1. Prose Translation
In fact, translation of prose is the most common among literary translations; it is far easier in themes, techniques, style and even in principles, than that of poetry and drama. Prose includes essays, fiction, biographies, autobiographies and other prosaic writings. Prose translation is also considered as the most common and popular as compared to other genre translations.
As quoted in Susan Basnett’s Translation Studies, Hilaire Belloc laid down six general rules for the translator of prose texts:
(I) The translator should not “plod on”, word by word or sentence by sentence, but should always “block out” his work. By “block out”, Belloc means that the translator should consider the work as an integral unit and translate in sections, asking himself before each section, what the whole sense is, and what he has to render.
(II) The translator should render idiom by idiom and idioms of their nature demand translation into another form from that of the original. Belloc cites the case of the Greek exclamation “By the Dog!”, which, if rendered literally, becomes merely comic in English, and suggests that the phrase “By God!” is a much closer translation. Likewise, he points out that the French historic present must be translated into the English narrative tense, which is past.
(III) The translator must render “intention by intention”, bearing in mind that the intention of a phrase in one language may be less emphatic than the form of the phrase, or it may be more emphatic. By “intention”, Belloc seems to be talking about the weight a given expression may have in a particular context in the SL that would be disproportionate if translated literally into the TL. He quotes several examples where the weighting of the phrase in the SL is clearly much stronger or much weaker than the literal TL translation, and points out that in the translation of “intention”, it is often necessary to add words not in original to conform to the idiom of one’s own tongue.
(IV) Belloc warns against les faux amis, those words or structures that may appear to corresponds in both SL and TL but actually do not, e.g. demander – to ask translated wrongly as to demand.
(V) The translator is advised to transmute boldly and Belloc suggests that the essence of translating is the resurrection of an alien thing in a native body.
(VI) The translator should never embellish (120-121).
Belloc’s six rules cover both points of technique and points of principle. He accepts that there is a moral responsibility to the original, but feels that the translator has the right to significantly alter the text in the translation process in order to provide the TL reader with a text that conforms to TL stylistic and idiomatic norms (Basnett 121)
2. Types of Literary Translation
1. Literary and Non-literary Translation
Traditional theorists divided translation into two types; literary translation and non-literary translation. Literary translation simply means translation of literature, where the translators were concerned with both sense and style. In non-literary translation, the emphasis was on sense. It was meant not to be “word for word” but “sense for sense” translation.
2. JOHN DRYDEN‟S CLASSIFICATION:
John Dryden, in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), divided translation into three basic types:
(I) Metaphrase, or turning an author word by word and line by line, from one language into another. This is an extreme literal translation.
(II) Paraphrase, or translation with latitude, the Ciceronian “sense for sense” view of translation. In this type of translation, adhering to the ST author’s original words is secondary to reproducing the intended ST meaning. For example, terms which designate culture-specific or highly complex technical or scientific concepts may have to be rendered using paraphrases (Munday 214).
(III) Imitation, where the translator can abandon the text of the original as he sees fit. Imitation corresponds to a very free translation or adaptation.
3. D. Washer’s Classification
D. Washer in his Encyclopedic Dictionary of Literary Terms puts forth three basic kinds of translation:
(I) A more or less literary exact rendering of the original meaning at the expense of the syntax, grammar, colloquialism and idioms of the language into which it is put (e.g. Lang, Leaf and Myers’ famous translation of the Iliad, 1883;
(II) An attempt to convey the spirit, sense and style of the original by finding equivalents is syntax, grammar and idiom (e.g. Dryden‟s Virgil, 1697);
(III) A fairly free adaptation which retains the original spirit but may considerably after style, structure, grammar and idiom (e.g. Edward FitzGerald’s free versions of six of Calseron’s plays, with 1853; the same author’s version of Omar Khayyam 1859) (623).
4. Literal and Free Translation
The distinction between “literal” and “free translation” can be found with Cicero (106- 43 BC) and St. Jerome (ca.347-420) in the “sense-for-sense” versus “word-for-word” debate. Literal translation is in essence concerned with the level of words, i.e. a word is the unit of translation. A narrow interpretation of literal translation conceives it as the one-by-one rendering of individual ST words into TL. This, however, turns out to be unfeasible, e.g. an Arabic sentence may not be rendered into English using the same number of words, instead it requires one or more words less. A broader definition of literal translation describes it as the close adherence to the surface structures of the ST message both in terms of semantics and syntax.
In a literary translation, G.E. Wellworth says, “what is required is the re-creation of a situation or cohesive semantic block in the new language in terms of the cultural setting of that language” (qtd. in Das 29). In literary translation, the translator decodes the motive of the SL text and re-encodes it in the TL text. In other words, an SL text gets recontextualized in the TL text. That is why Chandra Sekhar Patil calls literary translation “a transplantation of experience” from one linguistic plain to another (Das 29).
Free translation, in translating literature, is treated as a broad category comprising virtually any type of translation that is not faithful to the original, hence defining it depends on what individual scholars understand by it. A general definition of free translation conceives it as a strategy which is more concerned with creating a TT that sounds natural in the TL than with conforming to ST elements and structures. In contrast to literal translation, free translation tends to go beyond the word level, which means that the unit of translation can be a phrase, clause, sentence or even a larger unit (Munday 191).
