1. Theoretical aspects of translation

Translation as a notion

Ways of Translating

Kinds of Translating

Translation as a notion

Translation as a term and notion is of polysemantic nature and is mostly associated with the action or process of rendering the content of a source language (SL) word, word-group, sentence or passage in the target language (TL). The art of translation is one of the most subtle and difficult arts. A good translation is always the product of hard work of a talented translator.

The term «interpretation» is synonymous to «translation» and is used to denote the way or manner of presenting the idea of the work in translation orally (as well as its aesthetic, religious, political, pragmatic background and other qualitative characteristics of the work under translation). These may be artistic, genre and stylistic peculiarities rendered by the translator in his particular way, which is somewhat different from that of the author's. The thing is that «interpretation», unlike «translation», admits some more freedom of the translator in his treatment (at least in certain places or cases) of the matter under translation.

Translation is a human activity known since remote times and the profession of an interpreter or a translator is one of the oldest. The translator makes possible an exchange of information between the users of different languages by producing in the target language a text which has an identical communicative value with the source (or original) text (ST). This target text (TT) that is the translation is not fully identical with ST as to its form or content due to the limitations imposed by the formal and semantic differences between the SL and TL. Nevertheless the users of TT identify it, to all intents and purposes, with ST – functionally, structurally and semantically.

The functional identification is revealed in the fact that the users handle TT in such a way as if it were ST, a creation of the source text author. The functional status of a translation is supported by its structural and semantic similarity with the original. The structure of the translation should follow that of the original text: there should be no change in the sequence of narration or in the arrangement of the segments of the text. The translator is allowed to resort to a description or interpretation, only in case direct translation is impossible.

Semantic identification of the translation is presumed that the translation has the same meaning as the original text. No exchange of information is possible if there is discrepancy between the transmitted and the received message. The presumption of semantic identity between ST and TT is based on the various degrees of equivalence of their meanings. The translator usually tries to produce in TL the closest possible equivalent to ST.

Ways of Translating

The level or the degree of faithfulness of translation is predetermined by some factors. The main of them are the purpose of the translation to be performed, the skills of the translator/interpreter, the type of the matter selected for translation, etc. Depending on these and some other factors, the following methods of translating are traditionally recognized in the theory and practice of translation:

1. Literal translating is employed when dealing with separate words whose form and structure, as well as their lexical meaning in the source language and in the target language, fully coincide. These are predominantly international by original morphemes, lexemes/words, rarer word-groups having in English and Ukrainian (and often in some other languages too) a literally identical or very similar presentation and identical lexical meaning: administrator – адміністратор, director – директор, region – регіон hotel/motel – готель/мотель, hydrometer – гідрометр, Tom- Том, etc.

In many cases, however, the lingual form of the source language words is only partly conveyed in the target language. This happens when the common word is borrowed by each of the two languages from different source languages or when its lingual form is predetermined by the orthographic peculiarities of the target language: anti-alcoholic – протиалкогольний, music – музика, constitution – конституція, zoology – зоологія, atomic weight – атомна вага, chemical process – хімічний процес, national opera theatre – національний оперний театр.

2. Verbal translating is also employed at lexeme/word level. But unlike literal translating it never conveys the orthographic or the sounding form of the source language units, but their denotative meaning only: fearful – страшний, fearless – безстрашний, helpless – безпорадний, incorrect – неправильний, mistrust – недовіра, superprofit – надприбуток, non-interference – невтручання, weightlessness – невагомість etc.

The overwhelming majority of other words, when translated verbally do not preserve their structure in the target language. That is explained by the differences in the morphological systems of the English and Ukrainian languages: abundantly – рясно; bank – берег, береговий; cliff – бескид, скеля, круча; myself – я, я сам/сама; автомат – automatic machine, rifle; заввишки – high, tall; письменник – write, author; червоніти – to get/grow red, etc.

