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Outlining a new linguistic theoryof translation

Massimiliano MoriniUniversity o Udine Italy

In the ollowing article, an outline o a new linguistic theory o translationis given that can be o use to theorists and practitioners alike. Te linguistictheories o the 1950s and 1960s were too normative and a-contextual to accountor all the orms and aspects o translation; while the skeptical turn o ransla-

tion Studies has succeeded in unmasking the ideological quality o all theories,but cannot produce a cybernetics o translation, an account o how translationis materially done. A new linguistic approach can produce such a practical ac-

count, provided that the pragmatic level o analysis is given a prominent role and

that a touch o non-scientific skepticism is maintained.

Keywords: translation theory, translation practice, linguistics, pragmatics, text

acts, cooperation, politeness, deixis

In what ollows, a practice-based, and pragmatically-oriented, linguistic theory otranslation is proposed. Formulating a linguistic theory o translation is, on theace o it, as obvious an operation as writing an ichthyological description o fish:

translations are linguistic objects, and all those who think about translation mustinevitably do so in terms o language. Nevertheless, the recent history o rans-lation Studies has made such an apparently uncontroversial expression as a lin-guistic theory o translation controversial, and, indeed, suspect. Tereore, a briehistorical survey o the discipline is needed beore a (new, practical, pragmatic)linguistic theory is outlined.

Te pragmatic translator

ranslation Studies was born as a separate discipline in the 1950s. Tough thinkersand translators had been writing about the act o translation or at least a couple

arget : (), . ./target...mor / - John Benjamins Publishing Company

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o millennia (in the west: since Ciceros De optimo genere oratorum, around 52B.C.E.), this corpus o theoretical pronouncements had never been assembled into

anything like a coherent whole. In twenty centuries o translating, only a hand-ul o airly exhaustive essays can be isolated: Leonardo Brunis De interpretationerecta (around 1420), Alexander Frazer ytlers Essay on the principles o transla-tion(1790), and Friedrich Schleiermachers ber die verschiedenen Methoden desbersetzens(1813). Tese ull-sized treatises, as well as a number o shorter works(Martin Luthers 1530 Sendbrie vom Dolmetschen, Etienne Dolets 1540 La manie-re de bien traduire dune langue en aultre), and a host o minor, ofen repetitive pro-nouncements, discuss the nature o translation, the methods o translating, or therequirements o a good translator in very general terms. In the 1950s and 1960s,

scholars within the fields o inormation theory and linguistics set out, in a muchmore systematic manner, to define the phenomenon o translation in its entirety.Ultimately, these scientists aimed at excluding the operation o chance rom thetranslators activity. Te Zeitgeistis evident in Anthony G. Oettingers words:

Placing patterns into correspondence is one major linguistic problem o machinetranslation; devising recipes or transorming source patterns into target pat-

terns is another. O the existence o some solutions to these problems there islittle doubt, especially or closely related languages. A unique solution seems too

much to hope or. While the study o ormal linguistic patterns or their own sakeinterests many investigators, students o inormation theory in particular, the or-mal structure o discourse is relevant to translation only as a vehicle o meaning.Corresponding patterns, thereore, must be defined as conveyors o equivalent

meanings since, whatever meaning is or means, it is generally agreed that it mustbe preserved in translation. (Oettinger 1959/1966: 248)

Patterns, correspondence, recipes, transorming: Oettingers is the languageo computers and technical manuals, and other scholars employ very similar styles.In the interest o machine translation and in order to acilitate the task o humantranslators, linguists and computer scientists tried to define invariance (Oetting-er 1959/1960), ormal correspondence (Catord 1965), or equivalence (Nida1964), on a descending ladder o scientific assurance.1Gradually, these scholarscame to realize that no univocal solutions could be devised or the problems otranslation, and that the correspondences between even closely related languageswere too variable to be definitively systematized.2

In the 1970s, a revolution took place which transormed translation theoryand translation science into ranslation Studies. Te term itsel was coined by

James S Holmes, who proposed, in a 1972 paper, the use o a label that had alreadyproved productive in the general field o humanities (Holmes 1972/1988: 70). InHolmes wake, a number o scholars, mainly on the el Aviv-Leuven Axis (Her-mans 1999: preace), started to look at translation not in normative terms, as the

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Outlining a new linguistic theory o translation

linguistic school had done, but under a descriptive light. For the first time, trans-lated texts were viewed not only as target texts (i.e., in relation to their sources),

but also as texts in their own right (c. Even-Zohar 1978). Scholars adopting thisnew approach challenged the normative validity o traditional terms like fidelityand linguistic constructs like equivalence, by claiming that ar rom being eternaland universal, such concepts were historically determined. Tus, translation cameto be seen as a manipulative operation rather than a simple textual substitution:

ranslation is, o course, a rewriting o an original text. All rewritings, whatevertheir intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate

literature to unction in a given society in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation,undertaken in the service o power, and its positive aspect can help in the evolu-tion o a literature and a society. (Bassnett and Leevere 1990, preace)

Tis new outlook has produced and is still producing an impressive body o workin the field o Descriptive ranslation Studies so much so that the whole disci-pline today seems confined to the descriptive field. In Holmes seminal paper, how-ever, descriptive translation studies was only one o several branches o what heimagined to be a very leay tree that would sprout new boughs, as well as incorpo-rate old ones. Holmes first distinguished between pure and applied S: pureS urther branched into descriptive translation studies (DS) and translationtheory (T), whereas applied S would ideally produce results in the areaso language learning, translator training, translation aids, translation policy, andtranslation criticism in other words, it would be o use to language learners andteachers, and above all to translators and translation teachers.

