Literary & creative
interpretation
{
a new facet in Interpreting Studies?
A presentation by Marc Orlando (Monash University)
AALITRA, Melbourne, 10 March 2015
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The Andrei Makine case…
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Taxonomy of Interpreting:
Conference Interpreting (international meetings)
Liaison Interpreting (delegations, politicians, artists,
businessmen...)
Court Interpreting
Community Interpreting (healthcare, education, banking, legal
services...)
Media Interpreting (TV, press conferences…)
= a diversity of communicative situations, as well as of
modalities and environments
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Is it relevant to compartiment situations in predictable
drawers, or should interpreting be seen as “a sociocommunicative practice [and] a unified concept”(Pöchhacker,
2002) ?
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Taxonomy of Translation
Legal, business, medical translation
Media translation
Literary translation (a broad sense)
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Can we speak of
“literary interpreting” / “literary interpretations”?
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Would it be a different exercise?
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Would the interpreter of such ‘texts’ be expected to master
specific literary skills?
Orlando (2010), Interpreting Eloquence: When words matter as
much as ideas
The Art of Translation
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“Literary translators have to have a broad palette of literary skills as they
have to adapt their linguistic skills to the work of others”
(Furlan, 2007)
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Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the
means that allows us access to literature originally written in one
of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a
concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and
make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we
may not have had a connection before.
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Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle,
to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar.
As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that
kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.
Grossman (2010)
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Translation is no longer considered as a mere linguistic activity
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Translation is the transfer into another reality of a text and its voice, its
style, its function, its effects, etc.
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For each translation, fidelity to the ST and the author’s intentions is
unquestionable, but a certain level of intervention always exists along a
chosen strategy
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It bridges gaps between different cultures and can be seen as a form of
mediation facilitating the global exchange of cultural production.
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A translation is “a world of alternatives” (Langton, 2008)
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It is rarely a mere transfer with a single function, and the translator is
not only a neutral ‘mediating tool’: the translator as agent
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If done under reasonable conditions and with the support of the author,
a translation tends to ‘improve’ the source text
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A translation is “a limit, a threshold which generates a new
meaning”, compatible with the target cultural reality.
(Derrida, 2001)
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Derrida called this limit “the bar of translation”, a bar
functioning both as a barrier and a threshold, “at once
blocking and generating meaning, taking away from and adding
to the original text”.
This notion tends to present translation as an act of
communication where meaning is always lost and
generated.
= the product of the translational process is a new text,
independent and unique in its potential multiplicity.
Translation is an act of re-creation…
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The Translator’s role(s)
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A bilingual expert: a linguistic duty
A (bi)cultural expert: a sound knowledge of the cultures involved
A creative writer: “Translation is a craft which requires art and an art which
requires craft”. Literary translators have to have a broad palette of literary
skills as they have to adapt their linguistic skills to the work of others”
(Furlan)
A insightful reader: “Translation is the most intimate act of reading”
(Spivak)
A knowledgeable linguist: a varied background in-depth knowledge
An efficient and skilled investigator: an ability to efficiently acquire
ad-hoc information
A practisearcher : a sound knowledge of Translation Studies as a field
of research
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A translation must be as literal as possible but as free as necessary
The Art of Interpretation
Interpreting
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a form of translational activity in which the sourcelanguage text is presented only once and thus cannot
be reviewed or replayed,
the target text is produced under time pressure, with
limited opportunity for correction and revision
(Kade, 1968)
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Aural & analysis skills (DA)
Good memory capacity
Note-taking skills
“Deverbalisation” skills (ideas matter)
Oral production skills (registers), paraphrasing,
summarizing)
Public speaking/acting skills
Multi-tasking / Stress management skills
Research skills
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The Interpretive chain
A consensus seems to exist among researchers on what the
interpretive chain is :
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perception of the message;
comprehension of the speech/text (identification of words,
meaning of the words in the sentence, and then sense in the
context);
Deverbalization : the “immediate and deliberate discarding
of the wording and retention of the mental representation of
the message” (Seleskovitch, 1975); words and sentences that
gave birth to sense are forgotten, while sense remains
present without any linguistic support
reformulation (creation);
rephrasing/re expression (free and natural).
