Translational Relationship: Equivalence VS Recognizability

Translational Relationship:
Equivalence VS Recognizability

By Jiang Tianmin,
Sichuan International Studies University,
China

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Abstract: This paper is to historize the notion of equivalence by analyzing its origins and problems and to introduce recognizability as a feasible translation relationship by exploring the function of the situation-in-culture, that is, the target culture.

Key words: equivalence, recognizability.

1 Introduction

Toury sets three premises for the translational status of any text, namely, (a) there exists or has existed a source text, (b) the assumed translation has been derived from this source text via a transfer process, (c) there is an intertextual relationship between the two texts. Toury claims,

If we now proceed to take the three postulates together, an assumed translation would be regarded as any target-culture text for which there are reasons to tentatively posit the existence of another text, in another culture and language, from which it was presumably derived by transfer operations and to which it is now tied by certain relationships, some of which may be regarded - within that culture------necessary and/or sufficient." (Toury 1995:34)

The most problematic condition is the last one: what kind of intertextual relationships count as translational ones? It is here that spring those contradictory yet intertwined translation theories. The most notorious pairs are: prescriptive vs. descriptive, linguistic vs. aesthetic.

The first pair concerns different starting points: prescriptive approaches start from the definition and set ideal intertextual relationships, while descriptive ones argue that discovering the precise nature of the required intertextual relationship should be a valid goal, not the definition as the starting point of translation research. Or in other words, they are different in that the former purport that the boundaries of the concept of translation are ultimately set by something intrinsic to the concept of itself while the latter purport the boundaries are set by the ways in which members of a culture use the concept.

The second pair (linguistic vs. aesthetic) concerns its domain. The former describes translation as comparative linguistic undertaking and approaches it primarily from the perspective of the difference kin language structures. The object domain in this framework consists essentially of texts, mostly source-text / target-text pairs. The properties of each text pair are carefully studied, described and compared. This is considered too narrow a view by the latter. It is true that in all translating and interpreting the source and target languages must be implicitly or explicitly compared, but all such interlingual communication extends far beyond the mechanics of linguistic similarities and contrasts. The fact that language is part of a culture and in many respects constitutes a model of the culture gives much ground to the advocacy of the so called cultural turn which goes beyond linguistics into cultural studies.

The descriptive and the aesthetic always go together. Their combination aims at the systematic compilation of statements about regularities in the relationships between source and target texts, in the more sophisticated accounts attempting to relate these regularities further to relevant external factors in relation to the target culture. It proceeds from text comparison and makes generations of various sorts: usually groupings or classifications on the basis of shared characteristics, but also attempts at explanation, which build on observed correlations between the proposed groupings and, for example, socio and historico-cultural factors, especially those found in the realm of literary traditions, action-theoretical concepts, like skopos, or other external factors that seem to have a bearing on the intertextual relation.

In light of this, translation should be viewed with the target as one of most significant frames of reference, not the source as the final say. Translation as domestic inscription means that to say translation is a product of the influence of the source is rather to say it is a product of the reception of this influence by the target culture. The intertextual relationship between the source text and the target text, thus, shifts from a source-oriented equivalence to a target-oriented recognizability.

2 Equivalence: what the relationship should be

2.1 Equivalence

Equivalence has been considered the unique intertextual relation that only translations are expected to show: it is defined as the relationship between a source text and a target text that allows the TT to be considered as a translation of the ST in the first place. Nearly all traditional definitions of translation, whether formal or informal, appeal to some notion of this: translation means the replacement, or substitution, of an utterance in one language by a formally or semantically or pragmatically equivalent utterance in another language.

This notion is explicitly grounded on a transcendental concept of humanity as an essence that remains unchanged over time and space, plus the positivist idea of a truth-out-there, something objective and absolute. As for the former, Nida (1964:4), one of the most outstanding advocates of equivalence, states, "as linguists and anthropologists have discovered, that which unites mankind is much greater than that which divides, and hence there is, even in cases of very disparate languages and cultures, a basis for communication." The latter has to do with Platonic philosophy, for instance, Nida believes in that the message / meaning in context or the message/meaning and its reception can be pulled out of history, understood as unified and an essence of itself, and made into a timeless concept. It is this that conditions his dynamic equivalence, an equivalent effect which means thoroughly understanding not only the meaning of the source text but also the manner in which the intended receptors of a text are likely to understand it in the receptor language.

