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:

CONCLUSION1

CONCLUSION
Information technology has transformed not only the working practice of the
professional translator but also the way in which translation is studied. Although
the goal of fully automatic translation may still lie in the future (and some would
say will always remain a pipe-dream), technology is already allowing research into
areas that previously relied on anecdotal evidence. This is particularly the case with
the rapid rise in corpus linguistics which means that large amounts of naturally
occurring language can be examined rapidly and accurately. The possibilities are
enormous for contrastive analysis of languages, Descriptive Translation Studies
(ST–TT comparisons) and the study of universal features of translation (see
Project 1 below) as well as the generation of new texts (Bateman,Matthiessen and
Zeng 1999

------------------------------------------------------------

DESCRIPTIVE TRANSLATION :  In RELEVANCE theory, this is the use of language
normally as true or false of a given state of affairs. In
translation, this mode amounts to a ‘free’ translation.
Compare COVERT TRANSLATION

 : DESCRIPTIVE TRANSLATION
STUDIES (DTS):

A branch of Translation Studies, developed in most
detail by Toury (1995), that involves the EMPIRICAL,
non-PRESCRIPTIVE analysis of STs and TTs with the
aim of identifying general characteristics and LAWS
OF TRANSLATION

----------------------------

PRESCRIPTIVE :  An approach to translation which seeks to dictate
rules for ‘correct’ translation. Compare DESCRIPTIVE
TRANSLATION STUDIES...).

DIRECT COMMUNICATION

DIRECT COMMUNICATION
Relevance theoreticians had no problem responding to the question:w hat if we
needed to translate the Bible or Dickens for children? This, according to Gutt (1991)
would be a case of descriptive translation, and is therefore not acceptable as
‘translation’ but may well be called by another name (e.g. adaptation).

Example1

Example C8.1a English ST
Access all areas
Wherever you want to be
Land Rover’s entry into the fiercely competitive SUV market raised more than a few
eyebrows.
Make no mistake; it’s a real Land Rover. The car you can drive down the highway
can negotiate adrenaline-pumping steep, muddy hills and rough ground with similar
quiet authority

Consider Example C8.1a from a sample of publicity material for Freelander in
English, alongside a back-translation of the parallel Arabic version.
Note how almost the entire Arabic version is an ‘addition’, drastically rewording
the original. This is an extreme case of ‘descriptive’ translation.
➤ What kind of effect might this TT have on the target reader in a language with
which you are familiar? Is the effect compatible with the function of the text?
➤ Translate the above English ST ‘interpretively’ (adhering as far as possible
to the ST structure, etc.) into a language of your choice. What difference
in effect can you discern when comparing your version with the Arabic TT
above? Would you still regard your ‘interpretive’ version as a piece of effective
advertising?.

E x p l o r a t i o n

In Section A, we mentioned the use of translation shift analysis in Descriptive
Translation Studies as a means of producing hypotheses and making generalizations
about translation. Find several ST–TT pairs in your own languages.
Analyse them according to Vinay and Darbelnet’s procedures.What general
trends emerge in the analysis? What are the most frequent types of translation
procedures? What hypotheses can you suggest concerning what is happening
in these translations? How would it be possible to test these hypotheses?

Textual pragmatics and equivalence

Fundamental to any linguistic-textual approach in descriptive translation studies
is the assumption that translations are characterised by a double linkage: first by their
link to the source text and second by the link to the communicative conditions on the receiver’s
side. This double linkage is central in defining (and this means in particular: in differentiating)
the equivalence relation. The process of differentiating this double linkage,
and of thereby rendering it operational, is achieved by distinguishing between various
frameworks of equivalence; at this stage, (translational) equivalence merely means that
a special relationship – which can be designated as the translation relationship – is
apparent between two texts, a source (primary) one and a resultant one.
The specification of the equivalence relation follows from the definition of relational
frameworks; its application presupposes that the relational frameworks be specified.
Linguistic/textual units which differ in nature and range are regarded as target-language
equivalents if they correspond to source-language elements according to the equivalence
relations specified in a set of relational frameworks. Target-language equivalents
answer to translational units in the source text; both the similarities and the differences
between the units of the source-language and their target-language equivalents result
from the degree to which the values assigned to the relational frameworks are
preserved.

W h a t i s t r a n s l a t i o n ?

Translation Studies thus has two main objectives:
(1) to describe the phenomena of translating and translation(s) as they manifest
themselves in the world of our experience, and (2) to establish general principles by
means of which these phenomena can be explained and predicted. The two branches
of pure Translation Studies concerning themselves with these objectives can be
designated descriptive translation studies (DTS) or translation description (TD) and theoretical
translation studies (ThTS) or translation theory (TTh).
1.11
Of these two, it is perhaps appropriate to give first consideration to descriptive translation
studies, as the branch of the discipline which constantly maintains the closest contact
with the empirical phenomena under study. There would seem to be three major kinds
of research in DTS, which may be distinguished by their focus as product-oriented,
function-oriented, and process-oriented.

The other main branch of pure Translation Studies, theoretical translation studies or
translation theory, as its name implies, is not interested in describing existing translations,
observed translation functions, or experimentally determined translating
processes, but in using the results of descriptive translation studies, in combination
with the information available from related fields and disciplines, to evolve principles,
theories, and models which will serve to explain and predict what translating and
translations are and will be..

A g e n t s o f p o w e r i n t r a n s l a t i o n

This term has had many uses in Translation Studies, but its most influential
has been through the descriptive translation theorists, notably Gideon Toury,
who view norms as translation behaviour typically obtaining under specific
socio-cultural or textual situations (Toury 1995:54–5). These TT-oriented
norms encompass not only translation strategy but also how, if at all, a TT
fits into the literary and social culture of the target system. Other norms are
those proposed by Chesterman (1997), namely ‘product and expectancy
norms’ (governed by the readers’ expectations of what a translation should
be) and ‘professional norms’ (governing the translator and the translation
process).