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MICHELA CANEPARI
AN INTRODUCTION TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND TRANSLATION STUDIES
Milano 2011
© 2011
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Table of Contents
Introduction ..............................................................................7 Chapter 1 The Development of Language Studies .......................................11 1.1.The Beginning of the Twentieth Century..........................11 1.1.1. Saussure................................................................14 1.2.Structuralism...................................................................18 1.2.1. Jakobson ...............................................................23 1.2.2. Peirce....................................................................30 1.2.3. Chomsky...............................................................32 1.2.4. Barthes..................................................................36 1.2.5. Greimas ................................................................46 1.3.Poststructuralism .............................................................48 1.3.1. Derrida .................................................................49 1.4.Recent Developments in Language Studies.......................51 1.4.1. Newmark’s Componential Analysis ........................52 1.5.Discourse Analysis and its Disciplines ..............................56 1.5.1. Ethnography of Speaking .......................................57 1.5.2. Pragmatics ............................................................59 1.5.3. Conversational Analysis .........................................69 1.5.4. Interactional Sociolinguistics..................................73 1.5.5. Critical Discourse Analysis.....................................74 Chapter 2 Discourse and its Defining Elements ...........................................81 2.1.The Context of Situation .................................................82 2.1.1. Registers ...............................................................86 2.1.2. Dialects.................................................................90 3
An Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies
2.1.3. The Notion of Function.........................................99 2.2.The Co-Text .................................................................103 2.2.1. The Notion of Cohesion ......................................103 2.2.2. Textual Types and Genre Analysis .......................106 2.2.3. Information Packaging in Written Texts ...............112 2.2.4. Language and Ideology: Morphosyntactic and Lexical Strategies.................................................116 2.3.The Context of Culture .................................................132 2.3.1. Culture-bound Expressions..................................132 2.3.2. The Notion of Intertextuality ...............................134 Chapter 3 An Introduction to Translation Studies .....................................155 3.1.Recent Developments in Translation Studies ..................155 3.1.1. Communicative Translation and Translation Loss..................................................159 3.1.2. Malone’s Translation Strategies ...........................163 3.1.3. The Cultural Turn ..............................................170 3.2.Culture and the Notion of Cultural Translation..............179 3.2.1. The Development of Cultural Studies ..................184 3.2.2. The Language of Advertising ...............................196 3.3.Features of Spoken Language and Written Language ......224 3.3.1. The Notion of Spoken Grammar ...........................226 3.4.Postcolonial Translation ................................................247 3.4.1. The Development of Postcolonial Studies ............247 3.4.2. The Notion of Colonial Alienation and the Issue of Intertextuality..................................................251 3.4.3. The Language of Decolonisation..........................258 3.4.4. Translating First Names ......................................306 Conclusions ...........................................................................313 Bibliography .........................................................................315
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Appendix S.P.Q.T.! (Those Translators Are Fool!) Translation Problems in the Asterix Comics ............................... 353 Asterix – Bibliography ........................................................... 435
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Introduction
The present book, which was devised as a general introduction to language and translation studies, aims at helping readers develop useful strategies with which to approach the analysis of discourse in various contexts. With this intent, it begins by introducing some of the fundamental notions developed in linguistics, sociolinguistics, semiotics, critical theory, literary and cultural studies, which have influenced research work in the field of language and translation studies. In fact, in order to understand the aims of language and translation studies and the place these disciplines have in contemporary society, we cannot ignore the theoretical background that has determined their development and still supports them. The initial sections of this book therefore introduce various (linguistic, semiotic, literary and other) theories which, given the importance they have had for the development of language and translation studies, could not be taken for granted. The first chapter thus provides the foundations on which the remaining sections rest, and tries to emphasise common features, influences, chronological developments and so on, in an attempt to clarify the historical background from which these theories stemmed and suggest, if only very concisely, the cultural developments which rendered possible the incredible advancement of the intellectual debate we have witnessed in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. The second chapter introduces some of the fundamental notions at the basis of discourse analysis, applying some of the 7
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theories elaborated on within this field to the analysis of different textual types. Even though translation issues are discussed more systematically in the third chapter, for obvious reasons it was not always possible to keep the two discussions distinct, as the notion of culture which underlies the way human beings belonging to particular communities use language, is fundamental for translation as well. The third chapter, however, deals more specifically with translation studies, applying some of the fundamental notions recently elaborated on in this field to specific textual types such as advertisements, newspapers, literature and comics. Rather than being a compendium of theoretical jargon, this volume therefore aims at providing readers with some background in various theories, in order to bring to light the (thematic, chronological and geographical) relationship which exists between them and the impact they have had on language and translation studies. As a result, the links between the developments occurring in different fields of research are explained throughout the text, and these notions are then applied to specific texts* . In addition, the analysis of the translation *
Some parts of the present book are re-elaborations of material which first appeared, either in English or in Italian, in previously published works. In particular, occasional references are made to: Canepari, M. 2005. Introducing Translation Studies, Parma, Azzali Editore.
_____ 2006. Translating Postcolonial Texts, Parma, Azzali Editore. _____ 2008. ‘Aggressività simbolica e forme di deritualizzazione nel discorso calcistico del ventesimo secolo’, in E. Martines e G. De Rosa (eds). 2008. Angeli e demoni, Parma, Mup editore. _____ 2008. ‘Think Global, Act Local: traduzione e pubblicità nell’era della globalizzazione’, Il traduttore visibile, vol. 3, Parma, Mup editore, 2008. _____ 2008. ‘Infedeltà intersemiotiche alla ricerca di un lieto fine’, La Torre di Babele, vol. 5, Parma, Mup editore. I would also like to acknowledge the fact that some of the examples provided in this book are based on the corpora gathered by some of the students I’ve had the pleasure to work with throughout the years. 8
Introduction
strategies adopted in the British, American and Italian versions of Asterix developed in the Appendix by Enrico Martines offers an in-depth application of the theories approached in the remaining of the book.
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Chapter 1 The Development of Language Studies
In this first chapter we shall follow, although very briefly, the developments various scientific and human sciences have undergone as from the beginning of the last century, in order to understand where the theories scholars refer to today stemmed from. 1.1.The Beginning of the Twentieth Century Whereas the early Victorian era was characterised by a strong moralistic temper, the attempt to establish middle-class values, the importance of religion, a conservatism based on money and tradesman-like qualities, and a communal attempt to improve the condition of England, by the end of the century many thinkers and writers felt that the middle-class values they had previously helped to establish, were intolerably Philistine. Hence the reaction, in the literary production of the last decades of the nineteen century, represented by the aesthetic and the decadent movements, the work of Wilde and Swinburne, and a general emphasis on the importance of the independence from, and resistance to, the oppressive conformities of the Victorian age. During these years – dominated by personalities such as Marx, Darwin, and Spencer – the erosive process, as represented in Butler’s and Meredith’s works – could actually be said to have begun: Victorian synthesis started dissolving, the cultural climate began fragmenting, the progressive, optimistic view characteristic of the preceding era came to an end; religious certainty declined, the old rural order and its values faded, and new technologies
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developed. The belief that the various thinkers who had made their appearance in the previous years were opening a new age became widespread (I am thinking for example of Nietzsche, who during these years published some of his most important books, Zola and Edison), and several theorists in the different realms of consciousness and psychology began to emerge. For example, in 1890 William James introduced for the first time the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ which would become famous thanks to various modernist authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair; Freud published his Studies on Hysteria in 1895, and Bergson’s Matter and Memory saw the press in 1896. This was therefore a time of change, distinguished by a strong sense of transition, various scientific discoveries and the development of new technologies – as epitomised by Villiers de l’Isle Adams’s The Future Eve (1886), where Edison builds a female android. A new kind of sensibility developed, leading to an increased curiosity in the darker recesses of the self and the unconscious that Freud was beginning to explore, as testified by Stevenson’s publication of The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1886). In the 1890s the interests and themes approached by the arts constantly diversified, and if the decade could be described as an age of scientific development and social analysis – during which also the ambiguity intrinsic in the Imperial mission began to be addressed – it could be equally referred to as an age of romance. It was an age marked by a strong sense of contradiction, a moment of transition whose typical uncertainty found an expression in a growing sense of sexual ambiguity, as represented not only in Freud’s theory, but also in the radically changed representation of the sexes we have in the ‘new woman fiction’ – expression of the emergent feminist movement – and the (halfveiled) gay writing produced since the last decade of the nineteen century. 12
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By 1900, new dramas of social and sexual relationship were therefore replacing the Victorian dramas of religion and morality, and it was felt that it was time to break with the conventions Victorianism had implemented on a social, political, economic, philosophical and literary level. This was therefore a time of dawns and twilights, during which the sense of fin de siècle soon found a counterbalance in the feeling of aube de siècle and regeneration. If in 1901 the Victorian era truly closed, the belle époque inaugurated by the accession to the throne of Edward VII simultaneously began, ushering Britain into the twentieth century. A new era was opening, a time of fast change and political uncertainty, in which new schools of thought were developing, religion was often replaced with science and, in spite of all the differences which obviously distinguish the various disciplines, old social acceptances based on a priori assumptions broke down and were rejected in all fields of human knowledge. The old notions of the universe, man, even God, began to be re-examined, and what Dostoyevsky would call a ‘dialogical’ reality, began to be discovered behind, and in opposition to, the monological and stable world which Victorian society claimed was the ultimate, ‘true’ reality, and which realist fiction claimed to transcribe. A certain element of randomness and uncertainty entered science, for example, thanks to, amongst others, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Planck’s Quantum Theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which all contributed to the abolition of absolute notions and undermined the claims made by science to be delivering the absolute truth, suggesting that scientific discourse, like literary discourse, is a construction we use to make sense of the world. The discovery of the linguistic nature of all symbols (or the symbolic nature of all language), made it possible to consider the discourses of science and literature as equivalent codes in the larger system of language which were seen as contributing to the formation of the individual. 13
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Since the elaboration of Freud’s theory of the unconscious, language had actually appeared fundamental in the constitution of the individual, at least of the individual’s unconscious, where it played a central role in repressing those elements and desires the individual’s self could not accept, and then brought them back to consciousness through neurotic symptoms, dreams and the famous Freudian slips of the tongue. The importance assumed by language is further demonstrated by the development of the new discipline of linguistics. In fact, in the same way that traditional science was shaken by the theories proposed by Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg, during the first decades of the twentieth century various fields of the humanities were revolutionised by the linguistic theories proposed by the Swiss linguist Saussure and their application to various disciplines subsequently accomplished by structuralism. 1.1.1. Saussure It was actually Saussure who elaborated some of the dichotomies such as langue (language as a system) and parole (the linguistic expression of individual speakers), which would subsequently become fundamental in linguistics. In particular, one of the key concepts of Saussure’s theory was that language is a system in which meaning is the product of a phonological and graphological difference which distinguishes one linguistic sign from all other signs available in the system of language. Thus, we understand the word ‘cat’ as ‘not bat’, ‘not rat’, ‘not sat’ etc. Similarly, because language, as a cultural phenomenon, produces meaning by creating a network of differences (and similarities), we understand the sign ‘girl’ as ‘not-boy’, ‘not-woman’, ‘not-man’, ‘not-animal’, ‘not-deity’ etc. Moreover, it was Saussure who for the first time posited the notion that any linguistic sign consists of two sides: the signifier – that is, the sound-pattern of the word, the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound – and the signified – broadly speaking the 14
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concept we want to express; and his idea that the relationship between the two is not naturally determined, but is arbitrary and conventional, would utterly revolutionise the way we think about the world, our fellow human beings and, ultimately, our selves. Obviously, I am not suggesting that science, psychoanalysis and linguistics developed in the same way. What I am arguing, however, is that at the beginning of the twentieth century there occurred a general change of perspective in relation to many of the notions on which society had previously relied, and although these notions pertain to different domains and are therefore distinguished by their unique concerns and their unique means of investigation, the changes affecting various disciplines can be said to have some features in common. In particular, they share the acknowledgement that there are no universal ‘truths’ such as those which science, philosophy and religion, amongst others, have proposed over the centuries. By 1910 it seemed in fact clear that life was not as Western metaphysics and realism had suggested, but was filled with indeterminacies, which made it fragmentary and heterogeneous. And this conclusion was reached not only thanks to the discoveries of the new science, but also thanks to, amongst others, Dostoevsky’s polyphonic or dialogic novels – which, as Michail Bakhtin would argue in his important The Dialogic Imagination, make two voices interact in a sort of dialogue thereby disrupting the monological and authoritarian discourse of the epic, the historical and the scientific discourse – and to cubism (whose arbitrary disruption of the continuity that had always united an image pointed to the irrelevance of the traditional appeal of the subject and the credibility of its imitation). Hence, just as the writing of the age was increasingly drawing readers’ attention to the way the text was actually written, cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and
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space, showing instead that meaning resided in the picture’s stylistic structure. The necessity to break with the past became increasingly felt in many areas, and the spirit of modernism – stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis, all of which began to undermine the absoluteness of all systems in favour of a more relativistic perspective – was in the air. The first decade of the new century could actually be described as a period of discovery during which various experimental tendencies and movements that would continue to develop throughout the following years made their first appearance. The stimulating spirit of this modern age – represented for example by the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the literary experiments of vorticism and the narratives produced by authors such as Joyce, Woolf, F.M. Ford and Forster – underwent a great change, however, when confronted with the First World War: it had to deal with a shattered world where the progressive view of history and the sense of stability characteristic of the world opened up by the new century was lost, and where everything was felt to be temporary and provisional. Modernism then became marked by its more fragile, decadent tone, and if on the one hand it coincided with the experimental freeing of forms and with an increased attention to consciousness, on the other it was experienced as a reaction to the fragmentation of both culture and the psyche, the violence and the feeling of history as catastrophe that war brought about. It was in this climate, during the post-war 1920s, that most of the fundamental modernist books were published by Lawrence, Conrad, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Forster and Woolf. However, the mood and the atmosphere of literary London would soon drastically change. By the end of the 1920s, the sense of historical uncertainty, political disillusionment and social and economical pessimism had grown, fomented by the 16
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stock market crash in 1929 and, in the new decade, by the rise to power of Stalin in Russia, the Nazi ideology of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini’s Fascism in Italy and the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The proletarian fiction produced in this age of political and historical instability was filled with a sense of historical, political and psychological crisis, a feeling of anxiety, precariousness and chaos (often expressed in gothic and nightmarish visions) from which political commitment and ideological confrontation seemed initially to offer a way out. In this age, as totalitarianism arose and a new war of world proportions appeared increasingly inevitable, the commitment of literature initially took the form, for example in Orwell, of historical realism, ending, after the collapse of the Marxist argument for proletarian realism, in an experimental tendency towards fantasy, parody and satire through which (as in Beckett’s novels) the psychosis and absurdity of the world, and the surreality and threat of history (which earlier writers had tried to portray realistically) could be expressed. By the end of the decade, a dark and shadowy mood, brought about by the outbreak of war and the death of many writers who had shaped the previous decade, engulfed the intellectual and literary world. By the end of the war, writers had to face a world which was geographically, politically, socially, economically and ideologically shattered; they had to confront the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the Cold War, and the military potential of space travel. It was then felt that the whole intellectual and political world (crushed under the weight of the war) had to be re-constructed, and in this now post-modern world, a world in which history was perceived as dangerous, human nature as unreliable and life as tragic, many writers felt as though mute, and those who tried to speak had to confront the inadequacy of literary humanism in front of the absurdity and the horrors of war.
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Considering the general atmosphere of these years, the predominance gained by existentialist philosophy comes as no surprise. After the acknowledgement of the emptiness, the absurdity and the meaninglessness of the world, existentialism exhorted writers to re-construct the word which during the war had been corrupted and robbed of its transparency, and to revalorise the sign which had become a weapon. Indeed, as it was said about German: Use a language to conceive, organise and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanise man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it [...] Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone. But the cancer will begin (Steiner, 1967, 124).
With modernism and postmodernism, then, reality was increasingly perceived as a construction of man and his language, as the idea of a fundamental, ultimate truth (about man, the world and the universe itself), was replaced with the notion of truth as a working hypothesis (something which is able to explain a phenomenon until some other element able to change the previous theory is discovered). It is precisely the acknowledgment of the strong complicity between language, thought and reality, that led to two of the most important movements of the twentieth century: structuralism and poststructuralism. 1.2.Structuralism The structuralist and poststructuralist theories which developed during the second half of the twentieth century pushed into problematic status the very concepts of reality, culture and, as a result, translation. In particular, the notion of the ‘death of the author’ elaborated by Roland Barthes – namely the idea that the 18
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author, as soon as s/he begins to write, loses his/her identity and simply becomes a linguistic construct, a personal pronoun, the ‘I’ which only exists within the speech act that defines him/her – appeared particularly significant. With structuralism and poststructuralism, the text is thus seen as the destruction of all author-ity and origin. As a result, the truth of writing is thought to reside not in the author but in the reader. For the structuralist the meaning of each unit which composes any system (a key concept in structuralism, indicating a selfcontained entity which, while adapting some of its features according to the different conditions that may arise, maintains its structure) is not inherent in the unit itself, but is determined by the relation that a particular unit has with the other units of the same system. The structuralists insisted that, just like the phoneme, a textual segment acquires a meaning only on the basis of the place it holds in the system as a whole and, in their re-working of Saussurean linguistics, they underlined how these relations can be reduced to binary oppositions. At the basis of their theory, there was indeed the concept of difference which Saussure posited as central to his linguistics. The structuralists actually attempted to apply the linguistic model elaborated by Saussure to other areas of human experience. Lévi-Strauss, for instance, developed an analysis of totemism, myth and kinship systems based on Saussure’s phonemic oppositions. He was actually the first to apply Saussurean linguistics to the social sciences in an attempt to discover the deep mental structures which underlie and manifest themselves in large social structures such as kinship systems, mythology, magic, sacrifice and so on. As one of the major exponents of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss held that the various symbolic systems which compose culture can be treated as natural languages by virtue of their being symbolic and their having 19
An Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies
common origin in the mental mechanism of the unconscious. This unconscious – which, contrary to Freud’s, is simply a formal and structural unconscious that organises phenomena without giving them a content – is fundamental to Lévi-Strauss’ theory in so far as, by being postulated as the origin of all the various systems which constitute culture, it justifies his whole enterprise of reformulating anthropology as a semiology by the assumption that cultural phenomena are signs and can therefore be treated as language. In spite of refusing, since approximately 1969, to be labelled a structuralist, in many of his works Foucault exploits methods which are definitely determined by structuralism’s approach to the study of history. History has actually always been at the centre of Foucault’s analysis, and after his seminal L’Archéologie du savoir, he began what he conceived as an attempt to write a history of the present by approaching the subject of madness. His study resulted in two of his more important texts – Historie de la folie à l’âge classique (1961, translated as Madness and Civilization) and Naissance de la clinique (1963, translated as The Birth of the Clinic) – which were both welcomed by the structuralist Barthes as first applications of structuralism to historiography. In these works Foucault, by a movement which he calls ‘reversal’ (similar to structuralists’ defamiliarisation), overturns many of our assumptions on madness and shows how madness was actually created by the practice of internment in so far as, according to him, not only did internment actually enable ‘sane’ society to define what was to be regarded as ‘insane’ and ‘sub-human’, but it also created the conditions in which ‘madness’ could come into being, by relegating the alleged madmen in conditions which could have driven anybody insane. Finally, Lacan developed structuralism’s idea that the ‘I’ of the person is not a given, but only begins to exist when the individual is addressed by (and puts him/herself in relation to) Others. In his Écrits (1966) and the various seminars he held at 20
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L’École Normale Supérieure over a period of ten years, Lacan developed a general philosophy of the genesis of the individual as a human being by applying the linguistic models developed by structuralism to the data of psychoanalysis, in particular to Freud’s theory of the unconscious. For Lacan, then, it is language that turns the biological being into a human being provided with an identity; and as such, the concept of a true self proper to Western philosophical tradition cannot be any longer sustained, in so far as the ‘pure signified’ (or Platonic idea) of a human being is from its very beginning inscribed in language and cannot be disjoined from its signifier. Consequently, the supremacy of consciousness and the notion of ‘fundamental identity’ which Western humanist and Cartesian philosophy postulated (already revealed as fallacious by Freud) are exposed as arbitrary constructions. In Lacan, then, the constructed identity of Western tradition is replaced with the idea of a deconstructed identity, one that is constituted by the sum of the many fragments of identity determined by the structures proper to the Symbolic Order of language, according to which the child is fashioned in order to assume a definite place in the society s/he is recognised as belonging to. Furthermore, because the individual is subjected to the Other, because s/he has to fashion him/herself with reference to and, since the Oedipal drama, in rivalry with, the Other, and because s/he has to wait for the Other’s recognition in order to posit him/herself as a subjectivity, for Lacan every human discourse fundamentally derives from a demand for recognition by the Other, and therefore tends towards aggression and coercion. Finally, just as the subject is unable to grasp the truth about him/herself, so any other truth is unattainable, as it is always mediated by a language which reduces its essence to symbols. Structuralism was thus characterised by an interdisciplinary approach aimed at, as Scholes put it, satisfying the need ‘for a coherent system that would unite the modern sciences and make 21
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the world habitable for man again’ (Scholes, 1974, 2). Just like Marxism, structuralism represented a reaction to the alienation of modern societies in an attempt to overcome the division that various sciences and technologies had imposed upon the world. Structuralism expressed a striving towards the unification of the incredible amount of new information provided by various new disciplines, and presented itself as a possible method of overcoming the compartmentalisation of particular systems in order to grasp the general structure underlining them and the general laws according to which the structure of any system works. As appears clear from what has been said above, what various structuralists have in common is the determination to expose the strong complicity between language and power. This was actually one of the aims of structuralism in general, which initially was concerned with exposing the coercive use various (political, scientific, philosophical and religious) systems have made of language throughout history in order to have their version of reality and truth recognised as natural and given. By trying to bring to consciousness what had been taken as natural and reveal it as a construction, structuralism fundamentally aimed at denouncing the claims these systems made to convey universal truths, warning readers not to take culture for nature, and urging them to suspect all systems and all language. As suggested above, the starting point of structuralism (whether literary or not) was that language is a social system and that, conversely, every social activity (whether systems of kinship, the literature produced, the clothes worn or the myths created), could be intended as different languages (or, as Barthes would call them, codes). The meanings that cultural and social phenomena bear, in fact, make them into signs, hence – in the terms Saussure used to define the system of language – they have a social dimension and are arbitrary and conventional. As will appear clear below, the structuralists therefore treated systems 22
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which may not, usually, be understood as systems of signs, as though they were, trying to bring to consciousness the system of conventions that they assumed must be operating on an unconscious level to render meaning (whether that of a literary text or any human/social action) possible. It is for this reason that, together with Jonathan Culler (1975), I would define structuralism as essentially a theory of reading (of life as much as literature) which, starting from the effects that certain acts have, tried to clarify the process which leads those acts to have a particular effect/meaning. Structuralism anticipated the central role the reader began to attain in the theoretical discussion led by authors such as Ingarden, Booth and Eco amongst others (followed more recently by Iser, Fish and Riffaterre, for example), in which, despite their differences in approach and degree of freedom left to him/her in the interpretative process, the reader of the literary work – previously marginalised in favour either of the author (before the New Criticism) or the text (in the New Criticism) – has been granted a primary position in the interpretative and critical process. We could therefore see the change that occurred in the passage from the New Criticism to structuralism in terms of a shift of focus from what Roman Jakobson called the ‘sender’ or ‘addresser’ of the message, to the ‘message’ itself, and finally, beginning with structuralism and the various reader-oriented theories I shall discuss below, to its ‘receiver’ or ‘addressee’. 1.2.1. Jakobson Jakobson provided the link between Russian formalism – which could certainly be seen as the predecessor of structuralism, but not itself precisely structuralism (in so far as it did not conceive meaning as ‘relational’ or ‘differential’, hence reducible to binary opposition) – and structuralism proper. As one of the founders of the Formalist Moscow Linguistic Circle and – after having 23
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emigrated to Czechoslovakia in 1920 – one of the central figures of the Prague Linguistic Circle established in 1926, Jakobson’s studies in linguistics are extremely diversified (ranging from work in the fields of phonemics and grammar to the analysis of the linguistic aspects of translation). However, I think that two of the main concepts he elaborated are particularly relevant to our discussion. First of all, Jakobson posited a fundamental distinction between metaphor and metonymy, which for him correspond to the two main types of aphasia he was able to isolate and to the two figures on which various literary styles are based1. Beginning from the basic notion that any linguistic act implies the selection – along the horizontal line of the syntagmatic axis of language – of certain linguistic entities amongst many possible alternatives, and their combination – along the vertical line of the paradigmatic axis of language – into more complex linguistic entities, Jakobson recognised that the two principal types of aphasia (emissive and receptive aphasia) involved respectively selection and combination. Because the first type of aphasia affects the ability to substitute one element for another (resulting, for example, in the aphasic’s inability to use synonyms or his/her inability to name an object when s/he is shown a drawing of it), it was referred to by Jakobson as similarity disorder, and was linked to metonymy, in so far as this figure, based on contiguity, is largely used by the aphasics whose selective activities are altered (hence ‘fork’ is, for example, replaced with ‘knife’, ‘smoke’ with ‘pipe’ and so on). In the second type of aphasia, on the contrary, there is not a loss of entire words, but an alteration of the ability to construct propositions. This deficiency in the structuring of the context through combination was called contiguity disorder. In this 1
The application of this distinction to literary history influenced, for example, the work of David Lodge who, in 1977, sustained the metaphorical nature of modernism and symbolism in opposition to the metonymic realism which links signs mainly by their associations with each other. 24
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type of disorder, the ‘word’ is the only linguistic unit left intact by the tendency towards hyper-simplification which brings the patient to regress to the initial phases of the linguistic development of the child or even to the pre-linguistic stage (aphasia universalis). Whereas metaphor is impossible in the similarity disorder, metonymy is impossible in the contiguity disorder, in which the patient operates substitutions along the vertical line of metaphor. Further to this distinction, Jakobson also provided a fundamental model of communication which would become extremely influential. By analysing the fundamental factors of linguistic communications, Jakobson recognised in fact that every linguistic act involves a message (which must be distinguished from the meaning) and five other elements: a sender (or addresser) and a receiver (or addressee) between whom the message can pass, a contact (that is a physical medium which enables the communication), a code in which the message can be expressed and a context (or referent) to which the message refers. The relationship among these elements is variable, and depending on which of these factors is given emphasis in the act of communication, the act, as we shall see in Chapter 2, is said to have a different function. Jakobson’s model therefore emphasises the importance of the context and the idea that, in order to decode a message correctly (and re-code it for example in a different language by translating it), several different elements must be taken into account. This explains why this notion is at the basis of many recent works in translation studies, from the contextual models elaborated by Firth (1950) and Hymes (1972), to the ‘functional grammar’ elaborated by Halliday which, as we shall see in the course of the volume, has had a great influence on the way scholars approach translation. Indeed, the relevance that Jakobson’s theories – which for space reasons are here radically summarised – have in one of the most recent developments in the field of general 25
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translation studies (namely the analysis of translation practices in postcolonial contexts), is exemplified by the fact that they also form the basis of the analysis developed by Maria Tymoczo in the chapter ‘Metametonymics’ of her influential Translation in a Postcolonial Context (1999). Here, the scholar argues that, historically, translation has been modelled essentially as a process of selection and substitution, that is, a metaphoric process. As such, for a long time the practice has been devalued as a mechanical activity. However, Jakobson’s distinction between the metaphoric and the metonymic offers a new start towards the valorisation of the metonymic processes involved in translation, focussing on the creation of connections, contiguities and contextures realised in and through translation. It is not by chance, then, that Jakobson should directly address the issue of translation. In his article ‘Linguistic Aspects of Translation’ (1959) he deals in fact with the strong link between linguistics and translation, identifying three main types of translation: – reformulation or intralingual translation, when the translator is interpreting linguistic signs in one language through different signs in that same language, – translation proper or interlingual translation, when the translator is interpreting linguistic signs in one language through another language, and – transmutation or intersemiotic translation, when the translator is interpreting linguistic signs in one language through non-linguistic signs.
This distinction proves valuable even in today’s works of criticism (whether literary or not). For example, in J.M. Coetzee’s novel In the Heart of the Country (1977), the protagonist Magda, apparently isolated in the middle of the South African veld, towards the end of the novels tries to communicate with the planes that regularly fly over her farm. Although she initially relies on very basic and 26
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primitive means such as her voice, her arms and her white dress (namely her body, that is, the first non-symbolic sign of her ‘self’, 1982, 131), she goes through various levels of sophistication (for example using a fire to indicate her presence and project herself, hinting then at the possibility of exploiting songs and dances in order to attract the gods’ attention, ibid.), in order to finally reach the stage of writing, building messages with stones which she piles up and uses to form not only simple messages but, achieving an even higher level of sophistication, real poems (1982, 132-3)2. However, realising that her ugliness could not possibly tempt the gods to descend to earth and be with her, she tries to exploit the propagandistic and semi-coercive quality of language, and in order to persuade them to ‘buy’ the product she is offering, she publicises herself as ‘Cinderella’ (and not as one of the ugly sisters she previously identified with), trying to hide her physical appearance and her age by wearing a large hat (1982, 133). In the same attempt to present herself as more seductive and alluring, Magda resorts to ideographs, exemplifying what Roman Jakobson would define an intersemiotic translation or a transmutation, through which linguistic signs (namely Magda herself, understood here as a linguistic subject and as a creature of the author’s language), are interpreted through non-linguistic signs. In this case, too, in an attempt to lure the sky gods and make them take notice of her (1982, 134), Magda depicts herself as a younger woman, her figure fuller and with her legs parted. In addition, by claiming ‘it is my commerce with the voices that has kept me from becoming a beast’ (1982, 125), Magda 2
By spending weeks building messages with stones – ‘weeks filled with rolling stones about, repainting scratches, climbing up and down the steps to the loft to make sure my lines were straight’ etc. (1982, 133) – Magda exemplifies the notion of ‘productive work’ elaborated by Eco, according to which any communication implies a physical endeavour and a certain amount of physical work (Eco, 1988, 203). 27
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actually makes clear that the creation of the sky gods corresponds to her supreme effort at communication and at establishing an adequate sociolinguistic environment for the development of her communicative skills, an environment which was denied to her throughout her life. By repeatedly lamenting her incapacity to communicate with other people (1982, 101, 113), Magda strongly suggests her lack of what Eco would call a ‘competenza variamente circostanziale’ (1988, 53), that is, the ability to form presuppositions, repress idiosyncrasies and so on, all necessary competences for decoding a message. We can therefore see how relevant linguistic and translation theories might be for the analysis of postmodern novels. Indeed, there is a close link between postmodernism as a mode of writing and structuralism, in that just as according to postmodernist theories the truth of writing was thought to reside not in the author, but in the reader, who was asked to collaborate with the author so as to write, if only in his/her mind, the text itself, so structuralism, as suggested above, posited itself essentially as a theory of reading. By emphasising the role played by the receiver of the message, Jakobson and the structuralists in general set out to uncover the (often unconscious) structures which make meaning possible and tried to expose in a consistent way the fact that the meanings which human beings have been accustomed to take as natural are in fact the product of specific historical, social, cultural and, above all, linguistic conventions, in so far as the way individuals interpret reality depends on, and varies according to, the language/s they have at their disposal. With structuralism, then, reality began to appear as a product of language, and the claims made by previous philosophical and scientific systems to have discovered the truth about it (which implied that there existed an actual reality that could be described in an objective and unmediated way by language,
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understood as a transparent window on the world), were shown to be a fraud. In addition, by developing the concept of intertextuality3, the structuralists suggested not only that every text is basically an assemblage of fragments of preceding texts (a concept that bears significantly on the literature produced during the last fifty years and on the translations we provide for all types of texts, from postmodern novels to newspaper articles), but also that all perception of reality is filtered through preceding versions of that reality and that every new version of it is simply a reassembling of old elements (a concept already implied by Oscar Wilde, who maintained that the nineteenth century was a creation of Balzac). The idea that the meanings we give to the world are conventionally, historically and socially determined, and the structuralist notion of an unconscious set of rules which enable the subject to accomplish the different acts s/he performs in life and enable these acts to have a meaning, basically corresponds to a rejection of the notion of subject, and posits the relation between subject and world as one which depends on conventions. For the structuralists (and, in particular, for Jacques Lacan), ‘man’ was not the transcendental subject of Cartesian philosophy. Rather, as in Heidegger’s thought, ‘man’ was identified as a further product of language – a diminished subject who can accomplish speech acts only because there exist various systems of conventions which s/he does not control 3 This word was coined by Julia Kristeva in Séméiotiké (1969, 146) so as to indicate an author’s insertion of parts of other texts in his/hers, thus reelaborating the notion of bricolage Lévi-Strauss introduced in 1958 to account for the fact that new mythical meanings are simply a reorganisation of old myths. Also relevant here is the concept of prélévement, another word Kristeva introduced in the same text (1969, 271) in order to refer to borrowings made from other authors’ texts without indicating their origin or authorship. This notion would become fundamental in Barthes’s theory, as it is at the very basis of his notion of the ‘death of the author’ discussed further below, and is relevant in contemporary discussions about translation.
