post-colonial_translation

Chapter 4
Composing the other
André Lefevere
There is now general agreement among those who think and write about
translation, that the activity called ‘translating’, which involves
mediation between at least two code systems, should neither be equated
nor confused with the wider cluster of problems associated with
‘translation’, or ‘translation studies’. A text formulated in code 1, usually
equated with ‘the source language’, is reformulated in code 2, usually
equated with ‘the target language’, and during that reformulation
certain rules are observed. These rules were long thought to be eternal
and unchanging, centring mainly on fidelity or any number of its
synonyms; in recent years most scholars writing in the field of translation
studies have come to accept that such rules are mainly imposed by those
people of flesh and blood who commission the translation, which is
then made by other people of flesh and blood (not boxes and arrows) in
concrete situations, with a given aim in mind. In other words, the rules
to be observed during the process of decoding and reformulation depend
on the actual situation, on the function of the translation, and on who
wants it made and for whom. Fidelity will, for instance, still be
paramount in the translation of medical texts, but not in the translation
of advertisements, in which case it may well be counterproductive.
In what follows I would like to challenge further – as I have done
before, on occasion – the supposedly primary or fundamental role played
by linguistic codes in the operation known as ‘translating’. It is my
contention that people who translate texts do not, first and foremost,
think on the linguistic level, the level of the translation of individual
words and phrases. Rather, they think first in terms of what I would
like to call two grids. I do not want to speculate on the primacy of one
grid over the other; rather, I would suggest that we think of them as
intertwined. One is what I would like to call a ‘conceptual grid’, the
other a ‘textual grid’. Both grids are the result of the socialization process.