Similarly, Wills, another advocate, bases his theory of equivalence on the concept of a universal language which consists of universal forms and a core of shared experience, a belief that deep-structure transfer is possible via a hermeneutic process, and a generative component which translates intralingually from the base to the surface of a given language. Many other linguistically oriented writers on translation also cling rather tenaciously to standards which are beyond any conceivable change: equivalence is one such, second only to terium comparationis, something that presumably hovers somewhere between languages in some kind of air bubble and guarantees that what in the language you translate into is, indeed equivalent to what in the language you translate from.

Therefore, it is no surprise that equivalence is always taken for granted as a prescriptive criterion, as Koller (1995:196) says:

Translation can be understood as the result of a text-reprocessing activity, by means of which a source-language text is transposed into a target-language text. Between the resulting text in L2 (the target-language text) and the source text in L1 (the source-language text) there exists a relationship which can be designated as a translational, or equivalence relation.

Then the question to be asked is not whether the two texts are equivalent, but what type and degree of translation equivalence they reveal. The answer to this question displays a splendid variety. On the one hand, equivalence consists of two main binary oppositions: such is Nida's notorious pair of formal equivalence (focusing on the message itself and aiming at the same form and meaning) and dynamic equivalence (focusing on reception and aiming at the same effect on their respective readers); with different labels but in the similar vein are semantic vs. communicative put forward by Newmark (1988), overt vs. covert by House (1981), documentary vs. instrumental by Nord (1997) and imitative vs. functional by Jacobsen (1994), etc.; on the other hand, equivalence has been split up into functional, stylistic, semantic, formal or grammatical, statistical and textual subtypes with hierarchies posited to give some subtypes higher priority than others, such as textual equivalence by Baker (1992), functional equivalence by Newman (1994), and so on.

2.2 The problems with equivalence

However, the notion of equivalence is quite controversial: it is one of the central issues in the theory of translation and yet one on which theorists seem to have agreed to disagree. First, the transcendental concept of humanity as an essence that remains unchanged over time and space, plus the positivist idea of a truth-out-there, something objective and absolute as its ground is open to criticism. We may return to this in the following chapter. Besides, it surely carries a normative and source-oriented flavor with preference of identity or sameness, or correspondence. It prescribes what translators should do and what requirements their texts must fulfill to be accepted as translations, for instance, Koller declares that

there exists equivalence between a given source text and a given target text if the target text fulfills certain requirements with respect to these frame conditions. The relevant conditions are those having to do with such aspects as content, style and function. The requirement of equivalence thus has the following form: quality (or qualities) x in the source text must be preserved. This means that the source language content, form, style, function, etc. must be preserved, or at least that the translation must seek to preserve them as far as possible." (qtd. in Nord, 1997:7, emphasis in the original)

This raises the problem of circularity, namely, equivalence is supposed to define translation, and translation, in turn, defines equivalence. Equivalence is the aim of translation in that translation is seen as striving towards equivalence, or at least the particular kind of equivalence which suits the occasion. At the same time, equivalence is the precondition of translation in that only a target text which displays the required amount of equivalence, of the right kind, is recognized as a valid translation

The notion of equivalence postulates a relationship between source-language text and target-language text but does not say anything about the nature of the relationship. This makes it ahistorical in nature since the mere demand that a translation be equivalent to a certain original is void of content. This also undermines its applicability. The variety of equivalence typologies stated above, seen in another way, indicates its chaotic application: different scholars turn to different frames of reference. One of the sources of disagreement is that texts are not only very complex structures in themselves but are also complex with regard to the uses to which they are put and the effects which they can have in a given situation. This means that translation and the original can be compared with regard to a very large number of factors, any of which can be significant for some detail in the text, and hence needs to be taken into consideration when establishing equivalence. It turns out that each individual phenomenon may require its own theory of equivalence. Then, these phenomena cannot be accounted for in terms of generalizations those advocates of prescriptive equivalence have done.

Manipulated with the source as the dominant frame of reference, through abstraction and categorization, for instance, from intertextual to interlingual to intercultural, as an abstract and didactic relationship, or category of relationships between translations and their sources, the notion of equivalence deliberately limits other possibilities of translation practices, marginalizes unorthodox translation, and impinges upon real intercultural exchange. Instances of this kind could be numerous. According to Toury's (1980) observation on translations into the Hebrew, examples of complete linguistic equivalence to the source text were rare, and the instances of near-adequacy to the source text, when they did occur, were usually accidental; on the other hand, despite the general lack of conformity with hypothetical models of translation equivalence, examples of mistranslations, translations considered inadequate in the target culture were, ironically enough, also rare. Another case in point is the translations into Chinese at the turn of the twentieth century: they have often been deliberately put into oblivion, gaining no positive assessments as translations from most present Chinese translation reviewers since they were only partially linguistically and functionally equivalent to the source text although they did enter and function as translations, occupying all positions from the center to the periphery in the historical and cultural circumstances.

