Misplaced Pages

#631368

65-758: The Translators Association (TA) represents literary translators in the United Kingdom . It is part of the Society of Authors (SoA) and is affiliated with the International Federation of Translators (FIT). The Translators Association (TA) was established in 1958 as a specialist group within the Society of Authors , the UK trade union for professional writers, with a membership of more than 12,000. The TA provides professional advice, representing individual translators and acting as an advocate for

130-405: A bilingual document is the 1274 BCE Treaty of Kadesh between the ancient Egyptian and Hittie empires . The Babylonians were the first to establish translation as a profession. The first translations of Greek and Coptic texts into Arabic, possibly indirectly from Syriac translations, seem to have been undertaken as early as the late seventh century CE. The second Abbasid Caliph funded

195-563: A translators association or other related organization is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Literary translator Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between translating (a written text) and interpreting (oral or signed communication between users of different languages); under this distinction, translation can begin only after

260-430: A " measure word " to say "one blossom-of roseness." Chinese verbs are tense -less: there are several ways to specify when something happened or will happen, but verb tense is not one of them. For poets, this creates the great advantage of ambiguity . According to Link, Weinberger's insight about subjectlessness—that it produces an effect "both universal and immediate"—applies to timelessness as well. Link proposes

325-637: A common etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. For example, the English actual should not be confused with the cognate French actuel ("present", "current"), the Polish aktualny ("present", "current," "topical", "timely", "feasible"), the Swedish aktuell ("topical", "presently of importance"), the Russian актуальный ("urgent", "topical") or

390-450: A framework known as grammaire générale , first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot in a book of the same title , dominated work in syntax: as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and so there is a single most natural way to express a thought. However, in the 19th century, with the development of historical-comparative linguistics , linguists began to realize

455-503: A fully adequate guide in translating. The Scottish historian Alexander Tytler , in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including listening to the spoken language , had earlier, in 1783, been made by the Polish poet and grammarian Onufry Kopczyński . The translator's special role in society

520-656: A kind of uncertainty principle that may be applicable not only to translation from the Chinese language, but to all translation: Dilemmas about translation do not have definitive right answers (although there can be unambiguously wrong ones if misreadings of the original are involved). Any translation (except machine translation, a different case) must pass through the mind of a translator, and that mind inevitably contains its own store of perceptions, memories, and values. Weinberger [...] pushes this insight further when he writes that "every reading of every poem, regardless of language,

585-399: A number of various topics that a syntactic theory is often designed to handle. The relation between the topics is treated differently in different theories, and some of them may not be considered to be distinct but instead to be derived from one another (i.e. word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations). One basic description of a language's syntax

650-565: A poem like [the one that Eliot Weinberger discusses in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with More Ways) ], another untranslatable feature is that the written result, hung on a wall, presents a rectangle. Translators into languages whose word lengths vary can reproduce such an effect only at the risk of fatal awkwardness.... Another imponderable is how to imitate the 1-2, 1-2-3 rhythm in which five- syllable lines in classical Chinese poems normally are read. Chinese characters are pronounced in one syllable apiece, so producing such rhythms in Chinese

715-491: A subject is inserted, a "controlling individual mind of the poet" enters and destroys the effect of the Chinese line. Without a subject, he writes, "the experience becomes both universal and immediate to the reader." Another approach to the subjectlessness is to use the target language's passive voice ; but this again particularizes the experience too much. Nouns have no number in Chinese. "If," writes Link, "you want to talk in Chinese about one rose, you may, but then you use

SECTION 10

#1732802431632

780-440: A text's source language are adjusted to the syntactic requirements of the target language. When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed those terms, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of calques and loanwords between languages, and to their importation from other languages, there are few concepts that are " untranslatable " among

845-459: A translation bureau in Baghdad in the eighth century. Bayt al-Hikma, the famous library in Baghdad, was generously endowed and the collection included books in many languages, and it became a leading centre for the translation of works from antiquity into Arabic, with its own Translation Department. Translations into European languages from Arabic versions of lost Greek and Roman texts began in

910-435: Is a categorial grammar that adds in partial tree structures to the categories. Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based upon probability theory are known as stochastic grammars . One common implementation of such an approach makes use of a neural network or connectionism . Functionalist models of grammar study the form–function interaction by performing a structural and a functional analysis. Generative syntax

975-531: Is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least to Samuel Johnson 's remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a flageolet , while Homer himself used a bassoon . In the 13th century, Roger Bacon wrote that if a translation is to be true, the translator must know both languages , as well as the science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether. The translator of