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(hence the accusation of anti-humanism with which structuralism is often charged) – and, as in Peirce’s infinite process of signification, a sign. 1.2.2. Peirce Further to his categorisation of signs as icon (a sign which resembles its object), index (a sign which is somehow connected to its object, i.e. smoke and fire) and symbol (an arbitrary substitution of an object with another sign), the American semiotician C.S. Peirce also described, in 1895, another series of relations: the sign or representamen (which stands for something and creates in the mind of the person to whom it is addressed an equivalent sign), the interpretant (the equivalent sign or the idea created in the person’s mind by the first sign, which is thus ‘translated’ into a different sign) and the object itself which, says Peirce in 1906, could be either dynamic (that is, an object which determines the sign only in relation to its representation), or immediate (that is, an object which is precisely as the sign itself represents it). Because, according to Peirce, an intepretant is bound to become a sign for another object, which in turn creates another interpretant in a person’s mind, this process of signification is virtually infinite, and eventually replaces ‘man’ himself with a sign. We can therefore see how this theory can be applied to the same novel by J.M. Coetzee I briefly introduced above. Given the premises outlined before, the fact that the section in this novel which focuses on the sky gods should best demonstrate Coetzee’s training in linguistics and semiotics does not come as a surprise. Throughout this section, the author refers not only to philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche – whom he often quotes anonymously in order to suggest that in South African society nobody (not even those people who, like Magda, try to escape strict hierarchies by strong acts of the will) can escape the logic of master–slave relationships – but also to various theories 30
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elaborated by linguists and semioticians. In this context, the evolution of Magda’s communicative efforts, which entail increasingly complex messages and referents, could therefore be interpreted as an enlargement of what Pierce defined the ground of representation, that is, the general ‘idea’ which is referred to by the ‘representamen’ (i.e. a sign which stands for something or someone else), the ‘interpretant’ (that is, the sign which the ‘representamen’ creates in the mind of the receiver of the message) and their object (namely the thing or person replaced by the first two signs). Consequently, if the first message built by Magda, which reads ‘es mi’, could be put in relation to an object such as ‘Magda isolated in the veld’, the following ‘vene’ refers to ‘Magda isolated and longing for company’, while the successive references to Cinderella clearly entail a further enlargement of the ‘ground’, involving many references to Magda’s ill-treatment at the hands of her (step)-parent, her relegation to the role of servant, and so on. By declaring the death of the author, then, structuralism clearly made the very concept of ‘humanity’ problematic, in so far as what was once regarded as an essential ‘manhood’ (an essence which, belonging only to human beings, differentiates them from lower beings), was shown to be a pure construct, the product of particular social, political and philosophical systems which, as such, was not eternal and immanent, but historically and culturally determined. In a similar way to the new science (which finally abolished the old notions of absolute concepts and fundamental scientific truths) and Freudian psychology (which exposed the Cartesian notion of a coherent and unified subject as a myth, demonstrating how the human conscious always co-exists with, and is undermined by, the unconscious), structuralism demystified many of the truths on which Western societies were based, exposing as culture what was once taken as nature and
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denouncing that what was once assumed to be the truth about reality and the human subject was in fact a text. In spite of structuralism’s emphasis on the relative nature of all meaning, however, it must be remembered that for its exponents the laws which regulate the various systems were universal and, like in Chomsky’s theory of language, innate. 1.2.3. Chomsky The American Noam Chomsky was one of the most prominent structural linguists who, in Syntactic Structures (1957), developed his transformational grammar which, from the superficial structure of a sentence, works out the fundamental deep structure which underlies it. It is precisely on this distinction that translation theorist and practitioner A.K. Ramanujan relies in order to develop his conceptions of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ poetic form. Basing his theory on the notion that in any language the production of discourse (understood as Saussure’s parole) results from the use (which is infinite) of certain means (which are finite), and that the particular means provided by the langue are characteristic of that language (langage), in his translations of Indian poetry he tries to make ‘explicit typographical approximations to what [he] thought was the inner form of the poem’ (1967, 11). In his work, he therefore tries to translate not only the words, the sentences and the explicit themes of the poem, but also the principles which shape the source text, in an attempt to move from the level of literal significance to that of structural significance. In opposition to the behaviourist school (which suggested that language is simply a form of behaviour acquired by rewarding the production of correct sentences), Chomsky therefore argued that language is what makes human beings human and that which provides a basis for human thought itself. According to Chomsky’s Reflections on Language (1976), language is in fact a ‘mirror of the mind’, which means that by studying language we 32
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can discover the abstract principles governing its structures and its use, principles whose universality is a biological necessity deriving from mental characteristics and neurological systems (that is, innate faculties) of the species. Just as Saussure mainly concentrated on the study of langue (that is the language system as a whole), to the detriment of parole (the actual utterances of particular individuals), Chomsky mainly focused on competence to the detriment of execution, in order to uncover the systems which underlie and determine language. Central to Chomsky’s theory is the notion of Universal Grammar, namely the system of principles, conditions and rules which characterise all human languages and which, by being potentially applicable to any language, are available to any speaker, irrespective of the language s/he will grow into. According to Chomsky, from birth any human being possesses the basic principles of all languages, and it will only be by exposure to a particular language that the child will determine the parameters left open by the Universal Grammar and therefore acquire one language instead of another. Because neither imitation nor teaching cover a primary role in the learning of the mother tongue (see for example Plann, 1977), for Chomsky only the empirical data available to the child – divided into positive (the actual sequences heard by the child), negative (provided by the corrections of mistakes made by the child) and negative indirect (provided by the lack of occurrence of certain forms in the sentences the child hears) – can actually determine the language the child will adopt as his/her mother tongue. Chomsky’s endeavour to uncover the deep and innate structures of language was therefore part of structuralism’s effort to reveal universal laws and structures which, in a totalising effort, its exponents set out to explore beneath the surface of different particular cultural artefacts. In this sense then, we can see how, to a certain extent, both Freudian psychology – centred 33
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on the unconscious structure which lies underneath the individual’s consciousness – and Marxist economic analysis – focused on the distinction between base and superstructure – could be read as early forms of structuralism (indeed, it is perhaps these affinities that can account for the traces that Freud’s and Marx’s theories have left on the works of various exponents of structuralism). But precisely because of their interest in the universal structures lying beneath the most varied artefacts, in parallel to Saussure, the structuralists were not interested in the artefact itself, in so far as any artefact simply became the pretext for the investigation of the process of sense-making which they saw as characteristic of human beings as such. Thus, the structuralists never enquired into the material conditions in which the artefact was produced. Following in Saussure’s footsteps, they took a synchronic approach to their object of study: consequently, by concentrating on its universal (hence timeless) structures, they deprived it of its historical context, and by disregarding all notion of historical change, they placed it outside the temporal continuum. By so doing (in opposition to the more traditional approach of science) they rejected the notion of causality in favour of what we could refer to as laws of transformation, that is the fact that one structure (analysed in synchronic terms) may be seen to be transformed into another structure (equally analysed in synchronic terms), even though the actual process of transformation is not actually considered. Structuralism was initially concerned with exposing the coercive use which various systems (whether political, scientific, philosophical or religious) have made of language throughout history in order to have their version of reality and truth recognised as natural and given. By trying to bring to consciousness what had been taken as natural and reveal it as a construction, structuralism fundamentally aimed at denouncing the claims these systems made to convey universal truths, 34
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warning readers not to take culture for nature, or text for truth. In their attempt to make readers understand the conventions at work in all institutions, the structuralists revealed that language is never innocent. As Barthes would acknowledge in his Mythologies (1957) – and as we shall see in the following chapters of this book – language is always reduced to a sort of propaganda, always used to sell something, whether an idea (as in political discourse and, in a more insidious way, in the supposedly objective language of science), a feeling (as in a declaration of love), a product (as in advertisements), or a whole person (as when we try to be accepted and recognised by others). Because structuralism began to perceive all of reality as language and text, it obviously had a profound effect on the way actual readers came to view what perhaps can be considered the ‘text’ par excellence, that is literature. For this reason, it may be appropriate to see structuralism in the context of a series of theories which tried to clarify the role played by the reader in the consumption of literature, and although not all the authors I will briefly discuss in this section cannot be considered structuralists, it is important to refer, if only superficially, to the fact that with the end of the New Criticism, the position of the reader has increasingly become the focus of various theorists. Translators are, first of all, readers, and it is therefore important to understand the way in which, as readers, we receive literary (and other) texts. Not only this but, as translators, we should attempt, in the words used by Ramanunjan, ‘not only to translate a text, but [...] (against all odds) to translate a nonnative reader into a native one’ (1989, viii). Theories oriented toward the receivers of a message are therefore fundamental to translation studies as well and in particular will form the basis of the ‘target-oriented’ theory of Gideon Toury, de Campos’s ‘anthropophagic’ theory of translation and the various readeroriented theories elaborated on by the Polish theorist Roman 35
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Ingarden (Das Literarische Kunstwerk, 1930, translated as The Literary Work of Art), the German scholar Wolfang Iser (The Implied Reader, 1974; The Act of Reading, 1976), the French structuralist Michel Riffaterre (Essai d’application d’une méthode stylistique 1957; La Production du texte, 1979), the American Wayne Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961) or the Italian Umberto Eco (L’Opera Aperta, 1962; Lector in Fabula, 1979), amongst others. 1.2.4. Barthes The conception of the reader’s activity outlined above is quite similar to the description of the interpretative process Roland Barthes, one of the main figures in the reader-oriented criticism, offers in S/Z (1970), where he defines the practice of reading as a tireless process of approximation and revision in which the reader first finds and names the meanings, then un-names them in order to re-name them in the light of new elements found in the text (1970, 562). As will become clearer later, Barthes had an enormous influence on many different disciplines, ranging from semiotics to cultural studies and translation studies. It is therefore important to assimilate some of his basic theories, which would orientate intellectual productions of various kinds for years to come. Barthes, like various authors mentioned in this chapter, eventually abandoned his initially rigorous structuralism in order to become a champion of what would later be called poststructuralism, and this clearly makes it difficult to decide under which heading his works should be presented. This task appears even more arduous when we consider that the definition of structuralism and poststructuralism as ‘movements’ or ‘schools’ (understood as well-established communities whose members were all characterised by similar interests, methods and politics), is itself an artifice used by critics 36
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for convenience. In reality, the various authors who are said to belong to the structuralist community are in fact quite autonomous from one another, and are characterised by their differences, rather than their similarities. However, while respecting and emphasising the individuality and originality of the various theorists approached, we cannot forget that most of the French representatives of structuralism intellectually developed in the same historical and cultural environment: they witnessed the same events and they attended the same academic institutions (specifically the École Normale Supérieure), which meant that they had a similar training in the humanities, possibly underwent the same influences and, more importantly, they knew each other (or were at least familiar with each other’s work). Because they began to publish and achieve popularity more or less during the same years, it is at times difficult to determine which theory influenced which, but it is certain that in those years the cultural debate was very much alive, and the continuous meetings and discussions amongst these intellectuals stimulated the growth and the development of new ideas. The categorisation of authors such as Barthes into structuralist or poststructuralist is therefore always problematic4. Some texts can in fact be defined as structuralist in spirit, as with Le degré zéro de l’écriture (1953, translated as Writing Zero Degree), Mythologies (1957), Éléments de Sémiologie (1965, translated as Elements of Semiology) and Critique et Vérité (1966, translated as Criticism and Truth), together with some of his critical essays such as ‘De la science à la littérature’ (1967, translated as ‘From Science to Literature’) and ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’ (1967), translated as ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, where he directly address issues of ‘translatability’ by stating: 4
For reasons of space I cannot discuss this question in detail. On this subject, see for example Sturrock, J. (ed.). 1979. Structuralism and Since, Oxford, Oxford UP, and Culler, J. 1983. Barthes, London, Fontana Press. 37
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narrative lends itself to summary (what used to be called the argument). At first sight this is true of any discourse, but each discourse has its own kind of summary. A lyric poem, for example, is simply the vast metaphor of a single signified and to summarise it is thus to give this signified, an operation so drastic that it eliminates the poem’s identity (summarised, lyric poems come down to the signifieds Love and Death) – hence the conviction that poems cannot be summarised. By contrast the summary of a narrative (if conducted according to structural criteria) preserves the individuality of the message; narrative, in other words, is translatable without fundamental damage. What is untranslatable is determined only at the last, narrational, level. The signifiers of narrativity, for instance, are not readily transferable from novel to film, the latter utilising the personal mode of treatment only very exceptionally; while the last layer of the narrational level, namely the writing, resist transference from one language to another (or transfers very badly). The translatability of narrative is a result of the structure of its language, so that it would be possible, proceeding in reverse, to determine this structure by identifying and classifying the (varyingly) translatable and untranslatable elements of a narrative (1977, 120–21).
On the contrary, other works are much more ambiguous. S/Z in particular presents a combination of what could be defined as structuralist and poststructuralist features, and cannot therefore be classified as either. Such a text may be seen as a work of transition in which Barthes, while re-proposing some of the structuralist ideas he had already approached in previous texts, develops them into what should now be seen as the initial stage of his poststructuralist theorisation of the relationship between texts and readers. Further to the attention the title brings to the graphological and phonological distinction between ‘S’ and ‘Z’ (one of the many binary oppositions present in the text), amongst various aspects we could consider as leaning more towards structuralism 38
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(although, as we shall see, it plays a very important role in Barthes’ ‘poststructuralist’ theory of texts), is for example the idea that in the written text it is impossible to answer the question ‘who speaks?’ (1970, 582). As Barthes already suggested in ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’ (1967) and ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (1968, translated as ‘The Death of the Author’), where he posed the same question (1967, in Oeuvres complètes vol. II, 111; 1968, in Oeuvres complètes, 491), in the text no one speaks, in so far as ‘what happens’ in the narrative, ‘is language alone’ (1966, 103, in Oeuvres complètes vol. II, my translation). This concept is obviously closely connected to the general rejection of the notion of subject the structuralists enacted by postulating that the possibility of meaning is determined by unconscious rules which, amongst other consequences, strongly affect the role of the author. In fact, if the author is simply reassembling pre-existing elements, if the speech acts human beings accomplish are only possible because there exist a series of systems that the subject does not control, and if the author can create his/her work only because there exists a system of conventions which makes the creation of that work/utterance possible, delimiting and determining the possible varieties of discourse, then the author’s control over his/her material is very much undermined. It is this structuralist idea that Barthes would further elaborate in his concept of the ‘death of the author’, that is, the notion that as soon as the author begins to write s/he simply becomes, as in Benveniste (one of the main European linguists who became affiliated to the Prague Circle), the one who says ‘I’, the subject who (in a similar way to what happens in Lacanian psychology) only exists in the speech-act that defines him/her and who exists as such only in so far as s/he speaks (Barthes, 1966, in 1984, 191; Benveniste, 1966, 260).
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As a consequence of the fact that at the moment when s/he begins to write the author becomes him/herself a product of language, in the text and, because everything is assumed to be text, in every utterance – it is language which speaks (Heidegger, 1957, 161; Benveniste, 1966; Barthes, 1968, in Oeuvres complètes vol. II, 492). Because writing is the destruction of every authorial origin, then, the question ‘who speaks?’ is doomed to be left unanswered: the author, for Barthes, is dead; his/her role is simply to mingle the various quotations from different works belonging to various cultures which intertextually compose the text; s/he is simply the subject of the linguistic act behind which there is no ‘real’ person but simply a construction of language, a personal pronoun. As the ‘true place of the writing’ cannot be the origin represented by the author, for Barthes it finally coincides with the reading. According to Barthes it is in fact the reader who provides the unity of the text, not its author. As the Italian writer and critic Italo Calvino states in ‘Cibernetica e fantasmi (Appunti sulla narrativa come processo combinatorio)’ (1967), where he posits the death of the author proclaimed by Barthes in 1968 and considers the possibility of creating machines which – by combining pre-existing elements – would supplant the author in all his/her capacities: ‘at this stage, the modes of reading become determinant; the reader is responsible for literature to explicate its critical force’ (1967, in 1980, 180, my translation). By stating that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author’ (1968, in Oeuvres complètes vol. II, 495, my translation), Barthes therefore shifts the attention from the author (typical of the approach prior to the New Criticism) and the text (characteristic of the New Criticism), to the reader, and therefore makes his position clear vis à vis the issue of the relationship between texts and readers discussed internationally. We can therefore see that the central role given to the reader by structuralism and the literature produced during the post-war 40
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period could be described, in terms of Jakobson’s diagram, as a change in the predominant function of language. As we have seen, when the author loses total control over the meaning of his/her work, the process of the production of meaning passes to the reader, and the structuralists posited themselves as the ‘ideal’ readers who, through a rigorous approach to social phenomena, would uncover their deep and universal structures. The initial aim of literary structuralism was therefore the study of the relationship between the system of literature and the culture to which it belongs. Literary structuralism was therefore less concerned with the interpretation of a work, that is with the study of literature, than with the investigation of literariness5 and the definition of a poetics or a model of the literary system which, by using the scientific methods of modern linguistics, would give literary studies a scientific basis. By so doing, structuralism would give birth to the new science de la littérature (translated as ‘science of literature’) Barthes wrote of in Critique et vérité (1966, in Oeuvres complètes vol. I, 40), where he opposed classical criticism with a new, scientific kind of approach to the literary work and first introduced the notion of the death of the author. For this reason, structuralism sought the unification of the new sciences, and this issue of the unification of science and literature was discussed in different countries concurrently; in 1968, for example, Calvino gave two interviews on the subject in which he made reference to Barthes’s ‘Science vs. Littérature’ and Queneau’s ‘Science et Littérature’, both published in 1967. This interest is reflected in Barthes’ elaboration of the notion of a ‘zero degree’ of writing (for him best represented by Camus’ L’Étranger, 1942, translated as The Outsider) which Barthes 5
As defined by Todorov in Introduction to Poetics, literariness is ‘the abstract property that constitutes the singularity of the literary phenomenon’ (1981, 6). 41
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proposes in Le degré zéro de l’écriture (1953). In this Marxist text (in the sense that Marxism is considered as providing the tools to unmask bourgeois ideology), Barthes proposes what he calls an écriture blanche (literally, a white writing) as the ‘zero degree’ of language which, by not submitting to any social order, anticipates a homogeneous state of society. In order to disrupt bourgeois society Barthes proposes a writing stripped of all accepted notions and prejudices, and he describes the contemporary author as a tragic figure who ‘must now fight against the ancestral and powerful signs which, from an alien past, impose on him Literature as a ritual’ (1953, in Oeuvres complètes vol. I, 185, my translation). Although Barthes would soon abandon the idea of a neutral and objective language, in this work he nonetheless introduces some of the notions which would remain constant in his work. By contemplating the historical condition of literary language, Barthes actually begins to elaborate a notion very close to that of intertextuality, recognising not only that all language is a social phenomenon which exists in a particular culture, but also that its meanings are determined by the meanings that were previously ascribed to it. Barthes therefore sets out to expose the myths which he recognises at the basis of bourgeois society, and by developing an increasingly deep interest in Saussure’s linguistics, he begins to be concerned with the unconscious (or conscious but unspoken) structures in language. In Mythologies (1957), a text still significantly influenced by Marxism, he therefore embarks on an ideological criticism of the mass media’s language, and by applying the ‘scientific’ semiological method to the language of everyday mythology, he accomplishes an analysis of the concealed messages which the mass media use to promote and corroborate capitalist and bourgeois ideologies. In this work, Barthes tries in fact to show
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the reader that even the most ‘innocent’ and ‘natural’ image becomes the promoter of bourgeois myths. Similarly, in Le système de la mode (translated as The System of Fashion), he applies the semiological method to what he conceives as the language of fashion, which he equally sees as promoting bourgeois myths and ideologies. In spite of his attacks on bourgeois society, however, Barthes soon realises that both capitalist and revolutionary languages perpetuate their own myths. Indeed, he finally recognises that it is impossible to escape bourgeois models, and in Le mythe, aujourd’hui (1957, translated as Myth Today), he concludes that ‘ideologically, all that is not bourgeois is obliged to borrow from the bourgeoisie’ (in Oeuvres complètes vol. I, 127), which he openly demonstrates by substituting, for the bourgeois myths he wants to unmask, further bourgeois myths. In a way, then, it is Barthes himself who demonstrates the failure not only of his ‘scientific’ approach to myth, but also of his notion of a ‘zero degree’ of writing (or écriture blanche) and of his science de la littérature. Barthes in fact demonstrates, willingly or not, that the supposedly scientific metalanguage adopted by structuralism and by himself in order to talk about myth and, more generally, any aspect of language, is itself a myth: contrary to what Robbe-Grillet thought, no language is ever completely objective, in so far as any use of language and any act of perception turn, from the very beginning, any objective description of reality into an interpretation. Indeed, thanks to the various theories elaborated in the field of science and the efforts made by various experimental writers (who began to insert scientific discourse into their narratives, juxtaposing it with the discourse of fiction), scientific language was demonstrated to be metaphorical and to be, just like the poetic language of literature, a way of structuring reality.
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It therefore seems that whereas the members of OuLiPo (‘Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle’)6 hared an imaginative conception of science (expressed in their love for linguistic games and ludic manipulation of linguistic forms), and emphasised the metaphorical and symbolic nature of scientific discourse, the structuralists emphasised the ‘scientificity’ of the discourse of literature, holding an almost dogmatic belief in the possibility of what Barthes calls, in an essay symptomatically entitled ‘De la Science à la littérature’ (1967), ‘écriture intégrale’ (in Oeuvres complètes vol. II, 433, translated as ‘integral writing’), in which literature would become scientific. In the attempt to make the study of literature as scientific as possible, various authors thus engaged in the elaboration of models which, based on some of the fundamental notions proposed by Saussure, would have enabled an ‘objective’ approach which would be extremely analytical, without being evaluative. This is the case with Barthes himself, who in ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ begins his systematic identification of the various ‘codes’ that in his opinion can be found in every narrative. In spite of the fact that, beginning with S/Z (1970), Barthes begins to systematically reject structuralism’s obsession with structures in favour of a multiple and plural reading which would account for the various meanings of the text, in his analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine in this work, where he cuts up Balzac’s text into lexes (that is irregular and arbitrary segments of text), he further elaborates and exploits the codes he first singled out in his ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’ (1966).
6
The French group was founded by the writer Queneau and the mathematician François le Lionnais in 1960 with the aim of applying the principles of mathematics to literature so as to explore the possibilities of language and narrative organisation. 44
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Although, according to Barthes, all of these codes are simultaneously present in the same work and, occasionally, in the same sentence, anticipating the genre analysis which would develop in later years (as briefly introduced in the last chapter of this book), he claims that different genres or types of narratives will exploit certain codes more than others. Two of the codes Barthes identifies – the proaieretic and the hermeneutic – are sequential and irreversible. The first, the proaieretic code (similar to the functional aspect Barthes described in 1966), is the code of actions which signals sequences that start, develop and end. These sequences might not be fully described in a single section, but could be scattered through the text. The following code, the hermeneutic, determines the way in which the solution to a mystery presented in the text is either given almost immediately, or is postponed by means of false clues, partial or delayed answers and so on. The hermeneutic delay thus created serves not only to create suspense (as in the case of a detective story or recent advertisements constructed as mini soap operas), but orchestrates the whole interpretative process, obliging the reader to perform a movement of ‘naming – un-naming – re-naming’ the meanings of the text, thereby refuting the idea that there is a fundamental meaning of the text which the reader is supposed to uncover. The following three codes – the semic, the referential and the symbolic – are non-sequential and reversible. The semic code (an elaboration of the indicial analysis Barthes described in his ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’) indicates the way a character is constructed through particular semes (for example ‘beauty’, ‘wealth’, ‘cruelty’) which may or may not be presented in a single section (the character’s portrait), and which converge upon the character’s name. Since in realist novels the name functions as the anchoring point of all the semes which, by being repeatedly attached to the same name, constitute the character, 45
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and is used to give the impression that the anchoring point at which all the semes converge constitutes a precise individuality, a character defined by his/her peculiarity, we see how the different approach to the name assumed by a more experimental kind of literature (where, for instance, characters might be anonymous or have many different names) has profound consequences, as it points to the fragmentation of what was once perceived as a single identity. The referential is the code the author uses to give us information about the world and in realist narrative is abundantly used to create an air of vraisemblable and trick the reader into taking culture (the text) for nature (the world). In a similar way to the previous codes, this one can also be used to challenge the traditional approach to narrative description. Finally, the symbolic code, which remains somewhat obscure as Barthes never really explains what he means by it, determines the symbolic value of particular segments or words in the text. 1.2.5. Greimas A similar approach to Barthes’s (and Todorov’s, for that matter) study of literature was taken by the structural semanticist A.J. Greimas, who in Sémantique structurale: recherche de méthode (1966, translated as Structural Semantics: Search for a Method), re-elaborates the morphology of the Russian folk tales accomplished by the Formalist Propp in an attempt to develop, in accordance with structuralism’s totalising tendency, a universal grammar of narrative. Instead of Propp’s ‘spheres of actions’ and ‘functions’, Greimas proposes a more abstract notion, the actant, or basic role, that is the element which performs a syntactic function in the sentence at the basis of the narrative and to which the entire narrative can be reduced: the narrative’s elementary structure of signification. According to Greimas, a narrative is a signifying ensemble that can be grasped in terms of the relations among 46
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actants, and because each actant represents a syntactic function, the actantial model becomes the extrapolation of a syntactic structure organised around three pairs of opposed actants: Subject – Object, Helper – Opponent, Sender –Receiver. The actants can obviously be abstract (for example desire or vengeance) or collective (for example society); they can coincide with particular characters, and they can be humans, animals or even inanimate objects. The actants, which are characteristics of the deep structure of the narrative, are actualised and concretised, at the superficial level of the narrative, as actors. Hence, at the surface level one actant can be represented by several actors and, conversely, several actants can be represented by the same actor. Generally speaking, the three pairs describe three basic patterns of narratives: Search or Aim, Assistance or Impediment, and Communication. The first pair of actants focuses on the relationship between the subject and the object. The subject, being the element oriented towards an object, can therefore be considered as the desiring subject who acts in an attempt to reach the desired object. The second pair obviously relates to those elements who (or which) either work towards or against the realisation of the subject’s desire. This pair is quite mobile and in a certain sense ambiguous, in so far as the helper can become at a certain point an opponent, or can cover both roles simultaneously. Furthermore, this pair of actants is distinguished by the kind of relationship it has with the pair subject – object, as they can help or oppose either the subject alone, or the object and the desire the subject has for it. Finally the third pair is the most ambiguous of all, as it very rarely involves elements which are clearly ‘lexicalised’ (such as particular characters), and quite often consists of a series of general motivations which determine the subject’s actions. The sender indicates the element which (or who) pushes the subject 47
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to act and corresponds, in terms of a traditional grammatical description, to a causal clause or agent (for example Society, Love, Vengeance and so on), whereas the receiver coincides with the element which (or who) benefits from the action (obviously it may or may not coincide with the subject). According to Greimas, every narrative – which can be applied to any kind of (mini) narrative, including those developed, for example, by advertising7 – can be fundamentally reduced to a relationship between the actants, and the model is still relevant today, as it can be used to analyse adverts, where of course a particular product plays the role of the giver in relation to consumers, who play the role of receivers. 1.3.Poststructuralism It therefore appears clear that, in spite of the fact that structuralism initially set out to expose the coercive nature of any inflexible system, in open opposition to its own premises, it became more and more exposed to the same criticisms it initially made of other systems and institutions and, while undermining others’ claims to unveil great truths, it contradictorily proposed its own (partial) truth as ‘the truth’, thereby falling prey to the same beast as other thought systems. Structuralism’s oversystematisation and its obsession with structures finally turned it into one of the dogmatic and scientistic systems it initially wanted to expose, and by so doing it opened the way for poststructuralism, whose aim was to investigate the way in which the structuralist project to develop a grammar which would account for the form and the meaning of literary works is subverted by the works themselves. This is why it becomes extremely difficult to define a particular author as structuralist or poststructuralist, as Barthes, 7
For a discussion, see Chapter 2. 48
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Lacan and Foucault – whom I have introduced as structuralists – in reality would soon be counter-influenced out of their structuralism by the publication of some of Derrida’s major books which, as you can see, were published in the same years as some of structuralism’s founding texts (1967). 1.3.1. Derrida It was actually Derrida’s questioning of Western assumptions and his own deconstruction of the notion of structure that led from structuralism to poststructuralism. Derrida’s deconstruction, in fact, posited itself against all dogmatism and aimed at questioning the naturalness of our received conceptions of truth. In Derrida’s opinion the deconstructive text should show how a discourse undermines the philosophy it asserts, or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies, by identifying in the text the rhetorical operations that produce the supposed ground of argument, the key concept or premise (Culler, 1983, 86).
The central aim of Derrida’s deconstruction was to disrupt the metaphysics of presence which he saw at the root of all Western philosophy. It is on this metaphysics of presence that various oppositions such as meaning/form, soul/body, speech/writing, conscious/unconscious, normal/pathological, serious/non-serious language, and man/woman have relied, according a privileged position to the ‘presence’ intrinsic in the former term and defining the latter as a lack, a void, an absence. For Derrida, the aim of deconstruction is to expose the fact that the ‘presence’ which is considered inherent in the first element is itself not a given, but a product which, in order to function, must already possess the qualities which belong to its opposite. So, Derrida argues, Saussure’s dichotomy between signified and signifier is based on the metaphysics of presence and the privileged status granted to ‘speech’ (that is
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logocentrism), but even though he considers writing simply as a representation of speech, he uses examples drawn from writing to explain the nature of the linguistic sign, thus unwittingly admitting that speech is a form of a more generalised writing called by Derrida ‘arche-writing’ (1976, 109). By so doing, Derrida basically reverses the hierarchical opposition which made speech into the positive term and writing into the negative. In his other discussions of the various Western philosophical dichotomies, the same deconstructive movement leads him to posit a generalised figurative, non-serious language of which both literal, serious and figurative/metaphorical, non-serious language would be particular cases (1977, 90), a discussion which concluded with his assertion that a literal expression is a metaphor whose figurality has been forgotten (Culler, 1983, 150). To the metaphysics of presence which tries to impose a certain degree of coherence and logic on the text, Derrida thus opposes a metaphysics of absence: by concentrating on the ‘inferior’ element, by using the same language and the same principles it deconstructs, and by ‘overturning the classical opposition’ (1982, 329), deconstruction produces a general displacement of the system, disrupting our traditional habits of thought and creating new associations which had been concealed by the traditional dismissal of the second term. All this has obviously important repercussions on the role assumed by scholars of language, an expression used here in its most general meaning. Indeed, if the meanings which we assign the world are historically, conventionally and socially determined; if subconscious rules exist which enable the individual to carry out various tasks and enable these acts to have meaning, then the author – as a privileged subject – and the reader, the sender and the receiver of a message, would now lose, at least in part, their authority, because their productions and their interpretations would be determined by elements 50
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which are outside themselves and which they cannot control. And this idea, obviously, could not but have huge repercussions on the way we generally view users of language and their productions. 1.4.Recent Developments in Language Studies Indeed, after decades dominated by a view of language as an abstract system – purported for example by linguists such as Chomsky (who focussed on the ideal competence of speakers) and Bloomfield (who claimed that language should be analysed isolation, irrespective of the context in which it originated) – language scholars began to emphasise the fundamental relation between language and the context it stems from. The formal approach to language held by linguists in the past was at the basis of one of the main approaches to the study of lexis, which is clearly of fundamental importance also in translation studies. Generally speaking, the study of lexis has been the domain of the discipline called semantics, which is defined, by Cook (1992) amongst others, as the study of equivalences between linguistic units and entities or events in the world. Central to the discipline, is of course the study of meaning (or, following Leech, of meanings, as he distinguishes conceptual, connotative, social, affective, reflected, collocative, associative, thematic meaning), and it is precisely in order to deal with the meaning of single lexical items, that linguists Katz and Fodor (1963) elaborated componential analysis, a model of meaning according to which a word can be decomposed into its semantic property and broken up into its various components, whereby it is reduced to its ultimate contrastive elements. Thus, a word like ‘man’ could be defined as + male, + adult + human + animate, and this of course would contrast both with the definition of ‘boy’, defined as – adult, and a definition of ‘woman’, defined as – male. As this example suggests, it is 51
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therefore fundamental to bear in mind that words may contrast with other words on a number of dimensions at once. This is a type of analysis which has been very prolific, and although has been largely abandoned nowadays (in favour, as we shall see below, of more ‘context and discourse oriented’ approaches), it is still held in high consideration by many scholars, even in the field of Translation Studies, as Peter Newmark’s approach well demonstrates. 1.4.1. Newmark’s Componential Analysis Indeed, any lexical choice raises questions as to the implications of the ‘semantic components’ of the term, and it is for this reason that it might be useful to resort to componential analysis, thanks to which the meaning and all the implications of a term are precisely identified and so guide the search for a suitable translation. This is precisely what Newmark does in Approaches to Translation (1981), where he shows how a term can be broken down into its sense components and thus prepared for translation much more convincingly than by weighing up synonyms listed in bilingual dictionaries. He makes the example of ‘bawdy’: a.
Essential/functional components: i. Shocking (emotive) ii. Related to the sex act (factual) iii. Humorous (emotive/factual)
b. Secondary/descriptive components i. Loud ii. Vulgar (in relation to social class)
The item, having been stripped down, so to speak, to reveal all its possible components, can be then measured against the competing claims, in the target language, of near-synonyms,
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paraphrasal expressions, compensatory solutions or even replacement by zero, depending on the particular context of situation. In the case of a headline such as ‘Bush calls Iraq abuse ‘abhorrent’ (which was followed by an article on the tortures perpetrated by American soldiers on Iraqi prisoners in 2004), we could therefore break down the adjective ‘abhorrent’ as: a.
Essential/functional components: i. Shocking (emotive) ii. Disgusting (emotive) iii. Hateful (emotive) iv. Related to a crime of some sort (factual)
b. Secondary/descriptive components i. Morally bad (emotive/factual),
and thus translate it accordingly for example as abominevole. As it will appear clear in the following pages, however, it is not always possible to find a satisfactory translation. Further to this, translators have to accept that there are cases where, without any cushioning device such as commentary, notes, or glossary, authors insert in their works terms and expressions which are clearly untranslatable, precisely because they are untranslatable. This is for example the case of the Urdu word sharam, which approximately means ‘shame’, and in fact appears as the title of one of Rushdie’s novels (1983), but for which no real equivalent can be found. In this case, if we resort to componential analysis, we can see that the English translation is much more restrictive when compared to the original. Translators must therefore find supplementary strategies that might enable them to convey the meaning suggested by the Urdu word. In the case of ‘shame’, we could in fact identify: Essential/functional components a. Embarrassing (emotive) 53
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b. Humiliating (emotive) c. Related to a ‘disgrace’ or ‘scandal’ (in war, in social life, in sexual life etc.; factual) Secondary/descriptive components a. b. c. d. e.
