Aulas 1 a 3 Fundamentos da Tradução em Língua Inglesa

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Fundamentos da Tradução em Língua Inglesa
Ao final desta aula, você será capaz de:
1. Identify the different types of translation; (identificar os diferentes tipos de tradução;)
2. evaluate the role of the translator in relation to different types of translation described. (avaliar o papel do tradutor em face aos diferentes tipos de tradução descritos.)
The Meaning of Translation
The word translation comes from the Latin translatio, which means “to bring across”. If you think about the work performed by a translator, this meaning becomes more than evidenced: bringing information from one language to another so that the speaker/ writer of the second language can understand the message sent by the speaker/ writer of the first. 
The first translator was a hermeneutic who was given the task of interpreting the message sent from God to the Human beings. As time went by, the need to decode information among different peoples became more and more needed. Nowadays, there are many different ways and means by which languages can be translated and technology has come as an invaluable aid to the process of translation. Nevertheless, the process remains the same: there will be a person who knows both languages and will bridge the gap between the two to make the message known by the speaker of the second language. Thus, from here on we will call the language in which the text was originally written as the source language (SL) and the language into which the text will be translated the target language (TL).  
Now that you had this overview of the history of translation, let’s move on. The Tower of Babel is part of a story told in the book of Genesis in the Bible as a place where there was one people and one single language. God would have dismantled the place and scattered the languages all around the world to prevent them to get organised as a nation, and that was when the varied languages were created. 
Thus, as you could see, the need of translation has been present in the history of mankind since the very beginning of times, and the first attempt to decode messages across language was that of translating the message from God to the language of man. There have been many translations of the Bible and the 16th century witnessed many of these attempts, all of which were consequences of the attempt to understand the religious controversy of the time.
One of the first icons of translation is the Rosetta Stone and dates back from 196 BC. The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek. All the three scripts present basically the same text (with minor differences) and provided the key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Moving ahead in time, we can see the translation of Latin and Greek texts into many European languages. Humanism inspired the translation of many ancient texts and the job of translating a text from a foreign language into one's vernacular was seen by many as a noble challenge and a contribution to national literature. Others, however, considered it a job of minor importance, which would be performed by diplomats in the beginning of their careers or by writers who did not have fruitful careers.
The Renaissance was known as “the great age of translations” and many ancient documents were translated into European languages as a way of enriching those peoples with the so-valued knowledge that the great thinkers could provide. In the early 16th Century, the French had translated the works of Xenophon, Suetonius, Sallust, Thucydides, and Caesar but English translations would only come much later. Nicholas Grimshaw, in the preface to his 1558 English translation of Cicero focused on this phenomenon, and criticized the English for not having done for their country what Italians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Dutchmen and other foreigners have done for theirs.
Sir Thomas Hoby, an English Diplomat and translator, declared that it was his duty to his fellow countrymen to make available in English a useful guide about Renaissance court life, and translated Castiglione's The Book of Courtier into English in 1561. This book is considered to be one of the most important and widespread books of that time. English translations gradually increased; indeed, a study of Elizabethan translations is a study of the means by which the Renaissance came to England. However, the more translations were made, the more evident it became for the translators that in certain areas such as theology or medicine they would not find exact equivalents in English. There was a time they would say that English was not fit for the library but for the street (Crystal, 1995). At this time many foreign borrowings occurred. Some examples are: 
From Latin and Greek: anonymous, appropriate, autograph, chaos, climax, contradictory, disability, disrespect, emphasis, encyclopaedia, excursion, exist, impersonal, lexicon, relevant, scheme, system, temperature, thermometer, virus, among others.
From or via French: anatomy, chocolate, detail, entrance, grotesque, invite, moustache, muscle, passport, ticket, tomato, volunteer, among others.
From or via Italian: balcony, ballot, carnival, design, giraffe, lottery, opera, rocket, volcano, among others.
From or via Spanish and Portuguese: alligator, banana, canoe, cockroach, guitar, hammock, hurricane, mosquito, potato, tobacco, among others.
Theoretical Issues
In 1476, William Caxton set up his press in Westminster. This event is considered by many as the key factor that might have determined the shift from Middle to Modern English. Caxton was neither a linguist nor a literary scholar; he was a merchant who wanted the books he printed to be sold. In order to be successful, he was conscious that the language he used had to be understood throughout the country. 
At that time he already posed some questions dealt with by many translators in the years ahead:
- Should he use foreign words in his translation or replace them by native English words?
- Which variety of English should he follow, given the existence of major regional differences?
