General theory of translation
Denys Nykula <nykula@ukr.net>, sophomore at Kyiv International University, 035 Philology, correspondence course

The process of translation can be divided in two stages. First, the interpreter analyzes the source text in order to understand it and extract all its meaning. Second, the interpreter attempts to synthesize a replication of the meaning using the means of the target language. The stages don't happen strictly sequentially, they tend to intersect and parallelize. Dictionaries serve as the irreplaceable bridge between the two stages of translation.²

The synthesis of the translation is usually also split into two stages. First, the interpreter prepares a draft, which replicates the basic meaning of the source and might contain trivial differences in terminology and style. Second, the interpreter shapes the draft into a correct, stylistically equivalent translation which precisely replicates the meaning of the source. There might be a third stage, namely editing, during which the application of terminology becomes the most precise.³

Translators should have a grasp of all domains of life in the country they are studying; they should deeply know the culture and traditions of the country. A translation specialist has to be versatile.

Political competence boils down to the ability to take responsibility for collaboratively coming up with solutions to social problems and working together to implement them through democratic institutions.

Cross-cultural competence involves fostering positive relations between people of different nationalities, cultures and religions; helping them understand and respect each other.

Informational competence is characterized by a good command of computer technology and critical evaluation of social information spread through mass media.

Personal competence involves readiness for continuous improvement of own educational level, self-actualization and application of own potential.

Communicative competence consists of the ability to talk to members of multiple cultures simultaneously.

Besides practical competence, the translation specialist should also be socially and culturally competent.

The cognitive component of sociological competence involves the knowledge of the histories, morals and norms of both one's own nation and of the country which the translation specialist is studying.

The axiological component boils down to understanding and accepting the attitudes and values of different cultures and nations of the world.

The operational component consists of the ability to organize collaboration with representatives of different nationalities and cultures, as well as to predictably work in a team.

The reflective component involves the skill to assess own behavior in different situations of social and cultural communication.

A translator should have comprehensive cognitive and linguistic knowledge, vast cross-cultural erudition, strong psychological and eloquent literary skills.⁴

First, there is interpretation and there is translation. It's called interpretation when the interpreter speaks live, and translation when they take their time to write.

Consecutive interpretation is when the speaker makes pauses for the interpreter to translate their text on the fly, by phrase or paragraph.

Synchronous interpretation is when the speaker doesn't make pauses and the interpreter has to listen and speak simultaneously.

Parallel interpretation is when the interpreter doesn't just translate from one language to another, but vice versa, too.

There are subtypes of translation — written translation of what was heard, for example of a sound recording; and translation from a sheet, when the translator reads the text silently and translates it aloud.

Second, the specialists in the field of translation specialize in specific types of text.

To translate art, such as poetry, prose or folklore, one has to master literary talent. It's necessary to replicate the manner of the author while using words and imagery understood by the speakers of the target language.

Technical translators work with documentation for technological equipment, user manuals, exact science handbooks, technical articles, speeches and other texts full of specialized terms.

Economic translators work with accounting and tax documentation, international treaties and acts, as well as financial reports.

Legal translators work with regulations, laws and bills, contracts and agreements, jurisprudence books and articles.

Automotive translators work with user and repair manuals for vehicles, descriptions of electrical circuits of cars and other technical equipment, as well as guides on usage of technical liquids.

Medical translators work with medical history, reports, scientific and popular articles, lab test results, operation protocols and manuals for medical technology and equipment.

Sociopolitical translators work with documents, magazines, newspapers, radio and television speeches. Their goal is to influence the audience. This type of translation requires knowlede of political science and a grasp of both international relations and internal affairs.

There are radio engineering, military, chemical and other specialized translators, too. The translator has to be an expert in their chosen domain in addition to being a linguistic specialist.⁵

Contemporary linguistics are divided into two primary types, formal and functional, according to whether they focus on form or function.

After the end of the Second World War, there was a breakthrough in American linguistics when in 1957 Noam Chomsky published «Syntactic Structures». His program linked linguistics to the rationalist ideas of Rene Descartes and other seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers. According to Chomsky, grammar is a formal system making explicit the mechanisms by which sentences of a language can be generated; for this reason the tradition is called generative grammar.

In the late 1950s Europe, the linguistic developments took off in functionalist direction. Andre Martinet and Michael Halliday stressed that language develops the way it does because of the uses it is put to. One particular functionally oriented school of linguistics, led by Simon Dik, rejects the notions of generative grammar but takes seriously the requirement of analytical and theoretical explicitness.

Also in late 1950s, again in America, like Chomsky, Joseph Greenberg was rethinking questions of language universals and typology. However, unlike Chomsky, he sought universals through investigation of various languages rather than focusing on English.⁶

Language is a complex structure that consists of units of different order. Different levels of linguistic structures interact and form a hierarchy: units of each level are composed of the units of the previous level. Each language level is a subsystem of the general language system and is characterized by specific units that function according to certain rules and laws.