Vulgar Loud Dishonourable Infamous Detestable
For sharam, however, we could also have: Essential/functional components f. Modest (emotive/factual) g. Decent (emotive/factual) h. Related to a ‘moral’ or ‘virtuous’ act Secondary/descriptive components i. Courteous j. Shy k. Quiet l. Honest m. Respectable
The notion of ‘components’ has actually been extremely productive in various approaches to the study of lexis. Yet, albeit very useful, componential analysis has been recognised as incapable of dealing both with grammatical function words such as ‘of’ or ‘the’, and with the connotational meaning or the metaphorical uses of many content words. Componential analysis assumes in fact that features of words are invariable and does not take into account social and/or cultural factors. This last observation does obviously raise the question, very relevant to the study of translation, of the multi-layered aspect of lexical items. A word has in fact an etymology, a diachronic history which – if the term is not completely lexicalised – will be 54
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activated by its use, connotations, collocations, translation equivalents, personal associations, metonymic and metaphoric uses, echoes of homonyms which might or might not be exploited in puns, in written texts associated with images etc. Semantics alone cannot, obviously, account for all this. Indeed, although semantics has provided applied linguistics with useful frameworks for systematising meaning and relations among words8, and even though the somewhat abstract realm of
8
By ‘(meaning) relations’ I clearly intend the relations which a word, once it has been broken down into components, enters with other words according to the components they do or do not have in common. For example, words can be described in terms of synonymy when they are of the same meaning, or antonym, when they are of opposite meaning (however, as Leech suggests, because a word can contrast with another on different dimensions at once, it would probably be better to talk about ‘incompatibility’ or ‘meaning exclusion’). Words can also be connected by a relation of entailment (‘the earth goes round the sun’ entails ‘the earth moves’), presupposition (‘Mary’s son is called Matthew’, presupposes ‘Mary has a son’) or logical inconsistency (‘the earth moves’ is inconsistent with ‘the earth is stationary’). Another relationship of meaning is meaning inclusion or hyponomy, which occurs when a componential formula contains all the features present in another formula (as with ‘man’ and ‘grown up’), which is then referred to as superordinate term or supernym. In addition, we could have a co-hyponym, whereby a term shares with another term some components of a mutual supernym, but also has distinctive components which are mutually exclusive with those of the other. As Leech points out (1974, 99 – 100), we can therefore identify a binary taxonomy (whereby some expressions will be defined as contradictions, as in ‘the dead animal was still alive’), or a multiple taxonomy. It must be remembered, however, that although for practical purposes semanticists talk of taxonomies, many binary contrasts are best envisaged in terms of a scale running between two extremes. Another important binary opposition is relation, which involves a contrast of direction such as ‘up/down’, whereas lexical pairs such as ‘parent and child’ are called converses, while pairs such as ‘still/already’ or ‘all/some’ are called inverse opposition. Finally, we can talk of cyclic opposition, as for example the hierarchy to which the days of the week or the months of the year 55
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componential analysis has prompted direct application in vocabulary-teaching materials (Rudzka et al., 1981), as McCarthy states, ‘keeping the study of lexis penned within the world of semantics makes any proposal to develop a lexical model in harmony with a socially embedded view of language difficult’ (1991, 61). It was actually in the 1960s that the paradigm of lexical studies began to shift in Western Europe, following the general trend towards a more contextual and social approach to the study of language in general. In 1968 Fillmore elaborated the concept of a ‘case grammar’, which is more functionally oriented but which still does not take into consideration the context in which a text was placed. Even the recent philosophical influence on language study, in particular the Speech Act Theory elaborated on by Austin and Searle, while concentrating on ‘language in use’ still relies on the linguist’s intuition and in actual fact ignored all aspect apart from the utterance and the analyst himself. 1.5.Discourse Analysis and its Disciplines During the last decades, however, the emphasis of language (and translation) studies has changed considerably, and importance began to be given to the analysis of real data, including spoken data. Indeed, one of the main innovations introduced by discourse analysis, which we could identify as the final product of a whole series of developments in the field of language studies, is the attention paid to the analysis of spoken language. Thus, the emphasis of discourse analysis – here understood as a particular approach to the study of language which wants to move away from the Chomskyan emphasis on ‘competence’ in
belong, or simply hierarchic oppositions, which relate to different units of measurement. 56
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order to concentrate on ‘performance’ and rather than consider language in isolation, as in the Bloofmfieldian tradition, wants to focus on language in context/use – has actually been on the analysis of naturally occurring language (both in its written and spoken forms), and the linguistic patterns above sentence level. This clearly represents a major shift in the study of language, in so far as also the early attempts to analyse language in terms of ‘what could be done with words’ – that is the speech act theory developed for instance by Austin and Searle, and, at least in part, the pragmatic principles postulated by Grice – were mainly based on invented linguistic data. The attention to real data called for by ethnography of speaking (which focuses on the importance of direct/field observation), conversational analysis (which analyses in depth conversational exchanges, whether face-to-face or over the telephone, in order to shed some light on the patterns underlying for example turn-taking etc), and the linguistic approach adopted for example by Sinclair and Coulthard in their study of classroom interaction (and which represents a fundamental characteristic of discourse analysis as a whole), has had many repercussions on all aspects of language study, from grammar, to vocabulary, and clearly is not devoid of meaning also in the study of translation. The emphasis which Widdowson (1979) posited on the distinction between language usage (used to exemplify linguistic categories) and language use (which, on the contrary, is language used to communicate and indicates the use of sentences in the performance of utterances which give these linguistic elements connotative value), led to the concept of language as a social phenomenon and to the importance of ‘communication’, and what Hymes termed ‘communicative competence’. 1.5.1. Ethnography of Speaking It was actually Hymes who, during the 1970s, inaugurated the discipline referred to as ethnography of speaking which, 57
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developing some of the fundamental notions of anthropology, analyses language as used in real contexts by real speakers and, by careful observation, tries to identify the various components of a speech event. The fundamental methodology of this analysis is participant observation, which implies ongoing regular contact between the observer and the community s/he wants to study, some degree of participation in the life of that particular community and a natural setting9. The aim of an analysis carried out according to the principles of the ethnography of speaking is not just to collect data but to understand a particular way of life and of language use as group members understand them themselves. According to Levinson, then, ethnography of speaking is the cross-cultural study of language usage or, as Hymes suggests, is the study of how to use language in a contextually appropriate way. In order to understand the communicative competence of particular users of language, that is the rules of speaking that are operative in particular languageusing communities, ethnographers of speaking identify three relevant units: the speech situation (namely the social context); the speech event (which is determined by the use of language and involves activities which could not occur except in and through language, such as ‘argument’ or ‘gossip’) and the speech act (for example ‘greeting’, ‘apologising’ etc.), which in its turn it determined by the following elements: – Setting (time and space) – Participants (who, role) 9
This kind of analysis and, broadly speaking, the collection of spoken data, raised the issue of what is normally referred to as ‘The Observer’s Paradox’. According to this, the very presence of an observer, possibly recording the spoken language produced by the members of the community selected for analysis, prevents per se the setting from being completely natural. In turn, this issue is obviously closely connected to other ethical issues relating to the possibility of collecting data without community members being aware of the observer’s presence. 58
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– – – – –
Ends (purpose) Act sequence (what speech acts and what order) Key (that is the tone i.e. serious, joking etc.) Instrumentalities (channel or medium) Norms of interaction (the rules for producing interpreting speech acts) – Genres
and
This kind of analysis can be applied to more or less mundane genres (from religious meetings to domestic chats, village gossip, arguments in pubs etc.), and its primary purpose may not be to produce a simple description of speech situations, speech events and speech acts, but to produce a sophisticated analysis of what people are doing and what they think they are doing, when they speak. As Cameron claims, then, the ethnography of speaking makes some important contributions to thinking about talk as a culturally embedded activity, a notion which results fundamental both in language and translation studies. 1.5.2. Pragmatics Further to the ethnography of speaking, during the same decades we see the development of pragmatics, which focuses on the way language is used to do things and mean more than what is actually said. The term was first introduced by the American philosopher/linguist C.S. Peirce (1839 – 1914), but it was actually Charles Morris (1901–1979) who, during the 1930s, began to apply the term to linguistic behaviours. Although Morris’s use of the word was very broad, nowadays the term is used to refer to the study of meanings derived from the contexts of utterances rather than the meanings contained in the linguistic forms, which are the focus of semantics. Pragmatics therefore studies ‘language in use’ and the use that speakers make of particular words and expressions, which of course might well differ from the ‘dictionary meaning’ of that particular item. This discipline stems from a philosophical approach to language, and 59
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can be said to develop from the speech acts theories elaborated on, for example, by Austin and Searle. The basic notion of speech act theory is that when we express ourselves we do not only produce utterances containing grammatical structures and words, but we also perform actions via those utterances. This is particularly obvious when we deal with performative verbs – in that the linguistic act (provided certain ‘felicity conditions’ are satisfied)10 actually performs the action it describes – but it is also true for those speech acts we call ‘indirect’. It is the nature of the speech event itself that determines the interpretation of an utterance as performing particular speech acts. For instance, given two different contexts and two different intonation patterns, the utterance ‘this coffee is really cold’ can be interpreted either as a complaint or a request (for a cup of fresh coffee). When analysing a speech act, then, we always have to identify the locutionary act (that is the basic act of utterance), the illocutionary act (which refers to the function or illocutionary force of the act itself) and the perlocutionary act (which refers to the effect of the act itself). Because the illocutionary force is what ‘counts as’ (a prediction, a warning, a promise etc.), when interpreting a speech act we must identify the illocutionary force indicating devices, namely devices which indicate the illocutionary force of an utterance. Amongst these, the most obvious is a verb that explicitly names the illocutionary act, that is to say a performative verb such as ‘to warn’ or ‘to promise’. However, other devices such as stress, word order and intonation can help in the correct interpretation of an utterance. For instance, the sentence ‘What are you doing’, uttered by the same speaker within the same context, can have different meanings according to whether the speaker genuinely 10
For instance, in order to marry or christen someone, the speaker must be either a representative of the clergy or the captain of a ship. If the ‘felicity conditions’ required by a particular performative verb are not satisfied, the speech act can only be void and null, namely ‘infelicitous’. 60
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wants to enquire about his/her interlocutor’s engagements or whether s/he is making an ironic comment on his/her interlocutor’s activities or is asking the interlocutor to stop doing something. It therefore appears clear that intonation, one of the features of spoken language which can be reproduced in written language only partially (for example by using punctuation), actually helps disambiguate a message and convey meaning. In actual fact, intonation represents a contextualisation cue about the way a speaker intends hearers to treat his/her message. Intonation actually expresses some aspect of the speech function, usually having to do with certainty or doubt, and for this reason, the contrasts it expresses are closely tied to other grammar systems such as modality. Intonation is therefore said to make ‘meaningful distinctions’, helping disambiguating utterances, and because it can express grammatical functions and contrasts in meaning11, it should be identified as part of the linguistic system itself. Indeed, recent research has emphasised, precisely, the multiple functions of intonation (both semantic and pragmatic)12, showing how it can signal not only the mood of the 11
In tone languages, for example, intonation also has a lexical function, as the choice of tone results in different words. 12 For example, among the different functions of intonation Tench (1990) identifies the attitudinal function (used to express our attitudes towards objects, people, ideas and so forth), the communicative function (falls and rises in units of intonation are exploited to elicit information and maintain various kinds of social interchange), the informational function (falls are used for major information, rises for incomplete and minor information), the textual function (which creates the structure of the whole discourse and indicates for example a switch from one topic to another), a stylistic function (which enables us to recognise and distinguish between different kinds of languages such as sport commentary, radio report etc.). Similarly, Crystal classifies the various functions of intonation as follows: emotional (which expresses attitudinal meaning such as sarcasm or impatience), grammatical (as such, intonation has a similar function to that of punctuation), 61
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speaker, but also the information considered most important (rheme), or the information the speaker considers shared knowledge (theme) etc13. In their approach to intonation, scholars identify two main tones: rising and falling, and a combination of these. The tone group – that is a phonological unit consisting of a sequence of rhythmic units (feet) that represents what we could call a ‘quantum’ of the message – contains a tonic (tonicity) and a tone (tone), and indicates the way the speaker is organising his/her units. Broadly speaking, one tone group is the expression of one unit of information (either given or new information), and tonic prominence marks the culmination of what is new, enabling the speaker to create meaning. For instance, in his discussion of the interactive aspects of intonation, Brazil emphasises that what he calls referring tone (rise, fall-rise) indicates shared knowledge, whereas what he refers to as proclaiming tone (fall, rise-fall) indicates new information. Finally, what he calls level tone indicates the fact that the speaker is orienting more towards the language of the utterance itself. Similarly, the key (or pitch level), is an added meaningful choice. As Coulthard states in his An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1985), in fact, high key is mainly contrastive, low key is equative, meaning that it indicates equivalence, whereas mid key is additive, in the sense that it adds information. Thus, the same sentence ‘he gambled and lost’ can mean different things according to intonation and pitch level:
informational (prominence indicates what the speaker is treating as new information), textual (as it indicates paragraphs of meaning), psychological (in this sense intonation has to do with memorisation) and indexical (in this case, intonation marks personal or social identity). 13 For a discussion of ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ see Chapter 2. 62
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– //p he GAMbled //and LOST // CONTRASTIVE (contrary to expectations; i.e. there is an interaction-bound opposition between the two) – //p he GAMbled //and LOST // ADDITIVE (he did both) – //p he GAMbled //and LOST // EQUATIVE (as you would expect, i.e. there is an interaction-bound equivalence between them) (Coulthard, 1985, 111).
On the basis of what we have seen above, then, it appears clear that in order to interpret a particular speech act accomplished through speaking, participants in a communicative exchange must decode correctly what Grice refers to as implicature, that is the meaning which is inferred by listeners in an utterances in which a lot more is communicated than what is actually said14. This is for instance the case with tautologies, that is sentences such as ‘boys will be boys’ or ‘a hamburger is a hamburger’ which, from a logical perspective, do not have any communicative value, since they express something completely obvious. However, as with indirect speech acts in general, if hey 14
Grice also identifies different categories of implicatures: generalised conversational implicature (when no special knowledge is required in the context to calculate the additional conveyed meaning); scalar conversational implicature (certain information is communicated by choosing a word which expresses one value from a scale of values i.e. all, most, many, some, few; always, often, sometimes) and particularised conversational implicature, which refers to the very specific context in which our conversations take place. Grice also makes a distinction between conversational implicatures and what he refers to as conventional implicatures, which are not based on the cooperative principle or the maxims discussed below, do not have to occur in conversation and do not depend on special contexts for their interpretation. Generally speaking, they are associated with specific words and result in additional conveyed meanings when those words – for example ‘but’ (indicating contrast), ‘even’ (which indicates something that happens contrary to expectation), ‘next’ (suggesting that the present situation is expected to be different at a later time) – are used. 63
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are used in conversation, they clearly show the speaker’s intention to communicate more than what is actually said. Obviously, states Grice, for reference to be successful, collaboration is fundamental, in that in accepting speakers’ presuppositions, listeners normally have to assume that the speaker is not trying to mislead them. This observation led him to identify what he calls the cooperative principle, namely the principle which enables speakers to interpret the additional meaning conveyed by implicatures, and which the listener has to work out on the basis of what s/he already knows. According to Grice, then, participants in a conversation should ‘make their contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged’. According to Grice, this general principle of cooperation is articulated in four maxims: The Maxim of Quantity – Make your contribution as informative as is required; – Do not make your contribution more informative than is required The Maxim of Quality – –
Do not say what you believe to be false Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
The Maxim of Relation –
Be relevant
The Maxim of Manner – – – –
Avoid obscurity of expression Avoid ambiguity Be brief Be orderly (avoid unnecessary prolixity)
In order to help their interlocutors with the decodification of the message, speakers, according to Grice, often recur to hedges,
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that is cautious notes about the way the utterance is to be interpreted. Thus, in accordance to the maxim of quality, we can find hedges such as: ‘as far as I know’ or ‘I may be mistaken’; with reference to the maxim of quantity, we’ll find expressions such as ‘as you probably know’; as to relation, we could find ‘I don’t know if this is important’, and as far as the maxim of manner is concerned, we could use hedges such as ‘I’m not sure if this makes sense’ or ‘this may be a bit confused’. Further to the cooperative principle, however, when decoding a message users of language should also consider the bearing that politeness has on communication. According to Levinson, in fact, many of the inferences on which the communicative act rests are based on notion of face and politeness. It is important then to remember that the concept of face refers to a social standing or esteem which every individual claims for him/her self and wants other to respect. According to Levinson, we can distinguish positive face, namely an individual’s desire to be liked and approved by others, and negative face, which refers to the individual’s wish to be allowed to go about his/her business without others imposing unduly on him/her. In a similar way to face, then, also politeness can be both positive and negative, as it aims at preserving either the positive or the negative face of an individual. In the first case, politeness is expressed by showing interest, claiming common ground, seeking agreement and giving sympathy. Negative politeness, on the contrary, is expressed by being conventionally indirect, minimising the imposition, begging forgiveness and giving deference. These strategies, then, can be described as mitigating devices, namely linguistic items which are exploited in order to avoid face threatening acts, that is acts which could compromise the positive or negative face of one or both the participants in the conversation. These principles can obviously be applied not only to the analysis of real conversations but, bearing in mind the fictionality 65
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of a work of art, also novels, films or dramatic texts. For example, the issue of politeness appears paramount in most of Austen’s novels, as the society of the time dictated the attitude to be maintained in all social settings15, and can perhaps be best observed in Emma (1816), where the main character is constantly trying to mitigate her face threatening acts except once (namely the moment of the picnic when she answers back to Miss Bates rather impolitely), which, because of its unusualness and its important implicatures, can actually be identified as the turning point of the novel16. Similarly, Mrs Elton becomes an example of the way also compliments, from a pragmatic perspective, can be perceived as face-threatening interactional dilemmas. Specifically, Mrs Elton demonstrates how speakers, in an attempt to save their face, adopts a series of strategies and devices meant to prevent them from appearing immodest, and, simultaneously, from appearing too self-critical. Indeed, speakers, just as Mrs Elton does in Austen’s novel, can thank for the compliments received, can draw attention to the favourable circumstances or recall some other person’s opinion on the matter.
15
Amongst the many examples, we cite: ‘Emma was sorry to have to pay civilities to a person she did not like through three long months!’ (Austen, 1976, 693). 16 FRANK CHURCHILL: ‘I [Frank] am ordered by Miss Woodhouse to say, that she waives her right of knowing exactly wjat you may all be thinking of, and only requires something vert entertaining from each of you, in a general way [...] she only demands from each of you, either one thing very clever, be it prose or verse, original or repeated; or two things moderately clever; or three things very dull indeed; and she engages to laugh heartily at them all’. MISS BATES: ‘Oh! Very well [...] then I need not be uneasy. ‘Three things very dull indeed’. That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull thins as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I? [...] EMMA: ‘Ah! Ma’am, but there nay be a difficulty. Pardon me, but you will be limited as to numer – only three at once.’ (Austen, 1976, 795). 66
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Similarly, we could apply some of the basic notions of Pragmatics to such diverse material as the novel mentioned above, the film which works as its intersemiotic translation, Shakespeare’s Othello (as Coulthard does in his An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, 1985), or to other dramatic text such as, for example, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1978)17. Indeed, in this work, the whole issue of implicatures, retrieval of information and so on appears paramount, as the various characters engage in a sort of linguistic ballet meant to bring their unfaithfulness to the surface. For instance, the awkwardness of communication between the characters of the play is very often conveyed through a violation of one of Grice’s maxims, in particular that of relevance. For example, in the following dialogue, Emma: I wish you wouldn’t keep calling him Casey. His name is Roger. Jerry: Yes Roger.
17
For reasons of space we cannot discuss the translation of dramatic texts and its implications adequately. From a rapid survey of the works published on the subject, however, the translation of dramatic texts appears to have been rather neglected. In fact, as Bassnett states, ‘There is very little material on the special problems of translating dramatic texts and the statements of individual theatre translators often imply that the methodology used in the translation process is the same as that used to approach prose texts’ (1991, 120). In spite of this, the translation of dramatic texts clearly presupposes different difficulties and, as a consequence, calls for different translation strategies. ‘To begin with’, continues Bassnett, ‘a theatre text is read differently. It is read as something incomplete, rather than as a fully rounded unit, since it is only in performance that the full potential of the text is realized. And this presents the translator with a central problem: whether to translate the text as a purely literary text, or to try to translate it in its function as one element in another, more complex system’ (ibid.). Indeed, in theatre, issues of playability and issues of register become paramount. As a consequence, in order to be effective, translators of dramatic texts have to take into consideration these aspects as well, and consider the relationship between verbal and non-verbal language, stage and off-stage etc. 67
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Emma: I phoned you. I don’t know why. Jerry: What a funny thing. We were such close friends, weren’t we? Robert and me. (Pinter, 2000, 177),
Emma’s reply does not seem pertinent with the previous part of the conversation. In his turn, Jerry does not pick up what Emma has just said but changes again the topic of conversation, ignoring her last contribution to the conversation. Similarly, at the end of the fourth scene, Emma asks whether she can watch while the two male characters play squash together. Robert replies by giving a long series of reasons against this request, and by so doing, he violates the maxims of quantity and relation, in order to lead Jerry to a similar response. However, when Robert reaches his transition relevance place (that is the moment when the floor should be taken by another participant), and selects Jerry by asking him a question (‘What do you think, Jerry?’), Jerry actually replies by violating the maxim of relation. The character, in fact, simply answers ‘I haven’t played squash for years’ (Pinter, 2000, 214), which provides an answer to the first interlocutor’s question only indirectly. By working out this implicature, then, the reader realises that Jerry violates the maxim of relation so as to respect the maxim of quality, thereby suggesting his disagreement without however contrasting Robert directly. The situations and fictional works to which the principles of pragmatics could be applied are, obviously, innumerable, and for reasons of space we can simply mention them en passant, postponing their adequate discussion to a later stage. It is worth remembering, however, that various types of analyses could also exploit other methodologies, and in a similar way to the analysis of Pinter’s work mentioned above, could perhaps refer to some of the fundamental notions of conversational analysis.
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1.5.3. Conversational Analysis Conversational analysis, which was for example applied to Othello by Coulhtard, is actually another discipline which originated in order to identify and systematise the basic principles of spoken language, in particular, face-to-faceconversation. On the basis of some of the fundamental notions of sociology and ethnomethodology, conversational analysis focuses in fact on the structures of talk in interaction, which means that it does not focus just on conversation but also on talk in professional and workplace settings such as service encounters, doctor-patient consultations, courtroom and classroom talk etc., as well as political speeches and media genres. Contrary to the ethnography of speaking, this is a data centred approach which does not require the analyst to gain knowledge of the participants’ identity. The aim of conversational analysis is actually to defamiliarise what we normally take for granted in order to better understand the mechanisms that are at its basis. Thus, because talking is prototypically a joint enterprise in which people take turns, conversational analysis is mainly concerned with the description of sequential patterns, investigating the strategies adopted by participants in order to take their turn or ‘repair’ a problem in the negotiation of the floor (that is the right to speak)18. Usually, in order to take a turn, participants have to identify the turn-transition relevance place which, in the conversation, is generally indicated by particular prosodic and grammatical structures as well as non-verbal behaviour. Generally speaking, there are two main mechanisms that regulate the allocation of turns, in that either the current speaker selects the following speaker (either by naming him/her or by 18
For instance, conversational analysts noticed that speakers often use repair initiator devices such as pauses, return questions, mitigated corrections etc. 69
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producing a first part of an adjacency pair)19 or the next speaker self-selects him/herself. The person who is willing to take the floor, however, should be aware of the fact that the current speaker may decide to continue and might signal this intention by using an utterance incompletor (i.e. ‘but’, ‘and’), by beginning with an incompletition marker such as ‘if’ or by refusing to bring his/her turn to an end (in this instance, usually the speaker carries on speaking more loudly, more quickly and at a higher pitch). In natural contexts, it might actually happen that more than one person speak at the same time. There is however a big difference between overlaps – which occur when more than one speaker self-selects, thinking that the first speaker has reached the end of his/her turn (in cases such as this, usually one speaker apologises and stops speaking)20 – and interruptions, which occur when the overlap takes place at a point in the last speaker’s utterance that cannot be identified as a turn transition relevance place. Interruption, in fact, is a hostile act designed to deny the current speaker his/her legitimate right to the floor. According to Labov, however, the orderly and untroubled allocations of turns is not sufficient to guarantee the existence of meaningful interaction. In order to demonstrate this, the scholar analyses extracts of conversations between a therapist and his patient, emphasising how in an exchange such as the following: – Therapist: What’s your name? – Patient: well, let’s say you might have thought you had something from before, but you haven’t got it anymore – Therapist: I’m going to call you Dean,
the two speakers take hold of the floor in a very orderly manner without however being able to produce a meaningful exchange. In the example above, the therapist uses his second turn to 19
For a definition of adjacency pair, see infra. It should however be remembered that in cross-cultural communication different systems of floor organisation might be operative. 20
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answer the question himself, and this suggests that he has some reason to believe that the patient is not going to honour his obligation and provide an answer to the question. This, however, is not always the case, in so far as what might seem an irrelevant answer, might in fact be an insertion sequence. This is the case with the following exchange: – – – –
Customer: A pint of Guinness please Bartender: How old are you? Customer: Twenty two Bartender: Ok, coming up.
Here, the question the bartender asks is relevant to the exchange, in so far as he needs that question answered before being able to answer the question the customer asked in the first place. As a matter of fact, spoken interaction is often structured around pairs of adjacent utterances in which the second utterance is functionally dependent on the first. Generally speaking, if the first utterance is a question, as in the previous examples, the following utterance will usually be heard either as an answer or as a move that has to be made in order to put the speaker in a position to answer the question. Another example of adjacency pair is the ‘Greeting – Greeting’ pair. As the examples above make clear, if the second part of an adjacency pair is missing, it is noticeable and noticed. Indeed, if the second pair is missing, it is said to be ‘noticeably absent’, meaning that the speaker has probably withheld it for some purpose, in order to send an implicit message to the listener, and it will be up to the hearer to decode this implicit message and infer what the speaker wanted to express. This aspect is again well exemplified by many of the dialogues we can find in Pinter’s Betrayal, briefly analysed above. Within this play, silence actually plays a fundamental role in the characters’ communicative exchanges, and it is often used to perform different functions. When Emma at last confesses her
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unfaithfulness to Robert, we see that the dialogue is characterised by a series of silences and pauses, which demonstrate Emma’s awkwardness in keeping up appearances, an embarrassment which naturally leads to her confession: Robert: Was there any message for me, in his [Jerry’s, namely Emma’s lover] letter? Emma: No message. Robert. No message. Not even his love? Silence Emma: We’re lovers (Pinter, 2000, 229).
The turn-taking system that regulates the exchange of adjacency pairs, then, is said to be organised according to a preference system, according to which when the first turn gives the producer of the second turn a choice as to his/her answer (as with invitations, offers, suggestions or proposals), the choice between a ‘preferred’ or a ‘dispreferred’ response will have to be made. For instance, the preferred response to a proposal is acceptance, while a refusal is generally considered a dispreferred response, and is typically performed by elaborating and using mitigating devices. The preferred/dispreferred distinction, then, is made purely on the basis of formal patterns, in that preferred responses are prompt and short, while dispreferred ones are hesitant and elaborate, and might be introduced by discourse markers such as ‘well’. For example, in the following exchange Mark: I was thinking we could have fish? Sarah: fine Zoila: well, actually...I’ve stopped eating fish now because of...you know the damage it does to the ocean,
Zoila uses what we call mitigation devices in order to avoid posing a threat to the positive face of her interlocutors. Conversational analysis, then, emphasises how inferences can be drawn from the absence of a missing second part of an adjacency pair, and studies the use of discourse markers which, while 72
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thematically ‘empty’, contextually indicate a change of topic and project and/or check the state of shared knowledge, soften a face threatening act and so on21. 1.5.4. Interactional Sociolinguistics In a similar way to Labov’s sociolinguistic analysis, interactional sociolinguistics takes into consideration the way people use language and tries to explain these differences by correlating them to non-linguistic differences such as class, race, gender etc. However, contrary to sociolinguistics, which mainly focuses on pronunciation and grammar22, interactional sociolinguistics takes a similar approach also to other phenomena which play an important role in the organisation of spoken interaction, focussing for example on mechanisms such as turn-taking. The assumption on which this kind of analysis is based, is that crosstalk between people of different cultural backgrounds is not just a matter of surface linguistic features but relates, more fundamentally, to the assumptions language users make about the kind of speech event they are participating in and what they consider appropriate in a particular context. In an attempt to analyse the variations these structures undergo in different situations such as interracial or inter-gender contexts23, the kind of cross-cultural observation interactional sociolinguistics pursues, clearly brings to the fore the issue of cross-cultural communication (including instances of cross-talk 21
For a discussion see Schriffrin, 1980. For instance, Labov analysed the way New Yorkers use language, focussing in particular on differences of pronunciation, and related the variations to social differences. 23 For exemple, Maltz and Borker (1982) suggested that women use and interpret minimal responses such as ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to mean something like ‘I’m listening, go on’, whereas men use and interpret them as ‘I agree’. It was also suggested that while women are more likely to hear backchannel noises such as ‘mm...’ as a sign of listening, men are more likely to hear it as a sign of agreement. 22
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and up-talk, emphasising how the same formal features, including intonation patterns, may not serve the same purposes for every group of speakers), and the different meanings which non-verbal behaviour might have in cross-cultural contexts (amongst the various aspects on which interactional sociolinguists focused we can mention gaze behaviour, prosodic features such as intonation, pitch and stress, and paralinguistic features such as hesitation, pauses and contrasts of volume). All these aspects are clearly not represented in written language and are not explicitly taught, but are fundamental in any communicative act, in so far as, if we fail to understand people’s contextualization cues, we will miss part of the meaning they are trying to communicate (for example irony). 1.5.5. Critical Discourse Analysis Critical discourse analysis concentrates on the ideological dimension of discourse and its hidden agenda. This discipline – which in van Dijk’s words ‘primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context’ (2003, 352) – counts, amongst its founders, scholars such as Fairclough, Wodak, Fowler and, of course, van Dijk himself. Fairclough’s analysis, for example, concentrates on the implicit conventions according to which people interact linguistically, which he calls common-sense assumptions. It is precisely these assumptions which, according to him, coincide with ideologies, which are defined as propositions that generally figure as implicit assumptions in texts. Because ideologies contribute to the production and reproduction of unequal relations of power and relations of domination, they are conceived by Fairclough as a means of legitimising existing social relations and differences in power. Obviously, Fairclough is well aware of the fact that power is not simply a matter of language, in so far as, as the history and the literature of, for example, postcolonial countries 74
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demonstrate, physical coercion, torture, even death have been used again and again in history to implement particular ideologies. Yet, in the wake of Foucault et al., he also acknowledges that because language is part of the exercise of power, it is important to study and understand its workings. This awareness, in fact, is the only way we can actually hope to change language itself (as for example political correctness movements demonstrate). As such, not only the language used by marginalised subject, but also the linguistic approach adopted by critics and scholars can become, at least in part, a form of resistance. Indeed, the constitution of what Halliday would call an ‘antilanguage’ – that is an oppositional discourse which is used as a conscious alternative to the dominant discourse type – is the way to a more equal distribution of power in our world. This ‘antilanguage’, in fact, which could be seen as corresponding to what Roland Barthes calls an acratic language, that is the expression of a relative representation of reality, as opposed to the encratic language which dominant societies impose as universally true, thus turning it into part of mass culture, thereby assuring supremacy, legitimacy and unquestionability to the society it is spoken by (Barthes, 1973, 1611)24. By destabilising this 24
This corresponds to Barthes’s notion of the division and the war of languages. According to the scholar, in order to have its version recognised as truthful and natural, one society tries to achieve hegemony over other possible ways of structuring society by imposing models of intelligibility, and by so doing, the society in question turns its own language – once ‘acratic’ – into an ‘encratic language’. According to him, then, each day, in a single person, there accumulate several different languages, each of which tries to exclude the others. It is precisely this ‘explosion of the listening ability’ (1971, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. II, 1189) that, according to Barthes, makes the individual into an alienated being, and forces him/her to struggle in order not to be completely submerged by the language of Others. We can therefore see how, in Barthes, the notion of a division of languages is loaded with social and political connotations, as for him it is the division of bourgeois society which creates and perpetuates the division of languages in order to maintain its 75
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language, then, there is some hope to redress the balance of power in that, as Barthes claims, to change language is to change society itself. In his analysis, then, Fairclough focuses on the way language is used to impose or destabilise power. First of all, Fairclough distinguishes between ‘power in discourse’ (which for example can be observed in unequal encounters such as police officer/witness or doctor/patient amongst others., and which ought to be carefully analysed, especially in those encounters where non-powerful people have a cultural and linguistic background different from that of those in power), and ‘power behind discourse’ (which is for example at work in the standardisation process of Received Pronunciation and British English and the prescriptions it entails, with the consequent stigmatisation of other forms which are perceived as deviant, an aspect particularly important in the discussion of Black Britain). According to Fairclough, when conventions (for example in turn-taking) are routinely drawn upon in discourse, they come to embody ideological assumptions which then come to be seen as mere common-sense and which finally contribute to sustaining existing power relations. It therefore appears clear that ideology – as colonial and colonialist literature, media discourse and the discourse of history amongst others, have amply demonstrated – is most effective when its workings are less visible, that is when ideologies are brought to discourse not as explicit elements of the text but, as in texts such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) or power. To the stability society thus achieves there corresponds, in fact, the repression of all other representations of Reality (which are discredited, proposed as deviant from the ‘normal/natural’ and made, precisely, into an acratic language), and it is for this reason that, according to Barthes, the origin of the individual’s alienation is to be found in our cultural institutions: ‘under this total culture which is proposed to the subject by the institutions, it is his schizophrenic division which is imposed upon him every day; culture is in this sense the pathological field par excellence, in which the alienation of contemporary man is inscribed’ (1971, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. II, 1189). 76
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Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), as the background assumptions which on the one hand lead the text producers to ‘textualise’ the world in a particular way, and on the other hand lead readers to interpret the text in a particular way. This is the reason why critical discourse analysts concentrate on the linguistic features of discourse and closely analyse vocabulary, grammar, punctuation (or, in spoken language, intonation), turn-taking, types of speech act used (also in terms of their directness or indirectness), as these elements can be ideologically charged. In particular, as van Dijk claims, critical discourse analysis tries to bridge the gap between a micro-approach to the subject (exemplified by specific linguistic analysis) and a macroapproach (focused on notions such as ‘power’, ‘dominance’ and ‘inequality’ between social groups), bearing however in mind that in everyday interaction and in many texts, the macro and micro-level form a unified whole. For instance, a racist speech in Parliament (such as those uttered by Enoch Powell or Margaret Thatcher during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s), is a discourse at the micro level of interaction but, at the same time, it may enact the reproduction of racism at macro levels as well. Thus, as Fairclough claims, in analysing texts the analyst’s focus should constantly alternate between what is ‘there’ in the text and the discourse types the text is drawing upon, and which to an extent can be identified with the micro and macro level discussed above. In particular, Fairclough suggests that the analyst should ask a series of questions in relation to the text analysed, referring essentially to vocabulary, grammar and textual structures25. Despite their differences, all the disciplines briefly illustrated above, mix and influence each other in the constitution of discourse analysis, which could be considered an umbrella 25
For a detailed discussion, see Chapter 2. 77
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term/discipline which deals with socially situated language. Thus, although some of the disciplines introduced supra developed as a means of analysing spoken language, because they partake in discourse analysis, they can be used in the analysis of written discourse as well, and therefore have a bearing in the study (and translation) of different textual types. What mainly concerns us here, is that in all the disciplines introduced above and, in general, in discourse analysis, the emphasis is on the notion that meaning is not independent of context and that it depends on the shared knowledge of the participants who partake in the communicative act. We can therefore see how the fundamental role ascribed to context is one of the main and most fundamental changes which have utterly revolutionised the filed of language studies in general and, in particular, of translation. For example, to Hymes’s insistence on the importance of ‘communicative competence’ for users of language in general, there corresponds the notion of ‘communicative translation’ and ‘dynamic equivalence’, that is, according to Nida, the creation of a target language expression which reflects the way we would say something in the target language (Nida, 1964). Not only this, but the study of pragmatics and speech act theory posited a great emphasis on the notion of ‘function’ and skopos, which became fundamental in translation studies as well, and made scholars aware of the fact that, just as in language studies rules were abandoned in favour of pragmatic principles, on the basis of the difficulty experienced when attempting to fix sociocultural knowledge in rules, so in translation studies the prescriptive approach was abandoned in favour of a more descriptive approach aimed at the description of translation and the identification of general principles translators should follow. In addition, the study of adjacency pairs and the use of discourse markers are clearly of fundamental importance for the translator as well. Equally important are the issues of register, 78
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dialect etc. which the study of linguistic variation brought to the fore. If in this instance, as in the case of interactional sociolinguistics, the translator becomes so important, it is because the emphasis is now placed on intercultural communication which, as we shall see below, is what translation is about. Finally, as the study of the language of advertising, the language of politics and the language of postcolonial literature certainly emphasises, the ideological issues tackled by critical discourse analysis assume a fundamental role in translation as well.
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Chapter 2 Discourse and its Defining Elements
As mentioned in the previous chapter, during the last half century, the approach to the study of language underwent a series of major changes, as scholars such as Malinowski (who coined the expressions ‘context of situation’ and ‘context of culture’, Firth, Hymes and others began to stress the idea that in order to decode a message correctly we have to take into consideration both the particular situation in which the communicative exchange takes place and the different cultural background it stems from. This communicative act can also be referred to as ‘discourse’, which we can define in two distinct but interrelated ways. Discourse can in fact be understood both as language in use and (perhaps implicitly), as language as communication. Clearly, these two definitions have important consequences and rely on notions that neither linguists nor translators can ignore. For instance, a definition of discourse as language in use, namely the way language is used, both in the written and spoken codes, clearly implies the notion of context (both cultural and situational). Furthermore, by stating that discourse is language as communication, that is the way we communicate in the spoken and written codes, we implicitly refer to the purposes for which we speak and write. As a consequence, this definition of discourse clearly relies on the notion of function discussed below.
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2.1.The Context of Situation The context gives the receiver a framework within which s/he can interpret what is said or written. Language, in fact, is clearly influenced by various sociocultural aspects. As such, the general meaning of a text must be understood in a pragmatic sense, that is, taking into account not only the sender’s intentions, but also important variables such as the people who take part in the communicative act, the topic, the setting and so on. For example, as Ulrych notes (1992), the sentence ‘He delivered the punch’, is ambiguous, unless we know the circumstances (both verbal and non-verbal) in which it was uttered. The interpretation of the words ‘delivered’ and ‘punch’ depends in fact on the context, and whether the speaker/writer is for example referring to a man working in a supermarket who has delivered some punch (understood as a type of drink) to someone’s house, or whether s/he is referring for example to a boxing match. A text could therefore be understood as a web of relations which assign each other meaning and which can therefore be interpreted only if they are put in relation to one another. This notion, then, might be seen as related to the notion of system originally posited by the structuralists (in the wake of Saussure). From this perspective, language might therefore be considered as a system aimed at producing meanings: a semantic system in which meanings are expressed both by grammar and vocabulary. It would be up to Halliday to further elaborate the notion of system. In actual fact, the scholar would define his whole theory as systemic, that is to say, a theory of meaning as choice, by which language, or any other semiotic system, is interpreted as networks of interlocking options [...] starting with the most general features and proceeding step by step so as to become evermore specific: a message is either about doing, or about thinking, or about being;
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if it is about doing, this is either plain action or action on something [etc.] (Halliday, 1994, XXVI).
