On Information, Culture and Translation
Billy O'Shea
Prisopgave 1999
Engelsk Institut, Københavns Universitet
Til besvarelse af spørgsmålet:
"Med udgangspunkt i oversættelsesteori og/eller en eller flere
konkrete oversættelser mellem engelsk og dansk af samme litterære
eller filmiske værk, ønskes der en redegørelse for den rolle som
sociale, kulturelle og historiske faktorer spiller i produktionen eller
receptionen af oversættelser."
On Information, Culture and Translation 2
Contents:
Foreword: Borderlands
3
Theoretical section:
1. Introduction
5
2. An Information Model
7
3. Scientific Information
11
4. Humanistic Information
18
5. Information Compression and Decompression
40
6. Current Translation Theory
and the Concept of Information
46
7. Conclusion of theoretical section
84
Empirical section:
8. Kærlighed ved Første Hik: Subtitling the microculture
for the macroculture.
86
9. Conclusion of empirical section
100
Works cited
102
Appendix: Interpreters must be Interpreted
107
Index
108
On Information, Culture and Translation 3
Foreword: Borderlands
This paper is based on the theoretical perspective that I developed in my MA
thesis The Concept of Information in Translation Theory, which I have extended
slightly to demonstrate the application of translation theory to empirical material.
Since culture may be viewed as that which becomes visible at its own boundaries,
it is my belief that it is to the cultural borderlands that we must look in order to
find examples of the kind of problematic material that may give rise to useful
theoretical insights. Consequently, many of the empirical examples that I provide
in the course of this paper focus largely upon questions of ethnic and national
identity.
Borders, however, exist in more than a merely linguistic or geographical sense.
The past, too, is another country, as the novelist L.P. Hartley has stated,1 and thus
to translate texts from the historical past, even intralingually, is in effect to
smuggle them across a frontier and into an alien culture, where they come to play
a new role. In the social dimension, too, we can observe that cultural boundaries
surround the members of every religion, class, profession, or interest group, and
that this, too, can result in a specialised use of language that often requires
'translation' for the benefit of outsiders. We can say that wherever mutual
understanding ceases, a border arises - and the role of the translator is then to
enable an outsider to breach that barrier.
If we accept this definition of a translator's function, it then becomes clear that the
task of translation is performed by many people besides those who would term
themselves professional translators. Any educator who explains a text to a class is
a translator. An actor or a theatrical director who places a particular interpretation
on, say, a Shakespearian text is also fulfilling a translator's role. Their view of the
"correct" interpretation of a text may be subjective - but so, arguably, is the
linguistic translator's understanding of a source text. Ultimately, of course, given
the vagaries of human communication, we are all translators.
There is an old Irish joke about a man who crosses the border into Northern
Ireland from the Irish Republic every morning with an empty wheelbarrow, and
returns every evening, claiming that his wheelbarrow has become temporarily
invisible. Customs officials are convinced that he is smuggling something, but are
at a loss to discover what it is, being unable to examine the contents of an
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." L. P. Hartley,
The Go-Between (1953), opening words.
1
On Information, Culture and Translation 4
invisible wheelbarrow. Eventually, of course, they realise what it is the man is
actually smuggling - and in which direction.What is it, then, that a translator
smuggles across a cultural boundary, and in which direction? When we say that
texts are "translated", this is etymologically to imply that they are moved or
transported from a foreign culture and into our own. But if a text is to become
comprehensible to us, surely it is we who must become, albeit temporarily,
citizens of its cultural world. Looked at this way, it is the reader who is smuggled
across the border, not the text. The translator must guide us across the frontier,
must lift a corner of the veil, must usher us inside and transform us into honorary
insiders. From this point of view, then, the raw material upon which a translator
works is not the text but the reader, and as such, translation is a profession that
rightly belongs to the humanities, alongside those of the writer and the educator.
Eppur si muove: A translated text is clearly not an artifact of the source culture. It
is what the translation theorist Gideon Toury calls "a fact of the target culture",
and it is in the target culture that it plays out its social role. Something, then,
makes the journey in the opposite direction, from the source to the target culture or at any rate, something appears in the target culture which claims a relationship
to something else in the source culture. It is the relationship between these two
physically existing entities that determines, in practice, the expectations that are
placed upon the work of a professional translator.
These expectations spring from a quite different tradition to that of the
humanities. While teachers and actors are expected to bring their personalities to
the interpretations that they transmit, translators are assumed to be objective,
transparent, and capable of communicating the precise, literal and "correct"
interpretation of the source texts that they are given to work with. Translators are
thus often seen by their clients as being less like artists than technicians - people
whose job it is to relay objectively existing material accurately and without
distortion. Many translators, indeed, also see themselves in this way. Whether and
to what extent this 'scientific' view of the profession is one that translators can
ever in fact live up to is one of the questions addressed by this paper.
It seems that, as well as spanning the gap between linguistic cultures, translators
must continue to inhabit the borderland between science and the humanities, never
quite conforming to the demands of either. Yet the borderland, as I imply above,
is an interesting place to be, because it is here, along the faultlines between
cultures, that new developments tend to emerge. The borderland in which I choose
to write this paper is that of the interface between science and the arts, and I hope
that the inherent tension between these two very different perspectives will prove
to be a fruitful one for my purposes.
On Information, Culture and Translation 5
On Information, Culture and Translation
Curiosity killed the cat;
but information made him fat.
(English proverb)
1. Introduction
One definition of translation quality that can be found in theoretical literature on
the subject is “the optimal transfer of information from one language to another”.2
This definition, however, tends to beg the question of whether it is possible to
define information, measure information transfer, or indeed, recognise
information in its translated form. The difficulty, of course, is that information, as
the term applies to human communication, is a subjective quality which cannot
easily be defined: What is information to one person may not be so to another, just
as the concept of “information” itself means different things to different theorists.
However, it seems to me that if we are to propose that ’information transfer’ may
be a possible measure of translation quality - and I do not claim that this approach
is necessarily valid - we must make some attempt, at the very least, to delineate
what we mean by the term, and to clarify our thinking on the subject. In doing so,
I make no a priori assumptions as to the nature of information, nor indeed as to
whether something called information can usefully be said to exist at all. I
therefore offer no definition of information at the outset; whether or not we can
begin to approach such a definition is something that will hopefully become clear
in the course of the argument presented here.
One of my principal motivations for writing this paper is to explore the idea of
whether there might not be a conceptual continuum that is capable of
encompassing both the natural scientific and humanistic concepts of information,
and if so, whether such a 'continuum' model can be fruitfully applied to translation
theory. Communications Science,3 for example, treats the idea of information
E.g. Larson 1984: 438: “The goal of the translator is to communicate the same
information as was communicated by the source text.”
2
Communications Science deals with the engineering aspects of signal
transmission and reception. It thus belongs to the natural sciences, and is not to be
confused with disciplines of a more humanistic orientation such as Information
Science or Cybernetics.
3
On Information, Culture and Translation 6
rather differently from the humanities. The focus of information processing in
Communications Science is, firstly, on distinguishing information from
background 'noise', and secondly, on coding and decoding information in digital
or analogue form. Such information is coded according to unambiguous rules and
is 'verifiable', which is to say, it is either correctly encoded or it is not. There is no
middle ground. In the humanities, on the other hand, the coding and decoding
process - if we can call it that - is inherently 'fuzzy'; were it not so, the whole
discipline of literary criticism, for example, would cease to exist, since everyone
would know “what the author really meant”. Translation theory occupies an
intermediate position, with some theorists arguing that information is “contained
in” the text and is therefore capable of being correctly and verifiably translated to
another language, and others holding that since many concepts are culturally
specific, they cannot properly be translated at all.
The attempt to combine these two different approaches to the concept of
information is not in itself new. Indeed, following the publication of what later
became known as Shannon’s Information Theory in the nineteen-forties - which I
will summarise later in this paper - there was a prevalent belief that the
application of “hard science” to linguistic theory could result in the discovery of
universal rules governing human communication, which in turn would open the
door to the development of machine translation, expert systems and even artificial
intelligence. This research seems to have since run into something of a blind
alley.4 My contention in this paper, on the other hand, is that while scientific and
humanistic concepts of information are fundamentally different, a comparison
between the two may nonetheless give rise to some useful insights.
After a brief introduction to the scientific and humanistic concepts of information,
I will attempt to construct a simple model of information and language
processing, and thereafter attempt to analyse the concept of information as it is
understood by translation theorists. As I hope to show, a robust treatment of the
subject of information is largely lacking in the theoretical literature. While most
translation theorists make fairly free use of the term, there seems to be little
consensus with regard to the actual meaning or role of “information”. In
For a brief outline of the fortunes of machine translation, see Hjørnager Pedersen
1999 (a). Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) and translation memory
programmes have had some success, but this can hardly be regarded as machine
translation as such programmes essentially represent a systematisation of human
translations. See O’Brien 1998, Heyn 1998.
4
On Information, Culture and Translation 7
reviewing the literature, I have however deliberately avoided producing a general
survey of approaches to the subject of translation quality in general, which would
require a much larger work. There are many other possible dimensions of
translation quality besides information transfer, such as questions of tone and
style. However, my concern here is not with translation quality as such, but with
our thinking on the subject of the concept of information and its specific
application to translation. As I hope to demonstrate, the adoption of a different
perspective in this area may allow us to side-step the somewhat sterile and
inconclusive debates of the ’reader vs. text-centred’ variety that have in the past
tended to dominate discussions of translation theory.
2. An Information Model
Throughout this paper, I make use of a simple model in which I have attempted to
integrate scientific and humanistic models of information encryption in a way
which may facilitate the analysis of translation theory. It can perhaps best be
described schematically:
5. Symbol
4. Text
----------------------------------------3. Code
2. Data
----------------------------------------1. Signal
Fig.1: The Information Continuum
Each of the above levels 1-5 represents a form of information encryption, in
which the “message” of levels 2-5 is enfolded in the “medium” of the level
immediately below.5 Levels 2-4 thus function as both medium and message. The
scientific concept of information encompasses levels one to three, while its
humanistic counterpart is mainly concerned with levels three to five. There is,
therefore, a certain degree of overlap, justifying the use of the term “continuum”.
However, as I will argue, this does not imply that the processes of information
encryption that take place at levels four and five are directly comparable to the
The term “enfoldment” is borrowed from the physicist David Bohm. See Bohm
1987:16-17.
5
On Information, Culture and Translation 8
rule-determined and somewhat mechanistic processes occurring at levels one to
three, nor that there is any direct and unambiguous route from level one to level
five: Level three is, rather, the point at which one kind of information processing
ceases and another quite different process begins.
The terms that I have used above require some explanation. “Signal” and “data”
relate to Communications Science and will be dealt with in chapter 3. The terms
“code” and “text” denote aspects of human language as we generally recognise it.6
The distinction is a simple one: Code exists in the objective world, while texts are
our subjective understanding of such code. When we read or hear a statement in a
language that we understand, what we experience is text. If, on the other hand, the
language is unfamiliar, then what we experience is code.
This allows us to define translation for the purposes of this paper as the total
process of transforming code into text, implying that translation is a feature of all
human communication.7 With regard to interlingual translation, this also implies
that the process of translation is not complete until it has been understood (or
misunderstood) by the target audience, and therefore that, strictly speaking, the
written words produced by a translator do not constitute a “translation” as such
but rather a stage on the path to translation.
The stippled lines in the above diagram divide that which is immediately available
to the senses from that which is not. Since for the purposes of this paper I define
“text” as language as it is comprehended, texts exist only in the mind and are
therefore invisible. In other words, though we may all read the same words, we do
not all see the same text. (In fact, the belief in the objectively visible text might
fairly be described as a superstition.) It may be remarked that this definition of
“text” is much narrower than that employed in, for example, the field of semiotics.
While I have no quarrel with the idea of the context of a text also forming a text,
such that the ultimate text is the world itself - il n’y a pas de hors-texte [there is
“Code” refers here only to the recipient’s subjective experience of language as
comprehensible or otherwise and implies nothing as to the nature of the
communicative process itself. The idea that language can be viewed as semantic
code, on the other hand, is a theoretical perspective that will be dealt with later.
6
The idea that all communication involves translation was first propounded by
George Steiner. (See Steiner (1975) 1991: xii, 180, and 274-5.) I will later argue
that it is not usually possible to transform code into text without some additional
input in the form of frames.
7
On Information, Culture and Translation 9
nothing that is not text], as Derrida puts it - I feel that such a wide definition might
well be confusing in a paper dealing with translation theory. 8 I also believe, for
reasons which will hopefully become clear in the course of my paper, that the
distinction between “text” and “code” is one which is valid and useful for our
purposes.
I will deal only peripherally in this paper with level five, the symbolic level.
While we can be fairly sure that such a level exists (whether we call it the “level
of volition”, “level of primal cognition”, or some other such term), the fact is that
despite the existence of an enormous body of psychological, neurobiological and
linguistic theory, we know very little about the kind of information processing
that takes place here. I have called it the symbolic level, since it seems likely that
it is non-linguistic.9 Evidence from brain research 10 indicates that the languageprocessing and image-processing areas of the brain are closely interlinked; it may
thus be that the line between levels four and five represents a final transformation
of linguistic information to “visual” or quasi-visual information, the implications
of which I will be examining later. It is also probable that all linguistic
communication is accompanied by some degree of visualisation on the part of
both sender and receiver, but this is very difficult to verify.
Frames
The terms “code” and “text” should not be understood as merely representing,
respectively, the syntactic and semantic dimensions of language, which, by
themselves, I believe to be insufficient to express the full information content of a
statement. The weakness of syntax-based theory is that it fails to take account of
non-syntactic vehicles of meaning. A simple example is sarcasm: By changing the
tone of voice, a speaker may completely invert the meaning of what is said. One
might say that the “information polarity” of the statement has been reversed.
Written statements, too, are subject to contextual factors which can alter the way
8
See, for example, Eco 1990, Chap.2.
Confusingly, it is sometimes called the non-symbolic level, to distinguish it from
linguistic levels that make use of written symbols for thoughts and feelings. The
main point, however, is that it is generally recognised to be non-linguistic. See
Miller 1983: 59.
9
10
See Kandel, Schwartz and Jessell 1995, chapter 34.
On Information, Culture and Translation 10
in which they are understood, while statements made via the polysemiotic media11
in which most modern-day information exchange takes place (films, television
and the Internet) are uniquely sensitive to non-syntactic distortions and filters. In
an earlier article on the subtitling of TV news broadcasts, for example, I wrote:
We normally think of the subtitling of foreign-language news items as a
purely linguistic process: from language A to language B. But items of
foreign news are also “translated” by a host of other factors: picture and
sound editing, music and effects, captions, commentary and the
juxtaposition of other news items all have a bearing on the way that an
item of foreign news is understood, and therefore also influence the way
that the subtitles are interpreted.
[O’Shea 1997: 244]
In this paper, I use the term “frames” to denote such dimensions of information
which, while exogenous to a particular utterance, can influence the way that the
utterance is understood to the extent of becoming a part of the overall message. It
is a term which has already enjoyed a wide application. In communications
technology, “frames” indicate where the sub-divisions of a signal begin and end.
If a signal is incorrectly divided up, the data cannot be correctly resolved into
meaningful code. In television broadcasting, “frames” divide a continous signal
into bundles of data representing static images, twenty-five or thirty of which are
displayed on the screen every second. Marvin Minsky also introduced the term
“frames “ into artificial intelligence research, to denote bodies of knowledge
which have been internalised by the subject prior to the reception of a message
[Minsky 1986, chaps. 24-26]. In everyday parlance, on the other hand, a frame is
something which surrounds a picture, perhaps displaying a title - in other words, it
directs our attention towards something and suggests a way of looking at it.
Combining these concepts, I define a frame for our purposes as any factor that
influences the way code is transformed into text without itself being a part of the
code.12 Frames may thus have an influence both on the way that a translator
understands the original source language utterance, and on the way that a target
audience understands the subsequent translation.
Polysemiotic medium: A medium in which communication takes place via
several parallel, semiotically distinct channels simultanously, e.g. television.
[Gottlieb 1994: 62.]
11
It should be noted that this definition differs from Fillmore’s widely-used
“frame” concept (see Hanks 1996: 243-4), in which frames are subsumed within
language itself.
12
On Information, Culture and Translation 11
3. Scientific Information
I begin by examining the concept of information as it is employed in the natural
sciences, and in particular within two scientific disciplines that are directly
concerned with the processing of information, namely Communications Science
and Information Science.13 I hope to show that although the scientific concept of
information is fundamentally different from the concept of information as it is
utilised in the humanities, an understanding of the nature of this difference may
nonetheless yield insights that are applicable to translation theory.
Communications Science
Communications Science grew out of the advances in mathematics, computing
and communications engineering that came about around the time of the Second
World War, largely due to the innovative theories of certain engineers and
cryptographers, such as John Von Neumann, Alan Turing and Claude E. Shannon.
As its name suggests, Communications Science is primarily concerned with the
transmission of signals, and in that connection the need to distinguish data from
noise ( ’noise’ being any unwanted part of the signal, whatever its source or
nature) and with the encryption of information within such signals. Signal thus
refers to a physically existing electrical or magnetic current which contains
encrypted information. Since signals are not directly observable, the information
they contain is presented for interpretation (by a human being or a machine) in the
form of data, for example as a computer print-out, an image, or a file on a
magnetic disc. If the data has been correctly transmitted, it may then be
interpreted as part of a code, which I will define in a moment.
One might imagine that Communications Science would possess a clear and
unambiguous definition of information, but this is not the case. What is certain,
however, is that the concept of information as it is employed by theorists and
engineers in this field is somewhat remote from our everyday use of the term. For
Douglas MacArthur, for example, the concept primarily relates to probability:
For ... engineers, information relates to what we would call (sign-)forms, and to the
probability of the occurrence of forms; it does not relate (primarily, at least) to the
meaning of signs.
[1997: 15]
In fact, only the first of these qualifies as a natural science; Information Science,
as we shall see, belongs more to the social sciences.
13
On Information, Culture and Translation 12
(The “probability” of a given data sequence is a concept deriving from Shannon’s information
theory, which I will deal with shortly.)
Information theorists Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield, on the other hand, prefer to relate the
concept of information used in Communications Science to the recipient’s process of
selection:
... we have avoided using the word information, but it is time to explain what the
engineers mean by it. They do not mean the what that is to be communicated, but,
instead, they mean the instruction that the sender, by signals, conveys to the receiver,
commanding it (not him or her, but it) to select a particular message from the given
ensemble of possible messages. Thus, this information in the engineering sense is an
instruction to select.
[1983: 51]
The idea of selecting from an ensemble of possible messages may seem confusing if we think
of communication in terms of the transmission of ordinary speech - which has an infinite
number of possible combinations - but becomes clear if we think of a limited code, such as
the “10-4" CB radio code beloved of truckers and police forces. By using this kind of
shorthand, a fairly complex message can be communicated in minimal time and with minimal
use of resources. The important point about such codes is that their definitions are agreed
upon by both sender and recipient, and that the significance of any sign used within the code
can be verified by recourse to a code book or a set of rules. To this we must add the
requirement that code symbols must be referentially exclusive - i.e., a code message such as
“10-4" may not possess several possible interpretations. This allows us to define code in
general as follows:
Code: A finite set of signs and sign-relationships agreed upon by the sender and recipient of a
communication, the definitions of which are referentially exclusive and objectively verifiable.
It is of course immediately obvious that the above definition of a code is inadequate, by itself,
to define human language. First of all, natural language is not generally considered to be a
finite system. A code presupposes selectivity - but we cannot ’select’ from an infinite number
of possible messages. Secondly, we have the problem of objective verifiability and nonambiguity. Whilst on the one hand we possess dictionaries and grammars that at least purport
to define the code-like properties of language, we have on the other hand the stark fact of the
inherent ambiguity of human linguistic communication - as evidenced, for example, by the
On Information, Culture and Translation 13
enormous range of variation that is possible in translation. Even in intralingual
communication, ambivalence is possible both in the sending of a message (e.g. Bill Clinton’s
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”) and in its reception, since we can never
assume that every user of a language understands words and concepts in precisely the same
way.14 Language, then, cannot merely be defined as code, since its signification is not, in the
last analysis, objectively verifiable.
This being so, one might ask how it is possible to “encode” an infinite variety of natural
language messages into, for example, Morse. The answer is that Morse and similar codes of
encryption do not, in fact, encode language, but rather letters of the alphabet. The message’s
semantic content is therefore not so much encoded as enciphered, since codes, as such, always
involve the substitution of one unambiguous sign for another. Genuine codes involving
natural language are indeed possible - the CB radio type mentioned above would be an
example - but these are always necessarily finite, since each of the component signs must be
unambiguous, definable and verifiable. Any code that attempted to encompass an infinite
variety of signs would itself be infinitely large.
Since coded statements are unambiguous, it follows that statements made in code are
perfectly translatable from one code to another. When Morse is “translated” into letters of the
alphabet, or vice versa, for example, there is never any ambiguity involved regarding the
correct result. Computer scientists, too, speak of programming “languages” such as Pascal or
BASIC - which are actually codes - being translated into machine code by a compiler
programme. In this case, the same set of programming instructions will always, for a given
machine, translate into precisely the same machine code sequence. In mathematics, too, an
equation may be “translated” into graphic form, and back again, as often as may be desired,
without any loss of information. Any data loss or variation that does occur in the translation
of code is invariably the sign of some technical problem, such as the presence of “noise” in
signal transmission. Furthermore, the unambiguous nature of codes also means that the end
product of any such code “translation” will itself be a code. There are a variety of interesting
implications here for the relationship of code to text, which I will be exploring later in this
paper.
Information Science
Information Science, along with its near relatives Systems Theory and Cybernetics, grew out
of Communications Science, largely as a result of the attempt to apply some of the theories
and methods of Communications Science to the analysis of natural language. Claude E.
14
See for example Steiner (1975) 1991: 250.
On Information, Culture and Translation 14
Shannon’s information theory, in particular, generated widespread and perhaps misplaced
enthusiasm amongst language theorists when it was first published in the late 1940's.15 In
essence, Shannon’s theory dealt with the problem of separating a signal and its accompanying
data from background noise. Shannon demonstrated that the information value - in scientific
terms - of any part of a communication is inversely related to its probability. In other words, it
is the unusual parts of a communication that contain the most important information. The
most probable parts of a communication, on the other hand, are, to use Shannon’s term,
“redundant”, in that they may be omitted from a message without unduly compromising the
information content. (We could compare this process with the way in which non-essential
words may be left out of a telegram.) Shannon borrowed the term “entropy” from physics to
describe the level of information present in a signal: The more entropy - or order - that is
present, the less information.16 Thus a perfectly ordered signal, such as a single sign
transmitted 200 times, contains very little information, since 199 of these signs are in practical
terms redundant. Shannon showed, however, that the signal-to-noise ratio of any
communication could be improved, in theory to optimal levels, by increasing the redundancy
level of a signal. The simplest way to do this is to repeat the entire message.17 Since code, as
stated above, will always translate into the same data sequence, any variation between the two
sequences will at once reveal both the presence and the position of an error. However, the
second signal, consisting only of a repetition of the first data sequence, is in information terms
entirely redundant if no error is revealed.
15
Shannon (1949) 1964.
Shannon avoided defining information as such. The physicist Leon Brillouin, using
Shannon’s theoretical framework, attempted to define information as negentropy or negative
order, but this has run into the reasonable objection that lack of predictability does not in itself
constitute information in any meaningful sense. See Nauta 1972: 191.
16
This is a simple example. In actual practice, the process is much more complicated. See
Elias 1983: 499.
17
On Information, Culture and Translation 15
Information
Source
Transmitter
Receiver
Signal
Destination
Received Signal
MESSAGE
MESSAGE
Noise Source
Fig 2: Shannon’s original model of two-party coded communication [Shannon (1949) 1964:34]
The essential difference between the scientific concept of information, as described here, and
its humanistic equivalent is neatly illustrated by Tor Nørretranders’ remark that, according to
Shannon’s theory, a monkey sitting at a typewriter will produce more information than any
famous author.18 In scientific terms, this is perfectly correct: The monkey’s literary output is
random and therefore non-compressible, whereas the work of any human author will
inevitably contain a considerable amount of redundancy. (The question of the compressibility
of scientific and humanistic information respectively will be explored later.) The disparity
between these two concepts of information seems to be in part a question of terminology: For
the communications scientist, information comes into being - in terms of our model - at level
three, with the resolution of data into code. The interpretation of such code is rule-governed
and entirely uniform: Unless there is an error of some kind, there is no possible ambiguity in
the “message” that results. In point of fact, all purely scientific, technical, or factual
information could be described in this way, insofar as such information is expressed in
definable terms or relates to verifiable facts that may be observed, to the satisfaction of sender
and recipient, in the objective universe. As Steiner comments, speaking of the possibilities of
machine translation:
A large mass of scientific literature, moreover, is susceptible to more or less automatic
lexical transfer ... “H2O consists of two units of hydrogen for one of oxygen” is the kind
of sentence that is at once tautological and informative. It can be translated word-for18
Nørretranders 1991: 56-62 & 94.