1040-736: Is an act of translation: translation into the reader's intellectual and emotional life." Then he goes still further: because a reader's mental life shifts over time, there is a sense in which "the same poem cannot be read twice." Translation of material into Arabic expanded after the creation of Arabic script in the 5th century, and gained great importance with the rise of Islam and Islamic empires. Arab translation initially focused primarily on politics, rendering Persian, Greek, even Chinese and Indic diplomatic materials into Arabic. It later focused on translating classical Greek and Persian works, as well as some Chinese and Indian texts, into Arabic for scholarly study at major Islamic learning centers, such as

1105-677: Is characterized by loose adaptation, rather than the closer translation more commonly found in Europe; and Chinese translation theory identifies various criteria and limitations in translation. In the East Asian sphere of Chinese cultural influence, more important than translation per se has been the use and reading of Chinese texts, which also had substantial influence on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, with substantial borrowings of Chinese vocabulary and writing system. Notable

1170-413: Is concerned. (For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the last two centuries, see the monumental work by Giorgio Graffi (2001). ) There are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. One school of thought, founded in the works of Derek Bickerton , sees syntax as a branch of biology, since it conceives of syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in

1235-463: Is defined as an element that requires two NPs (its subject and its direct object) to form a sentence. That is notated as (NP/(NP\S)), which means, "A category that searches to the right (indicated by /) for an NP (the object) and generates a function (equivalent to the VP) which is (NP\S), which in turn represents a function that searches to the left for an NP and produces a sentence." Tree-adjoining grammar

1300-552: Is described in a posthumous 1803 essay by "Poland's La Fontaine ", the Roman Catholic Primate of Poland , poet, encyclopedist , author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French and Greek, Ignacy Krasicki : [T]ranslation... is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor and portion of common minds; [it] should be [practiced] by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating

1365-457: Is not hard and the results are unobtrusive; but any imitation in a Western language is almost inevitably stilted and distracting. Even less translatable are the patterns of tone arrangement in classical Chinese poetry. Each syllable (character) belongs to one of two categories determined by the pitch contour in which it is read; in a classical Chinese poem the patterns of alternation of the two categories exhibit parallelism and mirroring. Once

SECTION 20

#1732802431632

1430-542: Is the Japanese kanbun , a system for glossing Chinese texts for Japanese speakers. Though Indianized states in Southeast Asia often translated Sanskrit material into the local languages, the literate elites and scribes more commonly used Sanskrit as their primary language of culture and government. Some special aspects of translating from Chinese are illustrated in Perry Link 's discussion of translating

1495-528: Is the norm in classical Chinese poetry , and common even in modern Chinese prose, to omit subjects; the reader or listener infers a subject. The grammars of some Western languages, however, require that a subject be stated (although this is often avoided by using a passive or impersonal construction). Most of the translators cited in Eliot Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei supply a subject. Weinberger points out, however, that when an "I" as

1560-443: Is the performance–grammar correspondence hypothesis by John A. Hawkins , who suggests that language is a non-innate adaptation to innate cognitive mechanisms. Cross-linguistic tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty. Some languages, however, exhibit regular inefficient patterning such as

1625-519: Is the sequence in which the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) usually appear in sentences. Over 85% of languages usually place the subject first, either in the sequence SVO or the sequence SOV . The other possible sequences are VSO , VOS , OVS , and OSV , the last three of which are rare. In most generative theories of syntax, the surface differences arise from a more complex clausal phrase structure, and each order may be compatible with multiple derivations. However, word order can also reflect

1690-542: Is the study of syntax within the overarching framework of generative grammar . Generative theories of syntax typically propose analyses of grammatical patterns using formal tools such as phrase structure grammars augmented with additional operations such as syntactic movement . Their goal in analyzing a particular language is to specify rules which generate all and only the expressions which are well-formed in that language. In doing so, they seek to identify innate domain-specific principles of linguistic cognition, in line with

1755-711: The translātiō pattern, whereas Russian and the South Slavic languages adopted the trāductiō pattern. The Romance languages , deriving directly from Latin, did not need to calque their equivalent words for "translation"; instead, they simply adapted the second of the two alternative Latin words, trāductiō . The Ancient Greek term for "translation", μετάφρασις ( metaphrasis , "a speaking across"), has supplied English with " metaphrase " (a " literal ", or "word-for-word", translation)—as contrasted with " paraphrase " ("a saying in other words", from παράφρασις , paraphrasis ). "Metaphrase" corresponds, in one of