Systemic theory, then, is a theory of meaning as choice, according to which language can be interpreted as a series of networks of interlocking options (‘either this or that’). According to Halliday, each point in the systemic network always specifies an environment (that is, the choices already made) and a set of possibilities of which one is to be chosen (1994, xxvi-vii), and these two elements together constitute a system. By using the notion of system as a functional paradigm, Halliday developed it into the formal construct of a systemic network. Language, says Halliday, is a special kind of system in that it refers, as suggested below, to the sociocultural environment speakers live in. Language, then, might be said to be a social activity in two senses: it is related to the social system which we often define as a synonym of culture (understood here as a system of meanings), and, simultaneously, it is also concerned with the relationship with the social structure (understood here as one aspect of the social system). It therefore appears clear that Halliday mainly relates language to the social structure, and although he does not dismiss other approaches (such as Chomsky’s psychological interpretation of language as a process of the human mind), he tries to explain linguistic phenomena mainly from the social point of view. Proceeding with a general outline of his theory, Halliday states that discourse analysis usually aims at two achievements: understanding the text and evaluating the text and its effectiveness. As we shall see below, this last goal is achieved by interpreting not only the text itself, but also the context of culture it stems from, the context of situation it posits itself in, and the systemic relationship between context and text. As mentioned above, the distinction between context of culture and context of situation was first made by the anthropologist Malinowski who, having spent a long time 83
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studying the culture of a group of South Pacific islanders, found it difficult to illustrate his findings to an English-speaking audience without referring both to the general cultural background from which it stemmed (the context of culture) and to the immediate situation in which a particular utterance occurred (which he termed the context of situation). The context of situation might be said to coincide with the extratextual context of the text, and points to the fact that, in order to interpret a message correctly, we must understand both linguistic and situational clues, identifying with precision the communicative environment of the text itself. This, basically, is the implication of Jakobson’s model of communication (which could perhaps be considered the first model of the context of situation), according to which, as we have seen in the first chapter, the meaning of a message resides not in a single factor of the speech act, but in the total act of communication. Knowing the context of situation thus implies interpreting language appropriately in relation to the social context, thereby acquiring what Hymes calls ‘communicative competence’, which means that the speaker knows ‘when to speak, when not and [...] what to talk about with whom, when, where and in what manner’ (1972, 277). In order to identify correctly the context of situation, then, we ought to bear in mind a set of variables which, to an extent, might be compared to the various components which make up a context. Already in 1950 J.R. Firth – who developed many of the notions on which Halliday’s theory is based, referring to human linguistic behaviour as a network of relations between people, things and events – focused on the context of situation and in an attempt to further develop Malinowski’s study of the relationship between language use and the context of situation, identified the following components: 84
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– – – –
The participants (including their role and status) Their verbal and non-verbal actions The relevant objects and events The effects of the verbal actions
A couple of decades later, Hymes (1972) provided another componential analysis of any situational context, identifying: – – – – – – – – – –
The participants The message form The message content The setting The medium of communication The intent of communication The effect of communication The tone The genre The norms of interaction
Finally, House (1981) elaborated a contextual model of translation and identified a series of dimensions which appeared particularly useful to compare source text and target text in translation: – Dimensions of language user: • Geographical origin • Social class • Time – Dimensions of language use: • Medium (written, spoken, written to be spoken) • Participation (dialogue, letter, etc.) • Social role relationship (authority, friendliness, etc.) • Social attitude (from frozen to intimate) • Province (field of topic – namely whether we are dealing with a part of a film, or a play, poetry, quarrel...) 1. 1
In her analysis of the German translation of Sean O’ Casey’s play The End of the Beginning (1977), in which the geographical origin and the social 85
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2.1.1. Registers The relevance accorded by House to such variables as geographical origin, social class, social role relationship and social attitude amongst others, clearly raises the issue of dialects and registers.
attitude appear particularly significant, she emphasises how the translation fails to convey some of the essential features of the source text. These appear evident from the very beginning of the text: DARRY: I forgot. I’ll have to get going. BARRY: Get going at what? DARRY: House-work. I dared her, an’ she left me to do the work of the house while she was mowing the meadow. If it isn’t done when she comes back, then sweet good-bye to the status I had in the home. (getting into overall) Dih, dih, dih, where’s the back ‘n where’s the front, ‘n which is which is the bottom ‘n which is the top? BARRY: Take it quietly, take it quietly, Darry. DARRY: Take it quietly? An’ the time galloping by? I can’t stand up on a chair ‘n say to the sun, stand thou still there, over the meadow the missus is moving, can I? House begins by analysing the text syntactically, lexically and textually, and proceeds by identifying the various dimensions she inserted in her model. Thus, the ‘geographical origin’ is described as ‘Hiberno-English’; because of the presence of dialectical elements, the social class is recognised as ‘Irish lower class’, and the time is defined as ‘contemporary’. As to the dimension of the language use, she highlights that the text is ‘written to be acted’, that it consists of a ‘simple dialogue’; that the two interlocutors are two friends (which explains why the next dimension, that is, social attitude, might be described as ‘casual/intimate and mock-formal’), and that, of course, the province is to be identified with a ‘part of an Irish comedy’. In the German translation of the play, however, no attempt is made to find a corresponding geographical dialect, the mock formal level is not respected and the folk-play element of the source text is not represented. As a consequence of the omission of such features as dialect and deliberate affectedness, according to House the humorous element of the play is lost, which means that the goal of the play (i.e. entertaining the audience) has been, to some extent, compromised. 86
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Indeed, as we assume that every speech act is addressed to someone (in that even a monologue can be intended to be addressed to the speaker him/herself), it is clear that the definition of context is closely connected not only to the person who produces the message, but also to the person who receives it. Consequently, if, as Duff claims in Translation, ‘context is the what, where and to whom of our communication’ (1989, 20), the register coincides with the ‘how’ of our linguistic expression, that is, the way in which speakers/writers express themselves in particular contexts of situation. Although often registers and dialects are analysed as independent entities in relation to the context, here it seems coherent to include their discussion in the chapter dedicated to the analysis of context, as they are, in fact, determinant factors of the context of situation. Indeed, according to Halliday, the way language is used in particular social contexts can be looked at in terms of diatypes or registers. Because speakers use registers to say different things and to express different meanings according to the kind of social activity they are engaging in, registers tend to reflect conventionally-accepted types of discourse which differ from one another mainly in terms of vocabulary and grammar. In Language, Context and Text (1985), Halliday and Hasan distinguish three main variables which determine register: – Field, which refers to the subject matter and the nature of the activity. We can therefore speak of technical, scientific and legal registers, the language of sports and so on, depending on the activity the participants engage in. The field of discourse therefore comprises the event which is taking place, the spatial and temporal setting, the participants, what they know and what they believe. – Tenor, which indicates the social relationships existing between those involved in terms of power and status. The tenor of discourse, then, can express the attitude of the author 87
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of the message (detached, tentative, committed etc.), and it might be expressed by a number of linguistic devices. For instance, the author’s hedging (that is, his/her cautious attitude), can find expression in passive constructions such as ‘it has been reported that...’; verbs such as ‘allege’, ‘assume’, believe’, ‘expect’, ‘fear’, ‘suppose’, ‘presume’, ‘suggest’ etc. and attitudinal adverbs such as ‘admittedly’, ‘certainly’, ‘doubtfully’, ‘evidently’ etc. In addition, we can speak of formal, neutral or informal registers, according to the relationship (social, psychological and intellectual) that exists between the participants in the communicative event. Clearly, when translating from English into Italian and vice-versa, we ought to ensure that all the grammatical and lexical features of the text belong to the same level of formality2. – Mode, which concerns how language is being used, the organisation of the text etc. From this perspective, we can talk about a particular genre (lecture, lyric, essay) and the channel through which the communicative event takes place, both in terms of medium (spoken language, written language, written to be spoken) and of instrumentality (phone, tape, telex, fax, e-mail). It therefore appears clear that belonging to a culture, for Halliday and Hasan, entails constructing in our minds a model of the context of situation (1985, 28), assigning it to a field, a tenor and a mode, thereby noting what is going on, recognising
2
For instance, the sentences below illustrate how differently the same idea would be put across according to the different levels of formality: – ‘Visitors should make their way at once to the upper floor by way of the staircase’ – ‘Visitors should go up the stairs at once’ – ‘Would you mind going upstairs right way, please?’ – ‘Time you went upstairs, now’ – ‘Up you go, chaps’ (Scaglione, 2004). 88
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the personal relationships involved and seeing what is being achieved by language. As Halliday and Hasan state in Cohesion in English, If a passage hangs together as a text, it will display a consistency of register. In other words the texture involves more than the presence of semantic relations [...] it involves some degree of coherence in the actual meaning expressed: not only or even mainly in the content, but in the total section from the semantic resources of the language, including the various socio-personal and expressive components – the moods, the modalities, intensities, and other forms of the intrusion of the speaker into the speech situation (1976, 23).
A misreading of the register might thus lead to incongruities in spite of a general similarity in the semantic field, and if this appears fundamental when we are acting within a ‘monolingual’ context, where only native speakers are involved, it becomes even more important in situations where English is used as a lingua franca or as a second language, or where translation is involved. When faced with particular contexts of situation in which the difference of register results fundamental, the translator should, for both Halliday and House, strive to maintain the situational and cultural context by matching the variables found in the source text in the target text. Hence, although the attempt to respect the original context should not lead to a mere transposition from one language into the other3, the translator can make decisions as to the terminology to be adopted and how information should be presented for example from a
3
In fact, the structures used in the target language (active/passive forms, for example) will not always match the source language; the level of formality/informality cannot always be maintained unaltered in source language and target language, and the target language will not always follow the same information structure displayed by the source language. 89
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grammatical point of view (corresponding to Halliday’s field); the level of formality or informality to be respected (corresponding to Halliday’s tenor); the way information is organised and conveyed (Halliday’s mode); whether to make an effort to match the social distance existing between two interlocutors (House’s social attitude); or try and maintain the regional inflections present in the source language (House’s geographical origin) etc. Thus, a register could not only be defined as a sub-code of a particular language identified on the basis of how often certain lexico-grammatical features appear in a particular variety of text, but also, as Halliday, McIntosh and Stevens postulated as early as 1964, that language varies as its function varies and that it differs in different situations. It is precisely this variety of language that the scholars named, precisely, register. 2.1.2. Dialects Register, then, which can be identified as a diaphasic variety of language, is related to, but very different from, those sub-codes we call dialects, which relate to both the diatopic varieties of language (that is, geographical dialects, regional variations and/or languages spoken by ethnolinguistic minorities) and the diastratic varieties of language, which for example account for various jargons such as the language of youth or the differences between language as used by men and language as used by women. Indeed, whereas registers refer to the way individuals use language in particular contexts of situation, dialects relate to characteristics which are inherent in users of language themselves, and unlike registers they generally differ in phonetics, phonology, vocabulary and occasionally grammar, but not in semantics. Dialects can therefore be said to say the same thing differently, as dialectical features can identify a user of language in terms of his/her place of birth, class, education, gender and age. For instance, in English we can identify various 90
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kinds of ‘sub-dialects’ according to which aspect is most clearly expressed through a particular language variety: – the standard dialect, which is defined in terms of intelligibility (but not necessarily prestige) and relies on the standardisation process enacted by various institutions such as education, the media etc. As I will clarify below, in Italian there is no such thing as a standard dialect, as there are many different regional variations. The rendering of English dialectical features therefore can be a very challenging task for Italian translators who, before making a decision regarding which dialect to adopt, ought to analyse the context of culture very carefully both in the source text and the target text, taking into account the receivers of their work; – the idiolect, which expresses an individual’s personality and refers to the speech habits peculiar to a person. The idiolect therefore accounts for favourite lexical items, pronunciation and/or grammatical features characteristic of a speaker’s/writer’s linguistic productions; – the temporal dialect, which enables readers/listeners to assign a text to a particular period. This dialect therefore identifies texts both on the basis of their place in history (certain forms, for example, are now considered archaic, and certainly some others have ceased to exist altogether), and in the span of the speaker’s/writer’s life, in so far as, for example, we do not speak at fifty as we did at fifteen. To an extent, then, this dialect points to the developments of language from Anglo-Saxon to contemporary standard English, via infinite intermediate degrees such as Old English, Middle English and Modern English. At the same time, it also refers to phenomena such as the language of children (often characterised by paratactic structures, short sentences, particular lexical choices and so on), and the language of youth. The latter has often attracted the attention of scholars and linguists such as Berruto (1987) and Radtke (1993), 91
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especially for its contribution to the creation of new terms and expressions in the standard language. This area is of particular relevance for translators, who should be aware of the defining features of this jargon which is characterised by diatopic and diaphasic (as well as diastratic) variables both in the source language and in the target language. In particular, translators should always bear in mind some of the characteristics of the language of youth, such as the rapidity of change (essentially determined by the constant change of the users)4; the heterogeneity of the group, mainly determined by variables such as the users’ age, the place where they socialise (school, pub, club etc.), their cultural experience (students from high school, from secondary-school, uneducated youth etc.); and their attitude in relation to music, cinema, television, fashion, sport and so on; the lexical innovations youth introduce into the standard language, in particular the way they form neologisms (using metaphors; abbreviations; acronyms; lexical borrowings; ironic use of formal/Latin/learned expressions; euphemisms; technical words; hyperbolic expressions and the words and expressions they might borrow from other jargons such as the army jargon, the criminal jargon, the sexual jargon etc.; – the (intranational) geographical dialect, which enables readers/listeners to identify the speaker’s/writer’s place of origin. Clearly, in rendering an English text into Italian, translators ought to bear in mind that the diatopic varieties of Italian (including geographical dialects and regional variations) are more complex than English. For instance, besides cases such as ‘historical’ ethnolinguistic varieties such as Ladin (spoken in some parts of Trentino Alto Adige and Friuli), we can identify three broad types of dialects: Northern, Tuscan and Centre4
This holds true also in relation to cultural referents which can clearly change over the years, thus rendering obsolete certain translations. 92
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Southern dialects. Each of these dialects, however, articulates itself in many other sub-varieties, which are characterised by specific morphosyntactical, lexical, and phonological features5; – the (international) geographical dialect, which accounts for the spread of English as an international language and the various syntactical, morphological, lexical and phonological characteristics which distinguish the various ‘englishes’ of the world. This dialect, then, obviously comprises American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, South African, South Asian and Caribbean English, but also the many pidgins and creoles which have developed in contact zones6.
5
The translator willing to use a dialect will therefore have to study the context of situation of the source text in depth (for example, on the basis of House’s model introduced above), and make a decision as to the most effective dialect to be used in the target text. The importance of the translator’s choice is for instance exemplified by D.H. Lawrence’s translation of Giovanni Verga’s stories and his attempt to convey the flavour of the Sicilian dialect used by the Italian author by resorting to the Nottinghamshire dialect. Indeed, Lawrence realised that there were many similarities between Verga’s Sicilian and Nottinghamshire communities, as in both life seemed for example based on love, violence and the surrounding physical reality. Thus, he thought that some peculiar features of the Nottinghamshire idiom might adequately represent some of the features of the Sicilian language used by Verga. And in fact, although sometimes Lawerence’s translations reveal the inadequacy of his knowledge of the Sicilian language and society, he manages to create, in the words George Hyde used, ‘an idiom, that is rooted in dialect as Verga’s Italian was rooted in Sicilian peasant speech’ without actually positing itself as a transcription of any particular dialect (1981, 36). In his attempt to be as faithful as possible to the source text, then, Lawrence would render the original ‘Voi ne valete cento delle Lole, e conosco uno che non guarderebbe la gnà Lola, nè il suo santo, quando ci siete voi’ (Verga, 1942, 181) with ‘You’re worthy twenty Lolas. And I know somebody as wouldn’t look at Mrs. Lola, nor at the saint she’s named after, if you was by’ (Verga, 1928, 34). 6 Whereas a pidgin remains a contact language to which speakers of different languages resort in order to communicate, a creole is a pidgin 93
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Clearly, in this case as well, translators ought to take into account the linguistic and sociological/cultural implications of particular choices. For example, in the case of texts stemming from the once-colonised world, it is important to consider that the recourse to particular substandard forms of English is often identified with an attempt, on the authors’ part, to assert their identity and the identity of the country they stand for against colonial and neo-colonial powers. Thus, the emphasis Tonkin puts on the necessity of respecting the original text, for example by making an effort to convey phenomena such as code-mixing (when words from another language or dialects are inserted in the text) and codeswitching (when more substantial elements such as whole clauses or phrases are imported from another language, leading to the incorporation within the text of grammatical aspects of the language), therefore appears essential (Tonkin, 1993, 188). These strategies – which we shall analyse in more detail in the third chapter – actually become fundamental tools for the affirmation of the characters’ identity, usually setting a ‘third-person narrator’ (who generally expresses him/herself in standard English), in opposition to the characters, who stand for both the author him/herself and the community s/he belongs to. Ignoring such peculiarities would therefore mean to nullify the author’s effort and halve the impact of the texts themselves. Translators, then, should always be aware of the fact that the difficulties presented by texts such as these are never simply linguistic. As a consequence, unless the translator can actually understand the origin and the ideological bearing of certain lexical/syntactical choices, the translation will suffer enormously.
language which has developed into the mother-tongue of a specific community. 94
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– the social dialect, which enables readers/listeners to identify speakers’/writers’ social origin, on the basis of their affiliation to a particular social class. Here again, translators ought to be aware of a profound difference between English and Italian, in that although there are of course differences in the level of education, the diastratic component linked to education is often assimilated to diaphasic varieties of the language, according to which we can identify ‘popular’ and ‘educated’ registers. What is referred to as ‘italiano popolare’ was recognised by Spitzer (1921) at the beginning of the twentieth century as typical of the letters by soldiers fighting in the First World War and became an object of study during the 1970s thanks primarily to De Mauro (1970) and Cortelazzo (1972), who defined it as ‘the Italian which is learned at school by people whose mother-tongue is a particular dialect’. As defined by these scholars, ‘italiano popolare’ is thus a variety of Italian heavily marked by substandard morphosyntactic structures which render it rather unique, while sharing some lexical and textual features with colloquial varieties of Italian. In spite of the fact that, according to Coveri, Benucci et. al., characteristics such as invariable adjective used with an adverbial function (‘gli voglio bene uguale’, rather than ugualmente); simplification of the paradigm of possessive adjectives and pronouns (suo instead of loro) and accumulation of prepositions (presso a delle famiglie instead of presso delle famiglie), to cite but a few, generally speaking in Italy it is impossible to identify a particular social class from the way a person speaks. Thus, whereas in Great Britain the proverb ‘tell me how you speak and I will tell you who you are’ (in terms of your provenance from a particular social class) seems to hold true, in Italy it should be more likely changed to ‘tell me how you speak and I will tell you where you come from’. Indeed, in Italy, the social component (even that linked to education) often intermingles with other (often 95
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geographical) parameters. Thus, although a strong regional accent usually identifies the lower social classes, it is also true that, at the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the so-called ‘italiano regionale colto medio’, that is, a regional and educated variety of Italian typical of the middle classes as well (see Berruto, 1987). When called to translate texts which, in English, are clearly the product of members of a particular social class, translators should therefore consider the many and fundamental differences between source and target language and adopt a suitable strategy in order to convey the kind of implications intrinsic in the original choice of a social dialect. – the genderlect, which identifies the various features 1distinguishing woman’s language from man’s language. According to Tannen, for instance, women speak essentially to maintain their independence, while men use language to establish intimacy (1992, 26). Coates also investigates the lexicogrammatical choices made by men and women, suggesting that women tend to use more minimal responses, are less prone to interrupt their interlocutors and generally use modal adverbial and verb forms such as ‘perhaps’, ‘I think’ and ‘probably’, more often. In addition, whereas men usually engage in floor-holding, while the other men remain generally silent, women tend to join in and construct a ‘cooperative’ discourse. As a result, as Coates observes, in mixed-sex conversations this fundamental difference can create the impression that women keep interrupting man’s discourse. This, however, is not actually the case, and in fact observations show that in reality it is men who do most of the (real) interrupting. Clearly, in the case of genderlect as well, translators ought to find a way to convey the flavour which, in the source text, might be created by the use of this specific variety. This is particularly true in highly politicised texts such as feminist 96
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works or the writings stemming from the postcolonial world. For instance, there is a whole series of works which subscribe to a theory of ‘feminine writing’, that is, the idea that feminine writing drastically differs from masculine writing precisely because it originates in women’s different biology. This is for example the case with Hélène Cixous, whose whole work is centred on the notion of the female body as the site of woman’s writing, and whose theorisation not only fundamentally relies on the biological distinction between the sexes, but also supports the patriarchal description of woman proposing it as natural. Similarly, Luce Irigaray’s Spéculum de l’autre femme and Ce sexe qui n’est pas un also fail in their aim to subvert patriarchal discourse precisely because they fall back into essentialism and, in their attempt to define woman, basically reinforce the patriarchal discourse they are trying to undo. Indeed, despite the contempt for the phallocratic Freud and his theory of feminine inferiority deterministically based on woman’s anatomy7, these theories offer the same explanations he gave for the difficulties he had encountered in his research on woman’s sexual development. In fact, Irigaray’s positing of a language specific to woman – what she calls ‘le parler femme’ (’woman speak’), which emerges when women speak together – seems a repetition of Freud’s explanation of the impossibility of answering the question ‘What does a woman want?’ (in Jones, 1955, 468). These theories therefore confirm precisely the type of definition of woman which they simultaneously deny, and it is exactly this essentialism and the emphasis placed on the pre-Oedipal as opposed to the Symbolic, and on what Nin called ‘the music of the womb’ as 7
In Freud’s theory, the determinant factor is that the leading sexual organ in little girls is the clitoris which, being perceived as a small penis, obliges the young female to define herself in relation to the larger male penis and to perceive herself as inferior (1924, 320; 1925, 335–7; 1931, 376). 97
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opposed to logic, that has often been contested, for example by British author Christine Brooke-Rose (1991). In fact, the very concept of a ‘feminine specificity’ is questionable to say the least, especially in consideration of the fact that characteristics such as fluidity, open endings, circular structures (often indicated as typical of ‘feminine writing’), are also found in male writers such as James Joyce. And yet, whether carefully constructed by the feminist authors who champion this view or naturally occurring in the real life of real speaking/writing subjects, the language resorted to by many women (whether critics, artists, journalists or, simply, ‘women’) tend to assume particular idiosyncrasies to which the translator should be attentive and should obviously try to convey. In particular, translators should bear in mind that although certain features of genderlect might be ‘international’ and ‘interlinguistic’, others might not be considered so. For instance, the Italian sociolinguists Attili and Benigni (1979) emphasise the fact that feminine interaction is generally more oriented towards the interpersonal aspects of the conversation and the relationships between speakers, and Cortese and Potestà (1987) claim that feminine discourse is characterised by the presence of many polite formulae and, in a similar vein to Coates, by the presence of hesitation and attenuation forms. However, the tendency of women to prefer euphemisms and hyperboles, particular adverbs and modifiers, diminutives and affectionate appellations, and to use a smaller vocabulary, less taboo words and less technical terms, is a primary concern of the Italian sociolinguists Coveri, Benucci et al., but does not appear as central in the description made by their British counterparts. Clearly enough, the choice as to whether or not to use a dialect, depends on the context of situation – as exemplified for instance by politicians using expressions from a particular dialect typical of the region they are delivering their speeches in or, as we shall 98
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see below, adverts where we can find more than one inter or intra geographical dialect – on the function of our act of communication. 2.1.3. The Notion of Function Actually, according to Halliday, the components of meaning in language are, fundamentally, functional. Indeed, in the opening page of his An Introduction to Functional Grammar, he explains that the conceptual framework on which his grammar is based is a functional one rather than a formal one. By this, he means that: It is functional in the sense that it is designed to account for how the language is used. Every text – that is everything that is said or written – unfolds in some context of use; furthermore, it is the uses of language that, over tens of thousands of generations, have shaped the system. Language has evolved to satisfy human needs; and the way it is organised is functional with respect to these needs [...] Following from this, the fundamental components of meaning in language are functional components [...] Thirdly, each element in a language is explained by reference to its function in the total linguistic system. In this third sense, therefore, a functional grammar is one that construes all units of language – its clauses, phrases and so on – as organic configurations of functions. In other words, each part is interpreted as functional with respect to the whole [...] In a functional grammar [...] a language is interpreted as a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realised (1994).
By stating that the components of meaning are functional, Halliday thus emphasises that language is as it is because it has to perform certain tasks. Because speakers generally use languages for various purposes, it is impossible to identify one particular utterance with a specific function. Yet, it is possible to
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identify what Halliday in 1994 called metafunctions8, that is semantic macro-functions which correspond to the abstract
8
These can be seen as a re-elaboration of the functions identified by Jakobson. Indeed, according to him, depending which of the factors he posited in his Model of communication is given emphasis in the act of communication, the act will be said to have a different function. The linguistic act is therefore said to have: an emotive function when emphasis is given to the sender of the message, which means that this function aims at expressing the speaker’s/writer’s attitudes towards the topic s/he is talking/writing about; a conative (or persuasive) function, if it focuses on the receiver in the attempt to obtain certain results from him/her. Since the conative function is concerned with interpersonal relationships, its most explicit expression coincides with the use of the imperative and the vocative forms; a referential (or informational/denotative) function, when the attention is focused on the context (that it, the referent or topic of the message). This is clearly a primary function, in that it is used to exchange information; a poetic function, when attention is given to the message itself (the form in which it is realised, the sign). Although the adjective ‘poetic’ clearly brings to mind ‘poetry’ and ‘poems’, the poetic function can characterise prose texts as well, and can, for instance, be adopted in particular advertisements or other discourses which emphasise rhythm, musicality, and figurative expressions; a phatic function, if the focus is on establishing, maintaining or interrupting a contact between the sender and the receiver of the message. This function refers to all those expressions the sender uses in order to make sure that the receiver of the message is either physically able to receive the message (on the telephone or during a lecture, for instance, we can ask ‘can you hear me?’ or, if we have sent a fax, we could wonder whether our interlocutor can actually read our message), or conceptually apt to follow what is being said/written (‘do you follow me?’, ‘can you understand?’ and similar expressions). In addition, it refers to all those expressions with which the sender can open or protract the communicative act (‘Hi’, ‘listen’, ‘look’, ‘are you ok?’, ‘cold, isn’t it?’, ‘always rushing around, eh?’ etc.); a metalinguistic function, when the focus is on the code, that is, when we talk about language itself and the way it works. This is for example the case with language classes and it is typical of verbal codes, in so far as, in order to talk about themselves, even non-verbal codes must resort to verbal ones (for example, when we explain a road sign using verbal language). 100
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representations of the purposes which language is required to fulfil. As we read in An Introduction to Functional Grammar, according to Halliday, All languages are organised around two main kinds of meaning, the ‘ideational’ or reflective, and the ‘interpersonal’ or active. These components, called ‘metafunctions’ in the terminology of the present theory, are the manifestations in the linguistic system of the two very general purposes which underlie all uses of language: (i) to understand the environment (ideational), and (ii) to act on others in it (interpersonal). Combined with these is a third metafunctional component, the ‘textual’, which breathes relevance into the other two (1994).
The ideational function of language, then, is used to understand the environment. In this instance, language performs a referential function: through this function the speaker/writer commits to language his/her knowledge of the world, naming and describing things in the environment. We could therefore say that this is language for information, as it is used to express ‘content’. The interpersonal function, on the contrary, is used to act on others in the environment. In this case, language is used to express the speaker’s meaning potential, expressing his/her own beliefs, attitudes and evaluations and seeking to influence others’ attitudes and behaviours. This is language for interaction, as it is used to define the relationship between the speaker/writer and his/her addressee, focusing in particular on the role the users of language involved in the speech act adopt according to whether they are persuading, informing, questioning and so on. Finally, Halliday identifies a third function, namely the textual one, which is instrumental to the previous two and ensures that what is said/written is relevant and relates to its context. This function therefore represents the speaker’s/writer’s potential for forming the text into a coherent and cohesive entity 101
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and expresses the relation of the language to its immediate verbal and situational environment9. Further to the emphasis on the function and the situational context a communicative act stems from, the neo-Firthian approach to word meaning, of which the theroris introduced supra are an example, also suggests that the meaning of a word is as much a matter of how the word combines textually with other words (that is to say its collocations)10, as any inherent properties of meaning that words have on their on account. 9
In his discussion, Halliday relates the metafunctions he identified with other aspects of the grammar of the language used. Thus, according to Halliday, the ideational function is represented by ‘transitivity’ (which relates to the way various processes of the surrounding reality are interpreted and expressed) and has a systemic relationship with ‘field’; the interpersonal function are represented by ‘mood’ (the speaker’s/writer’s selection of a particular role in the communicative event and his/her determination of the choice of roles for the addressee) and modality (the expression of the speaker’s/writer’s evaluations and predictions), and is connected through a systemic relationship to ‘tenor’; and the textual function is represented by ‘theme structures’ (which shall be discussed in detail below and which express the way the message is organised) and is connected to ‘mode’. 10 The term collocation was coined by the British linguist J.R. Firth in 1957 to call attention to the fact that certain words usually go together and ‘indicates the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other’ (Sinclair, 1991, 170). From a psychological point of view, then, a word acquires certain associations ‘on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment’ (Leech, 1974, 20), and the interrelation of these two kinds of collocation enables readers/speakers to consider a specific collocation either usual or unusual, although this clearly depends also on register, style and genre. In fact, according to Firth, we can distinguish between ‘general’ collocations (which are considered more usual) and more ‘technical or personal’ collocations (as a rule, more restricted) (Firth, 1957, 195). In addition, collocations might be fixed or allow for a certain degree of variation. Proverbs, sayings, quotations and idioms are, generally speaking, fixed collocations, although – apart from ‘irreversible binominals’ such as ‘bread and butter’, ‘ups and downs’ etc., there might be a certain level of internal lexical variation (Sinclair, 1991, 111). At the other end of the spectrum, on the contrary, we find what Carter calls ‘unrestricted 102
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2.2.The Co-Text The notion of collocation and, as a consequence, the broader notion of the linguistic surrounding of a particular linguistic item in a given text, can also be defined as a different kind of context, namely the co-text, that is to say the linguistic context of the text, that which enables readers to identify all the elements of the text from a morphosyntactic point of view and to appreciate the relationship existing between one element of the text and all the others. Given these premises, it appears therefore evident that the notion of co-text heavily relies on the idea of cohesion. 2.2.1. The Notion of Cohesion Cohesion occurs when the interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of others. Cohesion is thus a relational concept, but in a similar way to all components of the semantic system, it is realised through the lexicogrammatical system of language. Cohesion accounts for the relations in discourse – one element is interpreted by reference to another; this means that in order to interpret something we have to refer elsewhere, to the context of an utterance/sentence, understood here as the co-text of our text. For instance, as Halliday and Hasan exemplify in
collocations’, according to which a lexical item can attach itself to a wide range of other items. The knowledge of whether a collocation is usual or unusual is, according to Hymes (1971), part of a native speaker’s competence. Thus, even though a person might decide to use an unusual collocation for dramatic, poetic or humorous effect, this choice still relies on what would be normally considered an usual collocation. As Partington notes, for instance, Dylan Thomas’s poetic inventions ‘all the sun long’ and ‘all the moon long’ depend for their effect on the more usual all day long and all night long. Yet, as Carter observes, even native speakers will not always totally agree on whether a collocation is acceptable or unacceptable (1987, 55), thereby leaving the possibility open to speakers/writers to create personal collocations by adapting what are considered fixed collocations. 103
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their Cohesion in English (1976), in order to interpret a sentence such as ‘he said so’, we have to link it up with some other passages in which there is an indication of who ‘he’ is and what he said (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 11). Cohesion might therefore be provided by what is left out of the text. We could therefore say that cohesion (grammatical or lexical) could be defined as the means whereby elements that are structurally unrelated to one another are semantically linked together. Because some forms of cohesion are realised through the grammar and others through the vocabulary, as we read in Cohesion in English, we can talk about: 1. Grammatical Cohesion The simplest and most general forms of cohesive grammatical relation are reference and conjoining. a) Reference: the information to be retrieved is the referential meaning. We can talk about anaphoric reference, when the information to be retrieved appears beforehand within the text (for example: ‘That woman is called Jane. She is Peter’s sister’), and cataphoric reference, when we have a sort of clue within the text, whose meaning – that is to say the element it refers to – will become clear only afterwards (for example: ‘I gave it back to Celia, the bike I borrowed’). Within these two major categories, we can also identify three different types of reference: • personal reference (that is, reference by means of the category of person – speaker, addressee, other person etc.: I, you, me, mine, my, he...); • demonstrative reference (that is, reference by means of location, on a scale of proximity – this, these, that, those, here, there); • comparative reference (that is, indirect reference by means of identity or similarity – same, identical, equal, better, more..., so.., less...).
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b) Conjunctions/connectives • Addition connectives (and) – ‘Mary entered the room and sat at her desk’; • Opposition connectives (but, yet) – ‘That decision brought about several problems, but it was worthwhile’; • Cause connectives (therefore, hence, thus) – ‘John had been missing for five weeks. As a result of his enquiries, the Inspector was convinced he had left the country’ (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 231). • Time connectives (then) – ‘O’ Driscoll carried the ball through the English defence and then scored a try’. c) Substitution • Noun substitutes – ‘If only I could remember where it was that I saw someone putting away the box with those candles in I could finish the decorations now. – You mean the little coloured ones?’ (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 91). • Verb substitutes – ‘He never really succeeded in his ambitions. He might have done, one felt, had it not been for the restlessness of his nature’ (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 113). • Clause substitutes – ‘Charlotte seems a very pleasant young woman’, said Bingley. ‘Oh dear, yeas, but you must own she is very plain. Lady Lucas herself has said so, and envied me Jane’s beauty’ (Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813) d) Ellipsis • Noun ellipsis – ‘Which last longer, the curved rods or the straight rods? The straight are less likely to break’ (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 148). • Verb ellipsis – ‘John’s arrived, has he? – Not yet; but Mary has’ (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 180). • Clause ellipsis – ‘...being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing. – No, it isn’t, said the Cartepillar’ (Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 1934). 105
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2. Lexical Cohesion a) Repetition – Of words – ‘Henry presented her with his own portrait. As it happened, she had always wanted a portrait of Henry’ (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 284). – Of patterns of words – ‘The people of this country know when newspapers are lying to them. They know when the government tries and conceal the facts.’ b) Synonyms – Straightforward synonyms – ‘Yesterday I was fired. As soon as I arrived at the office my boss gave me an envelope and told me it was redundancy money – £ 420.’ – Synonyms with word class change – ‘This travel agency is famous for the breadth of its offers: you will be able to choose from a very wide range of special vacations.’ c) Semantically related words – Hyponyms – ‘Jane has bought herself a new skirt. She really enjoys shopping for clothes’. – Superordinates – ‘Mary has decided to change the furniture in her flat. She has bought a new table for her kitchen’. – Antonyms – ‘That’s the top and bottom of it’ – Words relating to the same semantic field – ‘The Forthright Building Society required, apparently, that a borrower should sign, seal and deliver the mortgage deed in the presence of a solicitor, so that the solicitor would sign it as the witness’ (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, 284). 2.2.2. Textual Types and Genre Analysis The notion of cohesion is, in turn, closely connected to the idea of texture which Halliday identifies with an expression of the textual function and which is fundamental to the identification of a text as such.
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Once a text is identified as such, in fact, according to Werlich’s taxonomy, it can be categorised as descriptive (which can then be further divided into subjective descriptions, such as those found in narratives, newspaper articles and the like; objective or technical descriptions such as those distinguishing scientific texts, where impersonal constructions are often used); as argumentative, when the text concerns the cognitive process of evaluation and the attention is focused on the relationship between concepts and evaluations, in particular through reelaborations, transpositions, comparisons, oppositions etc. (in this case as well, we can talk about subjective – as with discussions, debates, interviews, commentaries, reviews and so on – and objective – as with scientific arguments, demonstrations and discussions); as narrative, which means that the text relates to facts, events, people and their actions, and presents events in sequential order, being therefore characterised by hierarchical organisation and temporal differentiation (according to Mortara Garavelli, 1988, such texts can be divided in chronological – such as biographies, diaries, chronicles, memories, historical works and so on; coverages – such as chronicles of journeys, reports of meetings, witnesses’ declarations, radio or television reports etc.; ludic – as with fables, fairytales, legends, novels, jokes and so on); as expositive, when the text relates to the cognitive processes of the person (these texts can be further divided in analytic – such as treaties, definitions of various kinds as found in encyclopaedias, dictionaries, manuals etc., academic conferences, lectures, essays, scientific reports and so on; synthetic – such as notes, diagrams, schedules, summaries, indexes etc.; and mixed – as with letters, reports and so on); as instructive, when the text concerns the cognitive process involved in the preparation of programs of various kinds. These types of text are used to give orders, provide information, offer advice and so on. They are said to have a certain amount of pragmatic force in that they are exploited to influence the 107
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addressee’s future behaviour. As such, they can be either public, which are more formal and indirect, as for instance with legal texts, user’s instructions, or good manners’ rules; or private, more informal and direct, as in memorandums and orders. If it is true that all these categories are rather generic, we must take into consideration the fact that, as Coveri, Benucci et al. emphasise (1998, 144), when these descriptions are related to the descriptions of the channel through which communication takes place – that is, when diaphasic studies are linked to diamesic studies – the description thus obtained will be rather precise. As Lavinio underlines, the channel of communication determines great linguistic and textual differences even within texts which belong to the same type or genre (1989, 57). Clearly, translators ought to bear in mind that in various languages these different types of texts might be characterised by syntactical, morphological or semantic peculiarities missing in another language. For instance, in Italian, descriptive texts are characterised by the use of the present or the imperfect (‘il cavallo correva lungo la spiaggia mentre il sole tramontava’); the use of ‘stare’ to indicate an action which has begun but has not yet finished (‘stava sorridendo’); the use of nominalisation processes (‘un mucchio di sassi’); the recourse to locatives, adjectives, special markers, colours, numbers etc., all aspects which can clearly relate to the target text but not necessarily to the source text. As mentioned above, further to the type of text, we can also identify the particular genre to which a text belongs. In order to fully appreciate the implications of the concept of genre, however, it would be appropriate to present an account of Bhatia’s description of the parameters which distinguish discourse analysis, because this naturally leads to an examination of the different genres identified by various scholars. Further to the parameters of ‘theoretical orientation’ and ‘general-specific’ scale, of which my account of Werlich’s 108
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taxonomy is part, the other parameters identified by Bhatia focus on the application, which defines for example the motivation of specific genre analyses such as those mentioned above, which have generally been applied to language teaching, in particular the teaching of English for Special Purposes and what we refer to a surface-deep analysis, which depends on whether, or at what level, a thick or a thin description of the language in use is provided (Geertz, 1973). It is precisely within the last category identified by Bhatia that we can place: – The register analysis developed by Halliday, McIntosh and Stevens in 1964, when named the variety of a language distinguished on the basis of its use as register (1964, 87). This notion, as anticipated above, therefore works as the link between the analysis of language functions as described above and the analysis of different genres as described below. According to Halliday and others, registers can be identified as different sub-codes of a particular language on the basis of both the function performed by language in a particular context (described, as we have seen above, in terms of field, mode and tenor)11, and of the frequency of particular lexicogrammatical features. As Bhatia notes, however, although it is extremely useful in its delineation of particular syntactic properties of specific varieties of English, this kind of analysis was seldom able to penetrate beyond surface features and therefore failed to provide an adequate explanation of the reason why, in specific varieties of texts, information is structured in a particular way. This analysis could therefore be said to produce a ‘thin’ description of language which, as Bhatia claims, falls some way short of offering an explanation to why a particular variety takes the form it does.