On Information, Culture and Translation
16
word into a host of tongues even if the automatic glossary is crude ... The nearer the
tautological ideal is to the passage - the more stringently and linearly it follows on a set of
definitions and unequivocally sequential derivations - the better then chances for
automatic translation. But although such linearity is absolute only in mathematics or
symbolic logic, much of scientific, technical and, perhaps, even commercial
documentation approaches the model.
[(1975) 1991 :326]
For those of us who are not natural scientists or technicians, however, most useful information
begins at levels four and five, with the conversion of code by the mind into a text that is
subsequently (or perhaps simultanously) connected with some system of symbolic values. At
this level, of course, ambiguity is not only a by-product of the information processing system
but may even be an integral characteristic of the system itself, as we shall see.
Shannon himself intended his information theory only for the use of communications
scientists, and was sceptical of any attempts to apply it more widely.19 However, the prestige
of “hard science”in the 1950's and 60's was such that many linguists, psychologists and social
scientists were eager to adopt ’scientific’ terminology and methods. For them, Shannon’s
theory arrived at the right moment. As Machlup and Mansfield put it:
The impressive slogan, coined by Lord Kelvin, that “science is measurement” has persuaded
many researchers who were anxious to qualify as scientists to start measuring things that
cannot be measured. As if under a compulsion, they looked for an operational definition of
some aspect of communication or information that stipulated quantifiable operations.
Shannon’s formula did exactly that; here was something related to information that was
objectively measureable.
[1983: 52]
19
See Tribus 1983: 475.
On Information, Culture and Translation
Or, in the words of Murray Eden:
The appearance of Shannon’s work had an explosive effect, not only in
communications theory, but in sparking a multitude of attempts to apply his theory to
all sorts of processes that appeared to be related to the transmission of objects with
semantic content.
[1983: 434]
Here it is the phrase “semantic content” that we should be wary of, for although codes may
be the medium of messages with semantic content (i.e. text), this does not imply that codes
and texts are the same thing. Any technical instrument - such as a thermometer - may
convey useful information to a scientist in the form of a code, but few of us would regard
such information as possessing semantic content in a linguistic sense. Codes, by definition,
are entirely unambiguous. Techniques of analysis, such as Shannon’s theory, that can be
usefully applied to codes and code transmission, have therefore no necessary validity when
applied to text.
This much should be perfectly clear. However, in the behaviourist-oriented, cyberneticsinfluenced atmosphere of the decades following the war, there was a certain tendency to
regard language (and, by implication, the human brain) as a gigantic machine.20 The
general tone of such early information theory may be exemplified by the following extract
from an article by Donald MacKay:
As early as our 1950 symposium on Information Theory, it was felt to be somewhat
scandalous that the theory of information seemed to have so little working contact with
such concepts as the meaning and relevance of information. Once the framework is
widened from the simple source-channel-sink model to include the sender and the recipient
of messages as goal-directed agents, however, the links are not hard to find.
Briefly, the key is to think of the act of communication as goal-directed to bring about
certain states of affairs in the recipient. The recipient at any given time has (1) a store of
factual information, (2) a repertoire of skills, (3) a hierarchy (or heterarchy) of criteria of
evaluation and priorities. These three interlock in a complex manner so as to set up at any
given time a certain total state of conditional readiness (SCR) for all possible action,
including planning and evaluating action. It is this SCR that can be thought of as the
operational target of a communication.
[MacKay 1983: 491]
See, for example, Colby & Knaus 1974. (“Men, Grammar and Machines: A New
Direction for the Study of Man”).
20
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On Information, Culture and Translation
Over the intervening decades, these attempts by Information Science theorists to apply the
methods of Communications Science to natural language seem to have yielded somewhat
disappointing results - at least if we are to judge by the progress of artificial intelligence
and machine translation.21 Furthermore, despite the enormous and often subliminal
influence of the cybernetic approach on language theory in general - of which I will be
giving some examples - its impact to date on actual translation practice has been
negligible. Are there, then, no useful insights for translation theorists to cull from the field
of Communications Science? I believe that there are, and that these relate to the
establishment of a clear and logical distinction between code and text. I will deal with the
relationship between these two concepts in the next chapter.
To sum up: The concept of scientific information is based on observable and verifiable
data that may be interpreted as part of a code. I have asserted that codes, within their field
of reference, are perfectly translatable. Such perfect translatability is contingent on a lack
of ambiguity, which in turn hinges upon definability and verifiability.22 In my initial model,
I categorised language-as-event as a code. However, I have also stated that the definition of
code is inadequate by itself to encompass the phenomenon of natural language. In the next
section, I will attempt to reconcile these apparent contradictions.
4. Humanistic Information
Having briefly examined the concept of scientific information, which is rooted in the idea
of code, we turn now to the concept of information in the humanities, which primarily
relates to the idea of text. The idea of text presupposes semantic content, which, as defined
for our purposes here, means something that is understood (’correctly’ or ’incorrectly’) by
human beings.
I have asserted that language which is not comprehended is experienced as code. This
implies that all language is initially experienced as code, since, logically, comprehension
cannot precede perception. Once such comprehension is achieved, however, the code itself
vanishes from our perceptual field: It costs us effort not to read a word which is written in
The code-based nature of scientific information, however, suggests that machine
translation may well meet with some success when dealing with technical material. C.f.
Steiner’s comment, above.
21
Note that perfect translatability does not imply that all translations of a given piece of
scientific information to a given target language must be identical: It does not matter, in
information terms, whether we write “The boiling point of water is 100 degrees Celsius” or
“H2O boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit”.
22
18
On Information, Culture and Translation
our own language, just as trained Morse code operators must concentrate if they are to
perceive dots and dashes as sounds rather than letters of the alphabet. We cannot see the
trees for the wood.
To what extent, however, can language be defined as a code in the scientific sense?
Certainly it has code-like properties: There are reasonably consistent rules of syntax, while
on the semantic level, words possess dictionary definitions that are not always ambivalent
or context-dependent. A naive approach, therefore, to the problem of translation might be
to assume that books of source and target language grammar and a comprehensive
source/target dictionary are all that is required. In theory, if our grasp of the respective
syntax systems is good enough, we could then perform translations without any
understanding of the actual meaning of either source or target utterance - which is precisely
what machine translation programmes attempt to do.
If the ’naive’ approach to translation were sufficient in itself, we could indeed define
language as code, without qualification. The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t work. To
illustrate why, we might usefully consider Noam Chomsky’s famous meaningless
sentence:
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether every word in this sentence has a
meaning that is capable of objective definition, we can agree that each of the above words
can be understood by most English speakers, and that the sentence as a whole conforms to
the relevant rules of English syntax. It is also an easy sentence to translate, being shorn of
all contextual and cultural references; indeed, a competent machine translation programme
could probably produce a fair approximation of this sentence in any desired language. This
sentence, therefore, conforms more or less to our definition of code. But it is not text, and
never will be, because in isolation it conveys precisely nothing. 23
Chomsky’s sentence fails to work as a semantic structure because each of its elements
contradicts the adjacent elements; that which is colourless cannot be green, that which is
In the narrow, informational sense, and when considered in isolation. In the context of a
poem, however, such a line might well convey meaning to the reader. It could also be
argued that since Chomsky composed his meaningless’ sentence in order to make a point,
that very point, if comprehended by the reader in that context, is its meaning. However,
this meaning would be derived from an interaction between the utterance and its frame, not
from the utterance alone (see below).
23
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On Information, Culture and Translation
green cannot be an idea, and so on. What is to stop us, then, from formulating a code rule
which states that the elements of a code sequence must have a semantically logical
relationship to each other, and to the whole? In theory, nothing; but that is not how
language actually seems to work. Many sentences are meaningless when taken out of
context; others are meaningless when separated from a tone of voice or a specific situation.
Politicians, for example, routinely complain of being quoted “out of context” even when an
entire statement has been reproduced: The occasion or timing of the utterance may have
been an essential component of the message itself. In other words, the semantic role, not
just of purely linguistic context, but also of frames, must be recognised. Could we not,
then, attempt to construct a code which would combine linguistic syntax with a “syntax of
frames”? As the anthropologist E. Leach puts it:
I shall assume that all the various non-verbal dimensions of culture, such as style in
clothing, village lay-out, architecture, furniture, food, cooking, music, physical gestures,
postural attitudes and so on are organised in patterned sets so as to incorporate coded
information in a manner analogous to the sounds and words and sentences of a natural
language. I assume therefore that it is just as meaningful to talk about the grammatical rules
which govern the wearing of clothes as it is to talk about the grammatical rules which
govern speech utterances.24
This approach to the “grammar” of non-verbal information has won widespread acceptance
in the social and linguistic sciences, not least in the field of semiotics. However, it is an
approach that I believe to be unrealistic as a model for the way in which frames are
perceived, and thus unhelpful as a basis for the construction of a theory of translation, for
reasons that I will be dealing with shortly.
But let us first deal with the question of whether and to what extent language may be
regarded as a genuine code. Here I would contend that while language-as-event is true
code, text is only partly so. Language-as-event consists primarily of words - and words,
whatever they may mean to us individually, have an objective existence as aural or legible
phenomena that are generally both recognisable and verifiable to the satisfaction of sender
and recipient. Language-as-event thus consists of words as things, i.e. identifiable
phenomena, and can in this sense be said to fulfil the requirements of a true code. (In the
case of oral communication, however, we should note that the existence of homophones
proves that we cannot always divide a stream of speech into the correct verbal units unless
we understand what the words themselves mean in context - a point to be dealt with later.)
24
Quoted in Sperber and Wilson 1986: 7.
20
On Information, Culture and Translation
21
It should be noted that in this strict sense, not even syntax, despite its seemingly rulegoverned nature, can be regarded as code. Examples of syntactical ambiguity abound:
“Fruit flies like a banana” [Hönig 1997: 183], “Chinese take away food”, “Money is no
object”, “Keep away from children”, etc. In such cases, only reference to some larger
context - the remainder of the utterance, or its frames - can help us to determine the correct
form. Indeed, much humour and word-play depends for its effect on just such syntactical
ambiguity. This extract from The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy provides us with two
examples (the final sentence should be understood as an imperative):
“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace.
It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water.”
[Adams 1979: 49]
Such word-play depends on two (or more) possible syntactical structures being mapped onto
two opposing semantic interpretations. We make our first choice on the grounds of probability
- since being “drunk” like a glass of water is not normally something that happens to human
beings - until the larger context makes it clear that we have chosen wrongly. It is thus clear
that, under certain circumstances, the perceived meaning of an utterance determines our
interpretation of its syntactic structure, rather than vice versa.
While we may be justified, with certain reservations, in regarding as a true code the
relationship between words as events and words as recognisable signs, we are on shakier
ground when we turn to the question of whether the relationship between such signs and the
concepts they point to, i.e. the signified, may also be regarded as a code-defined relationship.
Although the idea of language as semantic code has a respectable provenance - Sperber and
Wilson (1986: 2) trace it back to Aristotle - it is now generally accepted that the connotational
meanings a person can infer from almost any statement can be extremely idiosyncratic, while
on the denotational level, even the referential use of terms for everyday objects can be a
source of disagreement (i.e. people don’t always call a spade a spade - some may call it a
shovel).25 Furthermore, much linguistic communication seems only to be made possible by
virtue of the existence of frames, i.e. by information which is not “present” in the actual
words at all. Text, then, is not merely semantic code, but is a vastly more complex
phenomenon. As Sperber and Wilson put it:
25
See Bell (1991), p.99.
On Information, Culture and Translation
22
To justify the code model of verbal communication, it would have to be shown that the
interpretation of utterances in context can be accounted for by adding an extra pragmatic
level of decoding to the linguistic level provided by the grammar. Much recent work in
pragmatics has assumed, largely without question, that this can be done ... It would have
to be shown that every case of reference assignment can be dealt with by rules which
automatically integrate properties of the context with semantic properties of the utterance.
It would also have to be shown that disambiguation, the recovery of propositional
attitudes, figurative interpretations and implicit import can be handled along similar lines.
Nothing approaching such a demonstration has ever been given.
[1986: 11-12]
At a higher level of abstraction, however, text can contain codes. Consider the example of a
weather forecast. Apart from a few casual remarks, almost everything that the meteorologist
says is expressed in terms which have precise technical meanings. Even a term like “storm”,
which to the layman evokes a wealth of more or less amorphous images, possesses for the
weather forecaster an exact definition in terms of wind speed, etc. Weather forecasts are thus
eminently translatable - something which rarely applies to the news broadcasts that they
accompany, which, with their use of value-laden terms like “terrorist”, present a much more
difficult and controversial task for the translator.26
Code and Pseudo-code
Inadequate as it is, the code model of human speech and translation has gained broad
acceptance, as can be seen in the common requirement that translators must never "add
anything" to a text, and indeed also in the contracts that many translators (especially in the
USA) are required to sign stating that their translations will be "literal and accurate". As I
hope to demonstrate, translations can be confidently expected to be literal and accurate only
in the case of scientific, i.e. coded, information. In almost all other cases, the translator must
choose between being literal or communicatively accurate. Being communicatively accurate,
on the other hand, often implies the necessity of adding some kind of explanation to a text in
the form of textual elaboration or footnotes.27 The social milieu in which the translator must
operate is thus radically out of step with the reality of the translation process. It will be
commonly regarded as an error, for example, for a translator to translate the same word in two
different ways at two different points in the text.
All of this reflects a perception of the translator's job which is essentially mechanistic: The
translator works not for an audience but on a physical product, "the translation", the proof of
26
See O’Shea 1997.
27
See Chapter 5, "Information Compression and Decompression".
On Information, Culture and Translation
23
the translator's ability being the perceived quality of that physical product's relationship with
another physical product, "the source text". It also leads to what I term a pseudo-coded
relationship between interlingual terms, in that the "correct" translation of a particular term is
often determined in advance, even when several alternative translations would appear to be
possible. (There is a clear parallel here with Toury's concept of acceptability, which will be
dealt with later.)
I distinguish here, then, between three types of linguistic code: Firstly, lexical code, the
relationship between words as particular aural or visual phenomena and the corresponding
lexical units of language, which is a true code; secondly, semantic code, which is a
widespread model for the relationship between words and their meanings, but which can be
shown to be inadequate; and thirdly, sub-codes that may be constructed within a language
from limited groups of words and concepts whose meanings are defined and verifiable. The
last of these code types also encompasses the concept of scientific information, to the extent
that it is expressed in natural language.
Given the difficulty of defining language as semantic code, we might perhaps turn the
question around: Instead of asking why language is inadequate as a semantic code, we could
ask why codes are not adequate as languages. Here, a thought experiment may be useful. Let
us consider a world in which everything about which we can speak possesses a single, precise,
dictionary definition. In this imaginary world, all languages would be codes, since every
linguistic sign would be capable of verification. (This is a world where people always call a
spade a spade.) Every language in this world is thus capable of perfect translation into every
other. (On the other hand, the translators are all out of work, since the task of translation may
be quite adequately undertaken by computers.) Now try expressing the following statements:
“I feel great today.”
“She’s a real bitch”
“I’m not crazy about this kind of work.”
“I don’t believe in getting flustered.”
(Etc, etc ...)
It cannot be done. Vast areas of our human experience are inimicable to precise definition
(when and at what point does one become a real bitch?). Any language, therefore, which was
merely code would be inadequate to the task of enabling communication between human
beings. The inherent ambiguity of everyday language is thus not just an unfortunate and
On Information, Culture and Translation
24
inconvenient tendency towards vagueness of expression, but is rather an absolutely essential
and fundamental trait of discourse without which most human communication would not be
possible. This, I believe, is a central point.
Cybernetic Models
The idea of language as semantic code, however, has enjoyed something of a revival in the
late 20th century, with the advent of the computer and, concurrently, the rise of such fields as
Cybernetics, Psycholinguistics, Information Science, etc. It may be worthwhile to examine
some of the ideas behind this approach, and their implications for translation theory.
Firstly, since we read from left to right (or from right to left, as in the Semitic languages), and
we hear words one at a time (more or less), we might be disposed to believe that human
language analysis proceeds systematically, in linear sequence. We could call this idea the
“cybernetic model” of language comprehension, since it implies that language is analysed by
the brain in a way analogous to the sequential operations of a computer programme. This kind
of model of language perception, as I hope to demonstrate later, has formed something of a
scientific paradigm among language theorists since the 1950's, in that the fundamental
assumptions regarding its automatic and quasi-mechanistic nature have gone largely
unchallenged. For now, I wish only to point out some of the theoretical problems that such a
model presents.
First of all, the idea that language is subjected to linear analysis in the brain leads us into a
certain paradox, because while, as we have seen, our recognition of syntax structure depends,
not just on word order, but also on word recognition, our word recognition also depends to
some extent on syntax. Syntax, for example, allows us to recognise that the word “sleep” in
Chomsky’s nonsense sentence must in this instance be a verb, not a noun, but this perception
depends on us also being able to recognise the fact that it is preceded by the phrase
“colourless green ideas”, which can only be an NP. We cannot, in other words, always
recognise syntax until we have understood what the words mean, and we cannot always
understand what the words mean until we have perceived their syntactical relations.
These two processes, word recognition and syntax perception, must thus somehow proceed in
parallel, which presents a problem for the idea of linear analysis. One way around this
problem might be to propose that word recognition can somehow be separated from word
comprehension. This is the solution suggested by, amongst others, the translation theorist
Roger T. Bell, whose ideas I will be looking at in the next section. Another possibility might
be to propose a “double sequence”, in which the brain begins by attempting to make a rough,
word-for-word semantic analysis of the utterance in some kind of “naive code”, which must
On Information, Culture and Translation
25
then be modified by syntax, other contextual clues and frames before we can be satisfied that
we understand the statement. While I am in general agreement as to the likelihood of the latter
or some similar procedure being utilised by the brain, I am not satisfied that either of these
proposals is enough to save the cybernetic model, for reasons that I will come to in a moment.
However, if we tentatively accept the idea of “naive code”, it may be that language is initially
perceived as semantic code, before being modified by factors exogenous to the code itself.
Proponents of the cybernetic model argue that such external factors can also, in theory, be
codified in some form; but, as we have seen, there are some logical objections to this view.
There are, however, a number of other difficulties associated with the cybernetic model, not
the least of which is the problem of search time.28 This problem arises from the empirical
evidence of brain research in the fields of neurobiology and cognitive psychology: Since the
speed at which nerve impulses travel along synapses is relatively slow (between one and one
hundred metres per second), it can be demonstrated that human processes of sign recognition
cannot possibly be organised in the brain along the same principles as those of a machine
translation programme (i.e. in linear sequence). If they were, the search times required would
be much too long, and we would never manage to say or understand anything. This principle
holds true whatever the complexity of the data storage structure involved - in fact, the more
complex the structure, the worse the problem. In other words, we cannot get around the
problem by pointing to the unimaginable complexity of the brain; there is something
fundamentally wrong with our whole approach to the subject. To put it another way: A
machine translation programme, when it meets an unfamiliar word - in fact, each time it reads
any word at all - must search through its repertoire in order to ascertain whether this word is
already registered there or not. Since electrical circuits transmit impulses at speeds close to
the speed of light, this is not a problem for the computer, but it would be a major problem for
human beings with their relatively slow neural communications.29 How is it, then, that humans
apparently need no search time at all to determine whether grocid, pondenome, cratict or
reptagin are contained within their current personal vocabulary? 30 We know instantly whether
or not such terms are familiar. What is true of word recognition, moreover, seems to be true of
all pattern recognition, such as the recognition of faces, and the recognition of non-linguistic
sign systems generally: Familiarity or non-familiarity is a quality which can in most cases be
assigned almost instantanously - and this despite the fact that faces may be seen from many
28
See Bohm 1987: 16-17.
Strictly speaking, the comparison should be with a computer’s CPU clock rate. But this is
still many times faster than any known biological transmission rate.
29
30
The pseudo-English nonsense words are from Shannon (1949) 1963:.43.
On Information, Culture and Translation
26
different angles, and words may be heard in many different contexts.31 Thus, while pure
syntax analysis and parsing could theoretically proceed in the human brain in ways analogous
to the rule-governed analysis of machine translation, word and frame recognition must be
subject to some form of radically different organisational principle - one which, apparently, is
deeply bound up with the phenomenon of human consciousness itself. Furthermore, since the
perception of language involves several other parts of the brain besides those directly
involved with speech 32, there seems little reason to assume a hard and fast barrier between the
principles of analysis involved in language perception and those used to construct mental
models of other kinds of sensory information: Fundamental concepts such as category (“a
kind of”) and unique identity are common to both. This is not to assert that the brain views the
world in terms of language; on the contrary, it seems more plausible that the brain views
language as a special instance of the kind of patterns that occur in the natural world. In other
words, the brain may see the process of converting code into text as being more akin to a
jigsaw puzzle than a crossword puzzle.
Quite apart from the neurological evidence, the probability that this is the case is easily
demonstrated by logic alone: Let us suppose that the meanings of words are looked up in
some kind of mental dictionary (which in fact is highly unlikely). Then the ’entries’ in this
dictionary cannot consist of words, since this would lead to a circular process, unconnected
with the world of experience. Only machines, using code, can make do with substituting
words for other words, since they are not required to understand their meaning; this is not an
option available to human beings. Hence the significance of words, for human beings, cannot
ultimately be expressed linguistically. The probability, therefore, is that words and phrases,
once recognised, unlock a whole package of memories, images and sensory impressions.
There may well be other words - such as verbal associations - included in this package, but
their meanings must, in turn, ultimately be expressed in non-linguistic terms, if the process is
not to be circular. What applies to words applies even more so to frames, which are not
encompassed by the lexical code at all. I doubt, therefore, whether we can usefully speak of a
“syntax” of frames, at least as the term is normally understood, and I specifically avoid here
referring to frames as “meta-texts” or “inter-texts”, because while it may make sense on a
metaphorical level to speak of non-linguistic texts, if it is not as language - or anything
analogous to language - that such frames inform our cognitive processes, then the utility of
Interestingly, it can be shown that nonsense words are processed independently in the brain
from words that are understood, which would appear to provide some neurological
underpinning for the division between code and text. See Kandel, Schwartz and Jessel 1995:
644.
31
See for example Kandel, Schwartz & Jessell 1995, section IX, and Steiner (1975)1991: 180
& 274-5.
32
On Information, Culture and Translation
27
the meta-text concept to translation theory must necessarily be drawn into question.33 On the
contrary, as I have argued above, the weight of the evidence makes it more likely that
language is analysed by the brain in terms deriving from our experience of the physical world
than that the non-linguistic world is analysed in terms deriving from language. The kind of
visual pattern recognition involved in, for example, IQ tests, and at which human beings are
demonstrably adept, may even form the mould from which our understanding of syntax
originally springs - which would in turn imply that our perception of syntax does not rely on
the construction of Platonic ideal forms but rather on the perception of patterns of actual
usage, with all its exceptions and irregularities.
A Holistic Model
Refining our original model of information analysis slightly in the light of the above
argument, we thus obtain the following:
5. Symbol
4b. Text unit recognition
4a. Frame recognition
--------------------------3b. Contextual code
3a. Naive code
I describe this as a holistic model 34, in that it - despite its two-dimensional character on paper
- does not imply any pre-defined sequence of analysis. Elements of text should not be thought
of as proceeding in an orderly fashion from level 3a to level 5; we must, rather, imagine the
component elements of a semantic model of the utterance being passed rapidly up and down
the ladder, perhaps only to be assigned the semantic value of “?” in the first instance, until the
unit as a whole, together with its frames, can be comprehended and fitted into a text.
Returning to the jigsaw puzzle analogy, we might thus compare lexical code to a group of
jigsaw pieces, arranged - because of the linear mode of their communication - in a row. The
order of the pieces (i.e. their syntax) gives some clues as to their role in the overall picture.
However, the brain may alight, in the first instance, on any piece which contains some detail
that it recognises, and then search for other pieces that have some relation to the first one.
I refer here to non-linguistic frames. Framic knowledge, however, while exogenous to a
particular utterance, may have been linguistically communicated. I will deal with this point
later in the section on Linguistic Relativism.
33
The term “holistic” is of course used here purely in its denotational sense, as “having regard
for the whole of something rather than just parts of it”. No “New Age” connotations are
implied!
34
On Information, Culture and Translation
28
Two or more pieces, when successfully fitted together, may be treated as a unit forming one
detail of the total picture, to which other pieces may be added, and so on. The unit of text may
thus be defined as any arbitrary sub-division of an utterance which has been comprehended
to the satisfaction of the recipient, from an entire work down to a single word or morpheme.
This process, while usually subliminal, is by no means necessarily mechanical or automatic:
If, for example, the meaning of some part of an utterance is obscure, the recipient may well
decide to “suspend judgement” until the utterance in its entirety may be examined.