Verbal translating of polysemantic words permits a choice among some variants which is practically impossible in literal translating. Thus, the Ukrainian word автомат can have the following equivalent variants in English: 1. automatic machine; 2. slot-machine; 3. automatic telephone; 4. submachine gun (tommy gun). Similarly, the Englsih word bank when out of a definite context may have the following equivalent variants in Ukrainian: 1. берег (річки); 2. банк; 3. вал/насип; 4. мілина; 5. замет; 6. крен, віраж(авіац.); 7. поклади (корисних копалин). The literal variant/equivalent of the noun bank in Ukrainian can be, naturally, «банк» only.

When employed at the level of word-combinations or sentences verbal translation may often make the language units ungrammatical and pervert or completely ruin their sense: am reading now is not я є читаючий зараз, but я читаю зараз; never say die is not ніколи не кажи помираю but не падай духом; to grow strong is not рости міцним but ставати дужим; to take measures is not брати міри but вживати заходів; etc.

3. Word-for-word translation presents a consecutive verbal translation at the level of word-groups and sentences. This way of translation is often employed both consciously and subconsciously by students in the process of translating alien grammatical constructions/word forms. Sometimes students at the initial stage of learning a foreign language may employ this way of translation even when dealing with seemingly common phrases or sentences, which are structurally different from their equivalents in the native tongue. Usually the students employ word-for-word translation to convey the sense of word-groups or sentences which have a structural form, the order of words, and the means of connection quite different from those in the target language. To achieve faithfulness various grammatical transformations are to be performed in the process of translation and word-for-word variants are to be corrected to avoid various grammatical violations: You are right to begin with – ви маєте рацію, щоб почати з instead of Почнемо з того/припустимо, що ви маєте рацію/що ви праві.

4. Literary Translating represents the highest level of a translator's activity. Depending on the type of the matter under translation, this method of performance may be either literary proper or literary artistic.

Literary artistic translation presents a faithful conveying of content and of the artistic merits only of a fiction/belles-lettres passage or work. The latter may be either of a prose or a poetic genre (verse).

Literary proper translation is performed on any other than fiction/belles-lettres passages/works. These may include scientific or technical matter, didactic matter (different text-books), business correspondence, the language of documents, epistolary texts, etc. In short, any printed or recorded matter devoid of artistic merits (epithets, metaphors, etc.). But whether literary proper or literary artistic, this translation provides an equivalent rendering not only of complete content but also of the stylistic peculiarities of the passage/ work and its artistic merits, as in belles-lettres style texts.

Literary translations are always performed in literary all-nation languages and with many transformations which help achieve the ease and beauty of the original composition. The number of phrases and sentences in a literary translation is never the same as in the source language passage, neither are the same means of expression or the number and quality of stylistic devices. All these transformations are made in order to achieve faithfulness in rendering content and expressiveness of the passage under translation. Transformations are also used to convey the features of style and the genre peculiarities of the works under translation.

Literary proper or literary artistic translation of a larger passage often requires linguistic, historical and other inquiries in order to clarify the obscure places (historic events, notions of specific national lexicon, neologisms, archaisms, etc.).

5. Machine translation. Rendering of information from a foreign language with the help of electronic devices represents the latest development in modern translation practice. Due to the fundamental research in the systems of algorithms and in the establishment of lexical equivalence in different layers of lexicon, machine translating has made considerable progress in recent years. Nevertheless, its employment remains restricted in the main to scientific and technological information and to the sphere of lexicographic work. That is because machine translation can be performed only on the basis of programs elaborated by linguistically trained operators. Besides, preparing programs for any matter is connected with great difficulties and takes much time, whereas the quality of translation is far from being always satisfactory even at the lexical level, i.e., at the level of words, which have direct equivalent lexemes in the target language. Considerably greater difficulties, which are insurmountable for machine translators, present morphological elements (endings, suffixes, prefixes, etc.). No smaller obstacles for machine translation are also syntactic units (word-combinations and sentences) with various means of connection between their components. Hence, the frequent violations of syntactic agreement and government between the parts of the sentence in machine translated texts. Neither can the machine translator select in its memory the correct order of words in word-combinations and sentences in the target language. As a result, any machine translation of present days needs a thorough proof reading and editing.