11
This aspect would later be developed by other scholars such as Crystal and Davy (1969) and Gustaffsson (1975). 109
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– The functional language description which was proposed by Selinker, Lackstrom and Trimble in 1973 and was further elaborated on by them in 1974 and 1985, when they set out to investigate the relationship between grammatical choices and rhetorical functions in written English for Science and Technology (1973, 1). Their research suggested that unlike standard English (where the tense is chosen on the basis of the notion of time), in English for Science and Technology the choice depends on the notion of degree of generality, as the present tense is often used to indicate generalisation. Although their findings were sometimes misleading, they nonetheless laid the basis for other work in the field12, encouraging a shift of emphasis from a generic register of science to specific scientific genres. – The language description as discourse developed by Widdowson (1973), Candlin et al. (1974, 1980) and Bhatia (1982) amongst others, which is generally referred to as ‘interactional analysis’, and which could perhaps be described as one of the reader-oriented analyses which began to develop with structuralism and poststructuralism13. Finally, – the language description as explanation that is generally referred to in terms of genre analysis proper as developed by Swales (1981) and others. Unlike some other types of analysis mentioned above, according to Bhatia, genre analysis (which can be considered as one of the recent developments of 12
See for example Swales (1981) and Pettinari (1982). Indeed, as Bhatia claims, ‘discourse meaning [...] is not present in a piece of text ready to be consumed by the reader but is negotiated by the ‘interactive’ endeavour on the part of the participants engaged in the encounter, giving specifically appropriate values to utterances’ (1993,75). In this case too, however, analysis, according to Bhatia, does not pay enough attention to the sociocultural, institutional and organisational constraints and expectations that shape the written genre in a particular setting, and therefore do not provide an adequate description of particular varieties of language. 13
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discourse analysis), provides discourse analysis with sociocultural, institutional and organisational explanations, combining sociocultural and psycholinguistic aspects of textproduction and interpretation with linguistic insights. Because of its aims and the means it resorts to, genre analysis (in a similar way to translation and cultural studies) can be said to be an interdisciplinary activity, taking advantage of findings in linguistics, sociology, psychology and so on. By so doing, genre analysis provides a ‘thick’ description of language in use (especially in academic and professional texts), suggesting useful correlations between form and function. It is actually the definition of genre given by Swales and others that further emphasises the close link between the study of the functions of language and the different text-types or genres. As defined by Swales, genre corresponds in fact to A recognisable communicative event characterised by a set of communicative purpose(s) identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community in which it regularly occurs. Most often it is highly structured and conventionalised with constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their intent, positioning, form and functional value. These constraints, however, are often exploited by the expert members of the discourse community to achieve private intentions within the framework of socially recognised purpose(s) (Swales, 1981, quoted by Bhatia, 1993).
According to this definition, then, the communicative purposes of the speech act determine the genre to which the text is said to belong, and any major change in the communicative purposes is bound to produce a different genre (as opposed to sub-genres, which are produced by minor modifications in the purposes of the speaker/writer). Not only this, but Swales’s definition also emphasises that although a writer enjoys a lot of freedom, s/he nonetheless must comply to certain specifications and
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constraints in order to produce texts which are readily recognisable and recognised as belonging to a particular genre. In this sense, texts must therefore satisfy certain requirements of ‘acceptability’ (as to the addressee’s expectations) and ‘intertextuality’ that is, according to Dardano and Trifone, must share some common traits with other texts belonging to the same genre (1995, 533–36). Hence, any violation of these constraints will result in an oddity and in the inability to meet the receiver’s expectations. As a result, as we shall see in some of the examples provided in the following pages, the adoption or rejection of certain conventions will be exploited in order to obtain special effects and, as with certain journalists and reporters, impress upon the message a particular (ideological) perspective, thereby manipulating the reader’s perception of the news item reported. It is therefore clear that the context, the function and the register, will also determine the way we package information in our text. 2.2.3. Information Packaging in Written Texts The way information is structured in a text is actually a fundamental aspect of written and spoken communication and has been the object of study of the functional grammar elaborated on by Halliday, whose aim is, precisely, to understand how the linguistic system enables speakers and writers to produce and process coherent meanings. By so doing, grammar enables us to understand why some texts are more effective than others at communicating information or persuading people to do or ‘buy’ something, and can help us understand the nature of propaganda and the reasons for the success (or failure) of political or advertising campaigns etc. If it is true that instinctively we try to organise our message in a way that will make it easier for our receivers to understand, there are in fact various occasions in which we give priority to different goals other than conveying information. A change in the 112
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way we structure and package information in our text, then, invariably entails a change in the way the information is processed by the listener/reader14. For example, we can say, with Halliday, that generally thematic structure and information structure – the two interrelated systems of analysis involved in the text organisation and the structure of a clause – coincide. Thus, in an unmarked clause, the given (that is the shared or mutual knowledge to which the writer brings the reader’s attention in order to communicate effectively), is placed at the beginning of the clause and is followed by information which is considered new15. This information structure of given – new finds a parallel in the unmarked thematic structure of the clause in which theme (that is the idea represented by the constituent at the starting point of the clause, that is the point of departure of the message) is placed in initial position and followed by rheme, which corresponds to the rest of the message. Thus, in an unmarked clause, theme coincides generally with given, and rheme with new. Usually, then, rheme has a higher communicative dynamism than theme and keeps the interest aroused as to how the discourse will continue. Obviously, the requirements of syntax affect the presentation of information. Hence, in languages with relatively free word 14
Although ‘text’, according to Halliday, refers to a chunk of language that might be either spoken or written for the purpose of communication, from now on the term ‘text’ will be used to refer only to written texts, unless otherwise stated. 15 As mentioned in the first chapter, as Halliday emphasises in his Spoken and Written Language, in spoken language the distinction between Given and New is indicated by intonation, as tonic prominence marks the culmination of what is new in the particular information unit, thereby pointing to the grammatical function of intonation. As also Brazil and Crystal suggest, the speaker’s assumption of shared knowledge will be reflected in the choice of tone and that the informational function of intonation is used to mark what the speaker is treating as new). 113
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order such as Italian, there will be less tension between the requirements of syntax and those of communicative functions (Baker, 1992). Consequently, rheme might appear in very final position, as in the sentence: ‘Jack ha pagato il conto, e siccome era molto caro, ha contribuito anche Mary’. Thus, although the distinction between theme and rheme can be defined as functional, in English it generally coincides with the ordering of subject and predicate. Usually, in fact, theme corresponds to the first part of the clause and announces what the message is going to be about, whereas the remainder of the clause can be identified as the rheme. The term thematisation, then, refers to a general tendency to arrange sentences in such a way as to draw attention to what is communicatively important. The organisation of theme and rheme therefore depends on the genre of our text and its purpose, and any variation of the theme/rheme sequence becomes, as we shall see in the following pages, a strategic device the author exploits in order to focus the reader’s attention on a particular element to the detriment of others. Indeed, if in a news program or a newspaper article we find rheme in thematic position, it is obvious that this is not without (sometimes important) consequences. By being placed in thematic position, in fact, what is in reality new information is presented as a given, and it is assigned the status of common knowledge, that is something that everybody is supposed to know and, as such, to accept as common sense. Thus, in a sentence like this: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that he is considered as the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters. (Jane Austen, 1983, 187),
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the obliteration of theme and the positioning of rheme in thematic position, has vital repercussions. With these words, in fact, Jane Austen opens one of her most renown novels, namely Pride and Prejudice (1813), thus hinting at the basic plot which will be developed within the text, and representing, although very concisely, the society emblematically pictured in her novel. The ‘truth’ this quotation refers to, is actually posited as such not only in relation to the events involving the Bennet girls, but also in relation to the patriarchal system characteristic of the author’s society. If this is so, it is not only because of the lexical choices made by Austen (which posit a universal truth at the very basis of the following pages), but also because of the peculiar structure of the opening sentence. Indeed, contrary to what according to Halliday happens in written texts (Halliday, 1985, 73), here rheme appears in thematic position. The ‘it’ we find at the very beginning, is an empty it, which works as a dummy subject, which means that the pronoun holds the subject position, but simply as a sort of filler, until the real subject makes its appearance in the sentence. The real subject of this sentence, namely the clause ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’, is therefore postponed and can be defined as a rankshifted clause which originates an extraposition structure, a sort of discontinuous subject which begins with ‘it’ and carries on with the rankshifted clause. Thus, what Danes calls thematic progression – namely the way in which theme and rheme are chosen and ordered in relation to superior text units such as paragraphs, chapters etc. (Danes, 1974, 118-20) – appears extremely peculiar and does not seems to comply with the standard structure of written English16. In fact, given the fact that the pronoun appearing in thematic position is an empty subject, the element that technically 16
See also Bloor, T. and Bloor, M. 2004 (2nd edition). The Functional Analysis of English – A Hallidayan Approach, Arnold ed., London et al., 67-68. 115
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represents new information is posited in reality as something that everybody (at least within the society Austen depicts with great irony), can take for granted. 2.2.4. Language and Ideology: Morphosyntactic and Lexical Strategies The structure analysed just then, therefore exemplifies the fact that information packaging is full of implications and, far from being a simple device to convey straightforward information, has an important bearing on the way the world is presented by the writer and the way it is read by the reader17. Clearly enough, an author’s decision to foreground certain elements in the text systematically is an important factor to consider also when we are called to translate a text. Indeed, as Danes states, ‘one of the translator’s aims is to interpret the thematic progression of the source text in relation to its overall meaning and function and then reproduce it according to target language conventions in the target text’ (1974, 118–20). There are, of course, other strategies which authors can use in order to package information within their texts and convey particular ideologies, which we could define as propositions that generally figure as implicit assumptions in texts, which contribute to producing or reproducing unequal relations of power, relations of domination. For instance, the choice between paratactic and hypotactic constructions18, determines the emphasis given in the text to certain elements rather than others, 17
This is also extremely evident for example in commercial adverts, where the persuasive section is written in an interactional, informal style which heavily rely on personal pronouns (especially ‘you’ and ‘we’) in theme position, whereas the small print section displays a more formal style with a different selection of themes as to discourage any attentive reading for this section, with obvious advantage for the company. 18 Parataxis indicated that clauses are linked through coordination, whereas hypotaxis indicates the use of subordinate constructions. 116
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and can therefore be considered part of the ideological force of the text itself. Through parataxis and hypotaxis, in fact, language users can focus on those elements which are considered informationally important by bringing them to the foreground, while leaving in the background other elements which are not only predictable or known, but are also presented as informationally unimportant, with all the (ideological) consequences this might have. The differences between one sentence and another, then, are never only syntactic: in choosing a particular structure and in deciding how to segment discourse, writers make important decisions as to whether promote one clause above the other and whether to place one clause before or after another. In the former case, we talk about salience and, as Ulrych notes in ‘Parataxis and Hypotaxis: Formal and Functional Features’ (1994), a difference in construction indicates a difference in meaning, as syntactic inequality brought about by hypotaxis is accompanied by semantic inequality. The second aspect noted above is described as ‘sequencing’, and refers to the vital importance assumed by the order in which various features are presented in a text. Consequently, strategies such as embedding will also have repercussions onto the way readers/listeners perceive the reality represented within this sentence. Further to this, authors can convey a particular ideological stance by using passivisation, which accounts for instance for the difference between a sentence such as ‘USA attack Lybia’ and ‘Lybia attacked by USA’, or again the sentence ‘Lybia attacked’, where the responsibility of the action becomes less and less explicit. Similarly, authors can resort to nominalisation, which refers to the fact that it is structurally possible for predicates (verbs and adjectives) to be realised syntactically as nouns. These are called derived nominals, as for instance with the noun ‘allegation’ (which is derived from the verb ‘allege’) or ‘development’ (which 117
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is derived from ‘develop’). In an analogous way to the use of the passive form, the exploitation of nominal forms allows the deletion of certain information, therefore obscuring the responsibility for certain facts. If we compare the nominal form ‘allegations’ with the extended sentence ‘The Left has alleged against the Right that the Right corrupted the Government etc.’, we can for instance notice the deletion of the participants (who did what to whom?), any indication of time (there is no verb to be tensed) and any indication of modality (the writer’s views as the truth or the desirability of the proposition). In a similar way, the use of transitivity can also be identified as a further strategy which authors have at their disposal in order to convey, through the linguistic choices they make, ideology. As Halliday emphasises, transitivity does not simply indicate that a verb can or cannot take a direct object, but more fundamentally refers to the fact that, in the case of an intransitive verb, the action affects only the subject, whereas a transitive verb has repercussions also on other entities and the reality surrounding the subject. As a consequence, because transitivity offers users of language different possibilities as to the way they talk about reality, selecting certain modes of discourse and suppressing others, according to Halliday it becomes an important feature in the expression of the user’s point of view, thus acquiring ideological significance. Besides these morphosyntactic strategies, however, users of language also have at their disposal various lexical strategies to convey a particular ideology. For example, we could refer to semantic prosody, a concept which relies on the fundamental notion of collocation introduced above, and which was first introduced by Sinclair, according to whom particular lexical items are usually associated with either pleasant or unpleasant events (1987, 155-6). The favourable or unfavourable evaluation of the author’s utterance, is therefore not contained in a single word, but is expressed by a particular item in association with 118
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other items which are often found in particular collocations. This is the case of the verb ‘cause’, which has a strongly unfavourable prosody, as it often collocates with other items such as ‘accident’, ‘concern’, ‘damage’ and so on, whereas ‘provide’ usually collocates with ‘help’, ‘care’, ‘food’ etc., and is therefore imbued with a favourable prosody. Because some items might assume a particular prosody on certain occasions but not always (as with the verb ‘happen’, which might be found in association with unpleasant, neutral or pleasant items), sometimes the speaker/writer might use semantic prosody to express his/her feelings and attitudes or to influence ours, albeit subtly and almost subliminally. Indeed, according to Louw, clashes between the private use made of certain prosodies by propagandists, politicians and advertisers, and what are considered normal prosodies, might conceal secret aims and their attempts to tamper with receivers’ judgments and attitudes. Obviously, in any analysis of the relationship existing between language and ideology, we cannot avoid discussing in a more systematic way about what we refer to as connotation and denotation. In the first instance, it is fundamental to remember that it is the context which gives readers an idea as to whether lexical items are used denotatively or connotatively. The term denotation describes the way lexical items refer to a referent in the real world, whether a concrete or an abstract entity. The denotative meaning of a lexical item such as ‘dog’, however, only covers what we call the prototype meaning, that is a four-legged animal with a tail etc. According to the context the lexical item finds itself in, though, it can also assume different connotative values, suggesting more or less pleasant characteristics to the reader/listener. Connotation has been defined in different ways such as ‘the secondary implications’ of a lexical item (Lyons, 1977, 278), and, generally speaking, it is seen as ‘lying outside the core meaning’ of the item itself (Backhouse, 1992, 297). It 119
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could therefore be described as an ‘additional meaning’ of a lexical item, which enables speakers/writers to transcend the prototype meaning of a word and charge it with particular (if implied) significance, according to the context they find themselves in. Hence, as Taylor observes, the term ‘rat’ could be associated with disease, evil, dirtiness etc. in some cases, and to scientific advance in others (1998). As Hymes suggests, then, an awareness of the connotative value of lexical items is a vital part of the communicative competence of a speaker (1971). In fact, as Partington claims in his Patterns and Meanings, through connotation three different phenomena might find an expression: – class and regional origin, age, sex and relationships between speakers (for instance the expression ‘absolutely awful’ can be easily identified with an upper-class variety) – the speaker’s favourable or unfavourable evaluation. – particular denotations assumed by lexical items within a specific culture (for example, as Leech emphasises, in the past the term ‘woman’ was associated with words like ‘frail’, ‘irrational’, ‘gentle’ and ‘compassionate’; 1974, 15).
Indeed, because one of the ways ideology expresses itself in our culture is, of course, the way we use language in order to represent (or misrepresent) the world that surrounds us and our position in it, according to Fowler, any aspect of linguistic structure (whether phonological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, pragmatic or textual, can carry ideological significance). Hence, following the structuralist and poststructuralist stand, we can claim that language can, in fact, construct the Other at different levels, for example in terms of gender, relegating for instance ‘woman’ to the role of the ‘feminine Other’, or in terms of ‘race’, relegating certain communities to the position of sub-human Others. This is what we refer to as the issue of ‘sexism in language’, that is the construction of ‘woman’ as the inferior side of the 120
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dichotomy ‘man/woman’. For example in English, and even more so in romance languages such as Italian, the masculine is often taken as the general term in opposition to the feminine particular. Thus, we talk about ‘man’ in the general sense of ‘humanity’, when referring to a ‘somebody’, we use a masculine pronoun, and we generally talk about the ‘postman’, the ‘fireman’, ‘manholes’ etc., and because this kind of sexism is intrinsic to the structure of our languages, it cannot be eradicated very easily. Yet, efforts are made to plan or engineer language in such a way as to limit the sexist elements within language19. As a result, we now tend to speak about ‘letter carrier’ and ‘firefighter, and although it is not always possible to find adequate replacements which might be less marked, the efforts made seem to render some feminists’ understanding of language as a conspiratorial male plot unjustified. This is the reason why, for instance, the conclusion reached by critic Lincoln Konkle, who in an article claims: If, in the world according to poststructuralists, all we apprehend is a linguistic construct, and we ourselves are nothing apart from what our words say we are, then the gender issue – or, more real-worldly, the women’s movement to liberate itself from patriarchal oppression – is doomed to fail, for from modern languages back to classical in Western civilization, the words that signify female and the feminine are inextricably linked to the male and the masculine as the inferior side of a bipolar system. The only hope would be to destroy all previous patriarchal signifiers for the feminine, and for the masculine, and 19
The expressions language planning and language engineering refer to the standardisation process to which languages are sometimes submitted. When a particular language comes to be used as a national language of a nation-state of new constitution (Bulgarian, for instance, or Czech), it clearly needs a standard form and a certain amount of vocabulary, which have therefore to be created along a long period of time. 121
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then to start over, to create new representations of gender not based upon an etymology of inferiority and superiority (1995, 187-8),
seems utterly extreme, and does not take into consideration the fact that meaning is contextual, and that, as a consequence, it cannot be considered intrinsic to language as such, depending, on the contrary, mainly upon the context in which the language is used. As Toril Moi pertinently asks when discussing the problem of sexism in language in her Sexual/Textual Politics, If we hold with Vološinov and Kristeva that all meaning is contextual, it follows that isolated words or general syntactical structures have no meaning until we provide a context for them. How then can they be defined as either sexist or non-sexist per se? If it is the case, as Thorne and Henly argue, that similar speech by men and by women tends to be interpreted quite differently, then there is surely nothing inherent in any given word or phrase that can always and forever be constructed as sexist. The crudely conspiratorial theory of language as ‘manmade’, or as a male plot against women, posits an origin (man’s plotting) to language, a kind of non-linguistic transcendental signifier for which it is impossible to find any kind of theoretical support (1985, 157).
However, it must be remembered that to evident sexist forms such as ‘postman’, there is a subtler and more insidious way in which ideology, sexism in particular, is expressed in and through language, but even in this case, we must take into consideration both situational and cultural contexts. This form of sexism actually relates not so much to the use of such identifiable items as ‘man’, but more to the way in which other words are used in the co-text of particular items. Indeed, as David Crystal claims,
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there is more to sexist language than single lexical items and isolated grammatical constructions. It involves such considerations as order of mention (* I now pronounce you man and wife), and worthiness of mention (* Five people were involved in the incident, including two men) (1999, 368).
Thus, as we read in Introducing Linguistics, We constantly read things like these: he attacked his next-door neighbour’s wife (the woman wasn’t his neighbour?); the pioneers trekked across the prairies with their cattle, their seed corn, and their wives (the wives were just there as what?) [or] The new editor of the New Yorker is a striking and willowy blonde (2000, 141).
This use of highly connotative lexical items is actually typical of the language of the media, which often expresses an author’s bias precisely through the choice of lexis (as for example with the headlines ‘Cheat dumps his wife for blonde’ or ‘Brute kills pet terrier’) or, as mentioned above, the way a particular person is addressed. ‘Language’, claims British author Brooke-Rose, ‘is never innocent’ (1991, 8), but is always used to sell something (whether a product, a feeling or an opinion), and as such it is therefore always ideologically charged. Indeed, as Fowler states in Language in the News, Language is not neutral, but a highly constructive mediator [...] News is a representation of the world in language; because language is a semiotic code, it imposes a structure of values [...] the values are in the language already, independent of the journalist and of the reader. Ideology is already imprinted in the available discourse (all discourse). (1991, 1-4).
Thus, translators ought to pay particular attention to both the ideological implications of the source text, and those typical of the target text.
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As a result, it appears clear that more attention should be paid also to the translation of used (and often overused) formulae, which might well take on different connotations in one language/culture and the other, resulting in a discrepancy between the ideological impact the text has in the source and in the target language. It is therefore advisable to consider, in both texts, issues of political correctness, according to which the connotations of certain words and expressions offend certain members of a particular minority or social group, and should therefore be replaced by more unbiased terminology. However, in the case of Italian, as well as other romance languages, it might be rather difficult to avoid sexism in language, in so far as in Italian the lexical rules are not based on conventions (such as the English ‘postman’), but on grammatical gender, according to which everything and everyone must assume a gender. It is therefore inappropriate for Taylor to compare English and Italian strategies by stating that The general use of masculine pronouns has been largely replaced by the use of twinning (he or she, he/she, s/he, him/her, etc.), by pluralising the referent in question, or by dispensing altogether with pronouns. For example, instead of the translator must be careful when he translates connotational meaning, the plural version translators must be careful when they translate connotational meaning or the pronounless the translator must be careful when translating connotational meaning are preferred [...] in terms of English/Italian, there are areas where this kind of reasoning finds a direct equivalent, e.g. il traduttore to refer to all ‘traduttori’ (where the use of the plural would solve the problem in the same way), but as Italian generally dispenses with pronouns in anaphoric reference, the he/she question hardly arises (1998, 87).
The use of ‘i traduttori’, in fact, does not elude the fact that a masculine form is used (whether or not there are pronominal 124
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anaphoric references) and it is therefore up to translators to find adequate strategies to deal with the fact that the Italian text will be marked, to some extent or other, by gender-biased issues. For example, translators might want to avoid the twinning forms s/he and the like, which, while quite convenient in English, would produce extremely awkward results in Italian, and instead introduce a note at the very beginning of the text, explaining the reasons that determined the adoption of the generalised masculine form. More easily dealt with is, to a certain extent, the issue of political correctness in other areas. As Taylor notes, this might occur with a time-lag in different countries, and it is therefore vital for translators to monitor this time-lag in order to avoid anachronisms and positively offensive expressions. Thus, nowadays, we talk about neither ‘underdeveloped countries’ nor ‘paesi sottosviluppati’, as this expression clearly reinforced the view of certain countries as inferior to the all powerful superior civilisations. Similarly, in the USA, ‘negro’ was supplanted by Afro-American first, and later by African-American, whereas, as Crystal reports, the word ‘black’ ‘was felt to be so sensitive that some banned its use in all possible contexts (including such instances as blackboard and the black pieces in chess)’ (1999, 176), thereby fuelling the negative attitude towards political correctness, which has been described as ‘a lethal weapon for silencing anyone whose ideas you don’t like’ (New York Times, July 1991) and ‘the most pernicious form of intolerance’ (The Economist, 1991). We equally avoid ‘cripple’ and ‘storpio’, as the terms were connotatively charged with an idea of disgust; ‘physically handicapped’ was initially replaced by ‘disabled’, which was also replaced by ‘differently abled’ and, in Italian,
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‘disabile’20, ‘mongols’ and ‘mongoloidi’ were replaced by ‘persons suffering from the Down’s Syndrome’ etc21. We can therefore see the importance ideology can have for all users of language and, in particular, for translators. It is precisely because of the strong impact ideology has on our lives, the society we live in and its institutions, that it has become the focus of many disciplines. Indeed, as anticipated in the first chapter, the whole enterprise of structuralism and poststructuralism, in particular the work of Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser, could be seen as an investigation of the ideological bearings of certain cultural conventions in our society. It was actually Althusser who claimed that the main ideological instruments of society (such as legal system, religion, education system and family), determine the culture of a particular society and the lives of the people living in that particular society as much as economic conditions do. In Althusser’s terms, ideology therefore provides a conceptual framework through which people interpret and make sense of their material conditions, and as such it determines and produces not only who we are, but also our culture. As we have seen supra, the issue of ideology was taken up especially by 20
Taylor’s observation: ‘For the moment handicappato remains in Italian, possibly because, being a calqued expression, it does not have the same connotations as handicapped. But portatore di handicap is already current’ (1998, 87), seems itself an anachronism, as even in Italian ‘disabili’ represents nowadays the norm. 21 This, however, has elicited different reactions. To those who felt that the expression ‘mental handicap’ is a term of insult and should therefore be replaced by other expressions, the director of Mencap (a British charity representing mentally-handicapped people) in 1992 answered by stating that avoiding to talk about ‘mental handicap’ is not going to make any difference to the problems people face and might not do much for the charity itself, as ‘the general public – the people whose attitudes we need to change – do not recognise ‘learning difficulty’ as mental handicap’, thereby halving the impact the charity and its campaigns might have on the public. 126
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critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis, disciplines which study linguistic structures in the light of the social and historical context from which the text stems, in an attempt to clarify the values and the beliefs encoded in the language used in particular texts. It is precisely subtle forms of conveying ideology and the more or less agendas of language users that critical discourse analysis is determined to bring to the fore and expose, through a painstaking analysis of linguistic and structural aspects of the text. This is the reason why, according to Fairclough, the analyst should ask for example what kind of experiential values words have, whether, as often happens in the case of colonial literature or the language of newspapers or of advertising, there are words which are ideologically contested or contestable; whether strategies of ‘rewording’ (that is saying the same thing using different words), ‘overwording’ (namely identifying someone or something by using a number of words which draw attention to the subject it/him/herself, identifying it/him/her as different and/or deviant – as in the case of ‘woman’ or ‘black’ subjects) or ‘oppositional wording’, are applied; what ideologically significant meaning relations link the words present in the text (in the case of hyponpmy, for example, the word ‘totalitarianism’ might be included in the meaning of ‘communism’ or ‘fascism’ according to the political stance of the writer); whether there are words which collocate with particular negative or positive items, or whether there is a metaphorical transfer of a word/expression from one domain to another (as for instance with the description of blacks in animalistic terms we often find, as we shall see in the following chapters, in colonial and colonialist literature, as well as in the language of newspapers or the language of sports). Afterwards, the analyst should identify what Fairclough calls the relational values of words, for example searching the text for euphemisms (which try to avoid negative values being
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associated with particular notions)22, and formal/informal words (there is in fact a link between the formality of the situation, the formality of social relations and the formality of the language used)23. Finally, Fairclough asks what expressive values words have (for example in textual segments which implicitly or explicitly express the writer’s evaluation) and what metaphors are used (as when social problems are represented in terms of diseases or when immigration is depicted in terms of natural disasters). Moving onto grammar, Fairclough suggests the analyst should ask similar questions regarding the experiential value of the grammatical features present in the text, analysing for example what types of processes and participants predominate, whether actions, events or attributions are emphasised, whether agency is foregrounded or backgrounded, whether nominalization is used, whether active or passive tenses are used and whether sentences are in the main positive or negative. In addition analysts should study the relational values of grammatical features, asking for example: ‘which modes are used?’ (particularly relevant is, 22
As Geis (1982) emphasises in his study of political discourse, euphemisms are largely used in ‘nukespeak’ (a neologism forged on the model of the ‘newspeak’ George Orwell introduced in his 1984), in order to subvert the negative associations generally activated by the discourse of nuclear weapons. This might actually be best exemplified by Montgomery’s study of 1986, where we find a list of expressions used by politicians and their ‘translations’ into explicit English e.g. ‘strategic nuclear weapon’: large nuclear bomb of immense destructive power; ‘tactical nuclear weapon’: small nuclear bomb of immense destructive power; ‘demographic targeting’: killing the civilian population, etc.). 23 Let us consider, for example, the differences implied by the terms of address that different newspapers use to refer to the same person, i.e. Margaret Thatcher’s son: The Times: ‘Sir Mark’s awful day’; The Sun: ‘Mark’s at mercy of cannibal’; Daily Mail: ‘The boy Mark’; The Guardian: ‘Mark Thatcher’; The Sun: ‘Maggie torment over son’. 128
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obviously, the use of the imperative mode), ‘are there important features of relational modality?’, ‘which pronouns are used and how?’ (for example the opposition ‘we/you’ is, as we shall see, fundamental). Finally, attention should be devoted to the analysis of the expressive values of grammatical features. In this case, we are dealing with a different kind of modality and adverbs such as ‘probably’, ‘allegedly’ etc., and we should investigate the way sentences are linked together; analysts should focus on what logical connectors are used and which, if any, logical assumptions they cue, whether complex sentences are characterised by parataxis or hypotaxis, how cohesion is achieved etc. As to textual structure, Fairclough suggests analysts should focus on the organisational properties of the text as a whole, distinguishing for example between ‘dialogue’ (as in conversations – whether real or recreated in a literary work – interviews, etc.) and ‘monologue’ (as in a newspaper articles or official speeches). In the former case, analysts could concentrate on the turn-taking system, in the attempt to see whether there is an unbalance between the turns allocated to each participant, whether one participant controls the contribution of others also in terms of topic selection and topic change, whether overlaps and silences are tolerated, whether formulations are used i.e. rewording of what has been said or wording of what is implied and can be inferred from what has been said, which can be used both to check understanding but also as a means of control, in order to lead participants into accepting one’s version of what has transpired, thus limiting their options of further contributions. During the ‘interpretation’ phase, critical discourse analysts should therefore focus on surface utterance, on meaning utterance, local coherence, text structure and point (thereby matching the text with a repertoire of schemata, that is representations of characteristic patterns of organisation 129
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associated with different types of discourse), context of situation (thereby identifying ‘what’, ‘who’, their ‘relationship’, the ‘role of language’, that is to say whether language is being used in an instrumental way or as a part of a wider institutional objective), the ‘intertextual context’ which will be analysed further below, and the presuppositions readers of the text are bound to activate, the kind of speech acts involved etc. Afterwards, during the ‘explanation’ phase, the analyst should try and portray a discourse as part of the social process and thus as a social practice, showing it is determined by social structures and highlighting what reproductive effects discourses can have on those structures, especially when they are cumulated one upon the other. In fact, discourses can either sustain or change those structures. By so doing, analysts can identify the social determinants of discourse (i.e. what power relations at situational, institutional and societal level help shape it), the ideologies which lie behind it and the effects it entails. Equipped with these linguistic tools, discourse analysts therefore approach the analysis of various types of texts, both written and spoken, in order to investigate issues such as gender inequality, ethnocentrism and racism, discursive representation of aging etc. As the analyses carried out in this book demonstrate, it is obvious that, in the present case, here we are mainly interested in is the way language is used to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct cultural identities, and although for reasons of space we cannot describe in detail the way critical discourse analysts carry out their study and the guidelines they recommend, I hope that even the brief introduction provided in this book can suggest that the attention they grant to the analysis of the language used and their focus on issues of racism and sexism, demonstrate their proximity to other disciplines which equally focus on the impact that culture and the language that conveys it can have on the individual.
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Indeed, according to Fowler, any aspect of linguistic structure can carry ideological significance, and the importance this aspect has assumed throughout the years appears evident by the publication of volumes such as Apropos of Ideology (2003) and has noticeably influenced both linguistics and translation studies. Indeed, the importance the issue has assumed in translation studies is reflected in the publication of such volumes as The Practices of Literary Translation (1999), edited by Jean BoaseBeier and Michael Holman, which emphasises the fact that the translator’s task is constrained not only by the different ways in which source and target languages encode reality, but also by the target-culture ideological expectations and the functional nonequivalence of apparently identical patterns. Similarly, the authors of Apropos of Ideology (2003), edited by Maria CalzadaPerez, focuses on the fact that, historically, translation has always been a site for ideological clashes and that globalisation provides the setting for translational mechanisms even within monolingual artefacts. The aim of the volume’s authors, then, is to examine ideological phenomena as expressed in politics, religion, sexuality etc., in an attempt to identify the way they intrude upon the practice of translation. In fact, whereas the connotations of the different expressions ‘I am firm, you are stubborn, he is pig-headed’ are evident, quite often the value and the intensity of the connotation with which a term is invested are much subtler. As such, this bears a fundamental importance when we are working as translators in, say, a business meeting, or if we are translating texts where for example terms such as ‘dog’ are used to refer to human beings, as these terms, as well as other animals such as ‘lamb’, for instance, which, as Nida observes in Towards a Science of
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Translation (1964), cannot be considered a universal symbol of ‘peace’24, are intrinsically culture-bound. 2.3.The Context of Culture We therefore come to the notion of cultural context, which concludes our discussion of the general notion of Context. The context of culture can be defined as the total cultural background which lies behind a text and which determines its significance and, from a sociolinguistic and an anthropological perspective, corresponds to every aspect of human life which is socially determined, namely the totality of the signifying systems of particular groups, including the arts, the social activities and patterns of behaviour typical of a community (manners and rituals, for instance), legal systems, religions, history and so on. 2.3.1. Culture-bound Expressions As suggested above, language is not an isolated phenomenon, but is part of culture, and is therefore determined by it. Indeed, according to Edward Sapir – who in 1921 published the first textbook of general linguistics in English, thereby establishing a tradition of human language studies which took into consideration the relationship between language and culture and the actual use of language made by real speakers – and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf – who focussed on the study of native American and Canadian languages – different language communities perceive the same reality in different ways. As we read in Introducing Linguistics, as a demonstration of what is usually referred to as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Whorf pointed out that the Navaho speakers of Arizona – who have at their disposal an incredible number of words for talking about 24
As a consequence, Nida suggests that the ‘lamb’ we find in the Bible as a symbol of peace should for example be translated as ‘seal’, when translating the text for a target culture such as the Inuit one. 132
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lines of various shapes, colours and configurations – perceive the world in terms of its geometrical nature (as exemplified by the fact that they might name a particular rock formation as Tsé Áhé’ii’áhá, meaning ‘two rocks standing vertically parallel in a vertical relationship to each other), whereas English speakers see objects as resembling other objects (and for instance might call the same rock formation ‘Elephant’s feet’). Although the SapirWhorf hypothesis (also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis) is still controversial, the more moderate view – which sees language as reflecting culturally important aspects of a particular society, pointing to the particular behaviours, ideas or material possessions on which members of a community might place high value – is generally accepted. When reading and translating, then, we ought to be particularly attentive to all those aspects which, by being particularly culture-bound, might be hard to understand and translate, always bearing in mind that, as we shall see in the next chapter, some elements of communication might conceal subtle cultural and ideological assumptions not immediately identifiable in the target culture. As Taylor suggests, then, translation could actually be seen as the matching of the connotative and culture-bound values lexical items suggest. Hence, in a sentence such as ‘I would stay clear of that rat Jones!’, the word ‘rat’ – which suggests the deceitful nature of Jones – could be translated in Italian not with ratto but with verme. Clearly, if the language used by participants is highly connotative, translators are required to be very perceptive and make pragmatic evaluations as well, in order to understand the way a speaker is actually using a particular expression (‘speaker meaning’ as opposed to ‘dictionary meaning’) and test what meaning really lies behind utterances. Translators therefore have to decipher Grice’s implicatures, thereby identifying what speakers/writers actually mean by what they say/write. 133
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In order to translate successfully, translators must establish with certainty whether they inhabit the same universe of discourse as the source writer – namely whether they apply the same set of parameters to the world they live in. Obviously, the more diverse the cultures of two language communities the more possible it is that the speakers from the two communities do not share the same universe of discourse. In the case of a headline such as ‘Iraqi inmate: treated like dogs’, then, we must first of all consider the fact that each word can have both a denotative and a connotative meaning. Having accepted that target writers and source writers inhabit different universes of discourse, translators must then realise that in Islamic cultures dogs are more associated with dirtiness than loyalty/trustworthiness/friendliness as in Western cultures. In addition, Italian translators must consider that although in the target language the term cane also brings to mind animale and therefore a ‘subhuman’ being, the coefficient of intensity – which Snelling defines as the measure of the semantic force of words (Snelling, 1992, 121) – is different. Thus, although, in general, a translation of ‘dog’ as cane would be more than acceptable, the headline quoted above might actually benefit more from the application of a different strategy, thanks to which the term ‘dog’ is not replaced by cane but by something else. For example, we could opt for a superordinate term of cane, namely animali or bestie (of which the term ‘dog’ is a hyponym), as this term has the advantage of respecting the semantic field and the zoological connection of the source language, while suggesting more strongly the cruel treatment of prisoners. 2.3.2. The Notion of Intertextuality The quotation of the headline analysed above, is also a good example of the importance of a further strategy used in order to convey more than the literal meaning of words, namely 134
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intertextuality, which refers to the fact that authors of any kind constantly insert parts of other texts in their own. As mentioned in the first chapter, the idea of intertextuality basically corresponds to the structuralist notion that all perceptions/conceptions of reality are shaped by various cultural codes and that every work or version of reality is basically a recycling of another story. As defined by Taylor, then, intertextuality indicates the fact that the linguistic components of the communicative act will draw on words, expressions and permutations of these that have been said or heard, or read or written before in similar circumstances, either by the people themselves or by others (1998, 75).