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An interpretation/translation is not a linguistic translation
but rather a search for a sense equivalence in the target
language.
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The deverbalisation of the speech is the phase when the
interpreter forgets the form to get access to the intended
sense, thanks to various cognitive complements.
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Words > Meaning > Sense
But, is the interpretive act - the quest for sense – always a
relevant concept in the act of interpreting ?
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Different roles of the interpreter / different
perceptions, in different communicative situations
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Different types of speeches to be interpreted
What is an interpreter?
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A tap: ‘a language converter’
A conduit: ‘an invisible message converter’
A communication facilitator: ‘a message clarifier’
A cultural mediator: ‘a cultural clarifier’ “people who speak
different languages live in different worlds, not the same world with
different labels” (Sapir, 1928)
An advocate
A servant
A service provider (admin help, escort, guide…)
Text types / speeches types
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Three forms of speeches exist:
Descriptive, dialectic, affective
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Three forms of interpretations:
An explanation (the content prevails),
An argumentation (both content and form matter),
An eloquence exercise (form is essential)
Translation and deverbalisation?
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It is more difficult for the translator as the ST does not disappear,
and therefore the graphic signs remain and call for proper linguistic
correspondences in the TL, short-circuiting the search for
appropriate equivalences of sense.
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Even if deverbalisation requires an effort on the part of the
translator, it is present in the translator’s awareness of what an
author means in a given passage
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“In the first part of the year (1880), Freud was able to cope with the
boredom (of military service) by devoting himself to translating a book
by John Stuart Mill, the first of five large books he translated. It was a
congenial work, since he was specially gifted as a translator. Instead of
laboriously transcribing from the foreign language, idioms and
all, he would read a passage, close the book and consider how a
German writer would have clothed the same thoughts ― a
method not very common among translators. His translating work was
both brilliant and rapid.”
(Choi, 2004)
“The literature of the past 30 years seems to reflect a consensus, at
least on translation of informational texts (as opposed to literary
texts), in favor of a meaning and intention-oriented translation
strategy, as opposed to a strategy based on formal equivalence: it is
felt that translation suffers when it is constructed on linguistic
correspondences, and serves its purpose better when the form of the
source text is used to understand it and is then honorably discharged
while the reformulation process proceeds on the basis of an
autonomous mental representation of its meaning (informational,
emotional, social, intentional, etc.).”
(Gile, 2003)
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Can we speak of
“literary interpreting” / “literary interpretations”?
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Interpreting for Andrei Makine at the 2007 Auckland
Writers Festival
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Others’ views
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I’ve been working as an interpreter for literature, theater and the arts
for many years. I love the challenge and - since I have met many
writers and filmmakers, photographers and painters in my career – the
diversity of interpreting modes (or variations, including the
psychological versality) you’re required to adopt in this particular
setting. And it’s almost always consec, as you point out.
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Some writers are eloquent, some are shy, some are vain, some are
modest, some are drunk (yes, it happens, and it does not enhance
their intelligibility), some hosts know how to ask questions, some
don’t seem to know what they want to know.
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Sometimes the audience loves you (the interpreter) too, sometimes the
artist/writer does not want the audience to love anybody except the
artist/writer, yet they depend on you (the interpreter) to get the
message accross …
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Peter Mead (2012), ‘Consecutive Interpreting at a Literature
Festival’
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Interpreting in such settings can by no means be readily identified
with Orlando’s description of “literary interpreting”, [even if this
description] can be appreciated as a contribution to the growing
awareness of working modalities and environments which do not fall
neatly into the conventional categories of interpreting.
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‘even if comments focusing on features of literary language do not
occur very often in my experience of interpreting for authors,
metalinguistic comment is quite frequent. […] This obviously does
require the level of attention to words and nuances of which Marc
Orlando speaks’
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…my perception is that the “literary interpreting” genre is on the
increase
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A few examples…