2.3 Historizing equivalence

Seeing the disadvantage of such prescriptive and ahistorical approaches to translation, Toury shifts from defining translation a prior in terms of what it should be to looking at it empirically. As he says:

When one's purpose is the descriptive study of literary translations in their environment, the initial question is not whether a certain text is a translation (according to some preconceived criteria which are extrinsic to the system under study), but whether it is regarded as a translation from the intrinsic point of view of the target literary polysystem. (Toury, 1980: 43)

For Toury, if a text is regarded and functions as a translation in a given community, then we agree to call the relation between this text and its original one of equivalence. This move is rather more radical than it may seem: it divests the idea of equivalence of any substantial meaning, making it merely the name given to the translational relation that is posited as existing between two texts from the moment when one of them is accepted as a translation of the other; it also demotes equivalence from its central position as simultaneously the goal and prerequisite of translation, considering it merely the consequence of the decision to recognize a text as a translation. The downgrading of equivalence and shifting of attention to acceptability of a text as translation in the target culture brings translation norms to the fore. According to Toury, the exact relation between original and translation, which results from the translator's choices, needs to be determined from case to case. Whatever actual relation is found, we agree to speak of it as a relation of equivalence. But because this equivalence is the result of the choices made by the translator, and because the choices were governed by norms, the role of norms is crucial in shaping the text and coloring the equivalence relation. By introducing the idea of translation as a norm-governed activity, he reduced equivalence to a historical concept denoting any relation which is found to have characterized translation under a specified set of circumstances, or more fully: that set of relationships which will have been found to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate modes of translation performance for the culture in question.

It seems reasonable to strip the implications equivalence carries, namely, equality in value, an equitable exchange, or one thing being as good as another, down to a mere label, as Toury did. Then, we need take a critical look back at the close association between translation and equivalence with its full implications. Although pretending ahistorical and objective, it is culturally, or even politically defined notions and images of translation. Equivalence may be understood as a belief structure, the creation of a pragmatically necessary illusion. Our standard metaphors of translation incessantly rehearse this idea in casting translation as a transparent pane of glass, a simulacrum, and a replica. A translation may be a derived product, a mere copy and therefore secondary, but as long as there is nothing to jolt us out of our willing suspension of disbelief we assume that to all intents and purposes the replica is as good as and therefore equivalent to the real thing.

Equivalence as a normative criterion, however diluted through its subtypes, serves to control translation, to keep it in its space, in a hierarchical order, to avoid its erasure of the difference between production and reproduction which is essential to the establishment of power. By blurring the aspect of non-equivalence, of manipulation and displacement, translation sometimes covers the fact that it takes place in a context of power differentials which postcolonial studies have shown again and again. As the existence of so many two-way dictionaries indicates, this illusion holds that equivalence relationship can be readily established between languages. We can readily find in E-C dictionaries "他" and "她" as equivalents of " he" and " she" respectively. However, a critical interrogation of what these covers may be quite revealing. Before the 20^th century, Chinese people did not find anything wrong with the word "他" which did not denote any gender distinction. However, in 1910s, they suddenly felt the urge to establish an equivalent of " she" to fill the gap by coining a new word "她". This reflects not an inherent defect of the Chinese language, but the inequality between the Chinese and the English languages, for instance, no translators feel embarrassed when they translate the French feminine plural "ells" into English as "they" although it doesn't denote gender distinction. This also reflects a domestic motivation in China's course of seeking modernity to launch a campaign of gender distinction, or rather to set power differentials in such discursive strategies.

3 Recognizibility: what the relationship virtually is

The question of whether one text is a translation of another does not depend on the prescriptive and ahistorical equivalence relationships between the two. If it is right for Toury to reduce equivalence to historical and functional concept, a blank label to fill in, can we have other way round to view this relationship?

Gutt (1998) treats the label of translation as a potential aid to facilitate the correct interpretation of the translated product by the target audience. It plays a role similar to other text types, such as novel, poem essay, etc., which help to coordinate the intentions of the communicator with the expectations of the audience: when the communicator presents her utterance as a novel, this may trigger different expectations in the audience than if she called it a poem or essay. In this way, labels referring to different kinds of communication can fulfill an important pragmatic function in coordinating the activities of communicator and audience. Following Culler's definition of literature that "[l]iterature [---] is a speech act or textual event that elicits certain kinds of attention. It contrasts with other sorts of speech acts, such as imparting information, asking questions, or making promises" (qtd. in Hermans 1999: 51), Hermans (1999: 51) suggests that we should "start from the kind of signals emitted by an institutionalized-and therefore also historical and culturally determined-label translation'" and "envisage translation as promising a representation, and typically a re-enactment, of an anterior text which exists at the other side of an intelligibility barrier, usually a language barrier" (ibid., 52). A translation is then a text which usually invites the perception of relevant similarity, not sameness or identity.