In Holmes map, translation theory is closely allied to translation description:and it is not by chance that the most influential theories o translation o the lasttwo decades have been descriptive rather than operative (or a quasi-definitivesummary o twenty years o theorizing, c. oury 1995). Tose ew scholars o the

DS field who have tried to set agendas or the translator have done so in an ideo-logical vein, and their conclusions, as I have said elsewhere (Morini 20022003),do not pass the test o close logical examination (c. Venuti 1995, when he ex-horts translators to fight the domesticating tendencies o their societies). Forthe rest, translation training, translation aids, translation policy and translationcriticism have generally been conducted without explicit reerence to a theory otranslation.3

However, it is awkward or a practice-based discipline like ranslation Stud-

ies to lack a practice-based theory by which practice can be illuminated. Even atheoretician like Umberto Eco reely admits that translation theory must be basedon some sort o active or passive experience o translation (Eco 2003: 13) i.e.,on the experience o translating or having ones writings translated. Conversely,

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practice needs theory to understand itsel. In a recent book in dialogue orm onthe practical use o translation theory, translator Emma Wagner has asked theorist

Andrew Chesterman i thinking about translation can help us to become bettertranslators and give us a eeling o proessional sel-esteem. Chestermans answer,while apparently questioning the general validity o Wagners implicit assumptions(Would you pose the same question o other kinds o theory, I wonder?), essen-tially confirms that some such connection between translation theory and practiceis indeed needed, i not inevitable:

Should musicology help composers to become better musicians or composers?Should literary theory help writers and poets to write better? Should sociol-

ogy help the people and groups it studies to become better members o society?Should the theories o mechanics and cybernetics help engineers and computerscientists to produce better robots? I guess your answers to these questions will

not be identical: I mysel would be more inclined to answer yes to the last onethan to the others. o the sociology one, I might answer that it should at least helppeople like politicians to make better decisions. But the ones on musicology and

literary theory seem a bit different; such theories seem more to help other peopleunderstand these art orms, rather than the artists themselves. In particular, suchtheories might help academics (theorists) to understand something better, and

hence, in some abstract way, add to the sum total o cultural knowledge. (Chester-man and Wagner 2002: 12)

Chesterman proposes a number o theories as possible parallels with translationtheory; but the various sciences he mentions could also be taken as mirror-imageso different aspects o ranslation Studies. While DS provides the kind o de-scription which is also the province o musicology and literary theory, the cyber-netics o translation can only be studied by means o a linguistic theory. Every acto translation is, in the Peircean sense, an act o interlingual interpretation (Jako-bson 1959/1966: 233), and only linguistics can give us a practical understandingo language-to-language transactions, as well as the terminology we need in orderto understand what we talk about when we talk about translation. Te skepti-cal turn o DS has rightly questioned the validity o such linguistic concepts asfidelity and equivalence, but it has not provided adequate substitutes: as KirstenMalmkjr points out,

equivalence, or some sort o notion like it, is hard to give up in translation stud-

ies, since there must be some sort o relationship between a arget ext () anda Source ext (S) i the ormer is to be considered a translation o the latter;besides, the notion is essential i we are to make sense o certain types o trans-lation and mistranslation and even, arguably, o difference and non-translation.

(Malmkjr 1999: 263)

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A return to linguistic ranslation Studies is thereore advocated though withnone o the normative rigidity o early translation science and bersetzungswis-

senschaf. Te linguistic theorists o the 1950s and 1960s aimed to create ormulaeand algorithms or something as fluid as language, and wanted to keep context outo such a contextual activity as translation. A new linguistic theory o translation,by contrast, will have to be operatively open (most translation situations allow ormore than one choice) and contextual.

In other words, a new linguistic theory o translation will have to be pragmat-ic. Tere are many possible definitions o pragmatics (c. Levinson 1983: 132),but all o them somehow involve the inclusion o context into linguistic obser-

vation. O course, a general theory o translation cannot be uniquely pragmatic,

just as a translator does not work only at the pragmatic level: but the latter is thehigher rung o a hierarchical ladder comprising semantics, syntax, and phonet-ics.4Te first decisions the translator takes are o a pragmatic nature decisionsthat have to do with genre (to which genre does the source text belong? shouldthe target text belong to the same genre? Is there a comparable genre in the tar-get culture?), historical and geographical distance (how should a text written inAnglo-Saxon or in Farsi be translated?), register, cooperation (is the author/nar-rator/character ollowing/breaching/flouting/exploiting Grices maxims?), polite-

ness (what is the relationship between the author/implied author/narrator and thereader/implied reader/narratee? can/should it be reproduced in the target text?),and relevance (how is the source text, or any part o it, to be relevant in the targetculture?). When these general decisions are taken, related choices ollow on theother linguistic planes (not necessarily in any order: it is only the pragmatic levelthat consistently precedes the others). A theory o translation, i.e., a theory o whattranslation is, o how it works and the effects it produces, should ideally ollow thesame kind o hierarchy.

Tere are many reasons why it is important to develop the pragmatic aspectso a linguistic theory o translation. First o all, pragmatics had been disregardedby the linguists who tried to create a general theory in the 1950s and the 1960s, andi we do not want their labour to have been in vain, we have to pick up where theylef off. Secondly, a pragmatic theory o translation will be o greater use to trans-lators than any semantic, syntactic, or phonetic theory: because these cannot butbe incomplete and micro-linguistic; and a micro-linguistic theory o translationis ultimately impossible, while micro-linguistic practice is best lef to itsel or totranslator trainers and teachers. Conversely, a pragmatic theory o translation has

to be illustrated, and illustration necessarily involves the micro-linguistic level.5It must be said that the project is not totally unprecedented. From the late

1960s onwards, the linguists working on translation had come to realize that cer-tain contextual elements had to be introduced into the system to make it work.

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Tese linguists tried to link the methods to be used in translation with the unc-tion to be assigned to the source and the target texts. Katharina Rei first used

Bhlers theory o linguistic unctions to create a taxonomy o texts with annexedtranslating methods (Rei 1969). Hans J. Vermeer realized that the target text canhave a different unction (he spoke o skopos) rom its source (Rei and Vermeer1984/1991). Tese unctionalist theories are epitomised in Mary Snell-Hornbysranslation Studies: An integrated approach(1988), where a very flexible typologyis elaborated which allows or the overlapping o genres and methods.

