MEANING - BASED TRANSLATION
For Mildred Larson, translation consists of transferring without distortion the meaning of the source language into the target language, meaning which must be kept constant, even when the form of the source language changes as it is turned into the form of the target language. The form here represents the grammatical surface structure of the language, while meaning refers to the semantic deep structures. A translation based on the semantic structure of the language takes also into consideration the communication situation: historical setting, cultural setting, intention of the author, as well as the different kinds of meaning contained in the explicit and implicit information of the text. Besides referential and structural meaning, situational meaning is presented as an important element that would help the translator interpret the author’s culture or the cultural information given in the text. She makes the difference between literal and idiomatic translation, stating that a good translator should try to translate idiomatically, that is his translation will not sound like a translation, it shall sound natural in the target language, taking care not to fall into “unduly free translations”. The text to be translated has to make part of a translation project which involves the text, the target, the team and the tools, what Larson calls the four T’s. When that is settled various steps follow: the initial draft, evaluation of the initial draft, consultation and final draft. All these steps involve analysis of the text, comparison with the source text, evaluation of the translation.
On the first part of the text she presents ways of identifying the meaning components of lexical items of a language. (Meaning components form concepts, concepts form concept clusters and concept clusters form propositions). On the second part, she concentrates on grammatical structures and goes on to analyzing propositions that include simple concepts and others that include more complex concepts. These concepts, in many cases, will call the translator for rewording in order to find the best translation equivalent that represents the relations among the different parts of the whole proposition. The translator ought to recognize these concepts and also the importance of the illocutionary force of a proposition. From propositional clusters to semantic paragraphs to episode clusters we arrive at a discourse, so whatever analyses she proposes for a sentence or a paragraph is also valid for an episode and for a whole text. In a certain way, her work relates to the discoursive approach.
It is important for a translator to know about the generic and specific relationships of words in order to find the precise equivalent, particularly, when dealing with a target language whose cultural context is very distant from the source language and he has to deal with concepts whose representation is not easily solved because of the difficulty in finding a proper equivalent. The translator has to establish a systematic contrast between the concepts involved in both cultures and has to decide the importance of the meaning to transfer. In that sense, Larson’s theory joins that of Newmark, who assigns different hierarchies of meaning within a text, from the most important to the least important. And as he does, she discusses also the complexity of translating figurative senses and connotative meanings. Larson goes even further onto the translation of figurative uses of person and pronouns, symbolic actions, false friends and collocations. She illustrates every theoretical point with examples –many of them from a Biblical context– from different languages, showing the different ways in which languages are organized.
As far as lexical equivalents are concerned, the translator must take into account the following situations: there will be concepts known in the source language and in the target language; there will also be concepts from the source language that are unknown in the target language; there will be lexical items in the source text that are key terms and that sometimes have a symbolic meaning. All these situations must be clearly identified by the translator in order to solve problems of lexical equivalents.
