A Key Concept in Modern Translation Theory - Redalyc

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62 EQUIVALENCE REVISITED: A KEY CONCEPT IN MODERN TRANSLATION THEORY Other components which we labeled Conditions and Determinants are also important for understanding language use from a communicative point of view: Competences (grammatical, communicative, textual, and cognitive), Socio-Psychological Characterization of Participants (social variables such as gender, age, role; psychological variables such as motivation, attention, interest, memory), and Context (time and place of communication; historical, economic and social circumstances). At first this proposal was devised for analyzing monolingual communicative situations. Later we expanded it to include a bilingual situation similar to the one that takes places in translation (cf. infra Dynamic Translation Model). We underlined then that the text seemed to be a more suitable linguistic unit of analysis than the sentence, among other things, because: 1) It is a part of a communicative event that is contextualized and located in specific time and space coordinates with real participants 2 and under real social, historical, and economic conditions, and therefore corresponds to the true nature of language that, by definition, is ‘contextualized’; 2) It is not an immanent linguistic unit; its meaning is determined both by its inner structure and by the external factors that surround it; 3) its extension cannot be established beforehand; it may be as short as a word or as long as a whole book as long as it satisfies the participants’ communicative needs (Bolaños 1995:57). Now it is clear that the communicative approach for the analysis of language use holds both in the case of monolingual and bilingual situations. By definition translation is a bilingual situation that differs from bilingualism, among other things, because in translation speakers do not master the same language and need the help of a third party, i.e. the translator, that will re-establish the interrupted communicative act. Another important difference in relation to what occurs in bilingual situations is that in translation the translator has to reproduce a content identical or at least very similar to what the sender has uttered in L1 (semantically and pragmatically determined) but this time in L2. There is, so to speak, a conscious effort on the part of the translator to be faithful to the message initially expressed in L1 in a process we can call of semantic and pragmatic ‘duplication’, which rarely occurs in traditional bilingual situations where the flow of information continues even if there is exchange of languages in the interaction, in which case phenomena such as ‘code mixing’ or ‘code switching’ may emerge. 2 In this respect L.L. Vochmina (1987) distinguishes an internal and an external speech situation. An internal psychological situation presents itself as a manifold set (structure) of circumstances reflected by the subject and which arise in the process of interaction between the subject and his environment. The external speech situation corresponds to the set of circumstances which prompt the need to use speech for communicative purposes. The author clarifies that for man all situations in which he finds himself present themselves as linguistic to the extent that speech participates in the flux of almost all forms of human psychological activity. (p.16).
SERGIO BOLAÑOS CUELLAR 63 Once translation has been recognized as a peculiar bilingual communicative situation, it becomes evident that the linguistic unit of such communicative interaction is the text. There is a source text (ST) written in L1 and a target text (TT) in L2. As this is an interaction that, linguistically speaking, takes place between participants through texts, then textlinguistics should be the discipline that would provide a better foundation for understanding the translation process. This was foreseen by E. Coseriu (1977) more than 20 years ago when textlinguistics was just establishing itself as a new discipline: “Y en cuanto al estado de la investigación, la tarea no es fácil porque la teoría de la traducción debería, en rigor, ser una sección de la lingüística del texto y ésta, a pesar de los progresos de los últimos años, se encuentra todavía en sus comienzos” (p.215). When we attempt to describe and explain the relation that holds between a Source Language Text and a Target Language Text in translation we necessarily come across the concept of ‘equivalence’. Our view is that translation does not exist as such if no clear link between ST and TT can be established. J. House (1997) expresses this point of view as follows: “The notion of equivalence is the conceptual basis of translation and, to quote Catford, ‘the central problem of translation practice is that of finding TL (target language) equivalents. A central task of translation theory is therefore that of defining the nature and conditions of translation equivalence’ (1965:21).” (p.25) G. Jäger (1989), from the Leipzig school of translation, presents his view about the importance of dealing scientifically with the concept of translation equivalence, more specifically in relation to the possibility or the need of using (=operationalizing stricto sensu) this concept for the practical goals of the socalled automatic (machine) translation: “Against the background of modern conceptions of translation theory which attempt to understand globally the linguistic exchange, there arises inevitably the question about the general meaningfulness of research on the discovery and description of equivalence relations. Undoubtedly we would give an affirmative answer to this question and here we bear in mind a specially demanding test case for the science of translation: automatic [machine] translation.” 3 (p.33) 3 “Auf dem Hintergrund der modernen übersetzungstheoretischen Konzeptionen, die darauf abzielen, den Text in der Sprachmittlung ganzheitlich zu erfassen, entsteht zwangsläufig die Frage, ob die auf die Aufdeckung und Beschreibung von Äquivalenzbeziehungen gerichteten Untersuchungen überhaupt einen Sinn haben. Wir würden diese Frage unbedingt positiv beantworten und haben dabei einen besonders anspruchsvollen Bewährungsfall der Übersetzungswissenschaft vor Augen: das automatische Übersetzen”.
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