This notion is therefore important for the discussion of the headline quoted above, which obviously resorts to the kind of otherisation process inherited from colonisers of all times, and exploited throughout history in order to relegate particular sections of society to the position of ‘subaltern’. Consequently, also articles such as A Day of Terror: An Assessment (The New York Times – 12th September 2001) During the Second World War, the Japanese pioneered the use of kamikaze planes. The kamikazes sank 34 ships and damaged hundreds of others. During the battle of Okinawa, they killed almost 5,000 men. But the attacks yesterday, on a society at peace in a time of peace, carried out by attackers who took over civilian aircraft, appeared more sinister,
should be analysed bearing in mind all the intertextual references activated by the journalist’s linguistic choices. The headline reported above, followed by a brief extract from the relative article, appeared in The New York Times the day following the attack to the Twin Towers on 11th September 2001. When reading the text, we might immediately notice the opposition between some of the terms which appear in the
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headline and the brief extract reported. In fact, an emotional and highly evocative term such as ‘terror’ is used together with ‘assessment’, which on the contrary brings to mind a rational process. The headline of the article therefore seems to suggest that the USA can react and face whatever comes their way with great presence of spirit, thereby projecting the image of a strong, determined nation which faces Islamic fanaticism with coolness and rationality, even in the face of desperation. It is therefore interesting to see how the idea of nation invoked on the occasion of the terrorist attack, was also called upon on the occasion of the scandal of Abu-Gharib. Then, headlines such as ‘New Iraq abuse photos published’ (The Washington Post – 8th May 2004) or ‘Bush calls Iraq abuse ‘abhorrent’ (Article on Interview on al-Arabiya satellite channel – 7th May 2004)’, were followed respectively by articles beginning: New photos showing alleged abuse of Iraqi detainees by US soldiers have been published in a US newspaper
and The president revealed that the first time he saw the photographs of the abuse was when they appeared on US television late last month. Not American In interviews for US-funded al-Hurra network and the alArabiya satellite channel, President Bush said: “People in Iraq must understand that I view those practices as abhorrent”. “They must also understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know”.
In the case of the first extract, then, the term ‘published’ (which implicitly affirms the real existence of photos) is set in opposition to ‘alleged’, which is associated with the abuses supposedly performed by the ‘Americans’ who appear in those pictures. This 136
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opposition therefore insinuates to readers the doubt that the pictures might be only a forgery, thereby undermining the real existence and the truthfulness of the photos. Consequently, it is suggested that American soldiers might be innocent. Not only this, but the whole article is constructed so that Americans might eventually see themselves as the wronged people, falsely accused by Iraqis. Somewhat similarly, in the second example, the adjective ‘abhorrent’ is set in opposition to the expression ‘not American’, which is also given prominence in the text thanks to the bold type used. As a result, having established the truthfulness and the accuracy of the pictures, it is a matter of distancing ‘America’ (in the person of President G. Bush, who claims here the role of national emblem which is implicitly denied to the soldiers themselves) from those reprehensible acts. The only ‘bad guys’ are the individual soldiers, but their behaviour cannot change the fact that America is a nation of ‘good guys’. There is therefore an attempt to refurbish the myth of the nation, which must posit itself as a compact entity, in spite of minor internal fractures and deviant elements such as Lynndie England and her comrades. The idea of nation Bush invokes in the last extract is, fundamentally, similar to the one he called upon on occasion of the terrorist attack on 11th September 2001. Not only this, but if we read the first extract carefully, we cannot fail to note that it resorts to a rhetoric similar to that which animated many war speeches in the past. Thus, it is not by chance that the author of the article on the attack against the Twin Towers should refer to Japanese kamikazes and the Second World War. Indeed, the opposition thinking subject vs. irrational/fanatic, implicit in the first headline, cannot but bring to mind the famous lines from George Orwell’s ‘England your England’ (1941), when British rationality was set in opposition to the enemy’s irrational hatred and when the civilised world had to fight an irrational phenomenon such as Nazism: 137
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As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel enmity against me as an individual, not I against them [...] if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any worse for it. He is serving his country.
This kind of rhetoric thus manages to effect the creation of two separate entities: ‘us’ and ‘them’. The language used in these extracts, then, might be said to construct the identity of the individuals involved not only by invoking the myth of an homogeneous ‘I/us’, a collective national subject single individuals might identify with and might merge in, but also creating a different, often inferior, ‘Other/them’. As hinted at just above, from the European perspective, it was perhaps the Nazi experiment and the impact that language had in the creation of the Jews as ‘Others’, that alerted people to the devastating consequences language – and the linguistic construction of identity – could have. The Jews were in fact described by Hitler in the same terms of plant and animal parasites, as a maggot in a rotten corpse [...] a plague [...] a germ carrier [...] the spider that slowly sucks the people’s blood out of his pores; the pack of rats fighting bloodily among themselves [...] the typical parasite; the people’s vampire (quoted by Rosenberg in Alex Bein, 1964, 22),
and as such, to many German people they came into being as ‘others’, the infecting and contaminating elements which had to be eradicated before it could destroy. It is however rather surprising that this description of the Jews should dramatically recall the words that Totius (pseudonym for J.D. du Toit, one of the first South African poets writing in Afrikaans), used to describe the natives encountered by the trekkers during the Great Trek of the 1830s, when the early Afrikaners began to penetrate in the interior of South Africa
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searching for a place they could call really theirs in an attempt to set themselves free from the British who had colonised the coastal regions of the country. Here the native populations of Africa are described as ‘fierce vermin [...] stark naked black hordes’ (quoted by Hexham, 1981, 37), and it was precisely this kind of description which set the tone of many other works to follow (travelogues, pseudohistories etc.), relegating the natives to the role of the ‘subhuman others’, thereby strengthening Afrikaners’ sense of identity. Indeed, throughout history, ‘other’ populations have been defined as ‘brutish’, compared to animals of various kinds and, as with the first colonisers in Africa, identified in terms of their ‘animal souls’, while advice was given on how to catch, tame and breed them as if they were cattle. This is actually one of the main features of colonial discourse, broadly speaking all the writings and texts on which various Empires relied. As we shall see in the following chapter, the fact that the ‘otherness’ of the natives and their relegation to a position of inferiority are identified with linguistic constructs, partially turns the whole colonial (and neo-colonial) enterprise into a textual practice, at least for the Europeans, who throughout the centuries elaborated a whole series of rhetorical devices which then turned into conventions of comprehending other lands and other people, whose stereotypical characterisation played at once the double role of screening out their difference and alterity by assimilating them to known entities such as ‘dogs’, ‘foxes’ and ‘animals’ in general, and presenting their degradation and inferiority as natural. Because of this, we can see how headlines such as: Iraqi inmate: ‘Treated like dogs’ One of the Iraqi men who says he was photographed in degrading poses by American prison guards in Abu Ghraib jail is Haydar Sabbar Abed
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refer back to descriptions of ‘others’ in animalistic terms (although in this case it is the ‘other’ himself who, having interiorised colonialist descriptions, exploits the illocutionary force of the word ‘dog’). We can therefore see how the power of intertextuality still determines the way people belonging to different cultures are created as others. It must however be remembered that, apart from such exceptional cases as apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany, the power of language to construct the identity of the individual is still exercised in everyday discourses. This is the case, for example, with the language of jokes or advertising, which heavily rely on stereotyped forms of identity, or the language exploited by certain exponents of, generally, extreme political parties. For instance, when I asked a person from Yorkshire whether he could give me some examples of stereotypical representations of ‘others’, he admitted: The English make fun of the Irish. The Irish make fun of the Kerrymen (the inhabitants of County Kerry, in Ireland), while within England, we make fun of everyone who is not from where we are. So, in general, the Northerners are all poor, unhappy and rude. The Southerners are rich, greedy, fake and unfriendly. Londoners are generally annoying, talk too much, think they are the best and are ‘flash’. People from Essex are rude, boastful and rich, but with no taste [...] We British think, lets see...The French are superior, rude, snobbish and take our women. Spanish are all a bit lazy, and like blood sports and siestas. Germans are all incredibly loud and rude, have no sense of humour [...] are incapable of queuing and, for some reason, always get up really early in hotels to put their towels on the sunbeds to claim them, like Poland. The Americans are clearly all rich and stupid or poor and stupid. With no taste and no culture. Oh, and like guns. The Italians are all cowardly, and Mafioso and oily haired lotharios. And take our women, etc. (interview with Nicholas Currey).
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He also added the following jokes, which should provide some good examples of the stereotypical representations of people from different British regions: There are four kinds of people in the UK. First, there were the Scots who kept the Sabbath – and everything else they could lay their hands on. Then there were the Welsh, who prayed on their knees and their neighbours. Thirdly there were the Irish who never knew what they wanted, but were willing to fight for it anyway. Lastly there were the English who considered themselves self-made men... thus relieving the Almighty of a terrible responsibility. An Englishman, roused by a Scot’s scorn of his race, protested that he was born an Englishman and hoped to die an Englishman. ‘Man,’ scoffed the Scot, ‘hiv ye nae ambeetion?’ A philosophical Scotland supporter on the train south to attend the match with England was heard to comment: ‘No matter if we win or lose this game, we will still be winners in the game of life, because when our opponents waken up tomorrow they’ll still be English and we won’t’.
Among the many adverts in which this kind of stereotypical representation plays a fundamental role, one of the Peugeot advert that appeared on our television screens some time ago – in which an Indian boy destroys his Indian-made car using rudimentary instruments such as a hammer, a blow torch and, of course, an elephant, until it looks like a French car, after which he can finally parade with pride in front of girls – is particularly telling. This is also typical of the language of sports, where we generally find a strong emphasis on the inclusive/exclusive ‘we’: we are trying to rebuild the team [...] for us, only victory is important now. We do not care about style – we just want maximum points (The Independent, 11 October 2004).
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In addition, it is telling that in most sports commentary the semantic fields identified by the words used by the journalists have to do both with sports and war. Thus, wordings such as Argentina and Brazil eased to crushing victories in Saturday’s World Cup qualifiers, the former beating Uruguay (The Independent, 11th October 2004, my emphasis); Spain gained the first win of their World Cup qualifying campaign after quick-fire goals from strikers Albert Luque and Raul gave them a 2-0 victory at home to nine-man Belgium on Saturday. Belgium were reduced to 10 men after just 28 minutes when defender Eric Deflandre was sent off but Spain was unable to take advantage until Luque rifled home (The Independent, 11th October 2004, my emphasis),
or: Scotland succumbed to Norway [...] What happens if Scotland does not prevail? [...] Scotland struggled to respond [...] ‘it’s still a fight between Belarus, Slovenia and us two’, said the former Manchester City and Norwich defender (The Times, 11th October 2004, my emphasis);
are quite typical. It is therefore not by chance that in the above article from The Times, readers are confronted not only with verbs such as ‘succumb’, ‘prevail’, ‘fight’ and the like but, as in many articles related to the Scottish team, the author intertextually refers to Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart in order to set the scene and the tone of the article, thereby contributing to what was termed the ‘Braveheart rhetoric’. Through this intertextual reference, then, the article immediately activates in readers’ minds images which implicitly connect the violence of the battle sustained by the
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Scottish against the English and the violence experienced on the football ground, thereby bringing the game back to its origins25. Intertextuality might in fact be said to activate a scenario which represents some stereotypical components of a definable situation. Indeed, when speakers get involved in a communicative act, they never face something completely new, in so far as intertextuality enables them to create a sort of mental picture of the situation they find themselves in. The scenarios human beings activate, then, enable them to process texts and events on the basis of an analysis of the situation (namely a topdown processing, that is to say from the general to the particular, in the attempt to identify the structural features of a text) and not simply on the basis of the sequence of sentences as they appear in the text (that is to say adopting a bottom-up processing, namely a reversed order of analysis which, from the particular, moves to the general, focussing on lexical and grammatical features), helping them to screen out irrelevant information and create expectations as to what receivers might be faced with26. 25
Actually, since its origins, when football matches were disputed between teams of hundreds of men, who engaged in tribal aggressions (an aspect which obviously posits the issue of identity at the very centre of violent incidents amongst supporters), football has been associated with aggressive and violent behaviours, which have often led to the authorities’ attempts to limit the damages caused by this violence. 26 The same text can obviously be analysed according to these two different approaches. For instance, when facing a Job Advert, we could focus either on the general structure of the advert or the individual components of the advert itself. In the first case, we could for instance emphasise that these adverts – which share with standard advertising texts a general conative function, in that they try and sell (if only figuratively) something – are organised according to moves amongst which we mention: establishing credentials; introducing the offer (a move which is developed through a series of sub-moves such as offering the product and indicating the value of the offer); indicating essential incentives; enclosing documents; soliciting a 143
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The concept of scenario – which was described amongst others by Sanford and Garrod in Understanding Written Language (1981) – therefore becomes determinant for an understanding of the headlines previously analysed and the sport article referred to just above, which immediately establish a context conjuring up a scenario for readers, thereby creating what Minsky calls frames (1975), that is, mental structures that help readers recall the knowledge they have of the ‘Iraq phenomenon’ or the knowledge they have of Scottish resistance against the English and of the football game at large. Similarly, Schank and Abelson (1977) talk of scripts which, according to the definition given by Gran and Taylor in Aspects of Applied and Experimental Research on Conference Interpretation, correspond to ‘a representation of a process rather than a static set of data and accommodate the notion of expectancy [that is, the expectation of how the text will develop]’ (1990, 24); Johnson-Laird speaks of mental models in the homonymous book published in 1980; whereas van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) use schemata and situation model for a text in which the speaker’s world knowledge is integrated with information derived from the text (1983, 12). In the above-mentioned article, then, the intertextual reference to Braveheart creates for readers the context within which they are bound to place the remaining of the article, namely a context where football is closely connected to physical and verbal violence. In actual fact, recent studies have emphasised that there is a strong connection between the violence of football as a sport and the violence of the language used, in particular by the media, to describe and talk about that sport, with all the consequences this implies and which we shall briefly discuss below. response; using pressure tactics and ending politely. In the second case, we could comment for example on the linguistic and structural choices of the body-copy, emphasising for example the use of disjunctive language, imperatives, interrogative sentences, exclamations etc. 144
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This was actually the very attitude of the media during the period when the problem of violence in and around football reached its climax, namely during the seventies and the eighties of the twentieth century, when the phenomenon of hooliganism reached such proportions that British (and other) societies felt affected by it at more than one level. Obviously, any involvement in sports should be identified as a complex social phenomenon, and over the years many theoreticians have elaborated on the symbolic aggressiveness and the physical violence which often have characterised the world of football. However, in spite of the great number of essays, books, conferences and articles which have tackled this topic, the borderlines between symbolic aggressiveness and the deritualised forms which enable this aggressiveness to turn into physical violence are still rather blurry and mainly depend on the culture of the players and the communities of their supporters. Similarly, the borderline between what is considered a legitimate form of violence (which is considered intrinsic to the game itself and which is therefore tolerated by the participants’ pragmatic rules), and the violence which, on the contrary, is perceived as totally illegitimate, cannot be neatly identified. It is perhaps this problematic identification of neat borderlines that led to the very different attitudes that writers (from academic scholars to journalists) have maintained throughout the years in relation to the issue of violence in football. Indeed, during the first phase of this field, which posits itself at a crossroad where different approaches converge, the general trend was mainly one of tolerance of all forms of disturbance which did not directly interfere with the game itself. It was precisely this attitude that led for example to the creation of the myth of the
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pre-war football fan, who was allegedly characterised by his gentlemanly behaviour27. Similarly, the general idea that the period between the two world wars witnessed to a decrease of violence in football (which was largely publicised amongst academic circles as well), can be defined only as a further myth. Indeed, it was precisely at the beginning of the thirties that the diffusion of Fascist and Nazi ideals of virility and healthy bodies, led to an increased politicisation of football and a dramatic increase of the intimidation techniques it involved. Clearly, the violent fights amongst supporters which would characterise the game mainly from the sixties to the nineties of the twentieth century, were not so frequent, but it is precisely during this period that the aggressiveness of the regime conferred a particularly violent character to the game, especially in Germany. As Kuper maintains in his Ajax, the Dutch, the War (2003), during those years, even the German language of football changed considerably: Before Nazism, the Germans seem to have played a soft, slow and skilful football. Then they were subjected to 12 years of rhetoric about war, valour, strength and above all Kampf, a word so central to the Nazi mind that Hitler used it in the title of his autobiography. Kampf literally means ‘struggle’, but even before Nazism the German word was used with far greater frequency than the English one. A battle was a Kampf, any attempt to do anything difficult was a Kampf, and the Nazis often described life itself as a Kampf (often a Kampf for existence). During the war the nation’s press was filled each day with the manly sacrifices of the Kampfer at the front. The word was also obsessively overused in German football during the 27
This aspect was however harshly criticised for example by Hutchinson, who states that riots, unruly behaviour, violence, assault and vandalism, appear to have been a well-established, but not necessarily dominant pattern of crowds behaviour at football matches at least from the 1870s. 146
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Nazi years. A match was a Kampf, a battling footballer a Kampfer, and to play in a battling manner was kampferisch. After Germany lost to Sweden in 1941, Herberger noted: “The forwards are too soft! No Kampfer!! Against Sweden one can only win with strength and Kampf, speed and hardness!! (2003)28.
In spite of the fact that, as Kuper’s text emphasises, the language of football has always exploited the semantic field of war, the press of the time, as testified by the words used by several British newspapers issued on 5th December 193529, just a couple of years before an Austrian player died in mysterious circumstances after refusing to play for the Germans in 1938 (Kuper, 2003, 467), celebrated the friendly spirit that characterised the matches at the time. Yet, as mentioned before, violence was perpetrated, even though there were no disorders on the ground or amongst supporters. Indeed, even on the occasion of the match played in
28
Clearly, it is always during these years that racism in football increased considerably. Indeed, as Andy Dougan recalls in his Dynamo: Triumph and Tragedy in Nazi-Occupied Kiev, it was very dangerous to win over the Germans: ‘The defeat represented an affront to all that the German occupation stood for [...] Some of the players even thought the Germans may let them get away with victory, but that was never going to happen [...] And so it was, that some time after the match [between the Germans and Kiev’s team], the Start players were taken away from the Gestapo for three weeks. After that they were deported to the death camp at Babi Yar and it was there the Nazis finally ensured that these men would live on in the collective consciousness and in folk tales, for at the camp three of the players were killed [...] they were slaughtered one by one, standing in a line, with no great escape to save them.’ 29 ‘The game was played through the friendliest of spirit’ (The Times); ‘Greater than the game was the atmosphere of good fellowship in which it was played’ (Sporting Life); ‘There was not the slightest disorder. Of course there was a lot of flag waving but no jarring note to mar a fine afternoon’s entertainment’ (New Chronicle). 147
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1935, violence erupted at some stage, as the imprisonment of at least seven people confirms. It is perhaps because of the psychological consequences provoked by the attempted collaboration with the Germans in the creation of a friendly relationship (both in 1935 and 1938), that during the second half of the twentieth century (namely when racism and violence in football became an endless source of media interest), the British press assumed opposite attitudes in the way this violence was treated by journalists. Furthermore, the birth of disciplines such as cultural studies and critical discourse analysis, managed to bring to the fore the fact that the style adopted by the press when the violence in football reached its climax (namely the years of such disasters as that of Birmingham in 1985 – when a supporter was killed, 125 were arrested and 176 people were injured – and obviously Brussels – when 39 supporters of the Juventus club from Italy were killed during the finals of Champions League against Liverpool in 1985), characterised by sensationalism and hyperboles, contributed to what Stuart Hall defines an amplification spiral of violence which led to the creation of what Cohen called a moral panic in British society (1973, 30). It is precisely this moral panic – which was created by the sensationalist and hyperbolic language we find in headlines such as ‘TERRIFIED’ (News of the World, 29th January 1977), and the use of a sort of prophetic styles in headlines such as ‘Footbal’s savages – Warming up for the new season’ (Daily Mirror, 20th August 1973), or ‘When is it going to end?’ (Liverpool Echo, 30th May 1985) or again ‘What comes next?’ (Toronto Star, 1985, 30) – that can be considered responsible for the creation of the culture of violence at the basis of hooliganism. ‘The expectation’, as British author Christine Brooke-Rose sustains, ‘creates the expected’ (1984, 19), and indeed already in 1967 a supporter of Chelsea, who was arrested because carrying a razor, defended himself by saying that he had read in the 148
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newspaper that the supporters of West Ham would have caused troubles at the match. This phenomenon led then to the pressing demand for intervention on the authorities’ part. Also in this case, the press posited itself as the representative of British society through headlines such as ‘GET TOUGH WITH SOCCER HOOLIGANS’ (Daily Express, 24th March 1969) or ‘SMASH THESE THUGS!’ (Sun, 4th October 1976), or again ‘birch ‘em’, ‘drench them’ and so on, whose lexical choices, as we shall see, did not always have positive effects. It is therefore clear that hooligans, as well as other British perpetrators of violence of the time30, found in British media an important echo. Thus, by exploiting typographic strategies such as capitals headlines, dramatic images, exclamation and question marks and so on, the press turned the problem of violence in football into the British disease par excellance. Clearly I do not want to maintain, as for example Marsh did (1977, 1989), that hooliganism was simply a construction of journalists’ hysteria, and that what was stigmatised as violence in reality simply corresponded to ritualistic and symbolic patterns which were exploited by players and supporters to exhibit virile virtues safely. Yet, it is indubitable that this transformation of a symbolic form of aggressiveness into a de-ritualised form of violence was influenced and stimulated by the attitude the media adopted in their discussions of the phenomenon. In particular, the language used to construct the category of the hooligan, on the basis of which other events would be elaborated later on and interpreted by readers, favoured the process of amplification referred to above. If we analyse some of the semantic fields we find in the newspapers of the time, we can see that the press reacted to the violent language of hooligans with an equally violent language. These can be generally identified with counter-culture representatives such as Mods, Rockers and Skinheads. 30
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Indeed, hooligans were regularly described in terms of their alleged primitivism, bestiality and lack of humanity (‘the animal terrorising of ordinary people’, Sunday Mirror, 23rd March, 1967); their lack of rationality (‘One of the worst and most senseless outbreaks of soccer supporter trouble this year’, Sunday Mirror, 7th May, 1967); their madness (‘United don’t need these lunatic louts to help them win’, Sunday Mirror, 26th October, 1975; ‘The madness on the terraces’, Times, 31th May, 1985); their dissociation from the team and irrelevant numbers (‘99% of them are blokes who know their football, who respect its dynamic chief... it’s the remaining 1% who make us furious’, Sunday Mirror, 10th October, 1965; ‘we cannot tolerate a situation in which a few louts can terrify thousands of people’ (Daily Mirror, 13th August, 1970)31. This attitude was also corroborated by the various reports published by pseudo-governmental agencies such as Harrington’s report of 1968 (which emphasised the pathology of single individuals, who were described in terms of immaturity and inability to control themselves) or John Lang’s report, dated 1969 (which simply ignored the great social issues at the basis of the phenomenon, emphasising on the contrary the psychological and relational problems of these individuals)32. We therefore see that the approach of the media and the government appear 31
In a way, the strategy adopted here recalls the presentation of the American soldiers involved in the scandal of Iraqi prisoners commented on supra as a minority group of deviant elements that had nothing to do with America as a whole. 32 The reaction of Marxist scholar Ian Taylor was immediate: ‘Simply to employ a psychiatrist for a national government report is to legitimate the idea in the popular mind that ‘hooliganism’ is explicable in terms of the existence of essentially unstable and abnormal temperament, individuals who happen, for some inexplicable reason to have taken soccer as the arena in which to act out their instabilities. The psychological label adds credibility to the idea that the hooligans are not really true supporters [...] and that they can be dealt with by the full force of the law and (on occasions) by psychiatrists.’ 150
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rather contradictory to say the least. Indeed, if on the one hand they presented the phenomenon as a problem of British society, on the other they wanted to minimise the number of people involved. This, obviously, because it was easier to blame a small number of abnormal individuals, rather than analysing (as later on others would do)33, the political and social forces involved, thus keeping, once again, the problem away from football itself. Similarly, the problem of racism in football was treated in a rather superficial way by both the press and television34, despite the acknowledgement of the close connection between football, nation and Empire. On several occasions, both the press and television dismissed racist verbal abuse as part of the electric atmosphere surrounding important matches and justifying verbal attacks against players as representative of the opponent team and not as Africans or Caribbeans. In actual fact, it was television that – in a similar way to photos and capital headlines exploited in newspapers – by using slow-motion and standstills, contributed to the problem, adding horror to horror and making the perpetrators of violence more visible. Indeed, British popular press has always encouraged fundamentally racist attitudes and xenophobic tendencies in society at large, which then could not but get mirrored in football. Headlines such as ‘We Beat Them in 45... Now the Battle of 90’ (Sun, 1990) or ‘Achtung! Surrender. For you Fritz ze Euro 96 Championship is over!’ (Mirror, 1996), or ‘Mirror Declares Football War on Germany’ (Mirror, 1996); or again 33
See for instance John Clarke’s work (1973, 1978). It is precisely these kinds of attitude, that television (whose development acquired over the years a fundamental importance in sports, while perpetuating stereotypes in terms of race and/or gender), ignore. Actually, scholars such as Barnett (1990) and Whannel (1992) maintain that reporters often refer to ethnic and racial stereotypes to describe foreign players, while giving much less visibility to female performers in comparison to their male counterparts. 34
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‘Let’s Blitz Fritz’ (Sun, 1996), and ‘Herr We Go’ (Daily Star, 1996), clearly refer back to the war period and can only lead to intolerance, at least ‘helping’, as MP Kaufman claimed in 1990, the disorders that broke out in London and Brighton at the time. Not only this but, as Kevin Young (1992) well demonstrates, the same paradigms which define newsworthiness emphasise this tendency, privileging not only negative news, but also geographically closer episodes. This led for instance to an unbalanced treatment of a cyclone which, in the same period of Brussels’ disaster, hit Bangladesh causing the death of thousands of people, thereby creating the impression that the death of white people was more newsworthy and significant when compared to the death of non-whites. As Young describes: In a remarkably unbalanced treatment of Brussels and Bangladesh, the press went on to familiarize many of us with caricatures of soccer hooligans, with complex diagrams and illustrations of Heysel stadium and the route taken by the Liverpool ‘mob’ into the ‘Z’ section, while many more wondered ‘where is Bangladesh anyway?’ No maps were provided to answer that question [...] Ironically, none of the British or North American press reacted to the Bangladesh cyclone, surely a ‘killing field’ of much more devastating proportions, with such emotionally-charged headlines. (1992, 254, 260).
Yet, neither the media nor the government seemed aware of the fact. Indeed, it is rather easy to support campaigns against racism when they focus on pathologically aggressive criminal so neo-Nazis, but it is much more difficult to identify and tackle in an adequate way the racism and the violence expressed in the changing-rooms, on the ground itself, in the administrative sites etc. Furthermore, the fact that certain trainers and managers expressed themselves in racist terms, even though in mild and matter-of-fact tones, defining for example black players as ‘black antelopes’, praising their speed while simultaneously 152
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emphasising their lack of ‘intellectual capacity’ (Merkel, 1996) or the fact that, in their opinion, they have ‘an innate lack of discipline and consistency’, ‘are no good in mud’, ‘have no stamina’ e ‘lack bottle’ (Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research, 1), obviously will convey a certain image of the team to the audience, legitimising a certain community of supporters. And yet, none of these statements was commented on by the media. As a consequence, the fundamental racism surrounding football was not exposed as such and these claims were simply registered as the norm. From our discussion above, we can therefore see how the notions introduced and applied to particular texts in the previous pages, are clearly closely linked to the notion of context, and as such become fundamental for translators as well, in that they are required to re-enact a particular scenario at a later time and in a different language. This explains why it is important for translators to fully understand the scenario of the original writer and to respect the way the same scenario might be constructed in the target culture. Furthermore, since all cultures build others through various discourses, the study of stereotypes such as these becomes an important aspect of cultural and intercultural studies. This is not the right place to analyse the way these stereotypes have evolved and how these images are maintained in our societies. However, it is important to emphasise the close link between the culture of a particular country, its identity and the way that society uses language, as this clearly has important repercussions on the way also translator scan exploit language in order to render expressions which appear particularly related to the concept of national identity. As with idioms and other culture-bound expressions, in fact, the value and the force entailed by particular words and intertextual references might vary from source culture to target culture.
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3.1.Recent Developments in Translation Studies As mentioned in the previous chapter, the notions of function, context and intertextuality among others, have become fundamental for the development of translation studies as well. In fact, in a more fundamental way than the author of a message, translators are limited in their actions by a whole set of conventions (belonging to both the source and the target context). The translator actually coincides with the linguistic subject of the enunciation behind which it is impossible to pinpoint an individual, but a double gap: the person represented in the translator’s enunciation is not, obviously enough, the translator him/herself, but coincides with the person who corresponds to the name of ‘author’ who, in his/her turn, has already become the simple subject of the enunciation and has disappeared from the text as a person. The origin which, according to Barthes’s ‘death of the author’, is lost in the written text because of the way intertextuality acts, is even more remote when the text is filtered through a translator, since that the translator loses its autonomy twice: both as the author of the translation (as s/he is the result of a system of conventions, and his/her translation depends on systems which s/he cannot control), and as the author of the text itself, in whose original production s/he did not take part. However, precisely because the translator takes on a double role as both the sender and the receiver of the message, his/her intervention is essential, and the fact that author and translator somehow overlap clearly becomes fundamental. 155
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Indeed, the fact that with structuralism and poststructuralism language begins to be considered the creator of reality, has important repercussions even on translators, who become the holders of an enormous power. This is the reason why there has recently been a marked revival in the discipline of translation studies. In actual fact, translation is today considered a powerful and necessary tool whereby language users can exchange information and opinions referring to all disciplines. This aspect has obviously become more important in our postmodern world, a world in which exchanges between cultures and their integration is becoming increasingly frequent. This is why, as the proliferation of courses of studies dedicated to these issues demonstrates, the notion of ‘cultural mediation’ is becoming more and more important. As Snell-Hornby claims in Translation Studies (1988), we will always need (and increasingly so) translators, without whom most of the phenomena which characterise our ‘global’ society (such as films, Nobel Prize, scientific research, the Olympics etc.) could not exist or take place. According to the scholar, in a world that is rapidly growing smaller, international communication across cultures and even between the remotest corners of the earth is gradually being taken for granted, and that includes overcoming language barriers and cultural differences. Without translation the world of today with its rapid exchange of information would be unthinkable.
For reasons of space and for the purpose of the present volume, I will not be able to tackle every aspect in depth. However, because An Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies is mainly addressed to students of foreign languages and translation studies, it concentrates on those theories which approach issues related to language (the way language works, the way it can produce meaning, the impact it has on the individual mind and the surrounding reality and so on); issues related to
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the notion of identity which Western philosophical tradition has passed on over the centuries, and the repercussions that this notion has had on the concept of what has come to be labelled as national, racial and sexual identity, as expressed in particular uses of language; and finally on issues related to the status of knowledge in our society, in particular the demystification of the notion of absolute knowledge and truth in the domain of scientific, philosophical, literary and, as we shall see, translation studies. As many other disciplines, translation studies is relatively young and dates back to the second half of the twentieth century, when various information theorists, linguists and even engineers and mathematicians developed an interest in this field. Basing their research on the logic of calculators, scholars initially focused on single words and their transposition, thus rarely exceeding the level of the sentence, in an attempt to elaborate a normative and prescriptive model with which to give a set of rules to translators. Between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, however, we find signs of reaction to this aprioristic discipline. In fact, the theory of translation develops as an independent discipline during the 1980s, when we begin to talk about translation studies. According to this discipline, the equivalence between original text and translation is a relative concept, since there can be various translations both on a formal and on a functional level. It will be therefore up to translators to decide from time to time, according to the text to be translated, the historical and sociocultural context of both source and target texts, which is the degree of equivalence they should aim at. The publication of J.S. Holmes’s The Name and Nature of Translation Studies (1972) was, oviously, very important, as this text laid the basis of the discipline. Here the author expresses his desire to elevate research in the field of translation to the level of a complete discipline, claiming that practice should never be 157
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separated from theory and that theory of translation should open up to new developments occurring in other fields. The objectives of translation studies can therefore be summarised as follows: to describe translation as a process and to establish the general principles through which translation can be explained. Consequently, the discipline is interested in the description of existing translations, or in the description of the function performed by translation within particular sociocultural situations, or even in the description of the mental processes at work during the act of translating. Moreover, various partial theories have developed, which are categorised according to the means translators exploit in the realisation of their translations, the language used, the culture implicated in the process, the level of discourse on which the translation focuses (single words or entire texts), the typology of texts on which the translator focuses and so on. In addition, translation studies examines the use made of translation in various fields. Clearly, one of the most important applications in this sense relates to the teaching of a second language, both in general terms and, more specifically, in terms of translation. A second area coincides with an analysis of the instruments translators have at their disposal (for example, lexicography and grammar), while a third area relates more specifically to translators themselves, who try and spread, within their own field, new information regarding the role and the position of translators and translations in our society. The discipline of translation studies came into being as an answer to the needs of the study of comparative literature, but it also represented a reaction to what was considered a failure in the literary and linguistic field. The linguistic approach, in fact, while giving a less intuitive basis to the study of translation, simultaneously tended to exclude not only every ‘unscientific’ approach, but also literary texts as objects of study. However, if it is true that an antilinguistic reaction took place, it is also true that linguistics heavily contributed to the study of translation, 158
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because scholars of translation were unsatisfied not only with the linguistic aspects of translation studies, but also with the traditional literary approach, especially the rather low level to which literary translation (and its translators) were relegated. The first phase of translation studies was highly influenced by Russian formalism (for example it made an effort to give more importance to literalness as a discipline on its own, and each text was considered in specificity and analysed both synchronically and diachronically), but we can say that the importance ascribed to context during the 1950s and 1960s brought to what is normally referred to as the paradigm shift of the 1970s and 1980s, when scholars by moved away from the view of language as an abstract system – purported for example by linguists such as Chomsky (who focussed on the ideal competence of speakers) and Bloomfield (who claimed that language should be analysed isolation, irrespective of the context in which it originated) – which dominated previous decades and began to emphasise the fundamental relation between language and the context it stems from. As we have seen in the previous chapters, the fundamental role ascribed to the context is one of the main and most fundamental changes which have utterly revolutionised the field of the study of language in general and, in particular, of translation. For example, to Hymes’s insistence on the importance of communicative competence for users of language in general, there corresponds the notion of communicative translation and dynamic equivalence, that is, according to Nida, the creation of a target language expression which reflects the way we would say something in the target language (Nida, 1964). 3.1.1. Communicative Translation and Translation Loss The translation of expressions which appear particularly culturebound and idiomatic clearly represents one of the greatest challenges for translators, who in this instance really have to act 159
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as cultural mediators in the attempt to convey in the target text not only the language, but also the culture of the source text. Firstly, an expression could be so deeply rooted in the culture of origin that it might be first of all scarcely comprehensible to target-language receivers and, secondly, difficult to translate. As Katan acknowledges in his Translating Cultures (1999), it thus becomes fundamental for translators to have a strong background in the culture the texts stem from, in an attempt to exorcise the filters we resort to, albeit unconsciously, whenever we approach a text. These filters could actually be identified with the conceptual and textual grids which, according to Lefevere, underpin all forms of writing and which derive from the cultural and literary conventions of a given time and space. According to Lefevere, ‘problems in translating are caused at least as much by discrepancies in conceptual and textual grids as by discrepancies in language’ (Lefevere, 1999, 76), and translators ought to bear in mind the sets of grids in both source and target systems, in order to avoid imposing, for example, Western grids onto nonWestern texts, thus translating non-Western cultures into Western categories. This practice could be seen as an example of cultural transplantation, that is, one of the extremes of the ideal scale representing the various degrees of cultural transposition the translator can resort to in his/her work. In this instance, the text gets almost rewritten from the target-culture perspective, resulting in what might be more aptly considered an adaptation rather than a translation proper. As suggested above, this is the case with some of the texts originating from the postcolonial world, but also with some American remakes of certain European films or, as the last section of this chapter well exemplifies, of British appropriations of French comics. At the other end of the spectrum, though, opposite transplantation, we have exoticism and calqued expressions, thanks to which grammatical and cultural features of the source 160
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text are constantly imported into the target text with minimal adaptation. This practice might therefore result in a text in which the exotic element is either used by target-language users to construct source-language users as ‘others’ (with all the implications this entails), or which is exploited by sourcelanguage users to affirm their identity and the legitimacy of their culture and their language. Between these two extremes (namely exoticism and cultural transplantation) however, we have two intermediate degrees: cultural borrowing and communicative translation. The first one is particularly insidious for translators, who often think they can simply adopt the foreign word as a loan, without realising that the same expression might have more meaning in the source language than in the target language, or might refer to something different. Indeed, even the fact that a word is pronounced differently indicates that a lexical item which is apparently used identically in one language and the other, in reality does not have the same value. In addition, although the same words appear in the two languages, they might take on different meaning, or they might have more meanings in one language than in the other. Thus, the Italian word ballerina, which has entered the English language as a loan word, in Britain always indicates a classical ballet dancer; conversely, the word drink in Italian indicates an alcoholic drink, whereas in Britain it might well refer to any type of drink, regardless of its alcoholic content. It is therefore essential to take into consideration the fact that even loan words might be culture-biased and determined by the target culture. As a result, it might be necessary to translate the loan word into something different. For instance, the literal translation of ‘spaghetti rings’ (canned pre-cooked pasta produced by Heinz) – that is, ‘anelli di spaghetti’ – could be identified by Italian consumers only with difficulty, as ‘spaghetti’ in Italy is long and straight.
