Esenciales: Holmes Borges Rabassa

TEXTO 24: HOLMES, JAMES: “REBUILDING THE BRIDGE AT

BOMMEL: NOTES ON THE LIMITS OF TRANSLATABILITY”

TRANSLATION OF POETRY

Is poetry translatable?: Two stances

 Yes: every text, hence all poetry, can be transferred from one language to another
without substantial loss.
 No: no text in one language is ever completely equivalent to any text in another
language, that all translation is impossible.

In translation as in politics, most people take their stance in between the two extremes,
believing that translation of poetry is sometimes possible, sometimes impossible.

The serious attempts to define the specific problems of verse translation, and the specific limits
imposing themselves, are all too few. Yet this is a much more fruitful filed for discussion and
research.

THREE BACKGROUNDS OF POETRY

Problems with the translation of poetry at three levels reflective of the three backgrounds
against which the original poem, and any poem, manifests itself:
 Linguistic context: the poet draws upon a part of the expressive means of the
specific language he is using, in order to communicate something, and the words of
the poem take on significance for the reader only when interpreted within that
context.
 Literary intertext: a poem is written in interaction with a whole body of poetry existing
within a given literary tradition, and the rhythm, meter, rhyme and assonances of the
poem but also its imagery, themes and topoi are intimately linked with those in that
whole array of other texts.
 Socio-cultural situation: the poem exists within a socio-cultural situation in which
objects, symbols, and abstract concepts function in a way that is never exactly
the same in any other society or culture.

The basic problem is that the translator of a poem must somehow “shift” the original poem not
only to another linguistic context but almost without exception to another literary intertext and
socio-cultural situation.

THE TWO AXIS SURROUNDING THE THREE BACKGROUNDS

On each of these three planes, the choices confronting him range primarily on the axis
“exoticizing” versus “naturalizing”. Should he retain a specific element of the original
linguistic context, the literary intertext or the socio-cultural situation, knowing that in the new
context, intertext and situation that element will acquire an exotic aspect not attached to it in its
native habitat.

The choices of this kind may be complicated by series of choices on another axis, that of
“historicizing” versus “modernizing”; for example, should the translator reflect the time of
the original poem in his translation? Each translator of poetry then works continuously in various
dimensions, making choices on each of three planes, the linguistic, the literary and the socio-
cultural, and on the axis of exoticizing versus naturalizing and the axis of historicizing versus
modernizing.

What kind of choices do translators actually make? Theorists have often argued that choices
should be all of a piece:
 All exoticizing and historicizing: with an emphasis on retention. Convey the same
thoughts with the same graces and who translates changes nothing but the language.
 All naturalizing and modernizing: with an emphasis on re-creation. “Making it new” by
means of “creative translation”.

But actually, such “pure culture” translations are rarely if ever actually made. In practice,
translators perform a series of pragmatic choices, here retentive, there re-creative.

Among contemporary translators, there would seem to be a marked tendency towards

modernization and naturalization of the linguistic context, paired with a similar tendency
regarding the literary intertext, but an opposing tendency towards historicizing and
exoticizing in the socio-cultural situation. The nineteenth century was much more inclined
towards exoticizing and historicizing on all planes; the eighteenth, by and large, to modernizing
and naturalizing even on the socio-cultural plane.

THE TRANSLATOR’S GOAL

The translator’s goal, then, is a dual one: producing a text which is a translation of the
original poem but that is at the same time a poem in its own right within the target
language. Translation, like many other goal-oriented activities, lends itself to consideration in
the light of the theory of games. The translator plays the game of producing an acceptable
translation. The two basic rules of the game of verse translation are that the final result:
 Must match the original to a large enough degree that it will be considered a
translation
 Must be of such a nature that it will be considered a poem

The poetic criterion entails a demand of unity or homogeneity: a poem can be defined as a
coherent text whole. Yet, the fact of translation entails a basic dichotomy between SL and
TL, literatures and cultures. To harmonize the demand of unity and the fact of dichotomy, the
translator must resort to a game strategy of illusionism: accepting the dichotomy as
inevitable, he must map out a general strategy of selecting from his retentive and re-
creative possibilities those which will induce the illusion of unity.

Rather than coming to a definition of the limits of translatability such that we can say “all
translation can attain this and no more” we have arrived at a polyvalent situation: the verse
translator, by virtue of the choices he is required to make in his pursuit of the illusion of unity,
presents one possible interpretation of the original poem, re-emphasizing certain
aspects at the cost of others. For this reason, there will always be need of more than one
translation of any poem of importance, since several translations present more facets of the
original than anyone can do.
TEXTO 25: HOLMES, JAMES: “ON MATCHING AND MAKING
MAPS: FROM A TRANSLATOR'S NOTEBOOK”

EQUIVALENCE

No translation of a poem is ever the same as the poem itself. Nor is a translation of a poem
really equivalent to its original.

Equivalence is asking too much. The languages and cultures to be bridged, however close
they may sometimes seem, are too far apart and too disparately structured for true equivalence
to be possible. What the translator strives for is finding “counterparts” or “matchings” –
words, turns of phrase, and the rest, fulfilling functions in the language of the translation
and the culture of its reader that in many and appropriate ways are closely similar to those of
the words etc. in the language and culture of the original and its reader.

LEVELS IN WHICH THE TRANSLATOR HAS TO CHOOSE

In seeking “counterparts” or “matchings” the translator is constantly faced by choices, choices

he can make only on the basis of his individual grasp of the two languages and cultures
involved, and with the aid of his personal tastes and preferences. It seems that there are two
major levels where choices are made:
 Macrostructural level: This is the level of the poem as an entity. The translator finds
that in selecting a specific counterpart for one aspect of the original poem he may
have made it impossible to find a satisfactory counterpart for another aspect (e.g.
choosing a metrical pattern; if he’s working from a more compact language to one that
is less so, the result may be padding in the translation; if the other way round, he may
have to omit what amounts to essential details; etc.)
A poem that leans very close to prose, with no strict meter, no complex developments
of imagery, no highly connotative use of language at various levels, may present few
problems, and the translator will perhaps feel confident that he has succeeded in finding
satisfactory matchings for every major aspect of the poem. But if the original is a highly
complex structure exploiting a wide variety of possibilities in regard to meter, music,
imagery, and idiom, together with a richness in ambiguities and tonalities, the translator
can hardly avoid concluding that somewhere something has to yield.

 Microstructural level: the level of words or group of words. More study has been
made of the translator’s choices at the other major level that of the individual word or
group of words. These lower-level choices are so largely circumscribed by the
macrostructural that they are really secondary. Faced with the choice between a
word that appears to be an ideal match for the word in the original, but that has a
syllable too many or an accent in the wrong place for the meter and a word that is less
appropriate in its meaning, overtones, or music, but that meets the metrical
requirements, the translator who has decided to give priority to those requirements has
to make do with the second word. The choice that forces itself upon a translator may fall
so far short of the ideal that he decides to reshuffle his priorities completely and render
the poem in quite a different way. Or for that matter, give up entirely.

No matter how hard he may try, not even the optimum translation can ever fully and
entirely match its original, ever be more than a map of it. The territory remains, though it
must not remain terra incognita.

TEXTO 26: HOLMES, JAMES: “DESCRIBING LITERARY

TRANSLATIONS: MODELS AND METHODS”

TRANSLATION STUDIES OVER TIME

No one with an interest in translation studies can fail to be struck by the fact that a slight amount
was spent on the examination of translations. For all their prime importance in the history of
European literature, translations have been ignored as bastards beneath the recognition of
truly serious literary scholars.

Over the past century there have been hundreds of scholars who have moved out into literary
studies producing monographs that attempted to describe the relations between a literary
text or set of texts and its or their translation or translations. But a great number of studies
have been normative and naïve in their methodology.

Process-oriented study of translating over product-oriented study (the former gives rise to
the later)

Therefore, all too frequently one closes a study of this kind with the feeling that its author,
engrossed in his texts, failed to take time out to consider just what the process is that
manifested itself between the existing original text and the new text produced by the translator.
True, it is very useful to make a distinction between the product-oriented study of
translations and the process-oriented study of translating, but this distinction cannot give
the scholar leave to ignore the self-evident fact that the one is the result of the other, and that
the nature of the product cannot be understood without a comprehension of the nature
of the process.

During the past quarter century, scholars have also devoted a great deal of thinking, if not of
research, to the translation process as such. Yet the results of their thinking would seem to
be simplistic and naïve.

My point is that if the emerging generation of scholars working with translations is to avoid the
errors of their intellectual forebears, they must develop an adequate model of the translation
process before they can hope to develop relevant methods for the description of
translation products.

THE TEXT AND ITS TRANSLATION

Two planes: serial and structural

The earlier explicit, more or less formalized models of the translation process were designed in
the late 40s and early 50s as bases for programs of research into automatic translation.
These models started from the notion that texts were strings of words which could be
translated item by item. Later this basically lexical-rank model was replaced by a sentence-
rank model, in which a source-language passage was converted into a receptor-language
passage via a tripartite process of analysis, transfer and restructuring.

The shift from lexical-rank to sentence-rank was a significant step towards sophistication, but
the basic premise remained that a text is a string of units, essentially serial in nature.
However, texts are both serial and structural. On these grounds, it has been suggested that
the translation of texts takes place on two planes:
 Serial plane: one translates sentence by sentence.
 Structural plane: on which one abstracts a “mental conception” of the ST (map),
then uses that mental conception as a kind of general criterion against which to test
each sentence during the formulation of the new, translate text.

Such a two-plane model seem to come much closer than the earlier serial models to describing
the translation process as it takes place in the translator’s study.

However, I would question if one such map or mental conception is sufficient to model the
actual translation process adequately.

Two maps/conceptions

The translator, after reading the poem to be translated, abstracts a map from the original poem.
But he has a set of options to select from, and so, on the basis of these selections, he in fact
develops a second map, in various ways like the first, but in other quite different. It is this
second map (NOT the first) which he uses as his criterion to guide him in carrying out his
translation on the serial plane. If this really approximates the way in which the translator works,
then we arrive at a two-plane, two-map mode.

Three sets of rules

This model also includes three sets of rules by which the specific phases of the translation
process are carried out:
 Derivation rules: determines the way in which the translator abstracts his map of the
ST from the text itself. (Reader)
 Correspondence rules/matching rules/equivalence rules (different variants of the
name): determines the way in which he develops his TT map from his ST map.
(Translation)
 Projection rules: determines the way in which he makes use of his map of the
prospective TT in order to formulate the text. (Writer)

The first of the three phases the translator shares with every reader of literary texts, the third
with every writer; the second, however, that of developing a TT map from his ST map by means
of correspondence rules, is uniquely a translational operation.

Information in the ST map

It should be realized that the map of the ST will be a conglomerate of highly disparate bits of
information:
 Contextual information: as a map of a linguistic artefact, it will contain information at a
variety of ranks, regarding features of the text in its relation to the linguistic continuum
within which it is formulated.
 Intertextual information: as a map of a literary artefact, it will contain information, at a
variety of ranks, regarding features of the text in its relation to the literary continuum
within which it is formulated.
 Situation information: as a map of a socio-cultural artefact, it will contain information,
at a variety of ranks, regarding features of the text in its relation to the socio-cultural
continuum within which it is formulated.

In the case of all three types of information, and at the various ranks within each type, the
translator is confronted by two dilemmas:
  For each feature in his ST map, at least two kinds of corresponding TT map features
will usually be available. There will frequently be a feature that corresponds in form
and not in function (homologue), or in function but not in form (analogue). There
may also be a feature that corresponds in meaning but in neither functions nor form.
 Regarding these correspondences, the experienced translator will have discovered that
there is a certain interdependence among correspondences: the choice of a specific
kind of correspondence in connection with one feature of the ST map determines the
kind of correspondence available for another or others. The translator, then, establishes
a hierarchy of correspondences (e.g.: he may give priority to homological
correspondence and, as a result of this choice, be compelled to reduce his
correspondence requirements in regard to the semantic content of the poem).

In the case of many less complex text types, solutions to this problem of correspondence
hierarchy are clear. The translator of an informative text will tend to give full priority to semantic
correspondence and will retain other correspondences only when they do not interfere with that
priority. The literary text, however, is a much more complex entity, which may at various points
be informative, vocative, expressive or for that meta-lingual or meta-literary. This makes the
establishment of a hierarchy of correspondence priorities a much less clear-cut problem, and
various translators will choose various solutions, none of which is demonstrably “right” or
“wrong”.

THE TRANSLATOR’S POETICS :

The scholar must attempt to determine the features of the translator’s two maps and to discover
his three systems of rules, those of derivation, projection and correspondence; in other words,
the translator’s poetics.

