Автор работы: Пользователь скрыл имя, 23 Февраля 2014 в 10:06, курсовая работа
Целью данной работы является исследование особенностей буквальном текстов и их перевод, а также изучить теорию перевода и показать полученные знания на практике, чтобы показать, что метод перевода лучше при переводе таких текстов.
Для достижения этой цели автор должен:
Изучение проблемы литературного перевода и способы их использования.
Перевод поэмы “Нарциссы”
Перевод повести “Гарри Поттер и Дары смерти”
MINISTRY OF EDICATION AND SCIENCE OF REPUBLIC OF
KAZAKHSTAN
COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
PROBLEMS OF THE LITERARY TRANSLATION
Karaganda 2011
REPORT
The theme of the given course paper is “Problems of literary translation”
It’s difficult for translators to translate poems, stories, novels and etc, because there are not some phrases, statements, proverbs in Russian language. Also translators have problems with false friends.
The theme of the problems of the literary of translation plays a very important role nowadays. There are a lot of foreign writers and it is interesting to read their books and to know their stories and specific style of writing. That’s why the translators must transfer the meaning of the text adequately. The wrong translation can lead to the misunderstanding and translation mistakes.
The aim of this work is to study peculiarities of literal texts and their translation, also study the theory of translation and show the received knowledge in practice to show what method of translation is better while translating such texts.
To achieve this aim the author should:
The author reached the aims, mentioned above and did the following conclusions:
INTRODUCTION
The theme of the given course paper is “Problems of the literary of translation”.
It’s difficult for translators to translate poems, stories, novels and etc, because there are not some phrases, statements, proverbs in Russian language. Also translators have problems with false friends.
The theme of the problems of the literary of translation plays a very important role nowadays. There are a lot of foreign writers and it is interesting to read their books and to know their stories and specific style of writing. That’s why the translators must transfer the meaning of the text adequately. The wrong translation can lead to the misunderstanding and translation mistakes.
The aim of this work is to study peculiarities of literal texts and their translation, also study the theory of translation and show the received knowledge in practice to show what method of translation is better while translating such texts.
To achieve this aim the author should:
To use received knowledge in the following way:
In practice in the first chapter the author was going to describe problems of the literary translation, relevance of this theme, how to translate literary stories, poems better.
In practice in the second chapter the author translated poem “Daffodils”, story “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. During the translation of the poem the author had problems with equivalents, untranslatable, rhyme, and presentation of material in Russian language, because during the translation from English into Russian the meaning of words was changing. During the translation of story the author had problems with equivalents, presentation of material in Russian language. The author had to make some sentences according to the meaning of the text.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………
CHAPTER I: PROBLEMS OF THE LITERARY TRANSLATION
CHAPTER II: THE AUTHOR’S WORK
2.1 Poem: “Daffodil”……………………………………………………
2.2Story: “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”…………………………………………………………
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………
CONCLUSION……………………………………………………
Chapter I. PROBLEMS OF THE LITERARY TRANSLATION
Literary studies have always, explicitly or implicitly, presupposed a certain notion of `literariness' with which it has been able to delimit its domain, specify, and sanction its methodologies and approaches to its subject. This notion of `literariness' is crucial for the theoretical thinking about literary translation. In this paper, I have attempted to analyze various recent theoretical positions to the study of literary translation and sought to understand them in the context of the development in the field of literary studies in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The recent developments in the literary studies have radically questioned the traditional essentialist notion of `literariness' and the idea of canon from various theoretical perspectives. I have contrasted the traditional discourse on literary translation with the recent discourse in order to highlight the shift in the notion of `literariness' and its impact on translation theory.
The traditional essentialist approach to literature, which Lefevere calls `the corpus' approach is based on the Romantic notion of literature which sees the author as a quasi-divine `creator' possessing `genius'. He is believed to be the origin of the Creation that is Original, Unique, organic, transcendental and hence sacred. Translation then is a mere copy of the unique entity, which by definition is uncopy-able. As the translator is not the origin of the work of art, he does not possess `genius', and he is considered merely a drudge, a proletariat, and a shudra in the literary Varna system. This traditional approach is due to the Platonic-Christian metaphysical underpinning of the Western culture. The `original' versus `copy' dichotomy is deeply rooted in the Western thought. This is the reason why the West has been traditionally hostile and allergic to the notion of `translation'.