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Finally, we have communicative translation, a practice to which translators most often refer when translating texts in which the transmission of the content appears the main target of translation, independent of stylistic or cultural peculiarities. This is indeed the kind of translation adopted for clichés, idiomatic expressions, proverbs and so on, that is, all those cases in which a literal translation would result in a non-sense or a comic expression. Communicative translation could thus be defined as equivalent target-culture situation, and it might be considered as an exemplification of the notion of dynamic equivalence elaborated by Nida in 1964. According to Nida, ‘the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message’ (1964, 159). Communicative translation, then, is defined by Nida as the creation of an expression which reflects the way we would say something in the target language (1964, 166), and becomes particularly relevant in the translation of idiomatic expressions, when translators most of the time are required to create a sort of canonic form, that is, an expression which is generally accepted as standard by targetlanguage users. Thus, from the point of view of descriptive equivalence, an expression such as ‘he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth’ can be considered equivalent to ‘è nato con un cucchiaio d’argento in bocca’. Descriptive equivalence refers in fact to the relationship between source-text features and target-text features that are seen as directly corresponding to one another, regardless of the quality of the target text and the fact that particular target-text features might not be charged with the same meaning as it was originally intended in the source text. However, prescriptively, the equivalent of the expression would be ‘è nato con la camicia’. In order to produce a communicative translation, then, translators have at their disposal various strategies which might help them in their task.
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3.1.2. Malone’s Translation Strategies In his work The Science of Linguistics in the Art of Translation (1988), Malone identifies nine main strategies: 1. Equation: according to Malone’s definition (1988, 15), this strategy suggests some form of automatic equivalence. The most obvious cases are loan words (as with spaghetti) and calques, that is single words which are taken from the source language and (phonetically, graphically and syntactically) adapted to the target language, as in the Italian expressions dribblare, crossare and so on. Generally speaking, this strategy refers to the fact that if no other reason exists, a term should be translated by its one-to-one equivalent, as in man, generally translated as uomo, or dog, usually translated as cane. When adopting this strategy, however, translators should be particularly aware of false cognates (namely false friends, that is items which seem to correspond in meaning to some word in another language, but which in fact have a different meaning or cannot be used in the same tenses)1, or partial cognates (when the transparent translation is valid in some situations but not in others). Thus, even though occasionally the Italian word realtà might be correctly translated as ‘reality’, quite often it must be rendered differently. As Browne and Natali suggest in Bugs and Bugbears (1989, 141), expressions such as: a. l’arte come imitazione della realtà b. la realtà è dura 1
Thus, ‘blue eyes’ should generally be translated in Italian as ‘occhi azzurri’, and not ‘occhi blu’; ‘actual’ should be translated as ‘effettivo’, and not ‘attuale’, which means ‘current’; ‘accuracy’ should be rendered with ‘precisione’, and not ‘accuratezza’, which means ‘care’; ‘argument’ would be ‘argomentazione’ or ‘litigio’, and not ‘argomento’, translated as ‘topic’, ‘casual’ is ‘informale’, as ‘casuale’ would be ‘chance’, used as an adjective, and so on. 163
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c. d. e. f. g. h. i.
la sua malattia è una realtà progetti che diventano realtà spesso la realtà ci sfugge ha il senso della realtà bisogna tenere in considerazione la realtà locale gli editori devono conoscere bene la realtà sociale la realtà economica
shall thus be translated as: a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h.
art as imitation of nature life is hard (it’s a hard life) her illness is genuine plans which are realised often we don’t see things as they really are he is realistic we must keep local needs in mind publishers need to have a thorough knowledge of the social scene i. the economic situation
thereby exemplifying the predilection of English for more specific terms in comparison to the Italian vaguer concept of realtà. 2. Divergence: this strategy means choosing a suitable term from a range of potential alternatives. For example, the English word ‘cream’ could be translated in Italian as both panna or crema, and it is up to the translator to choose the correct alternative. It is therefore important not to stop at the first meaning we find in a dictionary, if we want to avoid inadequate translations. The strategy of divergence, however, also relates to grammatical constructions, in that at times more than one paradigm in the target language can be said to translate appropriately a paradigm in the source text. This is for instance the case of the Italian expression ‘se dovesse succedere’, which might be translated into English as ‘should it happen’, ‘if it should happen’, ‘were it to happen’ and ‘if it 164
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were to happen’. Similarly, an English possessive adjective or pronoun might be translated in many different ways in Italian, according to the number and the gender of the possession in question. Thus, ‘his’, might become ‘il suo’, ‘la sua’, ‘i suoi’, ‘le sue’. 3. Amplification: according to Malone, translators resort to this strategy whenever they add some element to the source text in order to make it more comprehensible to the target readers, as with translators’ notes, bracketed additions or simple additions. Thus, if in a text of contemporary history the translator finds the sentence ‘Callaghan still needs to find two more votes before tonight’s division’ (Wheen, 2004, xii), and correctly translates the sentence with ‘Callaghan deve trovare altri due voti prima della votazione per divisione di questa sera’, s/he might want to add a note in which s/he explains that ‘l’espressione ‘votazione per divisione’ si riferisce alla votazione dei parlamentari alla camera dei comuni in due gruppi’, adding a [n.d.t.] at the end of the sentence to indicate that this explanation was not present in the original text (Wheen, 2005). This strategy might also be required where the source language takes for granted certain components which may be cultural, semantic, linguistic or a mixture of these. Thus, ‘County’, might be translated as ‘Il County football’ or something similar, in order to render explicit that we are dealing with a football team. When adopting this strategy, however, translators should carefully consider whether the addition is necessary and whether it might result in a redundant target text. Thus, a word like ‘wilks’ – which Jamaica Kincaid uses instead of the standard ‘whelks’ in A Small Place (1998, 57) – was translated as molluschi in the first instance, and amplified immediately afterwards by the translator who, after a dash, adds: ‘i wilks, le chiocciole di mare’ (2000, 61). As a result, the sentence as a whole well 165
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exemplifies what Venuti, in his The Translator’s Invisibility, calls a ‘foreignising strategy’ (1995, 23). Foreignising, basically means making readers see the (cultural and linguistic) differences between their target culture, which they perceive as ‘domestic’, and the source culture, which is generally perceived as ‘other’. Domesticating, on the contrary, means rendering the source text familiar and recognisable for the target reader. As Venuti explains, Because translation can contribute to the invention of domestic literary discourses, it has inevitably been enlisted in ambitious cultural projects, notably the development of a domestic language and literature. And such projects have always resulted in the formation of cultural identities aligned with specific social groups, classes and nations (1995, 18).
In the translation provided above by Cavagnoli of Kincaid’s text, then, the term is kept in the original and italicised, but with a domesticating component, whereby the information it carries is made explicit in order to render wilks familiar to target language speakers. The sentence as a whole, however, sounds rather redundant, and because ‘amplification’ is still incapable of indicating the fact that the author used a nonstandard form in the source text, this strategy appears here unjustified and rather ineffective. 4. Diffusion: this strategy is concerned with the phenomenon of linguistically slackening source-text expressions for the target text version, that is, providing more elaboration in order to render the source-text expression in terms that are recognised as familiar by target-language receivers. Thus the Italian magari! could be translated as ‘if only I could/I wish that were the case’, thereby providing another example of communicative translation. As Taylor notes, yet a further category is represented by the Italian subjunctive and conditional, which can express many different meanings and
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often need diffusion in English, as in the example ‘la banda avrebbe rapinato tre banche’, which in English would result in a passive voice as in ‘the gang is alleged/said/reported to have robbed three other banks’ (1998, 57). Another example might be the use of Italian plural words which in English, being uncountable, need the addition of some extra element as with informazioni, translated as ‘some information’ or consigli, translated as ‘pieces of advice’. According to Malone’s classification, to these strategies there correspond antithetical strategies: 5. Substitution (antithesis of equation): in this case, the translation has no morphosyntactic or semantic resemblance to the source text. From a grammatical perspective, for example, the English genitive has no correspondence in Italian, where it has to be replaced by the form ‘di’, as in Gulliver’s Travels, which is regularly translated as I viaggi di Gulliver. On a semantic level the examples are many, and refer mainly to proverbs, idiomatic expressions, figurative uses of language and so on, when translators replace an expression with a completely different one which bears no resemblance (from a phonetic, grammatical and semantic point of view) to the source-language expression. Thus, an expression such as ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ should be translated as ‘piove a catinelle’; ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ should result in ‘la goccia che ha fatto traboccare il vaso’; and ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it’, would become the Italian ‘non si può tenere il piede in due staffe’. 6. Convergence (antithesis of divergence): Malone defines this strategy as the process thanks to which translators identify the most suitable term in the target language into which various terms of the source language might converge (1988, 36). For example, the Italian forms ‘tu/Lei/loro/voi’ are translated as
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‘you’, and the various titles ‘commercialista/ragioniere/ contabile’ all correspond to the English ‘accountant’. 7. Reduction (antithesis of amplification): this strategy consists of omitting elements in the target language because they are redundant or misleading. For instance, we do not translate ‘carta geographica’ with ‘geographical map’ but simply with ‘map’. Also in this case, however, translators ought to be careful not to betray the source text by making decisions which are clearly inconsonant with the author’s aims. For example, in Things Fall Apart (1958), Chinua Achebe makes it clear within the text that the word ‘harmattan’ refers to a wind from the Sahara by stating (for example) that ‘the cold and dry harmattan wind was blowing down from the north’ (1988, 18). Yet, Silvana Antonioli Cameroni, who translated the text into Italian, somewhat arbitrarily adopts a strategy of ‘reduction’, omitting in her translation – ‘dal nord soffiava asciutto e freddo l’harmattan’ (1994, 7) – the explicit reference to ‘wind’, presumably because considered redundant. If it is true that the concept of ‘wind’ is already implied by both the verb ‘to blow’ and the term ‘harmattan’, it is also true that Achebe himself thought the word might be difficult for an English-speaking audience to identify. Consequently, he decided to introduce an expression which in the source text might seem redundant to those readers who do know what ‘harmattan’ is. However, this would be clearly essential for all those readers who do not know how African people call the wind from the Sahara, and one might therefore wonder why the translator should think that term would be known to every Italian reader who happens to approach the text. 8. Condensation (antithesis of diffusion): in this case the target text is more economic from a linguistic point of view. This is true of the Italian expression ‘a buon prezzo’ which should be rendered in English as ‘cheap’, and of the verb ‘far vedere’, 168
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usually translated as ‘show’. We also talk about condensation when we have strings of adjectives and nouns which form concise, lexically-dense noun phrases (as in newspaper headlines, where they can often cause ambiguity as to the meaning of the textual segment). The last strategy Malone takes into consideration, is 9. Reordering, that is, the way words are positioned in the one language and the other. There are of course many examples of reordering: perhaps the simplest form it takes corresponds to the basic inversions of the adjective-noun sequence, which in Italian becomes a noun-adjective sequence (‘black dog’: ‘cane nero’), and the verb-object positioning (‘I love you’: (io) ti amo’). Obviously, as Taylor emphasises, it is important for translators to know when to adopt this strategy, whether for linguistic or rhetorical reasons, as in the case of the English expression ‘high pressure’, which in a medical context should be translated as ‘pressione alta’, whereas in a meteorological context should be rendered as ‘alta pressione’ (1998, 61). In addition, translators ought to be aware of the fact that although set collocations of two or more items might exist in both languages, they do not always match perfectly, as in the case of the expression ‘life and death’ which finds its counterpart in the Italian ‘vita e morte’. More often than not, collocations differ one way or another. For instance, they might match partly, while belonging to the same semantic field, as with the English expression ‘safe and sound’, which becomes ‘sano e salvo’; match perfectly but in inverted form, as with ‘black and white’, which in Italian becomes ‘bianco e nero’; maintain half the pairing, as with ‘the devil and the deep blue sea’, which might be rendered as ‘il diavolo e l’acquasanta’; or have no equivalent binomial form, as with the expressions ‘spick and span’, or the Italian ‘pochi ma buoni’.
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As far as the sentence is concerned, the frequent use of the passive voice in English makes it necessary to reorder in Italian. The English passive form, then, might be translated with: – an Italian passive voice (although less used than in English: ‘la porta viene chiusa’); – the impersonal construction known in Italian as ‘si passivante’ (‘si sentono voci’ for ‘voices can be heard’); – an active form using verbs with impersonal agents whose nominal or pronominal identity never appears (‘mi hanno detto che’ for ‘I have been told that’); – a participial construction (sometimes used also in English: ‘il motivo del reato, rivelato dall’avvocato dell’imputato’, for ‘the motive for the crime, (which was) revealed by the defendant’s lawyer’); – a continuos active form (‘lo stanno interrogando’ for ‘he is being interrogated’). We can therefore see how the fairly rigid English structure ‘theme – rheme’ often needs to be changed. 3.1.3. The Cultural Turn We have actually seen that, with the paradigm shift of the 1970s and 1980s, scholars such as Lefevere began to encourage a more flexible approach to translation (now understood as a ‘rewrite’). According to Lefevere, ‘re-writers tend to change the originals in order to adapt them to contemporary ideologies and poetic conceptions’, an aspect of translation which is evident for example in the German translation of Goldhangen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996)2, and, as we shall see, various 2
In this text, in fact, the translator tries to intervene directly onto those expressions which point clearly to the responsibility the German population has had in the Holocaust. As House notes, ‘the constant juxtaposition of the words German and Jewish (and their various derivations) is of course destroyed if the word German is deleted’ (1997, 155). As Lorenza Rega emphasises, ‘scorrendo la versione italiana (D.J. Goldhagen, I volonterosi 170
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translations of different kinds of texts. Lefevre’s concept of ‘rewriting’ comprises all forms of textual manipulation, including, besides translation proper, different typologies of texts such as theatre and cinema adaptations, children’s literature, shortened editions, anthologies, etc. Thus, rather than strictly focusing on linguistic aspects such as syntax, the paradigm shift introduced above, encouraged a more flexible approach to translation. It was Lefevere and Bassnett who, in a famous article, referred to the notion of cultural turn originally elaborated by Snell-Hornby (1990), according to which a translation cannot simply coincide with a linguistic transcoding, but has to posit itself as a cultural transfer as well. As anticipated above, then, also in translation studies the receiver viewpoint becomes paramount, and the emphasis is laid not so much on micro- and macro-syntactical elements, but on higher structures and on the relevance that the target text assumes in the target culture. In particular, Gideon Toury (an exponent of the targetoriented approach, according to which translators mainly operate in the interest of the target culture and language), adopts the concept of polisystem elaborated by Itamar Even-Zohar, and delineates his definition of translation conventions, dividing them into initial (to which translators resort in order to decide whether to adhere to the source-text conventions, adopt the conventions of the target text or embrace the conventions of carnefici di Hitler, Mondadori, Milano 1997), si individuano le stesse omissioni, anche se ovviamente il pubblico italiano non è così direttamente sensibile sul problema rispetto a quello tedesco; “cancellare dapprima ogni influenza dei cittadini ebrei sulla società, e poi la loro stessa presenza”. Il traduttore italiano Enrico Basaglia avverte però di aver mantenuto la differenza fra executioner (carnefice), perpetrator (realizzatore), executor (esecutore), actor o agent (agente o agente materiale), vista l’importanza di queste differenziazioni per il senso del testo. Tale differenziazione manca invece nella traduzione tedesca, ed è stata rilevata da House come fattore negativo ai fini della valutazione del testo tradotto’ (Rega, 2001, 20). 171
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both systems); preliminary (which include factors such as those regulating the selection of the work to be translated and the general strategies of translation to be adopted within the polistystem), and operative (which refer specifically to the decisions taken during the translation process). In addition, the notion of polisystem is to be understood as a whole set of literary systems which include both high and low forms. Thus, whereas translation studies scholars initially believed in the subjective ability of the translator to create an equivalent of the original text, which then would influence the literary and cultural conventions of a given society, polisystemic theoreticians started from opposite premises. They believed, indeed, that the social and literary conventions of the target culture fundamentally constituted the translator’s aesthetic sense, and that, consequently, they were the ones to influence the translator’s decisions and the strategies to be adopted. Thanks to polisystemic theory, then, not only are translations and interliterary relations amongst different cultures described more precisely, but even the actual literary and linguistic developments, together with the interliterary relationships within the system, are analysed and brought to light through translation. From what suggested above, it appears clear that the notion of an ideal equivalence between source text and target text has been abandoned. The translation loss which necessarily marks any translation is now acknowledged. Indeed, rather than holding onto an absolutist ambition to maximise the sameness between source text and target text – which encourages the conviction that there is a ‘right’ translation – it seems now more useful to admit that translation always results in a different target text, and that some elements of the source text are, inevitably, lost in the process. Translation loss therefore corresponds to an incomplete replication of the source text in the target text and suggests the loss of textual and cultural features in the translated text. Indeed, 172
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although some scholars refer to the differences between source text and target text as translation gains, for example when the target text is more explicit, precise, or economical than the source text, the difference still corresponds to a loss, in that the target text fails to replicate grammatical, phonic and prosodic features of the source text. Real homonymy very rarely occurs, and even from a phonic, rhythmic and prosodic point of view, there can be no real equivalence. For instance, cane and ‘dog’, while indicating the same referent, sound completely different, and therefore exemplify a phonic translation loss. Clearly, in a veterinary textbook this loss does not matter, but if the source text word is part of an alliterative pattern in a literary text, or appears in a poem or a song where it rhymes with another word (as for example ‘log’, as in the Beatles’ song Hard Day’s Night), the loss evidently becomes crucial. This aspect is well exemplified by the fact that even when source-text words have entered the target language as loan words, we still experience translation loss. The way speakers of the target language pronounce words which come from another language differs in fact from the way native speakers may pronounce that same word in their own language. Furthermore, as noted above, although the term might have acquired a place in the dictionary of the target language, it still introduces a touch of foreignness which is not present in the source language, and it might acquire a slightly different meaning in the target language. Translators, then, have to consider the consequences implied by the fact that, for example, ‘hostess’ is exotic in Italian and not in English, and sounds different in each language, or the fact that the expression ‘è nato con la camicia’ is phonically, rhythmically, grammatically, lexically and metaphorically different form ‘he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, etc. As we have seen, this also depends on the kind of text we are translating and on the function language has in that particular 173
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text. Thus, in the case of literary texts, it is important to take into account the literacy of the text. Philological translators, for example, by taking a positivist attitude and holding that what can be translated, can be translated clearly, and that what cannot be translated clearly must be confined to silence, often replace literary texts with non-literary texts. Against this view of language and translation, it is better to adopt a more flexible attitude, which might enable translators to render, in their translations, at least some of the features of the source text. Clearly even a category such as ‘literary texts’ is rather vague, but we shall refer here to the analysis Susan Bassnett makes of the ‘Specific Problems of Literary Translation’ (1991, 76), in order to tackle, albeit very superficially, the various types of text which could be considered literary. This is in no way an adequate analysis of this extremely rich field. I hope nonetheless it will give some idea of the complexity literary translation involves. In particular, we shall refer here to the problems inherent the translation of literary prose. Also in the translation of prose, it is essential for translators to consider the text as a whole, ‘while bearing in mind the stylistic and syntactical exigencies of the target language’ (Bassnett, 1991, 117). In her work, Bassnett quotes the list of general rules elaborated by Belloc (1931). Although the prescriptive attitude implicit in the concept of rule has been supplanted, as we have seen, by a more resilient approach which has taken the form of a series of principles and general guidelines theoreticians have attempted to identify as useful for translators, this list still represents a good example of possible approaches to literary translation: – The translator should consider the work as an integral unit and translate in sections, rather than word by word. – The translator should render idiom by idiom, ‘and idioms of their nature demand translation into another form from that of the original’. 174
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– The translator must render intention by intention [even though this is a very controversial notion, we can see the word ‘intention’ within the context of the skopos theorie briefly introduced below]. – The translator should pay particular attention to false friends and partial false friends. – The translator should never embellish. In order to emphasise the complex nature of literary translation, there follows another list of guidelines for translators, which Savory elaborated in order to summarise the seemingly contradictory alternative demands made of translation: – – – – – – – – – – – –
A translation must give the words of the original. A translation must give the ideas of the original. A translation should read like an original work. A translation should read like a translation. A translation should reflect the style of the original. A translation should possess the style of the translation. A translation should read as a contemporary of the original. A translation should read as a contemporary of the translation. A translation may add to or omit from the original. A translation may never add to or omit from the original. A translation of verse should be in prose. A translation of verse should be in verse. (Savory, 1968, 54).
We can therefore see how the translator, very often, must answer to contrasting demands whenever s/he approaches a text, questioning each strategy s/he decides to adopt at every step. Bearing these general remarks in mind, I would like to proceed to a brief analysis of an extract from the novel Autobiography of my Mother by Jamaica Kincaid, and compare this source text with the relative Italian translation which, clearly, works in this context as our target text. Albeit very superficial, this analysis might in fact be useful to highlight those aspects 175
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which, while being of little or no importance in a mainly informative text, can assume a fundamental importance in the translation of a literary text: The fisherman is coming in from sea; their catch is bountiful, my mother has seen to that. As waves plop plop against each other, the fishermen are happy that the sea is calm. My mother points out the fisherman to me, their contentment is a source of my contentment. I’m sitting in my mothers’ enormous lap. Sometimes I sit on a mat she has made for me from her hair. The lime trees are weighed down with limes-I have already perfumed myself with blossoms. A hummingbird has nested on my stomach, a sign of my fertileness. My mother and I live in a bower made from flowers whose petals are imperishable. There is the silvery blue of the sea crisscrossed with short darts of light, there is the warm rain falling on the clumps of castor bush, there is the small lamb bounding across the pasture, there is the soft ground welcoming the soles of my pink feet. It is in this way my mother and I have lived for a long time (Kincaid, 1997, 60)
Even from a first reading of the extract, it appears immediately obvious that the text relies on specific rhetorical aspects such as syntactical repetitions (‘there is [...] there’s [...] there is’); lexical repetitions (‘the fishermen’, ‘my mother’, ‘contentment’); onomatopoeia (‘plop plop’) and alliteration (‘s’ in ‘There is the silvery blue of the sea crisscrossed with short darts of light’). Now, if we compare the source text with the target text, some of the strategies the translator decided to adopt cannot but strike us as questionable, to say the least: I pescatori stanno tornando dal mare; la loro pesca è abbondante; mia madre vi ha provveduto. Mentre le onde si infrangono, si infrangono le une contro le altre, i pescatori sono felici che il mare sia calmo. Mia madre mi indica i pescatori, la loro contentezza è motivo della mia contentezza. Sono seduta nell’enorme grembo di mia madre. A volte sono seduta su una stuoia che lei ha fatto con i suoi capelli per me. Gli alberi di lime
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sono appesantiti dai frutti- mi sono già profumata con i loro boccioli. Un colibrì ha fatto il nido sul mio stomaco, un segno della mia fertilità. Mia madre e io viviamo in una capanna fatta di fiori i cui petali sono eterni. C’è il blu argenteo del mare, attraversato da luminosi raggi di luce, cade una pioggia calda sui rami di ricino, un agnellino saltella sul pascolo, i miei piedi rosei poggiano su un soffice terreno. Così mia madre e io viviamo da molto tempo. (Kincaid, 1997, 38-40)
In the translation of this segment, which refers to obeah mythology (an ancestral tradition which stems from the encounter between the African culture of the diaspora and the native Carib people), the only characteristic the translator could not avoid respecting is in fact lexical repetition. On the contrary, syntactical repetition, the use of the onomatopoeic expression referring to the waves, and the alliteration of the letter ‘s’, which, as suggested above, characterise this text, are ignored. We can therefore see here the importance that, in a literary text as well as other kinds of texts, the notion of function can assume and the importance for the translator to maintain, in the target text, a function equivalent to that of the source text. Yet, Skopostheorie does not take into account the cultural complexity of the translating process (both from the source text and the target text point of view), and the fact that not only can the target text maintain only some of the original functions, but that it can also assume different functions within the target culture. Translation studies, then, deemed translations to be, facts of target cultures, emphasising that one particular target text will respect certain features of the source text and not others, according to which one is prevalent in the source text, thereby further stressing that absolute equivalence is impossible. Indeed, in the same way that in the last half century or so, poststructuralism and postmodernism have acknowledged that there exists no universal truth, that the epistemological innocence of the nineteenth 177
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century, with its infallible grand-narratives, is finished and, as a consequence, that at the core of a text there is no fundamental truth to be unveiled, even so within the discipline of translation studies it is now admitted that there is ‘no absolute truth to be conveyed in translation’ (Simon, 1999, 63). This concept is also implied by de Campos’s idea that ‘translation as transtextualisation demythicises the ideology of fidelity’ (Vieira, 1999, 110), in that it expresses a refusal to duplicate the original. The many neologisms coined by the Brazilian translator Haroldo de Campos to define translation (in this particular instance translation of postcolonial texts), suggest very well the refusal of the notion of an ideal equivalence in favour of a more creative poetics of translation, which he defines as ‘reinvention’, ‘recreation’, ‘translumation’, ‘transparadisation’, ‘transtextualisation’, ‘transcreation’, ‘transluciferation’, ‘poetic reorchestration’, ‘reimagination’ etc. In addition, by constructing a whole discourse around Antropofagia in the 1960s, and by publishing Da Razão Antropofágica: Diálogo e Diferença na Cultura Brasiliera in the 1980s, de Campos has re-evaluated the original notion of Antropofagia, as expressed in the Brazilian avant-garde of the 1920s. By being applied to a poetics of translation, the metaphor of anthropophagy unsettles the primacy of origin and emphasises the role of the receiver in translation in so far as, as Vieira observes, Cannibalism is a metaphor actually drawn from the natives’ ritual whereby feeding from someone or drinking someone’s blood [...] was a means of absorbing the other’s strength, a pointer to the very project of the Anthropophagy group: not to deny foreign influences or nourishment, but to absorb and transform them by the addition of autochthonous input (1999, 98).
By so doing, then, Anthropophagy and de Campos’s re-reading of it establish themselves as non-Eurocentric theories of 178
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translation which, as de Campos himself claims in ‘Translation as Creation and Criticism’, enable the revitalisation of the past precisely via translation (1992, 36). Thus, according to de Campos, the target language and the culture it carries will interweave and transform the source text, thereby making translation into a ‘two-way transcultural enterprise’ (Vieira, 1999, 106). These notions clearly raised the issue of finding a precise definition of culture and, as we shall see below, different schools approached the problem from different perspectives. Clearly, a detailed description of the debate on culture cannot be the focus of this analysis, but in the following pages I will try and clarify what we mean by culture in order to understand how this notions determines the language used by speakers/writers and, of course, translators. 3.2.Culture and the Notion of Cultural Translation One of the oldest definitions of culture was formulated by the English anthropologist Edward Barnett Tylor in 1871. According to him, culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, costumes. By 1952, American anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckholn had compiled a list of 164 definitions (1952, 181). As Garzone points out in her ‘The Cultural Turn’ (2002), we can identify two main conceptions of culture, one which refers to the visible, empirically observable aspects of a nation’s life which tend to be considered, within that nation, shared knowledge (e.g. literature, law, religion etc.) and a more anthropological definition, which is situated at a higher level of generalisation and concerns invisible aspects such as values, beliefs etc. We can therefore see that Tylor’s quotation cited above comprises both distinct elements and can thus be said to bring together, if only intuitively, different
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theoretical stances which, because of the broadness of the subject, would be subsequently dealt with separately. This basic distinction, then, can be identified with what Hall terms high culture (which is external to the individual and related to a particular body of knowledge learned) and low culture (which is internal, collective and, rather than learned, is acquired). This definition, which recalls Hall’s distinction between formal and informal culture (1959) and Robinson’s division in external and internal culture (1988), is to be understood in terms of a shared mental model or map of the world, and cannot but bring to mind Hofstede’s famous title Software of the Mind (1991), which indicates, precisely, the cultural programmes shared by an entire nation. As suggested above, we can identify different approaches to the study of culture, from the behaviourist (which tends to be ethnocentric and refuses any contextualisation of its subject matter), to the functionalist (which looks at the reasons behind behaviour, but is still very culture-bound in its evaluations) and the cognitive approach (which attempts to account for the way the brain works, as with Hofstede). Similarly, we can refer to various models of culture elaborated within each approach. As such, we can refer for example to: – Trompenaar’s layers (the external layer corresponding to ‘artefacts’; the middle layer corresponding to ‘norms and values’ and the core corresponding to ‘basic assumptions’, 1993, 23); – Hofstede’s onion model (the outer layer containing ‘practices’, the following ‘symbols, heroes and rituals, and the central ‘values’, 1991, 7 – 9); – Brake et al.’s Iceberg Theory (1995, 39), which they elaborated on Hall’s cultural triad of 1952, according to which we could identify • technical culture (i.e. communication at the level of science, which in Brake et al.’s model corresponds to the tip of the iceberg); formal culture (which is part of an accepted way of 180
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doing things, as with traditions, rules etc. and thus related to concepts such as appropriacy, and is just below the surface of water) and informal culture (which accounts for the majority of the speaker/writer’s orientation toward action, communication, power, individualism etc. By relating to the illocutionary force of our utterances and, as Ulrych emphasises (1992, 254), to the connotative meaning of our utterances, this type of culture remains invisible, well below the water level). From this list, and the reproduction of the Iceberg Model below (see also Katan, 1999), which well encapsulates the various distinctions made above, it appears clear that all these elements scholars recognise (despite the different labels assigned to them), determine the individual’s verbal and non-verbal behaviour, his/her choice of dress, music, food, the way s/he interacts with others etc.
Indeed, as Saville-Troike emphasises in her The Ethnography of Communication, ‘culture encompasses all of the shared rules for appropriate behaviour that are learned by individuals as a 181
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consequence of being members of the same group or community’ (1986, 47- 48). This notion, obviously, embraces language which, as emphasised before, is no longer seen as an isolated phenomenon but as part of culture and, as such, appears determined by it. It was actually an anthropologist, Franz Boas, who began to discuss the links between language, thought and culture, stating that that the form of the language will be moulded by the state of the culture. This led to the notion of cultural relativism which, after Boas, would be developed by scholars such as Malinowski – according to whom language is essentially rooted in the reality of the culture (1938, 305) – and Sapir (1949, 207) according to whom language does not exist apart from culture. It was actually him who, by maintaining that language could only be interpreted within a culture and that no two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same reality, elaborated the famous, if controversial, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Clearly, the strong version of the hypothesis – that language determines the way language users think – has been contested, not least by translation scholars Hatim and Mason, who in their Discourse and the Translator, point out that if the theory were true, it would mean that translators would be incapable of conceptualising in categories other than those of their mothertongue (1990, 29). Yet, a weaker version of the hypothesis – namely that language influences thought – is by now widely accepted. As Montgomery emphasises, in fact, language takes on meaning within a culture and tends to condition our thoughts (1986, 178). This clearly implies that the same word can mean different things to people from different cultures in terms of connotative values and that, is a specific concept within a particular culture is missing, there will be no word for that concept. This is the reason why the process of translation is now 182
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being understood as an exercise not only in understanding texts, but in understanding cultural frames (Katan, 1999, 159). Hence the replacement of linguistic translation with the notion of cultural translation and the by now universally accepted proposition that the translation of a language implies the translation of the culture which finds expressions in that language. Thus, the traditional notion of the translator as the one who mechanically transposes words from one language to another has now been replaced by the idea of the translator as a cultural mediator, meaning a person who works as an intermediary between the receiver and the author of a text, and who, through his/her research work and textual production, enables the users of a language to receive the cultural products originally intended for speakers of another language. In a similar way to SnellHornby, who suggests that the translation process can no longer be envisaged as being between two languages but between two cultures involving cross cultural transfer (1988, 39 – 64), so Fruttero and Lucentini advocate that the translator is asked to ‘master not one language but everything that is behind a language, that is, an entire culture, an entire world, and entire way of seeing the world’ (2003, 60). As a consequence, understanding the culture of a country becomes even more relevant when we are called to translate texts which more specifically deal with the culture of one given country, with the way this culture interacts with other cultures, and the way in which this culture is ‘read’ by others. This is why translation studies should go hand in hand with cultural studies, a discipline which developed in the 1950s and which raised questions such as ‘what does studying the culture of a country mean?’; ‘why should we study it?’; ‘which tools do we have to do this?’, all questions which are often taken for granted.
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3.2.1. The Development of Cultural Studies It was precisely the development of cultural studies that focused the attention on texts other than literary, and on the importance of assimilating not only the language, but also the culture of a country/individual in order to achieve a real communication. One of the fundamental, though often underestimated principles of this discipline – which is closely linked to the study of the English language and often appears on a border line where literary and cultural studies overlap – is that it is possible to obtain a true form of communication only when speakers are aware of the cultural context in which the language is used. In order to achieve real communication – a ‘felicitous’ communication, as Austin would say (1972), that is, a communication in which the addresser of the message manages to perform, through his/her speech act, precisely what s/he wanted to perform (give an order, celebrate a wedding, apologise, make a promise, etc.) – it is not enough to know a language. One always needs to know about the culture as well, the context in which the language is used and the implications which certain linguistic attitudes can have in one culture and/or society. Thus, cultural studies tries to uncover the mechanisms which determine the communication between the sender and the receiver of a message, be they individuals, institutions or society as a whole. One of the fundamental aims of cultural studies, then, and one which is of fundamental importance for translators as well, is the investigation of the power relationships which underlay various forms of exchange, in an attempt to understand in which way these relationships shape the cultural practices of a specific society. Indeed, cultural studies claim to achieve a moral evaluation of modern society and by their commitment to radical lines of political action they aim to understand and change the structures of dominance everywhere.
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Because of this, cultural studies – often relying on disciplines such as critical discourse analysis – favours the analysis of various types of discourse, emphasising that there no longer exists a single privileged discourse of culture of which a restricted elite might have the monopoly (as might have been the case with literary discourse). Culture is in fact composed by many different discourses, high and low, standard and non-standard. Indeed, even in the three fundamental texts of the discipline – The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart (1957), Culture and Society by Raymond Williams (1958) and The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson (1963) – the term culture indicates a complex and pluridimensional entity which includes the products of class, ethnic, age and gender groups very different from one another. This is the reason why the theoretical positions of the founders of cultural studies were soon to find a counterpart in the development of folk music, pop music (literally, popular music), the media, various youth trends such as mods, rockers and punks3, that is, a series of cultural and social phenomena which seemed to confirm the fact that culture could no longer be understood as univocal, but had to be looked at as an ensemble of voices and different languages: the language of literature, of course, but also the language of music, the language of fashion, or the language of the Tour de France (analysed for example by Barthes in Mythologies); in a word, all those texts which concur in forming our life and which, because of this, can be considered the intertexts of our life, that is, the various symbolic systems which are thought of as composing culture. Culture therefore appears to be a rather ambiguous concept, and the elusiveness of the term clearly has important 3
During the 1970s, the study of the ‘style’ and behaviour of young working-class men became an obsession of British cultural studies. It was only during the 1980s that this narrow perspective broadened as to include women and blacks. 185
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repercussions on the methodologies adopted by cultural studies in its analysis of the various discourses produced by a particular society. For example, whereas most anthropologists adopt a generic conception of culture characterised by generalisation, defining it as a form of social behaviour related to the habits, the values, the beliefs etc. of a community, for others it corresponds to an abstraction from behaviour. Furthermore, while for some the material products of a certain group (such as fashion, pottery, music and so on) make up the culture of that group, for others anything ‘material’ is extraneous to culture. To these restricted (and restricting) notions of culture, however, there correspond others which seem to be all-inclusive and encompass virtually everything. For example, according to Raymond Williams – who could be said to hold what Garzone defines as a specifically culturological perspective on culture (2002, 160) – culture includes the organisation of production, the structure of the family, the structure of the institutions which express or govern social relationships within a community, the characteristic forms through which members of a society communicate. As such, it encompasses literature, history, religion, the law and everything that comprises the shared knowledge of a community in relation to various aspects of contemporary life such as the press, television, fashion and so on. Many distinctions can therefore be made as to the definitions of culture: anthropological vs. culturological, formal vs. informal, and even culture proper (understood as the cultural programmes of an entire nation) vs. sub-culture (associated by Hofstede with profession, regional background, sex, age group and the organisations to which the members of a community belong), and each of them entails a shift of emphasis and has therefore important consequences on the way we interpret (and translate) the cultural products of a community.