That is much more easily said than done. Many translators are less than eloquent in speaking or
writing about their craft, and in any regard, there is often a marked discrepancy between the
explicit poetics a translator avows to subscribe to and the implicit often subconscious
poetics he adheres to in actual practice. There may be some pointers towards a poetics to
be found in the translator’s prefaces, commentaries, notes, etc. And the limits within which an
individual poetics moves in a given literature in a given period can be demarcated grosso modo
by a study of the translation theory of that literature in that period.

How does the translation’s analyst act? In most cases, however, the analyst is left with little
or no material beyond the two (or more) texts: the ST and its translations. It is from these alone
that he must attempt to derive his description. The analyst will have to approach this problem in
a different way from that of the translator.

The translator derives a map of the ST from the text itself, next applies a set of
correspondence rules to develop a TT map from the ST map, and finally uses this second
map as a guide while formulating his TT.

The analyst, on the other hand, starting from the two texts, will at first apply a set of derivation
rules to each text in turn, in order to obtain maps of both texts. His next step will be to
compare the two maps in order to determine the network of correspondences between
their various features. This will then be followed by a third step in which he derives a set of
correspondence rules and a correspondence hierarchy from the network of
correspondences.

Only in one phase of these steps does the work of the analyst parallel that of the translator: in
the operation of deriving the ST map from the text.
One complication is that there is little or no tangible evidence of what has taken place in the
translator’s mind except the text he has produced as compared to the ST, the scholar
attempting to trace the relationship of the two texts likewise in most cases has no material
except those two texts from which to derive his conclusions. There is great danger that the
results of his analysis will be highly subjective and so of little value to other scholars.

There would seem to be a choice for the analyst between two working methods:
 The analyst upon studying the two texts, will derive from them a list of distinctive
features which strike him as significant and deserving of comparative analysis.
He will also determine a hierarchical ordering of the features. The analyst will have to
bring with him a detailed knowledge of linguistic, literary, and socio-cultural theory such
that he can identify contextual, intertextual and socio-cultural elements in the texts in a
manner acceptable to other scholars, and this must likewise be assumed and will
provide at least a modicum of intersubjectivity to his application of linguistic, literary and
socio-cultural research methods. But the fact remains that no discipline has given us
a generally accepted intersubjective method for determining distinctive features
in a concrete text so that their selection remains an ad hoc operation. The result
will be that the maps of the two texts derived by the analyst, like the translator’s
two maps, will be incomplete: the analyst may very likely discover blank spaces in the
translator’s maps, but overlook the blank spaces in his own.
 Repertory method: A second working method circumvent the problem of ad hoc
selection of distinctive features by determining beforehand a required repertory of
features always to be analysed, regardless of what specific text is involved . This
method has one major drawback: if its results are to lead to a map that is generally
acceptable as within reach of completeness, the repertory would have to be quite
extensive, and the task of providing full details on the texts would be one that is
arduous and tedious to the researcher and largely uninteresting to the reader.

However, the repertory method would assure a higher degree of intersubjectivity to the results
of the analysis based on it –provided that scholars in the field could reach agreement as to what
elements should be included in such a repertory. The task of working on such a repertory would
be enormous. But if scholars were to arrive at a consensus regarding it, it would then become
possible to provide descriptions of original and translated texts, of their respective maps, and of
correspondence networks, rules, and hierarchies that would be mutually comparable.

Holmes By Rodri

HOLMES

TRANSLATION OF POETRY

He states that problems in translation of poetry can be grouped in three levels, related to 3
backgrounds in which the original text manifests itself:

1. LINGUISTIC CONTEXT: the poet makes use of part of the expressive means of
a specific language in order to communicate something, and the words of the
poem take significance for the reader only when they are interpreted in that
context.
2. LITERARY INTERTEX: a poem is written in interaction with a whole body of
poetry, in relation with other texts, so the rhyme, rhythm, assonance as well as
the themes and topics of the poem will we related to those in that array of text.
 3. SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXTS: has to do with the society and the culture in
which the poem is written where the symbols, objects and concepts will never
be exactly the same in any other society or culture.
So, when translating the translator has to make some choices between exocitizing versus
naturalizing, and between historicizing or modernizing. Theorists have always argued that
choices should be all of a piec: all exocitizing and historicizing, with an emphasis on retention,
or all naturalizing and modernizing with an emphasis on re-creation. Holmes sees recreation
and retention as two extremes. He says that translators, in practice, perform a series of
pragmatic choices, here retentive, there recreative, at times historicizing, other times
modernizing, etc. There are some generalizations that can be made: translators will tend to
choose naturalizing and modernizing in the linguistic context and the literary intertex; but they
will tend to choose exocitizing and historicizing in the sociocultural context.

Holmes states that no translation of a poem is ever the same as the original because everything
is different: the tradition, the language, the readers and the author.

He says that translation consists of finding counterparts, matchings and then to fulfill functions in
the language and culture of the translation that are similar to the language and culture of the
original. In seeking counterparts, the translator is faced with choices, and in order to make those
choices he/ she uses his personal experience and knowledge and also his/ her personal tastes
and preferences. There are 2 levels where choices are made: at the macrostructure (the level of
the poem as an entity) and at the microstructure (the level of secondary choices, related to the
translator’s preferences).

He also says that translations are maps and the original texts are the territories, and as there is
no map of a territory which is suitable for every purpose, so there is no definite translation of a
poem. What we need is a variety of less-than-definitive versions for a variety of purposes.

MODELS

1. Sentence-rank model in the 40s, where translators translated item by item.

2. Lexical-rank model: replaced the sentence rank model and translators translated
passage by passage.
3. Nowadays: translation occurs in 2 levels: the serial level (sentence by sentences
translation) and a structural level (where the translator abstracts his map of original text
and uses it as a criterion for testing the sentence by sentence translation).

Holmes introduces 3 sets of rules:

a. Derivation rules: determine the way in which the translation abstracts his source
text map from the text itself.
b. Correspondence rules: determine the way in which the translation uses the ST map
to derive the TT map. (this is a specific translational operation)
c. Projection rules: determine the way in which the translation uses that map to
formulate the text.
The translator establishes a hierarchy of correspondences since a text or a portion of a text may
involve different choices regarding the target audience and its function.

When the translator seeks correspondences to design his target text map, he is faced with 2
dilemmas:

1. For each feature in the ST map, there are at least 2 features of the TT map available.
There may be 3 situations: one that corresponds to the form, but not with the function;
one that corresponds to the function but not with the form; and one that corresponds to
the meaning, but not with the form and function.
2. The interdependence of correspondences: the choice of correspondences in connection
to each feature in the ST map. In this case the translator has to make a hierarchy of
correspondences. If it’s an informative text, he will give priority to the semantic
 correspondence; if it’s a vocative text, he will give priority to the correspondence of
appeal, and if it’s a literary text, to the poetics, aesthetics, etc.
The difference between a translator and an analyst is in the process they make.

- A translator derives a map of the ST from the text itself, then he applies a set of
correspondences to derive the TT map, and he uses this second map as a guide to
formulate the target text.
- An analyst first derives the 2 maps from the 2 texts, then he compares the maps to
determine the network of correspondences and finally he makes a hierarchy of
correspondences.
2 kinds of analysts:

- The descriptive scholar who chooses a list of features that deserve comparative
analysis. As a consequence, the repertory will be incomplete.
- An ad hoc selection of the features that are always analyzed, no matter the type of text.
In this case the repertory will be complete, but too long and complex.

-Relacionar a Borges con los problemas de la traducción.

-Analizar los problemas de traducción en relación con "The Search of Averroes", "Pierre
Menard", o "Arabian Nights".

-Analyse the relationship between Borges’s essay on the translation of the “Arabian Nights”
and the general issues on translation.

-Give an account of Borges’s view about (mis)translation and periphery.

-Borges en su rol como traductor teniendo en cuenta la dicotomía periferia-metrópolis.

What are the most relevant implications of Shakespeare´s Caliban´s allegory and Borges´s
irreverent displacement towards a Latin American margin for a reevaluation of power
differentials?

WAISMAN (BORGES)
Borges does not explicitly state his theory on translation, but we can see it in his many writings
on the topic.

He challenges the traditional conceptions of translation by reformulating the relation between

the source and target texts and cultures, and by stating that there are no definite texts, only
versions or drafts, so there is no reason to believe that the translation is inferior to the original.

He states this from a South American margin, so he also challenges the center-periphery
dichotomy.

The development of Borges’s theories is interconnected with his fiction, so we can say that the
processes of translating, writing and reading are interchangeable.

For him difference and multiplicity is not a disaster, but a field for potentiality.

He states that literature is always translatable, because literature is translation

LAS DOS MANERAS DE TRADUCIR

In this essay, Borges indicates a very important aspect of all texts (translations
and originals): that they will have different values for different readers, even with
readers that speak the same language. For example, “El cuervo” by Edgar Allan
Poe does not mean the same for American readers than for Argentinian
readers, the same happens with texts read in Chile and in Argentina, although
it’s the same language. So, Borges alludes to the temporal and spatial
displacement that exist between the time and place a text is written and the time
and place a text is read. With this line of thought, he comes to the discussion of
how the meaning and interpretation of words change, even within the same
language, from country to country, from generation to generation and from
readers to readers.
He also states that there are 2 ways of translating: literalness or paraphrase.
The former has to with the Romantic mentality and the latter with the Classicist
mentality. Romantics consider the artist important, every one of the artist’s
words is essential, so they translate them literally. On the other hand,
classicists’ main concern is in the work of art, not in the artist, so they seek
perfection in translation. Borges’s tone suggests his preference for Classicism
and his condemnation for Romanticism, since he states that a literal translation
can never be faithful to the original.

LAS VERSIONES HOMERICAS

Borges states that to talk about translation is to talk about aesthetics, and that
there is no better way to enter into literature and its mysteries than the study of
translation. When he talks about aesthetics through translation, he is talking
about the aesthetics of his writings, and the central role translation plays on
them.
The most important concept in this essay is the concept of mobility of the
original. He considers that the original is a movable event, not a fixed and stable
text. And this mobility is inherent in all texts. By stating this, Borges challenges
the traditional translation theories which have always privileged the original over
the translation and have always considered the translation as inferior to the
original text. Borges says that there is no definite text, because all texts
(originals and translations) are drafts, they are versions of previous texts, re
readings of other texts. It is not the case that the translation is superior to the
original, but it is as legitimate as the original.
Borges suggests that literature is a series of multiply reflected versions. Every
text is a rereading of a previous one, constituted in a network of allusions,
reference and citation; so literature is an infinite system of intertextualities. By
saying this, Borges avoids the traditional practice of listing what is lost in the
translation.
LOS TRADUCTORES DE LAS MIL Y UNA NOCHES
In this writing, Borges demonstrates the importance of the displacement that
occurs when one goes from the original to the translation, and how these
displacements are the potential for new and unexpected meanings. He also
develops his theory of mistranslation.
First, he mentions Burton, one of the translators of The Nights. Borges claims
that Burton’s translation is so special because it achieves an effect of
hyperfidelity by executing a series of creative infidelities. The key lies in a
certain irreverence toward the original and the potential created by the temporal
and spatial displacements between the original and the translation, between
one version and the next. These falsifications result from Burton’s intention of
getting nineteenth-century audiences to like thirteen-century Arabian stories;
such falsifications are what Borges values the most, since he says that the merit
of the translation resides in its infidelities. This is why he values mistranslations.
Burton becomes the best translator/recreator for Borges because he rewrites
the original in order to recreate a version that is capable of displacing it.
Then, he mentions Mandrus, another translator of The Nights, who, as Burton,
also makes countless changes, omissions and additions. He states that the
greatness in Mandrus’s translation is in its creative infidelities that lead him to
his transmutative translation.
By postulating that it’s mistranslation –the infidelities and not the degree of
fidelity— that leads merit to the translation, Borges inverts the relation between
value and fidelity and frees himself from the constraints of the traditional
translation.
Borges’s valorization of Mandrus and Burton’s infidelities confirms his idea that
translation is more than possible and that it’s site for potentiality and gain.
Finally, he mentions Littman, another translator who is too honest and literal,
and does not make any changes or additions, and who does not take any from
the literary tradition to which he had access when he was translating the text.
Borges says that to fully realize the infidelities the translator has to take as
much as necessary from the tradition, if the translation does not undertake this
process, then the translation is unsatisfactory.

