Lecture 7 the analysis of meaning

The previous lecture examined some of the problems in assessing shifts of meaning between a ST and its TT. One of the key problems for the analyst was in actually determining whether the ST meaning had been transferred into the TT. In the early 1960s, when a systematic, theory-based approach to many disciplines, including linguistics, was prominent, translation theory underwent a quantum leap with the work of the American linguist Eugene Nida. He coordinated the translation of, the Bible from English into a variety of African and South American indigenous languages, some of which had no written tradition. Many of those chosen to undertake the translation had little experience of the task and sometimes encountered difficulties with literary and metaphorical aspects of the English texts. Nida adopted some of the current theoretical ideas in linguistics (notably Chomskyan linguistics) and anthropology and incorporated them into his training of translators. These ideas form the basis of his «Towards a Science of Translating» and «The Theory and Practice of Translation». As the title of the first book suggests, this approach saw translation as a science that could be analyzed systematically.

This lecture will concentrate on such ‘scientific’ approaches to the analysis of linguistic meaning, specifically in relation to the analysis of individual words or phrases. This field, semantics, is ‘the study of meaning’, its goal ‘a systematic account of the nature of meaning’. By this G. Leech initially avoids the circular conundrum of defining ‘the meaning of meaning’, a phrase that echoes the title of perhaps the best-known book on the subject, by Ogden and Richards who were the first of a series of famous proponents of the scientific study of meaning during the twentieth century. In the same vein, responding to the scientific mentality of other disciplines of the time, Nida and Taber consider semantics to be the ‘science of meaning’. For Nida, analysis of meaning was a major practical problem because his inexperienced translators, some of them non-native speakers of English, were sometimes confused by the intricacies and ambiguities of the ST, especially multiple senses, figurative meanings and near-synonyms. Nida borrows Chomsky’s surface structure – deep structure concepts in his analysis – transfer – restructuring model of translation. The analysis phase, which is of most interest in this chapter, involves examination of sentence structure and of two kinds of linguistic meaning: referential (referential meaning (otherwise known as denotation), which deals with the words as signs or symbols) and connotative (connotative meaning (connotation), the emotional reaction engendered in the reader by a word).

The key problem for the translator is the frequent lack of one-to-one matching across languages. Not only does the signifier change across languages but each language depicts reality differently (the semantic field occupied by individual signs often does not match). Some concepts are very language- or culture-specific. R. Jakobson may have claimed that any concept can be rendered in any language, but that still does not help the translator find an easily useable equivalent for Halloween in Russian, or валенки in English. E. Nida attempted to overcome this problem by adopting then current ideas from semantics for the analysis of meaning across languages.

REFERENTIAL MEANING

Various linguistic problems relating to referential meaning are described by E. Nida. For instance, the word chair is polysemous (has several meanings): as a noun, it can be an item of furniture, a university position as profes­sor or the chairperson at a meeting, and, as a verb, can mean ‘to preside over a meeting’. The word spirit also has a wide range of senses, including liquor, deter­mination and ghost as well as the ‘holy spirit’ use more prevalent in the Bible. The correct sense for the translator is determined by the ‘semotactic environment’ or co-text (контекст – the other words around it). Some meanings are figurative and need to be distinguished from the literal meanings: father of a child, our Father in heaven, Father Murphy, father of an invention or a country, and so on, each perhaps requir­ing a different translation. Words such as heart, blood and children are frequently used figuratively in the scriptures: so, children of wrath does not mean ‘angry children’ but has a figurative sense of ‘people who will experience God’s wrath’. Problems posed by near-synonyms such as grace, favor, kindness and mercy are also discussed. In all these cases, as a reader the translator first needs to disambiguate (differentiate between) the various possible senses of the ST term as a step towards identifying the appropriate TL equivalent. This is done by contrastive semantic structure analysis.

DISAMBIGUATION – SEMANTIC STRUCTURE ANALYSIS

An email in English from a Russian-speaking country tentatively inviting specialists to a conference begins: 'We are writing to invite you to a conference. We expect you will attend.

Reflect on what the translation error is here, and what you think could be its cause.

The incorrect use of expect instead of the more normal hope (or very much hope) is caused because the SL term (in this case the Russian verb надеяться) covers a wider semantic field than the English. Надеяться can correspond to hope, want, expect or even look forward to.