Compensation, loss and gain

A translation technique used to compensate for translation loss. The translator
offsets an inevitable loss at one point in the text by adding a suitable
element at another point, achieving a compensatory translation gain.
For example, an informal text in French using the second personal pronoun
tu might be rendered in English by informal lexis or use of the first name
or nickname. Compensation in an interpretive sense, restoring life to the TT,
is the fourth ‘movement’ of Steiner’s hermeneutic process (Steiner 1998:39,
see Part A, Unit 13).

These translation procedures have influenced later taxonomies by, amongst others,
van Leuven-Zwart (1989, 1990), who attempts a very complex analysis of extracts
from translations of Latin American fiction. However, despite a systematic means
of analysis based on the denotative meaning of each word, the decision as to whether
a shift has occurred is inevitably subjective since an evaluation of the equivalence
of the ST and TT units is required. Some kind of evaluator, known in translation
as a tertium comparationis, is necessary.

shiffts

Task A4.2
➤ The Eurostar ST has been reproduced below together with the German
translation. Look at the translation units that are matched up and, using the
back-translation to help you, note any ‘mismatches’, denoting shifts.
Example A4.3a
Eurostar
Please note that smoke detectors will be fitted on-board. Any misconduct will result in
necessary action being taken by rail staff and/or police.
Example A4.3b German
Beachten Sie bitte, daß die Züge mit Rauchdetektoren ausgestattet werden. Jeder
Verstoß wird mit den erforderlichen Maßnahmen durch das Bahnpersonal und/oder die
Polizei geahndet.
[Note please that the trains with smokedetectors fitted will be. Each violation will-be
with the necessary measures through the railstaff and/or the police punished.]

ST TT
1. please bitte
2. note beachten Sie
3. that daß
die Züge
4. smoke detectors mit Rauchdetektoren
5. will be fitted ausgestattet werden
6. on-board
7. Any misconduct Jeder Verstoß
8. will result in wird . . . mit
9. necessary action den erforderlichen Maßnahmen
10. being taken geahndet
11. by rail staff durch das Bahnpersonal
12. and/or und/oder
13. police die Polizei

Clear shifts in the second sentence can be seen in translation unit 7, where any
misconduct becomes the more specific and stronger ‘each violation’ in the German,
and in units 8 and 10, where will result in . . . being taken is altered to ‘will . . . with
. . . be punished’.Yet numerous issues arise when this type of analysis is undertaken,
not least what the translation unit is. This is illustrated by the term smoke detectors
in this and other versions (the leaflet also contained French and Flemish versions):
the German and Flemish have a one word equivalent (Rauchdetektoren and rookdetectoren
respectively) but the French needs the multi-word unit détecteurs de fumée
[‘detectors of smoke’]. Few would argue that the translations are correct and close
equivalents, but should the number of word forms used be taken into consideration
when deciding if a shift has taken place? Similarly, has a shift occurred in the
German because of the obligatory placing of the passive werden at the end of sentence
1? And how are we to decide if Verstoß, infraction (in the French) or overtreding
(Flemish) involves a shift from ST misconduct?
Identifying that a shift has taken place leads to questions such as what kind of
shift, what form of classification we can use and what the importance of the shifts
is. As will begin to become clear in Section B Text B3.1, Vinay and Darbelnet’s
categorization of translation procedures is very detailed. They name two ‘methods’
covering seven procedures:
1. direct translation, which covers
borrowing, calque and literal translation, and
2. oblique translation, which is transposition, modulation, equivalence and
adaptation.
30
I n t r o d u c t i o n
A
SECTION
ST TT
1. please bitte
2. note beachten Sie
3. that daß
die Züge
4. smoke detectors mit Rauchdetektoren
5. will be fitted ausgestattet werden
6. on-board
7. Any misconduct Jeder Verstoß
8. will result in wird . . . mit
9. necessary action den erforderlichen Maßnahmen
10. being taken geahndet
11. by rail staff durch das Bahnpersonal
12. and/or und/oder
13. police die Polizei

These procedures are applied on three levels of language:
i. the lexicon
ii. the grammatical structures and
iii. the ‘message’,which is used to refer to the situational utterance and some of the
higher text elements such as sentence and paragraphs.
At the level of message, Vinay and Darbelnet discuss such strategies as compensation,
an important term in translation which is linked to the notion of loss and
gain.

shifts translaton11

Task A4.1
➤ Look at these two examples. How many departures from formal correspondence
can you detect? How do you decide what a departure is?
Analysing these examples, it is clear that there are many formal correspondences at
lexical and grammatical levels:
please – bitte
beachten – note
that – daß
smoke detectors – Rauchdetektoren
will be – werden