Alternatively, the recipient may decide that the meaning of this part of the utterance is
unimportant, and cut the process short. Another somewhat neglected aspect of human
language analysis is thus the fact that we can discard information, in order to focus on what
seems most relevant. This ability to focus depends, in turn, on understanding. I emphasise,
therefore, my contention that human consciousness is an essential and active part of the
process of turning code into text. Without human consciousness, there are no texts.
Ambiguity and Information Value
The non-linearity of the above model also implies that, while sentence analysis may proceed
in linear sequence, it is more probable that our attention fastens in the first instance on that
which we find most ’interesting’, i.e. we make use of information hierarchies. Those
structural elements of an utterance whose role is almost entirely code-determined - the
definite article, for example - contain very little useful information. We are more likely to
focus initially on the more variable elements, such as nouns and verbs, consulting the
remainder of the sentence or its contextual code only secondarily, for clarification. This
makes sense from an organisational point of view, since the less static an element is, the more
processing time it will require. There is also a clear parallel here with Shannon’s concept of
redundancy, although I will later question whether this technical concept can usefully be
applied to linguistic information. Nevertheless, some words are clearly more equal than
others: Newspaper headlines and telegrams may, for example, occasionally omit the definite
article and other particles, but rarely central nouns or verbs. This seems to be in accord with
Shannon’s principle that the more unusual parts of a communication possess the greatest
information value. However, “unusual” may not be quite the right term when referring to
natural language, since many such nouns and verbs are, after all, extremely commonplace. We
focus, rather, on those elements of a sentence that are least code-determined, i.e. those
elements that contain the greatest amount of potential ambiguity. This leads us to an apparent
paradox, in that while the potential information value of code is related to its definability and
verifiability, the potential information value of any unit of text seems to be directly
proportional to its ambiguity. This distinction, which I hope to make clear in the following,
On Information, Culture and Translation
29
constitutes in my opinion the essential difference between the scientific and humanistic
concepts of information.
What, then, of perfectly straightforward statements that are immediately comprehensible?
Where is the ambiguity that provides evidence of their information value? But in fact, entirely
unambiguous statements are extremely rare in non-scientific discourse, since the apparent
meaning of even the simplest sentence can be distorted by frames such as tone of voice or a
specific social context. All such utterances thus remain ambiguous until the relevant frames
have been determined. It is also worth remembering that most units of text are comprehended
on an affective, sensual and quasi-visual plane, rather than on a purely intellectual plane. All
connotative information is ambiguous by its very nature. Were I to attempt to explain the
word “home” to a Martian, for example, I might well do so in terms approaching code: A
domicile in which one sleeps and eats some meals, often shared with close family members,
etc. The dictionary will provide a similar definition. But is this really what the word “home”
means to me, or to anyone? In general, the more difficult it is to define a word or concept in a
precisely coded form, the more affective information it is likely to contain, and the more
likely it is that it will rely on frames in order to convey meaning. Thus, in the case of highly
abstract and ambiguous statements, such as those referring to mental states, frames such as
tone of voice are likely to play a significant informational role. Any competent theory of
language or of translation must thus take account of such non-codable dimensions of
meaning, since few of the statements human beings are likely to make containing words like
“home” will make much sense to us if we rely on strictly semantic definitions. The terms
ambiguity and information are thus not, here, at odds with one another: On the contrary, as
has already been pointed out, ambiguity is an essential element of most discourse. Ambiguity
opens the door to frames, to the shared world of implicit knowledge on which all but the most
banal or technical human communication relies.
It should be emphasised that ambiguity, as I use the term here, is relative and not absolute: It
does not refer to an ultimate ambiguity of meaning, but to an ambiguity of formal meaning in
the unit of linguistic code under scrutiny. Hence, almost all words - unless they are
“scientifically” defined - are ambiguous in isolation. Most sentences are similarly ambiguous
when taken out of context, and many complete messages 35 are ambiguous unless connected
with frames with which the recipient is familiar. With regard to the dynamics of the above
model, we may thus assume ambiguity to be its essential motor. Some basic statements of
empirical fact - e.g. “John is laughing”, “It’s cold outside”- may contain so little ambiguity
that they can be comprehended on the level of naive code without the necessity of consulting
Messages are complete when the sender deems them to be, e.g. when “The End” appears on
the cinema screen. But for the recipient, no message, as text, is ever truly complete.
35
On Information, Culture and Translation
30
either contextual code or frames. Such statements are also those which present least difficulty
to the translator. If ambiguity is discovered, however, - “John is funny”, “She is cold”- the
unit (be it word, sentence, or whatever) is referred in this model first to contextual code, and
thereafter to frames.36 The process stops when the recipient thinks he or she has understood
the utterance - but a text may always be modified by later information and experience. The
meaning of a lecture may be illuminated by putting a question to the lecturer on a later
occasion, a poem we once read at the age of sixteen may mean something completely
different to us in middle age, and so on. In this sense, then, texts are never truly complete and neither, therefore, are translations.
Disinformation, distortion and misunderstanding
It would of course be naive to view language as being nothing but a system for the
communication of useful information. Quite apart from its many social and psychological
functions, language is also the tool of deception and exclusion. The use of argot and slang
generally involves the intended or unintended effect of excluding outsiders - indeed the
rhyming slang of Cockney, constituting a not inconsiderable portion of one of the major
English dialects, was apparently constructed for the specific purpose of presenting an opaque
surface to the uninitiated. What is information to insiders in such cases is intended to manifest
itself as code, or even disinformation, to outsiders. Steiner makes this point with his
customary eloquence:
In the creative function of language, non-truth or less-than-truth is, we have seen, a
primary device. The relevant framework is not one of morality but of survival. At every
level, from brute camouflage to poetic vision, the linguistic capacity to conceal,
misinform, leave ambiguous, hypothesize, invent is indispensible to the equilibrium of
human consciousness and to the development of man in society. Only a small portion of
human discourse is nakedly veracious or informative in any monovalent, unqualified
sense ... Scarcely anything in human speech is what it sounds. Thus it is inaccurate and
theoretically spurious to schematize language as ’information’ or to identify language, be
it unspoken or vocalized, with ’communication’.
[(1975) 1992: 239-40]
I deliberately use the term “ambiguity” rather than “incomprehensibility”: Once the patterns
of a particular language have been internalised, the brain rarely seems to conclude that an
utterance made in that language is incomprehensible, only that its place in the scheme of
meaning is, as yet, undecided. We assume that messages make sense, because we know that
most authors and speakers are rational and are therefore unlikely to violate Grice’s Cooperative Principle of discourse. (See Sperber & Wilson 1986: 33-34, & below, p.81)
36
On Information, Culture and Translation
31
Were language to be understood merely as semantic code, I would be inclined to agree with
Steiner: If we define information as a set of semantically truthful statements, then the compass
of linguistic information is limited to those few near-tautological utterances that are capable
of objective verification. Almost everything interesting that human beings can say, from “I
have a dream” to “The quality of mercy is not strained” would then belong to some other
category, not to information. But information in text is quite a different matter. To take the
question of mendacious statements first: Let us assume that, in best detective-series style, we
have decided that a particular utterance is untrue, i.e. that the speaker “is hiding something”.
In that case, we have most certainly gained information from an untruthful message, albeit
contrary to the wishes of the sender. (Our conclusion may turn out to have been correct or
incorrect, but unlike code, information in text is a subjective matter, not subject to the need
for verification.) It should also be noted that although this information is nowhere to be found
within the strictly semantic meaning of the message itself, it is nevertheless somehow
communicated by the message or by its accompanying frames (e.g. body language or tone of
voice). There are therefore occasions on which the information contained within the linguistic
code is at odds with the information conveyed by its frames. Since text is formed out of both
linguistic code and frames, the recipient will on such occasions apply some kind of personal
information hierarchy in order to decide which of these contradictory aspects of the message
should be given most weight.
This observation also holds true for the practice of translation. In subtitling, for example, it is
a common experience to discover that a line of dialogue which appears to mean one thing on
paper may mean something completely different when experienced in the visual and aural
context of a film, which is why it is impossible to subtitle a film or a television programme
properly from a manuscript alone. This in turn raises the interesting question as to whether
different productions of, say, Shakespeare should result in different translations. If the piece is
being subtitled for film or television, I would be inclined to say that this should be the case: In
stage and screen productions, what the director or even the individual actor is “saying” often
takes precedence over what the writer seems - on paper -to be saying. This is entirely
legitimate, and should be reflected in the translation.37
What, then, of false statements which we happen to believe? Here it must be admitted that
there is, on the face of it, no qualitative difference between true and untrue information at the
level of text. It is all information. The truth or falsity of a given statement cannot ultimately be
established by way of text alone. We can come some distance by way of probability
assessment (e.g. the statement “I bought the Times yesterday” is more likely to refer to
37
See Bassnett-McGuire 1985: 87-102.
On Information, Culture and Translation
32
purchasing a copy of the newspaper than to purchasing the enterprise which publishes the
Times 38), but in the end, we must have recourse to scientific information, i.e. statements
whose truth or falsehood can be objectively established.
This leads us to the controversial area of “hard” information such as news and journalism. If,
for example, a source language word corresponding to “guerrilla” is translated in a TV news
broadcast by a target language word more akin to “terrorist”, or vice versa, on what grounds
can we say that this is an incorrect translation, or that information has been lost? Since the
dictionary definitions of these two words are very similar, it would be difficult to criticise
such a translation on strictly denotational grounds alone. Connotationally, however, these
terms are clearly in complete contrast, and would probably result in the target-language
viewer’s understanding of what is said being sharply at variance with that which was
understood by the original, source-language audience. Proving that this is the case, however,
is extremely difficult, and it is thus undeniable that translation offers many opportunities for
the deliberate or unconscious manipulation of a message. This is a point that I will be
returning to later in this paper.
Even translating controversial terms by their supposedly formal equivalents may give rise to
problems. The Danish word terror, for example, denotes not an emotion but political
violence; thus a terrorist in Danish is someone who practises such political violence, but not
one who - in the strictly literal sense of the English term - seeks to further political ends by
spreading fear. The pejorative aspects of the word “terrorist” are thus much more to the fore
in English than in Danish, which is why English-language journalists aspiring to objectivity
are reluctant to use the term. Hence, although the actual usage of the two words in English
and Danish is close enough in practice to justify their being regarded as synonyms for most
translation purposes - and I will later argue that usage must take priority over entymology the fact that the term “terrorist” is not definable or verifiable means that terrorist/terrorist is a
pseudo-code pair: It is not a pair of signs whose relationship is code-defined. It is therefore by
no means given that the translator can automatically and in every case substitute one for the
other, whatever the dictionary may say. This example underlines the fact that only scientific
information - information expressed in terms that are objectively defined - can ever have an
obvious and universally valid equivalent in another language.
Another area of difficulty that arises in this context is the fact that even when no obvious
frame accompanies a message, the target audience’s cultural background may itself apply a
kind of “automatic” distortion to translated utterances. The statement “I pray every day to
38
Example taken from Sperber and Wilson 1986: 13.
On Information, Culture and Translation
33
God for guidance”, for example, might well be the sign of an honourable politician in the
United States, but in a Danish context it might mark a public figure out as being somewhat
simple-minded. In such cases there is nothing whatever the translator can do except hope that
the audience is sophisticated enough to make allowances for cultural differences; but while
they may well be able to do so if the statement originates in an internationally well-known
culture such as that of America, statements originating in less familiar cultures are in danger
of being misunderstood or ’slanted’ by the target audience even when competently translated.
The reasons for this will be explored later in the section on Linguistic Relativism.
In order to prevent the sort of misunderstandings that arise from unfamiliar terms and
references, translators often attempt to apply a correcting lens in the form of explicitation or,
if this is not possible, to seek what Eugene Nida - whose ideas I will deal with later - terms
dynamic equivalence by straying from a formally equivalent translation towards one that may
make comprehension easier for the target audience. However, this path is a dangerous one for
those not thoroughly familiar with the source culture. The conflict in Northern Ireland, for
example, is in Denmark (and in many other countries) widely believed to be the result of
religious differences alone. This results in TV news subtitlers and journalists automatically
translating political labels such as “Republicans” or “Unionists” into religious terms such as
katolikker and protestanter, in a well-meaning attempt to make the conflict easier to
’understand’. This can result in translations like the following:
The violent Republican movement had the choice to light the touchpaper
or not to light the touchpaper. And they chose to light the touchpaper.
Subtitled as:
De voldelige katolikker havde valget. Men de valgte at puste til ilden.
[The violent Catholics had the choice. But they chose to blow on the fire.]
[O’Shea 1997:245-52]
This translation policy distorts both the causes of the conflict and its potential solutions; for
while a political conflict may be amenable to political solutions, a religious conflict probably
admits of no solution except separation and cultural homogenity - a sub-text which is unlikely
to be lost on a European public for whom internal “religious” conflicts of one kind or another
are becoming an increasing irritant.
There are no easy answers to the above dilemmas except a thorough knowledge of both
source and target cultures. A knowledge of the respective languages alone is clearly
On Information, Culture and Translation
34
insufficient to produce adequate translations of material in which the role of frames is likely
be significant - which is to say, in any material that is not purely technical or scientific in
nature. We could begin, however, by acknowledging that information in language is at least as
much a matter of frames as of code, and therefore that translation theory must take account of
“information” which is nowhere visible in the lexical code alone.
Applying the Model to Translation: an example
I will briefly attempt to clarify the above model by means of a simple example from my own
translating practice. I was recently required (as a subtitler) to translate the following Danish
sentence into English:
Jeg har ikke sat så mange lys på kagen, fordi jeg vil ikke have, hun får for mange
kærester.
Analysing this sentence as naive code, with appropriate regard for the differing syntax of
Danish and English, we obtain something like the following:
I didn’t put many (lights/candles) on the cake, because I don’t want her to (get/have) too
many (boyfriends/girlfriends).
Contextual code - in this case within the sentence itself - clears up most of the ambiguities
(assuming, perhaps wrongly, that the girl in question is heterosexual):
I didn’t put many candles on the cake, because I don’t want her to have too many
boyfriends.
We thus arrive at what at first glance seems to be a perfectly acceptable English sentence. On
examination, however, we find that this sentence cannot be described as text, because, as it
stands, it is completely incomprehensible. It is still code. Consulting the remainder of the
contextual code - a documentary programme in which the above was a throwaway remark
made at a birthday party - we find it to be of no help at all. We must therefore file this entire
sentence under “?” unless we are familiar with the relevant frame, which is the context of a
Danish birthday party and its associated customs, one of which is that the number of candles
that remain alight after blowing on a birthday cake is supposed to indicate the number of
boyfriends or girlfriends that one has. But if the meaning of this sentence is obscure or
ambiguous to outsiders, how can I claim that this fact in itself enhances the sentence’s
information value? Since the information model that I have presented implies that information
must be defined subjectively, as “that which the recipient does not already know”, then, to the
On Information, Culture and Translation
35
extent that part of a message needs to be explained, it represents a source of potential
information - in this case, about Danish customs. Were the above sentence part of a written
text, for example, instead of a subtitle, the translator might well have decided to add a
footnote explaining the significance of the remark. This footnote would then become part of
the translation, inasmuch as it would help to convey the relevant information. On the other
hand, evaluating the above sentence in the context of a TV programme, a translator might
decide that this odd phrase is not very important and not worth wasting time on: Not all
information, after all, is perceived to be equally valuable or relevant in the context of a
complete message. But in either case, the point to be emphasised is that, whether we are
speaking of intralingual or interlingual communication, the process is in the end neither
mechanical nor unconscious, but requires the active intervention of human beings as sifters
and evaluators of information.
The analysis given above is very basic and by no means exhausts the possible ambiguities
involved. Were the same sentence, for example, to be translated into a non-European
language, perhaps one from a culture unfamiliar with birthday cakes (or even with birthday
celebrations) then the problems involved might be considerably greater; on the other hand, its
information potential would also be greater (see fig.2, below). We arrive, then, at what I hope
is a different perspective on the old problem of how to approach culturally specific references.
Birthdays are known
Birthdays are celebrated
On Information, Culture and Translation
36
Birthday cakes are known
Danish birthday cake tradition
Fig. 2: a framic map of the ”birthday cake” problem
Insiders and Outsiders
The term “insider”, as I utilise it here and elsewhere in this paper, is a relative one: Insiders
are those who share certain frames with respect to a particular area of discourse. It should be
noted that insiders need not possess a set of signs whose use is exclusive to themselves alone;
the term “birthday cake”, after all, also exists outside the innermost frame (see illustration,
above). But the usage of a sign, and thereby its meaning, changes as it crosses the boundary
between frames. No two individuals, however, will share precisely the same set of frames,
since we are all insiders in some areas of discourse and outsiders in others. Hence the “text”
of a message will never be precisely the same for two people, even if they share most of the
relevant frames. They will, however, tend to agree as to its essential meaning.
An ambiguous sign encapsulates or compresses the information contained in the frame that
encloses it. Such ambiguous signs can thus only be understood in the surrounding, outer
frames if that information is “decompressed”, i.e. made explicit. The amount of explanation
that will be required, and thus the information potential of a given sign when it is translated
for outsiders, will vary in inverse proportion to the number of frame boundaries that it must
cross in the process.
The Translator as Spy
At this point, the objection may be raised that the information we thus glean from the abovequoted sentence has nothing to do with the intentions of the speaker, who presumably had no
particular desire to convey information about Danish customs to anyone. This is true, but here
there are two points to be borne in mind:
1. In the context of this sort of fly-on-the-wall documentary television programme, a remark
like this was never intended for the viewer anyway. The message is intended for an insider,
one who understands the code and its attendant frames. We merely overhear it.
On Information, Culture and Translation
37
2. Even in more traditional media, writers rarely write with future translations of their work
in mind. They write for other insiders, members of their own time and their own culture, who
speak their language and understand their allusions and social code. Every translated work is
thus in some sense merely ’overheard’: We, the outsiders, are not the intended recipients of
the message.39
The translator is thus ultimately a spy: Someone who intercepts messages and passes them on
to persons for whom they were not originally intended. As any eavesdropper knows, however,
overheard communication can be extremely confusing, since frames are implicitly present in
any communication between insiders. The task of espionage - the passing on of information is thus not complete until the translator succeeds in making the information contained by
these frames explicit for those listening in.
Here, however, a caveat must be added: Too much “anthropological” explicitation may
unduly increase the information load of the utterance and obscure the central thrust of the
message.40 The ambiguity of everyday speech has after all a function, which is to save time
and effort. Human speech between insiders is a form of shorthand; if all the assumptions that
underlie such conversations were to be stated in full, the translated communication would
become very top-heavy indeed.41 Just enough explicitation is needed in translation to make the
overall message clear (i.e. the translator’s subjective perception of what the overall message
is), which means that the translator must evaluate in the context of the specific unit of text the
relative importance of any detail that might require explicitation to the overall message of that
unit. This means evaluating the relative importance of words in the context of a sentence,
sentences in the context of a paragraph or line of dialogue, and so on. The importance of each
larger unit normally - though not always - takes precedence over each smaller one, which
implies that alternative strategies, such as translating without explicitation, or not translating a
potential source of confusion at all, may on occasion enhance rather than detract from the
information value of the translation as a whole. Much depends on the purpose of the
translation, the target audience, and the medium used. Explictation, for example, is rarely a
realistic option in the medium of subtitling, where the emphasis more often than not is on
deleting as many inessential details as possible from the dialogue, rather than adding to it.
Statements made directly to foreign-language recipients via an interpreter are obviously an
exception. Mention should however also be made of Walter Benjamin’s somewhat
idiosyncratic claim that the primary audience is not the “intended recipient” of the
communication either. See Benjamin (1923) 1992.
39
40
See Larson 1984: 441.
41
In fact, as I will argue later, it would become infinitely large.
On Information, Culture and Translation
38
This is where information hierarchies come into play: While it is, for example, an old adage
of the theatre that every line of dialogue must either advance the action or reveal character, I
doubt that many subtitlers, when faced with the choice, are inclined to sacrifice the former for
the sake of the latter. For better or worse, modern audiences and translators tend to rate the
information value of the plot rather more highly than information about the characters
themselves, and subtitlers will try to accommodate that tendency. (Whether this has remained
constant since, say, the time of Shakespeare is open to question: By my own very rough
calculation, lines of dialogue in Hamlet which specifically advance the action amount to
somewhat less than one-quarter of the whole.) The subtitling of news and current affairs
programmes, however, presents a quite different set of criteria. To return to the abovementioned example from Northern Ireland, if in news broadcasting we translate a term like
“Republican” by “Catholic” because our audience does not know what a Republican is, or
because we lack the space to explain the term, then, obviously, we have seriously
compromised the potential information value of the utterance to the viewer. We have removed
the unknown and replaced it with the known; but as I have stated above, it is what we do not
know that represents information, not what we know. If explicitation is difficult or
impossible, as in subtitling, then it would be better, in information terms, to allow the
question “What is a Republican?” to form in the minds of the viewers than to substitute a
misleading ’equivalent’ term. If the quest for equivalence leads us to render all foreign
concepts in the seductive accents of the familiar, then what we are telling our audience is that
they already know all about the world and that there is nothing new under the sun. But as
spies, our function is not to tell our audience what they want or expect to hear, but rather
what, in our estimation, they will need to know if they are to understand the intercepted
message. The concept of equivalence will be discussed further in the section on Eugene Nida.
Phatic Information
As has already been noted, language may be regarded as playing many roles besides the
communication of information. However, in this paper I take a broad view and assume that all
utterances have some kind of communicative (and therefore informative) function. This
includes phatic communication, which is normally defined as “speech without informative
content”. Examples of phatic communication are the sort of polite, set phrases that one utters
when initiating contact with strangers or when merely “filling a gap” in a conversation (such
as the Jutlandish “Så det”). In some cultures, phatic communication can be highly ritualised
and may occupy considerable amounts of time in business and diplomatic contacts. In the
West, however, phatic communication is generally restricted to greetings, weather remarks
and polite inquiries about one’s health that often do not even require a reply.
On Information, Culture and Translation
39
If phatic communication were truly devoid of information content, no theory of translation
based on the concept of information would be able to account for it. There would be nothing
to translate. I take the view, however, that phatic communication does indeed convey
information, even if that information is only “I recognise the norms of civilised discourse and
am not dangerous”. We may compare it to the electronic “hand-shaking” that computers
engage in when contact is established between them by way of a modem: An exchange of
signals designed to establish that communication is indeed possible. The essence of much
phatic communication is thus the establishment of areas of agreement - which would explain
why initial contacts so often take the form of a statement with which no one could possibly
disagree, such as weather remarks. When it is broadly established that certain frames are
shared by sender and recipient, the discourse can proceed to other, more detailed and perhaps
more controversial areas.
To summarise: ”Humanistic” or non-technical information relies very largely, though not
exclusively, on terms and concepts which are indefinable and thus inimicable to codification.
Such ambiguity is not a hindrance to intralingual communication but is rather the very
essence of most everyday discourse. The greater part of the information communicated by
such means is not present “in” the lexical code at all, but is merely implied by means of
frames. Since ambiguity provides the means by which such frames are indicated, the potential
information value, in humanistic terms, of any utterance will be directly proportional to its
perceived ambiguity. Such ambiguity will be relatively small for “insiders” who possess
knowledge of the appropriate frames, but may be much larger for the target audience of a
translation. If a translator is to communicate all the information conveyed by such statements
optimally, the translation process must necessarily be incremental, the extent of the
explicitation required varying according to the cultural and temporal distance between
“insider” and “outsider” cultures.42 However, the translator must also evaluate the information
value of such explicitation in the context of the message as a whole.
5. Information Compression and Decompression
I have argued above that if translations are to be considered adequate from an informational
point of view, translations of statements made between insiders will require explicitation.
Another way to look at such “insider-directed” statements is to regard them as conveying
compressed or enfolded information, which must be decompressed to some extent by the
translator for the benefit of the target audience, to the extent that that audience consists of
42
Non-verbal explanations are also possible in translation, as we shall see.
On Information, Culture and Translation
40
outsiders. In certain fields of translation, however, such as in subtitling and interpreting, the
emphasis is in the opposite direction: Information must be compressed by the translator to the
greatest extent possible. In this section, I hope to show that scientific and humanistic
information is compressed in different ways and thus presents different challenges to the
translator.