1820-529: The Al-Karaouine ( Fes , Morocco ), Al-Azhar ( Cairo , Egypt ), and the Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad . In terms of theory, Arabic translation drew heavily on earlier Near Eastern traditions as well as more contemporary Greek and Persian traditions. Arabic translation efforts and techniques are important to Western translation traditions due to centuries of close contacts and exchanges. Especially after

1885-528: The Bible into German, Martin Luther (1483–1546), is credited with being the first European to posit that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language. L.G. Kelly states that since Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century, "it has been axiomatic" that one translates only toward his own language. Compounding the demands on the translator is the fact that no dictionary or thesaurus can ever be

1950-500: The Grammaire générale . ) Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of "subject – copula – predicate". Initially, that view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as Franz Bopp . The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th century, which could reasonably be called the "century of syntactic theory" as far as linguistics

2015-531: The Latin word translatio , which comes from trans , "across" + ferre , "to carry" or "to bring" ( -latio in turn coming from latus , the past participle of ferre ). Thus translatio is "a carrying across" or "a bringing across"—in this case, of a text from one language to another. Some Slavic languages and the Germanic languages (other than Dutch and Afrikaans ) have calqued their words for

Translators Association - Misplaced Pages Continue

2080-595: The Middle East 's Islamic clerics and copyists had conceded defeat in their centuries-old battle to contain the corrupting effects of the printing press , [an] explosion in publishing ... ensued. Along with expanding secular education, printing transformed an overwhelmingly illiterate society into a partly literate one. Syntax The word syntax comes from Ancient Greek roots: σύνταξις "coordination", which consists of σύν syn , "together", and τάξις táxis , "ordering". The field of syntax contains

2145-533: The Renaissance , Europeans began more intensive study of Arabic and Persian translations of classical works as well as scientific and philosophical works of Arab and oriental origins. Arabic, and to a lesser degree Persian, became important sources of material and perhaps of techniques for revitalized Western traditions, which in time would overtake the Islamic and oriental traditions. In the 19th century, after

2210-524: The concept of "translation" on translatio , substituting their respective Slavic or Germanic root words for the Latin roots. The remaining Slavic languages instead calqued their words for "translation" from an alternative Latin word, trāductiō , itself derived from trādūcō ("to lead across" or "to bring across")—from trans ("across") + dūcō , ("to lead" or "to bring"). The West and East Slavic languages (except for Russian ) adopted

2275-520: The context itself by reproducing the original order of sememes , and hence word order —when necessary, reinterpreting the actual grammatical structure, for example, by shifting from active to passive voice , or vice versa . The grammatical differences between "fixed-word-order" languages (e.g. English, French , German ) and "free-word-order" languages (e.g., Greek , Latin , Polish , Russian ) have been no impediment in this regard. The particular syntax (sentence-structure) characteristics of

2340-599: The 60th anniversary of the TA. Translators on the Cover - An open letter issued by the Society of Authors in September 2021, and signed by authors and translators, to campaign for translators' names to be included on the cover of the works they translate (#TranslatorsOnTheCover in social media ). This article related to a United Kingdom trade union is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about

2405-463: The Chinese tradition. Traditions of translating material among the languages of ancient Egypt , Mesopotamia , Assyria ( Syriac language ), Anatolia , and Israel ( Hebrew language ) go back several millennia. There exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh ( c.  2000 BCE ) into Southwest Asian languages of the second millennium BCE. An early example of

2470-522: The Dutch actueel ("current"). The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence , the 2nd-century-BCE Roman adapter of Greek comedies. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive, mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an artist . The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics such as Cicero . Dryden observed that "Translation

2535-447: The VO languages Chinese , with the adpositional phrase before the verb, and Finnish , which has postpositions, but there are few other profoundly exceptional languages. More recently, it is suggested that the left- versus right-branching patterns are cross-linguistically related only to the place of role-marking connectives ( adpositions and subordinators ), which links the phenomena with

2600-695: The actual practice of translation has hardly changed since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and the Middle Ages , and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents —"literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary—for the original meaning and other crucial "values" (e.g., style , verse form , concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with speech articulatory movements) as determined from context. In general, translators have sought to preserve

2665-418: The appearance of writing within a language community. A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source-language words, grammar , or syntax into the target-language rendering. On the other hand, such "spill-overs" have sometimes imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched target languages. Translators, including early translators of sacred texts , have helped shape