PIERRE MENARD
This is Borges’s most important writing on the topic of translation. Here he deals
with Pierre Menard and his efforts to translate Cervantes’s Don Quixote word
for word. The success of Menard’s work lies in his incompleteness and
recontextualization. This incompleteness shows that there is never a perfect
translation, either in the same language or from one language to the other.
Moreover, Menard shows an irreverent attitude, since he does not follow the
literary traditions. Borges has the same attitude, since he does not consider that
translation is what Jakobson called “interlingual translation”, translation for him
is a deep rewriting, which involves recontextualization and a collaboration of
previous texts which are available for new readers in new contexts.
In this essay, Borges also emphasizes again on the idea that there is no definite
text, that all his fictions are He shows this with the metaphor of the hall of
mirrors: the effect is of a hall of mirrors, of refractions represented in
mistranslation, in which what one repeatedly encounters is otherness.
He also states that the same text, the same utterance can never have the same
meaning twice. Texts accumulate meaning through changes and shifts in time
and space, and with each displacement they expand their potentiality.
Finally, he states that although Pierre Menard’s translation is incomplete and
“unfaithful” to the original, it can be of interest to certain readers, so he states
that the merit of the translation resides on its infidelities, its displacement with
the original text.

LA BÚSQUEDA DE AVERROES
This text contains interesting insights into linguistic and cultural difference and
its potential for writers in the periphery. It forces us to consider the unbridgeable
differences between cultures, languages, religions and historic periods. In the
story, Averroes fails to translate the words “tragedy” and “comedy” into Arabic.
The irony of the story is that Averroes actually encounters several examples of
these concepts, but does not recognize them as the solution he seeks.
In this text Borges does not consider difference and otherness as problematic,
but as rich in potential. Averroes’s failed search shows us that there are
fundamental differences between cultures and languages that are too large to
overcome. So Borges’s text underlines the definitive role of the cultural and
historical contexts in producing and determining meaning: “tragedy” and
“comedy” are not impossible to translate, but the understanding of such
concepts is culturally conditioned.
The reader is considered a protagonist in the construction of meaning, but
meaning is culturally and linguistically determined. What is important is not the
meaning inherent in the text but the search of meaning. The potential lies in the
processes of rereading, rewriting and mistranslating. Translation for Borges
forces us to confront differences, but such difference or multiplicity is not a
disaster for him, it’s a field of potentiality.
EL ESCRITOR ARGENTINO Y LA TRADICION (CENTER AND PERIPHERY)
This essay is a road map for the Argentinian writers to position themselves with
respect to the occidental canons without being restricted or defined by them.
The key is to take a stance of irreverence towards the traditions of the center.
Borges claims marginality as a privileged site for innovation, since the margins
provide writers a great opportunity to innovate, as they are not bound to the
canons of the center. This occurs because South American writers are at once
a part of the center and apart from the center, so they have much freedom and
mobility.
This essay is also a critical response to 3 ideas:
That Argentinian tradition is a continuation of the Spanish tradition.
That Argentina is not connected to the European heritage, and as it is a
young and primitive site it should not treat with European themes.
That Argentinian tradition should abound in local colour and should
exclusively deal with local themes.
Irreverence puts in motion the displacement that is so important for Borges. The
irreverence can be accomplished through different techniques: blurring the lines
between genres, languages and culture, fragmentation, recontextualization and
appropriation. The practice of writing as translation becomes a privileged
method by which peripheral writers can originate their own literatures and
challenge those of the center.
Borges finds himself in a privilege position, where he can innovate, an
innovation that challenges the center-periphery dichotomies and which
transforms periphery sites and minor sites into site of potentiality. To theorize
translation is to theorize one’s (and others) relationship with language. This
activity differs for writers in the center and in the periphery. The difference
between center and peripheries can be better understood if we consider the role
of displacement in translation.
Every translated text becomes an object separated from its source context,
culturally, historically and linguistically. In this, translation and reading are
interchangeable operations: differentiated from its source context, the text is
displaced and reinscribed in the target context. Spatial, temporal, and linguistic
distances between source and target texts take on a magnified significance in
the periphery. When those in the margins read, translate, or rewrite texts
belonging to traditions of the center, they experience a sense of displacement,
of their own otherness.
Thus, a defining aspect of center-periphery dichotomies is the distance
between the two poles: a distance that comes to represent economic and
political disparities, even as it establishes and maintains relationships of
(inter)dependency that has to do with power and subjectivity. Borges talks about
the difference of translating into the Spanish from Argentina (the periphery),
which is different from the Spanish from Spain (the center); this distinction
separates and values the Argentine for its implied linguistic, cultural, and
historic distinctiveness. To innovate from the margins (to reread, to rewrite, to
mistranslate) is to challenge center-periphery dichotomies by remapping
accepted cultural and political relationships.
ASHCROFT
CALIBAN’S VOICE
Caliban’s voice offers a reexamination in the issue of language in postcolonial
literatures. The study takes as its point the figure of Caliban in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest, which is a major allegory of the colonial enterprise, a character
that has always been constructed as a creature outside civilization, as the
colonized other in postcolonial readings of the play. Caliban remains a symbol
of postcolonial resistance, while many would hold that the only function of
colonial language was oppression. Caliban is the key to the transformation of
this allegory in a postcolonial reading, since he is not colonized by Prospero.
It is not the simplicity of Caliban’s rebellion and striving for identity which makes
him so relevant to the postcolonial experience, it’s actually the complexity, and
we can find that complexity in language, because there is where freedom
resides. We discover how crucial language is in the process of colonial control.
Language is not just one strategy of the many colonizing strategies, it’s the very
mode of cultural control, the vehicle by which those strategies are effected.
In this book, Ashcroft develops the relationships between language and race,
identity and translation.

LANGUAGE AND RACE

The concept of Caliban’s animalistic, language less identification with nature, and not with
culture, locates the origins of racism in what peter singer calls speciesism. The indeterminacy
of Caliban in the play is the indeterminacy of species. It is the animal like nature in his lack of
language what makes him a less race, if human at all, and a slave.

This is one of the most common attitudes of colonizers: to identify colonized people with nature,
and not with culture, and as they are nature and not human beings, they are part of the
environment that has to be tamed. This attitude was justified by a long-standing discourse of
discrimination. Subject people were subject races, so they had to be tamed and civilized.

Race exists almost entirely in language. We can see this in the 2 words that have caused
catastrophic consequences in human history: black and white, and we can see how through
language, in history, we have had differences in race.

The interest in race and language in this chapter comes from:

  The ways it reveals the function of language in constructing the most pervasive
category of human difference.
 The language of race has become an important instrument in postcolonial
writing.
 The language of race unveils difficulties which exist in other categories of
human discrimination

The connection between race and language has been formalized in the 19th century because of
a development in the race-based philology. The major question of race has focused on the
issue of origin. There were 2 sides: the monogenesis which believe all races descended from
Adam and polygenesis which believe in multiple origins. In the middle of the two is that philology
emerges.

The philologist who has the most to say about the connection of race and language is Ernest
Renan, who does not support biological races, but linguistic races. He says that there are no
pure races, and that race refers to 2 things: a physical race and a cultural race. Language is the
key for Renan because it plays an important role in the formation of culture. For him, there are 5
documents which determine the race within human species: a separate language, a literature
with identifiable characteristics, a religion, a history and a civilization.

LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

Language introduces us to an identifiable world, initiates us to family. It identifies us and defines

us. Our language is not just a language, it’s OUR language, the language of the human beings.
In postcolonial societies, the question of language is related to the question of struggle. Central
to this struggle is the place of language in one’s construction of identity.

Language is associated with identity, because it constructs identity in many ways:

psychological, physical, ethnic, geographical, social. The active engagement in language is a
key to the role of language in the construction of private, religious, national and cultural identity.
The language we speak is crucial for establishing who we are.

TRANSLATION AND TRANSFORMATION

Translation has become one of the most important issues in postcolonial studies. The kind of
inner translation that occurs when a writer write in a second language could be the point where
translation studies and postcolonial studies meet. The argument of this chapter is that
translation (the movement of a text from a source language to a target language) and
transformation (the shaping of a text in a target language by the cultural nuances of the source
language) are overlapping in postcolonial literatures. They co-exist.

Transformation means that not only the language is transformed, but also the reader and the
writer are transformed in the cultural engagement represented by postcolonial literatures.

Another idea proposed in the chapter is that translation occupies a third space, it occupies the
space of language itself. So translation not only negotiates between language, it also inhabits
the space of language itself. And what is important is that language itself is transformative, a
space which is unstable. This is the space post-colonial writers inhabit between imperial and
vernacular cultures.

In the context of postcolonial writing there are 3 routes of translation:

To translate the vernacular text into English

To translate the English text into a vernacular
The production of an English text by a bilingual writer.
This chapter also mentions the metonymic gap: the linguistic variation stands for cultural
difference. This gap is a cultural gap formed when writers transform English according to the
needs of the source culture. This occurs when they insert unglossed words, phrases and
passages and unknown allusions, references or concepts. It’s always inserted into the text in
the way of allusion, dialogue or language variance.

Strategies of transformation in postcolonial writing:

Glossing: parenthetic translations of individual words.

Untranslated words: leaving some vernacular words untranslated in the text for
conveying the sense of distinctiveness and forcing the reader to engage with the
vernacular culture.

Interlanguage: fusion of the linguistic structures of the 2 languages.

Syntactic fusion: the adaptation of vernacular syntax to standard orthography makes the
rhythm and the texture of the vernacular more accessible-
Code switching and vernacular transcription

TEXTO 27: RABASSA, GREGORY: “THE MANY FACES

OF TREASON”

TRADUTTORE, TRADITORE

Translators have always been said to be traitors. But is this accusation fair? Can we stop
betraying? The answer to these questions is no.

There are many subjects of betrayal: if we do not betray one, we betray the other.

Types of betrayal

 Betrayal of the word: and since the word is the essence of language, we also
betray language, and since languages are products of a culture (or the other
way about) we betray a culture.
 Betrayal of the author: Absolute empathy does not exist, we can never put
ourselves in the skin of the author, we can’t be the author.
 Betrayal of the readership: If we betray the author, we betray his public who
was expecting to read that author. Besides, if the author was planning a
betrayal on his readers, we might be betraying that too.
 Betrayal to ourselves: we might sacrifice our best hunches in favor of some
pedestrian norm in fear of betraying the task we were set to do. This, according
to Rabassa, is the worst betrayal.

…….
WORDS: Words are treacherous things, much more so than any translator, because
they are mere metaphors for things, they are not the thing itself.

→ Gulliver’s Travels “since words are only names for things, it would be convenient
for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular
business they are to discourse on.”

Implications on that phrase

 This would eliminate the need for all the many languages that are spoken in
the world. It could even be possible to rebuilt Babel.
 A wealthy man would have more “things” an be more eloquent whereas a
poor man would be less expressive: this means that the richer you are the
more education can have access to.

Babel and its consequences: “pierre” and “stone”

If a word is a metaphor for a thing, why does a single thing have so many metaphors in
orbit around it? “Pierre” means “stone” but it also is a French name, Pierre, which
cannot be translated into “Stone”. Moreover, “pierre” comes from the Greek “petra”,
therefore it has biblical connotations, St Peter. “Stone” comes from “stein”, no biblical
connotations here. Besides, “pierre” can never sound like “stone”. Is it a pierre a stone?

A language (and a culture) as it progresses, will use a word designed to name a

thing so much that it will end up moving it towards a different tangent from a
word in another tongue meant to describe the same thing.

Even if a thing can be cloned, the word (with its cultural or even phonetic implications)
that designates it cannot and any attempt to reproduce it in another tongue is betrayal.
Some concepts seem to be the exclusive property of one language and cannot be rightly
conceived in another.

Borrowing: As we borrow from another language to enrich our own, more often than
not there is treason a foot, if not to the meaning certainly in the sound.

These betrayals are a reflection of the hurdles present in communication between

cultures.

AUTHORS

Kafka’s metaphor: imposition of another culture

If you ask a New Yorker, Kafka’s Gregorio Samsa is a cockroach, though Kafka’s
description points at a hard-carapaced beetle. This then can be seen as a betrayal by the
imposition of another culture.

Authors and betrayal : An author is a compendium of factors that can be betrayed:

language, culture,and individual words. If he is to betray one of these factors, he
betrays them from within because these factors constrain him. A translator is a
betrayer from without, from a reflective, not reflexive, awareness.

Within his cultural limits, an author must extend himself as far as he can to set
himself and his art apart from the commonplace. With the translator we have quite
the opposite situation: he must not set himself apart from the culture laid out before
him. To do so would be betrayal.

Translators: betrayers to themselves :The translator is a writer too. He is also a

reader, an attentive reader: he has to read closely so as to know which is the
appropriate interpretation. Here is where he receives less guidance from a text. Besides,
he has to read the Spanish into English as he goes along, with the result that his reading
is also writing.

A translator must know that this is the best he can do in this place, in this time and
must still recognize that his work is, in a sense, unfinished.

