5.7 Decision-Making

Achieving equivalence involves a complex decision-making process which the translation theorist Jin Levy defined in terms of moves as in a game of chess, and choices to make from several alternatives (Levy, 1967). In doing any kind of translation, there will always be a “problem”, and a number of possible “solutions”. At every stage of the translation process, choices are made, and these obviously influence subsequent choices. At one level, this may be illustrated by Koller’s typology of equivalence relations, with the translator opting for one kind of equivalence framework, then eliminating this option if it proves unworkable and trying out the next higher-level frame of reference.

Like all matters to do with text in context, however, translation decisions are rarely if ever so straightforward and “sequential”. They tend to be highly complex and, as Koller intended his relational frameworks to be, “hierarchical”. The hierarchy is in fact iterative in the sense that one progresses through the text, one can come back again and again to decisions already taken, reviewing and altering them.

This hierarchical, iterative nature of decision-making (i.e. how decisions can be reviewed up and down the hierarchy, which decisions are overriding and which are minor, etc.) is often driven by a number of fairly subjective factors such as the translator’s own aesthetic standards (Levy, 1967).

A factor that is less subjective than aesthetics is the translator’s own socio-cognitive system (the translator’s culture and system of values, beliefs, etc.). This plays an important role in informing translation decisions and thus confirming the hierarchical-iterative and relative nature of equivalence relations.

In addition to aesthetics, cognition and the criterion of knowledge base, the task specification agreed with clients could drastically influence decision-making. This raises issues of translation skopos or purpose, loyalty and conflict of interests, etc. We can now refer to this sense of purpose specifically as “the purpose of the translation”, and distinguish it from the purpose of translation (in the collective), which has to do with the skill involved in translating within a particular professional setting (e.g. subtitling).

The nature of the commission is a crucial factor in defining the purpose of the translation. For example, in translating a press release for the radical Palestinian group Hamas reporting one of their “suicide” bombings and talking eulogistically about the carnage they caused, the translation brief had to be re-negotiated with Hamas who commissioned the translation. The translator suggested a more conciliatory tone, eradicating all references to bloody scenes for which credit was being claimed in the Arabic version. The suggestion was flatly refused by Hamas.

5.8 Textual Pragmatics

By far the most concrete set of criteria for effective decision-making seems to be grounded in text type. Linguist and translation theorist Robert de Beaugrande sees equivalence relations in terms of the translation generally being “a valid representative of the original in the communicative act in question” (Beaugrande, 1978:88). The decision-making involved would thus be partly subject to system criteria such as grammar and diction, and partly to contextual factors surrounding the use of language in a given text:

Newsweek: It is a bid [sic] odd, isn’t it, that a journalist who was held captive by the Taliban would, several months later, be converting to Islam?

Ridley: I know, you couldn’t make it up. It is strange.

(Newsweek , 26 August 2002)

In this example, there is a typo (“bid” for “bit”), a minor performance error which can be rectified easily. But what about isn’t it? Pragmatically, this feature suggests “surely”, another problem concept for many users of English as a foreign language. To render isn’t it? into Arabic, for example, we need to gloss it by something like “I am sure you will agree”. Similarly, we need to complement you couldn’t make it up by something like “even if you wanted to”. These pragmatic glosses are indispensable in any meaningful rendering of the above utterances, certainly into Arabic.

These considerations can only highlight the proposition, that it is not the word which is the unit of translation but rather “text in communication” (Beaugrande 1978:91). This is a contentious issue, and one that has often been misunderstood. Fawcett sheds some useful light on the psychological reality of “text” as a unit of translation: “What professional and even novice translators actually do is relate the translation of the micro-level of words and phrases to higher textual levels of sentence and paragraph, and beyond that to such parameters as register, genre, text conventions, subject matter, and so on. (Fawcett, 1997:64)