Experiences in Translation
by Umberto EcoCommunication is Translation
All communication is translation in some sense––imperfectly moving from one’s initial meaning to the intermediary of words to the reader’s ultimate understanding. Within language, between languages, and across time are all avenues along which we have to “translate” meaning.
In his essay on the linguistic aspects of translation, Jakobson (1959) suggested that there are three types of translation: intralinguistic, interlinguistic, and intersemiotic.
That words, sentences, and texts usually convey more than their literal sense is a commonly accepted phenomenon, but the problems are (i) how many secondary senses can be conveyed by a linguistic expression, and (ii) which ones a translation should preserve at all costs.
Translations do not concern a comparison between two languages but the interpretation of two texts in two different languages.
The form of the linguistic expression cannot be mapped one to one onto another continuum… In the shift from continuum to continuum, the interpretation is mediated by the adapter, and is not left at the mercy of the addressee.
Anyone who summarized the Divine Comedy in English by saying that it is ‘a powerful and fascinating representation of the destiny of human souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise’ would certainly be providing a succinct interpretation of the entire poem, perhaps maintaining that only in such a way could its deep nature be expressed, but, once again, it would be pure (and not very perspicuous) rhetorical licence to call it a translation.
The language of music certainly has limited power compared to speech because it would be rather difficult to express the content of the Critique of Pure Reason in music, but a visual language would also have trouble expressing all the senses of Kant’s text. Equally, it is difficult to express the sense of Beethoven’s Fifth in words.
Languages carry large contexts
Eco argues that translation, as it’s normally understood, is just a subset of the broader sense that involves additional cultural and linguistic context in the way of transmitting meaning. These contexts, both for the original text and the translator, affect the relationship between the original and translated versions, as well as the options for the translator along the way.
We decide how to translate, not on the basis of the dictionary, but on the basis of the whole history of two literatures.
should a translation lead the reader to understand the linguistic and cultural universe of the source text, or transform the original by adapting it to the reader’s cultural and linguistic universe?
To see how this question is not nearly as preposterous as it seems, we should consider the fact that translations age. Shakespeare’s text, in English, is always the same, but if modern French readers read a Shakespearean translation from the last century they feel uncomfortable and cannot take it seriously.
in order to show something, Nerval uses terms that must have been familiar to readers of his day, but may be obscure for modern readers, and even for modern French readers themselves. It is as if a contemporary text, which says, ‘He switched on the computer in the dark room, and stood as if hypnotized,’ were read by a reader of one hundred years ago who has never seen a computer.
A translator’s choices
Through his personal experience as a translator, Eco also discusses some of the key considerations of translation, including how difficult (impossible) it is for a translator to remain neutral and not impart any of their own context on the translated output.
Once again the translator must decide what the fundamental content conveyed by a given text is. In order to preserve a ‘deep’ story, the translator is sometimes entitled to change the ‘surface’ one.
A translation that manages to ‘say more’ might be an excellent piece of work in itself, but it is not a good translation.
Aesthetic appreciation is not just a matter of the effect one experiences, but also involves an appreciation of the textual strategy that produces it.
Many Italian spectators recall having seen Ingmar Bergmann’s The Seventh Seal, where Death plays chess with the protagonist. If this had been a written text, Der Todt (or its Swedish equivalent, en dod, also masculine in gender) would have translated as La Morte in Italian (or La Mort in French). As Bergmann had to show this Death by means of images, he decided to show it as a male, a fact that strikes every Italian or French spectator, accustomed to conceiving of Death as a being of the female gender. The fact that for Italians and the French this strange and unexpected figure of Death reinforces the impression of fear that the filmic text certainly intended to suggest is, I should say, an ‘added value.’ But this demonstrates that the transmutation of matter adds meaning or lends importance to connotations that were not originally such.