Translators Association - Misplaced Pages Continue

2730-573: The center is the letter-versus-spirit dilemma . At the literalist extreme, efforts are made to dissect every conceivable detail about the language of the original Chinese poem. "The dissection, though," writes Link, "normally does to the art of a poem approximately what the scalpel of an anatomy instructor does to the life of a frog." Chinese characters, in avoiding grammatical specificity, offer advantages to poets (and, simultaneously, challenges to poetry translators) that are associated primarily with absences of subject , number , and tense . It

2795-471: The extremes in the spectrum of possible approaches to translation. Discussions of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show remarkable continuities. The ancient Greeks distinguished between metaphrase (literal translation) and paraphrase . This distinction was adopted by English poet and translator John Dryden (1631–1700), who described translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in

2860-504: The framework of generative grammar, which holds that syntax depends on a genetic endowment common to the human species. In that framework and in others, linguistic typology and universals have been primary explicanda. Alternative explanations, such as those by functional linguists , have been sought in language processing . It is suggested that the brain finds it easier to parse syntactic patterns that are either right- or left- branching but not mixed. The most-widely held approach

2925-456: The human mind . Other linguists (e.g., Gerald Gazdar ) take a more Platonistic view since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system . Yet others (e.g., Joseph Greenberg ) consider syntax a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages. Syntacticians have attempted to explain the causes of word-order variation within individual languages and cross-linguistically. Much of such work has been done within

2990-423: The left (indicated by \) for an NP (the element on the left) and outputs a sentence (the element on the right)." Thus, the syntactic category for an intransitive verb is a complex formula representing the fact that the verb acts as a function word requiring an NP as an input and produces a sentence level structure as an output. The complex category is notated as (NP\S) instead of V. The category of transitive verb

3055-866: The middle of the eleventh century, when the benefits to be gained from the Arabs’ knowledge of the classical texts were recognised by European scholars, particularly after the establishment of the Escuela de Traductores de Toledo in Spain. William Caxton ’s Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (Sayings of the Philosophers, 1477) was a translation into English of an eleventh-century Egyptian text which reached English via translation into Latin and then French. The translation of foreign works for publishing in Arabic

3120-527: The modern European languages. A greater problem, however, is translating terms relating to cultural concepts that have no equivalent in the target language. For full comprehension, such situations require the provision of a gloss . Generally, the greater the contact and exchange that have existed between two languages, or between those languages and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating among them. However, due to shifts in ecological niches of words,

3185-479: The more recent terminologies, to " formal equivalence "; and "paraphrase", to " dynamic equivalence ". Strictly speaking, the concept of metaphrase—of "word-for-word translation"—is an imperfect concept, because a given word in a given language often carries more than one meaning; and because a similar given meaning may often be represented in a given language by more than one word. Nevertheless, "metaphrase" and "paraphrase" may be useful as ideal concepts that mark

3250-476: The place of that division, he positioned the verb as the root of all clause structure. Categorial grammar is an approach in which constituents combine as function and argument , according to combinatory possibilities specified in their syntactic categories . For example, other approaches might posit a rule that combines a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP), but CG would posit a syntactic category NP and another NP\S , read as "a category that searches to

3315-1160: The profession as a whole. The TA administers prizes for published translations of full-length works of literary merit and general interest from the following languages into English : Arabic , Dutch or Flemish , French , German , modern Greek , Italian , Japanese , Portuguese , Spanish , and Swedish . The TA is run by a committee of ten elected members. The current committee members are Vineet Lal and Ian Giles (co-chairs), Rosie Hedger, Anju Okhandiar, Clare Richards, Isabel del Rio, Nicola Smalley, Fiona Sze-Lorrain , as well as Shaun Whiteside and Roland Glasser (both ex-officio). Previous committee members include Anthea Bell , Peter Bush , Robert Chandler , Charlotte Collins , Howard Curtis , Rebecca DeWald, Kari Dickson , Marta Dziurosz, William Gregory, Daniel Hahn , Rosalind Harvey, Nicky Harman , Sawad Hussain, Natasha Lehrer , Antonia Lloyd-Jones , Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, Christina MacSweeney , Ruth Martin, Samantha Schnee, Ros Schwartz , Jamie Lee Searle, Trista Selous, Deborah Smith , Ruth Urborn, Helen Wang . Translators Association - A special series curated by Charlotte Collins to celebrate

SECTION 50

#1732802431632

3380-551: The same type. The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini , from c.  4th century BC in Ancient India , is often cited as an example of a premodern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory since works on grammar had been written long before modern syntax came about. In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as "traditional grammar" began with the work of Dionysius Thrax . For centuries,

3445-453: The semantic mapping of sentences. Dependency grammar is an approach to sentence structure in which syntactic units are arranged according to the dependency relation, as opposed to the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars . Dependencies are directed links between words. The (finite) verb is seen as the root of all clause structure and all the other words in the clause are either directly or indirectly dependent on this root (i.e.

