1、A PROBE INTO THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION1. THE NATURE OF TRANSLATION2. DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION IN TRANSLATION3. CONCRETE WORDS, ABSTRACT WORDS, GENERAL WORDS AND SPECIFIC WORDS4. TRANSLATION WITH THE HELP OF INTERNET(Revised in 2010)By Xu ZhaoxiangShanghai Urban Construction Design & Research Insti
2、tuteA PROBE INTO THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION1. THE NATURE OF TRANSLATIONTranslation is actually a process of communication, in which, the translator uses the target language to reproduce the same communication effect as made by the source language. To achieve this purpose, a translator should, first o
3、f all, have a profound knowledge of both languages, and be able to use them freely. This is quite obvious from the fact that if the translator doesnt have perfect command of the source language, he cannot understand the work thoroughly. And though he may be a master of the target language, he cannot
4、 reproduce the work which is dim to him. It is the same in the opposite case, i.e. the translator has acquired a perfect comprehension of the original work, but his limited expressions of the target language will also hinder him from turning out a satisfactory rendition.In the oral communication, pe
5、ople can apply various devices to enforce or make clear what they are not saying adequately, such as gestures, body movements, facial expressions, pitch, rapidity of utterance, etc., which may play a role even greater than words in the discourse. In the written communication, however, the writer can
6、 only resort to words and punctuation marks to express his thoughts and feelings, which always seem to be insufficient to the effect. But by selecting and arranging words, that is, through diction and rhetoric devices, the writer can also enhance his expressions. Then the part for a translator to pl
7、ay is just to select and arrange words in the target language in a way as similar as possible to what is used in the original work so as to achieve the equivalent impact on readers. Some other devices, though not so closely related to language as words, can likewise have a certain influence on writt
8、en communication. For example, the quality and style of printing, format, quality and size of paper and binding, etc. are all important factors for a good reading. If possible, the translator should similarly follow suit. If you intend to start some translation work, you should be fully aware of the
9、 main characteristics of the work.2. DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION IN TRANSLATIONSometimes you have to consult a dictionary during your work and may be distressed to find that the word has a list of meanings instead of one, and you have to make a choice among them. In fact, this is a common case for al
10、most every word in a language. Further analysis shows that the meaning of words are generally of two types denotative and connotative.The denotative meaning is the primary meaning of a word. It is the meaning that accompanies the birth of that word, and therefore its function is just like naming and
11、 denoting. For instance, the meaning of the word “tigress” is denotative when it refers to a fierce female animal of the cat family. It is the same with the word “rose” when it is used to refer to a kind of flower.The connotative meaning is the secondary meaning of a word, which is derived from its
12、primary meaning through its long period of prevailing, and it always has a certain connection with the denotative meaning of that word. The connotative meaning is inseparable from the context and is often of figurative nature, having one or more major functional characteristics of the original refer
13、ent. For example, in the sentence “She is really a tigress in the neighborhood”, the meaning of the word “tigress” is connotative as it now refers to a fierce woman, taking the fierceness of the animal for the secondary meaning to provide a vivid picture of that woman. For another example, the flowe
14、r “rose” is often brought to the beloved to express a feeling of “love” or “friendship”, which in turn arouses happiness on the side of the receptor. From this function of the flower, we now have its connotative meanings like “love”, “happy” or “smoothness”, and we wont feel absurd to such sentences
15、 as “Things now become rose” and “He saw a rose in her eyes”. No doubt, it is easy to understand the sentence “The shopkeeper was an old fox” as the word “fox” really means “someone cunning” here. However, the development of the word meaning from denotation to connotation cannot always be traced eas
16、ily. The Indians will wonder why a “white elephant” is a useless thing in English as its runs quite contrary to their common knowledge of that animal.In translation, it is relatively easier to handle the denotative meaning of words in the text, and a word-for-word translation would be possible if we
17、 disregarded the shift in grammatical structure, or if the referent of the word in the source language was exactly the same as that of its correspondent in the target language. Unfortunately it is not true in most cases, and difference in grammar and in the range of a referent makes translation a ha
18、rd nut to crack.Translation of the connotative meanings of words often requires much more labor of the translator, both in his comprehension of the source language and in his reproduction in the target language. To understand the connotative meaning of a word, you must take two steps. The first step
19、 is to know accurately its denotative meaning, its major characteristics, its function or its etymology, i.e. the history of its formation. The second step is to connect it with the context so as to get the relevant meaning. It is often far more arduous to complete the work in the second step, espec
20、ially in cases like a “a white elephant” mentioned above, since it has nothing to do with “a huge useless thing” when it comes across people not of the British origin. Such meanings are often found very difficult to express in the target language if the translator tries to keep their original flavor
21、. Generally, there are three ways of reproducing the connotative meaning of words in the source language, which are listed below in the sequence of difficulty.I Reproduction in words of the target language with almost the same denotation and connotation. For example, you can translate “tigress” and
22、“old fox” into Chinese as “雌老虎” and “老狐狸”, no matter whether they refer to some animals, or a fierce woman or a cunning old man. This kind of translation can be called “happy match translation”, and so it is less painstaking.II Reproduction in words of the target language with different denotation b