Tis article stems rom these theories, while also accepting that a theory otranslation can only be normative in a very negative manner it can dictate whatcannot be done, or what should not be done, or what does not work. A new lin-

guistic theory cannot but take into account the skeptical U-turn effected by De-scriptive ranslation Studies: the proven act that the same text has been shownto have been translated in very different ways, with very different styles, and ac-cording to very different ideologies, rules out the possibility o creating translationrecipes not to mention ormulae or algorithms. Tis is what translation theorycannot do: what it can do is show the conditions in which translators work (a taskalready perormed by DS), and analyze the possibilities they have in each singletranslating situation.

Te three functions of translation

When they set out to create taxonomies or the use o translators and translationscholars, the German linguists o the 1960s and 1970s (Katharina Rei, WernerKoller, and others;6later, Peter Newmark (1988) popularized some o their ideasor the Anglophone world) tried to define a ew main textual types according tothe predominance o one linguistic unction or another. Drawing on Bhlersunctional model o language (Bhler 1934/1982: 2433), Katharina Rei distin-guished between content-centred (predominance o the reerential unction olanguage), orm-centred (predominance o the expressive unction), and effect-centred texts (conative unction) different text-types calling or different trans-lation strategies (Rei 1969). Tis simplistic tripartite model was soon expandedto account or a wider spectrum o unctional possibilities: Rei hersel operateda distinction between text types and varieties (novels, poems, manuals, recipes;Rei and Vermeer 1984/1991: 176179), while Werner Koller invited translators

to distinguish betweenprimary and secondary text-unctions (Koller 1979: 129).Vermeers Skopostheorie contemplated the possibility o unctional change in thepassage rom source to target text, and indeed subjected the skoposo the ormerto that o the latter (Rei and Vermeer 1984/1991: 100).

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Tese unctional theories are a creditable attempt to leave the swamp o a-contextual bersetzungswissenschaf behind, and to establish a connection be-

tween language and world, text and context. Nevertheless, their interpretation othe term unction is somewhat restrictive, even when flexibly applied (c. Snell-Hornby 1988). In the end, unction, or all these scholars, is the same as, or closelyrelated to, genre: a way o unctioning in certain ostensive ways which are com-monly associated with given classes o texts.

While maintaining that affiliation to genre or text-type is one o the waystexts have o acting in and upon the world, I insist that it is not the only one or eventhe most important. A pragmatic theory o translation must incorporate genreinto a wider and more systematic ramework. My definition o unction, accord-

ingly, incorporates all the (inherently pragmatic) ways in which texts unction inthe world.

I one were asked to define the epistemological province o pragmatics, onecould say that it is about the where and when o peoples talk (deixis), about theway people relate to one another through language (implicature, presupposition,politeness), and about what people do to each other and the world when theyspeak (speech acts). Since here we are concerned with the pragmatics o writtenrather than spoken language, we could conceive o a text pragmatics studying

the where and when o texts, the way texts interact with people (rather than othertexts), and what texts do or try to do. In view o this tripartite definition, threemain metatextual categories can be envisaged which I propose to call unctions:the locative, the interpersonal, and the perormative unction.

Since each o these unctions defines a number o means by which texts takeplace in the world, interact with the contexts they evoke, create, and are producedin, one would almost be inclined to call them metaunctions but this, togetherwith the use o interpersonal or the second o my three unctions, would createconusion with Hallidays grammatical system (Halliday 1985). I not intended,however, this conusion is not totally unmotivated: just as Hallidays grammartries to explain how speakers and writers use language as a creative, interactive,and organizational bridge between themselves and the world, a pragmatic theoryo translation aims at explaining how bi-texts7create, interact with, and (try to)modiy and organize the world outside their paper borders.

Te performative function: ext acts

When J.L. Austin reuted the descriptive allacy o traditional linguistics in hisamous 1955 William James Lectures, he observed that words are used not only tostate or describe a state o affairs, but also to do things, to change the speakers

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world. Austin observed that every speech act has a locutionary content, an illocu-tionary orce and a perlocutionary effect i.e., that every utterance (or sentence,

in Austins somewhat dated terminology) aims at achieving something and achievessomething, intended and real effects not necessarily being equal. His ground-break-ing observations were mainly confined to oral speech and to the limited scope othe single sentence though the analysis o the elicity conditions to be satisfiedor the perormative act to be successul ensured that there was some connectionbetween the single sentence, the co-text, and the context o situation.

Since 1955, however, the perormative dimension o language has been in-vestigated in relation to written as well as oral language, and it has been pointedout that very ew illocutionary acts are understandable at the level o the single

sentence or the single utterance.8It is evident, or instance, that in a conversationalinteraction like the ollowing, a sort o continuous illocutionary act is perormedby both speakers (roughly, the protagonist/narrator is trying to obtain a worriedreaction rom Sachiko, and Sachiko is more or less covertly telling her to mind herown business):

Sachiko turned and waited or me to catch up. Is something wrong? she asked. Im glad I ound you, I said, a little out o breath. Your daughter, she was

fighting just as I came out. Back there near the ditches.

She was fighting? With two other children. One o them was a boy. It looked a nasty little

fight. I see. Sachiko began to walk again. I ell in step beside her. I dont want to alarm you, I said, but it did look quite a nasty fight. In act, Ithink I saw a cut on your daughters cheek.

I see. As a matter o act, I continued, Id meant to mention this to you beore. Yousee, Ive seen your daughter on a number o occasions recently. I wonder, perhaps,

i she hasnt been playing truant a little. Its very kind o you to be so concerned, Etsuko, she said. So very kind. Imsure youll make a splendid mother. (Ishiguro 1982: 14)

On a bigger scale, it can be observed that even entire texts certainly do something,in the sense that they modiy, or aim at modiying, the status quo o the world they aim at achieving contextual effects on real people in real situations. Tis ismost evident with the text types that Rei calls operative and inormative (in-struction manuals, advertisements; Rei and Vermeer 1984/1991: 206); but it can

be argued that all texts, whether published or not, aim at perorming somethingand may, or may not, perorm something (the purpose o a novel, or instance,may be to entertain, or to renovate the English language, or both: i nobody readsthe novel, both purposes are rustrated).