The fundamental language level is phonetics. A phoneme (a sound) is an indivisible unit of a language. Phonetics researches how and where sounds are articulated, how well they combine, and what their acoustic features and positional changes in speech are. It also researches tone and accents.

The second language level is centered around morphemes. A morpheme (a syllable) is the minimal meaningful unit, as the meaning of a word is centered in its root, which is one of the morpheme types. The other morpheme types are affixes: prefix, suffix, inflection, postfix and interfix.

The third language level is lexical; it involves words. Multiple disciplines function at this level. Etymology researches where a word comes from. Semantics researches what the word means. Morphology considers to what part of speech the word belongs. Lexicography describes the rules and principles of vocabulary building.

The fourth and final language level is syntactic. Researches of syntax study word groups and sentences, and the rules according to which they are formed. There is descriptive and historical syntax, constructive and communicative syntax, general and partial syntax etc.

A person who has mastered all four levels of a language pronounces the phonemes correctly, knows the spelling and understands the meaning of words and their relation to different communicative tasks, constructs sentences according to the rules of the language, and has a vast erudition when it comes to synonyms and phraseological units.⁷

The Toledo school of translations is an umbrella term for the three generations of translations who worked in Spain during the 12th and 13th centuries. Some of them translated to Latin. The others translated from Arabic and Latin to the Old Spanish. They worked independently but collaborated situationally whenever the state or the church had an order for them.

In the 18th-century Germany, during the classicism era, the translation schools of Breitinger and Gottsched formed. They shared a rationalistic conception of language, according to which, any pair of languages could be translated into each other, even if the translation wouldn't be entirely equivalent. Gotsched, adhering to the classical canon of classicism, considered a translation good if it satisfied the norms of poetics. If it didn't, the translator had to keep shortening their work until it did. Breitinger, however, insisted that a translator had to closely follow the source material in meaning as well as in form. To expand the capabilities of the German language, he tried replicating various words and idioms of the source languages.

The 20th-century was marked by the emergence of the High Institute of Translation in Paris. This institution focused on constructing a holistic interpretive theory of Seleskovich and Lederer who summarized their vast personal experience and empirical observations in interpretation and translation. According to their theory, a successful translator has to master their native language, the source language, the background knowledge of the world, and the methodology of translation. They posited that interpretation is rooted in the triad of understanding, deverbalization and reconstruction, with the emphasis on deverbalization as the main cognitive stage of translation. They described translation as an act of communication complicated by cultural factors, rather than a simple operation on linguistic units.^{8 , 9}

In Ukraine nowadays, the main approach to translation is the approach of the communicative school. Its main idea is to replicate the general meaning of a text as well as conceptual perception in the context of information about its author and recipient. Communicative translators focus on the precise perception of the text by the reader thanks to concise and understandable translation.

The functional school focuses on replication of the function of text in the context of its situational and cultural peculiarities. Functional translators pay attention to the cross-cultural realities that create a basis for an effective perception of the communicative goal of the text.

The cognitive school, developed in the Ukrainian scientific community, researches the process of translation from the standpoint of knowledge acquisition and thinking. Translators who follow this methodology attempt to replicate the ideas of the author as well as their cognitive experience and way of thinking.¹⁰

According to the situational (denotative) model, the meaning of all linguistic signs represents certain objects, phenomena and relations of the everyday reality. A real situation is a complex of the denoted objects and the relations between them. Any real situation can be described in terms of any language because people share the same reality regardless of which language they speak. The terms may differ: «keep of the grass» — «по газонах не ходити». It is the responsibility of the interpreter to find the precisely equivalent terms, come up with new terms or represent the situation using existing alternative means.¹²

Semantics study the meaning of a term, which can be found by determining a differential quality, antonymic to a certain other term. For example, a student is not a teacher, neither he or she is multiple students. When the interpreter applies the semantic model of translation, their goal is to replicate the meaning that is relevant to the communication, and avoid replicating irrelevant meanings.

Finding a creative way to replicate the meaning matters when the source and target languages say the same thing without strict equivalence, using different words with multiple meanings: «Last year saw a rapid growth of industrial production» — «Минулий рік відзначився швидким зростанням промислового виробництва».¹³

The transformational model of translation relies on structural changes of the text during the translation, for example the changes in how sentences are constructed.

It is related to the informative model of translation, which rejects the weight of elementary semantic components and their related categories in the process of translation. Instead, the interpreter focuses on decoding and relaying different types of information carried by the source text. Applying the informative translational model, one keeps in mind the distinctness of cultures, the conditions during which the source text was created and the cultural competence on the recipient of the translation.¹⁴

When applying the transformational model, the interpreter begins by transforming surface structures (complex sentences) into core, invariant structures, in which the logical and syntactical relations are the most transparent. They continue by substituting core structures of the source language with the equivalent core structure of the target language. Finally, they reconstruct a structure in the target language that stylistically matches the structure of the source.