- How should language be spelled or punctuated, given the scribal variations of the previous centuries?
- In publishing native writers, should he change their language to make it more widely understood?
(Crystal, 1995, p57)
These are just a few of the issues translators have to face when choosing their way through translations. Other issues have arisen as time went by and translations started to bloom. Theories about the nature of translation started to emerge. The distinction between metaphase and paraphrase (the former referring to the literal translation (word-by-word) of the texts and the former to a reformulation of the original text) which had already been brought up by the Greeks was only one of them. In general, it has been agreed that translators would seek equivalents in the TL to match the meaning in the SL but would borrow terms from the TL if that was the only way to keep faithful to the message originally being conveyed.
Other issues are listed below:
- The grammatical structure: some languages have fixed word order (English, French, Portuguese) whereas others have free word order (Latin, Greek).  The declinations in Latin and Greek will determine their grammar, whereas in English, for instance, the position the words have in the sentence will do so.
- Etymological knowledge: eg. the use of cognates (for example: pretend/intend in English and pretender/intencionar in Portuguese).
- Fidelity or Transparency: if a TL text is faithful to the ST it means that it kept its full meaning, without distortion; if a TL text is transparent, it means that it appears to a native speaker of the TL to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to its grammar, syntax and idiom.
- Backtranslation: if a text in the TL is translated back to its SL will it keep the same meaning as in the original text?
You have probably checked the answers to the exercise above and have confirmed or rejected some of the answers you have provided. Let’s examine each of the items carefully.
• A competent translator must have very good knowledge (written and spoken) of the SL and an excellent command of the TL. Translators have to make choices when transferring information from a SL to a TL, and therefore, they must be well aware of the alternatives they have. Moreover, they also have to know about the etymological and idiomatic correlates between the two languages so as to make informed choices.
• A competent translator does need experience and the more translations he does the more practice will he get. It has been suggested that it will take a person about 10 years of practice to become an accomplished translator. Simply being able to speak the SL and the TL is not enough.
• A competent translator must be not only bilingual but bicultural as he needs to make use of intercultural references so as to be able to make choices in order to make his translation transparent.
• A competent translator must have a profound understanding of the etymological and idiomatic correlates between the two languages in order to avoid using equivalents that do not carry the meaning being implied by the author.
• A competent translator must never censor the text being translated. The work of a translator is simply transferring the information from a SL to a TL as faithfully as possible without placing any sort of judgment on what is being said.
• A competent translator needs to be familiarized with the content of the text being translated. Kasparek (1983) states that translations inescapably involve choice, and choice implies interpretation. Thus, the familiarity with the content is mandatory so translators can make sensible choices while translating.
 Fundamentos da Tradução em Língua Inglesa
Ao final desta aula, você será capaz de:
1. Identify the different types of translation; (identificar os diferentes tipos de tradução;)
2. evaluate the role of the translator in relation to different types of translation described. (avaliar o papel do tradutor em face aos diferentes tipos de tradução descritos.)
Miguel de Cervantes in his Don Quixote, once wrote that:
“Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.” 
This enlightening quotation can illustrate how challenging the work of a translator can be and how important it is in giving meaning to a message sent in a SL to a TL. The idea that the meaning proposed by an author can be obscured in TL if not translated carefully is strengthened when we come across badly translated texts in which the message is totally different from the original one.
In our previous lesson, we had an overview of the story of translation through times and started studying the role of the translator. In this second lesson, we will go through the different types of translation and continue analysing the work of a translator, this time comparing the jobs of the translator and the interpreter.
Types of Translations
Translations can be classified into many different categories, depending on the form (oral, written), type (literal, non-literal), method (simultaneous, consecutive), the medium (human, computer-assisted, mechanic).  
Observe the following chart. Click on each of the boxes to know more about each of them:
Human – Translation from SL to TL made by a human translator.
Mechanical – Translation in which a computer program analyses a source text and produces a target text without any human intervention. This kind of translation can usually be used with texts with limited range of vocabulary and simple sentence structure.
Computer-aided – Translation in which a human translator decodes language from SL to TL with the assistance of a computer. Usually the computer does the first round of translation and the professional translator revises the produced text for fine-tuning.
Written – Translation performed in written form, irrespective of the text format, and can be literal or non-literal, consecutive or simultaneous.
Oral – Translation performed in oral form, irrespective of the text format, and, differently from the written mode, can only be non-literal, consecutive or simultaneous.
Non-literary - Translation of texts that belong to the world of facts (eg. weather forecast, reports).