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Te intentional/perormative value o a text has been defined in various waysby translation scholars, text linguists, and pragmatists. As has been seen, transla-

tion scholars have listed a number o unctions o texts in connection with themain unction o language withinthe texts. ext linguists have spoken o the in-tentional dimension o texts, whose very nature it is to reach receivers and pro-duce an effect on them (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981). Recently, certain prag-matists have tried to identiy the evaluative pattern (the point) expressed by andthrough a text (Tompson and Hunston 2000; c. also Labov 1972). Tese are allways o looking at the impact o texts upon an existing state o affairs. More gener-ally, it can be said that when a text is written and/or published, a text act is per-ormed that has an illocutionary orce and may have perlocutionary effects on the

world (c. Hatim 1998: 73).A pragmatic theory o translation cannot do without a theory o text acts,

because translators and theorists have to look at the intended and real effects osource texts and bi-texts in order to re-produce or analyse them. I a translatoraims at doing what the source text does in the target language with all the ob-stacles posed by linguistic and cultural barriers he/she must translate a text actrather than a mere text; and translation scholars must consider translations in thislight i they want to understand how they change or aim at changing an existing

state o affairs. O course, illocutionary orce and perlocutionary effect are to bekept separated in theory as well as in practice. For the translator, the illocution-ary orces inscribed in the text (rather than the authors intentions) are generallymore important than its perlocutionary effects: in the past, many translators andlinguists have spoken o an equivalence o effect to be obtained in the passagerom source to target language; but while it is very difficult to gauge real effects onreal readers, the source text can be analysed or the potential readings it contains i.e., or its illocutionary orces.9Being bound by no practical considerations, thetheorist is reer than the practitioner in his/her pragmatic analysis o the bi-text:a translation critic can study the illocutionary differences between a source and atarget text, whereas a historian o translation may be interested in the perlocution-ary effects o certain target texts in a given place at a given time. (One o the greatachievements o DS has been the realization that translations, i.e., target texts,can be and must be considered as texts in their own right as well as reflections orreractions o their sources.)

Inevitably, the illusory simplicity o theoretical definition conceals a wealth oanalytical and practical difficulties. For translator and translation scholar alike, it

is not at all easy to define each single text act exhaustively, except in the above-quoted cases (advertisements, manuals), in which the text has a very straightor-ward unction (persuading to buy something, instructing in the use o something).Usually, though, both the illocutionary orces and the perlocutionary effects o a

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text are multiple, complex, and difficult to isolate with any certainty: ultimately,the weight o perormative analysis rests on the translators or on the theorists

shoulders, and though interpretations may differ in degree o correctness and pre-cision, more than one reading is possible, and Spitzers philological circle (Leechand Short 1981/1983: 13) cannot be evaded (we make theoretical predictionsand veriy them in practice, but our very predictions influence our verificationprocedures).

Tough there is no way out o epistemological uncertainty in sof sciencessuch as ranslation Studies, a route must be chosen, and the most a theorist or apractitioner can do is explain and justiy his/her choice. By explaining the premis-es and conclusions o his/her actions, the translator gives his/her readers an idea o

the relationship between the source-text act and the target-text act. In producingan Italian translation o Lewis Grassic Gibbons Sunset song(Gibbon 1932/2005) a novel set in the Scottish countryside, written in a mixture o English and Scots I have tried to isolate the illocutionary orces inscribed in the text, as well asthe perlocutionary effects produced by the appearance o this experimental Scot-tish novel in the British book market and cultural milieu o the 1930s (and o to-day). Gibbon did not use Scots or sentimental purposes, but because he wanted togive it the literary dignity and prestige o other European languages: this is made

evident by the act that both the characters and the narrator speak in a harmonicblend o English, Scots, and Anglicized Scots (while novels by earlier northernauthors conronted an educated English-speaking narrator with rough Scots-speaking peasants). Tis linguistic choice is thereore ideologically central to thebook it is a consequence o what the book wants to do in the world. Inevitablyand ironically, the strong national tinge o Sunset songhas led to its being per-ceived as having only local relevance in the English-speaking world: while stylis-tically comparable texts such as Virginia WoolsMrs Dallowayand James JoycesUlyssesare today catalogued as modern classics, Sunset songis mostly unknown, aliterary curiosity or Scottish initiates. In my Italian version, I have tried to give atextual account o the orces and effects embodied in the source text (a reproduc-tion was impossible, because the context o situation was radically different): inmy reading, the linguistic/nationalistic issue was crucial to a deep understandingo Sunset songas a work o imaginative literature thereore, I tried to ashion asynthetic Italian, made up o a number o Italian dialects, to reproduce the Scotswords, phrases, and constructions used in Gibbons original.

As this example shows, the illocutionary orces inscribed in the source can

never be exactly reproduced in the target text: while Sunset songis, amongst otherthings, an act o cultural/political defiance, Canto del tramontois an account othat act, as well as an attempt at popularizing Scottish literature in Italy; and otherstrategies might have been used by other translators to obtain similar or different

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effects. Pragmatic barriers are, afer all, as insurmountable as phonetic or syntacticones: and as Vermeer understood more than twenty years ago (Rei and Vermeer

1984/1991), the skoposo a text never remains exactly unchanged in the language-to-language transition. Analysis at the pragmatic level orientates the lower-levelchoices and observations o translator and theorist: but both translator and theo-rist must know that no aithul pragmatic copy is possible, because contexts vary

just like phonemes, morphemes, and syntactic constructions and the pragmat-ic orces encoded in different grammatical systems are never exactly the same,though in cognate languages they may reach a very high degree o similarity.

