprendre à la radio: to hear on the radio etc., and in prepositions tied to a verb: être en colère contre: to be mad at or with, dépendre de: to depend on, veiller sur: to look after etc.  There are of course many forms of grammatical modulations, some more sophisticated and complex than others.  They may involve number (La police a attrapé le voleur: the police have caught the thief), or tenses and moods, such as use of the present or present perfect in English instead of the future or future perfect in French after conjunctions of time (Quand tu seras prêt, nous pourrons partir:  when you are ready, we will leave) and whereas word modulations mirror a translator’s lexical ability, such modulations are a reflection of his grammatical knowledge. They also never are an option.

Message modulations on the other hand can be found neither in a standard bilingual dictionary nor in a grammar.  They involve a phrase, a sentence or a whole message, remain at the sole discretion of the person doing the translation, and serve as the touchstone of what constitutes a good and experienced translator, one who has learned to recognize that a change of focus is needed in order to give the message an idiomatic turn.  Among their main categories we find the positive vs. negative viewpoint (Je ne vois vraiment pas en quoi j’ai tort: I fail to see why I am wrong), the active-passive viewpoint (On m’a dit de revenir: I was told to come back), the singular-plural viewpoint (Tous les dimanches furent occupés: every Sunday was busy), the personal-impersonal viewpoint (Il se peut qu’ils viennent:  they may come), the abstract-concrete viewpoint (Savez-vous faire cela? Can you do this?), and opposite viewpoints (Pouvez-vous patienter? Are you in a hurry?).  Like transpositions, modulations may be necessary, when there is no other idiomatic way of transposing a message, or optional, when one of the various ways of translating the message.  Thus, the following sentence “Le chien n’a pas cessé d’aboyer” may be translated literally as “The dog did not stop barking”, or with a transposition verb-adverb “The dog barked continuously”, or still with a modulation negative-positive “The dog kept barking”.  It is further interesting to note that modulation is often interrelated with transposition.  Verbal expressions with one auxiliary in French and another in English are a good example of this phenomenon:  avoir faim/ soif/ raison/ tort = to be hungry/thirsty/right/wrong.  A sentence like “J’ai de la chance” may be translated as “I am lucky “(a transposition noun-adjective and a modulation active-passive) or as “I am in luck” (a modulation alone).

When to Resort to Equivalence and Adaptation

Linguists disagree on the status of the last two translation techniques, equivalence and adaptation.  Vinay and Darbelnet and their followers give them as valid categories just like transposition and modulation, while Chuquet and Paillard, for instance, consider that equivalence is nothing but an off-shoot of modulation and that adaptation, in which socio-cultural factors that are subjective as well as linguistic come into play, constitutes too vague a category [4].  At any rate, equivalence is indeed related to modulation, for it can best be defined as a set message modulation, but it also presents distinctive traits. Among these set messages we find greetings, exclamations, clichés, idioms, slang expressions, proverbs and axioms, and cultural references.  Most of these and their English counterparts are consigned to specialized dictionaries.  They are used in specific situations and reflect the usages, customs and trends of a particular linguistic group.  They are modulations, in that they view a concept from a distinctive angle - often an image as in the case of proverbs, clichés and idioms-, but they are also set, in that you must use them as they are, without modification.  Clearly the images conveyed cannot pass literally from one language to another:  a cliché like être sage comme une image (to be as good as gold), an idiomatic expression like s’occuper de ses oignons (to mind one’s own business), a proverb like “Il ne faut pas vendre la peau de l’ours avant de l’avoir tué (a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush), or a cultural allusion like l’homme du 18 juin (De Gaulle) use imagery which is steeped in the history and culture of the language and therefore call for different signs that speak more clearly to the T.L. audience.  With equivalence we are in the domain of the metalinguistic, beyond the mere linguistic aspect of the language and into the socio-cultural environment by which a language is always affected.  Not surprisingly then we will find the need for this technique in the translation of plays, dialogues, as well as magazines and newspapers, and generally all culturally sensitive material.

The last translation technique and the furthest removed from literal translation, adaptation, does indeed constitute a large and vague category.  When one SL concept is untranslatable because it does not exist, or does not exist exactly in the same way in the TL, it needs to be adapted or approximated in order to become understandable to the targeted linguistic group. In fact understandability is the main purpose of adaptation, which is unquestionably the least satisfactory of all translation procedures, since some loss occurs in the transfer of the message.  Many French cultural concepts do not exist in English and need to be adapted, from the familiar form of address tu to conceptions of time, space, measures, meals, and institutions, to name but a few.

Conclusion: the Benefits of a Linguistic Approach to Translation

In conclusion the linguistic approach does teach beginning translators the skills necessary to make a serious job of translation assignments.  It renders the task less formidable, and in addition serves a pedagogical purpose:  it fosters powers of observation concerning the mechanisms of the languages studied.  By comparing and contrasting the respective syntax, stylistic patterns and metalinguistic components of French and English, by finding out what the two have in common, or what sets them apart, students deepen their understanding of both and learn to make the passage from one to the other smoother, quicker and more accurate.  Such a method may have eased the way towards a life-long love of the art of translation.

References

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