Literary – Translation of texts that belong to the world of imagination (eg. literature and other similar texts).
Consecutive – Type of oral translation in which the SL is translated into the TL after the utterance has been made.
Simultaneous – Type of oral translation in which the SL is translated into the TL almost at the same time in which the utterance has been made.
Sight-translation – Type of translation in which a written text in the SL is translated orally into the TL. It can occur both consecutively or simultaneously.
Machine Translation (MT) - Translation in which a computer program analyses a text in a SL and produces a text in the TL without human intervention; this sort of translation, however, involve pre- or post-editing from a translator.
Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT)/ Machine-Assisted Translation (MAT) – Translation in which human translators interact with a translation system, as an assistance tool, and which offers, a list of translations that best complete the part of the sentence already translated.
Human-Assisted Machine Translation (MAMT) - Translation in which a computer system does most of the translation, appealing in case of difficulty to a (mono- or bilingual) human for help.
Types of Translation According to the Level os Analysis and Synthesis
Another way of classifying the types of translation is related to the level of analysis/ synthesis of the text. They can be:
The classification according to the Unit of Translation is quite self-explanatory. Focus your attention on the other classifications.
 Using the number in parentheses next to the classifications above, match the categories to the following definitions listed below:
Back Translation - Kind of translation in which the translated text in the TL is translated back to SL to determine if the original meaning has been preserved.
Common Language Translation - Kind of translation in which a text in a SL is translated in the same SL in an idiomatic version to suit the average speaker. The grammar and lexis of the text is chosen very carefully to ensure understanding of the text.
Free translation - Kind of translation that keeps the meaning from the SL but uses the natural forms of the TL. This is a kind of idiomatic translation.
Translators or Interpreters?
In our first lesson, we studied the role of the translator and the different opportunities available for this professional in the job market. Now that we have been through some of the different types of translation, we can see that none of the types described, except for the machine translation type, would be feasible without the interference of the translator. We have already studied some of the requirements needed for a good translator; now we shall expand what we studied about the translator’s role vis-à-vis the different types of translations studied in this lesson.
In this lesson we saw that two of the possible types of translation are the oral or written mode. And based on these, the translators can work both as translators (in a broad sense) or interpreters. The difference between these two professionals is that the final product of a translator’s job is a written document, whereas the final product of an interpreter isin oral mode.
The work of an interpreter is very stressing and requires a lot of ability and practice from the professional. Some of the skills required include: 
- High degree of proficiency in both English and the other language.
- Impartiality.
- Ability to accurately and idiomatically turn the message from the SL into the TL without any additions, omissions or - other misleading factors that alter the intended meaning of the message from the speaker.
- Be used to doing simultaneous and consecutive interpretation and sight translation.
- Ability to communicate orally including appropriate delivery and poise.
- Having high professional standards and professional conduct.
Translation Workflow
Once the translator has accepted a translation task, there are certain basic stages that should be followed. The process of translation may vary from one translator to another but basically the stages include:
Evaluation: The project is evaluated using the following criteria: Target Language/Audience and Subject Matter
Glossary Development: A glossary is created to ensure consistency of terminology, so that translations complement one another and are consistent.
Initial Translation: The source document is translated.
Quality Assurance: After the completion of the initial translation, the translation undergoes a review by a senior translator or an editor. The translation is edited and proofread for grammatical and syntactic accuracy and appropriateness of style and for possible omissions. The editor then works with the original translator to decide which changes to be implemented.
Client Approval: The first draft of the document is sent to the client for approval.
Translator Proofreading: The original translator now proofs the formatted text for any discrepancies caused by formatting, such as improper hyphenation, omissions, etc.
Final Delivery to Client: The translated and formatted document is now handed in to the client.
 Fundamentos da Tradução em Língua Inglesa
Ao final desta aula, você será capaz de:
1. Have a brief Idea of the contributions that the study of Linguistics has brought to translation studies; (ter uma breve idéia das contribuições que o estudo da lingüística trouxe para o estudo da tradução;)
2. understand the various aspects which are into play when translating a text a SL to a TL. (entender os vários aspectos que devem ser considerados ao fazer a tradução de um texto para a língua alvo.)
Most of the times there will be lexical correspondences between different languages (parts of the body, family relations)
Some languages don’t have words to describe everything (in the video, chrome handlebars in English, for example)
Some languages don’t have words to describe items which would be considered essential to other cultures (left, right) as they have different kinds of spatial orientation (cardinal orientation).
These few issues are enough to give us just a glimpse of the great amount of differences one can find between languages, and provide us with an overview of the importance that the study of Linguistics has acquired in helping translators cope with such differences. 