Kinds of Translating

Depending on the form of conveying the sense, the following kinds or types of translating/interpreting are to be distinguished:

1. The written translating represents a literary faithful sense-to-sense translating from or into a foreign language. It may also be a free interpreting performed in writing. The matter under translation maybe a belles-lettres passage (prose or poetry work), a scientific or technical newspaper passage (article), etc.

2. The oral interpreting is a regular oral sense-to-sense rendering of a speech, interview or recording which can proceed either in succession (after the whole matter or part of it is heard) or simultaneously with its sounding.

There are two main kinds of oral translation – consecutive and simultaneous. In consecutive translation the translating starts after the original speech or some part of it has been completed. Here the interpreter’s strategy and the final results depend, to a great extent, on the length of the segment to be translated. If the segment is just a sentence or two the interpreter closely follows the original speech. When the interpreter is expected to translate a long speech he has to remember a great number of messages and keep them in mind until he begins his translation. To make this possible the interpreter has to take notes of the original

messages, various systems of notation having been suggested for the purpose. The study of, and practice in, such notation is the integral part of the interpreters training as are special exercises to develop his memory. Sometimes the interpreter is set a time limit to give his rendering, which means that he will have to reduce his translation considerably, selecting and reproducing the most important parts of the original and dispensing with the rest. This implies the ability to make a judgment on the relative value of various messages and to generalize or compress the received information. The interpreter must obviously be a good and quick-witted thinker.

In simultaneous interpretation the interpreter is supposed to be able to give his translation while the speaker is uttering the original message. This can be achieved with a special radio or telephone-type equipment. The interpreter receives the original speech through his earphones and simultaneously talks into the microphone which transmits his translation to the listeners. This type of translation involves a number of psycholinguistic problems, both of theoretical and practical nature.

Exercise 1. Apply literal/verbal/word for word translation in the following sentences.

The magnanimous explosion is termed by astrophysics as the Big Ben. 2. The light emitted by distant galaxies is found to be moving away from our galaxy, the Milky Way. 3. The Little Bang created by CERN – the largest center of particle physics research in the world – is an important step in understanding the early state of the universe’ Big Bang. 4. A trip by Voyager 2 in 1989, the only visit by a spacecraft on Neptune, is the only source of credible information we have about the planet. 5. People living in an urban locality have generic houses, busy schedules, small families and secluded lifestyle. 6. AI researches hope to invent intelligent machines which can perceive, learn and reason like humans. 7. The trade-mark of early modern fonts is the sans-serif typeface. 8. After leaving Athens, Aristotle spent some time travelling and possibly studing biology in Asia Minor (now Turkey) and its islands. 9. He returned to Makedonia in 338 to tutor Alexander the Great, after Alexander conquered Athens, Aristotle returned to Athens and set up a school of his own, known as a Lyceum. 10. Aristotelian philosophy became the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church. 11. As a result some discoveries in the Middle Ages and Renaisance were criticized simply because they were not found in Aristotle.12. A car engine is called an internal combustion engine.

Exercise 2. Apply the written literary translating in the following passage.

In the 1930s with the United States reeling from the Depression, the U.S. government began to take an active role to promote economic growth and stability. An important influence was that of John Maynard Keynes, an English economist who developed a way to analyze and explain economic depressions. His influential work, «The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money» (1936), seemed for a time to revolutionize economic thinking in America. Keynes observed the interrelationships among income, savings, consumption, investment and interest rates; he believed that the amount of private investment taking place in an economy dictates whether or not the system stagnates or expands. Keynes was one of the first to argue that it was the special duty of government to actively influence the economy through fiscal policies. He saw government spending or tax reduction as the primary instrument for meeting the twin goals of expansion and stability.

Many of Keynes’s ideas were included in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program. After World War II, Keynes’s full-employment policies were accepted by the United States as well as many other nations.

Exercise 3. Apply oral consecutive translation from English into Ukrainian in the following sentences.

The Maya disappeared more than 1000 years ago, leaving pyramids, a unique form of writing and a network of lost cities in the deserts and jungles of Central and South America.