Hierarchical Compression
Pure, unadorned statements of fact43 are notoriously difficult to compress, as every news and
documentary subtitler is aware, and the same is true of most scientific and technical
information. While ordinary day-to-day verbal and written communication is usually
amenable to what one might term “lateral” compression (see below), scientific and factual
statements tend to contain very little redundancy and thus offer very little leeway in this
regard. (Nørretranders’ monkey at the typewriter is producing scientific information by
default, precisely because we would not know how to go about compressing the monkey’s
literary output.) Many scientific statements in fact comprise what we might call informational
singularities - to borrow a term from physics - in that they cannot be further compressed. In a
hierarchical sense, however, strictly scientific statements are already compressed, in that they
build upon a myriad of earlier statements and assumptions. Thus, a highly compact scientific
statement such as Einstein’s famous “e=mc²”44 may be considered to be the apex of a pyramid
of information encompassing the Theory of Relativity and, beyond that, the experimental and
theoretical knowledge of several scientific disciplines, right down to the level of basic
mathematics and physics. Since none of these preliminary steps can be skipped if we are to
arrive at e=mc², such a scientific statement may be said to ’contain’, in some sense, the entire
body of knowledge that supports it (see fig.3, next page).
Whether such hierarchically-compressed statements need to be decompressed in translation is
something that depends entirely on the needs of the target audience: Translated conference
papers, for example, will usually require no decompression at all if intended for other
Lexical Code
A “factual statement” for our purposes here is one whose truth can be verified, though not
necessarily one which has been verified. In the case of news subtitling, for example,
assertions may be regarded for the purposes of translation as factual statements.
43
A scientific statement need not, of course, take a mathematical form. An example from the
biological sciences might for example be: “Most eukaryotic protein-coding genes require
activators.” [Darnell, Lodish & Baltimore 1990: 401]
44
On Information, Culture and Translation
41
Structural assumptions
Fig.3. Hierarchical Compression
specialists, but may require a great deal of explicitation and expansion if the target audience is
the general public, or even scientists from other fields. Here we may note that the idea of
information size that we thus obtain is somewhat counter-intuitive: While we normally think
of the size of a certain amount of information in terms of the number of photocopies, web
pages or column inches that it occupies, the compressed information present, for a given
audience, in a certain amount of lexical code may in fact be in inverse proportion to its
physical size. Thus, a slim scientific paper that contains very little information, or perhaps no
new information at all, to an expert in the field may represent a vast body of hierarchically
compressed information for the layman. In the unlikely event that such a paper were required
to be translated for general consumption, many of its underlying assumptions would, ideally,
have to be made explicit in the translation - which, of course, would probably require a
translation the size of a fairly large textbook. Nothing less, however, could in strictly
informational terms be considered an adequate translation for a general audience. (This would
of course also be true if the work were to be “translated” into non-technical language for the
benefit of a source language audience - a point I will return to in a moment.)
Lateral Compression
The hierarchical compression of information is only possible when each of the subordinate
statements on which it rests is definable - in other words, when we are dealing with a
linguistic sub-code. Humanistic information, on the other hand, does not usually use terms
that are rigorously defined, and cannot therefore employ hierarchical compression. The use of
frames, however, means that the reach of humanistic information, too, can exceed its grasp, so
that, for example, ordinary day-to-day utterances can convey a great deal of connotative and
affective information in relatively few words. In the context of subtitling, Luyken, Reid and
Herbst, for example, quote the phrase “You mustn’t forget: I went to a public school, of
course,” and comment:
On Information, Culture and Translation
42
Even if a suitable translation could be found, no Language Transfer could ever render all
the emotional associations linked with the idea of public school in England (single-sex
education, monastic life, separation from parents, sports and, not so long ago, corporal
punishment).
[1991]
We may coin the term “lateral compression” to refer to this kind of non-hierarchical
compression of the size of the lexical code relative to the amount of information conveyed.
Logically, there are two ways in which this can be done:
1. Extending the amount of implied information.
2. Abbreviating the lexical code as much as possible without unduly compromising the
information content.
The first of these methods is employed in communication between insiders and involves the
use of frames, as in the above example and our earlier “birthday cake” problem. The second
method is typically used by subtitlers and others who are required to squeeze a large amount
of information into a small amount of code, via the use of a variety of techniques such as
paraphrasing, condensation, etc.45 It may be noted that although the above statement is already
highly compressed using method 1, this does not prevent it being further compressed using
method 2, as: “Don’t forget, I went to a public school,” which would be an adequate
encapsulation of the essential information for subtitling purposes. If, however, the audience is
unfamiliar with the ethos of British public schools, then some kind of decompression may be
called for - explicitation, equivalent expressions, footnotes, etc. - although here again, we
must be aware of the occasional informational value of unfamiliar concepts, particularly when
these are extremely culture-specific. In a subtitling context, where footnotes are impossible, it
might thus be better to retain the English term “public school” rather than substitute a targetlanguage equivalent which fails to convey the necessary connotations.
If we assume, for the moment, that the “amount of information” present in a given message
could in some way be measured, then we can illustrate the idea of lateral compression with a
simple mathematical model. We can define the degree of lateral compression, L, as the
amount of information present, I, divided by the size of the lexical code, K:
L=I/K
Thus L=1 for unambiguous statements that cannot be laterally compressed further, such as
most scientific statements and certain unambiguous and verifiable statements of fact. If we let
45
See Gottlieb 1997:77-79.
On Information, Culture and Translation
43
R stand for the amount of redundancy present in a given message (i.e., the amount of lexical
code that can be removed without compromising the information content), then it is clear that
R=K-I. It would be tempting to write this as I=K-R, and to present this as an “objective”
measure of information content, but there is a snag: The amount of redundancy present is
almost as hard to measure as the amount of information. If, for example, a statement says the
same thing in two different ways, we might calculate that, taken as a whole, the message is
50% redundant. But if the message contains nothing that I do not already know, then its
redundancy level for me is in fact 100%, which means that (given I=K-R), its information
content is zero. There is, in other words, no escaping the ultimately subjective nature of
information evaluation.
To take another example, if a weather forecaster states, “Almost an inch of precipitation fell
on London yesterday, so it was fairly wet there”, is the second part of the statement
redundant, or not? I would argue that it is not, since what the meteorologist is in fact doing is
explaining - and thereby translating - a piece of scientific code for the benefit of the general
public. This leads us towards the idea that all translation is essentially explanation - and
conversely, that all explanation, whether intralingual or interlingual, is translation. The
variable factor is the amount of explanation (or “information decompression”) required,
which in turn depends on the requirements of the target audience. (Explanations, however,
may vary considerably in type and quality - a point that I will be returning to in the section on
Eugene Nida.)
The fact that L=1 for “incompressible” scientific statements does not mean that values for
L>1 cannot be achieved. In figure 4 (next page), the slope of the lines exemplifies possible
degrees of lateral compression. Any given statement would occupy a point on one such line. It
can be seen that the degree of lateral compression may be increased in the case of ambiguous
statements to values greater than 1, since such statements, via the use of frames, convey more
information than is visible in the lexical code. On the other hand, phatic and repetitive
statements with a high degree of redundancy will tend to have L-values of less than 1,
exemplified by the lower line. At the extremes, we may note that a line identical to the “K”
axis would represent statements that, no matter how many words they employ, convey no
information whatsoever, whereas a line identical to the “I” axis would indicate the various
informative values of silence. (Silence, being infinitely ambiguous, can equally convey
nothing at all, or everything.)46
46
For more on the information value of silence, see Nørretranders 1991: 141-143.
L>1 (Ambiguous statements)
L=1 (Scientific information)
On Information, Culture and Translation
44
L<1 (Partly redundant statements)
Fig. 4: Lateral Compression
I do not mean to imply by the above that L=1 is in some sense an ideally efficient mode of
communication. The “public school” example, above, indicates that a large amount of useful
if indefinable information may be conveyed at L>1, while L<1 is also useful in rhetorical
speech and in literature. Phrases such as “cease and desist” or “never, never and never”, for
example, while partly redundant in a formal sense, may nonetheless convey affective
information which is by no means irrelevant. Consider, for example, the following example
quoted by Hatim and Mason: In the run-up to the 1988 American presidential election, vicepresidential candidate Dan Quayle fended off criticism of his youth and inexperience by
reminding the Senate that Kennedy had been a relatively young man when he assumed the
presidency. This attracted the following dismissive comment from a Democratic senator:
I knew John Kennedy. John Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no John
Kennedy.
On the face of it, there is a certain amount of redundancy here in the repetition of the name of
“John Kennedy”, but, as Hatim and Mason point out,
... any translation which replaced the reiterated name by pronomial reference or variation such
as ’the former president’, Mr Kennedy’, etc., would fail to capture the rhetorical effect.
[1990: 124]
On Information, Culture and Translation
45
However, some translators, such as subtitlers, may have no choice but to sacrifice a certain
amount of rhetorical effect for the sake of the essential information (defined according to the
information hierarchy that is selected). We might therefore ask: How far can the above
statement reasonably be compressed in information terms? To compress it to the point of “I
knew Kennedy; you’re not him” would clearly be tautological and ridiculous: For one thing,
we may note that there are two “John Kennedys” here, with the final “John Kennedy”
referring to Kennedy not as a person, but as an icon (or as a sign, if you will). Both of these
should be represented in the translation. Affective information is also present: The intimate
personal knowledge of friendship must be conveyed.47 Hence, a subtitle which compressed
this information in an acceptable manner might be the target language equivalent of:
John Kennedy was my friend.
You’re no John Kennedy.
Total information compression - condensation - is not always possible, however. Ideally, the
subtitler will attempt to convey all the information he or she perceives in the original verbal
message, but since this is often impossible because of the constraints of time or space, some
of the information, even when not formally redundant, will usually be lost. The criteria
applied in such information deletion will in general reflect the subtitler’s personal information
hierarchy (e.g. in fiction, the perceived importance of plot as opposed to character), as well as
formal requirements (e.g. the number of permitted characters per line) and some cultural
factors (e.g. the level of sexual explicitness that is acceptable in a given target language
culture).48
6. Current Translation Theory and the Concept of Information
Having thus, hopefully, established a reasonably plausible model of language perception and
delineated two distinct types of linguistic information, I will now attempt to apply these
concepts to an analysis of the concept of information in current translation theory. One way to
categorise schools of translation theory is to group them along the axis of their attitudes to the
possibility or impossibility of accurately translating any utterance. At one extreme of this axis
we have the language relativists, such as the linguist Benjamin Whorf, who held that language
is so intimately bound up with culture that accurate cross-cultural translations are ultimately
impossible. Although - almost by definition - few translation theorists could be described as
In my opinion. As earlier stated, the information that a translator perceives to be present in
any non-scientific statement is essentially a subjective matter.
47
These are the kind of factors that Gideon Toury, whose theories will be discussed later in
this thesis, terms “norms of the target culture”.
48
On Information, Culture and Translation
46
pure Whorfians, Whorf's ideas have nonetheless made themselves widely felt, and can indeed
be said to have undergone something of a revival in modern Deconstructionist criticism, as
well as influencing conflict-based theories such as those of of Lawrence Venuti and the
postcolonial school. At the other extreme, we have what I will here term the “pragmatist”
school, who believe that anything can be translated, given the proper techniques. In between
are such theorists as Eugene Nida, who proposes that translators should aim for target
language “equivalence”, and Gideon Toury, whose approach is social scientific, descriptive
and norm-oriented.
The Pragmatists: Peter Newmark
The British translation theorist Peter Newmark is a good representative of the pragmatist
school, i.e. theorists whose work is firmly rooted in empirical practice and whose primary
concern is the production of workable translations rather than adding to the body of
philosophical knowledge. For Newmark,
The translation theorist is concerned from start to finish with meaning. He is, however,
not concerned with the theoretical problems and solutions of semantics, linguistics, logic
and philosophy, but only with their applications in as far as they can help the translator
solve his problems.
[1981: 23]
Translation theory, likewise, is:
...neither a theory nor a science, but the body of knowledge that we have and have still to
have about the process of translating.
[1981: 19]
As good as his word, what Newmark usually then gives us is a list of techniques and
categories rather than a theoretical approach. He is nonetheless generally regarded as a
theorist, mainly due to his introduction of the dichotomy between “communicative” and
“semantic” translation. He defines these concepts as follows:
Communicative translation attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as
possible to that obtained on the readers of the original. Semantic translation attempts to
render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic stuctures of the second language will
allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original.
[ibid :39]
“Communicative” translation can be seen to be identical to Eugene Nida’s concept of
“dynamic equivalence”, which I will address later. Newmark’s main theoretical claims thus
On Information, Culture and Translation
47
stand or fall on the question of whether or not there is another, equally valid, “semantic”
approach, which seeks to render precise meaning rather than convey an effect. I will return to
this question in a moment.
Newmark finds the quest for equivalence “nebulous and theoretical” [1983: 8], and seems to
have a distaste for translations which, in his eyes, go too far down the road of cultural
adaption:
The translation theorist has to raise the question, in considering Nida’s dynamic
equivalence, not only of the nature (education, class, occupation, age,etc.) of the readers,
but of what is to be expected of them. Are they to be handed everything on a plate? Are
they to make any effort? Are they ever expected to look a word up in a dictionary or an
encyclopaedia?
[1981:51]
Each new translation of the Bible, he complains, seems to be directed at “increasing numbers
of less well-read people” [1981: 45] and comments that “inevitably one thinks of
communicative translation as mass communication”[ibid: 63].
Newmark’s argument here may be couched in the terms of class prejudice, but he has a point
with regard to informational content: I have previously pointed out the information value of
unfamiliar concepts and the danger of the translator compromising such information for the
recipient by over-emphasising the need for instant comprehensibility.
Newmark is equally forthright on the subject of translatability:
Here I should state that every variety of meaning can be transferred, and therefore, unequivocally, that
everything can be translated. [1983:9, author’s emphasis]
Newmark thus apparently desires to place himself firmly at the opposite end of the theoretical
spectrum from the Whorfian school. However, he then goes on to qualify the above statement:
This does not mean that every relevant aspect of meaning in a text is translated, because
this would sometimes be longwinded and cumbersome (a translation should usually be as
concise as possible, like good writing) and would require a long explanation.
[ibid]
In other words, not everything is translatable without explication, but in general, explication is
to be avoided. The reader is not to be handed everything on a plate.
On Information, Culture and Translation
48
Newmark treats the term “information” as being synonomous with “meaning”, as in the
following passage:
By meaning, I am not referring to the whole meaning. Je suis arrivée tells us that a
woman is speaking and that she arrived either just now or some time ago; die Sonne geht
auf tells us that the sun is rising now or that it rises regularly, and that it is feminine
gender in German. But in the context, it is unlikely that all this information would have to
be transferred. We are therefore only talking about functionally relevant meaning being
transferred, leaving out all the superfluous features of meaning that also can be found in
the text.
[ibid]
This appears to betray a certain confusion between medium and message. It is questionable,
for example, whether one can properly attach the term “meaning” to the fixed structural
features of a language. As Joseph Grimes states:
... it is desirable to make a distinction between those things in language over which the speaker
can exercise choice and over which no choice is available to him. The former reflect meaning;
as many linguists have pointed out, meaning is only possible when a speaker could choose to
say something else instead. 49
In this instance, the fact that die Sonne is feminine in German is something which is entirely
code-determined, i.e. it is part of the medium, not the message.50 It is therefore inappropriate
to list this fact among the factors giving ’meaning’ to the sentence, whether “functionally
relevant” or not. In addition, the fact that die Sonne geht auf possesses two alternate meanings
implies, to my mind, that the sentence has no meaning when taken out of context: Like
Schrödinger’s cat, it exists in two parallel states until the box is opened - or, in this case, until
the context becomes clear.51 Thus, instead of saying that a fragment of text possesses two or
49
Grimes, Joseph The Thread of Discourse (1975). Quoted in Larson 1984:31.
This is not, of course, to imply that structural features cannot convey information. The
interplay between formal and informal forms, for example, is regularly used in many
languages to convey aloofness or familiarity. But these are alternate features which can be
freely chosen by the author or speaker, thus conveying intention. Fixed, unalterable structural
features are unavailable for this purpose.
50
“Schrödinger’s cat” refers to a paradox of quantum mechanics, in which the outcome of
certain sub-atomic events is theoretically indeterminate until the results are observed. The
physicist Erwin Schrödinger jokingly described an apparatus in which a cat might be put into
a sealed box containing a device which would kill it if one of two possible outcomes occurred.
In theory, the cat would neither be dead nor alive until the box was opened.
51
On Information, Culture and Translation
49
more alternate meanings, we could perhaps more usefully formulate a general rule that all
ambiguous units of lexical code are meaningless in isolation. Newmark, however, seems to be
making the opposite case, namely that words approach unambiguous semantic code:
Finally, I should say that the important factors of a translation (and its text) are its
intention, its meaning, its tone, its impact, its ’texture’, its function, the text as a unit - but
that the evidence for all these factors can only be found in the words in the text. “Words,”
- not sentences ! - “are to be interpreted according to their ordinary and natural meaning,”
says Halsbury. In any challenging text, there is continuous tension between the maximal
unit - the text - and the minimal, the word.
[1983:8]
Newmark thus appears to ignore the larger interplay between the text (by the usual
definition of “text”) and the source or target cultures, presumably because this would
lead him into Whorfian territory which he is loath to enter. Yet every translator is
familiar with texts which, while readily translatable on the lexical level, are difficult to
comprehend without at least some knowledge of the culture from which they spring - as,
for example, the previously mentioned ’birthday cake’ problem. Newmark does not
regard this as a serious hindrance:
Many words are profoundly affected by their contexts both linguistic, cultural and
situational and cannot be translated in isolation. The impact of text linguistics on
translation suggests that the whole text should be assumed to be the unit of translation.
However, my argument is in the opposite direction. I am suggesting that on the whole,
many more words are relatively context-free than relatively context-bound.
[1983: 7]
Newmark is uncompromising in his attitude to words as the fundamental units of meaning:
In any type of translation, the back translation test is conclusive, one cannot appeal
against it, provided no collocations are implicated: ’a rose’ is une rose is eine Rose,
unless it is an ’English rose’, in which case it might be ’fraîche comme une rose’ or eine
englische Schöne, or the ’rose’ (pomme, Brause) of a watering can, or is otherwise
figurative or technical.
[1983:8]
On Information, Culture and Translation
50
This seems an extraordinary claim.52 Back translations can only be “conclusive” in the
case of one-to-one correspondance, which, as we have seen, is a condition that normally
holds only for terms that are definable, verifiable and referentially exclusive in both
languages. If there is even the slightest degree of ambiguity, no back translation can
possibly measure translational accuracy: A rose may well be une rose, but un bois (or
en skov) might stand for “a wood” or “a forest”, according to context. Even when there
is a large degree of parallelism, such as French dans and English “in”, knowing that
dans can in 73% of occurrences be rendered by “in” is of little benefit to the translator
on those occasions when it can not.53 Curiously, although Newmark claims that this
’test’ is less conclusive in the case of language which is “figurative or technical”, his
argument would have been more convincing if he had taken some technical example: a
car battery, for example, is a car battery and nothing else, in virtually any language.
Terms for items which are defined solely by their function are in general much more
amenable to codification, and are less susceptible to the sort of metaphorical and
figurative confusion that Newmark describes above. Many a poet, after all, has
compared his love to a red, red rose, but surely few have employed the humble car
battery for this purpose.
This brings us back to Newmark’s original distinction between communicative and
semantic translation. Essentially, this dichotomy represents an adaptation of the
centuries-old division between “free” and “literal” translation. Newmark maintains that
communicative or “free” translation is appropriate for:
... most non-literary writing, journalism, informative articles and books, textbooks,
reports, scientific and technological writing, non-personal correspondance, propaganda,
publicity, public notices, standardized writing, popular fiction - the run-of-the-mill texts
which have to be translated today but which were not translated and in most cases did not
exist a hundred years ago.
[1981: 44]
Semantic or literal translation, on the other hand, is to be applied in the case of
... original expression, where the specific language of the of the speaker or writer is as
important as the content.
Newmark was less dogmatic on this point in a text published two years earlier,
where he writes: “... the back-translation test, though useful, is never decisive.”
See 1981:146.
52
53
Catford 1965. Quoted in Hatim & Mason 1990: 26.
On Information, Culture and Translation
51
[ibid]
An instance of translational difficulty quoted by Hans G. Hönig may serve as an example of
the sort of criteria that might be applied in choosing between these two approaches: If, in a
British court case, a defendant is asked “How long did you stay in that bar?”, and he answers,
“Till closing time”, there are two possible ways in which a translator may choose to translate
this reply:
1. “Until the bar closed.”
2. “Until 11.00 p.m.”
The first of these is an example of semantic translation. It may appear to be the more accurate
of the two, but a target audience unfamiliar with British licensing laws may not be aware of
the fact that the defendant’s reply actually indicates a very precise time.54 If this is the
essential information that the defendant meant to communicate - and not, for example, the fact
that the bar was closed when he left - then the second, “communicative” translation may be
preferable. Again, it can be seen that much depends on the translator’s subjective evaluation
of the information that is relevant for a particular target audience - it does not depend, as
Newmark appears to claim, only on the “type of text” involved.
The terms “communicative” and “semantic” translation would also appear to be somewhat illchosen, given that all translations aspire to communicate, and that all types of translation, by
their very definition, possess semantic content. I suspect that what Newmark really means is
“explicatory” contra “non-explicatory”, i.e. a choice of approach depending on the degree to
which the audience needs to have some terms and concepts in the message explained to them.
Formulated in this way, it is immediately obvious that the really decisive factor is whether or
not the target audience are insiders or outsiders with respect to the original utterance. In one
sense, of course, all members of a target language culture are by definition outsiders in
relation to speakers of the source language - which means that all translations must be
explicatory to some extent - but this cultural distance may be greatly diminished in the case of
conceptually limited areas of discourse, such as professional, scientific and technical
communication.Translations of papers presented at a scientific conference, as previously
noted, will require very little explication, since all parties to the communication are presumed
to be insiders with respect to the central concepts and ideas. Such translations are also likely
to contain a great many terms which are definable and verifiable, and which are therefore not
so much translated as converted to another code - as miles may be converted to kilometres, or
Fahrenheit to Celsius. In contradistinction to Newmark, I would therefore contend that it is
54
With a slight variation, depending on whether the incident took place in summer or winter.
On Information, Culture and Translation
52
precisely in the area of “informative articles and books, textbooks, reports, scientific and
technological writing” that a free or “communicative” approach is least appropriate, since in
such cases comparatively less will have to be explained to the target audience. In the case of a
general audience, however, and particularly when that audience is temporally or culturally
remote from the source culture, a more explicatory approach may be required. (These two
approaches need not, of course, be mutually exclusive within a given translation.) An
explicatory approach can take one of two possible forms 1. Direct explicitation, by which the implicit assumptions underlying unfamiliar idioms, terms
and concepts are made plain by means of textual elaboration or footnotes.
2. Indirect explicitation, by which idioms, terms and concepts that are foreign to the target
audience are replaced by others which are more familiar.
Both of these approaches may be regarded as techniques for achieving information
decompression. Their relative advantages and disadvantages will be discussed in the section
on Eugene Nida and equivalence theory.
Roger T. Bell
I have earlier claimed that cybernetic models have exerted a strong influence on linguistic
theory since the 1940's. A good example of this influence is available to us in Roger Bell’s
Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice, which was published in 1991. In this
work, Bell displays an approach which, although less dogmatic and rather more logically
rigorous than that of Newmark, is still firmly positioned within the pragmatist camp. Bell thus
describes his task as :
... (1) to outline the kinds of knowledge and skill which we believe must underlie the practical abilities
of the translator and (2) to build this outline into a model of the translation process.
[Bell 1991: xvi]
The transfer of information is, for Bell, one of the central functions of translation, especially
in a modern context:
From a practical point of view, we recognize that in a rapidly changing world in which
knowledge is expanding at an unprecedented rate, information transfer is coming to
depend more and more on efficient and effective translation.
[ibid]
The focus of Bell’s enquiry can thus be seen to be highly relevant to the topic of this paper.
On Information, Culture and Translation
53
However, Bell’s concept of information seems to be limited to the rather old-fashioned idea of
information as discrete bundles of factual data that can be “stored” in the memory and
“retrieved” via some quasi-mechanical process. Discussing long-term memory, for instance,
he compares the process of mental information retrieval to the computerised catalogue
systems used by libraries, and comments:
We would suggest that a computerised catalogue of this type provides us with a very
convenient model for the LTM [Long Term Memory]; both the database itself and the
accessing systems which allow us to retrieve the information stored in it.
[ibid: 258]
This analogy, accompanied by a process diagram of the type used to illustrate computer
programme sequences, clearly illustrates Bell’s predilection for cybernetic models. I have
already indicated that I find this kind of mechanistic approach unhelpful when discussing
human patterns of cognition and language processing. To reiterate, such models assume that
language consists of some kind of semantic code which can be analysed and reproduced in a
non-ambiguous way, and that the process of analysis itself is linear, unconscious, automatic
and relatively inflexible.
The other models presented in Bell’s work also show the influence of the cybernetic school of
thought. His model of intralingual communication is, as he himself implies, essentially an
adaptation of Shannon’s model of code transmission [ibid: 18], while the book’s central
model, that of the translation process itself, is also based on computer-like processes (fig.5).