The translator must not betray his hunches, his acquired instinct. He will be closer
to being right that way and, in any case, he will not have betrayed himself.
Confidence in ones-selves is always crucial. The translator must always value his
judgment.

In my opinion, there are not only types of betrayals, there are also degrees of
betrayals within those types. In addition, I consider that translation is a matter of
balance that depends on the situation: We know that we are going to betray someone
or something: somebody is going to loose, and somebody is going to win. We just have
to balance that betrayal.

Though following our instincts is frequently the best way to go, I must admit that many
times my instincts were wrong. I also believe that the ability of doubting of my own
instincts has made me a better translator, with better instincts for that matter.

All in all, I would say that I agree with Rabassa, but I can’t deny that I learn from my
mistaken instincts.

 Relate the concepts of manipulation, symbiosis, parody, transformation and

transference to the concept of betrayal developed by Gregory Rabassa.

Otros que toma: Lafevere Beaugrade Flotow Aixela Jackobson Nirinja Campbell
Mossop, Hermans Timoxcko Bell
……………………
DE BEAUGRANDE
According to De Beaugrande, potential audiences and readers’ perspectives are
conductive avenues to approach the issue of translatability. A text will be
translatable when the resulting translated text fulfills at least some of the readers’
expectations in the target culture.
The CONTEXT is constituted by the situational configurations surrounding the
text.
The CO-TEXT is the textual, linguistic environment surrounding a certain word.
INTERTEXTUALITY is the relation of the text with previous or contemporary
texts as regards a chain of texts, literary traditions and conventions.
Sometimes a word has more than one meaning and the translator makes use of
the context in order to rule out inadequate meanings and choose the appropriate
one. However, there is a situation called POLYVALENCE in which a word
cannot be reduced to a single meaning, and thus produces ambiguity and
obscurity and may interfere in arriving at the correct interpretation when reading.
Polyvalence can be eliminated with a close evaluation of the context, co-text and
intertextuality.
The author also states that most contributions of translation of poetry do not
focus on the processes whereby a text is read and understood, so many errors
derive from inadequate reading rather than inadequate writing.
He says that there are many reasons why it’s important to focus on the reading
process when translating:
1. the basis of translation is not in the original text, but in the
representation of the text generated in the translator’s mind. So theory
must account for typical obstacles in the reading comprehension and
how to tackle those obstacles.
2. Sometimes, some errors derive from the differences between the
original text and the representation of the text in the translator’s mind.
This happens because the translator adds some components to that
representation, such as his own knowledge, beliefs and conventions.
So theory should account for how the mental representation is reached
and how that representation typically differs from the original.
3. Reading and writing strategies are closely related. The writer generates
a stretch of discourse and the evaluates it with regard to its
effectiveness in conveying the mental representation that motivated the
discourse. This evaluation leads to reconsideration and revision. The
ability needed to evaluate a text is a reading skill, that’s why in order
 to fully describe the act of translating, we have to describe the process
of reading.
4. The translator cannot produce an equivalent text if he does not have in
mind the response of the potential readers of the translation.
5. The reader perspective is the most conductive avenue to approach the
issue of translatability. A text will be considered as translatable when
the resulting translated text fulfills at least some of the reader’s
expectations in the target culture.
6. The matter of translation criticism can also be approached from the
readers’ perspective. When a translation is evaluated, the most
frequent question is whether the translation is suitable to represent a
literary text to a foreign reader. Sometimes the incompetence of
translators derives from lack of knowledge and experience in one or
both languages, or from lack of competence in the processes of
writing, reading and translating.
Stages in the reading process:
1. Readers must supply some the perceptions not presented in the text.
2. Readers reduce in this way the undefinedness of the text.
3. In order to accomplish the first 2 tasks, readers must actualize the
potential of language elements to refer to the real world.
4. Obstacles in a text must be overcome
- I’s essential to maintain the meaning potential of a text during translation.
As a reader, the translator naturally tends to complete the text, filling the
gaps. Danger: the translator’s own additions and responses.

CAMPBELL
MODEL OF TRANSLATION COMPETENCE
He says that a model of translation competence should show whether the
translation competence can be divisible into components, describe the
developmental path in the process of learning how to translate and include the
description of the differences in the performances by different translators.
In his model there are 3 independent components:
1. Target language textual competence: the ability to manipulate the genre.
This is related to grammar and lexis under the level of sentence.
2. Disposition: reflects the characteristics of the translator unrelated to the
language and how these characteristics impact on the translating job.
 3. Monitoring competence: concerns how and to what extent the translation
output is checked.
There are 4 principles in this model of translation competence:
1. Translation competence can be divided into independent components.
2. Translation education is a matter of development of the various
components of the translation competence.
3. Students are likely to have different level of achievements in the
components of the translation competence.
4. Assessment of translation is better seen as a matter of learners.
The optimum combination of these components appears to be: high level of
textual competence and a risk-taking but persistent disposition. This model is
related to the 2 standpoints from which models of translation may derive:
a. A functional standpoint which has to do with the textual competence.
b. A neo Cartesian standpoint, which has to do with mental processes, so it’s
related to the disposition and the monitoring process.
For a student, it’s very important to have a model of translation competence,
since it can provide a great source of knowledge as regards their level of
achievement.
Without a model of translation competence, students obtain feedback from:
- Ephemeral reactions of the teacher during class discussion
- Marked translations as homework
- Ordinary academic grading
This kind of feedback is very poor and limited and fails to inform students.
Differences between marked translation feedback and translation competence
model feedback:
MARKED TRANSLATION TRANSLATION COMPETENCE
MODEL
Feedback is fast Feedback is slow
Feedback into teaching Feedback into learning
Focus on specific teaching points Focus on underlying competences
Low reliability High reliability
Face validity Construct validity
So, this model is very useful for teachers:
- In the diagnosis of student problems
- In the student assessment
- In the design of individualized teaching and learning strategies
- In the evaluation of teaching
LEPPIHALME
An allusion is a cultural bump. They are expected to convey a meaning that goes
beyond the mere words used. As cultural bump elements, allusions depend on
familiarity to convey meaning. There are 2 kinds: KEY PHRASES and PROPER
NAMES.
The strategies the author proposes to translate proper names are:
a. To leave the name unaltered. Three subcategories:
1. Use the name as such.
2. Use the name, adding some guidance.
3. Use the name, adding a detailed explanation, for example a footnote.
b. To replace the name by another name. Two subcategories:
1. Replace the name by another SL name.
2. Replace the name by a TL name.
c. To omit it, but to transfer the sense in another way. Two subcategories:
1. Omit the name but transfer the sense by other means, for example by a
common noun.
2. Omit the name and the allusion altogether.
The strategies for translating key phrases are:
a. To use a standard translation: commonly used for Bible translations.
b. Minimum change/to use a literal translation: recommended when the
translation is transparent.
c. To use footnotes, endnotes or explanations as additional information.
d. To use extra allusive guidance added in the text: for example the use of
inverted commas or italics, or some additions made to clarify.
e. To use simulated familiarity or internal marking, that is, the addition of
features that signal the presence of borrowed words.
f. To replace the key phrase with a TL key phrase: usually done for
proverbs.
g. To reduce the allusion to sense by rephrasal, making its meaning overt.
h. To omit: only when the key phrase is not essential.
i. To re-create, using a fusion of techniques: creative construction of a
passage which hints at the connotations of the allusion or other special
effects created by it. Recreation empowers the translator to be creative, to
be active, freeing him/her from the limitations of the source text and
emphasizes the necessity for considering the target text readers’ needs.
There are no rules or guideline on how to achieve this, it can be seen as a
fusion of strategies which is realized in context.
AIXELÁ
Develop some of Aixela’s conservation strategies.

What are CSIs?

Culture-specific items (CSI) are textually actualized items whose function and connotations in a ST
involve a translation problem in their transference to a TT, whenever this problem is a product of the
nonexistence of the referred item or of its different intertextual status in the cultural system of the
readers of the TT.

There are two types of CSIs: Proper nouns and Common expressions.

Strategies for translating CSIs

 Conservation (less degree of manipulation):
1. Repetition: the translators keep as much as they can of the original reference. The
obvious example is the treatment of most toponyms (Seattle=Seattle). Paradoxically,
this “respectful” strategy involves in many cases and increase in the exotic or archaic
character of the CSI which is felt to be more alien by the target language reader
because of its linguistic form and cultural distance
2. Orthographic adaptation: this strategy includes procedures like transcription or
transliteration, which are mainly used when the original reference is expressed in a
different alphabet from the one that target readers use. Nowadays, this procedure is
reserved mainly for the integration of references from third cultures (for example,
Russian names in English works, SL English Russian name: Kemdov = TL Spanish:
Kenidof) and for the transference of Spanish words 'mis-spelt' in English texts (for
example SL: English Jose -for Josephine-, TL: Spanish: Jose -which might mean Josefina
or José-).
3. Linguistic (non-cultural) translation: with the support of pre-established translations
within the intertextual corpus of the TL, or making use of the linguistic transparency
of the CSI, the translator chooses in many cases a denotatively very close reference to
the original, but increases its comprehensibility by offering a TL version which can still
be recognized as belonging to the cultural system of the ST. Units of measure and
currency are very frequent examples of this strategy (SL dollar = TL dólares; SL inch =
TL pulgada, which is a unit not used in Spain).
4. Extratextual gloss: the translator uses one of the above-mentioned procedures, but
considers it necessary to offer some explanation of the meaning or implications of the
CSI in a footnote, endnote, glossary, commentary, etc.
5. Intratextual gloss: this is the same as the previous case, but the translators feel they
can or should include their gloss as an indistinct part of the text, usually so as not to
disturb the reader’s attention (SL five feet eight = TL cinco pies con ocho pulgadas).
 Substitution (greater degree of manipulation)
1. Synonymy: translator resorts to some kind of synonymy or parallel reference to avoid
repeating the CSI (SL Baccardi = TL aguardiente de caña).
 2. Limited universalization: Usually for the sake of credibility, the translator seeks
another reference, also belonging to the SL culture, but closer to the reader’s culture:
another CSI, but less specific (SL five grand = TL cinco mil dólares).
3. Absolute universalization: the basic situation is identical to the previous one, but the
translators do not find a better known CSI or prefer to delete any foreign
connotations and choose a neutral reference for their readers (SL Chesterfield = TL un
sofá).
4. Naturalization: the translator decides to bring the CSI into the intertextual corpus felt
as specific by the TL culture. Currently, this strategy is infrequently used in literature
(SL dollar = TL duro -currency denomination still in use in Spain-).
5. Deletion: the translators consider the CSI unacceptable on ideological or stylistic
grounds, or they think that it is not relevant enough for the effort of comprehension
required of their readers, or that it is too obscure and they are not allowed or do not
want to use procedures such as the gloss, etc. They therefore decide to omit it in the
TT (SL dark Cadillac sedan = TL Cadillac oscuro).
6. Autonomous creation: the translators decide to put in some nonexistent cultural
reference in the ST. (SL Shall we stay here and shed tears = TL Que nos quedemos aquí
derramando lágrimas como Magdalenas).
7. Compensation: deletion + autonomous creation with a similar effect.
8. Dislocation: displacement in the text of the same reference.
9. Attenuation: replacement, on ideological grounds, of something “too strong” or in
any way unacceptable by something “softer”

TYMOCZKO

 Maria Tymoczko considers that any translation entails a metonymy. Discuss this
point and give an example.
 Explain why any translation is metonymical

What is a metonymy

Tymoczko says every telling is a retelling. Every creation is a re-creation. As any literary work is
a rewriting of previous text, translation is also a form of writing that is rewriting. And a basic
feature of rewritings and retellings is that they are metonymic.

Metonymy is a figure of speech in which an attribute or an aspect of an entity substitutes for

the entity or in which a part substitutes for the whole. In one way or another, rewritings and
retellings evoke a culture, a literary system or a tradition by presenting just a part of it.

Why translations are metonymic

According to Tymoczko, all translation is a metonymic process. Translations are metonymic

because it is a form of representation in which parts or aspects of the source text come to
stand for the whole. Translations are always partial, there is never total or complete
translation. Translators must make choices, because there is always loss and gain in moving
between languages and between cultural discourses, because a translator cannot capture
everything, because there are inconsistent demands on the translator, because there are limits
on the practicable information load of the target text, and so on. Therefore, the translator has
to make a metonymic selection of specific attributes. Translators select some elements, some
aspects, or some parts of the source text to highlight and preserve: translators prioritize and
privilege some parameters and not others, and, thus, translators represent some aspects of
the source text partially or fully and others not at all in a translation. By definition, therefore,
translation is metonymic: it is a form of representation in which parts or aspects of the
source text come to stand for the whole.
Tymoczko by AGS

The Metonymics of Translation

Every telling is a retelling. Writers do not simply create original texts: to a great extent any
literary work is dependent on texts that have gone before and literature is as much about
literature as about life. There is a fabric of intertextuality that links texts to other literary work. A
literary work, like a translation, depends on previous texts: neither is an “original semantic unity”,
both are “derivative and heterogeneous”. Every writing is a rewriting.

