Defining Translation

What is Translation?

There are many simple ways and many complex ways to answer this question, none is unanimously preferred. One simple way to put it, however, would be that translation is the rendering of linguistic data originally produced in one language into another language. On the one hand, we have seen that many people do not believe in perfect translation. But the idea that translation deals with saying the same thing in another language is easy to grasp, and it gives an accurate summary that we can accept as such in most situations without confusing each other. Indeed, the ability to describe any given situation or event in the world is a powerful property commonly ascribed to all human languages. 

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For example, unless you're Korean, you probably have never eaten sun-ji hae-jang-guk (선지해장국), but I can explain so you can understand what it is: it is a broth (guk), also called 'hangover soup' (hae-jang-guk), with vegetables and coagulated cow blood (sun-ji), tripe etc. I can continue to explain its taste, texture, odor, when and how it is usually eaten, and so on. I can add details endlessly, and you will have a pretty good idea of the soup when you put together all the information you have been given.

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Of course, your understanding will still be limited, for the simple reason that you still have never tried the food. However much information I provide, you will not know exactly what sun-ji hae-jang-guk tastes like until you actually taste it. This seems to be where language falls short: it can describe an experience but cannot itself be that experience. As long as we define translation to be inter-lingual, the problem here is not of translation but of experience. I can translate the word "선지해장국", but I cannot translate the food 선지해장국, because it is not language; it is a hangover soup with coagulated cow blood.

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But, bringing back the discussion of Huckleberry Finn, 

we are concerned with a special kind of language that

goes by many names—literary, poetic, aesthetic etc.

Generally, we often call texts written in this kind of

language as literature, and it is in literature people seem

to consider perfect translation impossible. Let us begin to

ask how literary language is different through the frame 

of 선지해장국. Let us imagine that Korea's greatest poet, 

whoever that might be, wrote a splendid sijo (a traditional poetic form in Korea) on this soup. Possibly, that poem could be so descriptive that it is almost as though we feel like we are really tasting the soup as we read it. It will, however, always be checked by the phrase 'almost as though'. It can correspond to that experience in original and captivating ways, but the poem itself cannot literally give us the taste of 선지해장국.

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I drew this example to arrive at the question of what it is that distinguishes literary language. For the purpose of this project, I will adopt the explanation given in a short essay by Roman Jakobson. His terminology appears simplistic at first glance but proves useful when we think about how literary language differs from our everyday language, and why that different may cause problems in translation.

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What is Literary Translation?

Jakobson establishes that pretty much any message can be conveyed in any language: “All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language. Whenever there is deficiency, terminology may be qualified and amplified by loan-words or loan-translations, neologisms or semantic shifts, and finally, by circumlocutions”. In other words, when I say that the sentence 'I like pie' can be translated into Korean or any other language, I mean that I can convey the idea that I like pie in that target language (the language translated-into).

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As was the case earlier, even if pie did not exist in Korea (which it does), I still would have been able to convey this idea, which Jakobson terms “cognitive experience,” by providing a number of encyclopedic details, namely that pie is a certain baked dish usually made of such and such ingredients, eaten usually under such and such circumstances, with such and such flavors and textures, and the like.

 

Languages are mutually translatable, because they typologically “differ essentially in what they must convey,” but “not in what they may convey”.

 

Up to this point, there is no reason for the translator not to be optimistic, especially when Jakobson goes so far as to state that “Any assumption of ineffable or untranslatable cognitive data would be a contradiction in terms”.

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Towards the end of his essay, however, he acknowledges that

there is a realm of language that cannot be translated, where

we finally have an explanation for literary language: “In jest,

in dreams, in magic, briefly, in what one would call everyday

verbal mythology and in poetry above all, the grammatical

categories carry a high semantic import. In these conditions,

the question of translation becomes much more entangled

and controversial”.

 

In this realm of language, “Any constituents of the verbal

code … carry their autonomous signification”. That is, it is

not only the propositional content that the linguistic signs

convey (the 'meaning' of the sentence that the words point at) but also the way in which various grammatical aspects of the signs are structured itself that bears meaning.

 

If 'I like pie' were to occur in a poem as a line, we might expect that there must be a reason why the line is so short, why it ends with a vowel as opposed to a rougher-sounding consonant, why there is the rhyming 'ai' sound among the three words, etc. We could be entirely right or entire wrong as to the author's intentions, but the very fact that this sentence occurs in a poem equips us with a different mindset that encourages us to look into the formal details of the sentence's composition. Jakobson says that “syntactic and morphological categories, roots, and affixes, phonemes and their components (distinctive features)” can all contribute to this artistic realm of the text.

 

Still, it is difficult to define this realm of "autonomous signification" precisely and give it a crystal-clear term that pinpoints everything it comprises. It can be described in many ways: poetic, rhythmic, dramatic etc. However vague the definition might be, it is also hard to argue that there is no difference whatsoever between 1) regular usage of language, where all "cognitive data" is translatable and 2) whatever it is that we call literary language, where the “high semantic import” of is formal structure is embedded in and inseparable from the sentences produced by the original author.

 

In the case of rhyming, for example, “Phonemic similarity is sensed as semantic relationship”. A familiar phrase in literary translation is the Italian “Traduttore, traditore”, which is something like 'translator, traitor'. This phrase, Jakobson says, can be translated into English only without the precise “paronomastic value” (meaning that it is a pun). While we can translate the phrase as “the translator is a traitor” and explain that the original achieved a certain poetic effect by juxtaposing two phonetically similar words, our English translation cannot retain the exact same rhyme as the original.

 

Once the medium of expression changes, from Italian to English, even though anything can be explained one way or another, the immediate effects of verbal art cannot be felt directly in the way it was originally structured. This sounds a little similar to the previous analogy to sun-ji hae-jang-guk. In that case, language could describe the taste, but it could not make us directly experience that taste. In the case of poetry, one might be able to describe in English what it is like for someone who understands Italian to hear the Italian phrase, and she might be able to explain what kind of formal details create such effects. But we will not be able to feel the same effects that she felt without access to the Italian original; we will not be able to experience the "autonomous significations" of the original sentence.

 

So Jakobson concludes, “Poetry by definition is untranslatable". This sounds very discouraging at first, but he then provides a very useful phrase that can be attributed to literary translation: "Only creative transposition is possible”. It is the nature of this “creative transposition” that takes up much of the task of the literary translator, the question of what the translator ought to do. I will be quoting terms like "cognitive data", "autonomous significations", and "creative transposition" several times throughout project.

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What is Good Literary Translation?

Just as the reader expected: depends. People’s views on translation are deeply connected to the philosophical, ethical or political causes they already support. For this project, I think it is enough to point out that any thinker's philosophy of translation is not going to be distinct from her philosophy of everything else. There already are many long, long books that have compiled those kinds of arguments. There can be numerous justifications for why translation should be done in a certain way, but, broadly speaking, there are not that many options for how to go about the actual activity of translating. We will explore them on the next page.

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Before proceeding, I wanted to bring up this memorable quote by Robert Frost. He once defined poetry as “that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation” (this definition is now widely rephrased as “poetry is what gets lost in translation.”) This remark is congruous with Jakobson's definition we've looked at. In short, language can always tell of anything, but translations can't tell what the original tells in the selfsame way.

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