Although superficially complex, this model of language perception and translation can be
seen to have certain features in common with the model I have utilised. Re-arranging Bell’s
format slightly allows a more direct comparison:
6. Semantic representation (“Symbol”).
5. Pragmatic analysis.
4. Semantic analysis.
3. Syntactic analysis.
2. Word recognition.
---------------------------------------------1. Source language text (“Code”)
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(The “output” stage of the translation process on the right of Bell’s diagram can be seen to be
essentially the left-hand perception model in reverse.) It is obvious that, although the initial
and final stages of Bell’s model and my own are the same, the path that Bell envisages as
necessary for the comprehension of messages and for their translation differs considerably
from my own proposal; the most fundamental difference being that Bell’s model, as we can
see from the arrows in the illustration, represents an essentially linear process.55 The first stage
in language perception, for Bell, is “word recognition”. This takes place in what Bell
describes as a “visual word recognition system” (although it must presumably also encompass
aural messages). The point of this structure is merely to divide an utterance into words - “a
linear string of symbols” - but since Bell’s model is linear, the position of this stage would
imply that we are able to recognise words and assign them their proper designations before we
perceive what they mean. This is not an idea that I would dismiss out of hand, given that,
according to my own model, meaning is something that is ultimately endowed upon
individual words by a larger context, but it does raise some awkward questions as to how
precisely this process of identification is supposed to take place in isolation from all semantic
considerations. What, for example, are we to do with the many homophonic words and
phrases that we routinely use in oral communication? How are we to distinguish “piece” from
“peace”, “knew” from “new” or even “Gladly the cross I’d bear” from “Glad Lee, the crosseyed bear” unless we take account of their most probable meanings in context? Secondly, is it
possible, even in written communication, to separate word recognition from word
comprehension?Admittedly, some words can be both familiar and incomprehensible, just as
some unfamiliar words can be comprehensible in context, but the implied claim that
familiarity and comprehensibility can always be separated seems dubious; not least because,
as I have earlier noted, distinguishing semantic from syntactic analysis may in many cases
prove difficult or impossible.
This is not a problem that Bell seems willing to acknowledge, since, moving on, we find that
the next stages in his model are syntactic and semantic analysis respectively. Here it is clear
that Bell assumes syntactic analysis to be the primary stage. The model’s procedure for the
syntactic analysis of clauses 56 is surprisingly complex, containing something called a
“frequent structure store”, which can bypass grammatical parsing, and a “frequent lexis store”
which obviates the need for a lexical search in the case of familiar words and phrases. Thus,
in the case of set phrases such as “once upon a time”, Bell claims - reasonably enough - that
we do not need to submit such phrases to time-consuming syntactic analysis. However this
Bell in fact denies this, but it is hard to see how his model could be applied in any other
way. His own examples are exclusively linear. See Bell, op.cit.: 61.
55
56
Bell regards the clause as the basic unit of translation. Bell, op.cit.: 29.
On Information, Culture and Translation
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again, in terms of Bell’s model, would depend on our being able to recognise such phrases
independently of their meaning, which seems unlikely. While I would tend to agree that a
phrase like “once upon a time” is probably perceived as a syntactic and semantic unit, it could
be argued that it is the very recognition of the illocutionary function of this phrase - as the
formalised beginning of a story - that is its essential “meaning”, and that it is precisely our
perception of this meaning that causes us to suspend syntactical analysis. Yet Bell places the
recognition of illocutionary and perlocutionary functions much later in the model, in the
“Pragmatic Analyser”.
Bell illustrates what he claims to be the primacy of syntactical analysis by way of a
nonsensical phrase:
the smaggly bognats grolled the fimbled ashlars for a vorit
[ibid: 49]
Here he contends that the subject-predicate-object-adjunct structure of the clause is
“transparently clear”, and comments:
It is even possible to infer something about the items themselves; bognats and ashlars are
countable, possess the attributes of being smaggly and fimbled respectively and bognats
are, it seems, able to groll ashlars either for a period of time (how long, we might
wonder, is a vorit?) or for some client (i.e. on behalf of a vorit). All this information
derives from the reader’s syntactic knowledge and, unfortunately, does not tell us (a)
what the function of all the elements is (for a vorit, for example) nor (b) what the words
themselves mean. For that we must turn to the lexical search mechanism.
[ibid: 49-50]
This argument seems plausible enough, but if we look closely, we see that Bell is cheating
slightly. Firstly, in this example, the particles “the” “a” and “for” are not presented in
unfamiliar code, but are merely ’given’. Yet Bell places lexical analysis after parsing : The
meaning of such particles, he says, is to be found in the Frequent Lexis Store [ibid:47]. If
Bell’s model is indeed linear, and is intended to process entire clauses at a time, this is a clear
contradiction. (To be fair, Bell himself at several points acknowledges the limitations of the
purely linear approach, but he gives no indication as to how an alternative process of
linguistic analysis might take place within his model.) Secondly, Bell’s nonsense words
possess word endings that give obvious clues as to their function: Plural nouns ending in -s, a
verb ending in -ed to indicate the past tense, and adjectives ending in -ly and -ed. If, however,
we substitute for these some of the random nonsense words generated by Shannon’s
On Information, Culture and Translation
56
probability formula, the structure becomes much less clear, and such inferences become
almost impossible:
the regoactiona froure antsoutinys the lat reptagin for a demonstures 57
It is thus clear that the perception of word endings must comprise a necessary stage in the
parsing of English sentences. But is it likely that we can perceive such word endings without
performing any lexical searches, a task which Bell allots to the next stage of the process?
[ibid: 47-49] And how can we separate the search for the meanings of individual words from
the parsing process that precedes this, or from the semantic analysis of the entire clause that
follows it? If, for example, we searched our memory and found that bognats was a proper
noun with which we were familiar, then the noun would not be plural or countable at all.
Smaggly could then also be a noun, and the entire phrase the smaggly bognats grolled the
fimbled ashlars for a vorit might be an NP referring to a “smaggly” - one that that our old
friend Bognats grolled the fimbled ashlars in exchange for a mere vorit. In other words, since
language is not semantic code, there is nothing necessarily given about the relationship
between the form of the lexical code and its meaning in text.
The threefold division between syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis can thus be seen to
be a chimera, a condition forced upon us by our adoption of linear, mechanistic models. Bell’s
model is one such mechanistic model, revealing above all the influence of one particular latetwentieth-century cultural artifact: The computer. Models deriving from such simple
cybernetic analogies can only work one way. They make no allowances for focusing, for
interest, for personal information hierarchies or for the vagaries of human attention. In short,
all that such cybernetic models really tell us is how human beings would approach the
question of language perception and translation if they were as mindless and hopelessly
inefficient at this task as computers have hitherto proved to be.
Equivalence : Eugene Nida
Eugene Nida, one of the most influential translation theorists of the last decades, is best
known for the concepts of formal and dynamic equivalence introduced in his 1964 work,
Towards a Science of Translating. Nida states that, since precise equivalents between separate
languages do not exist 58, we must seek the closest degree of equivalence possible. There are
essentially two kinds of equivalence that translators may aspire to:
57
See Shannon (1949) 1964: 43.
58
I would of course dispute this contention in the case of scientific information.
On Information, Culture and Translation
57
1. Formal equivalence, which “focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and
content.” Idioms and culture-specific concepts are rendered literally, and clarified if necessary
by the addition of footnotes, in order to convey information, not just about the message itself,
but also about the culture from which it emanates.
2. Dynamic equivalence, which “aims at complete naturalness of expression” in the target
language. Here, the emphasis is on enabling the target audience to comprehend the message
itself, without it being necessary for them to understand the relevant cultural background.
This approach involves, amongst other things, replacing idioms and concepts with which the
target audience may be unfamiliar with others that originate in the target language culture in
order to clarify the underlying meaning. [Nida 1964: 159]
The aim of both these techniques can be seen to be the construction of a particular kind of
explanation of the source language message according to the needs of the target language
audience. Since I have earlier argued that all translation is essentially explanation, it would
appear that either of the above strategies ought to constitute an acceptable means of
information decompression. However, to state, as I have done, that explanation is the essence
of any act of translation is not to maintain that any explanation will do. Explanations come in
many varieties: They can be partisan or disinterested, well-informed or “religious” (i.e. based
on complete ignorance masquerading as authority). Ideally, a translator should be extremely
knowledgeable concerning both source and target cultures, while at the same time having an
entirely neutral attitude with respect to his or her source material - a difficult combination to
achieve, particularly if the source material deals with controversial subjects. Even when
translators are entirely disinterested and have no stake, as such, in the effect produced on the
target audience by their translations, their own knowledge of the background to their source
material may be limited, or their interpretations open to question - an example being the
previously mentioned recasting of political positions as religious ones in translated reports
from Northern Ireland. Societal norms, of which the translator may not even consciously be
aware, can also play a role in shaping the translator’s interpretive framework.59 Finally,
pressure of work, particularly in the broadcast media, may mean that translators simply do
not have the time to acquaint themselves with the cultural or situational background to their
source material.
All of these factors mean that it is as important to focus on translators’ explanations as it is to
focus on their linguistic competence.60 This is particularly relevant if the translator chooses to
59
I explore this subject more fully in the next section, which deals with Gideon Toury.
The question of the kind of explanation that is preferable, however, is ultimately a matter of
the values of the observer. I will return to this subject in my conclusion.
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58
adopt Nida’s strategy of “dynamic equivalence”, in which the role of the translator as
explicateur is rendered more or less invisible. When, for example, Nida approves of the rephrasing of St. Paul’s “I am a Hebrew, born of the Hebrews” as “I am a Hebrew-speaking
person, born of Hebrew-speaking parents” in order to, as he says, “fill out an elliptical
expression”, he provides us in reality with a somewhat tame explanation of what Paul’s proud
statement of ethnic identity, in his opinion, really means [1964: 227]. Such an interpretation is
clearly debatable; yet a target audience without access to the source material or to an
alternative translation would, in this instance, have no option other than to accept Nida’s
version at face value.
One argument against the use of dynamic equivalence is the fact that, as I have already
argued, unfamiliar concepts may in themselves possess information value for the target
audience which an over-reliance on dynamic equivalence can easily degrade. Nida himself
acknowledges this problem, and states that translations must be linguistically, not culturally,
equivalent [1974: 134]. However, the distinction between these two positions is far from
clear. Nida criticises, for example, J. B.Phillips’ New Testament translation for rendering
“had an evil spirit” as “had a psychological illness”[ibid.], but praises him for translating
“greet one another with a holy kiss” as “give one another a hearty handshake all around”
[1964: 160]. Nida is also ready to endorse the substitution of “leopards” for “wolves in
sheep’s clothing” when translating biblical texts for an African target audience [Ibid.: 237]
and “white as egret feathers” for “white as snow”[1974: 4]. There is, in other words, a line
beyond which the quest for dynamic equivalence arguably becomes a serious distortion of
source language information, and it is not clear from Nida’s writings exactly where this line
runs.
These examples illustrate what Venuti calls the “domesticisation” of utterances emanating
from temporally or culturally remote societies, by which he means the erasure, in translation,
of the unique cultural viewpoint of such utterances and their transformation, in effect, into
expressions of the target culture [Venuti 1995:21-24]. I would not go so far as to agree with
Venuti that Nida’s concept of dynamic equivalence conceals a “cultural political agenda”
[ibid.: 118], but there is no denying that Nida’s universalist and humanist outlook causes him
to tone down the significance of cultural differences:
As linguists and anthropologists have discovered, that which unites mankind is much
greater than that which divides, and hence there is, even in cases of very disparate
languages and cultures, a basis for communication.
[Nida 1964: 2]
On Information, Culture and Translation
59
It has also been pointed out by Edwin Gentzler and others that, as a dedicated Christian
missionary and Bible translator, Nida was naturally concerned that the underlying message of
the Word of God should be communicated to the reader; the measure of success in this case
being the effect produced.61 This emphasis on effect is also echoed in a definition of
equivalence offered by Alexander Souter, which Nida quotes with approval:
Our ideal in translation is to produce on the minds of our readers as nearly as possible the
same effect as was produced by the original on its readers.
[1964: 164]
Details of Hebrew culture etc., are, from this perspective, of minor significance compared
with the importance of universalising the Good News. Or as Nida himself states:
... in Bible translating the purpose is not to communicate certain esoteric information about a
different culture, but to so communicate that R3 [the reader of the translation] may be able to
respond to M3 [the translated message] in ways substantially similar to those in which R1 [the
original recipients] responded to M1[the original message].
[ 1975: 33]
But translations of the Bible, we may note, constitute something of an anomaly in the world
of written translations generally, inasmuch as, if one believes the Bible to be the word of God
and that there exists a biblical injunction to “preach the gospel to the whole world”, then the
target audience of the translation is in fact the intended recipient of the message - which is
obviously not a condition that obtains in most translational situations. Thus, the translator is
not in this instance a spy, but rather an interpreter, since there are in reality only two parties to
the communication: God and the reader. However, to complicate matters still further, there is
also an “invisible” third party present - namely, the original audience. God has phrased his
message to the reader in a way which would be comprehensible to an ancient population
group living in the Middle East, and the translator must then adapt this message for what is in
effect a new first-order recipient. The task of the translator, as interpreter, is then merely to
ensure that that message is optimally transmitted and that the sender’s intended effect is
produced upon the target audience.
61
Gentzler 1993, summarised in Florentsen 1994: 227.
On Information, Culture and Translation
60
In two-party communication, there is only a sender, a recipient, and a message: Anything
which makes comprehension of the message difficult is merely “noise”. The two-party
perspective thereby provides a rationale for the jettisoning of cultural baggage which is the
inevitable concomitant of dynamic equivalence. It is thus unsurprising that Nida’s writings
reveal the influence of Shannon’s communication theory, which also, in its original form,
dealt with the problems of two-party communication. Nida describes Shannon’s theory 62 as
containing “some very important insights for the translator”, and he adopts wholesale many of
the fundamental concepts of communication theory, such as predictability, redundancy and
channel capacity [1964: 129-144]. However, as has already been pointed out, Shannon’s
theory was concerned with the transmission of code, not of meaning. Shannon never claimed
that his theory could be applied to semantics, and was sceptical of attempts to do so. The
resulting confusion reveals itself particularly in Nida’s treatment of Shannon’s concept of
redundancy:
Though redundancy might theoretically seem to be a waste of effort, it actually fulfils a
very important role in the efficiency of language, for by re-enforcing a communication by
partially predictable signals one may overcome many of the hazards of “noise”.
[1964: 128]
Here it is not clear what the original communication actually consists of, nor what, in
linguistic communication, one might reasonably describe as “noise”. Nida then goes on to
distinguish between what he calls “linguistic redundancy”, the predictability of words and
phrases, and “cultural redundancy”, the unstated cultural assumptions that surround a
message, remarking that:
... in most instances, any message in the source language will need to be filled out with at
least some types of redundancy, so as to match the linguistic and cultural redundancy to
which the original receptors had access.
[ibid. :130]
While few would disagree with the general thrust of Nida’s argument here, namely that
opaque and obscure references and phrases ought to be clarified in translation, Nida’s use of
the term redundancy appears to be contradictory, in that he seems to be claiming that a
message passed between source language insiders is one which contains a high degree of
In fact, Nida refers to “Information Theory”, the application of Shannon’s communication
theory to linguistics. As has been noted, this was an extension of Shannon’s theory that
Shannon himself never endorsed.
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61
cultural redundancy, to which the translator must add even more of “some types” of
redundancy in order to make the original message clear to outsiders.
This confusion arises, in my opinion, from the misapplication of Shannon’s concept of
redundancy to non-coded communication. To deal with “linguistic redundancy” first:
Shannon quite rightly stated that the repetition of a coded signal makes errors in transmission
less likely, but this is not at all the same thing as saying that repetitious linguistic statements
are better at conveying information. They may well be so in some circumstances, but there is
no direct and logical line of argument from Shannon’s theory to this conclusion. Secondly,
with regard to “cultural redundancy”, it makes no sense to speak of any kind of redundancy
resulting in a decrease in the amount of lexical code. What Nida refers to as “cultural
redundancy” is not actually redundancy at all, but compressed information. Or, as Edward
Sapir puts it:
Generally speaking, the smaller the circle and the more complex the understandings
already arrived at within it, the more economical can the act of communication afford to
become. A single word passed between members of an intimate group, in spite of its
apparent vagueness and ambiguity, may constitute far more precise communication than
volumes of carefully prepared correspondence exchanged between two governments.
[Sapir 1931, quoted in Gumperz 1996: 375]
In other words, in terms of the model presented in this paper, the information content of an
utterance may be compressed by utilising ambiguity to refer the recipient to a frame. Such
compressed statements must employ ambiguity - i.e. what appears to be ambiguity at the
lexical code level - since non-ambiguous statements, by definition, possess only a single
referent.63 Nida, however, views ambiguity as an impediment to meaning, rather than its
vehicle:
Rather than being impressed with the ambiguity in language, one ought to be much
more impressed with the relatively small amount of it that exists, especially on the
discourse level. Whenever one tries to describe language in terms of units, whether
words or sentences, isolated from discourse, serious difficulties inevitably arise, for it is
only in the context of the discourse that many potential ambiguities are actually
resolved.
[Nida 1975: 87]
An exception to this would be statements that are made in “secret” code, i.e. statements
designed to present one, apparently unambiguous, meaning to outsiders, and another to
insiders. Such statements, however, can hardly be described as being free of ambiguity!
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On Information, Culture and Translation
Nida is of course quite correct to point out that most ambiguity is resolved in discourse,
but fails to note that ambiguity is precisely what makes such discourse possible in the
first place. However, Nida in my view correctly identifies the unit of lexical code under
scrutiny as the factor which determines the level of ambiguity: Most words, for
example, are ambiguous in isolation; but that which is ambiguous at the level of
individual words is less likely to be so on the sentence level, while apparently
ambiguous sentences may be unambiguous in the context of the message as a whole,
and so on. Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind that many ambiguous utterances
ultimately refer to frames, and cannot therefore be resolved by reference to any larger
unit of lexical code alone. In passing, we may also note that the question of whether a
translation actually employs formal or dynamic equivalence is also determined by the
unit of lexical code under scrutiny: If we attempt, for example, to translate a nonscientific sentence “literally”, we can only do so by seeking dynamic equivalents at the
level of the individual words, i.e. words in the target language whose normal usage
corresponds to that of the individual words of the source language. There is thus no hard
and fast division between the techniques of dynamic and formal equivalence (or
between Newmark’s “semantic” and “communicative” translation). It is, rather, a
question of the level of structural focus.
Another way of formulating Sapir’s observation is to state that the level of integration and
intimacy present in a given community determines the degree of information compression
that is possible for insiders within that group. There is thus a direct link between cultural
integration and information compression, which we may express as the number of frames 64
that are shared by a given group. This is, I believe, an important point, and one that I will
be returning to later.
With regard to his treatment of the concept of information itself, it is difficult to tell
whether Nida views information as being an objective or a subjective entity. When, for
example, Nida states that most discourse is 50% redundant [1964: 129], he appears to be
implying that this is a measurable amount and thus, conversely, that the level of
information present must be objectively measurable, too. However, since Nida regards
redundance as something that facilitates information flow, this conclusion may be
unwarranted; for it is difficult to see how, in that case, one can separate information as
such from its required level of accompanying redundance. Elsewhere, however, Nida
It is a verbal convenience to speak of a number of frames. I do not mean to imply that
frames are actually countable.
64
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defines information in subjective terms - at least if we are to understand “meaning” to refer
to the significance of a message for human beings:
Information: The total meaning which constitutes a message, especially conceived in its
distinct parts.
[1964: 202]
However, when he elsewhere states that “All types of translation involve loss of
information, addition of information, and/or skewing of information” [1975: 27], it is hard
to see how this fact could be established unless information is treated as an objective entity
whose presence or loss can in some way be measured.65
If, as in the model presented in this paper, a subjective concept of information is employed
(“that which the recipient does not already know”) then it would appear that dynamic
equivalence must necessarily constitute a somewhat inefficient form of information
transfer, since this strategy aims precisely at rendering the unknown in terms of the known,
the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. However, I have also stated that information flow is
impeded if every aspect of the unfamiliar is allotted equal information value, resulting in
“top-heavy” translations. Optimal information extraction requires focusing, which means
that the importance of the various parts of a message relative to the whole must be
evaluated according to the translator’s own information hierarchy - including the
translator’s conception of the needs of the target audience. For Nida, as a committed
Christian, the essential information contained in biblical texts is the Word of God, which
must be universally communicated. His own information hierarchy, which he terms
dynamic equivalence, thus causes him to rank what he perceives to be the underlying
message of these texts higher than any mere anthropological details which might confuse
the issue. According to my own model, then, Nida’s translations must be accepted as
legitimate, since while I may criticise his lack of neutrality with regard to his source
language material, or his claims for the general validity of his approach, I cannot prove that
such an underlying message does not exist in biblical texts, nor that it is of lesser
importance than he asserts. If, on the other hand, one views the Bible primarily as a
cultural document containing important information about the belief systems of an ancient
people, then that would naturally constitute an entirely different information hierarchy, and
would result in an entirely different translation. But as long as the translator is wellinformed about his subject and does not commit formal errors, assigning a subjective
nature to information implies that one cannot argue for the natural superiority of one
Strangely, Nida elsewhere speaks of “bad translations” that “paraphrase by addition,
deletion or skewing of the message.” [1974: 173]
65
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information hierarchy over another. (This touches on the debate concerning whether any
prescriptive approach to translation can ever attain objective validity, and it is a point that I
will be returning to in the next section on Gideon Toury.)
Nida’s concept of “dynamic equivalence”, then, may be viewed as a particular kind of
information hierarchy. As this hierarchy arises from a specific and unusual two-party
translational situation, it cannot claim universal validity, since the subject matter of most
translations consists of “overheard” communication in which at least three parties are
present - four, if we include the translator. For reasons that I have noted earlier, the
approach that Nida terms formal equivalence would from a purely informational point of
view actually be preferable in such cases. However, dynamic equivalence has its uses: As
the only explicatory approach which does not require footnotes or necessarily imply an
increase in the size of the resulting lexical code, it is a frequently employed strategy in
subtitling, as well as in other areas of “constrained translation” in which more explicit
forms of explanation would be inappropriate.
Polysystem Theory: Gideon Toury
At the end of the last section I remarked that the general validity of prescriptive theories of
translation (i.e. theories that focus on how translations should be produced) has been
questioned, since it seems impossible to establish any universally accepted measure of
translation quality. The recognition of this fact has in recent years produced a movement
away from prescriptive theory towards ’Descriptive Translation Studies’ that aim to
describe and explain translations as they actually exist, rather than as they should be or
could be. The Israeli theorist Gideon Toury has been a prominent spokesman for this
movement. For Toury, translations are empirical facts, capable of scientific study like any
other phenomena of the natural world:
Since the object-level of translation studies consists of actual facts of
’real life’ - whether they be actual texts, intertextual relationships, or
models and norms of behaviour - rather than the merely speculative
outcome of preconceived theoretical hypotheses and models, it is
undoubtedly, in essence, an empirical science. [...] Translated texts and
their constitutive elements are observational facts, directly accessible to
the eye. In contrast, translational processes ... are only indirectly available
for study, as they are a kind of ’black box’ whose internal structure can
only be guessed, or tentatively reconstructed.
[Toury 1985: 16-18, author’s emphasis]
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On Information, Culture and Translation
Toury’s perspective is immediately revealed to be diametrically opposed to my own, as I
would dispute the idea that texts, as I have defined them, can have any objective existence
outside of the mind. However, words, i.e. elements of lexical code, certainly do enjoy an
objective existence as identifiable visual or aural phenomena, so I will proceed on the
assumption that this is what Toury is actually referring to.
Toury’s approach, in extension of the ideas of the social theorist Itamar Even-Zohar66 and
others, is based on the idea of polysystems, a network of social systems within which
translations constitute “literary facts” in a systemic constellation of relations. All social
systems are to a large extent organised around norms, i.e. standards of expected or
acceptable behaviour. In the case of translations the relevant norms are mainly those of the
target culture, since translations, according to Toury, are “facts of one system only: the
target system”, being initiated from within the target system and operating only within that
system 67 [Toury 1985: 19]. The first task of descriptive translation studies, then, is to
reconstruct the norms which govern a translator’s choices:
Even when it is texts that are taken up and analysed, the focus of the
study is not the texts as entities in themselves but rather what they can
reveal with respect to the process which gave rise to them, i.e. the choices
made by the translators and the constraints under which these choices
were made.68
In terms of the model adopted in this paper, then, what Toury is seeking to discover is the
translator’s information hierarchy, which, as he rightly points out, is likely to be
determined to a large degree by such factors as the translator’s own cultural background
and the expectations and norms of the initiator of the translation and the target audience.
Toury proposes that translations may be oriented in relation to two main axes:
1. Acceptability: The degree to which a translation conforms to target system norms.69
66
See Even-Zohar 1990.