Tis pragmatic indeterminacy is inherent in the very act o translation, thoughit can be masked in modern times by the translators tendency to (paradoxically)

appear invisible in order to present a fluent version which can pass as a aithulcopy o the original indeed, the original itsel (Venuti 1995). However, DShas taught us that translation is never innocent, that it always implies some sort orewriting o the source. Even when the translator has no explicit ideological vi-sion to impose upon the target text, his/her ideology is brought to bear on his/herwork: in Gideon ourys terms, the translation norms o the translators societyinfluence his/her work in one sense or another.

It is revealing to study the bi-texts o ormer ages as alignments o source-

text and target-text acts: rom this kind o operation, we can learn a lot about thenorms o past societies as well as about the perormative indeterminacy o trans-lation. In the numerous translations produced in the European Renaissance, orinstance, it is quite ofen the case that the target text is invested with perormativeorces which are only partially present in, or even totally absent rom, the source:Sir John Haringtons version o Orlando Furiosohas a serious epic, Virgilian qual-ity that is totally absent in Ariostos original; Philemon Hollands translations oRoman and Greek classics invested the target texts with English nationalistic er-

vour. In the Middle Ages, such pragmatic transormations are even easier to detectin the translators attempts to turn Pagan masterpieces into pieces o Christianor moral instruction as in the amous ourteenth-century Ovide moralis(c.Morini 2006). o go back to modern times, however, even the translators impulseto subtract his/her signature rom the translation is linked to a norm dictatingwhat the target text has to do in the target culture: the translator must be invis-ible because readers (or so the commonplace goes) want to read a primary text,and a translation would obtain less attention and have a weaker impact i it waspresented as secondary.

All these historical and contemporary examples show that the translationnorms o any given society are in their essence pragmatic/perormative: theyprimarily dictate what a translation has to do all stylistic choices at all lev-els being both personal and subordinate to perormative unction. Tereore, the

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perormative unction o translation, though not primary in an epistemologicalhierarchy, takes logical and chronological precedence over the interpersonal and

locative unctions in theory as well as in practice; because the translator, or thetranslator scholar, first has to understand what the source text or the bi-text does and that understanding guides his/her choices or intuitions as ar as the otherpragmatic unctions and the other linguistic levels o translation are concerned.

Te interpersonal function: Cooperation, politeness, interest

I a text does something, i it modifies and/or aims at modiying an existing

state o affairs, it cannot do so directly: a text only has an impact upon the worldthrough the influence it exercises upon its readers (though that primary impact isnot necessarily the only one: one need only think o what Rushdies Satanic versesand its translations mean to a large number o people who never read it in the firstplace). A pragmatic description o the bi-text or translational purposes, thereore,cannot but take into account the ways in which the bi-text enters into communica-tion with its (source and target) readers. Grices theory o cooperative communi-cation (Grice 1967/1991), Brown and Levinsons and Leechs studies o politeness

(Brown and Levinson 1987; Leech 1983), and Sperber and Wilsons notion o rel-evance (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) can help the translator to understand theinterpersonal relationships inscribed in and presupposed by the source text, andthe translator scholar to analyse bi-textual links on the interpersonal level. (Onceagain, we must look or potential relationships realized in the text(s) rather thanactual relationships with real people.)

All the theories o communication evolved by pragmatics rom the 1970s on-wards represented an attempt to expand the code model o classical linguistics,according to which a message is encoded and sent rom a sender to a decodingreceiver through a channel (air, in the case o human speech) which may or maynot be disturbed by noise. While this model describes the passage o linguisticsignals rom a sender to a receiver, it does not explain how receivers use contextualinormation to interpret messages which are ofen less than completely explicit;neither does it account or all those parts o human speech which are not strictlyunctional in communicative terms. Grice first expanded the code model by not-ing that all speakers intuitively recognize a cooperative principle the maxims owhich (quantity, quality, relation, and manner) they can choose to ollow, exploit,

or flout. Sperber and Wilson tried to simpliy Grices theory by insisting that themaxim o relation (relevance, in their definition) was really the only one at workin human interaction (hearers extract inormation by coupling speakers utter-ances with relevant contexts). Brown, Levinson and Leech studied all the polite,

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communicatively unnecessary efforts humans make in order to maintain goodrelationships with one another to maintain, in Brown and Levinsons terms,

each others ace.While an account o whata text communicates to its readers will be primar-ily semantic (though very little communication is non-contextual), an account ohow a text communicates with its readers, o the balance between explicit andimplicit inormation, o the relationship between text (author, implied author,per-sona, narrator) and readers, will necessarily be pragmatic. Te pragmatic theorieso Grice, Sperber and Wilson, Brown and Levinson, and Leech were initially con-ceived or ace-to-ace interaction but textual activity also involves interperson-al contact, and the practical difference between ace-to-ace and textual exchanges

(textual communication is more unidirectional and less fluid) does not detractrom their essential similarity. As Basil Hatim points out, texts behave more or lesslike people:

More specifically, Hoey ocuses on the means by which writers establish a dia-logue with their readers, anticipating their reactions and building this into theconstitution o their texts. It is this dialogic nature o the written text which has

particularly caught the attention o Literary Pragmatics: o course, speech is morepersonally evaluative than writing, but some speech can be as analytic and ob-

jective as any written text designed with these communicative aims in mind. Bythe same token, it is argued, writing can be casual and unceremonial and alwayscapable o interacting with human beings more undamentally than any writing (Hatim 1998: 86)

Tis dialogue between text and reader(s) can be conducted in many different ways,the degrees and styles o cooperation and politeness varying along the axes o cul-ture, genre, individual personality. First o all, texts address their readers in a vari-ety o ways, either directly or indirectly: advertisements, or instance, ofen addressthe receiver directly, whereas scientific articles usually adopt a more impersonalstance which conceals, but does not cancel, the relationship between text and read-er. In literary texts, a number o fictional figures (implied author, narrator, poetic

persona, narratee) mediate between the text, or its originator, and the reader.Te collision between text and reader, however, is not confined to those in-

stances in which the reader is openly mentioned and addressed, or covertly evoked;on the contrary, it permeates all texts o whatever description, or writing andpublishing a text means establishing a contact with one or more than one (actual,potential) readers. Te quality o the relationship is defined, on the interpersonal

axis, by how the text chooses to tell its readers what it wants to tell them: one mustlook at the ratio between explicit and implicit communication (presuppositions,implicatures, implicitures, subplicit meanings, etc.),10 at the degree o evidencewith which relevant inormation is signaled and distinguished rom irrelevant