The traditional discussion of the problems of literary translation considers finding equivalents not just for lexis, syntax or concepts, but also for features like style, genre, figurative language, historical stylistic dimensions, polyvalence, connotations as well as denotations, cultural items and culture-specific concepts and values. The choices made by the translators like the decision whether to retain stylistic features of the source language text or whether to retain the historical stylistic dimension of the original become all the more important in the case of literary translation. For instance, whether to translate Chaucer into old Marathi or contemporary are very important. In the case of translating poetry, it is vital for a translator to decide whether the verse should be translated into verse, or into free verse or into prose. Most of the scholars and translators like Jakobson.
believe that in the case of poetry though it is "by definition impossible ...only creative transposition is possible...". It is the creative dimension of translation that comes to fore in the translation of poetry though nobody seems to be sure of what is meant by creativity in the first place. The word is charged with theological-Romantic connotations typical of the `corpus' approach to literature. [4, 20-25]
The questions around which the deliberations about translation within such a conceptual framework are made are rather stereotyped and limited: as the literary text, especially a poem is unique, organic whole and original is the translation possible at all? Should translation be `literal' or `free'? Should it emphasize the content or the form? Can a faithful translation be beautiful? The answers to the question range from one extreme to the other and usually end in some sort of a compromise. The great writers and translators gave their well-known dictums about translations, which reflected these traditional beliefs about it. For Dante (1265-1321) all poetry is untranslatable (cited by Brower 1966: 271) and for Frost (1974-1963) poetry is `that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation '(cited by Webb 203) while Yves Bonnefoy says `You can translate by simply declaring one poem the translation of another" (1991:186-192). On the other hand theorists like Pound (1929, 1950), Fitzgerald (1878) say" ...the live Dog is better than the dead Lion", believe in freedom in translation. The others like Nabokov (1955) believe "The clumsiest of literal translation is a thousand times more useful than prettiest of paraphrase". Walter Benjamin, Longfellow (1807-81), Schleriermacher, Martindale (1984), seem to favour much more faithful translation or believe in foreignizing the native language. While most of the translators like Dryden are on the side of some sort of compromise between the two extremes.
Lefevere has pointed out that most of the writings done on the basis of the concept of literature as a corpus attempt to provide translators with certain guidelines, do's and don'ts and that these writings are essentially normative even if they don't state their norms explicitly. These norms, according to Lefevere, are not far removed from the poetics of a specific literary period or even run behind the poetics of the period (1988:173). Even the approaches based on the `objective' and `scientific' foundations of linguistics are not entirely neutral in their preferences and implicit value judgements. Some writings on translation based on this approach are obsessed with the translation process and coming up with some model for description of the process. As Theo Hermans (1985:9-10) correctly observes that in spite of some impressive semiotic terminology, complex schemes and diagrams illustrating the mental process of decoding messages in one medium and encoding them in another, they could hardly describe the actual conversion that takes place within the human mind, `that blackest of black boxes'. Lefevere notes, the descriptive approach was not very useful when it came to decide what good translation is and what is bad.
Most of recent developments in translation theory look for alternatives to these essentializing approaches. Instead of considering literature as an autonomous and independent domain, it sees it in much broader social and cultural framework. It sees literature as a social institution and related to other social institutions. It examines the complex interconnections between poetics, politics, metaphysics, and history. It borrows its analytical tools from various social sciences like linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, history, economics, and psychoanalysis. It is closely allied to the discipline of cultural studies, as discussed by Jenks (1993:187) in using culture as a descriptive rather than normative category as well as working within an expanded concept of culture, which rejects the `high' versus low stratification. It is keenly interested in the historical and political dimension of literature.
`Paradigm shift' to use Theo Hermans' phrase or the `Cultural turn' in the discipline of translation theory has made a significant impact in the way we look at translation. Translation is as a form of intercultural communication raising the problems that are not merely at the verbal level or at the linguistic level. As Talgeri and Verma (1988:3) rightly point out, a word is,' essentially a cultural memory in which the historical experience of the society is embedded. H.C.Trivedi (1971: 3) observes that while translating from an Indian language into English one is faced with two main problems: first one has to deal with concepts which require an understanding of Indian culture and secondly, one has to arrive at TL meaning equivalents of references to certain objects in SL, which includes features absent from TL culture. The awareness that one does not look for merely verbal equivalents but also for cultural equivalents, if there are any, goes a long way in helping the translator to decide the strategies he or she has to use. Translation then is no longer a problem of merely finding verbal equivalents but also of interpreting a text encoded in one semiotic system with the help of another. The notion of `intertextuality' as formulated by the semiotician Julia Kristeva is extremely significant in this regard. She points out that any signifying system or practice already consists of other modes of cultural signification (1988:59-60). A literary text would implicate not only other verbal texts but also other modes of signification like food, fashion, local medicinal systems, metaphysical systems, traditional and conventional narratives like myths, literary texts, legends as well as literary conventions like genres, literary devices, and other symbolic structures. It would be almost tautological to state that the elements of the text, which are specific to the culture and the language, would be untranslatable. The whole enterprise of finding cultural equivalents raises awareness of the difference and similarities between the cultures .It also brings into focus the important question of
cultural identity. Else RibeiroPires Vieira (1999:42) remarks that it is ultimately impossible to translate one cultural identity into another. So the act of translation is intimately related to the question of cultural identity, difference and similarity.
