TRANSLATION AND MEANING: A CULTURAL- COGNITIVE ...

adaptation, perceived by the midcult public as an encounter with real art
(Milton, 1997: 433).
This brief analysis of the voluntary unreliability of the translator,
particularly in the case of intersemiotic translation, has shown that there are
different factors contributing to the choice for unfaithfulness. In broad lines,
the adapter either wants to change the people’s attitude towards a text,
gaining a new audience for it through the adaptation, or s/he wants to
abandon the hidden position of a normal translator – who should be
relatively invisible in the translation – by offering the new version as a valid
interpretation of the original text. When the re-writing is achieved in a
different type of medium, s/he will be allowed to show more creativity than
the linguistically-bound translator. The two main consequences of this fact
are that, on the one hand, the adapter tends to allow himself or herself more
freedom from the original in terms of meaning production, on the other hand
the result of the re-writing process may be a work of art that – at least at a
superficial level – can claim its independence from the original altogether. If
the purpose of the adapter is to present the new work as original creation,
textual intervention will be more abusive (in terms of traditional translation
practice), often starting with a change in the title of the original. In such
cases only those familiar with the source text in greater detail are still able to
identify it in the adaptation. This is the ultimate degree of translational
unreliability and unfaithfulness, an exceptional situation, somewhere at the
border between translation and pseudo-translation or original creation.
As far as unreliability is concerned, intersemiotic translation is
similar to the interlinguistic translations of the (in)famous belles infidèles
type, for instance. If the latter are generally accepted as variants of their
source texts, so intersemiotic translations must be accepted as translation
instances in their own right and, if paraphrasing (or adapting) is in order, the
stuff that culture is made of. The unreliability of the translators is then a
quality that, on the one hand represents the __expression of the human need
for imaginative, subjective, innovatory interactions with pre-existing
cultural texts, and on the other hand accounts for the invariance and the
change within the cultural matrix.
References
Álvarez, R., Vidal C.-A. M.(eds.). 1996. 'Translating: A Political Act' in Translation,
Power, Subversion. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Baldick, C. 1990. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Baker, M. 1992. In Other Words. A Coursebook on Translation. London, New York:
Routledge.