23、ut similar connotation, as in cases like translating the English proverb “to teach ones granny how to suck eggs” into the Chinese idiom “班门弄斧”, and to “rain cats and dogs” into “下倾盆大雨”. The result of translation, though not as desirable as achieved in I above, is also quite satisfactory.III Reproduc
24、tion in words of the target language whose denotative meaning is equivalent to the connotative meaning of the original expressions, so this kind of translation is rather explanatory in nature and much of the original style is lost. For instance, you have to turn the English expressions “a rubber nec
25、k” into Chinese as “一个探头探脑的人”, and “a white elephant” as “大而无用的东西”. Apparently, the result still leaves much to be desired. The reason is that it is very difficult to find equivalents with exactly the same connotations in the target language, either because of their nonexistence or because of the tr
26、anslators limited knowledge of that language.During the process of translation, the translator, while coming across some words or expressions with connotative meanings, will naturally first apply the way in I to finish his work directly and quickly. If he is not lucky enough to find such words in th
27、e target language which can match those in the source language happily, he has to rack his brains to seek for the suitable substitute, i.e. using the way in II, and if he is already at his wits end and still cannot locate the expression desirable, he is obliged to take the last measure described in
28、III to explain in plain simple words, as in the case of “a white elephant” mentioned above. The last way is therefore the most difficult though the results finally achieved are usually not so satisfactory.Now we may well realize what an important role our knowledge of words denotation and connotatio
29、n plays in our work of translation.3. CONCRETE WORDS, ABSTRACT WORDS, GENERAL WORDS AND SPECIFIC WORDSBefore we go any further on this topic, it is necessary to give clear definitions to these terms: concrete words, abstract words, general words and specific words.Concrete Words The referents of suc
30、h words are perceptible or tangible in the real world or in the belief and imagination of people, such as “books, fire, water, names of color, quark, god, ghost and hell”. These are just nouns. Concrete words can also be verbs when they refer to visible motions related to the concrete nouns, such as
31、 “kick, crush, laugh, fall and run”.Abstract Words The referents of such words are activities of the mind or the results of such activities, and anything else that neither perceptible nor tangible. They can be nouns like “idea, dream, strength and sorrow”, verbs like “conceive, imagine, feel, see an
32、d have”, adjectives like “good, terrible, wise, sad and happy”, and adverbs like “hardly, always and completely”.General Words The referent of such a word consists of a group of referents of several words, which have at least one common characteristic in the field of semantics. For example, “food” i
33、s a general with reference to “meat, grain, fruit and vegetable”, having the “common core” of “something edible”.Specific Words The referents of such words are components of some general word. In the example above, “meat, grain, fruit and vegetable” are specific words to the general word “food”. In
34、semantics, general words are termed as “Superordinates”, while specific words are their “Hyponyms”.With the above points in mind, lets see what is the interrelationship between these kinds of word. As mentioned above, “food” is a general word, but it becomes a specific word with reference to the wor
35、d “livelihood”. Likewise, “fruit” can be shifted to be a general word against the group of words “apple, pear, peach, banana, etc.” This shows that whether a word is general or specific is determined by its reference and is therefore relative and changeable.Lets make another analysis of words like “
36、food, fruit, tool and vehicle” to see whether they are concrete words or abstract words. It is true that no one is actually able to see “fruit, tool or vehicle”, but we can apparently feel that they differ from words like “idea, concept, feeling, emotion, meaning, etc.” The difference lies in the fa
37、ct that the meaning of words can be visualized by people, such as “apple, pear and banana” within the word “fruit”, “spanner, hammer and saw” within “tool”, and “bus, truck, car and bicycle” within “vehicle”. Whether general or specific, words of the second group, however, can never be visualized. S
38、o it is reasonable to consider the first group of words to be concrete while the second, abstract. Usually, the more general a concrete word is, the less concrete it becomes. For instance, “plant” is more general than “flower”, so “flower” is more concrete than “plant”, and the word “rose” is even m
39、ore concrete than “flower”, which now becomes a general word, the superordinate over the word “rose”. Abstract words, however, can never be less abstract even if it is very specific. The words “derogatory and commendatory” are hyponyms in respect to the word “meaning”, but they are just as abstract
40、as their superordinate. The interrelationship between the four categories of words can be illustrated better in the following diagram.Concrete Words Specific WordsAbstract Words General WordsThe arrow here means “can be shifted to”.4. TRANSLATION WITH THE HELP OF INTERNETWith the development of Inte
41、rnet, people now can obtain much greater amounts of information much easier and faster. Through “Google”, “Baidu” and other search engines, we can find a lot of new words and expressions which havent been collected in the dictionary yet. “Google” even has a powerful function for translation. We may
42、make use of the internet search engine to help our translation in the following steps.Step 1 - Open a search engine like “Google” and type the words or expressions in the source language, e.g. 上海市城市建设设计研究院 in the frame for search.Step 2 - Type after the expression in Step 1 some words in the target
43、language which you are certain the complete translation contains. Here, we can type “Shanghai” “Construction” and “Design”, inserting two spaces between the words that are not next to each other as we are not sure whether “城市” here is expressed with “city”, “metropolitan” or “urban”.Step 3 - Hit the
44、 “Search” then and the full English name thereof will generally appear.Step 4 - If you dont know how to translate a word or an expression in the source language, you may type some more words familiar to you that are usually next to it. For example, if you cant give English for “水龙”, type “消防水龙 ” and then “fire” after two spaces, and the answer will come out.
