UTF-8__0415396417Translation

ISSUES IN TRANSLATION STUDIESspecific entry for ‘translation’ in their longer Encyclopedia. Hatim and Mundayprefer to talk of ‘the ambit of translation’, defined as:1. The process of transferring a written text from SL to TL, conducted by atranslator, or translators, in a specific socio-cultural context.2. The written product, or TT, which results from that process and whichfunctions in the socio-cultural context of the TL.3. The cognitive, linguistic, visual, cultural and ideological phenomena whichare an integral part of 1 and 2.Hatim and Munday (2004: 6)As we shall see below, it is the phenomena in the third point of this definitionthat have attracted most attention in recent translation studies.However, such definitions still do not answer the question of the limitson translation, and the boundaries between translation, adaptation, version,transcreation, etc. that have key implications for the criteria by which the targettext is judged. For example, adaptation, again, has been variously defined as:a set of translative operations which result in a text that is not accepted as atranslation but is nevertheless recognized as representing a source text of aboutthe same length.(Bastin 1998: 5)but also as:a term traditionally used to refer to any TT in which a particularly free translationstrategy has been adopted. The term usually implies that considerable changeshave been made in order to make the text more suitable for a specific audience(e.g. children) or for the particular purpose behind the translation.(Shuttleworth and Cowie 1997: 3)Such contradictory attempts at definition highlight the difficulty, and evenfutility, of expecting watertight categories for what might better be viewedas a cline of strategies under the overarching term ‘translation’ that mightresemble Figure 1.1 (see below).The left-hand side of the cline relates to translation strategies that arebased on the maintenance of ST structure, the most extreme being that of‘phonological’ translation (Nord 1991/2005: 33) such as the Zukofskys’ famoustranslation of the poems of Catullus (1969), which sought to recreate thesound of the Latin rather than render the sense. ‘Formal’ here refers to Nida’sformal equivalence (or ‘formal correspondence’, Nida and Taber 1969), which‘focuses all attention on the message itself, in both form and content’ (Nida1964: 159; see Chapter 2), a kind of literal translation that is ‘contextuallymotivated’ (Hatim and Munday 2004: 41). ‘Functional’ is Nida’s ‘dynamic’7