This contention has, not surprisingly, been challenged from a number of quarters: See
Karamitroglou 1997, pp. 35-36.
67
68
Toury 1993, in Karamitroglou 1998: 13, Toury’s emphasis.
A good example being the tendency of English translations of the tales of Hans Christian
Andersen to become simplified and censored in order to conform to target-system
expectations regarding the appropriate form of “fairy tales for children” in English.
[Hjørnager Pedersen 1988: 103].
69
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2. Adequacy: The degree to which a translation conforms to source system norms.
Upon examination, these criteria reveal themselves to be in essence a further development
of Nida’s concepts of formal and dynamic equivalence, since acceptability - conformity to
target system norms - will almost always result in an utterance that appears “natural” in the
target language, while non-conformity to target system norms, “adequacy”, will generally
imply a translation that more closely reflects the tone and formal meaning of the original.
Toury’s main contribution, however, is to place these strategies in a social context, i.e. in a
context of implicit or explicit constraint rather than that of free choice.
Toury maintains that the norms governing translational behaviour will reveal themselves to
researchers who objectively investigate translational phenomena. However, there is in my
view a problem here, in that we in fact possess no objective yardstick for the study of
norms. Europeans, for example, might well find one set of norms to be active in a
particular translational context, whereas Asian researchers might perceive a quite different
set. I would therefore contend that, since culture is that which becomes visible at its own
boundaries, norms are nothing other than the subjectively perceived patterns of behaviour
of a group of people as compared with the patterns of behaviour of the observer. From this
perspective, then, norms have no objective existence, but are merely a measure of the
relative cultural distance between any two communities. They may indeed be studied as
such - for example as Toury suggests, by contrasting the norms of source and target
cultures - but let us have no illusions as to our scientific objectivity on the matter, since it
is “our” norms that make “their” norms visible in the first place.
Another conceptual problem that arises is the fact that, as Toury admits above, the actual
decisions of the translator take place in a ’black box’ to which we have no direct access. It
is therefore difficult to see how we can be sure of correctly identifying any norms which
we may perceive as operating in a translator’s output. To take a small example: The sequel
to the Disney cartoon film The Lion King has received the title Simba’s Pride in English.
This has been translated into Danish as Simbas Stolthed, a title which translates “pride”
only in the sense of an emotion, not as the collective noun for a group of lions. While no
Danish term exists that could reflect the ambiguity of the English word here, alternatives
such as Simbas Slægt or Simbas Flok, which would have expressed the other meaning of
“pride”, appear to have been rejected.70 At first sight, there would appear to be two possible
explanations for this:
Obviously, in the context of a film title, no explicatory approach other than an attempt at
dynamic equivalence is possible, since footnotes and explicitation are ruled out.
70
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1. The translator was unaware of the alternative meaning of “pride”.
2. The translator was indeed aware of the word’s ambiguity in this context, but decided, on
whatever grounds, that the “emotional” meaning was the most important or most
acceptable.
In the absence of the translator’s own comments, it would appear to be impossible for us to
select the correct explanation. However, the story does not end here, because, as a film
translator myself, I know that there are a number of other possible explanations:
3. The translator originally chose a different term, but was “corrected” by a proof-reader or
media executive who was convinced that a mistake had been made.
4. The translator’s original choice was rejected on the grounds that the title Simbas
Stolthed would have more audience appeal in Denmark.
5. The translator had nothing whatever to do with the choice of title, which was determined
in advance by the film company or distributors.
6. There is no intended ambiguity in the English title. The Disney company were
themselves unaware of the use of “pride” as a collective noun. (This is admittedly unlikely,
but we cannot rule it out.)
And so on. My point is that we cannot reconstruct the rationale for any translational
decision with any certainty from the end product alone. We can certainly point to oddities
in translation and raise questions about them, but we can never be quite sure of the correct
explanation unless we consult the translator - and perhaps not even then. Toury’s
“scientific” hunt for norms here would thus appear to be something of a quixotic
endeavour. The question of the influence of cultural and professional norms on translations
is certainly a valid and an interesting one, but it is a subject which, in my opinion, must
remain firmly within the domain of humanistic - not scientific - inquiry and debate, since
we cannot stake any claim to empirical objectivity in an area which is irremediably
subjective.
To state that translational norms, as such, exist only in a relative sense is not to maintain
that all systematic inquiry into the operation of norms in the process of translation must
necessarily be ruled out. Toury’s approach may be viewed as an attempt to bring
translation theory into dialogue with the social sciences generally, which is to be
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On Information, Culture and Translation
welcomed. However, a weakness of the polysystems approach is that it is essentially
functionalist in orientation, and thus suffers from the generic weakness of most
functionalist social theories in having difficulty accounting for change.71 Briefly stated, the
problem is that if every social phenomenon is to be regarded as playing a norm-enforced
role in a system, how are we to explain the fact that systems alter and evolve over time?
Toury attempts to explain such change in terms of deviancy from the dominant norms, but,
as he points out, any translator who in reality defies such norms is liable to experience
various kinds of sanctions:
The price for selecting this option may be as low as a (culturally
determined) need to submit the end product to revision. However, it may
also be far more severe, to the point of taking away one’s earned
recognition as a translator, which is precisely why non-normative
behaviour tends to be the exception, in actual practice. On the other hand,
in retrospect, deviant instances of behaviour may be found to have
effected changes in the very system. [...] Implied are intriguing questions
such as who is ’allowed’ by a culture to introduce changes and under
what circumstances such changes may be expected to occur and/or be
accepted.
[Toury 1995: 64, author’s emphasis]
Such deviancy, Toury claims, may under certain circumstances even be spontaneously
welcomed by the system:
It is not unusual for a certain amount of deviance to be regarded not only
as justifiable, or even acceptable, but as actually preferable to complete
normality.
[Toury 1995: 28, author’s emphasis]
See for example Scott 1990:41 : “... Consider the social scientist (often called
structuralist-functionalist) who takes as axiomatic the notion that equilibrium (“steady
state”, cleaving to and maintenance of the status quo) is natural rather than normal, in
social systems. Thus, basically collaborative social relations are taken for granted and for
good, negative or disruptive relations seen as deviant and in need of normalisation, or at
least containment, lest the whole rock towards anarchy.” Toury’s attitude to the role of
“deviancy” is far more subtle than this, as is his attitude towards normative change, but his
starting-point is nonetheless a functionalist model of social interaction. (Functionalist
social theory (for example Parsons 1950) should not be confused with the “functionalism”
of the skopos school of translation theory (e.g. Nord 1997), to which it is only vaguely
related.)
71
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However, the idea of “acceptable deviance” is oxymoronic and makes a nonsense of the
concept of norms.72 The question of who is allowed to introduce changes, and under what
circumstances, is indeed intriguing; but in my opinion, a truly socio-economic theory of
translation, one capable of accounting for change, would have to go further and analyse
translation in the context of institutionalised conflict between power groups, and the
control of information flow and language within society generally. Why is it, for example,
that a public figure who decides to employ a term - perhaps a foreign loan word - in an
unfamiliar way may well succeed in getting that usage generally accepted, whereas any
translator who attempts to provide an unusual but appropriate translation for a word or
phrase will almost certainly attract public and professional censure? The oft-quoted words
of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty are perhaps as relevant here as ever:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it
means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words means so
many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty “which is to be master - that’s
all.” 73
In times of tension and crisis, the relatively benign social norms that govern translators’
behaviour may turn into naked coercion: In an article entitled Tolke Skal Tolkes
[Interpreters Must Be Interpreted], published in the Danish newspaper Politiken on 23
May 1999 [see appendix], for example, the journalist Jens Holsøe points out that the
official interpreters provided by the Serbian government to international journalists in
Serbia are in an extremely vulnerable position, since, as Holsøe states :
Some social theorists, Even-Zohar among them, hold that systems in fact maintain their
long-term stability by being partly open to change. I find this explanation unconvincing.
Either the system is attempting, via norms, to maintain its coherence, or it is not. In a
norm-based system, it is hard to see how an attempt to change the dominant norms could
be viewed as anything other than a challenge to the system itself; to which, as Toury points
out, the system will respond with sanctions. (In a parliamentary system, for example, a
change in the governing political parties does not constitute a challenge to the dominant
norms, whereas an attempt to overthrow the principle of majority rule would certainly do
so.) This means that such a challenge, if it is to be successful, must have recourse to
economic or political power in some form - which in turn implies that the analysis of
translational norms cannot ultimately be separated from the analysis of class and power
within society as a whole.
72
73
Gardner edition: 269.
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On Information, Culture and Translation
En ærlig tolkning om serbiske forbrydelser kan føre til arrestation eller chikane mod
familien.
[”An honest interpretation of an account of Serbian war crimes may lead to arrest or to the
harassment of one’s family.”] (My translation.)
Few translators in time of peace encounter such intimidation as this; nevertheless, the
economic and social pressures towards conformity can be significant within any power
system.74 In those areas in which we do discover a diversity of translational approach, we
tend also to find a division of power: The recent international argument concerning the
correct interpretation of the final words of the pilot of EgyptAir flight 990 before its crash
provides us with a good illustration: The issue of translation was controversial here
precisely because two important power groups were involved; namely, the Boeing
company and the government of Egypt. Had only one power group been involved, there
would have been no controversy. Or, in the words of Alta Vista's Internet news service:
Two weeks ago our hopes of understanding what happened to EgyptAir
990 were pinned on the freshly recovered cockpit voice recorder. So far,
unfortunately, the only thing it has succeeded in making clear is that
cultural differences are deep, diplomatic issues are strained, and
translation is not just a matter of matching words with a language.
Biblical translation, too, affords us an example of an area in which various kinds of power
groups have vested interests in promoting orthodox or unorthdox kinds of translation
respectively, and are prepared to struggle to defend these perspectives (the recent
controversy in the Danish periodical Faklen over Bible translations providing us with a
good illustration.75) Changes in the translational norms governing these areas will almost
certainly be found to parallel changes in the relations between power groups in society
generally: As the Christian lobby declines in influence, for example, we may well see
translations of the Bible that will tend to place more emphasis on the polydeism of the
early Hebrews, or on the rabbinic tradition within which Jesus preached.
74
See for example Hönig 1997.
Faklen 1 & 2, 1996. Another example would be Ian Paisley’s attack on the Catholic
church’s translation of the New Testament into modern English, Good News for Modern
Man, published in Northern Ireland under the title False Views for Modern Man.
75
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In passing, it is perhaps worth noting here that there is a certain accordance between the
perspectives of functionalist social theory, classical economics, behaviourism, cybernetic
models of translation, perscriptive and descriptive grammmar, and even Newtonian
physics, each of which is ultimately based on a mechanistic analogy. These are essentially
modernist philosophies, unconsciously reflecting mankind's enthusiasm for the machine.
As theoretical perspectives they can be very useful in specific circumstances, but, as is
becoming increasingly obvious from current research, we do not have to stray very far
from the specific and the immediate before the mechanistic analogy breaks down entirely.
Conflict-based theory: Lawrence Venuti
The examples that I gave at the end of the last section illustrating the commercial, social
and political pressures that can be brought to bear on translators must obviously derive
from a view of society, and the translator's place within it, that is based somewhat more on
the idea of institutionalised conflict than on a theory of social consensus. The conflict
perspective is still a somewhat unusual position in translation theory, but it is characteristic
of radical schools of thought such as feminist translation theory, postcolonial theory, and
the works of Lawrence Venuti, whose ideas were briefly mentioned in the section on
Eugene Nida. Venuti is highly critical of Nida, whom he accuses of "imposing the Englishlanguage valorization of transparent discourse on every foreign culture, masking a basic
disjunction between the source and target-language texts which puts into question the
possibility of eliciting a 'similar' response." [1995:21] For Venuti, the approach of dynamic
equivalence amounts to a violent appropriation of the works of the source culture by the
target culture, in which:
"The aim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, the
recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim often risks a wholesale domesticisation
of the foreign text, often in highly self-conscious projects, where translation serves
an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agenda, cultural, economic,
political." [1995:18]
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On Information, Culture and Translation
Venuti's response to this problem is to advocate a strategy of "foreignisation", in which
terms, phrases and concepts that are unfamiliar in the target language are adopted in
preference to dynamic equivalents which fail to convey the "otherness" of the source
culture. This is the precise opposite of an explicatory approach, but paradoxically, it is
nonetheless concerned with communicating aspects of the source culture to the target
audience.
I will be returning to Venuti's ideas in the empirical section at the end of this paper, but for
now I wish to emphasise the following points:
1. Venuti's perspective, like Nida's, may be viewed as being essentially an information
hierarchy. For Venuti, the most important information to be conveyed is the fact of
otherness, which takes precedence over the need to make the translation easily digestible in
the target culture. This kind of information hierarchy may indeed be apposite in literary
translation and in other fields of translation in which the material to be translated is in
some way characteristic of the source culture (i.e. contains compressed information about
the source culture), but it is difficult to see how the foreignisation approach could be
applicable in the fields of scientific, technical and commercial translation in which most
professional translators actually make their living - a fact which may to some extent
account for the unpopularity of Venuti's ideas within the profession.76 From the point of
view of the model utilised in this paper, scientific and business communities themselves
form interlingual cultures with their own characteristic frames and forms of information
compression. The signs that they use in this connection are to a large degree codifiable,
ensuring relatively smooth translation across linguistic boundaries. The virtue of
"transparency" that many competent translators lay claim to, therefore, and that Venuti
derides, may to some extent be a valid one in these fields.
2. Whatever its merits, the foreignisation approach can never in practice be other than a
compromise, if a workable translation is to be produced. (The ultimate 'foreignisation',
after all, would be not to translate at all.) What Venuti essentially advocates, again in terms
of my own model, is to increase the ambiguity of the translation, thereby raising the level
of compressed information that it represents. The fact that a term or phrase is unusual or
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On Information, Culture and Translation
unfamiliar is in itself, after all, highly communicative, inviting the target audience to draw
its own intuitive conclusions, in the total context of the message, concerning these aspects
of the source culture, or else to conduct its own research into that which it does not
understand. However, while I believe that Venuti has a legimate point with regard to the
communication of certain aspects of culture, this is in my opinion only one of the many
dimensions of information that a translator may legitimately take into account when
constructing an information hierarchy for the specific translation. Furthermore, I see no
reason why foreignisation, in those areas in which it is appropriate, cannot be combined
with other strategies, such as dynamic equivalence, within one and the same translation. In
the empirical section, I will be giving some examples of how I believe this can be done in
the field of subtitling, with the aid of some guidelines borrowed from postcolonial theory.
3. Finally, it must also be remarked that foreignisation looks rather different from the other
end of the telescope, when the source is a large, international culture such as English. In
this case, foreignisation may with some justification be viewed as a contamination of the
target language with terms, concepts and expressions that are characteristic of the source
culture. As a translation strategy, foreignisation then comes to represent the very cultural
neocolonialism that Venuti so passionately berates. In my opinion, this underlines the fact
that no information hierarchy, however well-intended, can ever claim universal validity.
Linguistic relativism: Benjamin Whorf
Finally, to complete the spectrum of theoretical positions with regard to the perceived
feasibility of inter-lingual communication, we turn to the claims of those who maintain that
translation is essentially impossible. The modern version of this tradition within translation
theory was initiated by the American linguist Benjamin Whorf, whose famous work
Language, Thought and Reality was published posthumously in 1956.77 Whorf’s analysis
of, in particular, Native American languages led him to conclude that certain languages
may in and of themselves embody conceptual worlds and culturally-specific modes of
thought that simply do not lend themselves to translation. Whorf developed two categories
of linguistic meaning, to which he gave the names phenotype and cryptotype. A phenotype
is the apparent morphological category to which a fragment of lexical code belongs; its
surface appearance. A cryptotype, on the other hand, is “... a meaning, but one so nearly at
76
Mentioning Venuti's name on a translators' mailing list, for example, guarantees a
strong reaction, most of it extremely negative.
77
The underlying concept, however, has its roots in 18th and 19th century German thought,
particularly in the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt.
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On Information, Culture and Translation
74
or below the threshold of consciousness that it cannot be put into words by the user and
evades translation” [Whorf (1956) 1974: 105]. Whorf found, for example, that verbs in the
Hopi language bore signs of familial resemblance that seemed to have little do with their
surface categories: The Hopi word for “to sleep”, for example, has a word-ending which
places it in association with other verbs denoting will-directed activities. Whorf concluded
that for speakers of the Hopi language, “sleep [is] a state which the subject developed into
by continuous readjustment, not one which he launched himself into” [ibid: 108]. Words
thus have, as it were, two families to which they can belong: One that is explicit and
obvious, and another, shadow-family whose relationship is felt rather than understood by
the speaker of the language. Both of these contribute to the speaker’s subjective
understanding of their meaning:
The meaning of a phenotype, though ostensibly plain, can really not be completely
understood in all its subtlety until the cryptotypes that go with it have been dredged up
from their submerged state and their effective meanings to some extent brought into
consciousness.
[ibid: 109]
It is thus impossible to transfer all of the meaning of such words from Hopi to another
language, since, while a word’s phenotype can in most cases be translated, we cannot
translate the vague sense of belonging-to-a-family that a given word conveys to the
native speaker through its resemblance to other Hopi words. Ultimately, Whorf
contends, such structural relations add up to a separate world-view, a linguistic reality
unique to the speakers of a language and which is inimicable to translation. Our
perception of time, for example, is governed by the verbal modes that we have at our
disposal to express statements involving duration. As Steiner puts it:
The ’strong’ sense of the time-language relation is grammatical. It is no Whorfian fantasy
to say that our uses of time are mainly generated by the grammar of the verb.
[Steiner (1975) 1992: 137].
Thus, while in the Western conception time is linear, and is assumed to possess an objective
existence independently of our experience of it, the Hopi language expresses - or, according
to Whorf, conditions - an entirely different understanding of time:
Hopi may be called a timeless language. It recognizes psychological time, which is much like
Bergson’s “duration,” but this “time” is quite unlike the mathematical time, T, used by our
physicists. Among the peculiar properties of Hopi time are that it varies with each observer, does
On Information, Culture and Translation
not permit of simultaneity, and has zero dimensions, i.e., it cannot be given a number greater than
one.
[Whorf (1956) 1974: 216]
Whorf maintains that the fact that European languages share a number of structural
features has blinded us to the enormous diversity of linguistic realities that are possible, as
well as to the great complexity and subtlety of expression that is possible in the languages
of so-called “primitive” cultures. Whorf’s argument, however, while attractive and
intuitively plausible, rests on a logical tautology; for, as Steiner notes, we cannot “argue
that a native speaker perceives experience differently from us because he talks about it
differently, and then infer differences of cognition from those of speech” [(1975) 1992:
97]. It may well be that speakers of exotically complex languages inhabit psychic worlds
that are radically different from our own, but unless such differences can be expressed, this
proposition can no more be demonstrated than its converse: Nida’s universalism (see p.62,
above).
Secondly, even if we accept that such alternative linguistic realities exist, is it not more
likely that the translational difficulties they present owe more to the vast cultural gulf
between source and target communities than to any inherent linguistic obstacle? Given a
common lifestyle, even languages with very different grammatical structures - such as
Finnish and Swedish - seem to be capable of developing a sufficiently similar linguistic
“world-view” to allow relatively smooth translation, although minor cultural differences
will certainly remain. When cultures diverge, on the other hand, even speakers of the same
language will encounter communication problems. The experience of the German
translation theorist Christiane Nord is probably familiar to many people who speak a
language that spans several cultures:
The biggest culture shock I ever experienced was when I lived in Austria for a
year and a half: speaking the same language does not prevent you from
culturally putting your foot in your mouth every second time you open it.78
[Nord 1997: 134]
Christiane Nord’s problem is a cultural one, but her experience of it is linguistic; the language
she knows does not communicate the meaning she wishes to convey, because the Austrian usage
is different to that with which she is familiar. This seems to me to be a central point. Meaning
George Bernard Shaw also once famously remarked that the British and Irish are two peoples
divided by a common language.
78
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On Information, Culture and Translation
can ultimately only be defined in terms of usage, and is thus primarily a question of culture - as
was argued in the section on Nida - not of entymology or language structure.79 It would be
difficult to argue, for example, that the French must necessarily gaze upon the moon with
different eyes than the Germans because la lune is feminine in gender whereas der mond is
masculine. This is because European languages nowadays share a common frame with regard to
the moon, which means that whatever term we use, we are essentially referring to the same thing
- a lifeless satellite of the earth. The grammatical gender of the moon in a modern European
language is thus not normally a factor that the translator need take cognizance of. If, on the other
hand, we were translating documents from pre-Christian Europe - i.e. from cultures in which the
moon was seen as a god or goddess, whose gender might be of some importance to the target
audience’s understanding of the translation - then that would be a different matter. There is,
therefore, a direct link between the number of frames shared by a social group - i.e. their degree
of cultural integration - and language usage; a fact which we see reflected in the specialised
argots of sub-cultures, whether these be chemical engineers or Rastafarians. This then leads to
the danger of “culturally putting one’s foot in it” - using terms of discourse, or signs, whose
outward form may be identical in two different cultures, but whose informational content
diverges because of the “framic distance” involved. (In interlingual communciation, this can of
course also apply to terms that are supposedly formal equivalents, leading to what I have earlier
termed a 'pseudo-code' relationship between sign pairs.)
This is not to minimise the difficulties which can be presented by purely structural differences,
whether lexical or grammatical. As previously mentioned, aspects of grammatical meaning such
as the alternation between formal and informal forms of address, which is a feature of most
continental European languages, may often cause problems when translating statements made in
these languages to a language that lacks these features, such as English. This kind of problem
causes particular difficulties in subtitling, where the translator cannot make use of footnotes or usually - explicitation, and is therefore often obliged to seek dynamic equivalents in the target
language. However, if the translator judges these aspects of the message to be important to the
target audience’s understanding, a way can generally be found to convey the implicit information
- in this case, aloofness or familiarity - implied by the grammatical form of such statements in
the source language.
The central problem of linguistic relativity can thus in practice be seen to be essentially a
question of compressed information. Whorf points out, for example, that a statement made in the
African language Chichewa, concerning an event which happened some time ago, may make a
grammatical distinction between whether or not it was an event with consequences for the
In non-scientific discourse. Scientific terms may be formally defined in a way that can make
them impervious to usage as such.
79
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present [Whorf 1956: 265]. While it might be impossible to convey this information in a way
which is dynamically equivalent for a European target audience, an academic or literary work
can always, in theory, clarify the implicit meaning - again, if it is considered informationally
relevant - either by elaboration of the text or by means of a footnote. (Whorf himself, after all,
manages to explain such concepts perfectly well.) Chichewa folk-tales will thus always be
capable of written translation, albeit possibly in annotated form, whereas an oral Chichewa tale
presented to camera in a documentary might well present considerable problems for the hapless
subtitler. Such problems, however, are in principle no different from the kind of translational
problems associated with any other kind of compressed information, such as oblique references
to locally-known persons or traditions. Difficulties of this kind, while sometimes considerable,
are of a practical rather than a theoretical nature. Hence, without necessarily wishing to subscribe
to Nida’s belief in universal human values, it seems clear that anything that can be
communicated between insiders can also be explained to outsiders - eventually.
This reflects my earlier assertion that the meaning of an ambiguous statement - which is to say,
almost any non-scientific statement - lies not solely nor even primarily within the message itself,
but is produced by an interaction between the message and its frames, such as the source
language culture or the specific communicative situation. The translator, as spy, must therefore
somehow elucidate certain relevant framic aspects of the message for the benefit of the target
audience, if the compressed information contained in “overheard communication” is to be
adequately understood.
Adjacent
Remote
Fig.6: Framic Distance
The amount of explanation needed is inversely proportional to the number of frames common to
both source and target cultures. However, an “explanation” need not necessarily be verbal: One
of the advantages enjoyed by subtitlers and other translators of polysemiotic material, for
example, is the fact that obscure lines of dialogue will often explain themselves on screen or on
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On Information, Culture and Translation
stage.80 Furthermore, explanations are never complete. (What would constitute a complete
explanation of a translation of Hamlet, or a Hans Christian Andersen story? Ambiguous
utterances ultimately connect to everything.) Finally, while an explanation may be contiguous
with the translation itself, it may also be detached from it: Footnotes, for example, often merely
point the way to an explanation rather than provide one. (Similarly, the “explanation” of most
scientific statements may be assumed to lie in other works which may be consulted if desired.) In
addition, the development of hypertext for the electronic media may yet provide us with
innovative ways in which a translation and its accompanying explanation may be separated or
integrated.81
Deconstructionism
The fact that the meaning of a message is not solely encapsulated by language has led some
modern deconstructionists [e.g. Florentsen 1994: 240] to adopt the neo-Whorfian position that
translation may in fact be impossible. Since few utterances can be reduced to a single,
unambiguous and determinable “meaning”, this argument goes, their translatability will always
be open to question. All reading is misreading, even in terms of the author’s intentions. Hence, in
this view, no translation communicates the author’s intentions, and even if it did, the target
audience would be incapable of understanding it correctly [Hjørnager Pedersen 1999 (b): 66].