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details, and generally at the order in which inormation is given (in a scientific ar-ticle, an abstract sums up the main argument or hypothesis, whereas in a detective

story or in Jane Austens novels, crucial details are withheld until the denouement).Cooperation/relevance and politeness interact in unpredictable ways, and no tworeaders will eel involved by and included in a text to the same degree: in certaincases, i the text is clear and explicative, readers will eel included; the reverse maybe true on other occasions, because extreme clarity can be elt as offensive (readersmay eel that their decoding abilities are being undervalued) or boring (in a liter-ary work o art, but also in a newspaper article, one must not give away ones goodstoo soon). Teoretically, one would tend to assign a positive value to clarity andperspicuity: but the changeableness o the principle o politeness and o Leechs

interest principle11reminds us that no linguistic quality is perceived in the samemanner by all people on all occasions.

At this juncture o cooperation/relevance, politeness and interest, the trans-lator acts as a pragmatic mediator: the task is neither innocent nor simple, andrequires knowledge o the norms regulating cooperation and politeness in di-erent cultures. Once again, perect interpersonal equivalence is impossible toobtain i only because languages and cultures (as well as people) vary in thethings they say explicitly or implicitly. In a perceptive article on Presumption and

translation, Peter Fawcett has noted how the Inormationsangeboto a text cannever be the same when grafed onto another language/culture. I the translatordoes not take into account interpersonal as well as phonetic, semantic, and otherpragmatic differences, he/she does so at the risk o offending or alienating his/herreaders:

We need presupposition, o course, because without it we would not get out o the

house in the morning; but it poses acute problems in translation. Most Hungar-ians do not have to be told that Mohcs was the site o a military deeat, just asmost French people do not have to be told about a certain military difficulty atAlsia. A writer in these languages can call up powerul complexes o knowledge

and eeling very economically. ranser these to another culture, however, and thepresupposed supply o inormation may not be there. Te problem then becomesone o assessing the likely state o affairs and the possible solutions, with each step

o the way raught with difficulties. (Fawcett 1998: 120)

Even apart rom these interlingual differences, translation as a communicative ac-tivity seems to display cooperation and politeness principles o its own. Researchin the field o corpus linguistics has recently shown that translators rom and to

all languages tend to simpliy, clariy, make explicit what is implicit in the sourcetext (c. Laviosa 2002: 18). Tis is probably because while translators are com-monly seen as only partially responsible or the Inormationsangeboto the targettext, any oddities in the latter are requently attributed to them rather than to

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the source authors a translated text, to be credible as the copy o the source,must be readable and fluent (c. Venuti 1995). Now, while in certain textual types

(e.g. instruction manuals) simplification, clarification, etc. may be acceptable and,indeed, desirable, on other occasions simplification may be equated with corrup-tion (though that too cannot hold as a general rule; teachers o literary translationtraditionally say that one must not simpliy or disambiguate what is complex orambiguous in the original).

Innumerable historical and contemporary examples demonstrate that transla-tors tend to be more cooperative and polite than original authors. Once again, thetranslators o the past tend to be more open and straightorward in their actions,and their bi-texts can be used more conveniently as illustrations. Sir John Haring-

tons above-mentioned version o Orlando Furioso, besides cutting many stanzaswhich the translator thought useless or irrelevant or his English readers, exhibits acurious kind o cooperative politeness which transorms Ariostos mocking narra-tor into a more collaborative and reassuring figure. Ariosto requently disappointsreaderly expectations by jumping unexpectedly rom one narrative line to another,or by cutting narration short in the thick o action. Harington seems to eel thatthis is treating readers unairly, because he adds side-notes which direct the readerto the textual loci in which a scene is continued or concluded (Tis post overtakes

Bradamant, 2 Booke, st. 62, He ollows it in the 10 booke, staffe 62; Harington1591, I. 70; VIII. 24). And when Ariosto jokingly admits that he is only decreeingthe end o a canto because his sheet is ull on both sides and he himsel is tired owriting, Harington seems to find that politer measures are required:

Ma prima che pi inanzi io lo conduca,Per non mi dipartir dal mio costume,Poi che da tutti i lati ho pieno il oglio,

Finire il Canto, e riposar mi uoglio12(Ariosto 1584: XXXIII. 128)

But more o this hereafer I will treat,For now this booke begins to be to great (Harington 1591: XXXIII. 118)

A rather rude interruption is turned into a rational explanation ollowed by apromise or more action to come; and while modern translators rarely allow them-selves such microtextual deviations rom their sources as Harington did, very ewo their works, i looked at in detail, would turn out to be totally devoid o similarpolite and cooperative additions.

In his bi-textual analysis, the scholar must look at the interpersonal unction

as it transorms itsel in the passage rom the source to the target text; while thetranslator can take advantage o an understanding o the interpersonal aspects othe source text, as well as o an awareness that translation ofen displays interper-sonal norms o its own.