A rather interesting approach to literary translation comes from Michel Riffaterre (1992: 204-217). He separates literary and non-literary use of language by saying that literature is different because i) it semioticicizes the discursive features e.g. lexical selection is made morphophonemic ally as well as semantically, ii) it substitutes semiosis for mimesis which gives literary language its indirection, and iii) it has "the` textuality' that integrates semantic components of the verbal sequence (the ones open to linear decoding)-a theoretically open-ended sequence-into one closed, finite semiotic, system" that is , the parts of a literary texts are vitally linked to the whole of the text and the text is more or less self contained. Hence the literary translation should "reflect or imitate these differences". He considers a literary text as an artefact and it contains the signals, which mark it as an artifact. Translation should also imitate or reflect these markers. He goes on to say that as we perceive a certain text as literary based on certain presuppositions we should render these literariness inducing presuppositions. Though this seems rather like traditional and formalist approach, what should be noted here is that Riffaterre is perceiving literariness in a rather different way while considering the problems of literary translation: `literariness' is in no way the `essence' of a text and a literary text is, for Riffatere one that which contains the signs which makes it obvious that it is a cultural artifact. Although he conceives of literary text as self-contained system, Riffatere too, like many other contemporary approaches sees it as a sub-system of cultural semiotic system. However, if one is to consider Riffatere's notion of `text' in contrast to Kristeva's notion of intersexuality one feels that Riffaterre is probably simplifying the problem of cultural barriers to translatability.[3,230-245]
The assumption that literary text is a cultural artifact and is related to the other social systems is widespread these days. Some of the most important theorization based on this assumption has come from provocative and insightful perspectives of theorists like Andre Lefevere, Gideon Toury, Itamar Evan -Zohar, and Theo Hermans. These theorists are indebted to the concept of `literature as system' as propounded by Russian Formalists like Tynianov, Jakobson, and Czech Structuralists like Mukarovsky and Vodicka, the French Structuralists thinkers, and the Marxist thinkers who considered literature as a section of the `superstructure'. The central idea of this point of view is that the study of literary translation should begin with a study of the translated text rather than with the process of translation, its role, function and reception in the culture in which it is translated as well as the role of culture in influencing the `process of decision making that is translation.' It is fundamentally descriptive in its orientation (Toury 1985).
Lefevere maintains, `Literature is one of the systems which constitute the system of discourses (which also contain disciplines like physics or law.) usually referred to as a civilization, or a society (1988:16).' Literature for Lefevere is a subsystem of society and it interacts with other systems. He observes that there is a `control factor in the literary system which sees to it that this particular system does not fall too far out of step with other systems that make up a society ' (p.17). He astutely observes that this control function works from outside of this system as well as from inside. The control function within the system is that of dominant poetics, `which can be said to consist of two components: one is an inventory of literary devices, genres, motifs, prototypical characters and situations, symbols; the other a concept of what the role of literature is, or should be, in the society at large.' (p.23). The educational establishment dispenses it. The second controlling factor is that of `patronage'. It can be exerted by `persons, not necessarily the Medici, Maecenas or Louis XIV only, groups or persons, such as a religious grouping or a political party, a royal court, publishers, whether they have a virtual monopoly on the book trade or not and, last but not least, the media.' The patronage consists of three elements; the ideological component, the financial or economic component, and the element of status (p.18-19). The system of literature, observes Lefevere, is not deterministic but it acts as a series of `constraints' on the reader, writer, or rewriter. The control mechanism within the literary system is represented by critics, reviewers, teachers of literature, translators and other rewriters who will adapt works of literature until they can be claimed to correspond to the poetics and the ideology of their time. It is important to note that the political and social aspect of
literature is emphasised in the system approach. The cultural politics and economics of patronage and publicity are seen as inseparable from literature. `Rewriting' is the key word here which is used by Lefevere as a `convenient `umbrella-term' to refer to most of the activities traditionally connected with literary studies: criticism, as well as translation, anthologization, the writing of literary history and the editing of texts-in fact, all those aspects of literary studies which establish and validate the value-structures of canons. Rewritings, in the widest sense of the term, adapt works of literature to a given audience and/or influence the ways in which readers read a work of literature.' (60-61). The texts, which are rewritten, processed for a certain audience, or adapted to a certain poetics, are the `refracted' texts and these maintains Lefevere are responsible for the canonized status of the text (p179). `Interpretation (criticism), then and translation are probably the most important forms of refracted literature, in that they are the most influential ones' he notes (1984:90) and says,
` One never translates, as the models of the translation process based on the Buhler/Jakobson communication model, featuring disembodied senders and receivers, carefully isolated from all outside interference by that most effective expedient, the dotted line, would have us believe, under a sort of purely linguistic bell jar. Ideological and poet logical motivations are always present in the production, or the non production of translations of literary works...Translation and other refractions, then, play a vital part in the evolution of literatures, not only by introducing new texts, authors and devices, but also by introducing them in a certain way, as part of a wider design to try to influence that evolution' (97) .