Lecture 7
Grammatical Aspect of Translation Plan
Grammatical problems in translation.
Transformations in the Process of Translation.
Rendering contextual meaning of the articles.
Translation of asyndetic substantial clusters.
5. Ways of Translating of Passive Voice.
Grammatical problems in translation.
The grammatical structure of language is an important part of its overall system, no less important, in fact, than its lexicon or vocabulary. The elements of the grammatical structure, such as affixes forms of inflection and derivation, syntactic patterns, word order, function words, etc., serve to carry meanings which are usually referred to as " grammatical '' or "structural" meanings, as distinct from lexical meanings. The rendering of these meanings in the process of translation is an important problem relating to the general problem of translation equivalence which must be considered at length.
Grammatical forms of different languages only very seldom coincide fully as to the scope of their meaning and function. As a rule there is only partial equivalence, that is, the grammatical meanings expressed by grammatical forms, though seemingly identical, of two different languages coincide only in part of their meaning and differ in other parts of the same meanings.
Speaking about grammatical peculiarities in translation we should mention also different grammatical differences of SL and TL (English and Ukrainian). There are a lot of peculiarities of the English language which can make the problems in translation. They are:
1. Analytical character of English and synthetical character of the Ukrainian language (no inflections in English):
This is a round table. – Це – круглий стіл.
I am sitting at the round table. – Я сиджу за круглим столом.
2. Wide usage of auxiliary verbs.
3. A great number of structural parts of speech which corresponds to inflections in Ukrainian.
4. Strict, rigid and inflexible word order. Each part of the sentence has its definite place and changing the word order speaker changes meaning of the whole sentence.
5. Wide usage of impersonal constructions with participle and gerund which is not typical in our language.
It is possible to solve all these problems only due to master translation, using grammatical transformations.
2. Transformations in the Process of Translation.
Alterations in the structural form of language units performed with the aim of achieving faithfulness in translation are referred to as translator’s transformations.
They are carried out either because of the incompatibility of the target language means of expression, which makes the transplantation of some source language units to it impossible, or in order to retain the style of the source language passages and thus maintain the expressiveness of the source language sense units.
The most regular are the following two types of transformations:
“inner” transformations;
“outer” transformations.
Example of inner transformation: the noun icon apart from its direct Ukrainian meaning ікона may have in some context also the meanings зображення, портрет, статуя. Similarly with the noun idea which may mean apart from its genuine international sense ідея also думка, задум, гадка.
Outer transformations may sometimes change the structural form of the sense unit under translation. Thus, the noun the Orkneys becomes a word-group Оркнейські острови and the Hebrides become Гебридські острови.
Grammatical transformations usually become necessary because of the difference in the means of expressions in the target language. They are mainly employed in the following cases:
when translating antonymically:
For the thousandth time I’ve told you, keep you nose out of the business. – Тисячний раз тобі кажу, не втручайся в цю справу.
Fair words fat few. – гарні слова не нагодують. Гарними словами голод не проженеш.
when rendering the meaning of most passive constructions;
when translating sentences with an inverted word order.
Grammatical structures of two languages are different to such an extent that any attempt at word-for-word is doomed to failure. In the course of translation, it is always necessary to perform various grammatical and lexical changes or translations to achieve translation equivalence. These transformations can be divided into four types:
transposition, replacements, additions, omissions.
It should be born in mind that this classification is, to some extent, arbitrary and that in practice it is hardly possible to find these elementary transformations in "pure form''. In most cases they are combined with one another, so that what we observe is a combined use of more that one type of transformation: transposition and replacement, addition and omission at the same time, etc.