Studies of oral literature have come to similar conclusions. The content, form and performance
techniques of any given traditional song or tale, for example, derive from established patterns
that the teller or singer inherits and in turn passes on to those who succeed him.

Folk tellers themselves acknowledge their own indebtedness to the tellers who have gone
before them.

Literary works are recreations, retellings or rewritings, whether they are oral or written, ancient
or modern. Investigation of the way any particular type of rewriting functions also potentially
illuminates other types of recreation, rewriting or refraction. Translation theorists stressed that
translation is a very obvious form of rewriting. Investigations of translation and translations have
much to teach about the nature of literature as a whole. Conversely, investigations of retellings
and rewritings have much to teach about translation as a process and translations as products.

Although translations are probably the most radical form of rewriting in a literature or a culture,
they are to be grouped with other modes of processing primary texts, including film versions of
texts, children’s versions, criticism, reviews, literary histories, anthologies, editions, etc. Not only
are literary texts themselves forms of rewriting, literary texts do not exist and operate simply in
their primary form; rather literary works are surrounded by a great number of refracted texts.

A basic feature of rewritings and retellings is that they are metonymic. Metonomy is a figure of
speech in which an attribute or an aspect of an entity substitutes for the entity or in which a part
substitutes for the whole.

The metonymic aspects of literary retellings are particularly clear in two cases:

The case of oral traditional literature: when a traditional oral tale is told, the telling is metonymic
on several levels. Each telling evokes metonymically all previous tellings of the tale that the
audience has participated in, and the telling instantiates and reifies metonymically the entire
tradition that the audience and teller share.

The case of mythic literature: every telling is a retelling. There are no stories for which this is
more true than myths, for which there are no “originals”. Myths descend from the depths of time.
Even if we suppose that there was once a single moment of creation of any specific myth,
behind that moment of creation lies a vast body of tale types and archetypal patterns which the
myth reworks and reanimates.

Like folktellers, literary artists use the metonymic aspect of mythic retelling in powerful
ways. Authors commonly use a canonical version of the myth as an implicit standard of
comparison, against which the audience measures the author’s own vision. For a mythic
retelling to make its full impact, the audience must be familiar with such a canonical version of
the myth as a baseline for their reception of the mythic retelling.

In order to understand and appreciate any one version of a myth, a reader must refer a
specific version to the whole mythic tradition. At the same time such a rewriting of a classical
myth stands metonymically for the larger mythic corpus of which the single story is part.

Though the metonymic aspect of mythic rewritings is particularly clear because the content of
the texts represents larger wholes, all literature works this way and the metonymic aspects of
texts are not restricted to content. Aspects of poetics are also metonymic in written literature as
in oral literature.

The metonymic level of a text is only one of many levels: the literal level, of course, but also the
metaphoric level. The metaphoric level can be generalized by the audience, so that it too
becomes a metonymy (e.g. in Anouilh’s Antigone, Antigone’s resistance to Creon is to be read
as a metaphor for resistance to the Nazis, but in turn it can be seen as a metonymic of all
human resistance to injustice everywhere and for all time.

Within literary works other sorts of metonymies are also operative. A piece of literature
customarily evokes its culture through consequential and telling signals or details. The cultural
elements within a literary work are metonymic evocations of the culture as a whole, including its
material culture, history, economy, law, customs, values, and so on. Metonymic structures
within literary texts are woven, referring to various aspects of the literary system and to other
cultural systems alike.

The metonymic features of literature are essential to the ways literature is learned, recognized,
and known, and, thus, to the epistemology of literature. Because single literary works can
represent larger abstract literary wholes, human beings are able to learn about and recognize
tale types, genres, categories of literature, forms and so on from a limited exposure to literary
examples. The learning of literature involves the recognition and mastery of patterns.

Metonymy in literary rewritings and retellings is also an important aspect in cultural continuity
and change. It permits the adaptation of traditional content and form to new circumstances,
allowing change while still maintaining a predominant sense of the preservation of larger
elements of tradition. The metonymic dimension of literature enables traditional audiences to
correct the mistakes or omissions of traditional tellers, to take enjoyment in tales told in an
abbreviated or cryptic manner, to fill gaps in narrative textures. It enables young tellers to learn
from others, to correct or improve upon their teachers’ versions, etc.

Those special rewriters called translators grapple with the metonymic aspects of literature all the
time. In translations of works from cultures and literatures that are related to the receptor system
most of the metonymic aspects of the ST related to literary and cultural patterns are transparent
to the translator’s receptor audience. Many of the metonymic aspects of texts often present
relatively few problems to the receiving audience of a translation. Thus, for example,
contemporary English-speaking audiences understand fairly well the generic signals of
nineteenth-century Russian novels such as Anna Karenina; the plotting and character types are
familiar, even though certain aspects of Russian culture, such as elements of the law or the use
of nicknames or the symbolic significance of samovars, may not be. Such works in translation
are able to be integrated into canons of world literature with relative ease. But what happens
when the metonymic aspects of the story are opaque rather than transparent to the receptor
audience? How is a translator to translate a work whose characters, plot, form, genre and
literary allusions are unfamiliar and “unreadable” by the intended receptor audience of the
translation?
What happens, then, when translating a non-canonical or marginalized literature? The
intent is to consider specifically texts that have been excluded or omitted from the canons.
There are often massive obstacles facing translators who wish to bring the texts of a
marginalized culture to a dominant-culture audience: issues related to the interpretation of
material culture and social culture, history, values, and world view; problems with the
transference of literary features such as genre, form, performance conventions and literary
allusions; as well as the inevitable questions of linguistic interface. For all these reasons the
information load of translations of such marginalized texts is often very high. Because neither
the cultural content nor the literary framework of such texts is familiar to the receiving audience,
the reception problems posed by marginalized texts in translation are acute. The translator is in
the paradoxical position of “telling a new story” to the receptor audience, even as the translator
refracts and rewrites a source text.

The way in which a literary text represents metonymically features of its literary systems and
ultimately features of its whole culture is what makes translating a text of a marginalized culture
so difficult. A translator assumes a large responsibility in undertaking to produce a text that
becomes representative of the whole source literature and, indeed, of the entire source culture
for the receptor audience.

What happens when the translator has to tell a new story?

Either the translator must make some decisive choices about which aspects to translate –that is,
to choose consciously to translate selected facets of the literary information in the text.

Or the translator must seek a format that allows dense information transfer through a variety of
commentaries on the translation.

However, even in a dense scholarly presentation, not all the information serving metonymic
functions in a text from an unfamiliar literature or culture can be realized in translation: the
information load is too great, and the information is coded in textual features that make
inconsistent and irreconcilable demands on the translator. Translation inevitably involves
linguistic loss and gain, and it is not possible to capture every linguistic feature of the ST. In the
same way literary and cultural aspects of the text also make incompatible demands on the
translator, choices must be made, and literary and cultural loss and gain, as well as linguistic
loss and gain, also occur in translation. All translators select specific aspects of the metonymic
relationships between text and literary system, or text and culture, to realize and to privilege.
They ask what larger wholes will the translation point to, stand for, be related to?

A translator who foregrounds the translation as a window into a new language is choosing to
have the translation be metonymic primarily of words of the SL and the language as a whole
and will downplay representing other metonymic aspects so as to make the information load
manageable.

The human tendency to assimilate the unknown to the closest known pattern must also be
reckoned with. Even as metonymic aspects of a ST are stripped away in the translation process,
a translation –specially a translation of a marginalized text into a dominant language- gest
assimilated to existing metonymies in the receptor system. The translator consciously or
unconsciously picks metonymies to evoke other than those of the ST, specifically the
metonymies of the receptor literary system and language. This is what happens when a
translator looks for a “dynamically equivalent” metre, for example. Similarly, the plot of the ST
may be altered so as to facilitate assimilation between the plot of the translation with plots in the
target culture.

Although the metonymic dimension of translating is particularly apparent in translations of

marginalized texts, all translation is in fact a metonymic process. Translations are always partial.
There is never total or complete translation. Translators must make choices, because no perfect
homology is possible, not even in synonymy or intralingual paraphrase. Decisions are required
in translation because there is always loss and gain in moving between languages and between
cultural discourses, because a translator cannot capture everything, because there are
inconsistent demands on the translator, because there are limits on the practicable information
load of the target text, and so forth. Translators select some elements, some aspects, or some
parts of the source text to highlight and preserve: translators prioritize and privilege some
parameters and not others; and thus, translators represent some aspects of the source text
partially or fully and others not at all in a translation.

According to Holmes, the question of metonymy structures the map determining the specific
transfer rules between source text and target text. The map a translator constructs is typically a
highly personalized one rather than a simplistic either/or map and it involves a specific hierarchy
of objectives.

The metonymics of a translation are not simply of abstract interest. They cast an image of the
ST and the source culture; they have political and ideological presuppositions and impact; they
function in the world. For the receiving audience the translation metonymically constructs a ST,
a literary tradition, a culture, and a people, by picking parts, aspects and attributes that will
stand for wholes.

 Lefevere (1985:241) said “translations are probably the most radical form of
rewriting in a literature or a culture” and with other modes of processing primary
texts they shape the evolution of literature and culture. On which grounds can it be
thought that Maria Tymoczko agrees on that? How does this view highlight the
importance of translation?

Lefevere and the refracted texts

Lefevere provides the notion of refracted texts, which are texts that have passed into the
corpus of a literary tradition by way of multiple rewritings, such as a comic version of the
Bible. Refracted texts are texts responsible in large for defining, maintaining and redefining a
canon. Translation is one form of refraction, a form of writing that is rewriting.

Tymoczko and metonymy

Tymozcko agrees with that, and provides us the notion of all writings as rewritings, and all
rewritings as metonymic texts: they represent a whole culture by presenting just a part of it.

Literature customarily evokes culture through signals or details such as places, key historical
events and so. Such elements are metonymic evocations of the culture as a whole.

Metonymic allow cultural change and continuity: it allows change but still maintains a
predominant sense of the preservation of larger elements of tradition.

The metonymic dimension of literatures enables traditional audiences to correct the mistakes
or omissions of traditional tellers. This enables young tellers to learn from others, to correct
or improve upon their teacher’s version.

Tymoczko and translation form a marginalized culture

Translations are metonymic because it is a form of representation in which parts or aspects

of the source text come to stand for the whole.

Therefore, translations, as metonymic texts, allow cultural change and continuity.

Yet, in translations of works from cultures and literatures that are related to the receptor
system most of the metonymic aspects of the source text related to literary and cultural
patterns are transparent to the translator's receptor audience.

In translations of works from cultures and literatures that are not related to the receptor
system, metonymic aspects are not transparent to the translator’s receptor audience. This is
so because the culture from which that type of text comes from is marginalised and so is its
literature: literature canons are defined by Western perspective.

So, translations, shape the evolution of literature and culture, but are constrained by the
canons established by the Western perspective. A translator can provide two types of
translation:

 Popular translation:
o Limited in their transfer intent
o Minimally representative of the metonymic aspects of the source text.
o Accessible to a broad segment of the target audience.
 Scholarly translation:
o Dense information transfer.
o It allows a good deal of metatranslation to proceed through introductions,
footnotes, appendices, parallel texts, etc.
o It appeals to a limited audience.

Translation is important because it cast an image of the source text and the source culture. It
has political and ideological presuppositions and impact. For the receiving audience the
translation metonymically constructs: a source text, a literary tradition, a culture, a people.

 In what sense can a translation of old Irish literature constitute a resistant practice
according to Maria Tymoczko?