The distinction between free and literal translation has been the subject of many studies and has undergone various developments. One of the most famous attempts at providing new descriptions of literal versus free translation can be found in Catford (1965). He differentiates between “bound” and “unbounded” translation: the former type is bound by rank (e.g. a word needs to be translated by a word, a phrase by a phrase, and so on); the latter type, which corresponds to free translation, can render an ST text segment with a TL segment of a different length (e.g. an ST phrase may become a TL clause). Other scholars view free translation as a translation that goes beyond what is required to render the ST meaning without alteration while the TL requirements have been fully adhered to (Munday 191).
5. J.C. Catford’s Classification
J.C. Catford, who sets up his theory of translation based on the principles of general linguistics developed by Halliday, classifies translation into a number of types:
5.1. Full Translation and Partial Translation
J.C. Catford makes a classification of translation in terms of extent, level and ranks, as “total” and “restricted” translation or “full” and “partial” translation. The destination between “full” and “partial” translation is made in terms of extent. In a “full” translation, every part of the SL text is replaced by the material in the TL text. Catford defines:
In a partial translation, some part or parts of the SL text are left untranslated: they are simply transferred to and incorporated in the TL text. In literary translation it is not uncommon for some SL lexical items to be treated in this way, either because they are regarded as “untranslatable” or for the deliberate purpose of introducing “local colour” into the TL text. This process of transferring SL lexical items into a TL text is more complex than appears at first sight, and it is only approximately true to say that they remain untranslated.
5.2. Total Translation and Restricted Translation
Catford makes a distinction between “total” and “restricted” translation which is related to the levels of language in translation. He defines “total” translation as “replacement of SL grammar and lexis by equivalent TL grammar and lexis with consequential replacement of SL phonology/graphology by (non-equivalent) TL phonology/graphology”. A restricted translation is that where the SL textual material is replaced by equivalent TL textual material at one level only. Restricted translation at the grammatical level or lexical level only is difficult if not impossible because of the independence of grammar and lexis. But Catford does give examples of all four types:
5.2.1. Grammatical Translation
The source language grammar is replaced by equivalent target language grammar without replacing source language lexis by target language lexis.
Lexical Translation
The source language lexis is replaced by equivalent target language lexis without replacing source language grammar by target language grammar.
Graphological Translation
The graphic substance of the SL is replaced by “equivalent” graphic substance of the TL, with no replacements at the levels of phonology, lexis or grammar except for accidental changes.
Phonological Translation
This is a kind of “restricted” translation where the phonological units of the source language text are replaced by equivalent phonological units of the target language. The grammar and lexis of the source language text remain the same except the random grammatical or lexical deviations. In doing the phonological translation of the English plural “cats” to a language which has no final consonant clusters might be kat (Das 32).
6. Interlinear Translation
This is sometimes known as “Cribs/Exact Translation”. Jeremy Munday defines, “A translation written between the lines of the ST. It is often used to indicate the lexical and syntactic structure of the ST, for the purpose of analysis or to enable the TT reader access to a sensitive text. Walter Benjamin describes interlinear translation of the Bible as the “ideal of all translation” because it gives fresh vigor to the ST” (199).
7. Transliteration
Here, SL graphological units are replaced by TL graphological units; but these are not translation equivalents, since they are not selected on the basis of relationship to the same graphic substance. In other words, the one-by-one rendering of individual letters and signs of an SL item in one alphabet with the closest corresponding letters and signs of another alphabet (Munday 236).
8. Overt Translation and Covert Translation
This is J. House’s classification of major translation types or strategies. An overt translation is one that presents the text explicitly as a translation. The source text leading to such a translation may be of two types: a text closely associated with a historical occasion (e.g. a speech delivered by a prominent political figure) or a “timeless” text, i.e. essentially a text of literary status, one that, while, transmitting a message of general significance is also clearly source-culture specific (Palumbo 81). Covert translation describes a translation which is comparable to the ST in terms of the function it has in its discourse environment. In House’s translation model, this type of translation focusses on “language use”, as a result of which anything which might remind the TT readership of the origin and discourse environment of the ST is suppressed (Munday 179).
9. Semantic and Communicative Translation
Semantic Translation is a translation aiming at rendering the exact meaning of the original while considering the “bare syntactic and semantic constraints of the TL”. For example, a semantic translation for the German Frischer angestrichen! would be Recently painted!, instead of the communicative translation Wet paint!, which in many contexts would be a more appropriate solution (Newmark 54). Communicative translation is a mode of translation that gives priority to the informative function of the ST or reproduces on TL readers the effect obtained on readers of the original. A communicative translation of the French Défense de marcher sur le gazon would be Keep of the grass, while a semantic translation would be Walking on the turf is forbidden.
10. Documentary and Instrumental Translation
Proposed by Christiane Nord, documentary translation refers to both a method and a type of translation having as their primary aim that of reporting on the communication given in the original text (Nord 72). A documentary translation can be seen as a reproduction of the ST which privileges formal correspondence, or a way of informing the reader of the content of the ST without fitting the TT to the target situation in either functional or communicative terms (Palumbo 38). Instrumental translation refers to a method of translation aimed at producing a text that, in the target context, functions independently from the ST (Nord 81). An instrumental translation, in other words, focuses on the communicative purpose of the TT, which may be different from that of the ST.