UTF-8__0415396417Translation

PETER NEWMARKIn Approaches to Translation (Newmark 1981), I introduced the conceptsof (a) semantic translation, defining it as translation at the author’s level,the attempt to render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures ofthe target language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original; and(b) communicative translation, which is, at the readership’s level, an attemptto produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained onthe readers of the original; it renders the contextual meaning of the originalin such a way that both content and language are readily acceptable andcomprehensible to the readership.Note that Nida’s functional equivalence and my communicative translationare identical, but that House’s covert translation, which is similar,stresses the different culture in each of the two languages, rather thanthe effect on the reader. Nida’s formal correspondence is a distortion ofsensible translation; House’s overt translation and my semantic translationresemble each other, but I put more stress on the possibilities of literaltranslation. In these theoretical pairs, the text typology is important: Nidabases his theories on Biblical texts, but they are not intended to be confinedto them; House’s covert translation uses scientific, tourist and financialtexts as examples; her overt translation has religious (Karl Barth), political(Churchill) and literary texts, the latter a lovely excerpt from Sean O’Casey’sThe End of the Beginning. I use an extract from Proust for semantic translationand a political column for communicative translation. I stress thatthe language in semantic translation is serious and authoritative; in communicativetranslation, facts and ideas are more important than language,but if the original is well written it should be closely translated, whateverthe text.Nida’s, House’s and my dualistic theories covered literary and nonliterarytexts. In their choice of appropriate examples, they were influenced,as was Katharina Reiss, an important figure for popular text translation,and Christiane Nord (1991/2005) (documentary and instrumentaltranslation), by the psychologist Karl Bühler, who distinguished the threefunctions of language as the expressive, the descriptive and the appellative.Reiss (1971/2000) links these functions to ‘expressive’, ‘informative’ and‘appellative’ text types and to topic or domain text ‘varieties’ or genres (a novel,a scientific report, an advertisement, etc., see Chapter 3). Whilst this typologyencouraged translators to use appropriate language, it incurred the risk,particularly in the ‘Americanized’ business and tourism areas, of promotingthe overuse of typically stale, standardized expressions in translation.Later, in About Translation (Newmark 1991) and many later publications,I attempted to soften the rigidity of such schemes by suggesting a series oftranslational correlations, such as:1. The more important/serious the language (keywords, collocations,emphases) of the original, the more closely it should be translated.30