Gutt (1998) puts this relationship as interpretive resemblance, positing that the translation should resemble the original closely enough in relevant respects. In a similar vein, borrowing from Ludwig Wittgenstein the concept of family resemblances, Toury (1980) views original texts as containing clusters of properties, meanings, possibilities, while all translations privilege certain properties /meanings at the expense of others, and thus pushes the concept of a theory of translation beyond the margins of a model restricted to faithfulness to the original, or of single, unified relationships between the source and target texts. Family resemblances, after all, are also of many different kinds. Some family resemblances may even be such that we would not want to describe the resembling text as a translation at all but as something else. Holmes (1988) spoke of a translation as being a map of the original: an original may have many true maps for different purposes, but it remains the case the map is not the territory. Chesterman further proposes the notion of truth.

Truth describes the quality of a relation between a proposition and a state of affairs. The proposition is not the same as the state of affairs---but the one bears a recognizable relation to the other---translations relate to their source texts in a wide variety of acceptable ways, depending on a whole host of intratextual and extratextual reasons. The point is that all these relations must be true to the original, in one way or another, as required by the situation. (1997:179, emphasis my own)

The notion of recognizability, as I perceive, carries elements of both subjectivism and objectivism. A translation can be seen as a copy or betrayal (in no derogatory sense of the two words) or both of its source text depending on how we would see it. To say that we clarify the translational status of a text is rather to say we actually categorize the text and its original. This is analogous to linguistic categorization: through categorization a working equivalence is established for a particular set of cases, and this equivalence in turn establishes a working difference between those cases, and other sets of cases, for instance, a word in a language embodies a decision to treat a particular range of things as if they were the same, and then to treat everything that falls outside that range as different. The primary origin of the principles of equivalence must lie in the purposes of the speakers, for the categories originate from them: they are the ones who have set up the system for their own use. In other words, the equivalence created by the categories of a language is a functional one: those things included in category can be and are treated as equivalent for the purpose of the category even though they are not identical. Conversely, what is excluded from a category is treated differently even though some excluded things may be more similar to some members of the category than those members are to many other members of the category. Categories relate to our purposes primarily, and to the actual differences of the real world secondarily (Ellis 1993:27-44). In terms of translation, difference indicates the impossibility that TT (target text) is ST (source text), while similarity indicates the possibility that TT is a translation of ST. Their working together makes the working equivalence to secure the translational relationship between A and B. This equivalence is subject to the purpose of the community; here I would like to refer to the community in the target culture, following the target-oriented approach. That is to say, this categorization is, to a great extent, done in the framework of the target culture.

4 Behind recognizability: a translation is any text accepted as a translation in the target culture

This suggests a shift from the objective text to living people: it is not texts as such structured compositions in a particular language that are translations or otherwise, it is the use of such texts with a particular intention that constitutes translation. In other words, the intertextual relationship is established and maintained in the process of intentional communications by people.

It also indicates the shift from the source to the target: traditional translation studies were indeed marked by extreme source-orientedness and its preoccupation was mainly with the source text and with the proclaimed protection of its legitimate rights. Target constraints, while never totally ignored, often counted as subsidiary, especially those which would not fall within linguistics of any kind. Against this background, Toury's concept that a translation is any text that is accepted in the target culture as being a translation is truly revolutionary. It indicates that translation is actually inscriptions in terms of the target culture instead of the source culture, that is, domestic inscriptions, as I would call them, and gives much larger scope for transnational relationship between the source-text and its translation.

Toury (1995: 81-84) exemplifies prospective vs. retrospective stances by metaphor. A prospective stance may give allowance to one of only three categories concerning the translation of metaphor: (1) metaphor into the same metaphor, (2) metaphor into different metaphor, (3) metaphor into non-metaphor. This stance may have access to (4) metaphor into 0 (i.e., complete omission, leaving no trace in the target text). But the prescriptive attitude it always assumes may lead to disregard of (4): it is not that (4) is impossible (in principle), or non-existent (in actual reality), but only that writers intent on the rights of the source text refuse to treat zero replacements legitimacy as translation solutions, or else they would do so only in the case of unimportant metaphors, or those used in unimportant texts, in source-oriented terms, of course. When proceeded from the target text, the four basic pairs listed above immediately find themselves supplemented by two inverted alternatives where the notion of metaphor appears in the target rather than the source pole: (5) non-metaphor into metaphor; and (6) 0 into metaphor (i.e., addition, pure and simple, with no linguistic motivation in the source text). The adoption of a target-oriented approach leads to an extension rather than reduction of scope, in keeping with actual reality.