Example:

Surface structure: The White House pressurized the Senate into reconsidering its decision.

Core structures: The White House pressurized the Senate. The Senate reconsidered its decision.

Establishing relations: The White House pressurized the Senate so that it should reconsider its decision.

Substitution: Білий дім натис на сенат, щоб той скасував своє рішення.

Further stylistic editing may be possible.¹⁵

A sender is someone who encodes and sends a message to a receiver through a channel. The sender initiates the communication.

The receiver is the one who has to decode the message in a way that is meaningful for them.

The message is the particular meaning or content the sender wishes the receiver to understand.²¹

The channel is the method the sender uses to deliver the message to the receiver. The most common channels are verbal and non-verbal. Verbal communication relies on language; it involves speaking, writing and sign language. Nonverbal communication includes gestures, facial expressions, paralanguage and touch. The channel can be mediated, for example using a computer.

Channels tend to be noisy. External and internal noise make encoding and decoding messages more difficult. No message is received exactly as it is transmitted by a sender because noise distorts it in one way or another.²¹

The code means symbols of the language used to transmit a message. In a communication that uses two languages, the sender and the recipient don't share the same code. They can only understand each other when someone transforms the text in one (source) language into such text in the other (target) language that the message of the sender can affect the recipient. This is the task of translation.

The sender communicates the source message to the interpreter, who acts as an intermediary recipient. The interpreter recodes the message, substituting the signs of the source language with signs of the target language, trying to establish equivalence. The interpreter then communicates the message in the target language to the final recipient.

The contact with the interpreter in the middle usually involves partial loss of meaning, as full equivalence is unobtainable. Being the original recipient, the interpreter translates for a different group of recipients than the sender of the message. The interpreter has to study the message more thoroughly than the final recipient.²²

A literal, or lexically equivalent translation seeks to produce a translation as close to the original text as possible, with little or no room for interpretation. Accuracy of terminology is the key to this type of translation. Literal translation is used in technical and scientific fields, as well as when translating official documents, legal texts and trade contracts.²⁴

A free, or stylistically equivalent translation aims to convey the intent and nuance of a source text, in addition to its literal meaning. When following this approach, translators use equivalent expressions in their target language even if they don't align with the literal meaning of the source. A typical example is idiomatic translation. Free translation is suited to literary and poetic contexts, where the message is effective when the text maintains a rhythm and evokes feelings.²⁴

A semantically equivalent translation maintains the same meaning in the target language as found in the source language. The essence, ideas and feelings conveyed in the source text are preserved, allowing the reader to understand and appreciate the original intent of the author. Achieving semantic equivalence requires a careful balance between literal translation and the cultural context of both languages.²⁵

In culturology, a functional style means the usage of literary language in a certain sphere of human activity. Depending on the conditions and the goals of communication, each functional style selects and organizes different linguistic units: words, morphological forms and syntactic constructs.

The journalistic style attempts to influence the recipient; the scientific and formal business style informs them; the vernacular style emphasizes the communicative function; the literary, artistic style focuses on the aesthetic function of the language. The artistic style portrays a secondary, transformed or fictional world, while other styles represent our reality.²⁶

Language norms are conventions and rules of linguistic unit usage, historically formed among the educated segments of the population and codified in vocabularies. There exist orthoepic, word-forming, grammatical, lexical, syntactic and stylistic norms.

Stylistic norms regulate the contextual usage of a word according to its semantics (meaning) and stylistic features (whether it's literary, vernacular, archaic etc). Unlike the general language norms, which are imperative, stylistic norms are advisory. Stylistic norms regulate what option is preferable in a specific style when multiple options are available.

Stylistic standards are words, expressions and syntactic constructs bound to a certain style of literary language.²⁷

Stylistic transformations are translational methods that help the interpreter shift stylistic accents, neutralizing the connotations or exposing their relevance. Such transformations adapt the language of the translation to the stylistic norms of the target language.

Logization is when the interpreter substitutes an emotionally expressive or ethnically marked unit of the source language with its stylistically neutral counterpart in the target language: bucks — долари, to give a sack — звільнити з роботи.

Expressivation is when, on the contrary, the interpreter substitutes a neutral unit of the source language with its stylistically marked counterpart in the target language, adding emotional expressivity to the translation: to go — чимчикувати, house — хата.

Modernization is substitution of legacy, archaic or historical words, expressions and syntactic structures with their modern counterparts, which weakens the aesthetic function of the source: yeoman — фермер, «Would you be so kind as to supply us with the additional information» — «Надайте нам, будь ласка, додаткові відомості».

Archaization is when modern, common vocabulary is substituted with archaic and historic words, expressions and syntactic structures in order to reconstruct the historical reality or saturate the language stylistically: the clothes — шати, «Don't hesitate to apply for further information» — «Якщо ваша ласка, надайте нам додаткові відомості».²⁸