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Massimiliano Morini

Te locative function: ime, place, and text deixis

As a pragmatic subject and a perormative agent, in order to act and to exercise aninfluence upon its readers, the text must be situated in time and space. However,the locative unction o a text is no easier to identiy than its perormative andinterpersonal unctions. A text acts and communicates within, and by connect-ing with, various contexts o situation: first o all, the context o production, whichmay or may not be indicated within the text itsel (a legal will must contain calen-drical reerence to the time and place o writing, while a antasy novel will prob-ably be set in the distant past o some northern country), but is usually betrayedby style and lexicon (even a antasy novel will bear the marks o its literary period);

secondly, the context (or the contexts) the text evokes or constructs, which may ormay not coincide with the context o production (think o the difference betweena historical essay, an instruction manual, and a science fiction novel); thirdly, thecontext(s) in which the text is published and read, endlessly changing with everysingle reader and every new edition. All these contexts have a bearing on the waya text acts upon readers and non-readers, and must be taken into account (or,are implicitly considered) when a bi-text is studied or created. Furthermore, un-like flesh-and-blood speakers, texts act and communicate in a urther dimension

which we could call textual, or intertextual: whether or not it alludes to other simi-lar or different texts, every text is inherently intertextual, because it is built upon aknowledge o how other texts are built (genre is one o the most evident intertextu-al traits). Tis third dimension o the locative unction is less material but not lessimportant than the other two: as .S. Eliot well knew (Eliot 1919/1975) thoughhis insights were limited to literary creation every new text enters into a livingrelationship with all other existing texts, which it modifies and is modified by.

When a text is translated into another language and a bi-text is created, thelocative unction (which cannot be identified with absolute precision in the firstplace) cannot be kept intact. By being grafed onto another temporal, spatial, andtextual plane, the text acquires, evokes and creates new contexts, and these con-texts make it act and communicate in novel ways. When Orlando Furiosois trans-lated into English by Sir John Harington, it is also translated into England (assixteenth-century translation theorists well knew): an Italian courtly romance anda sophisticated long poem is turned into an English epic made up o wooden end-stopped lines and reerences to Queen Elizabeth. Italian landscapes are made tolook much like the English countryside, and many English readers will find loca-

tive reerences to English places, events, and texts (intertextually, many passages othe English Furioso, as well as o the Liberatain Edward Fairaxs 1600 translation,remind one o Spenser rather than Ariosto or asso).

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It may be objected that this is a borderline case, and that modern translatorsdo not take the same liberties with the source text that Harington or Fairax did.

Borderline cases, though, are used in mathematics to demonstrate the general va-lidity o a hypothesis: when conditions are less extreme, the application o the ruleis less evident but the rule is equally valid. In our time, when a recently-writtentext is translated rom a European language to another (cognate) European lan-guage, say rom English to German, or rom French to Italian, the illusion is cre-ated that nothing changes in the locative unction but the changes are there allthe same. Tese changes become more evident, their treatment more crucial orthe translator and the translator critic, when the source text and the target text be-long to contexts which are very distant either temporally, spatially, or textually. As

I have demonstrated elsewhere (Morini 2005), the problems involved in translat-ing a source text written in the Middle Ages are analogous to those one has to acein bringing a text rom Australia to Italy: the same difficulties are created when notextual tradition exists in the target culture which can be compared with the tradi-tion (genre, text-type) o the source text.

It is perhaps not surprising that the problems connected with locative transer-ence have been studied mainly by translation scholars whose specialized researchfield is literary language. In his 1975 ranslating poetry, Andr Leevere observed

that the translators reedom (what he calls, curiously enough, the reedom o thetheme) is inevitably circumscribed by the concentric circles o language, time,place, and tradition (Leevere 1975: 19). Leeveres main interest is practical: hewants to provide translators with a series o strategies to come to terms with lin-guistically and culturally alien source texts. What is o interest here, though, is hisintuition that while language as a translational barrier can be taken or grantedand thereore need not be taken into consideration at all (his idea o language issemantic/grammatical; I would say that language contains all aspects o a text),time, place and tradition can be grouped together in a single definition (tpt ele-ments). emporal, spatial and intertextual distances are to all interests one and thesame thing or the translator and the theorist.

Tough his solutions are less convincing than his exposition o the prob-lem, Leevere does try to list a series o techniques and strategies. More or less inthe same vein, a better and more efficient set o strategies is provided by James SHolmes in his essay on Te cross-temporal actor in verse translation (Holmes1971/1988). Holmes observes that in turning temporally distant source texts intoanother language, the possibility o translating ingenuously and a-theoretically is

ruled out by the act that even choices which would appear as neutral in othercases (e.g. writing into the standard contemporary version o the target language)impose one interpretation or another (i I translate Beowul into standard con-temporary Italian, I cancel a great part o its temporal strangeness). With such

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Massimiliano Morini

texts, thereore, the translator must decide whether to create a historicizing ora modernizing version in the target language, on the linguistic, socio-cultural,

and literary or poetic levels (Holmes 1971/1988: 37). Tough the ocus here is ontime, the same could be said o space: when a text is translated, an effect o loca-tive estrangement is automatically created which can be reduced or lef untouchedby the translator.

Once again, there is no single solution to the problems posed by locative trans-erence. Speaking o temporal distance (which seems to interest the literati muchmore than geographical or textual distance), Ezra Pound understood as early as1919 in one o those brilliant essays in which his native cunning was not blockedby the axes he had to grind that ultimately each translator must choose a way

o alerting his/her readers to the temporal otherness o the original, and that eachtranslators choice will be guided by the textual elements that strike him/her as pri-mary and substantial. Pounds choice o language in translating Guido Cavalcantiwas pre-Elizabethan English, because he thought this the only way o maintainingGuidos unique musical quality (Pound 1919/2000: 32); but he was well aware thathis choice was not definitive, and that many other possibilities could have beenenvisaged by other individuals working with the same source text.

Conclusion

Pounds idea o personal responsibility anchored to textual evidence is central totranslation and translation theory in general: given the pressures and blandish-ments exercised and offered by his/her society, each translator will be attractedto different qualities in the source texts he/she works with, and will render thosequalities in idiosyncratic ways. Any translation theory, whether cultural or lin-guistic, must take that element o personal responsibility into account i it doesnot want to be lured into the old traps o exhaustiveness and scientificity. Descrip-tive ranslation Studies has avoided those traps by insisting on the ideologicalpressures attending translation and, at the same time, on the individuality o thetranslational activity; but being a descriptive discipline, it has not and it could nothave produced a unified theory o translation (though many insights o DS areinvaluable to anyone who wants to set up such a theoretical building). A generallinguistic theory o translation can be o more immediate relevance to practitio-ners as well as theorists, but in order to be credible it has to keep in mind that not

even phonetics, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics united can explain or oreseewhat has taken or will take place in any single act o translation. Ultimately, apartrom those cases in which a machine does all or almost all the work (machinesare good at working with standardized languages and text-types), translation is

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perormed by one or more unpredictable humans working with that most unpre-dictable o human products language. Tough theory can observe practice and

extract general rules out o it, it will never be able to open the little black box thatwill keep translation and the other secrets o the human brain locked until thebrains doomsday.