3510-527: The semantics or function of the ordered elements. Another description of a language considers the set of possible grammatical relations in a language or in general and how they behave in relation to one another in the morphosyntactic alignment of the language. The description of grammatical relations can also reflect transitivity, passivization , and head-dependent-marking or other agreement. Languages have different criteria for grammatical relations. For example, subjecthood criteria may have implications for how

3575-527: The sense. Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of "imitation", i.e., of adapted translation: "When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments..." This general formulation of the central concept of translation— equivalence —is as adequate as any that has been proposed since Cicero and Horace , who, in 1st-century-BCE Rome , famously and literally cautioned against translating "word for word" ( verbum pro verbo ). Despite occasional theoretical diversity,

3640-465: The sheer diversity of human language and to question fundamental assumptions about the relationship between language and logic. It became apparent that there was no such thing as the most natural way to express a thought and so logic could no longer be relied upon as a basis for studying the structure of language. The Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic. (Indeed, large parts of Port-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from

3705-574: The subject is referred to from a relative clause or coreferential with an element in an infinite clause. Constituency is the feature of being a constituent and how words can work together to form a constituent (or phrase ). Constituents are often moved as units, and the constituent can be the domain of agreement. Some languages allow discontinuous phrases in which words belonging to the same constituent are not immediately adjacent but are broken up by other constituents. Constituents may be recursive , as they may consist of other constituents, potentially of

3770-474: The target language, "counterparts," or equivalents , for the expressions used in the source language: When [words] appear... literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since... what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words: 'tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate

3835-418: The untranslatables have been set aside, the problems for a translator, especially of Chinese poetry, are two: What does the translator think the poetic line says? And once he thinks he understands it, how can he render it into the target language? Most of the difficulties, according to Link, arise in addressing the second problem, "where the impossibility of perfect answers spawns endless debate." Almost always at

3900-414: The verb). Some prominent dependency-based theories of syntax are the following: Lucien Tesnière (1893–1954) is widely seen as the father of modern dependency-based theories of syntax and grammar. He argued strongly against the binary division of the clause into subject and predicate that is associated with the grammars of his day (S → NP VP) and remains at the core of most phrase structure grammars. In

3965-513: The very languages into which they have translated. Because of the laboriousness of the translation process, since the 1940s efforts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to automate translation or to mechanically aid the human translator . More recently, the rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for translation services and has facilitated " language localisation ". The English word "translation" derives from

SECTION 60

#1732802431632

4030-511: The wider goals of the generative enterprise. Generative syntax is among the approaches that adopt the principle of the autonomy of syntax by assuming that meaning and communicative intent is determined by the syntax, rather than the other way around. Generative syntax was proposed in the late 1950s by Noam Chomsky , building on earlier work by Zellig Harris , Louis Hjelmslev , and others. Since then, numerous theories have been proposed under its umbrella: Other theories that find their origin in

4095-508: The work of the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei (699–759 CE). Some of the art of classical Chinese poetry [writes Link] must simply be set aside as untranslatable . The internal structure of Chinese characters has a beauty of its own, and the calligraphy in which classical poems were written is another important but untranslatable dimension. Since Chinese characters do not vary in length, and because there are exactly five characters per line in

4160-933: The works of others than in their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they render their country. Due to Western colonialism and cultural dominance in recent centuries, Western translation traditions have largely replaced other traditions. The Western traditions draw on both ancient and medieval traditions, and on more recent European innovations. Though earlier approaches to translation are less commonly used today, they retain importance when dealing with their products, as when historians view ancient or medieval records to piece together events which took place in non-Western or pre-Western environments. Also, though heavily influenced by Western traditions and practiced by translators taught in Western-style educational systems, Chinese and related translation traditions retain some theories and philosophies unique to

4225-624: Was revived by the establishment of the Madrasat al-Alsun (School of Tongues) in Egypt in 1813. There is a separate tradition of translation in South , Southeast and East Asia (primarily of texts from the Indian and Chinese civilizations), connected especially with the rendering of religious, particularly Buddhist , texts and with the governance of the Chinese empire. Classical Indian translation

#631368