TYMOKZCO
In her book Translation in the postcolonial studies, chapter 4, she talks about the
2 traditions of translating early Irish literature.
There are 2 traditions: the scholarly tradition and the literary tradition.
SCHOLARLY TRADITION:
- Translations are unreadable gloss translations, lacking literary interest or
merit (example Whitney Stroke’s translation)
- The information load is heavy because the English syntax and grammar
follow the Irish patterns, even the obligatory norms of English are
violated. The English is full of calques, loan translations, loan creations,
borrowed words, etc.
- The main strategies consist of literal renderings.
 - Their purpose is secondary to that of editions and they are subordinate to
the Irish texts.
LITERARY TRADITION:
- Translations are readable, constituting stylistic achievements in English,
but departing from textual material, formal properties and linguistic
structures in Irish (example: Augusta Gregory’s translation).
- The information load approximates the norms of English literary texts.
- Use of euphemisms when necessary.
- She leaves out unnatural expressions or words.
- Literary qualities achieved
- Omission of elements that might be offensive to the reader.
Tymockzco also proposed 3 factors playing a core role in the divergence of these
traditions:
1- Nationalism, which relies upon literalness and condemns domesticating
practices.
2- Irish literary revival which attempts to shift discourses and poetics of
English language literature and tries to challenge the English literary
canons and polysystems.
3- Irish language movement. Irish language was considered unique and
distinctive. There was an attempt to reflect the nation’s heritage tjrough
language.
As a conclusion, Tymoczko says that the polarization of English translations of
Irish literature is in many cases more apparent than real, because they function in
symbiotic and complementary ways. They form the system of translation which
in turn is a subsystem of the literary polysystem, so although they are divergent,
they are in turn complementary, one cannot exist without the other.
TRANSLATION AND POWER
Translation is associated with power in all senses, in part, because translation is
a metonymic process as well as a metaphoric one. Translations are inevitably
partial; meaning in a text is always overdetermined, and the information in a
source text is therefore always more extensive than a translation can convey.
Conversely, the receptor language and culture entail obligatory features that
shape the possible interpretations of the translation, as well as extending the
meanings of the translation in directions other than those inherent in the source
text.
The metonymies of translation per se are rarely named explicitly and have yet to
be fully explored. Such metonymies are to be found in the way that translation is
always a partial process, whereby some but not all of the source text is
transposed, and in the way that translations represent source texts by highlighting
specific segments or parts, or by allowing specific attributes of the source texts to
dominate and, hence, to represent the entirety of the work. Metonymy operates
also in the way that translated texts are written and read as representations of
their source cultures and in the way that translations, as elements of the receiving
literary system, metonymically encode features of the receiving cultures.
As a result, translators must make choices, selecting aspects or parts of a text to
transpose and emphasize. Such choices in turn serve to create representations of
their source texts, representations that are also partial. This partiality is a
necessary condition of the act, is what differentiates translations, enabling them
to participate in the dialectic of power, the process of political discourse and
strategies for social change.

GUTT
Nida and Taber define dynamic equivalence as follows:
“Dynamic equivalence is to be defined in terms of the degree to which the
receptors of the message in the receptor language respond to it substantially the
same manner as the receptors in the source language. This response can never be
identical, for the cultural and historical settings are too different, but there should
be a high degree of equivalence of response, or the translation will have failed to
accomplish its purpose.”
For Nida and Taber, the main objective of translation is concerned with
conveying the meaning of the original text:
“Translating must aim primarily at ‘reproducing the message’. To do anything
else is essentially false to one’s task as a translator.”
However, comprehension of the original message is not enough:
“Communication is not merely informative. It must also be expressive and
imperative if it is to serve the principal purposes of communications. That is to
say, must not only provide information which people can understand but must
present the message in such a way that people can feel its relevance (the
expressive element in communication) and can then respond to it in action (the
imperative function).”
Beekman and Callow developed their own approach called “idiomatic
translation”, which resembles the dynamic equivalence approach in its rejection
of form-oriented translation, and its emphasis that a translation should convey the
meaning of the original. It also demands that the translation should be faithful to
the ‘dynamics’ of the original, but it looks at these dynamics in terms of
‘naturalness’ of language use and ease of comprehension rather than receptor
response:
“A translation which transfers the meaning and the dynamics of the original text
is to be regarded as a faithful translation. The expression transfers the meaning,
means that the translation conveys to the reader or hearer the information that the
original conveyed to its readers or hearers… The expression, the dynamics,
means that (1) the translation makes a natural use of the linguistic structures of
the RL [receptor language] and that (2) the recipients of the translation
understand the message with ease.”
Larson’s model is an extension of the idiomatic approach to translation in
general, and is very similar to the model of Beekman and Callow. But she
includes the aspect of audience response in her definition of ‘dynamics’:
“The underlying premise is that the best translation is the one which a) uses the
normal language forms of the receptor language, b) communicates, as much as
possible, to the RL speakers the same meaning that was understood by the
speakers of the SL language, and c) maintains the dynamics of the original SL
text. Maintaining the ‘dynamics’ of the original ST means that the translation is
presented in such a way that it will evoke the same response as the source text
attempted to evoke.”
All these approaches together share the following basic objectives:
1. A translation must convey to the RL audience the meaning or message of
the original.
2. It must do so in a way that is faithful, equivalent to the dynamics of the
original (keeping in mind that there are differences in what is meant by
‘dynamics’).
In his approach, France asks simply ‘what the author is trying to get across in
his/her translation, how he/she goes about communicating his/her meaning and
how far we may judge him to have been successful in communicating his/her
thoughts to his readers’.
France believes that there is more than just the ‘surface meaning’ (the one any
intelligent reader might be expected to grasp) in some texts; there is also a
‘bonus’ meaning accessible to those who are more “sharp-eyed” or better
instructed. The bonus meaning is the intended ‘message’ of a text. Any
translation committed to conveying the intended original meaning should convey
to the RL audience at least the surface meaning, the main point that it was
intended to convey to all members of the original audience.

BASSNETT (JAKOBSON)
Jakobson distinguishes 3 types of translation:
 1. Intralingual translation (an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other
signs in the same language).
2. Interlingual translation (an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some
other language. Also referred as translation proper).
3. Intersemiotic translation (an interpretation of verbal signs by means of
signs of nonverbal sign systems).
After establishing that interlingual translation describes the process of transfer
from SL to TL, Jakobson points to the central problem in all types: while
messages may serve as adequate interpretations of code units or messages, there
is ordinarily no full equivalence through translation. Even apparent synonymy
does not yield equivalence, and Jakobson shows how intralingual translation
often has to resort to a combination of code units in order to fully interpret the
meaning of a single unit.
Jakobson claims that translation is only an adequate interpretation of an alien
code unit and equivalence is impossible. As complete equivalence cannot take
place in any categories, Jakobson declares that all poetic art is technically
untranslatable:
“Only creative transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition (from
one poetic shape into another) or interlingual transposition (from one language
into another) or intersemiotic transposition (from one system of signs into
another, for example from verbal art into music, dance, cinema or painting).”
According to Jakobson, poetry is governed by “paronomasia”: the relationship
between phonemic and semantic units (e.g., puns and other plays on words).
Because translation of poetry necessitates a disassociation of the link between the
phonemic and the semantic, it is accompanied by a loss of either content or form,
and of the connection between them.

GADDIS-ROSE
Literary criticism is dependent on translation, which, in turn, gains from the
scrutiny of the former. Translation and criticism enhance the understanding and
appreciation of literature. For a serious study of literature, both should be
considered an indispensable combination.
Without translation, literatures could not be experienced outside their usual areas
of language use. Without criticism, literatures could not build up the traditions
that help preserve and disseminate them.
Translators and translations are mediators. In their appropriation of something
not theirs to begin with, they risk damaging or misrepresenting what they have
appropriated. Mediators may be inherently incapable of complete neutrality, and
yet they are indispensable links.
 What both translation and literary criticism can be in certain circumstances is a
distillation or expansion of the text in question, but neither necessarily results in a
finer product or higher mental process. Both are derivative, deriving from a prior
text. A translation can be considered a better piece of writing than the original
literary work.
Literary translation is a transfer of distinctive features of a literary work into a
language other than that of the work’s first composition. But literary translation
is also a form of literary criticism. What translating does is to help us get inside
literature, whether directly, by putting into our own language the literature we are
studying, or indirectly, by comparing translations; either way, we examine
literature from the inside.
Literature must have been translated for enhancing one group’s cultural heritage
at the expense of another’s. Perhaps as a kind of imperialism where the ‘text’
supported or solidified a territorial or lineal claim, or perhaps as a benign looting
to bolster what was felt to be inferior native patrimony, or as a pleasure
commodity with a prize. All of these possible motives share one common aspect:
the usage of knowledge of language and skill of expression to satisfy some
combination of power and desire.
Nowadays, the motives for translating literature may not be all that different;
literary translation is a mediated record.
In her analysis of Camus’s ‘L’Etranger’, Gaddis-Rose denotes that Gilbert and
Ward, translators of Camus’s work, were older at the time they carried out their
translations than Camus when he wrote L’Etranger, and both translators had
different kinds of life experience. Both translators conceived their task by the
literary norms of their own generation.
According to Gaddis-Rose, Gilbert’s translation is a product conceived as a
target text on the basis of his own reading, and Gilbert made his translation
conform to his own interpretation. While his translation would be termed
‘faithful’, it is free, target-oriented (domesticated) and meaning-based
(interpretive).
Ward encountered L’Etranger through Gilbert’s translation, which he
commended for “consistency”, “earnestness” and as “an effort to make the text
intelligible”. Ward’s goal “was to venture further into the letter of Camus’s
novel, to capture what he said and how he said it, not what he meant. Gaddis-
Rose describes this translation as intentionally literal, source-oriented
(foreignized) and language-based (neoliteral).
The main issue with both translations is that they alter the first-person narrators,
which give readers different cues for establishing what we believe we think the
L’Etranger means.
HERMANS
LINES OF APPROACH
As a field of pure research, translation studies has two main branches. The first,
descriptive translation studies, is concerned with describing translation,
translations and the activity called translating. The second, translation theory, is
charged with explanation and description.
Holmes subdivides the descriptive branch, which consists of a product-oriented
division which investigates existing translations, a function-oriented one which
looks at how translations fare in their socio-cultural context, and a process-
oriented section interested in the mental processes taking place in translators’
heads. There is also a branch called applied translation studies, and it is
composed of translator training, the production of translation aids, translation
policy, and translation criticism.
Toury decides to divide ‘Translation studies’ into two main branches, one ‘pure’
and one ‘applied’. The pure subdivides in ‘descriptive’ and ‘theoretical’

POINTS OF ORIENTATION
In the context of empirical translation studies one term in particular has gained
prominence: literature as polysystem. The polysystem concept, which views
literature as a network of elements which interact with each other, is meant to
serve as a tool for investigating why translators behave in this or that way, or
why some translations prove more successful than others.
Polysystem theory viewed literary and cultural life as the scene of a perpetual
struggle for power between various interest groups. It also added a teleological
dimension to translation by suggesting that a translator’s behavior was guided by
ulterior motives. Translation could now be seen as one of the instruments which
individuals and collectives could make use of to consolidate or undermine
positions in a given hierarchy.
‘Descriptivism’ was used in opposition to other terms and approaches. This
makes it possible to characterize its ‘negative heuristic’, the things which
descriptivists are reacting against and emphatically do not want to do. They do
not want to be prescriptive, and they do not want value judgements to be the sole
or even the primary aim of the study of translation. Descriptivists want to
conduct research for its own sake and not in order to distil from it practical
advice or guidelines for good translating, or rules of thumb which translators
should follow whey then translate.
The ‘positive heuristic’ of descriptivism redefines the aims of studying
translation by claiming legitimacy for research which is ‘of light’ rather than ‘to
use’. It wants to study translations as they are, and to account for their occurrence
and nature.
The way in which the descriptive paradigm was elaborated in practice give rise
to some issues. One issue concerns the ultimate goal of translation studies. Toury
claims that what lies beyond description is the discovery of ‘laws’ of translation.
No one else in the descriptive camp has followed Toury in this quest. For them
the aim remains that of gaining insight into the theoretical intricacies and the
historical relevance and impact of translation.
Another point bears on the question of whether the descriptive option entails the
observer’s neutral, objective stance, detached from the object of study.
Delabastita and D’hulst insisted on the need for “a detached and purely
descriptive attitude for the neutral observer and for the historian” and “the
researcher’s ideal of a maximally neutral and complete understanding”.
Connected with the ideal of ‘detachment’ is the strict separation between object-
level and meta-level; for the researcher, actual translations constitute the object
of study, while the researcher’s own pronouncements about these texts operate at
a meta-level.
The skopos theory takes as its ultimate goal the provision of adequate guidelines
for translating and sees itself as a form of applied translation studies. It is
predominantly concerned with professional translating, whereas descriptivists
have tended to dwell in the literary sphere.