Notes

. Certain studies o these years, above all those produced by German bersetzungswissenschaf,today look like monuments to epistemological presumption (e.g. Kade 1968).

. Te 1965 ALPAC report, commissioned by the US government and claiming that machinetranslation was not cost-efficient, contributed to creating a certain disillusionment.

. One could mention a number o general translators handbooks (Samuelsson-Brown 1993;Soer 1996; Owens 1996; Robinson 1997; Osimo 1998; Landers 2001) and guides to using elec-tronic tools (rujillo 1999; Austermhl 2001; Bowker 2002) in which the description o strate-gies, aims, social and economic conditions, and translation aids is either unaccompanied byan explicit theoretical ramework, or held together by a net o outdated and/or ragmentarytheories. Tere are obviously exceptions to this rule: corpus linguistics, when applied to rans-lation Studies and translator training, usually provides a firm connection between theory and

practice (c. Aston 1999, Laviosa 2002); my own manual La traduzione: eorie. Strumenti. Prat-iche(Morini 2007) is an attempt at using practice to illuminate theory and applying theory tothe criticism o practice.

. Tis is, o course, a pragmaticians view o the linguistic world (c. Carnap 1938). My defini-tion o semantics, in particular, is o a pragmatic nature semantics being seen as concernedwith a-contextual meaning, whereas pragmatics takes the context o situation into account. AsLevinson (1983: 32) writes: Te most promising [definitions o pragmatics] are the definitionsthat equate pragmatics with meaning minus semantics or with a theory o language under-standing that takes context into account, in order to complement the contribution that seman-

tics makes to meaning.

. An attempt to teach translation at all levels is Zacchi and Morini (2002), where the decisionso real translators are shown and illustrated on a top-down principle.

. Albrecht Neubert can also be mentioned as one o the earliest translation scholars to link textunctions and translation methods. In his article on Pragmatische Aspekte der bersetzung(Neubert 1968/1981) he listed our translational categories according to the (actual or potential)unctional distance between source and target texts: while in the case o scientific literature thatdistance is minimal, fiction creates or presupposes a wider gap, and such textual genres as localpress articles or advertisements are specifically source-directed.

. I use the term bi-text as defined by Brian Harris. According to Harris (1988: 8), or the trans-lator and the scholar, a bi-text is not two texts but a single text in two dimensions, each o whichis a language. My theory studies bi-texts as double units, in the sense that it can be applied to

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the whole bi-text, to the relationship between the two halves o the whole, or to the source/tar-get text in isolation. Accordingly, my illustrative examples will be applied to the writers or thetranslators sides o the translational divide, or to the whole transaction.

. C. Hervey (1998: 13): Implicit in what has been said so ar is that illocutionary unction isa property o utterances; this, however, instantly raises the question: utterances o what? In soar asgreetingreers to a particular type o illocutionary unction (differently conceived and di-erently perormed in different cultures), and because greetings vary in extent rom the mono-syllabic Hi! in English to the multi-turn exchanges in Wolo , it ollows that illocutionaryunction may pertain to a variety o various sizes o linguistic unit. Some o these units clearlyconsist o a succession o sentences while others appear to all below what would be consensu-ally recognised by linguists as a complete sentence. C. also Ferrara (1980) or a definition ospeech-act sequence.

. O course, perlocutionary effects o source texts can influence the way translators work: theact that a source text has been censored, or instance, can lead the translator to sanitize parts oit. One should also mention that some pragmatists (reproducing an ambiguity already present inAustins seminal lectures) tend to blur the barrier separating the illocutionary and perlocution-ary levels by distinguishing between real and potential effects. Leo Hickey writes: In studyingperlocution in translation, let us keep in mind that a translator is not concerned with real effects(i any) produced on real readers (i any), o the , but only with the potential effects (Hickey1998a: 218).

. Bach (1994) calls implicitures all those inerences triggered by the lack o a (syntactic,

semantic) element which has to be supplied by the receiver. Bertuccelli Papi (2000: 147) definesas subplicit all those implicit meanings which may glide into the mind o the hearer as sideeffects o what is said or not said.

. Once again, Leech ormulates this principle to account or certain uncommunicative ea-tures o conversation, but the definition can be easily adapted to the written word: I shall tenta-tively propose an Interest Principle, by which conversation which is interesting, in the senseo having unpredictability or news value, is preerred to conversation which is boring and pre-dictable (Leech 1983: 146).

. But beore I lead him urther on / so as not to stray rom my habits / Since my sheet is ullon all sides / I want to stop it here, and have a rest.

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no: Bruno Mondadori.

Rsum

Larticle prsente les contours dune nouvelle thorie linguistique de la traduction susceptibledorienter tant les thoriciens que les praticiens. Les thories linguistiques des annes 1950 et1960 taient trop normatives et dcontextualises pour rendre compte de toutes les ormes etaspects des traductions ; paralllement, si le tournant sceptique des ranslation Studies a per-mis de dmasquer la part idologique de toutes les thories, il na pas t en mesure de produireune cyberntique de la traduction, une explication de la manire dont la traduction se drouledans la ralit. Une nouvelle approche linguistique peut ournir une telle explication, condi-tion daccorder un rle important laspect pragmatique de lanalyse et de conserver une pointede scepticisme non savant.

Authors address

Massimiliano MoriniUniversit di UdineDipartimento di Lingue & LetteratureGermaniche e RomanzeVia Mantica 3I33100 UDINEItaly

e-mail: [email protected]
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]

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