For two centuries archaeologists have speculated why their civilization collapsed, with theories ranging from civil war to overpopulation and environmental degradation.

Today, an international team of scientists publishes powerful evidence pointing to a series of devastating droughts over a period of 150 years which played a pivotal role in ending one of the most intriguing cultures in human history.

The scientists led by Gerald Haug, professor of geology at the Geo-Forschungszentrum institute in Postdam, Germany, conclude in the journal Science that a change in the climate pushed the Maya civilization into terminal decline. These data suggest that a century-scale decline in rainfall put a general strain on resources in the region, which was then exacerbated by the abrupt drought events, they say.

Exercise 4. Apply oral consecutive translation from Ukrainian into English in the following sentences.

Українська банківська система до цього часу визнавала пріоритет кредиту, але кредитна діяльність за нинішніх умов є занадто ризикованою для банку й дорогою для клієнтів. Сьогодення вимагає нових продуктів, і ми готові задовільнити цю потребу. Банк розпочав роботу на ринку цінних паперів, страхування ризиків, тощо. Вексельний обіг, управління цінними паперами, їхнє обслуговування є для банку новою стратегією. Також прагнемо збільшувати присутність приватної особи у нашому банку – фінансувати житлове будівництво, надавати кредити, приймати на вклади кошти.

Найкращий показник – час. Жоден інший ветеран-банк не витримав десятирічне випробування часом. Наших ровесників, на жаль, поглинули по черзі хвилі банкрутств, а ми зберігаємо свою частку на ринку й одержуємо прибутки. Велика заслуга у цьому персоналу банку. Ми пишаємося своїми фахівцями. Ці люди мають неоціненний досвід роботи за найскрутніших умов, коли необхідні сила волі, витримка й уміння швидко приймати правильне рішення.

(lines of credit, to give priority, securities market, risk insurancing, the increase of capital, individual concerns, offering interests on deposits, challenging, the core of team, determination, decision-making and self-control)

Exercise 5.Compare two texts below and find the inexactitudes in all sentences of the Ukrainian machine translation.

Voice input, sometimes referred to as speech or voice recognition, allows you to enter data and issue commands to the computer with spoken words. It is an alternative to typing on a keyboard. The software has been developed to provide a fast method of writing onto a computer and can help people with a variety of disabilities. It is useful for people with physical disabilities who often find typing difficult, painful or impossible. Voice recognition software can also help those with spelling difficulties, including dyslexic users, because recognized words are always correctly spelled. Put simply, you talk to the computer and your words appear on the screen.

Voice recognition promises to be the easiest method for data entry, word processing and conversational computing, since speech is the easiest, most natural means of human communication. Voice input has now become technologically and economically feasible for a variety of applications. Early voice recognition products used discrete speech recognition, where you had to pause between each spoken word. New continuous speech recognition software recognizes continuous, conversationally paced speech.

Спробу голосового набору, який іноді називають як мова або розпізнавання голосу, дозволяє вводити дані і давати команди комп'ютеру з вимовлених слів. Це альтернатива, набравши на клавіатурі. Програмне забезпечення було розроблено, щоб забезпечити швидкий спосіб запису на комп'ютері і може допомогти людям з різними вадами. Це корисно для людей з обмеженими фізичними можливостями, які часто знаходять набравши важко, боляче або неможливо. Програмне забезпечення розпізнавання мови можуть також допомогти тим, хто з орфографічними труднощів, у тому числі з дислексією користувачів, так як розпізнані слова завжди правильно пишеться. Простіше кажучи, ви говорите на комп'ютер і ваші слова з'являються на екрані.

Розпізнавання голосу обіцяє бути простий спосіб для введення даних, обробки текстів і розмовної обчислень, оскільки мова найпростіший, найприродніший спосіб людського спілкування. Спробу голосового набору стала технологічно і економічно доцільно для різних застосувань. Продукти раннє розпізнавання голосу використовується дискретний розпізнавання мови, де ви повинні були паузи між усним словом. Нове програмне забезпечення розпізнавання злитого мовлення визнає безперервний розмовною темп мови.