ROBINSON
POWER DIFFERENTIALS
She says that translation plays 3 roles in postcolonial studies:
- As a channel for colonization, corrected by education and the control of
the market and institutions
- As a lightening-rod for cultural inequalities
- As a channel for decolonization
She mentions Jacquemond’s theory of translation inequalities. Jacquemond has 4
hypothesis in relation to this:
1. A dominated culture (DM) will translate far more of a HEGEMONIC
CULTURE (HC) than the latter will of the former.
 In order to illustrate this, he uses the terms “language from the north” to
refer to the East, to the first world, to the hegemonic culture and
“language from the south” to refer to the rest of the world, the DC. This
means that Southern intellectual production will be translated only for
small circles of specialists, whereas books from the North are read on a
much wider scale in the South. This has to do with Venuti’s concept of
trade imbalance.
2. Texts of the DC translated by the HC will be perceived as difficult,
strange, mysterious, of interest only to a small group of specialists and
translations will tend to be literal full of footnotes, whereas a DC will
translate HC works accessibly for the masses.
3. A HC will only translate works from the DC that follow certain
stereotypes.
4. An author of the DC who dreams of reaching larger audiences will tend to
translate or write his/her work in the hegemonic language. Nowadays, it’s
common that the only way to get read in the world is to write or be
translated into English, which has always been the lingua franca, because
of a century of first British and the American economic, political, military
and cultural dominance.
To conclude, a DC will be represented in a HC by translations that are fewer in
number, perceived as difficult, chosen because they conform some stereotypes
and written following those stereotypes. A HC will be represented in a DC by
translations that are greater in number, perceived as interesting, chosen because
they come from the HC, and written in ignorance of the DC.
Jacquemond offers a dual schematization of power differentials when theorizing
them:
There is a colonial moment: translators working in the DC are mediators who
integrate foreign objects without questions. And there is a postcolonial moment:
translators working in a HC appear authoritative figures who keep the other
culture at distance and at the same time they make it comprehensible.

ROBINSON- BECOMING A TRANSLATOR

The author has the following thesis: translation for the professional translator is
a learning cycle that moves through the stages of INSTINCT, EXPERIENCE,
HABIT, and within experience through the stages of ABDUCTIONS
(guesswork), INDUCTION (pattern building) and DEDUCTION (theories,
laws); the translator is at once a professional for whom complex mental processes
have become second nature and a learner who is constantly faced with new
problems and has to solve them.
 The translator has two mental states and processes: the subliminal state, where it
seems as if the translator was not thinking. It’s a fast state which has to do with
habit, and allows translators to earn a living at the work. And the analytical state,
where the translator looks up for words in the dictionaries, checks grammar,
looks for synonyms, etc. It’s a slow state which has to do with experience, and
gives the translator a reputation for probity and acumen.
The analytical material is stored for use and then in the analytical process it
becomes second nature. The translator needs both habit to make the process
speed up and make it enjoyable, and experience, fresh experiences which impulse
learning.
The process of translation can also be related with Pierce’s theory of a triad. The
translator starts with instinct, where he guesses the meaning of a word or phrase,
this is related to the abduction process. Then he continues with experience, where
he proceeds by translating those words and phrases, moving back and forth from
one language to the other, this is related to the induction process. And finally, the
habit stage, where the translator sublimated gradually some solutions to specific
problems and makes problem-solution patterns, which become second nature.
This is related to the deduction process. Ultimately the translation feels more
competent and starts to regard himself as a professional.
Finally, the process of translation can be seen as a translate-edit-sublimate
process. The translator jumps into the text first and translates it intuitively, then
he thinks of what he has done and edits it intuitively too, allowing the first
intuitive translation to challenge a well-reasoned principle in which he believe
deeply. And finally he sublimates, he internalizes what he has learned and makes
it second nature, and makes it part of his intuitive repertoire.
According to this model, the translator is at once a professional who has
internalized problems to specific solutions and has made them second nature, and
a learner who is faced with new problems and must find solutions to those
problems, and who thrived on those problems since novelties mean variety,
growth and enjoyment.
The translator approaches new texts, new jobs, new situations with an intuitive or
instinctive readiness, a sense of her own knack for languages and translation that
is increasingly, with experience, steeped in the automatisms of habit. Experience
begins with general knowledge of the world, experience of how various people
talk and act, of professions, of the vast complexity of languages, of social
networks and of the differences among cultures, norms, values, assumptions.
The translator has an intuition or image of his/her ability to solve whatever
problems come up. Gradually the “problems” will begin to recur, and to fall into
patterns. This is ‘induction’. As the translator begins to notice and articulate,
these patterns and regularities, ‘deduction’ begins, and with it the theorizing of
translation. Every translator will eventually develop a more or less coherent
theory of translation, even if he/she isn’t quite able to articulate it.
This model is an ideal model of the process of translation, but actually it’s not
always like this, because in real life there are several obstacles, for example, lack
of memory, inadequate dictionaries, untranslated words, etc.

Relate Nirinja and Von Flotow’s view. Why language is a political

instrument?

NIRANJANA
Etnography has always considered their project as one of translations, for
etnographers their activity consisted on translating, transcribing and clarifying
the non-civilized cultures not only to understand them, but also to expand their
culture’s knowledge. The invisibility of language serves to mask the power
inequalities and the colonial implication in the discourse of ethnography.
In ethnography, the non-western other has traditionally been placed outside
history, they have denied them the name of “history” and have given them the
name “nature”. This denial of coevalness, displacement in time and space, serves
to distance the observer from the observed, and removes the other from “the
dialogic situation” and contributes to an intellectual justification of colonialism.
The privileging of fieldwork suggests the significance given to techniques of
observation and the recording of “facts”. This epistemological model, based on
classical concepts of reality and representation, seems to align fieldwork with the
systematic effort to establish an unequal relationship between the “West” and its
“Other”. Fabian suggests that while the maintenance and renewal of this
relationship requires a “coeval recognition of the Other as object of
power/knowledge” the justification and rationalization of the relationship needs
the denial of coevalness.
The critique of ethnography is a critique of ethnocentricity, and it claims to see
the non-western other as different from the western, not bad, just different. But
the same gesture that pretends to assign difference, actually denies it, since it’s
still the civilized ethnographer who acts as agent of knowledge reflection.
The new critique of ethnography focuses on coevalness: once cultures and
subjects are recognized as sharing the same time and place, an inversion of the
Western traditions will be allowed by the non-western other producing, reflecting
and translating their own realities. It also accepts that neither culture nor text is
unified. Both are enmeshed in relations of power and both have more than one
subject. To see the split nature of subject/author is to take into account the role of
language in constructing both “subject” and “reality” and to challenge the notion
of language as transparent.
One of the accomplishments of the critique of anthropology is the attention it
pays to power relations and historicity in discussing the colonial construction of
the discipline. The critics are aware of the hegemonic strength of classic
ethnographic texts and the need to problematize the conditions of their creation.
VON FLOTOW
In the 1960s the notion of gender evolved and extended to the biological sexual
differences. Early feminist use of the term ‘gender’ referred to the result of the
social process that turns young females into girls, and later into women. This
process instills into girls and women the physical, psychological and
sociocultural attributes that are typical of a particular time and culture and which,
as a rule, differ substantially from the attributes of the men of the same period.
More recently, ‘gender’ studies have been examining the construction of male
attributes and attitudes that are typical of certain societies and cultures at specific
historical moments.
The feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s focused on 2 aspects:
- They tried to show that the difference between women and men was due
to artificial behavioral stereotypes with gender conditioning.
- They de-emphasized women’s differences, stressing women shared
experiences and their solidarity.
Gender was understood to be the basis of women’s subordination in public and
private life, and was viewed as a phenomenon affecting all women. It became an
analytical category and a notion that has impact on business decisions,
educational institutions and government policies. It is recognized as a basic
substructure of society that must be examined, analyzed and understood.
As regards language and women, there are 2 important approaches:
- The reformist approach which views conventional language as a symptom
of society which generates it, and it sees it as reformable, if good
intentions prevailed. This has led to the creation of handbooks with non-
sexist language, language workshops and courses, which represent women
in language, rather than subsume them under a category.
- The radical approach views conventional language as one of the most
important causes for women’s oppression, a medium through which
women were taught and come to know their subordinate place in the
world. Women positioned themselves in a role of the individual who is
excluded and trivialized through conventional patriarchal language. From
this perspective all of conventional language becomes a danger to
women’s confidence, self-esteem, psychological development and
creativity, precisely because it is controlled and manipulated by
“malestream” institutions.
The remedies that were applied to patriarchal language took radical forms.
Writers took issue with standard language and criticized, rewrote or ignored
dictionaries and other established reference materials. They viewed standard
syntax and the established literary genres as reflecting and perpetuating
patriarchal power structures.
Translation has long served as a way to describe what women do when they enter
into the public place: they translate their private language, their specifically
female forms of discourse, developed as a result of gendered exclusion, into
some form of the dominant patriarchal code.
Dunas explains that men don’t translate. They begin from a theoretical platform
that is already in place. “Feminine literature” is an organic writing which is
translated from blackness, from darkness. Women translators don’t know
themselves, or only poorly. And when women write, they translate this darkness,
like a new way of communicating rather than an already formed language.
The work of translating in the era of feminism has had an acute effect on
translation practice:
1. Translators have sought out contemporary women’s writing to
translate them in their culture. Because of the experimental nature of
much of this work, they have had to deal with enormous technical
challenges in the translations.
2. Because the women’s movement has defined language as a powerful
political instrument, women translators have made some interventions
or censorship in the translations.
3. Interest in women’s lost work.
1. The radical writing of the 1960s was experimental. It sought to destroy the
conventional everyday language. Women considered conventional
language as a cause for their oppression, so they needed to reform
patriarchal language. Radical feminist writing was experimental because
they seek new ideas, new grounds and a new feminist language. Writers
have tried new words, new grammatical structures, metaphors and new
language.
This have cause serious problems for translators. Some examples of this are
translating of the body and translating of the experiments with language. In the
first place, feminist writers have identified stereotypes when writing about the
female body: the devoted and unsexed mother, the lover, the holy virgin. So, they
have looked for and developed vocabulary for censored and denigrated parts of
the female body and they have tried to create an erotic writing that appeals to
women. So, the entire semantic field around issues of sexuality has caused
serious problems for translators.
As regards the translation of the experiments with language, such as change in
the syntax, in the grammatical structures, in words, or the creation of a new
feminist language, it was a difficulty for translators. When confronted with this
kind of texts, full of wordplay and fragmented syntax, translators had to develop
similar creative methods to supplement their work.
2. Translators who were politicized and found some texts as an offence, tend
to make some changes into the translations. Feminist translators “correct”
what they considered unacceptable and translated them in the name of the
feminist truths. Over the past decade a number of women translators have
assumed the right to query their source texts from a feminist perspective,
to intervene and make changes when the texts depart from their
perspective. This has been controversial, since translators are normally
expected to keep their ideologies or politics out of work.
When feminist translators intervene in a text for political reasons, they draw
attention to their action. In so doing, they demonstrate how easily misogynist
aspects of patriarchal language can be dismantled once they have been identified.
One example is Maier who translated Octavio Armand’s text and changed the
images of father/mother because she considered it as offensive. The same
happened with Levine who translated Cabrera Infante and considered his work
oppressively male and misogynist. Infante uses language that obscure women
and their works, so the translator makes some changes.
Another example is de Lotbiniere-Harwood who decides to censorship the parts
she considers offensive. While Maier and Levine explain their discomfort and
dismay at patriarchal language, de Lotbiniere-Harwood does not mitigate her
intervention with explanations, she assumes the right to change what she can’t
approve of, and she considers translation as a political practice.
3. Finally, feminists point out that the literary canon has always privileged
male works to detriment women’s works, as a result there are much work
of women writers lost. So translation has begun to play an important role
in making available the knowledge and experience of these writers.
Numerous publications of such work have appeared in translation.

LEFEVERE- TRANSLATING LITERATURE

Lefevere proposes some categories for translation analysis that go beyond
individual texts:
 1. Authority: not only the authority which comes from the patron, institution
or person commissioning or publishing the translation, but also the
authority which comes from the text and from the culture.
- Patron: authority draws the ideological parameters of the acceptable, so it
influences the selection of texts to be translated and how they are going to
be translated.
- Culture: there are some cultures which are considered, at certain times,
more prestigious than others, so they are more authoritative.
- Text: there are some texts which are considered as authoritative, for
example, the first translation of a classical text sometimes remains the
authoritative text.
2. Expertise and trust: the intended readers who don’t know the original trust
the experts (whose expertise is guaranteed and checked). They trust that
the translation is a fair representation of the original. Patrons who
commission and publish translations also trust the experts because they
leave the task of checking the translation to them.
3. Image: The image of the source text a translator has consciously or
unconsciously sets out to develop and the intended audience (the readers).
Translation not only projects the image of the work that is translated and
the world it belongs to, but it also protects their world against images
which are radically different, by adapting them or eliminating them.

BELL

 Explain Bell’s translator’s competence

The translator must, as a communicator, possess the knowledge and skills that are
common to all communicators, but in two languages.