We have already studied that translations have been present in the history of man since its early years, however translation was not considered a field of studies before the 1980’s.
Since then, the interest in translation literacy has been evidenced by the proliferation of translation training programmes worldwide and nowadays most universities have a department of translation studies interested in investigating the differences among languages and how to deal with such diversity when having to translate texts from a SL to a TL.
The more translators investigated into their field the more interdisciplinary the study of translation became and contribution from various fields of study such as linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, philosophy and anthropology, among others, was welcome into the investigation.
In this unit we shall focus our attention on some of the contributions linguistics has offered to the study of translation and the important insights it has brought to this field of study.
Jakobson and the Linguistic Aspects of Translation
Roman Jakobson (1959) was one of the first linguists to consider the contributions of linguistics to the study of translation. In his text On Linguistic Aspect of Translation he deals with issues that are crucial in understanding the translation process such as interlingual, intralingual and semiotic differences.
Let’s take for example the word snow. 
Except for the inhabitants of a few cities in the south of Brazil, the concept of snow to the average Brazilian is limited to the idea of falling snowflakes taken from movies.
Even in textbooks, when students learn the question “What’s the weather like?” the idea of snow does not go beyond the symbol  used to represent snow in weather reports and  other related texts.
How would a Brazilian translate the words crust, crud, slush, powder, ice, all of them referring to different types of snow without having to resort to other linguistic resources rather than that of summoning the pre-conceived knowledge that the word snow offers? 
That is to say that meaning (signatum) cannot exist without a sign (signum). 
So that a listener can fully understand the meaning of a word he must have the concept of this word clear in his mind.
Thus, when having to translate a text about snow, for example, to a Brazilian, the translator will have to make use of more explicit language to try and convey the meaning of certain items to a reader/ listener who does not have the same linguistic reference as the one who has produced the text.
Jakobson makes a distinction among three possible types of translation:
Intralingual translation - Or rewording refers to the interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs in the same language. For example, the intralingual translation of bring up in the sentence She was brought up by her grandparents would be “take care for someone until s/he is an adult, often giving this person particular beliefs”.
Interlingual translation - Or translation itself refers to the interpretation of verbal signs by means of another language. For example, the interlingual translation of the sentence She was brought up by her grandparents into Portuguese would be something similar to Ela foi criada e educada por seus avós. 
Intersemiotic translation - Or transmutation refers to the interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal signs systems (music or image). For example, when Edward Munch painted The Scream, he tried to translate into an image his concept of a scream:
 
Let’s examine more deeply the concept of the interlingual translation, which is the focus of our study. 
The example cited and its translation (She was brought up by her grandparents/ Ela foi criada e educada por seus avós) leads us to an interesting issue to observe as regards translations: the choice of the words criada and educada in the TL somehow accounts for the idea that some sort of “particular belief” would have to be present during the upbringing. 
Thus, both criada and educada have to be present so that the meaning of bring up can be fully translated.  
To the Brazilian Portuguese speaker, the use of the verb criar does not bring along the concept of educar  (which, by the way, is not equivalent to educate in English), so, in order to keep the meaning implied by bring up a suitable translation would have to include the verbs criar and educar. 
As Jakobson says, “there is ordinarily no full equivalence between code-units, while messages may serve as adequate interpretations of alien code-units or messages”.
One of the main concerns in linguistics is the mutual translability between languages: is it possible to find exact equivalence in meaning when translating a message from a SL to a TL?
Nothing can be interpreted without a translation of its signs into other signs in thesame language or into signs of another language. The picture illustrates the process of translation from a SL into a TL.
Equivalence in difference is one of the main concerns of linguistics. 
When translating a text from a SL into a TL, the linguist examines the mutual translability between the two languages to try and to find a correspondent in the TL that provides the exact meaning to the text (oral or written) in the SL. 
This search for an equivalent will take into account many different aspects of both languages so the receiver of the message in the TL can understand the message correctly.
In one of the examples we cited we mentioned the translation of the verb to raise from English to Portuguese and suggested that the verbs criar and educar be included so as to give the exact meaning to the verb in English.
Many other examples can be cited, for example, the word saudade from Portuguese to English can be translated by means of the verb to miss, but the meaning in English would have to be complemented in order to fully translate the original meaning in Portuguese.
When it comes to grammar, the translator has to be even more careful.
Eventually one can come across items which have no corresponding grammatical equivalent in the TL.
In this case the meaning would have to be translated in lexical terms.