Systemic differences between the languages must be accepted. These include wordorder
changes and the construction of the German imperative with the addition
of the pronoun Sie [‘you’]. However, there is a clear departure from formal
correspondence in the translation of the ST on-board and the restructuring of the
second clause. In this text, the only possible textual equivalent for on-board is die
Züge (‘the trains’) which is added with a change of grammatical subject (ST smoke
detectors to TT die Züge). The analyst then has to decide whether ausgestattet is a
formal correspondent of fitted. A dictionary definition is not enough since some
dictionaries may give ausstatten as a translation of to equip or fit out but not fit.
However, the role occupied by ausgestattet and fitted in the two languages is very
similar, so it is highly unlikely that we would class this as a shift.
Catford was the first to use the term shift, but the most comprehensive taxonomy
of translation shifts, based on their ‘translation procedures’, was set out by the
Canadians Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet in their A Comparative Stylistics
of French and English (1958/1995).While it is true that they approach the subject
from the point of view of comparative or contrastive stylistics, using parallel
non-translated as well as translated texts, they describe a detailed and systematic
model for the analysis and comparison of a ST–TT pair. The first step involves
identification and numbering of the ST units and the units of translation (see
Section A, Unit 3). This is followed by a matching of the two.

shfits

A shift is said to occur if, in a given TT, a translation equivalent other than
the formal correspondent occurs for a specific SL element. This is what has
occurred between the French and English texts in Example A4.1

The following example, from a leaflet distributed on board Eurostar trains explaining
the measures being taken to detect smoking, can illustrate these differences.
Example A4.2a English
Please note that smoke detectors will be fitted on-board.
Example A4.2b German
Beachten Sie bitte, daß die Züge mit Rauchdetektoren ausgestattet werden.
[Note you please, that the trains with smokedetectors fitted will-be.].

translation shifts6

Translation shifts
Unit 3 looked at the unit of translation, whether word, phrase or higher level.
The present unit will now discuss models or taxonomies that have been proposed
for examining the small changes or ‘shifts’ that occur between units in a ST–TT pair.
A connecting theme of the examples is rail travel, perhaps a symbolic counterpoint
to the best known taxonomy of translation shifts, devised by Vinay and Darbelnet
and initially inspired by the study of bilingual road signs in Canada.
TRANSLATION SHIFTS
On some international trains in Europe, there is, or used to be, a multilingual
warning notice displayed next to the windows:

Example A4.1
Ne pas se pencher au dehors
Nicht hinauslehnen
È pericoloso sporgersi
Do not lean out of the window
The warning is clear, even if the formis different in each language. The English, the
only one to actually mention the window, is a negative imperative,while the French
and German use a negative infinitive construction (‘not to lean outside’) and the
Italian is a statement (‘[it] is dangerous to lean out’). Of course, these kinds of
differences are typical of translation in general. It is not at all the most common for
the exact structure of the words to be repeated across languages and, even when the
grammatical structure is the same (as in the French and German examples above),
the number of word forms varies from six (ne pas se pencher au dehors) to two (nicht
hinauslehnen).
The small linguistic changes that occur between ST and TT are known as translation
shifts. John Catford was the first scholar to use the term in his A Linguistic Theory
of Translation (1965, see Section B Text B4.1).His definition of shifts is ‘departures
from formal correspondence in the process of going from the SL to the TL’ (Catford  1965:73). The distinction drawn between formal correspondence and textual
equivalence will be crucial and relates to Saussure’s distinction between langue and
parole:

THE UNIT OF TRANSLATION AS A PRELUDE TO ANALYSIS

THE UNIT OF TRANSLATION AS A PRELUDE TO ANALYSIS
Division of ST and TT into the units of translation is of particular importance in
Vinay and Darbelnet’s work as a prelude to analysis of changes in translation, the
translation shifts that will occupy us in Unit 4.As an illustration of how this division
works, and how it might illuminate the process of translation, look at Example
A3.4a, a poster located by the underground ticket office at Heathrow airport,
London:
Example A3.4a
Travelling from Heathrow?
There are easy to follow instructions on the larger self-service touch screen ticket
machines.

Task A3.3
➤ Before reading further, imagine you have been asked to translate this poster
into your first language (or main foreign language).Write down your translation
and make a note of the translation units you use when dividing up
the ST.

