Writing between the Lines

The Language of Translation

Bibliographic Data

ID4271004
AuthorsJohn Sturrock (corresponding author)
Year1990
Volume21
Issue4
Pages993
Publication date1990-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/469196
OpenAlexW2321091915
LanguageEN
Citations received9

company with its source once it has been published; after that it stands alone, patently derivative but a text in its own right. As books, translations differ from original texts only on the title page, where it is advertised that this work is a translation, made from language x by translator y.' Its status of translation may or may not be borne in mind by readers as they read. Generally, it is not; readers hope not to be reminded as they go that what they are reading is (only) a translation. The translator whose prose is not sufficiently smooth to pass for indigenous will be faulted, and accused of writing translationese, which counts against him as a professional failure. In complaining of the awkwardness or unnatural phrasing distinctive of translationese, we take as a premise that in good translation the source must not show through. What follows here is an extended questioning of the soundness of this premise. Because published translations exist in physical independence of their source, they are only ever collocated with it by rare individuals on rare occasions: when there is a translation prize to be given, perhaps, or when a translated author checks the foreign version of his work for gross infidelity. At most other times, the translator's work is taken on trust, the source from which he has been working having been definitively shelved so far as its new audience is concerned. There are interesting exceptions, however, when the convention of independence is broken and a translation is published in the presence of its source, in order to make metalinguistic points about the technique or the theory of translation. A treatise on translating, for instance, will quote or make up specimen sentences from at least two languages, through the intelligent examination of which degrees of bilingual synonymy or equivalence may be established

Linguistics · Natural language processing · Translation (biology) · Translation studies · Biochemistry · Chemistry · Computer Science · Philosophy · Translation Studies and Practices

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