What is known as transposition is a change in the order of linguistic elements: words, phrases, clauses and sentences, in the text of translation as compared with the original. Most often this change of order is made necessary due to the necessity of preserving intact what is called `functional sentence perspective`, namely, the division of the sentence into two main parts from the point of view of communication: "known or theme" and "new or rheme". In Russian this division of the sentence is usually expressed by means of word order: what is already known or supposed to be known to the hearer (usually from the preceding context), that is, "theme" is placed at the beginning of the sentence whereas what is new, that is communicated for the first time and, therefore, what forms the semantically most important part of the message ( rheme ) is placed at the end of the sentence. In English the word order is arranged, on the whole, along the same lines; however, in certain cases the "theme" is placed at the end and the "rheme", correspondingly , at the beginning of the sentence due to the fact that the newness of the "rheme" is expressed differently, namely, by the use of the indefinite article (or with plural forms of nouns and with uncountable nouns of the zero article) with the noun which is the subject of sentence. Therefore, in Ukrainian word order in these cases must be reversed, i.e., the sentence subject which is the "rheme" of the sentence must be placed at the end: cf. A boy came in – Зайшов злопчик but: The boy came in – Хлопчик зайшов. Likewise: A match flared, in the darkness – В темряві спалахнув сірник.
Light was coming into the cellar from somewhere – В підвал звідкілясь проникало світло.
Cigarettes were passed after lunch – Після сніданку подали сигарети.
Within a complex sentence a similar tendency is observed: in Ukrainian the first place is occupied by that part of the sentence ( main or subordinate clause) which must logically precede the second, whereas in English the position of both clauses, though not quite fixed, is in most cases governed by syntactic rules: namely, the main clause precedes, in most cases, the subordinate one. This often calls for a change in the order of clause in the process of translation, as for instance: He trembled as he looked up – Поглянувши в гору він затремтів.
Within a passage of discourse, independent sentences sometimes are also transposed as in the following example: "You goin` to court this morning?" asked Jim. We had strolled over. – Ми підійшли. – Ви в суд підете? – Спитав Джім.
Here the transposition of sentences is used to make up for the absence in Ukrainian of the difference between the Past Indefinite and the Past Perfect ( the action of the second English sentence precedes that of the first).
Replacements are by far the most common type of grammatical transformations. Replacements can affect practically all types of linguistic units: word forms, part of speech, sentence elements, sentence types, types of syntactic relations, etc:
He took the bell-rope in his hand and gave it a brisk tug. – Він взявся за шнур і різко його смикнув.
In this sentence we can see the replacement. The predicate with the object took in his hand is translated with the verb with suffices –ся: взявся, and set phrase gave it a brisk tug is translated with simple verb, we have simple predicate.
Additions are caused by different factors. Very often they are necessary by what may be called structural incompleteness of certain word groups in the source language. Thus, in English in many cases words are omitted that can be easily resorted from the context. While in Ukrainian their actual presence in the word group is necessary, which calls for additions in translation; cf.: pay claim – вимога підвищити зарплату, gun license – посвідчення на право носити зброю, oil talks – переговори з на рахунок нафтового питання, solid engine – двигун на тревдому паливі, the Watergate judge – суддя, призначений на розгляд так званої Уотергейтської справи.
Sometimes additions are necessary to compensate for lack of grammatical forms in the target language. Thus, that lack of plural forms of the corresponding nouns in Ukrainian calls for lexical additions when translating the following phrases: workers of all industries – працівники віх галузей промисловості, modern weapons – сучасні види зброїя, enemy defences – захисні споруди противника, other philosophies – інші філософські теорії/течії/напрямки.
Omission acts in the opposite direction as compared with addition and is used to ensure a greater degree of what is called, "compression", that is, reducing the redundancy of the text by omitting words which can be easily restored, form the context. Thus, the following sentence from J. Salinger's novel: "So I paid my check and all. Then I left the bar and went out where the telephones were" is translated by R. Rait-Kovaleva as: Я рассплатился и пошел к автоматам. The words left the bar are omitted, because of their redundancy (the bar was mentioned in the preceding context and leaving is implied by the subsequent use of went out). Note also other transformations here, such as unification of sentences and replacement of a complex sentence by a simple one, all of which greatly reduce redundancy of the original text.
Her hands rested side by side on her lap. – Її руки спокійно лежали на колінах.
One can trace the omission of word-combination side by side because such position of hand seems to be quite natural and doesn’t need any translation.