Take for example the sentence Joan had her hair cut. (The causative have has no equivalent form in Brazilian Portuguese and in order to explain the meaning implied by the sentence, the translator would have to make use of other verbal resources to explain the fact that Joan did not actually cut her hair herself (in which case the sentence would have to be Joan cut her hair).
Another interesting example would be the lack of gender marker in English.
The translation of words with dual gender (friend, teacher, baby, doctor, student) requires a gender marker in Brazilian Portuguese.
For instance, when translating a sentence such as The student decided to study hard for his final tests, the translator would have to look for textual clues to help him choose between “o aluno” or “a aluna”. 
Similarly, when translating the sentence Meus irmãos vivem perto da minha casa into English, the translator would have to look for elements to define if “irmãos” corresponds to brothers (if the speaker has male siblings only) or if there is a sister among them, in which case the translation to English would have to make reference to both brothers and sisters.
Register is another aspect to be considered. For example, the word sibling used in the previous paragraph could be used as an equivalent to “irmãos” if the text being translated was of a more formal nature, but would not be suitable in a more colloquial exchange.
Pragmatics is another issue worth investigating for the study of translation. It can be defined the study of the purposes for which sentences are used. 
For instance, let’s imagine the following two scenes:
Two people in an enclosed room, the weather is cold and the window is opened. One of them says: “It’s cold”. The purpose of the sentence is not to say it’s cold, but to suggest that the window be closed. Thus, in this case It’s cold = Close the window.
A mother and a son; the son is leaving home wearing a T-shirt. The mother looks at him and at his clothes. She says: “It’s cold”. The purpose of the sentence is not to say it’s cold, but to suggest that son get a coat. Thus, in this case It’s cold = Get a coat.
How would a translator deal with each of the situations? 
If both situations were part of written texts, and the texts were being translated from English to Brazilian Portuguese, the purpose of the sentence “It’s cold” would be easily understood in both languages.
If, however, the situations were part of a verbal account, the translator would probably have to make use of other clues to make the meaning of the utterance clear for the receiver (describing the setting or the weather, for example). 
In other situations, the understanding of the function of certain utterances in communication might constitute of an issue for the translator (children understanding the use of irony, for instance).
1 – Naturalization - Transferring a word from SL into TL text in its original form. The words fiancé and fiancée, which have been taken from French, for instance.
2 – Neutralization - A type of paraphrase at word level (the item is generalized (neutralized) with some culture free words. Take, for example, the types of snow described in the beginning of this lesson, instead of describing any of the types of snow, the translator could opt for the use of the word snow simply.
3 - Descriptive and functional equivalente - Explaining a SL cultural item in one of either  two ways: a descriptive or a functional element. The descriptive element deals with size, color and composition. The functional element talks about the purpose of the SL cultural-specific word.
4 -  Explanation as footnote - The translator may decide to give extra information to the TL reader in a footnote. It may come at the bottom of the page, at the end of chapter or at the end of the book.
5 - Cultural equivalente - The SL cultural word is translated by TL cultural word. In this case, there is an equivalent word in the TL to translate the one in the SL.
6 – Compensation - A technique used to confront the loss of meaning, sound effect, pragmatic effect or metaphor in part of a text. The word or concept is compensated in other part of the text.
Corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is a study of language and a method of linguistic analysis which uses a collection of natural or “real word” texts known as corpus. Corpus linguistics is used to analyze and research a number of linguistic questions and offers insights into the dynamism of languages.
The use of a corpus database constitute of an invaluable tool for the translator as it can help him decide on the use of certain words during translation. 
Let’s have a look at the British National Corpus and search for the word sibling, mentioned in the beginning of this lesson.
We can see that most of the sentences indicate a formal use of the word, which would ratify our decision of using siblings in formal contexts and brothers and sisters in more informal ones.  
Corpus Linguistics can aid the translator  by: 
allowing access to naturalistic linguistic information (corporal consist of “real word” texts which are mostly a product of real life situations, which makes corporal a valuable research source for dialectology, sociolinguistics and stylistics);
facilitating linguistic research, thus reducing the time needed to find particular words or phrases (a research that would take days or even years to complete manually can be done in a matter of seconds with the highest degree of accuracy);
enabling the study of wider patterns and collocation of words;
allowing analysis of multiple parameters at the same time (researchers can analyze a larger number of parameters simultaneously);
facilitating the use of the second language (study of the second language with the use of natural language allows the students/ translators to get a better “feeling” for the language and learn the language like it is used in real rather than “invented” situations);