TRANSLATION AND MEANING: A CULTURAL- COGNITIVE ...

THE UNRELIABLE TRANSLATOR
VERONICA POPESCU
University of Iaşi
One aspect of translation to which theorists tend to refer to rather
than explore is the very personal and essential contribution that the
translator brings, the use of imagination. Nowadays, when literary
translation is supposedly a more responsible act than in the past, the
translator needs knowledge of the literary and critical history of the
particular text and/or author, awareness of the reason(s) why the particular
text was selected for translation, a good knowledge of his or her own
cultural context, some idea about the expectations of the target readership,
and, last but not least, the imaginative power to enter the fictional world of
the text and to recreate it, according to his or her own interpretation of it, in
the text of the translation.
Functionalist or communicational approaches to the process are
useful in the larger frame of translation as a means to allow texts of different
types to enter the polysystem of the translating culture, to use Itamar Even
Zohar’s term (1978/1990). As Mona Baker shows in her comprehensive In
Other Words (1992, passim), the translator evaluates the strictly textual and
paratextual elements of the original, s/he attempts to find equivalent words,
phrases in his or her language, analyses denotations and connotations,
preserves the overall structure of the original and shows great care for the
rhetorical devices employed by the writer, particularly in those cases where
they are of particular importance for the literary quality of the original,
paraphrases, operates cuts and explicitation if necessary, finds solutions for
culture-bound elements non-existent in the target culture, and operates all
changes that would make the target text readable, coherent and acceptable as
translation. However, not enough is said about the translator as reader,
interpreter, a literary critic in his own right. Christiane Nord (1997) speaks
of the translator’s multiple tasks while approaching a text for translation,
showing particular care for the writer’s intention, but also for the target
readers who must not only understand why the text enjoyed a particular
status in the source culture and was therefore considered worth translating,
but also respond in a fashion that is compatible with the assumed writer’s
intention (89-93). What practice shows, however, is that the translator is
often tempted or forced to misinterpret that original intention and to be
instrumental in the process of manipulation between cultures. It is what the
Manipulation School, represented by scholars such as Theo Hermans, André