A translator approaching this short text will most probably break it down into the
title (Travelling from Heathrow?) and the instructions in the second sentence.While
that sentence will be taken as a whole, it might also in turn be sub-divided more or
less as follows:
There are/
[easy to follow/instructions]/
[on the/larger/self-service/touch screen/ticket machines]
Here, the slashes (/) indicate small word groups with a distinct semantic meaning
that might be considered separately, while the brackets ([. . .]) enclose larger units
that a practised translator is likely to translate as a whole.
The actual French TT on the poster indicates how this operates in real life:

THE TRANSLATION SHIFT APPROACH1

THE TRANSLATION SHIFT APPROACH
2
4
I 1 Note the similarity with recommendations by Nida and Newmark which were
discussed in chapter 3.
2 This forms the basis of the discourse analysis models discussed in chapter 6.
3 These functions originate in Riihler (1939165) and are later developed by
Halliday. See chapters 5 and 6 for a more detailed explanation.
4 See, for example, Fish (1981) or van Peer (1989).
5 In The Royal River Thames: Westminster to Greenwich Cruise and Sail and Rail
Guide (1997), London: Paton Walker, pp. 7 and 14.

system theories3

For Toury (1995: 13)' translations first and foremost occupy a position in
the social and literary systems of the target culture, and this position determines
the translation strategies that are employed. With this approach, he is
continuing and building on the polysystem work of Even-Zohar and on
earlier versions of his own work (Toury 1978, 1980, 1985, 1991). Toury
(1995: 36-9 and 102) proposes the following three-phase methodology for
systematic DTS, incorporating a description of the product and the wider
role of the sociocultural system:
1 Situate the text within the target culture system, looking at its significance
or acceptability.
2 Compare the ST and the TT for shifts, identifying relationships between
'coupled pairs' of ST and TT segments, and attempting generalizations
about the underlying concept of translation.
3 Draw implications for decision-making in future translating.

An important additional step is the possibility of repeating phases (1) and (2)
for other pairs of similar texts in order to widen the corpus and to build up a
descriptive profile of translations according to genre, period, author, etc. In
this way, the norms pertaining to each kind of translation can be identified
with the ultimate aim (as more descriptive studies are performed) of stating
j laws of behaviour for translation in general. The concepts of norms and laws
are further discussed in sections 7.2.1 and 7.2.2 below.
I The second step of Toury's methodology is one of the most controversial
areas. The decisions on which ST and TT segments to examine and what the
1 relationships are betureen them is an apparatus which Toury (1995: 85) states
I should be supplied by translation theory. Yet, as we have seen in chapters 4 l
and 5, linguistic translation theory is far from reaching a consensus as to
what that apparatus should be. Most controversially, in earlier papers (1978:
93, 1985: 32), Toury still holds to the use of a hypothetical intermediate
invariant or tertium comparationis (see page 49 for a discussion of this term) as
an 'Adequate Translation' (AT) against which to gauge translation shifts.
However, at the same time he also admits (1978: 88-9) that, in practice, no
translation is ever fully 'adequate'; for this contradiction, and for considerl
i ing the hypothetical invariant to be a universal given, he has been roundly
I ~ criticized (see, e.g., Gentzler 1993: 131-2, Hermans 1999: 56-7).

Functional theories of translation

5.0 Introduction
The 1970s and 1980s saw a move away from the static linguistic typologies of
translation shifts and the emergence and flourishing in Germany of a
functionalist and communicative approach to the analysis of translation. In
this chapter, we look at:

1 Katharina Reiss's early work on text type and language function;
2 Justa Holz-Miinttiiri's theory of translational action;
3 Hans J. Vermeer's skopos theory which centred on the purpose of the
TT;
4 Christiane Nord's more detailed text-analysis model which continued
the functionalist tradition in the 1990s.

Van Leuven-Zwart's comparative-descriptive model of translation shifts3

4.4 Van Leuven-Zwart's comparative-descriptive model of
translation shifts
The most detailed attempt to ~roducean d apply a model of shift analysis has
been carried out by Kitty van Leuven-Zwart of Amsterdam. Van Leuven-
Zwart's model takes as its point of departure some of the categories proposed
by Vinay and Darbelnet and Lev9 and applies them to the descriptive
analysis of a translation, attempting both to systematize comparison and to
build in a discourse framework above the sentence level. Originally published
in Dutch in 1984 as a doctoral thesis it is more widely known in its
abbreviated English version which consists of two articles in Target (van
Leuven-Zwart 1989, 1990). The model is 'intended for the description
of integral translations of fictional texts' (1989: 154) and comprises
(1) a comparative model and (2) a descriptive model. Like Popovi;, van
Leuven-Zwart considers that trends identified by these complementary
models provide indications of the translational norms adopted by the
translator. The characteristics of each model are as follows:
1 The comparative model (1989: 155-70) involves a detailed comparison
of ST and TT and a classification of all the microstructural shifts (within
sentences, clauses and phrases). Van Leuven-Zwart's method (1989:
155-7

:

Van Leuven-Zwart first divides selected passages into 'comprehensible
textual unit[s]' called 'transemes'; Ishe sat up quickly' is classed
as a transeme, as is its corresponding Spanish TT phrase 'se
enderezo'.
Next, she defines the 'Architranseme', which is the invariant core
sense of the ST transeme. This serves as an interlingual comparison
or tertlum comparation~s (see chapter 3). In the above example, the
Architranseme is 'to sit up'.
A comparison is then made of each separate transeme with the
Architranseme and the relationship between the two transemes is
established.) :