Peter Newmark (1916-2011)
(Based in his Approaches to Translation, Pergamon Press, 1982)
“Translation is a craft consisting in the attempt to replace a written message and/or statement in one
language by the same message and/or statement in another language. Each exercise involves some
kind of loss of meaning, due to a number of factors. It provokes a continuous tension, a dialectic, and
argument based on the claims of each language. The basic loss in on a continuum between
overtranslation (increased detail) and undertranslation (increased generalization).” (p. 7)
Choice between:
Translating “communicatively” (“the same effect”)
or “semantically” (“the precise contextual meaning”) (p. 22)
“Communicative translation” – preferable where the message itself is what matters: notices,
instruction manuals, guidebooks, etc. Thus, “Nu calcați pe iarbă” should be translated as “Keep off
the grass” in English or “Pelouse interdite” in French. (Compare Nida’s “dynamic equivalence”.)
“Semantic translation” – preferable where the way the message is expressed is important: literary
translation. (Compare Nida’s “formal equivalence”.)
Reasons for loss of meaning:
1) “the text describes a situation which has elements peculiar to the natural environment,
institutions and culture of its language area”
– substitution can only be approximate:
a) using recognized translation equivalent – if it is likely to be known and/or acceptable to the reader
b) “transcribing the foreign word” – e.g. “directeur du cabinet” [borrowing]
c) “translating” (“head of the minister’s office”)
d) cultural equivalent (“Permanent Undersecretary of State”)
e) “naturalizing the word with a loan translation” (“director of the cabinet”) [calque]
f) adding/substituting a target-language suffix [compare Ro. “fotbalist]
g) defining/paraphrasing (“head of the Minister’s departmental staff”) – perhaps as a footnote to b)
Consider how you would translate:
“He currently holds the Government posts of Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice […]”
(https//[Link])
“După mai multe vizite pe la vornicie, la postelnicie, la agie, la casa poștei, alergături cari au dăinuit
vreo zece zile, […]”
(Ion Ghica, Scrisori către Vasile Alecsandri)
“Un bordei în care nu se găseau decât două bănci de lemn şi vatra cu ceaunul de mămăligă.” (Dinu
Pillat, Așteptând ceasul de apoi)
2) “the two languages […] in context have different lexical, grammatical and sound systems, and
segment many physical objects and virtually all intellectual concepts differently.”
Four “lexical scales”, on which words in different language rarely correspond precisely:
1 – “formality (from frozen to uninhibited)” [reference to Martin Joos’s stylistic scale for spoken
English: “frozen”, “formal” (one-way), “consultative” (two-way), “casual”, “intimate”]
2 – “feeling or affectivity (from overheated to deadpan)”
3 – “generality or abstraction” (from popular to opaquely technical)”
4 – “evaluation” subscales (pp. 7-8):
“morality (good to bad)”
“pleasure (nice to nasty)”
“intensity (strong to weak)”
“dimension (e.g. wide to narrow)”
[for example, on the “dimension” subscale, fluviu, râu, pârâu ... the first two difficult to distinguish in
English without inserting an adjective – e.g., for fluviu, “mighty river”, “wide river” (depending on
where you want it to be on the “intensity” subscale)]
Plus the scale of “frequency”:
“corresponding words, collocations, idioms, idioms, metaphors, proverbs, sayings, syntactic units and
word order must be equally frequent (in the appropriate style and register of the text) in the source
and the target language” (p. 8) – may over-ride the rule that “a translator should not translate an SL
item into a TL item which would normally and naturally have another equivalent in the SL” – e.g.
French perturbation might be translated by English violent disorder (which would normally be a
translation of désordre violent), because English perturbation is more unusual (p. 129)
3) different personal styles of the writer and the translator – the translator habitually respects
conventional canons that the writer departs from (p. 8)
4) “different theories of meaning and different values” of the writer and the translator – the
translator may value connotation and denotation differently from the writer, may look for
unintended symbolism, alternative meanings, different emphasis… (p. 8)