The deconstructionist position may, I believe, be refuted by reductio ad absurdam: If
the perfect transmission of information is held to be the only valid form of human
communication, then not only is translation impossible, but so is conversation. I would certainly
agree that meaning is ultimately indeterminable and incomplete [Florentsen 1994: 242-243 ff.],
but this fact is not in itself a hindrance to communication unless one insists upon the need for an
objective definition of what it is that is communicated. Such a definition, I have argued, is only
Another way of putting this would be to state that polysemiotic communication permits the
direct transmission of certain frames which can modify the meaning of a translated linguistic
message. Whether or not visual information is itself in need of intercultural translation is,
however, a moot point.
80
Hypertext may be regarded as a kind of “electronic footnote” system that, instead of merely
providing the title and date of a publication, can lead the reader directly to the quoted work itself,
or to an explanation of terms used. Currently used mainly in Internet publications, the system
could easily be adapted for subtitles, particularly in DVD video systems, and could also be used
to provide background information in translations of future electronic books. (An example of a
non-academic application for the latter might be an explanation of the reference to “a dog with
eyes as big as the Round Tower” in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Tinderbox”: At present,
such references are usually “explained” by seeking dynamic equivalents in the target language,
which, as I have already noted, tends to compromise their information potential. With hypertext,
the reader might instead be provided with a picture of Copenhagen’s Round Tower and a brief
description, or passed on to an Internet site where this information could be found.)
81
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On Information, Culture and Translation
possible in the case of code-based scientific information. In terms of the model presented in this
paper, then, the deconstructionist position, to the extent that it questions the possibility of
translation, seems to rest upon a confusion between text and code which, to my mind, again
reveals the pervasive influence of the cybernetic model: No value judgement is possible without
comparison, yet with what can we compare human communication? The probable answer is:
With machine communication. But when computers exchange “information”, what they are in
fact transferring is code, the successful transmission of which depends on creating a perfect,
objectively verifiable copy. No perfect transferral of text, however, has ever been possible, nor
would it be desirable. (We might speculate upon the kind of world we would inhabit if such text
transferral were in fact feasible. Since the recipient of an utterance would essentially receive the
sender’s experiences - nothing less, after all, would do - no individuality would ultimately be
possible. The individual point of view upon which, amongst other things, creative linguistic
production depends is thus predicated upon imperfect communication.)
Structuralism
Some structuralists maintain that the form and content of an utterance are inseparable, and thus
that the informational content of any statement is inextricably bound to a particular set of signs.82
Any attempt to reproduce this message in a different set of signs will produce a new message.
Real transfer of meaning between languages is thus ultimately impossible.
It seems plausible that much may be lost when, for example, Shakespeare is translated into
another language. But what is it, exactly, that we lose? We speak of the magic and the music of
Shakespeare’s English, but for a modern audience much of that eloquence, like that of the King
James Bible, consists precisely in its relative obsolescence. We cannot hear Shakespeare as a
contemporary audience would have done: Shakespeare’s signs are not our signs. As a result,
even what we call the “original” has, in subjective terms, already been translated. Hence, as far
as emotional and intellectual response is concerned, a competent translation may well
communicate more to a foreign-language reader who has some knowledge of Elizabethan society
than the original will convey to a modern English-speaker who lacks such knowledge.83 In point
of fact, the relationship of sign to signified is indeterminable, for if we insist that the “original”
signs are an essential part of the message, then we must also insist that everyone must perceive
these signs identically - and who is to determine what that correct perception should be? No
reading of a work, after all, be it performance, production or translation, can be invalidated on
the grounds that it is not definitive, that it has not offered the ultimate explanation. Since, as
stated above, ambiguous statements can in the final analysis be connected with everything, there
82
See for example Scott 1990: 239-242.
As an illustration, we might consider the fact that many English speakers assume Juliet’s
“Wherefore art thou Romeo?” to mean “Where are you, Romeo?”.
83
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On Information, Culture and Translation
is no limit to the amount of information we can subjectively derive from non-scientific
utterances, if we really want to. Hence, every reading of a work is new; it is always, potentially,
a new message.
The greatest difficulties for translators ultimately spring from cultural rather than linguistic
differences as such. Shakespeare belongs to a different time and a different culture to the modern
reader. We can understand him directly only to the extent that our cultures and our languages
have signs in common, which is to say, to the extent that we are insiders in relation to
Shakespeare’s utterances. To the extent that such common features are absent, however, we are
obliged to have the meaning of the code explained to us by a mediator - either verbally, or
polysemiotically, by means of the on-stage action. Such a mediator can be a translator, a
producer, or even an actor, but their impressions of what a text “really means” can never be
entirely authoritative or conclusive. Thus, every production or reading of Shakespeare, or indeed
of any work, is in reality a translation, an attempted explanation. There is no “original”. To this
extent, then, I agree with the deconstructionists, although I do not agree that the absence of a
determinable original constitutes a theoretical problem. These are merely the conditions under
which human communication has always taken place.
A more serious objection to the information value of translations, in my opinion, relates to the
possibility of a mismatch between the information hierarchy of the target audience and that of
the translator. The information content of ambiguous utterances, as I have remarked, is
potentially infinite; hence, if everything must be explained to the target audience, a translation
could, in theory, become infinitely large. The application of some kind of selective information
hierarchy, both on the part of the translator and of the target audience, is thus essential. However,
since an information hierarchy is essentially a filter, translations are filtered twice; once by the
translator, and then again by the reader of the translation. If the information hierarchies of
translator and target audience are identical this will not matter, but if there is any mismatch
between them there is a danger of information loss from the target audience’s subjective point of
view. Nida’s information hierarchy with regard to biblical translations, for example, places a low
value on “esoteric information about a different culture” (see p.60, above), but such
anthropological details may be precisely what a particular target audience may wish to know, or
may need to know in order to understand, to their own satisfaction, a particular biblical text.
’Correct’ Translations?
This leads us to a question that goes to the heart of the entire debate regarding the validity and
legitimacy of translation: If all humanistic information is subjective, what is to stop translators
from writing anything they please? Could a translator not legitimately render “I want to buy a
box of matches” as “My hovercraft is full of eels”, as was done in the famous Monty Python
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On Information, Culture and Translation
’Hungarian Phrasebook’ sketch? Here I would argue that Grice’s maxims84 apply in translation as
they do in all other forms of human communication. There is an unspoken contract between the
target audience and the translator to the effect that the translator will honestly attempt to render
his or her understanding of the source utterance (although manipulative translations are certainly
possible). Rational human beings, to the extent that they are insiders with respect to a given
communication, will usually agree as to its essential purport. Were this not so, human
communication could not function in a social context. Hence, if translators are rational although this, too, is an assumption - and are well-informed with regard to the source culture,
their attempts to convey the informational content of a source language statement will show a
tendency to converge, if never entirely agree. Thus, while it may well be true that no two
translators, given the same source material, will produce identical translations, it is equally true
that an unbiased reader - or even a computer - will find much in common between two
competently produced parallel translations of a given work.85 The existence of this common
material is my answer to the argument that there is no provable link between any original
utterance and its translation: Parallel translations will possess common lexical and syntactic
features to a statistical degree far exceeding the probability of chance matches.86 However, this
seems to be as far as we can go in the direction of objectively evaluating translations of nontechnical material, since even such basic concepts as “rationality” and “reality” are social
constructs whose area of validity is bounded by the frames shared by particular communities.
The claimed correctness of a given translation is thus always open to challenge by social groups
whose “reality” diverges from that of the target audience for which the translation was originally
produced. UFO-enthusiasts, for example, could easily produce their own translation of the Bible,
as could a great many other sects. In the absence of Divine or extra-terrestrial intervention ( i.e.
“authorial explanation”: see ”Truth and Falsehood in Translation”, below), neither we nor they
Grice’s maxims relate to the norms governing most communicative situations.
Briefly stated, these are:
1. Cooperation: Co-operate with others to further the communicative situation.
84
2. Quantity: Say as much as is needed, but no more.
3. Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false, or that for which you lack evidence.
4. Relation: Be relevant.
5. Manner: Be clear and orderly.
[Grice 1975, 1978, in: Hatim and Mason 1990: 62]
In the case of computer analysis, the sample of lexical code would have to be sufficiently large
to eliminate the possibility of chance matches, and the translations would have to be made with
the same target audience in mind.
85
This is, however, not sufficient to prove that two samples of lexical code are translations from
the same source, as - obviously - simple copying could also explain the common material. They
must also “claim” to be translations in the sense that Toury suggests [Toury 1985: 20].
86
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have any means of demonstrating beyond doubt the ultimate correctness or incorrectness of such
translations - although the expertise and framic knowledge of mainstream biblical translators
would obviously constitute a powerful argument in favour of their interpretations for those of us
who share the broadest frame of consensus reality. Such interpretations, however, can always be
challenged; were this not so, controversies over biblical translations would have ceased long ago.
In summary, then, the idea of measuring translation quality in terms of information transfer seems
to be valid only for the translation of scientific information (which includes positivistic assertions,
and any verifiable facts and figures that might appear in non-technical material). In all other cases,
the accuracy or inaccuracy of translations is a question that is socially determined. To put this in
terms of equivalence, we could say that for pairs of scientific terms an equivalent relation can be
proven (or disproven), whereas in the case of humanistic information, equivalence can only ever
be asserted.
Truth and Falsehood in Translation
Closely related to the subject of perceived correctness in translation is the question of deliberate
manipulation. One slightly startling discovery I made when I first attempted to apply the
information model presented here is that, if one employs a subjective concept of information, it
seems to be impossible to prove that even wilful mistranslation is in fact inaccurate.87 Most
translation is overheard communication,88 and as such it is also uncorroborated testimony; hearsay
evidence, of a kind that would be quite unacceptable in a court of law. The problem is that truth,
like accuracy, is in the case of non-scientific statements a question of the information hierarchy
that one applies. What is an accurate translation for one target audience may to another target
audience represent a scandalous manipulation of the truth. (One thinks again of Bible translations,
and of the “terrorist”/”guerilla” problem.) As a translator, I have a personal commitment to
attempt to relay the truth as I see it, but I cannot deny that my own information hierarchy, and
thereby my conception of truth, may well have been conditioned by the dominant norms of my
culture. I would, for example, personally regard it as manipulation for a translator to translate a
news soundbite on the basis of what an interviewed person seems to be saying when taken out of
context, if the translator were aware of a broader context - such as the unbroadcasted remainder of
the interview - which made a different intended meaning clear.89 I have also stated that I regard it
87
This problem was originally formulated by the philosopher Willard Quine as the problem of the
indeterminacy of translation.
88
With the exception of translated two-party communication, e.g. interpreting.
Note that when an utterance is edited before translation and publication, the discarded portion, to
the extent that the translator is aware of it, becomes framic knowledge in relation to the portion
published, and can thus still legitimately exert an influence on the translation.
89
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as a manipulation in news subtitling to translate, for example, people’s expressed political
positions as though they were religious convictions. In extension of this, I also take a somewhat
conservative view with regard to authorial intention, in that I believe that a translator should take
all the relevant framic information of which he or she is aware into account, and that statements
emanating from an author concerning the purpose or meaning of a work are indeed relevant to its
translation. But these are merely elements of my own, subjective information hierarchy: Other
translators would maintain that the meaning of a work or statement is independent of what the
author, or any individual reader, may consider it to be, and thus that it is legitimate to translate an
utterance entirely according to one's own conception of its meaning. Many conceptions of truth
are possible; however, so as not to cross the line into total ethical relativity, I would also maintain
that the greater the personal stake that a translator has in the effect produced on a target audience
by a translation, or the greater the social pressures that the translator experiences, the more likely
it is that such translations will be manipulative.90
7. Conclusion of theoretical section
The concept of information remains stubbornly non-scientific, despite the fact that many of the
everyday uses of the term imply that it is an objective phenomenon whose extent can be measured:
We are told, for example, that the Internet contains “vast amounts of information”, that computers
“process information at great speed”, and so on. The recent history of translation theory, too, has
been marked by a tendency to assume that information ought somehow to exist independently of
mere human needs and perceptions, with theorists who gravitate towards an objective, code-based
concept of language arguing that, since language is code, everything can be translated, and other
theorists taking the view that, since language is clearly not code, translation must unfortunately be
impossible. Both of these extreme positions are, in my opinion, mistaken. With the exception of
scientific information, human communication has never been based on objectively definable
terms, but on a much more subtle interplay between language and our implicit, subjective
knowledge of the world. In part, as I hope I have demonstrated, language theorists may have been
led astray by a late 20th-century fascination with mechanical, coded communication - Shannon’s
misapplied concepts continue to haunt translation theory into the 1990's 91- and in particular by the
false analogy with computer processes that I have termed the cybernetic model. In part too,
though, we may historically have been led astray by literacy itself; by the promise that mere
written, visible signs, shorn of their social and situational contexts, could still somehow
See for example the article by Jens Holsøe in the appendix. Holsøe points out, inter alia, that the
slant of translated accounts concerning conditions in Kosovo that, prior to the initiation of
NATO’s bombing campaign, were relayed to the outside world via the OSCE, tended to depend
on whether these accounts were translated by Serbs or by ethnic Albanians.
90
91
See, for example, Tymoczko 1999:223
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On Information, Culture and Translation
encapsulate the span of human thought and emotion in a way that might remain forever inviolate
and fresh. When knowledge first took the form of books on shelves, it took on the illusion of
physical existence, and as the libraries grew, it must have seemed that human wisdom was
growing with them.
In part, this illusion may have been fostered by the success of scientific information itself, which,
almost alone of all the varieties of human wisdom, has proved genuinely cumulative, capable of
being piled up in books and papers and being added to and re-used by succeeding generations.92
Much of this success has been due to the fact that it has proved possible to transfer such
information almost faultlessly from culture to culture, since the codes and definable terms on
which most scientific information is based are often capable of near-perfect translation. It can even
be argued that it was in large measure this ease of translation that secured the survival of
occidental civilisation during the Dark Ages, since without the corpus of scientific knowledge that
passed, through the centuries, from Greek to Arabic, and subsequently from Arabic to Latin, there
might have been no European Renaissance.
Humanistic information, however, has always confronted the translator with a far more formidable
task.93 As I have attempted to show, almost all non-scientific utterances are inherently ambiguous,
and all ambiguous utterances are rooted in a framic context from which they can be abstracted
only with difficulty. This much is well known, but my task in this paper has been to try to
delineate the theoretical basis for this problem, and to indicate ways in which it might potentially
be overcome. As such, the theoretical part of my paper has not been a scientific undertaking, but
rather a process of intellectual inquiry of the old-fashioned, humanistic kind. I have, it is true,
barely scratched the surface of the subject of the relationship between information and translation.
Translation theory being more concerned with language reception than with language production,
I have spent very little time on the question of information from the point of view of the author or
speaker. Nor have I dealt with the many possible dimensions of translation quality - such as the
retention of tone, style and form - that, arguably, also constitute forms of information. Clearly,
much more theoretical work could be done in these areas. Nonetheless, I feel that the model I have
utilised, with its emphasis on the fundamental division between the concepts of code and text, has,
as an explanatory perspective, held up well to the problems it was presented with. In accordance
with my own insistence on the subjective nature of humanistic information, however, it will be for
Thomas Kuhn has persuasively argued that scientific information, too, is subjective in the long
term. However, discussion of this subject extends beyond the focus of this thesis. See Kuhn 1975.
92
The fact that translators tend to regard scientific information as more difficult to translate than
humanistic information relates primarily to the need for the translator to acquire an understanding
of the technical terms involved, rather than to any inherent theoretical problem that it presents.
93
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On Information, Culture and Translation
others to judge whether or not it contains any real and valid insights that may prove useful to
translators or to translation theorists.
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On Information, Culture and Translation
8. Kærlighed ved Første Hik: Subtitling the microculture for the
macroculture
In this chapter, I examine the subtitling to English of a Danish feature film in the light of
the theoretical perspectives developed in this paper.
Kærlighed Ved Første Hik ("Love at First Hiccough") is the title of an extremely wellcrafted Danish comedy film for teenagers (based on the novel of the same name by Dennis
Jürgensen), that I recently subtitled into American English.94 While the overall theme is
familiar from similar films the world over (low-prestige boy competes with high-prestige,
wealthy rival for the love of beautiful girl), the setting is very specifically Danish, thereby
presenting the subtitler with a number of interesting problems.
Subtitling from the language of a relatively small nation into a large, international language
like English confronts the translator with challenges that are similar to those involved in
interpreting a minority culture to a majority culture. Since we hardly can refer to a nation
as a minority, however, I will for convenience term these the microculture and the
macroculture respectively. Like professional and social subcultures within a single
language community, the microculture shares some cultural frames with the macroculture
while utilising specialised references that will require expansion and explanation if their
significance is to be understood outside of their home frame.
As the largest frames of the macroculture encompass the microculture, the macroculture is
in less need of explanation to the microculture than vice-versa. This is because the balance
of commercial, cultural and communicative power between America and the rest of the
world is such that contemporary Europeans are always to some extent insiders with respect
to the English-language macroculture. Most of us do not need to be told where New York
is or what happens at Halloween. We already know. The reverse, however, is not true:
Americans do not necessarily know to which land Copenhagen belongs, or what happens at
the feast of Sankt Hans. This means that the challenges facing the Danish-English subtitler
are quite different from those that confront his or her colleague who translates from
English to Danish. The English-Danish translator who subtitles, say, an American TV
series, can take a great deal of framic knowledge on the part of the Danish audience for
My normal target language would be British English, but no American subtitler was
available at the time. However, as I had also translated two earlier versions of the film
manuscript, I was asked to subtitle the film, and the result was proof-read by an American.
94
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granted, and is thus under less pressure to adopt an explicatory strategy. Since it can be
assumed, for example, that the audience will understand a humorous reference to Bill
Clinton, the subtitler will not feel any particular need to substitute a cultural "equivalent",
such as the name of the Danish prime minister. Were such a substitution to be made, it
would in any case probably have an unintended comic effect, since it would seem highly
unlikely to the viewer that the TV characters concerned, ostensibly living in the USA,
would ever have heard of the Danish prime minister, much less be able to make jokes
about him. We could perhaps term this effect "implausible equivalence", and it is a
question that I will be returning to later. For now, we can note that the functional
equivalence or otherwise of the Danish prime minister to the American president is not the
issue here: The point is that the translation would seem literally incredible. This is a
problem that did not concern Nida when he approved the translation of the biblical wolves
in sheep's clothing as "leopards" - but then, the target audience for that translation is
unlikely to have been as familiar with the source culture as we are with the American
macroculture. On the other hand, any reference to "Poul Nyrup Rasmussen" in a subtitled
Danish film for an American audience would have to be explained in the English subtitles
in some way, either by the use of equivalence or by adding or substituting the words "the
Prime Minister".
However, as earlier stated in the theoretical section, the explicatory strategies available to
the subtitler are somewhat limited, with lack of subtitle exposure time and screen space in
many cases forcing the subtitler to seek dynamic equivalents in the target language rather
than make any attempt to explain an obscure reference. Pressed to extremes, this policy can
easily result in a subtitled film that, as far as its translated dialogue is concerned, could just
as well have originated in the USA. In some cases this 'internationalisation' (or
'domesticisation', as Venuti would put it) may even be commercially desirable, since a film
that is not bonded to any particular culture may well prove easier to export or to remake in
an English-language version. However, in the case of films such as Kærlighed Ved Første
Hik, i.e. those that are palpably "Danish" in atmosphere, I find myself agreeing with Venuti
that such a strategy amounts to a sell-out to the target culture, as well as a missed
opportunity to communicate some facets of Danish life to a foreign audience. But what is
to be done?
The facts of cultural domination make the language of post-colonial theory to some extent
relevant here, even though Denmark has never in reality been the colony of any larger
nation. In her book Translation in a Post-Colonial Context, for example, the translation
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On Information, Culture and Translation
theorist Maria Tymoczko identifies what she terms the "signature concepts" of a culture,
which are "central to the universe of discourse in a culture as well as to the horizon of
expectation shared by its members." 95 Tymoczko compares three English translations of
the Irish epic Táin Bó Cuáilinge, preferring that of the poet Thomas Kinsella to earlier
translations by Augusta Gregory and Standish O'Grady precisely because Kinsella
represents the signature concepts of ancient Gaelic culture by "defamiliarised" language in
English:
In Kinsella's text various concepts, values and beliefs of Irish culture are signalled through
marked language that resists assimilation to the dominant cultural norms of the Englishspeaking world: his language for the signature concepts of Irish culture does not lend itself to
domesticisation by British, American or Irish readers. [1999:176]
This, clearly, represents a translation strategy that is diametrically opposed to Nida's
dynamic equivalence, and is closer to the foreignising strategy advocated by Venuti. The
choice is not 'either-or', however: I see no reason why subtitlers should not adopt Nida's
equivalence when the situation demands it, reserving Tymoczko's "defamiliarised
language" for the signature concepts of a culture, if we can identify them. Foreignisation,
as previously remarked, can never be the sole strategy: There must always be an element of
compromise, if a workable translation is to be produced.
What is defamiliarised language? Subtitlers, because of the expectations they must
conform to, rarely have the freedom that Kinsella, as a literary translator, enjoyed when he
invented new English terms such as "warp-spasm" for the Gaelic ríastrad. Neither is the
option of retaining a foreign term in its original language - which is another way of
"defamiliarising" a culturally specific concept - normally one which would be available to
the translator of screen fiction. I would therefore define defamiliarised language for our
purposes in a much broader sense, as any translated utterance that demands a willingness
on the part of the audience to accept a certain "foreignness" in the terms employed. In this
particular film, for example, the names of the characters are allowed to retain their Danish
form in the subtitles, with no concession to English orthography: "Anja" is Anja, not Anya,
and so on. Amounts of money, similarly, are expressed in "crowns", not converted into
dollars, milk comes in litres, and references to the monarchy, confirmation, etc. are all
95
Tymoczko 1999:166.
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retained in the translation. The audience, in other words, is continually reminded of the fact
that the action of the film is taking place in a foreign culture to which they are the
outsiders. They are expected to be prepared to make some kind of effort to understand that
which is unfamiliar. This is not an unreasonable requirement, given that the potential
audience for any subtitled foreign film in English would normally consist of reasonably
well-educated people with a certain curiosity concerning other cultures. It is also worth
remembering that anyone who reads or views a fictive work must always in practice enter
a foreign culture in which they must look for clues that will help them to understand what
is going on. If a work has been translated, that fact may add an extra cultural distance, but
it does not change the fundamental demands on the audience. On the other hand,
Kærlighed Ved Første Hik is not a documentary film about Denmark: Its primary function
is to tell an entertaining story - so some kind of balance must be struck between the need to
entertain the audience on the one hand, and the need to honestly represent Danish culture
on the other.
The information hierarchy that I applied when subtitling this film would, if I had
formalised it, have looked like this:
1. The primary function of this film, and thereby also its translation, is to tell an
entertaining story. (The information that a line of dialogue is meant to be humorous, for
example, will take precedence over other considerations, if a choice has to be made.)
2. In the case of obscure cultural references, the translation strategy varies according to
whether or not the concept dealt with is considered to be a "signature concept" in Danish
culture:
2a. Signature concepts should as far as possible retain their Danish flavour in
translation.
2b. Dynamic equivalents may be sought for phrases which would be obscure
if translated too directly, but which are not considered to be signature
concepts.
3. As always in subtitling, the normal restrictions of exposure time and screen space apply,
which may at times override any or all of the above considerations.
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On Information, Culture and Translation
The above may give the impression that I had an entirely free hand in choosing the
information hierarchy that I considered most appropriate, but Toury is of course right to
insist that an element of social constraint is always present. Suffice to say that if my
information hierarchy had been radically at odds with that of the subtitling company or the
client, my translation would certainly not have been accepted.
With these considerations in mind, then, we can turn to the finished result. I will not
attempt an exhaustive analysis of the film's English subtitles, but will focus only on those
aspects that are problematic - and thereby interesting from a theoretical point of view.
Obviously, considerations of scientific vs. humanistic information rarely arise in a
translation of this genre: Almost all the relevant information in the dialogue is humanistic
and relies for much of its communicative value on frames of various kinds: cultural, visual,
situational. However, the first few lines provide us with one of the few examples of
"scientific information" in the film:
Viktor:
Tredie dag i 1.G., og så bliver jeg, Viktor Knudsen, ramt af en epidemi. Og vi
snakker ikke om skoldkopper eller influenza. Næh, vi snakker om et anfald af
total, uhelbredelig, Anja-epidemi.
Subtitled as:
On my third day in the 10th grade,
I, Viktor Knudsen, -
- was struck by an epidemic.
And we're not talking
chicken pox or 'flu.
It was a case of
total, incurable "Anja-itis."