The notion that translation is any text that is accepted in the target culture as being a translation carries several important implications. First, as Toury stresses that "translations are facts of the culture which hosts them, with the concomitant assumption that whatever their function and identity, these are constituted within that same culture and reflect its own constellation" (1995:51). A translation is a translation in the target culture, not the source culture. And so " the position and function which go with a text being regarded as a translation, are determined first and foremost by considerations originating in the culture which hosts them" (ibid., 26). Translation norms do not exist exclusively in the target-culture: some may have their origin in the source culture, and some in the intercultural state inhabited by the translator. However, it is the target culture which confirms translation status.

Second, there is nothing that is absolute or permanent about translation status because of its subjective elements: the trust (as Chesterman calls it) people in the target culture gives to it is relative. Even a text quite sincerely claimed and accepted as a translation/good translation could be criticized and even rejected as such by the same culture, perhaps centuries later, as expectations change.

This further indicates that translation criticism is virtually contextualized. According to Hung Eva (1998: 168)，the assessment of any given translation is conditioned by the translator's status in the translation's receiving culture; the receiving culture's perceived needs, whether ideological or literary, at that particular point in history; and finally the literary norms current at the time of assessment. Social and cultural changes inevitably give rise to different kinds of needs, and lead to the adoption or development of new ideological and literary norms, which in turn redefine the assessment of many translations. This may somehow account for the negative assessment the post-New Literature Chinese of the turn-of -the-century translations. The late Qing period and early Republican era witnessed two revolutions, the first of which was a reshuffling or readjustment of traditional values and practices to cater to the perceived needs of the nation, while the second of which aimed at uprooting all traditional values and practices, including the traditional literary language. Translations done in this period were deprived of their social and literary context after the New Literature Movement, thus cutting out any support the late Qing period translations would have received. They are often accused of being unfaithful to the original text and ignorant of Western literature and culture, conclusions that are formulated on the foundation of post-new Literature Movement ideas about the Western literary canon and literary translation. The cultural requirement and the social context of the time of translation are conveniently overlooked.

Thus, translation criticism should be contextualized: it should not stop at a haste judgment after textual comparison before exploring the manipulating powers hidden in the target culture and make it a seemingly ahistorical final say. Further, it should be aware of possible prejudice of its assessment resulting from current social context when evaluating translations at a different historical time and bring translation to the context where it is born.

Finally, this definition should also shed light on the production of translation. Source-oriented approach may favor a retrospective orientation, which is also reflected in the bottom-up process of translation, i.e. working from source-language elements and transferring the text sentence by sentence, or phrase by phrase. However, Focusing on translation as TT production also means that translation-oriented text analysis should be understood as a TT-oriented analysis. This invites a prospective view of translation, something related to a top-down process. It starts on the pragmatic level by deciding on the intended function of the TT and asking for specific text-typological conventions, and for addressees' background knowledge and their communicative needs. It puts the TT in the center and makes it clear that the ST is but one of the factors influencing the make-up of the TT. This is illustrated in the following figure (Schaffner 1998: 87).

Target communication situation

We can see from the above diagram that TT is not the result of the influence of ST, rather it is a result of the reception of the influence of ST by the target culture. Thus, the intertextual relationship between the source and the target texts joins the network of other relationships in the target culture. Viewing translation as " an offer of information formulated by a translator in a target culture and language about an offer of information (the source text) formulated by someone else in the source culture and language" (Nord 1997: 32), Skopos theorist Vermeer calls this relationship intertextual coherence, which is considered subordinate to intratextual coherence, and both are subordinate to the skopos rule. Intratextual coherence, according to him, suggests that a translation should be acceptable in a sense that it is coherent with the receivers' situation: the receiver should be able to understand it; it should make sense in the communicative situation and culture in which it is received. The term skopos usually refers to the purpose of the target text which once again is mainly triggered by the target culture. As he states:

one of the most important factors determining the purpose of a translation is the addressee, who is the intended receiver or audience of the target text with their culture-specific world-knowledge, their expectations and their communicative needs. Every translation is directed at an intended audience, since to translate means to produce a text in a target setting for a target purpose and target addressees in target circumstances.（qtd. in Nord 1997:12）

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