The professional translator has access to five distinct kinds of knowledge:

1. Target language knowledge
2. Text-type knowledge
3. Source language knowledge
4. Subject area knowledge
5. Contrastive knowledge

The translator must have:

1. Semantic knowledge: How propositions are structured.
2. Syntactic knowledge: How clauses can be synthesized to carry propositional
content and analyzed to retrieve the content embedded in them.
3. Pragmatic knowledge: How the clause can be realized as information-bearing
text and the text decomposed into the clause.
Bell describes four areas of knowledge and skills within the communicative
competence:
 Grammatical competence: knowledge of the rules of the code. The knowledge
and skills required to understand and express the literal meaning of
utterances.
 Sociolinguistic competence: the ability to produce and understand utterances
appropriately in context.
 Discourse competence: the ability to combine form (cohesion) and meaning
(coherence) to achieve unified texts in different genres.
 Strategic competence: the mastery of communication strategies which may be
used to improve communication or to compensate for breakdowns.

Then, Bell defines the translator communicative competence as: “the knowledge and
ability possessed by the translator which permits him/her to create communicative
acts –discourse- which are not only grammatical but socially appropriate. In order to
create, comprehend and use context-free texts as the means of participation in
situated discourse, the translator must possess linguistic competence in both
languages and communicative competence in both cultures, consisting of:
 knowledge of the rules of the code which governs usage and knowledge of and
ability to utilize the conventions which constrain use; and
 knowledge of the options available for the expression of the macro functions
of language and knowledge of and ability to use the options available for
making clauses count as speech acts.

 Explain Bell’s model of translation

In his book, Bell provides a model of the translation process which derives from work
in psycholinguistics and in artificial intelligence on real-time natural language
processing. Bell says the process is not a linear one in which stages follow a strict
order. It is an integrated process in which the order is not fixed and back-tracking,
revision and cancellation of previous decisions are the norm rather than the exception.

He divides the process into: analysis and synthesis and, within them, three
distinguishable areas of operation: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic.

Analysis:
 Syntax: lexical meaning, analysis of structure. It involves deriving structure
from the linear string of symbols output by the visual word-recognition system.
 Semantics: relation between subject and content. It involves deriving content
from the syntactic structure. Analyzing what the clause is about.
 Pragmatics: Purpose. Tenor, mode and domain. This involves isolating the
thematic structure of information received and providing a register analysis of
 it.

Synthesis:
 Pragmatics: involves semantic representation: The translator decides if he’s
going to preserve or alter the purpose, the thematic structure and style of the
original.
 Semantics: it has to do with illocutionary force. Creating structures to carry
the propositional content and to produce a satisfactory proposition.
 Syntax: involves the structures and lexical meaning. The writing system is
activated to realize the clause as a string of symbols which constitute the TL
text.

The process of translating, concludes Bell, can be modelled as a cascaded and

interactive process which contains three major stages: syntactic, semantic and
pragmatic processing, and each of these has to be involved in both analysis and
synthesis.

BERMAN
He says that translation is a trial of the foreign, because it established the relation
between the proper and the foreign and because the foreign work is uprooted
from his foreign ground.
He talks about the ANALYTIC OF TRANSLATION which is the system of
deformation which operates in every translation and prevents it from being a trial
of the foreign. It’s an analysis of the deforming forces which are unconscious and
make the translation deviate from its essential aim. The analytic is designed to
discover these forces and show where they are practiced.
There are 2 kinds of analytic:
- Negative analytic: which is concerned with ethnocentric translations
(adaptations, free writing, etc) and with the deforming forces which are
unconscious and are part of the translator’s being.
- Positive analytic: which has to do with the operations that have always
limited the deformation in an unsystematic way.
There are 12 deforming forces:
1. RATIONALIZATION: it is related to the syntactic structures, how they
are rearranged in a certain idea of discursive order and how nouns are
translated into verbs and verbs into nouns. A rationalization that is
obligatory for us is gerunds, because some gerunds which are possible in
English are not possible in Spanish, so rationalization there is obligatory.
2. CLARIFICATION: concerns the level of clarity in words and their
meanings. Explicitation can mean the manifestation of something that is
 not apparent in the original, or it can aim to make clear something that is
not clear in the original text.
3. EXPANSION: it’s a consequence of the previous 2 tendencies. Every
translation is longer than the original, but sometimes the expansion is
empty: it adds nothing to the text, so we risk to have an overtranslation.
4. ENNOBLEMENT: it is an stylistic exercise which consists of producing
elegant sentences using the original text as raw material. It’s a kind of
rewriting.
5. QUALITATIVE IMPOVERISHMENT: replacement of terms, figures and
images in the original with terms, figure and images in the translation that
don’t have the same sonorous and iconic richness. A term is iconic when it
makes image.
6. QUANTITATIVE IMPOVERISHMENT: has to do with a lexical loss.
The translation contains less signifiers than the original. This results in a
translation which is longer and poorer.
7. DESTRUCTION OF THE RHYTHM: this is very difficult to destroy, but
one example is with the arbitrary change of punctuation.
8. DESTRUCTION OF THE UNDERLYING NETWORKS OF
SIGNIFICANCE: the literary work always has an underlying text where
certain signifiers link, forming a network. If this network is not
transmitted, then the signifying process is destroyed.
9. DESTRUCTION OF THE LINGUISTIC PATTERNING: this has to do
with the sentences construction. As a consequence, when the translation is
more homogenous, it’s more incoherent and inconsistent than the original.
10. DESTRUCTION OF THE VERNACULAR NETWORKS: exoticization
is used for translating the vernaculars. This can be done by using
typographical procedures, such as italics, to isolate what doesn’t exist in
the original and add it in the translation, or by translating a foreign
vernacular with a local one (for example, translating Parisian slag with
lunfardo de Buenos Aires).
11. DESTRUCTION OF IDIOMS OR EXPRESSIONS: prose is full of
images, expressions and figures. To translate them with an equivalent is to
attack the discourse of the foreign work.
12. DESTRUCTION OF THE SUPERIMPOSITION OF LANGUAGES:
superimposition of languages is threated by translation, since the tension
in the original, for example between Guarani and Spanish, tends to be
effaced.

EVEN ZOHAR
Translated literature may occupy 2 positions in the literary polysystem: a central
position and a peripheral position.
To say that a translated literature occupies a central position means that it
participates actively in shaping the center of the polysystem. It’s an integral part
of the innovatory forces, and there is no distinction between the original texts and
the translated writings. When the literary models are emerging, translated
literature is one of the means of creating a new repertoire.
3 conditions that may give rise to this situation:
1. When the polysystem or the literature is young. In this case a
translated literature fulfills the need of a younger literature to put into
use its newly founded tongue, so younger literatures benefits
themselves from other literatures.
2. When the literature is weak or peripheral- in this case they may not
have a repertoire, so this lack is filled with translated literature.
3. When there are turning points, crisis or literary vacuums.
To say that a translated literature occupies a peripheral position in the polysystem
means that it constitutes a peripheral system within the polysystem. In this case,
it does not have any influences in major processes and is modelled by the
dominant type in the target literature. It becomes a source of conservatism, a
means to preserve the traditional taste. There are no major changes in the
polysystem.
More often than not, the translated literature will occupy the peripheral position.
And sometimes it may be the case that a section of the translated literature is
peripheral whereas another section of the same literature is central.
When the translated literature occupies a central position, the translator’s main
concern is not to look for ready-made models in his home repertoire, bit he is
prepared to violate the home conventions. The adopted translational norms may
be foreign and revolutionary for the target literature. If this trend is defeated, then
the translation will not gain ground, but if the trend is successful, the repertoire of
the translated literature will be enriched and will be more flexible.
When the translated literature has a peripheral position, the translator’s main
concern is to look for ready-made secondary models for the following texts.

Mossop. Flojo.
What are the most important parameters that Mossop proposes if you
are acting as reviser-editor of your own translator? How are these
parameters inextricably intertwined with the analytical state Robinson
claims will give a translator probity and acumen?
¿Cuáles son los parámetros más importantes que propone Mossop si actúa como revisor-
editor de su propio traductor? ¿Cómo se entrelazan inextricablemente estos parámetros con el
estado analítico que, según Robinson, otorgará probidad y perspicacia a un traductor?
Los parametros de revision sirven para chequear errors y tipo de errors. Una lista exhaustive
sería interminable, pero para hablar y discutir la revision, resulta conveniente contar con una
lista corta de tipos de errors. Mossop propone 12 parametros que se dividen en 4 grupos.
1. TRANSFERENCIA
A. La traducción refleja el mensaje del texto Fuente? 🡪 PRECISÓN/EXACTITUD
La tarea principal de los traductores no literarios es garantizas que la traduccion
mantenga el mismo mensaje que el TF. La traducción no tiene que ser tan precisa
como sea posible, sino como sea necesario. De hecho, un exceso de atención en la
precision puede resultar en un texto incomprensible. Es preciso prestar atención a que
no hayan ambiguedades peligrosas y que el mensaje principal pueda ser entendido.
B. Se dejaron afuera elementos? 🡪 COMPLETENESS
A menos que estemos escribiendo un resumen o algún tipo de texto similar, se
requiere que los traductores incluyan todo el contenido del TF en la traduccion, sin
adiciones ni omisiones. Los traductores deben intentar proveer una interpretacion de
cada expression y, con algunas excepciones, deben reflejarlas en la traduccion.
Algunas adiciones y omisiones son necesarias, y siempre habrá información más y
menos relevante para mantener.
2. CONTENIDO
a. La secuencia de idea tiene sentido? Hay contradicciones o sinsentidos? 🡪 LOGICA
Debe evitarse cualquier tipo de sinsentido, contradiccion entre oraciones, secuencias
temporalis o causales imposibles, ed decir, cualquier tipo de error logico.
La falta de logica puede ser de dos formas: 1. El TF es ilogico y el traductor no ha hecho
nada al respect (si la intención está clara por el contexto, se puede cambiar algo apra
que resulte en un texto logico); 2. El TF tiene sentido, pero el traductor introdujo un
sinsentido.
b. Hay errors conceptuales, factuales, o matemáticos? 🡪 HECHOS
Generalmente estos errores aparecen el el TF, pero tambien pueden ser introducidos
por el traductor. En el primer caso, hay que cumplir con los deseos del cliente
3. LENGUA Y ESTILO(problemas con la lengua o con el estilo?
a. El texto es fluido? Se establecen conecciones claras? Las relaciones entre oraciones
son claras? Hay oraciones dificiles de leer? 🡪 FLUIDEZ
En terminus generals, el lector debera ser capaz de comprender el significado en una
sola lectura a velociadad promedio. Si no lo logra, posiblemente haya un problema con
la organizacion o una mala coneccion de oraciones.
b. El language utilizado es adecuado para los usuarios de la traducción? 🡪 HECHO A
MEDIDA (TAILORING)
La traduccion debe ser adecuada para los lectores de acuerdo al uso que le daran. Por
ejemplo, si es un manual de instrucciones para instalacion de algo en la computadora,
debemos imaginar al Usuario tipico de computadora siguiendo una secuancia de
acciones. Esto implica grado adecuado de formalidad y tecnicismo y el tono emotive
adecuado, ademas de un vocabulario que se adapte el nivel educativo del lector.

c. El estilo es el adecuado para el género? Se utiliza la terminología correcta? El fraseo

coincide con el utilizado en textos similares de la lengua meta? 🡪 SUBLENGUAJE
Cada genero y campo tienen un uso lexico, grammatical, sintactico, de estilo, etc que
es propio de cada uno y puede diferir entre lenguas. Make sure de que las elecciones
coincidan con el genero y el campo con el que lidiamos
d. Las combinaciones de palabras son idiomáticas? La traduccion cumple con las preferencias
retóricas de la lengua meta? 🡪 IDIOM (modismo, forma de expression, dialect)
Por lo general no todas las combinaciones gramaticales son utilizadas en la realidad. Pueden
ser gramaticales pero no idiomaticas. Estos usos idiomaticos no son un problema a menos que
el traductor no sea native de la lengua a la que traduce. Por ejemplo, wash you teeth es
perfectamente grammatical, pero el uso es clean or brush.

e. El uso de reglas gramaticales, ortografía, puntuacion, estilo es correcto? 🡪

MECANICA
Ademas de reviser que no hayan errores gramaticales, ortigraficos, de puntuacion, etc,
es preciso asegurarse de cumplir con el estilo que se ha sido especificado en un trabajo
en particular.

PRESENTACION FÍSICA
a. Hay problemas con la disposicion del texto en la página, como espacios, sangria, margenes,
etc? (LAYOUT) 🡪 DISPOSICION EN LA PAGINA
b. Hay problemas con el formato, como negrita, subrayado, Fuente, tamaño de la letra, etc? 🡪
TIPOGRAFÍA
c. hay problemas con la forma en la que el document esta organizado, ej, numero de pagina,
encabezados, notas al pie, tabla de contenidos 🡪 ORGANIZACIÓN