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On Information, Culture and Translation
Here, the terms "epidemic", "chicken pox" and "'flu" are all capable of precise definition
(even if I employ the colloqial form "flu" in preference to the more formal "influenza"),
and they thus enjoy a coded relationship with their Danish counterparts. Had I translated
the term skoldkopper with "mumps", for example, the translation could have been proven
to be incorrect. On the other hand, I can translate Anja-epidemi with the more likely
English expression "Anja-itis" because the term epidemi is in this case used only as a
metaphor for Viktor's infatuation. The use of quotation marks underlines this point.
The translation of 1.G by "10th grade" is an attempt at dynamic equivalence in American
English. The American school system, fortunately for the subtitler, closely parallels the
Danish division between folkeskole and gymnasium. Both 1.G and "10th grade" thus
represent the first year in a new school for a young adolescent of about 14-15 years of age,
with all the insecurity that that implies. There is thus in this instance nothing uniquely
"Danish" about the expression, so the use of a dynamic equivalent is - in my view appropriate.
Viktor's wealthy rival is Peter. He arrives at the school, not, like Viktor, on a bicycle, but in
an expensive car, leading to the following exchange between Anja and Peter:
Anja:
Den er virkelig fed.
Peter:
"Hvad skal man med gratis glæder, når man kan få dyre slæder?"
Subtitled:
Anja:
It's really cool.
Peter:
"Nothing quite feels
Like expensive wheels."
Before translating the ubiquitous Danish slang expression fed with "cool", I consulted with
American colleagues via the translators' e-mail network "Lantra" in order to to make sure
that "cool" was still a current expression amongst teenagers in the United States. It is.
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On Information, Culture and Translation
The main function of Peter's aphorism here, as I see it, is to convey his materialism and
snobbishness. The translation of his remark should thus communicate this information, but
should also - preferably - rhyme in order to convey the fact that Peter is quoting a saying
(hence, also, the use of quotation marks). It must also be somewhat compressed, given that
the exposure time available for the second subtitle is just three seconds. This compression
means that some information is lost here; namely the implication that Peter also has a
contemptuous attitude to gratis glæder, "free pleasures" - which include, by implication,
human relationships (as in the English saying "the best things in life are free").
The two previous examples roughly conform to Nida's definition of dynamic equivalence.
We can see an example of the opposite strategy, defamiliarised or "foreignised" discourse,
in the following exchange, which occurs when Viktor's best friend, Torkild, holds a party
at which Viktor hopes to see Anja:
Viktor:
Jeg tror ikke, hun kommer.
Torkild:
Jeg tror sgu hellere ikke, dronningen kommer, Viktor, men ... jeg går ikke
rundt og piver over det, vel?
Subtitled:
Viktor:
I don't think she's coming.
Torkild:
The Queen's not coming either.
No point in crying over it.
The monarchy is to my mind one of the "signature concepts" of Danish society, so I have
chosen to translate dronningen as "the Queen", despite the fact that the only queen that
most American English speakers would be familiar with might be the Queen of England.
Substituting some high-prestige TL equivalent person here, such as "the President" or
"Madonna", would to my mind seem absurd, but other subtitlers may disagree.
A similar situation arises when Viktor's father, Kristian, expresses surprise at seeing his
son dressed in smart clothes for Anja's birthday party:
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On Information, Culture and Translation
Kristian:
Hvad fanden ..? Skal du konfirmeres igen?
Subtitled:
Kristian:
What the ..?
Are you getting confirmed again?
Confirmation is a major rite of passage in the lives of young Danish adolescents for which
the nearest cultural equivalent in English-speaking countries would be a Jewish Bar
Mitzvah, or possibly a 21st birthday party. Neither of these, obviously, constitutes a
satisfactory equivalent in this instance, and in any case, confirmation may justly be
regarded as a signature concept in Danish culture which deserves to be given a
"foreignised" form in translation. By using the formal TL equivalent of the term, despite its
differing connotations in SL and TL cultures, the audience is invited to intuitively make
the connection between confirmation and formal dress in a Danish setting. This will not,
obviously, explain the significance of the Danish confirmation tradition, but it will help to
explain Kristian's surprise.
(An episode of the Danish TV series Landsbyen (The Village), that I once subtitled as an
exercise, posed a similar problem. At one point in a small family gathering, a female
character begins to tap her glass with a spoon, whereupon her husband remarks in surprise,
Du har vel ikke skrevet en sang? ("You haven't written a song, have you?"). Since writing
songs for formal occasions is a specifically Danish tradition that is unknown in Englishspeaking cultures, I subtitled this with the dynamic equivalent, "You're not going to make a
speech, are you?". Nevertheless, it would be possible to make a case for the more literal
translation, should a different information hierarchy be deemed appropriate for this
particular subtitling task.)
The foreignisation strategy, however, can be pressed too far. The following translation is
one which I feel to be unsatisfactory:
Torkild:
Viktor, min dreng! Hun er tredie G'er. Det ville være lettere at score ...
Pierrot.
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On Information, Culture and Translation
Subtitled:
Torkild:
Viktor, she's a 12th-grader.
It'd be easier to score Pierrot.96
The dynamic equivalent "12th-grade" for tredie G'er is appropriate, but the reference to
Pierrot is too remote for most members of the target audience, and the connection with
specifically Danish culture is far from obvious. The figure of Pierrot, if it is recognised at
all in the TL culture, would conjure up a connotational red herring: The "sad clown" of the
French pantomime who is hopelessly in love with Columbine. The Danish Pierrot, on the
other hand, is not a mime but merely a friendly clown who entertains children at
fairgrounds. Thus the mapped pair of signs Pierrot/Pierrot, while formal equivalents, may
be regarded as having a pseudo-coded relationship.97 Moreover, no level of intuition on the
part of the audience could possibly allow them to see from the subtitles alone that Torkild's
remark here is intended to be grossly humorous, not wistful. Hence, mindful of the
information hierarchy that we have adopted, it might have been preferable in this instance
to substitute a target culture equivalent that appeared equally ridiculous or impossible as
the object of seduction, which at least would have communicated Torkild's humorous
intentions. "Ronald McDonald" or "Bozo" are possibilities, although both of these have
drawbacks: Bozo is remembered as a clown figure mainly by the older generation of
Americans (for the young, a "bozo" is merely a fool). "Bozo" also provides a good
example of implausible equivalence: Despite the fact that the figure of Bozo is a
reasonably close American cultural equivalent to Pierrot (no dynamic equivalent, after all,
is ever perfect), it nevertheless seems unlikely that Danish teenagers would ever have
heard of him. On the other hand, Danish teenagers would certainly have heard of Ronald
McDonald, but this name is simply too long for the subtitle line - the maximum line length
in most subtitling work being 36 characters. In the end I left the subtitle as it was, but I am
far from satisfied with it.
The transitive form of the verb "to score" is adopted here for reasons of space, although
it is less usual in this context than "to score with". However, I am advised by American
colleagues that it also can be used transitively in the sexual sense, as well as in its more
usual meaning: to obtain drugs, etc.
96
97
See "Code and Pseudo-code", Chapter 4.
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On Information, Culture and Translation
The names of commercial products, etc., have for the most part been converted to their
dynamic equivalents in the TL: When Torkild, for example, calls Viktor a Lørdagskylling
("Saturday Chicken", i.e. a coward), this is translated as "Kentucky Fried", since, whatever
the merits of Lørdagskylling, it can hardly be regarded as a signature concept of Danish
culture, and is in any case mentioned only metaphorically here. I am less happy, however,
with the substitution later in the film of "Hershey Bar" for Mælkesnit, since, although
Mælkesnit is a German, not a Danish, product, my conscience, speaking in the ringing
tones of Lawrence Venuti, reminds me that Hershey Bars are not available in Denmark and
that this kind of translation gives the (as yet) misleading impression that the young in
Denmark consume precisely the same products as their American counterparts. A similar,
though slightly more complex, problem is encountered when Viktor, too embarrassed to
ask for condoms (kondomer) at a local grocer's, begins to stutter "Ko...ko...ko..." - which
results in him purchasing Corona cigars and several bottles of Kondi, a Danish soft drink.
Here it is fortunate that Danish term kondomer begins with the same sound as its English
equivalent, but in order to communicate the humour we also have to find a soft drink
whose brand name begins with "co...". Coca-cola is the obvious candidate, but
unfortunately the shopkeeper can clearly be seen to place several green bottles on the
counter. (This is an example of what Gottlieb terms the sladreeffekt ("gossip effect") of the
screen image: In this case, however, it serves to undermine rather than help to explain a
potential subtitle translation.98) In the end, since consultation with colleagues abroad gave
no useful result 99, I invented a translated name for the product: "Condy". The unfamiliar
brand name then has the added benefit of indicating to the audience that the product in
question is one which is specific to the source culture.
Ideally, I would have liked to apply the foreignisation strategy to any term that is linked to
some signature concept in the source culture, but there are times when this is impossible.
This is the case, for example, when Gitte calls Viktor Lille Per, referring to a character in
Danish family comedy films of the 1950's that are frequently re-screened on Danish TV. It
is difficult to see how foreignisation could be applied here; I could perhaps have used the
the name as it is, or translated it as "Little Per", but there is not in this case enough
98
99
Gottlieb 1994:73.
"Kool Aid" was suggested, but this does not come in bottles.
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On Information, Culture and Translation
information in the visual or situational frame for the target audience to be able to make any
intuitive connection. Only an attempt at dynamic equivalence can thus, in my opinion,
convey the contemptuous attitude towards Viktor's youth and gaucheness that Gitte
expresses by the use of this term. The translated term I eventually used was "Lil' Abner",
although this is certainly an implausible equivalent, given that Danish teenagers can hardly
be supposed to have heard of this American comic strip character.100
Strangely enough, a foreignisation strategy and a strategy of dynamic equivalence can
sometimes lead to the same solution. Consider the following fragment of dialogue between
Anja and her best friend, Gitte:
Gitte:
Anja, se nu at komme i tøjet. Putterne de holder fest, og den crasher vi.
Anja:
Første G'ere?
Gitte:
Ja, det er lige noget for dig.
Subtitled:
Gitte:
Anya, get dressed.
There's a Tot party we can crash.
Anja:
-10th-graders?
Gitte:
- Just the place for you.
Here, we are faced with a slang word (putter) whose usage in the film applies only in the
innermost frame of discourse, namely that pertaining to Danish school student culture and
this particular fictive school. While the word can be used outside this frame as a term of
affection, it is used in the film in an ironic sense, as a term of contempt applied by final
year students to those in the first year of gymnasium, and carries overtones implying that
first-year students are "little children." Since this usage is confined to the innermost frame,
it will require explanation even for most Danes - a fact acknowledged by the film's
screenwriters101, who allow Anja to "translate" the term in the next line of dialogue: Første
Its supposed equivalence can also be questioned: Lil' Abner, although certainly gauche,
was not, in fact, "little" at all.
100
101
Søren Frellesen and the author of the book version, Dennis Jürgensen.
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On Information, Culture and Translation
G'ere? ["10th-graders?"]. The term occurs many times in the film's dialogue and is crucial
to an understanding of the plot, since it is the fact that Viktor is a putte, as well as coming
from a lower socio-economic rung, that makes his relationship with Anja problematic. The
subtitler must therefore give the translation of this term careful attention. If an equivalent
term from current American school culture is chosen here, we run the risk of producing a
translation that can be understood only by school students. On the other hand, a word like
"kids" is too broad and fails to convey the specificity of the put-down. Instead, I have
appropriated "tots", a term that normally refers to toddlers, and one which could
conceivably be used in a similar sense in a corresponding target language school. This is
then linked to a specific meaning by Anja's "translation" of the term, so that the audience is
once again invited to intuitively supply the explanation for the unfamiliar usage. As such,
then, this is an example of Venuti's foreignisation strategy. However, the role that the word
"tots" plays here is nonetheless that of a "false" dynamic equivalent - i.e. we have used
foreignisation to suggest a dynamically equivalent relation that does not, in fact, exist. The
following diagram illustrates this relationship: The actual framic relationship between the
terms putter and "tots" in the film is A-B-C, but it suggests a fictive equivalent relationship
A-D.102
Danish school culture
American school culture
D
A
B
Danish adult culture
C
American adult culture
fig. 7: framic map of the relation "putter"/"tots"
Bearing in mind that while the apparent direction of the translation/explanation is A-BC, the real "motion" is in the minds of the target audience, and is in the opposite direction.
102
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On Information, Culture and Translation
However, we must not be misled by a diagram such as this to suppose that it necessarily
represents the reality of the communicative process. To do so would be merely to present
yet another mechanistic model. What it represents in this instance is nothing more than the
intention of the subtitler: Whether or not this intention is successful in communicating
what the subtitler considers to be the essential information is another question entirely.
Other characteristic aspects of Danish culture, such as the relatively open parental attitudes
to teenage sexuality, are communicated in the film by situational frames rather than by
specific utterances, and do not, thus, present major problems for the translator. One such
instance occurs when Anja's father, Willy, having found Viktor in bed with his daughter,
proceeds to give him a lecture on the importance of using condoms rather than on morality.
Such situations are automatically "foreignised", inasmuch as the foreign aspects of the
culture in question, relative to the TL culture, are implicitly conveyed by the action of the
film. Any attempt to find a dynamic equivalent in cases like this would in effect amount to
a manipulative translation - as would be the case if a deliberate effort were made to turn
Willy's speech into a morality lecture, should this be considered more appropriate in the
target culture.
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, I find problematic areas to be the most interesting
ones from a theoretical point of view, and I have consequently focused on such areas in my
analysis here. In doing so, I have perhaps given the impression that Kærlighed ved Første
Hik is from a cultural and communicative point of view a very problematic film to
translate. This is not the case. The film's story is told in a way which is substantially
universal - at least as far as Western culture is concerned. In all, I have counted 29 unique
instances in Kærlighed ved Første Hik (not counting repeats) where a more or less direct
rendition of the dialogue would have caused problems of comprehension for the target
audience. Of these, 12 were solved by foreignisation and the rest by dynamic equivalence.
That is not a large proportion of the film's 735 subtitles.103 However, these particular
subtitles were occasionally important to an understanding of the plot, and in general
contributed much to the atmosphere of the film.
It is impossible to quantify the true number of subtitles that have been influenced by
considerations of equivalence, since it can be argued that the selection of any TL term by
the translator implies, at least, the assertion of an equivalent relation. See p.83, above.
103
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On Information, Culture and Translation
Again, there is no knowing to what extent these solutions were truly successful, but the
aim throughout was to communicate signature concepts of Danish culture, when these
occured, in a way which would neither erase their unique cultural character nor make them
seem alien, while at the same time continuing to convey the film's plot and its humour.
In applying translation theory to the subtitling of a relatively light comedy film, it has not
been my intention to over-intellectualise a task that most competent subtitlers could
accomplish perfectly well without recourse to translation theory of any sort. The purpose
of my analysis has been to allow practice to illuminate theory, rather than the reverse.
However, I feel that an awareness of some of the issues raised by theorists may be of
benefit to subtitlers and may help to bring about a greater understanding of the often
complex issues surrounding the communication of cultural information across a linguistic
barrier.
Every form of translation operates under its own particular conditions and constraints, and
each will thus illustrate different aspects of theory. Subtitles, considered as language, are
often - in terms of my model - highly ambiguous, especially in fictional works, and are
therefore heavy in potential information content. This is because subtitling typically
involves highly compressed fragments of lexical code that rely on visual, cultural and
situational frames for their explication. As such, any theory that relies on language alone
will fail to account in full for their communicative effect. I have found the concept of
frames useful here, but it is not sufficient, as some theorists have maintained, to regard
frames as merely referring to information that has previously been communicated to us by
way of language. Much of what we "know" about our own culture has never been made
explicit to us in words, and similarly, the visual "explanations" that accompany subtitles
are neither verbal nor do they precede the linguistic message. As polysemiotic
communication of one kind or another increasingly becomes the norm, translation theorists
will have to look beyond the printed or spoken word to the total context of a translated
message.
The question of whether a translated work should speak with its own voice or in the
accents of the target culture has sparked violently opposed theoretical positions. Venuti
and Nida represent the extremes of this debate, but strangely, the ideas of both these
theorists have proved useful to me as analytical and practical tools in the area of subtitling.
This is because both Nida and Venuti, in their very different ways, are both concerned with
the resolution of ambiguity, with which subtitles are replete: Nida by linking an ambiguous
utterance to the frames of the target culture, Venuti by allowing the ambiguity to remain a
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On Information, Culture and Translation
riddle that the target audience must themselves intuitively solve. In terms of my own
information model, Venuti's strategy, since it retains ambiguity, is that which has the
greatest potential to convey information about the source culture. However, there are
several caveats to be kept in mind here, as is illustrated by the information hierarchy I have
adopted in this case, which is a reasonably typical one for a subtitled work of fiction. The
need to communicate information about the source culture is rarely the first priority in a
subtitled work; consequently, I have utilised the foreignisation strategy only when some
degree of acquaintance with the source culture would be essential to an understanding of a
particular utterance, and, as far as possible, whenever the utterance reflected a signature
concept of the source culture. It must be emphasised, however, that foreignisation as a
strategy presupposes the existence of sufficient framic information to allow the target
audience to make an intuitive connection. Merely baffling the audience is not an end in
itself. In the case of obscure utterances of lesser cultural portent, Nida's dynamic
equivalence strategy is a more convenient one for subtitlers, and is often easier to
implement as an explicatory strategy in a medium where footnotes are impossible.
9. Conclusion of empirical section
At the beginning of this century, in the silent movie era, Denmark managed to achieve a
commanding international position in film production, with Danish stars like Asta Nielsen
becoming famous around the world. The talkies, of course, put an end to all that.
Hollywood's innovative talking movies tore down some barriers to communication but
erected new ones, creating a virtual cinematic Tower of Babel where before there had only
been the lingua franca of silent on-screen action, perhaps accompanied by a musical frame
to help communicate the affective information, and punctuated by the occasional caption.
In effect, the arrival of the talkies meant that from that moment on, the larger and more
economically powerful nations would do most of the talking. And that, broadly, has been
the direction of the cultural tide ever since.
Coming from a nation that has for all practical purposes lost its native tongue has made me
sensitive to questions of linguistic politics. I have some sympathy, therefore, for the point
of view of Maria Tymoczko when she argues that a strategy of foreignisation is
permissable and even desirable when translating from Gaelic to English, whereas the same
strategy in the opposite direction would amount to anglicisation, and thereby
contamination, of the Gaelic language. The fact is that it is impossible for any microculture
to "contaminate" the macroculture, since the macroculture does not feel itself to be under
any threat.
The man known in English as King Canute was a Danish king who ruled England as well
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101
as Denmark, and who once, famously, commanded the tide not to come in. Many of the
European cultural initiatives designed to protect the microcultures seem charged with a
similar optimism. If culture is that which becomes visible at its own boundaries, one could
argue that a nation has been colonised to the extent that it is aware of its own foreignness.
By that definition, most of the European nations are well on their way to becoming
colonies, at least in the cultural sense. A small amount of foreignisation in translation will
not turn back the tide, but it will, perhaps remind some members of the macroculture that
European nations do indeed retain a unique and vibrant culture of their own, with their own
characteristic traditions and modes of expression.
As communications technology continues to advance, there seems little doubt that the
coming century will see both the languages and the cultures of Europe coming under ever
more intense pressure from the macroculture. As a convinced materialist, however, I doubt
that much can be done about this unless and until the balance of economic power is
radically shifted. Until then, we who are in the happy position of interpreting the
microculture to the macroculture are like small children throwing stones into the sea. They
may not be very large stones, but if they are thrown with sufficient force, they do
occasionally create very satisfying ripples.
Billy O'Shea
Copenhagen, 14.01.00
On Information, Culture and Translation
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107
APPENDIX : Article by Jens Holsøe in "Politiken", 23 May 1999 [My translation]
Interpreters Must Be Interpreted
"They stand in long queues in the Stenkovec refugee camp, in front of tents and desks: Kosovo
Albanian refugees seeking evacuation. More than 52,000 have up till now been flown out to the
USA, Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Turkey, and many other countries.
The interesting thing is how the selection takes place. This is where the translators come in. For
journalists, diplomats, observers and international aid workers, too, the local translator is a crucial
factor. Is the translation correct, has the language been manipulated slightly or is the result a direct
lie? Anything is possible.
From many different sources, a picture is emerging of the individual lands' translators using
(almost) every means available to make sure their families, their friends and their acquaintances
come first in the queue for evacuation.
Prior to the initiation of the bombing campaign on 24 March, the international media and the
political decision-makers of the USA and Europe received their information concerning conditions
in Kosovo from the OSCE's observer corps and from KDOM, the Kosovo Diplomatic Observer
Mission. But they, too, were equipped with translators; some with Serbs, others with Albanians.
And the stories they brought home were completely different.
Recently, I was in the Macedonian town of Lojane, which is entirely populated by ethnic
Albanians. I had an Albanian interpeter with me, whom they trusted because he was of "good
family". The previous day, some Italian journalists had also been in town, but they had had
Macedonian translators, and so had been given the cold shoulder. No one wanted to talk to a
Macedonian. That's just how things are.
Mistakes creep into all translations. Albanians have problems translating numbers. Every time I
have a number translated, I ask the translator to write it down. If I don't, I can't be certain whether
it's 35, 350, 3,500 or 35,000. And that does make a difference.
A small army of international aid organisations has now moved into Macedonia. They are all
equipped with translators who are Macedonian citizens, registered with the Macedonian police. In
many situations, these translators can find themselves in a serious dilemma. How can they correctly
translate accounts of conditions that may present the government and the authorities in a bad light?
In Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia and Serbia, no one has to ask who you are. They ask who
your transator is. Then they know more or less where you stand.
For this reason, all printed or broadcast information coming out of Serbia and Kosovo at the
moment should be treated with a great deal of scepticism. Not only are journalists and other visitors
subject to Serbian censorship, but the official interpreters are also feeling the hot breath of the
secret police down their necks. An honest interpretation of an account of Serbian war crimes may
lead to arrest or to the harrassment of one's family.
Free speech under attack from all sides. Just getting a little of it into newspaper columns or the
ether is a very complicated process."
On Information, Culture and Translation
Index:
Adams, Douglas 21
Affective Information 13, 42-45, 100
Ambiguity 13, 15, 16-21, 24, 28-30, 37-39, 62-68, 73, 99
Bell, Roger T. 24, 52-57
Bohm, David: 7, 25ff
CB radio code: 12-13
Chomsky, Noam 19,24
Code 6-11, (definition) 12, translation of, 12-18, naive 25, 27, 29, 34 semantic 8, 21-25, 31, 49, 53, 56
lexical, 23-27, 34-44, 49, 56, 61-65, 74, 82ff, 99 pseudo-, 22-23, 32, 77, 94
Communications Science: 5-8, 11-14, 18
Compression, hierarchical 40-42, lateral 41-44
Cybernetics, 41-44
Cybernetic models 24-25, 52-57, 73, 79
Data, 8, 10-15, 18, 25, 53
Deconstructionism 79-80
Derrida, Jacques, 9
Disinformation 30-34,
Dynamic equivalence 33, 47, 57-66, 72, 74, 88, 91, 92, 96, 98 100
Enfoldment, of information 7, 40
Entropy 14
Evan-Zohar, Itamar 65, 69ff, 102
Explanations, types of 57-58
Factual statements, 40
Frames: 8 ff, 9-10, (definition of) 10, 20-21, 25-31, 34-39, 42-43, 62-63, 73, 77-78, 82, 86, 90, 98-99
Framic distance 77-78
Framic map, 36, 97
Holistic model 27-28
Information Science: 11-14, 18, 24
Information hierarchies 28, 31, 45, 57, 64, 66, 73-74, 81-83, 89-90, 93-94, 100
Insiders 4, 30, (definition) 36, 37, 39-42, 52, 61, 63, 78, 80, 82, 86
Language-as-event 18, 20,
Machine Translation 6, 15, 18-19, 25-26
Newmark, Peter 46-53
Nida, Eugene 57-65
Norms 39, 58, 65-71, 83, 88
Nørretranders, Tor: 15, 40, 44ff
Overheard communication 37, 78, 83
Phatic information 38-39, 43
Polysystem theory 65, 68
Pseudo-code, 22-23, 32, 77, 94
Redundancy 14-15, 28, 40-45, 60, 61
Sapir, Edward 61-63
Shannon, Claude E. 6, 11-17, 28, 54-61, 84
Signal, 8, 10-15, 39, 61
Signature concept 88-93, 95, 99-100
Spy, translator as, 36-38, 60, 78
Steiner, George 15, 30-31, 75-76
Structuralism 80-81
Text 7-11, 21-22, unit of (definition) 28,
Toury, Gideon 4, 23, 46, 64, 65-72, 90
Translation (definition) 8
Truth, in translation 83-84
Venuti, Lawrence 46, 59, 72-74, 87-88, 95-99
Whorf, Benjamin 46, 49, 74-79
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