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Because of the difficulty in defining culture, the subject of cultural studies as a discipline can appear equally ambiguous. In addition, the methodological approach of the discipline also appears rather unsystematic and heterogeneous. Cultural studies, in fact, does not have a specific theory, but borrows from social-science disciplines and all branches of humanities and the arts, appropriating and using theories from anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, textual analysis, musicology, political science, art theory and, of course, linguistics and semiotics. Indeed, in order to understand how cultural studies works we need to refer to some of the notions introduced in the previous chapters, since concepts such as sign, code, text, representation and so on, are fundamental to the cultural-studies enterprise as well. Saussure’s notion of language as a cultural phenomenon, Jakobson’s idea that the principles governing linguistic systems also organise other types of communication systems such as film and fashion, Barthes’s suggestion that the way we dress, what we eat etc. can be equally studied as signs, and the general concern of semiotics (that is, the study of signs and the way they work in social life) appear at the very basis of cultural studies. Initially sharing structuralist aims and goals4, cultural studies therefore set itself in opposition to many of the academic 4
As we have seen above, the starting point of structuralism was that language is a social system and that, conversely, any type of social activity may be thought of as a different language (or, as Barthes would call it, a code). The meaning taken on by social and cultural phenomena thus makes them into signs which, on the basis of the definition given by Saussure, have a social dimension and are arbitrary and conventional. The structuralists were therefore the first who treated systems which normally would not be considered as systems of signs as if they were, thereby attempting to shed some light onto the unconscious conventions they believed determined any system. 187
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institutions of the time, focusing on a series of projects which went beyond the study of canonical texts carried out in traditional literature departments, forcefully suggesting that the idea of canon at the basis of literary studies was no longer tenable. Thus, cultural studies has analysed cultures as disparate as high culture, low culture, public culture, popular culture, rock culture, gay culture, black culture, colonial culture, postmodern culture, style culture etc., and has concentrated on various cultural practices such as art, architecture, literature, music, film, advertising, television, theatre, dance and so on. The kind of analysis cultural studies practises, then, bears many resemblances with the discourse analysis typical of literary as well as other kinds of text, and assumes a fundamental importance for translators as well who, as receivers of a message, are first of all required to decode it correctly, in order to recode it at a later stage. In this instance, discourse comes to represent a culturally produced group of ideas containing texts (which, in their turn, contain signs and codes), and representations (which describe power in relation to Others)5. Because, as we read in Introducing Cultural Studies, ‘a way of thinking a discourse often represents a structure of knowledge and power’ (2003, 14) and, as we shall see, often becomes a tool for propaganda, discursive analysis exposes these structures of power, contextualising the discourse historically, culturally and socially. The aim of cultural studies can thus be said to be not only the study of culture as a discreet and autonomous entity, but of 5
We can therefore see how Lacan’s concept of the Other is fundamental to cultural studies as well. The Other is thus understood as the entity outside the ‘self’, and while, generally speaking, non-Western cultures are seen as the Other of, and by, the West, within Western societies, members such as homosexuals, immigrants and even women are sometimes construed as the Others. 188
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culture as it manifests itself in the political and social contexts of a particular society at a specific time. Consequently, cultural studies analyses youth sub-cultures and television news programmes, but also images of women, of masculinity and femininity, the politics of sport, the status of science and so on, in an attempt to empower people by making them understand the relationship between culture and power. By concentrating on these various discourses, then, cultural studies comes close to other disciplines such as sociolinguistics and, one hopes self-evidently, translation studies. As a discipline, cultural studies can be said to have been born in 1964, when the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was established under the directorship of Richard Hoggart. The Centre actually institutionalised the discipline and brought attention to working-class culture (distinguishing, with Thomspon, between the culture made for the working class from the culture made by the working class) and to oral culture, both of which had hitherto been marginalised, if not completely excluded, from the canon. According to Hoggart and Williams, the task of cultural studies was to endorse the culture of common people against the canonical high culture typical of the middle and upper classes. By setting working-class culture (perceived in nostalgic and personal terms) in opposition to the mass culture created by and through American models, Hoggart thus tried to emphasise the cultural neo-colonialism to which the working classes were subjected. Hoggart’s successor, Stuart Hall, focused on identity – claiming that issues of sex, race and religion drive society and determine people’s sense of identity – and the practical impact that cultural studies can have on reality. After the initial phase of the 1960s – during which British cultural studies was influenced by the New Left which had emerged as a response to the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, and which was essentially formed 189
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by intellectuals from the former British colonies who did not manage to break into the establishment of the British Left – cultural studies underwent a structuralist phase in the 1970s, in order to enter a poststructuralist phase during the 1980s, when the subjectivity of any type of study was emphasised, any type of positivistic idea of objectivity was rejected and everything was declared to be a linguistic construct. Thus, even though initially British cultural studies essentially dealt with problems of class (often in terms which were later recognised as white, middle-class, male and Eurocentric), already in the 1980s and then more openly during the 1990s issues related to the identity of women, homosexuals and the immigrants arriving from the formerly colonised world (and the place they occupy in contemporary British society) were brought to the foreground. In particular, with Hall, cultural studies became more international and more attentive to the theoretical work carried out in the field by scholars all over the world6. Besides the development of specific trends such as the cultural studies of science7, or the technoculture theory (according to which technological artefacts are charged with an intrinsic cultural and social baggage), cultural studies increasingly focused on issues of gender (including queer theory, which analyses the opposition hetero/homosexual) and race (including the study of the various diasporas of the world, that is, the minority communities living in exile). 6
Indeed, with the election of Margaret Thatcher, British cultural studies began to migrate to other countries, thus becoming highly diversified. In America, Canada, Australia, France and South Asia, cultural studies took on particular characteristics while losing others, and for example concentrated on the analysis of popular culture while disregarding political issues. 7 This was essentially developed by scholars such as Jerome Revetz (1971) and Thomas Kuhn (1962), who emphasised the relative and arbitrary nature of science, suggesting that scientific knowledge is socially and culturally constructed and not discovered. 190
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According to cultural studies, cultural identity is essentially a discursive entity which is achieved and constructed through specific linguistic and rhetorical means. An example of this is political rhetoric, which constantly shifts from the particular to the universal, as when referring to the British in a general sense, thus eliminating all differences of race, religion, age and gender. From the discussion carried out above, then, it appears clear that the major shift implied by the cultural turn, is one of orientation. A mediator, contrary to a traditional translator, tries to recreate culture-bound frames wherever necessary, accepts that difference is the norm and that there is no single correct translation. According to Toury, in fact, ‘correct’ has to be intended according to the constantly changing and conflicting socio-cultural norms in the receiving culture. As Even-Zohar underlines, there can be no equality between the various literary systems and types (1978, 16), in so far as, as Bell confirms, ‘equivalence is a chimera’ (1991, 6). Obviously, in order to solve the difficulties posed by differences in culture, translators have at their disposal several strategies and it is important for translators to act constantly in the awareness of the different options open to them. In particular, the meta model elaborated by Bandler and Grinder in 1975 appears extremely useful. The model identifies generalisation (defined by O’ Connor, as instances in which one example is taken as representative of a number of possibilities), deletion (which can be both syntactic and semantic and could be used to reduce lexical density) and distortion (which encompasses both generalisation and deletion and refers for example to nominalisation – which is itself a form of deletion – and presupposition – which is also a hidden distortion of reality – playing with the thematic structure of an utterance etc.). Clearly, the meta model is relevant to any discussion of language, but in the specific, it can be successfully applied to translation.
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Obviously, because categories are culture-bound, there will be differences in generalisations, but in translation, resorting to a superordinate rather than a hyponym can reveal itself very useful. Similarly, either through an unobtrusive manipulation of the text or a comment inserted outside the main body of the text, we could add an expression in order to make the frames available to the source culture reader equally accessible to the target reader. As Newmark suggests, for example, we could re-create cultural equivalence by substituting an institution from one culture with an equivalent from the target culture, or through intertextuality or creating a totally imaginary ‘as if’ scene with target culture institutions and persons (1988, 82-83). Similarly, according to Baker, the translator could decide to omit or replace whole stretches of text which violate the reader’s expectations of how a taboo subject should be handled, an opinion which is shared by Newmark, who is in favour of deletion when the language may be taken as offensive. Indeed, as Hatim and Mason note, it is already fairly standard practice to add or delete according to the accessibility of the frame (1990, 94). Finally, distortion, which becomes a way of directing the addressee to what the speaker/writer considers important, can occur through a faithful, literal translation and by making explicit what was originally implicit. These strategies, together with the strategy of chunking (that is changing the size of a unit as, for example, when we chunk up and, from the specific, we move to the general by using a superordinate, or when we chunk down, moving from the general to the specific), correspond to a certain extent to Malone’s strategies identified above, and appear fundamental to any form of translation willing to take into consideration the cultural context from which a text stems. These strategies are essential in any kind of intercultural encounters, as for example in business encounters, and they appear particularly important in all those texts where political 192
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and ideological nuances are central, as for instance in the texts stemming from the postcolonial world or texts focused on issues of political correctness such as gender, disability etc. As the following pages demonstrate, translators should be attentive to all those aspects which appear culturally determined. For instance, we ought to be aware of individuals’ different relations to the physical environment (which, for example, in Western culture determine, at least in part, a person’s identity, although, as Hall observes, in England it is mainly the social system that determines who a person is – 1982, 138); their relation to the ideological environment (of which religious and political beliefs are obviously part and determine for example the way in which ‘fanatic’ or ‘totalitarian’ can be interpreted). It is important also to consider the climate in which a person lives (as ‘hot’ clearly does not mean the same thing in the UK and Africa), the kind of space people have to confront and which is bound to determine the ideas of ‘public’ and ‘private’ space and what can be considered ‘distance’ and ‘proximity’. ‘Space’ can also be interpreted in psychological terms and, following Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner we can speak of diffuse orientation and specific orientation (1997, 73-76) according to whether a person is more or less willing to let others into their life (an essential notion to understand for example how the word ‘friend’ is used, a word which should not be translated but mediated). This relation to space, also influences the linguistic style adopted, in that, as Hall points out, distance between people is maintained partly through appropriate loudness (1982, 142), and of course, what is considered appropriate varies from culture to culture (according to him, soft speaking is another important strategy for the English as a response to the lack of space). It is also essential to consider the dress code of a person. For instance, as Katan suggests (1999, 69) American dress style, as reflected in their large use of sneakers, is far too informal for most European standards and, as in French culture, might 193
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indicate non professional behaviour (not only, then, ought we to dress appropriately, but we should also be aware that clothes change their symbolic meaning as they cross borders, as for example with the Barbour jacket (which, while being worn in England by people who live or spend their time in the country – i.e. members of the aristocracy – in Italy is never worn by country people but by those who wish to have a casual jacket). Furthermore, it is important to consider ‘olfaction’ as what can be considered a perfume, a smell or an odour, clearly depends on one’s cultural upbringing and the ingredients one is accustomed to consume. It is also important to consider the different orientation people from different countries have towards time. Indeed, as Hall emphasises (1983), monochromic time cultures perceive time as the frame, which means that the focus is on the task and that schedules are important and adhered to. These are the fixed time cultures which perceive time technically (hence the motto ‘time is money’). By contrast, polychronic or multi-focus cultures place great emphasis on the relationship between interactants and multi-tasking. We could therefore talk about fluid time cultures, in which punctuality is defined with more flexibility and delays are expected and tolerated (as in Italian culture, where subito technically means ‘immediately’, although it is hardly ever uttered with this literal meaning, especially in a busy coffee shop). Cultural mediators, then, should not only be aware of these differences, but also make the people involved in communication partake in their knowledge, as to avoid a breakdown in communication due for example to a person’s lack of (monochromatic) punctuality. Another issue related to time of which mediators should be aware, is whether the interlocutors (that in the case of literary translation could be understood as the characters of a novel or the authors themselves of literary works) come from a ‘past-oriented’ culture (in which tradition is 194
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paramount), a ‘present-oriented’ culture (which emphasises the ‘here-and-now’) or a ‘future-oriented’ culture (whose members can plan ahead to the next generation), in so far as words such as ‘enduring’ and ‘infinite’ need to be interpreted against these orientations. Another important aspect mediators should be keenly aware of, is the orientation towards power. Brake et al., for instance, talk of ‘hierarchy’ and ‘equality’, and this basic concepts seem to correspond to Hofstede’s division between ‘high power distance’ and ‘low power distance’ as well as to Trompenaars’s ‘ascription’ and ‘achievement’, according to which different cultures tend to accord status either on the basis of family background or title or on the basis of results, regardless of background. In an analogous fashion, we ought to be attentive as to whether a culture privileges what Brake et al. term individualism (as Northern Europe) or collectivism (as for instance Japan), Trompenaars’s universalism (as with American mass production, which tends to generalise procedures and apply them universally) or particularism (which, on the contrary, emphasises difference, uniqueness and exceptions, from food or restaurants to the application of parking fines, as in Central and South America and Southern Europe). Furthermore, cultural mediators should pay attention to whether a culture is, according to Brake et a.l’s definition, ‘competitive’ or ‘cooperative’, because, as Hofstede explains, this interpretations affects the interpretation and evaluation of terms such as ‘average’ and ‘best’ (1991, 90). Similarly, of fundamental importance is the extent to which a culture feels uncomfortable with ambiguity, uncertainty or change, and whether the cultures are ‘high’ or ‘low’ context in that, as Hall observes, and as we shall discuss in detail below, individuals, groups and cultures have different priorities with regard to how much information needs to be made explicit for communication to take place (1983, 59 – 77). 195
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3.2.2. The Language of Advertising All the aspects discussed supra, can easily be observed also in the strategies translators resort to when they are called to translate advertising texts. Indeed, advertising texts appear at a sort of crossroad where literary, journalistic and commercial texts meet, as they seem to borrow features from – and assume some of the functions of – all these textual types. The origins of advertising date a long way back, as already in ancient Rome there were signboards and inscriptions which were meant to illustrate the salient characteristics of particular goods. However, although the art of advertising has had a place in every historical period, it is only with the industrial revolution and the mass production it implied, which it began to acquire the importance it holds in contemporary society. As we read in Consumer Society in American History (1999), where advertising is approached from a historical perspective, with the development of technology production (and the economic investment it involves), markets became larger, and it became necessary to ‘place’ the goods produced: informing consumers of the existence of a new product, convincing them of its superior quality, persuading them to buy it, has therefore become increasingly important. As we shall see, the advertising process involves both linguistic and non-linguistic features, in so far as through images and a careful exploitation of the grammar of visual design (Kress and von Leeuwen, 1998), publicity texts manage to create a strong bond between particular products and ideals such as beauty, youth, strength, success etc., thereby suggesting that by purchasing a particular product consumers will also get hold of the quality inherent in the product itself. This is particularly true when the advertising campaign is based on the appearance of famous people such as Muhammed Ali (who was used to recommend a particularly strong anti-cockroaches product). As O’ Donnel and Todd rightly observe, ‘evidently the advertisers 196
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hope that some of the prestige associated with the communicator of the message will be transferred to their product’ (1991, 104). In order to fully exploit the potentials of this aspect of advertising, then, it is essential to know the target of a particular product, so that the advertising campaign can be directed to specific sectors of society, be it professionals, housewives, children, teenagers etc. According to the target audience, advertising will borrow more or less extensively from TV, film and other media. Adverts can in fact be presented as news, as mini-documentaries and even as soap operas. Indeed, because most of the time advertising campaigns are run on different medias, sometimes they might take advantage of the possibilities offered by one particular channel (for example television, as in the case of the ‘soap opera’ adverts), in order to appear later on in a sort of ‘standstill’ and ‘reduced’ form which might appear in newspapers, magazines and on billboards, once the consumers have become familiar with the product and can readily recognise the advert in its synoptic form. With the usual time lag, these are formats which have only recently reached Italy. This is for example the case of Infostrada or Tim adverts. In all these instances, we can therefore talk about an ‘infomercial’, a genre which, as we read in Introducing Media Studies, refers to ‘an extended advert that purports to be a documentary or a chat show’ (2000, 108). It is a type of advertising born entirely out of mainstream TV that blurs all standards and genres, emphasising that all media are selling something, whether ideas, lifestyle choices etc. Sometimes, advertisements get so sophisticated that it appears very difficult, if not virtually impossible, to understand which product is actually advertised. This is even more so in our postmodern times, when advertisements borrow many of the devices exploited by postmodern literature such as intertextuality, symbolism, iconicity etc. in order to create a miniaturised work 197
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of art. Far from being a simple commercial experience, advertising therefore becomes a clear exemplification of the strong bond existing between language and culture. Consequently, as Guidère states (2001), the translation of adverts represents a privileged means of communication for a company that intends to export its products to other countries. Simultaneously, however, advertising posits itself as the representative of the very country it stemmed from. On the one hand, it does so by advertising specific products (for instance, any advert which promotes pork meat would not have any meaning in Muslim countries), but it does so also at a different level, namely at the level of the associations it activates, especially if it adopts a soft-sell approach8. In these instances, in 8
Within the field of advertising, we can identify two main categories of adverts, namely product-ads and non-product ads. As O’ Donnell and Todd state in their Variety in Contemporary English (1992, 101-102) can resort either to a technique of hard-sell (a relatively straightforward technique which urges the consumer to buy a particular product by giving one or more reasons to do so, and which is generally used for utilitarian products such as detergents etc.) or to a soft-sell technique, a much subtler and more emotive technique which exploits the strong relationship existing between language and ideology, in order to sell luxury items such as chocolates, perfumes, jewels and so on. The exploitation of this technique enables the advertisement to act at a more subliminal level, and accounts for the fact that sometimes an advert is not even immediately recognisable as such. Through the years, hard-sell techniques have been supplanted by a softer approach. Indeed, the soft-sell approach has become so popular, that nowadays even utilitarian products such as detergents and washing-powders are generally advertised through soft-sell campaigns. Washing-powders, for instance, direct their advertising campaigns to mothers and strongly suggest that if wives and mothers are successful, it is, at least in part, because they use that particular washing powder. This aspect has obviously become increasingly important as women tend to work more. Thus, campaigns relating to cleaning products, electric appliances and (frozen or other) foods, emphasise the fact that by using particular products, working women will not cease to play their traditional role and will be able to cook, clean and entertain their guests. This is also the 198
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fact, the advert can be understood as a representation of those elements we can broadly identify as culture. Thus, while not promoting pork meat directly, even an advert such as the one below, which aims at selling a particular brand of fridges,
would be considered unacceptable in certain countries, as you can detect some ham inside the fridge itself, and would therefore run the risk of having the advertised product rejected. Advertising, then, makes explicit not only the visible aspects of culture, but also the invisible ones, that is to say the value orientations which, in the iceberg model introduced above, are placed at the very bottom of the iceberg. Advertising, can thus only be understood as an expression – an intersemiotic translation – of a specific culture. As a consequence, any
general idea at the basis of many make-up accessories, which are directed mainly to those women who do not have enough time to wait around for their nail-varnish to dry. The different life-style which characterises women nowadays, is also at the basis of the fact that for example ‘man’ increasingly appears in advertisements relating to family/home life. The advertisements for washing-up liquids, for example suggest family harmony and a supportive partner who does the washing and takes care of the baby while mum is either working or simply taking a break; while washing-machines are sold by emphasising the fact that they are so simple to use that even a man could use it etc. 199
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translation project in this field should posit itself as a linguistic and cultural project. Already in 1972, Pierre Hurbin wonders whether it is actually possible to translate the language of advertising. Twenty years later, Claude Tattilon still considers whether the language of advertising requires a process of translation proper or whether it would be better to refer to a broader notion of adaptation. Since then, however, the situation has evolved even more, as the multicultural and multilinguistic societies we live in, have drastically changed the idea of cultural context. The general idea of globalisation, then, has necessarily changed the way advertisements are produced and translated. This, in spite of the fact that even the notion of what sociologists call Mcdonaldization – namely ‘the process according to which fast-food principles are controlling increasing sections of American and other societies’ (Katan, 1993, 1) – cannot be defined as a successful, globalising policy tout court. Indeed, because the same element might assume different meanings in different contexts, even McDonald’s was compelled to pursue, rather than a real globalising policy, the philosophy of what we could refer to as ‘Think Global, Act Local’. Thus, in spite of the fact that they maintain the famous slogan ‘I’m lovin it’ unchanged throughout the world, they tend to adapt to the cultural peculiarities of the various countries that host their branches9. This attention to the target culture and the issue of cultural differences clearly has important consequences on the advertising campaigns launched by various companies. An example might be provided by an advert for ‘red bull’ beer 9
For example, Talbott suggests that until 1995, what was born as the fastfood restaurant par excellance, namely McDonald’s, turned into what could be described as a slow-drink venue in Moscow, where customers could wait a very long time before receiving their meal and were allowed to stay on the premises for an equally long time, simply chatting in front of a cup of coffee. 200
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released in Italy a few years back, where the original advert was not only translated linguistically (‘red bull gives you wings’ was thus rendered as ‘red bull ti mette le ali’), but it was also adapted culturally to the target culture (as such, one of the adverts represented a young Italian boy who ‘flies’ away from a very stereotyped Italian mother who invokes, with a very strong accent from the South, ‘San Gennaro’). Far from being a simple commercial experience, then, advertising becomes an example of the strong connection between language and reality. Clearly enough, the economic and financial dimensions are fundamental but, as Bassnett (1991, 2829) and Séguinot (1995, 57-59) suggest, very few strategies of international marketing were successful simply by resorting to a linguistic translation of an advertising campaign. If this so, it is because selling the same advert in different countries, does not mean, simply, to sell the same reality with a different linguistic label. Perhaps the campaign will have to be re-oriented, the visual elements will have to be changed (a process which clearly has an important bearing on the translation cost of the text) and the selling points of the product might need to be changed, so as to respect the value orientations that characterise the attitude of the target culture towards notions such as tradition. For example, as Séguinot suggests, a campaign that focuses on youth such as this
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would have no meaning in countries where old age (and the marks it can leave on a person’s face) is identified with wisdom, as for example in China or India. Similarly, as Mona Baker puts forward in her discussion of a slimming product, such an advert would not appear particularly convincing in countries where thinness is not considered particularly attractive. In addition, in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the code governing advertising prohibits the exposition of a woman’s body in its entirity or part of the body different from her face, thereby rendering outlaw even an advert such as this:
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Obviously, these codes and laws depend on the historical moment, on the political situation and other factors, and it is fundamental for translators to know the legal system of the target country in depth, as this is clearly part of culture. For instance, while in Quebec it is compulsory for adverts to be bilingual, in France, Evin Act banned any advertisement which used languages other than French. As Mansfield well demonstrates in her ‘Fra comunicazione multilinguistica e funzione pragmatica nei cartelli stradali e nella pubblicità cartacea’ (2007), in Italy not only do many adverts introduce different languages in their body-copies and slogans, but entire adverts are left in English and occasionally provided with Italian subtitles, something which would have been considered completely unacceptable during the linguistic prohibitionism imposed by Fascism. If these factors relate to the commercial aspect of advertising (in that the translator’s over-sight of certain codes might compromise the success of the campaign), they obviously bring to the fore the strong connection existing between language and ideology. Indeed, advertising always posits itself as an attempt to create consensus and to influence, through its conative force, the receiver of the message. Thus, as with other elements of the text, translators can be either source or target oriented, either adhering to the ideology put forward in the original message or taking their distance from it. On the basis of Lefevere’s notion of grids discussed above, we can identify three types of company which adopt three different strategies as to the translation of their advertising campaigns.
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First of all, a company might tend towards centralisation, and by using in loco translators who reside in the country from which the advert stemmed, produce translations which are particularly source oriented (in fact, while being native speakers of the target language, the translators employed by this kind of ethnocentric companies are nonetheless distant from the target country both linguistically and culturally and generally intervene on the source text only moderately). On the contrary, the companies defined as policentric assume a de-centralising position, and by resorting to translators residing in the target country (who are therefore constantly in touch with the target market from an economic, linguistic and cultural perspective), try to adapt their campaigns to their target context as much as possible. Finally, we could have geocentric companies, which try and overcome geographical and cultural barriers by creating global and a-cultural adverts, characterised by a minimal use of verbal language. This synergy between company politics and the linguistic policy the company pursues (Eurocentric – centralising; polycentric – decentralising; geocentric – minimal use of language), therefore leads to the adoption of different translation strategies. Indeed, as mentioned before, the multilingualism of certain advertisements can be interpreted differently on the basis of the company launching the campaign and the purpose it had when it created plurilingual advert in the first place. In order to understand this phenomenon, it is however necessary to refer to some fundamental notions, such as diglossia, which we could define as the situation that characterises particular communities, within which two or more languages are used with differential functions which hardly ever overlap. Obviously enough, this notion does not coincide with the actual bilingualism that might characterise the members of a particular community, and it is precisely in order to clarify the correlation between bilingualism and diglossia that Fishamn (1967) submitted an analysis of the way these two elements might combine. According to him, we could therefore 204
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have situations where diglossia and bilingualism are simultaneously present; situations where diglossia is present without, however, an actual bilingualism; communities which, on the contrary, are characterised by bilingualism without however resorting to diglossia, and situations which are characterised by neither bilingualism nor diglossia. Bearing this in mid, it appears clear that in advertising, a whole series of endolinguistic and intralinguistic choices are at stake. This is for example exemplified by the fact that, according to Cadorna (1974), particular regional variants of the same language are exploited in order to convey a sense of truth and authenticity. Clearly, if this holds true in relation to the speeches of politicians (who sometimes exploit the communicative force of dialects so as to posit themselves as members of the community they are addressing, thereby gaining their trust), it appears valid also in relation to other forms of propaganda, such as, for instance, the adverts of food products. Indeed, as Cadorna maintains, ‘the information carried by particular phonetic features, is exploited for particular products such as food’ (197, 123). Not only this, but even in those adverts we could define as geocentric, the absence of verbal elements that could convey the sense of regionalism and authenticity is supplanted by the features we find in the visual, which, as in the adverts below, might evoke an undefined regional accent:
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The actant of the advert, easily identifiable as a hard-working farmer, therefore testifies to the freshness and the genuineness of the products he offers his potential consumers, just as in the advert below, the image of the farmer, together with the verbal elements of the headline and the body-copy, point to the naturalness of the product:
Thus, even though linguistic varieties such as geographical dialects – whether intra or international – as well as foreign words, might actually result incomprehensible to the target receiver, thereby rendering void the informative function of the advert itself, their highly emotive function enables them to evoke (if only at a subliminal level) precise (even though connotative), meanings. This is for instance the case with the advert below, where the Italian words ‘mamma mia’ (which should moreover result easily understandable by most people in more than one country), together with the visual, suggest the long (Italian) tradition which lies behind the product advertised:
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If this is so, it is clearly because each language, as discussed above, reflects the status and the culture associated with it. Each language, then, as Cook maintains in his The Language of Advertising (1992, 107), evokes particular values which, in a similar way to the stereotypes on which they are based, can change with time. Thus, Italian is the language of amore, but also of good food, whereas French is more easily associated with elegance and, as a consequence, seduction (which justifies the exploitation of this language in the adverts promoting perfumes, beauty products etc.), whereas English (both in its British and American varieties), is generally associated with nobility, youth and high-technology, which accounts for the fact that it is often used in adverts promoting high-tech equipment, products related to sports etc. Generally speaking, adverts that use English as their main or only language10, even when the advertisement is exported to other
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It is however important to bear in mind that also when the use of verbal language is minimal, the English language exploited is characterised by the same features it displays in longer adverts originally produced in English. 207
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countries (such as the famous Heineken slogan ‘sounds good’ or more recently, ‘are you still with us?’), are clearly addressed to a young target, who is more likely to know English enough to understand the slogan itself. Similarly, as Bassnett emphasises, the famous slogan ‘No Martini? No party’ or, recently, the ‘Nespresso, what else?’, exploited successfully in the campaigns interpreted by George Clooney, rely on a minimal use of English, which results immediately comprehensible to the Italian audience, identifying the potential consumers as young and fashionable people, just like the actants we see in the adverts themselves. In other situations, as with the advert below,
Cosmopolitan (UK, marzo 2006)
an advert can mainly work on the iconicity and the symbolism of the visual. In the advert above, for instance, the apple held by Amongst these, the imitation of orality is paramount, which implies: interpersonal involvement; more subjective less precise and more emotive language; immediacy; reliance on shared background; reliance on onomatopoeic expressions; reliance on sound symbolism; importance of intonation; importance of prosody and paralinguistic clues; redundancy. From a lexical point of view, we tend to note: more limited vocabulary; more monosyllabic words; paralinguistic features used to establish cohesion; less precise quantification. From a morphosyntactic point of view, we generally have: greater grammatical complexity; lower lexical density; frequent syntactic abnormalities; less careful sequencing; fragmentation; incomplete sentences; disjunctive grammar (non-finite clauses – where the subject is missing – and minor clauses – where there is no predicator). 208
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the young woman clearly refers to the city where the advertised perfume is produced – namely New York a.k.a. the big apple – and to the myth of Eve eating the apple, thereby evoking her sensuality. It is clear that such an advert, at least in Western societies, will not need any translation process in order to communicate its message (if anything it might posit ideological issues in terms of race and gender), in so far as the minimal use of verbal elements renders it comprehensible for the target receiver without posing any kind of linguistic problem. Yet, even though this culture of youth which, Kaynak (1989, 132-3) and Kelly-Holmes (1995, 73) amongst others put forward, should keep above national cultures, thereby positing itself as an example of the multicultural society hinted at above, where English could act as a lingua franca, it is obvious that even in this instance the cultural context determines the value a message can assume. Thus, an advert similar to the one above, might perhaps be tolerated in Saudi Arabia, as it simply shows the woman’s face, but the allusion to Eve could go lost in a Muslim culture (as connotation is, as discussed above, totally culture-bound) or, if it were understood, might very well lead to the refusal of the advertisement itself, as it suggests the relationship between the sexes. The Nike advert, however, symbolised by the famous slogan ‘Just do it’, which was exported all over the world, can pose problems at more than one level. Besides ideological and political concerns as to the allged neo-colonisation of American products, we also have to consider both linguistic and cultural issues. As an article which appeared in Business Week in 1992 well demonstrates, the Japanese manager in charge of the translation of the Nike campaign could not find a suitable semantic and syntactic alternative for the English slogan, characterised by an extreme but very effective conciseness. As a consequence, they decided to retain the source language slogan,
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thereby initiating the global spread of the by now legendary ‘Just do it’. Further to the linguistic aspect, though, the issue of translation also brought to the fore important (albeit invisible) cultural issues. As Katan maintains, in fact, in the world of business, Japan stands out for its long term orientation, which accounts for the fact that usually agreements are considered valid at least till the following generation and that sometimes businessmen plan a hundred years ahead. Finally, the adoption of a strategy of zero-translation might find a justification also in relation to the product itself. Indeed, scholars have repeatedly pointed out that for certain categories of products translation has negative effects on the success of the campaign as it seems to nullify the fundamental selling points at international level. As Guidère sustains, this is the case with sport articles, in so far as translation seems to render ordinary the product, almost obliterating the extraordinariness (very often testified by the level of excellence in sports characteristic of the testimonials) that connotes the product in the source language and culture, whose important achievements in sports are generally renowned. The fact that the choice as to whether maintaining an advert in the source language is connected to the product itself, could perhaps explain why the famous slogan of L’Oreal, while not posing great linguistic problems and presenting exactly the same visual and format in the various international campaigns, is translated into different languages.
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Cosmopolitan (UK, 2006)
Cosmopolitan (Italia, 2006)
However, on the basis of examples such as these, or even the Nike campaigns for women’s products, which contrary to those for men, are generally translated, it might perhaps appear justified to wonder whether the decision concerning the translation of a campaign has to do not only with the product itself but also with the target receiver in terms of gender, in so far as the corpus analysed (albeit limited), seemed to point to the fact that woman might perhaps be considered less educated in the English language when compared to her male counterpart. This sort of consideration obviously raises issues of political correctness and ideological stands, and brings to the fore the ethic sensitivity that translators working in this field, which can be defined as technical only with some difficulty, should develop. Indeed, although this aspect has been rarely approached, it is fundamental for translators to base themselves not only on pragmatic considerations but also on ethical ones. This is appears pivotal in a field, such as that of advertising, where ideological issues are ever present and heavily influence the way potential buyers learn to know ‘Other’ realities. For instance, as scholars have repeatedly pointed out, adverts representing women, as those from the Fifties below – whose slogan reads ‘you couldn’t chose a better way to be free’ – and perhaps
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even more so in recent times, have always put forth an image of woman that could be defined, at best, politically incorrect:
Similarly, advertisements such as that for Peugeot briefly referred to in Chapter 2, often offer a stereotyped image of Other cultures, thus perpetuating the prejudices generally attached to any country which, in the dialectics ‘Us’ vs ‘Them’, is identified as the ‘Other’.These are obviously very general and simple examples, but make it clear that any advertisement – and consequenctly any translation – addresses ethical issues. Far from being simply a commercial experience, advertising therefore becomes a clear exemplification of the strong bond existing between language and ideology. As we have put forward in the previous Chapter, language is never innocent, but is always used to sell something, be it an opinion, a product, a person’s feeling, a view of life or a perspective of the world. In his re-elaboration of Marxist theories, the structuralist French scholar Louis Althusser used the expression ‘ideological state apparatus’ to describe, precisely, social institutions such as the media, which represent capitalism as normal and inevitable. The world of the media, thus, is seen as producing a commonsense
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which, according to Althusser, really corresponds to an ideological tenet. As we have seen in the first chapter, it would be up to another structuralist, Roland Barthes, to further elaborate on the issue of ideology. Starting from the premise that ideologies work through symbolic codes which explain and represent social, cultural and political reality, Barthes classified these symbolic representations as mythic, defining them not simply as false, but as deceiving, in that they make readers (understood here in structuralist/poststructuralist terms) take a particular representation as natural. Mythic symbols, then, according to Barthes et al. become essential in shaping a culture’s self-identity, and finish to represent what are seen as eternal and immutable truths. Thus, culture, according to Barthes, is created through the many codes man is faced with every day, including the language of myth which we find, albeit re-elaborated, in everyday language, including the language of advertising. It is not by chance, then, that advertising should be seen as such a complex phenomenon. Indeed, as O’ Donnel and Todd emphasise in their Variety in Contemporary English, ‘advertising [...] involves two interacting processes, namely, communication and persuasion’ (1991, 101). If advertising is such a complex phenomenon, however, it is mainly because in order to achieve its goal (i.e. communicate and persuade), it makes use not only of language but also many other visual and/or audio elements, according to the channel used. Thus, ‘Language is only one strand in the communication network and [...] under the guise of straightforward simplicity, advertisements are usually subtle and carefully constructed’ (ibid.) As we have seen above, in fact, each advert presents a close interrelation of verbal and non-verbal elements, which are laidout according to different formats and techniques. Further to the general techniques of hard sell and soft sell introduced supra, 213
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advertising can exploit different formats. For instance, we can talk about a product-information format, when the product is the centre of the focus and its virtues are pointed out and explained; a product-image format, when the product is associated with certain images that we may not readily attribute to it; a personalised format, thanks to which a direct relationship is established between the product and human personality, and the product itself is represented as an intimate partner for the person who participates in the advert; and a lifestyle format, thanks to which the product is associated with a particular lifestyle (this type of advert is very popular with soft drinks, cars, mobile phones and luxury items in general). When analysing the language of advertising, we can also identify different techniques which are exploited in order to achieve the best result in the campaign of a product. As the authors of Introducing Media Studies suggest (2000, 110-111), we could thus talk about the ‘weasel words’ technique, which uses empty but colourful words in order to create adverts that can be easily memorised (a typical example is the advert for OMO, which apparently washes ‘wither than withe’ or, in Italian, ‘più bianco del bianco’); the endorsement technique, where a celebrity tells us how wonderful the product is; the statistical technique, which claims to provide statistical proof of the product qualities; the expert technique, which exploits the appeal that a figure presented as an expert might exercise (a typical example of this technique might be the ‘Uomo del Monte’ advertisements in Italy or many of the adverts promoting baby products); the mystery ingredient technique, which suggests some new discovery has been made (typical of this technique are expressions such as ‘new formula’, ‘più efficace perché arricchito con...’); the compliment the user technique, which flatters consumers making them feel they have every right to use the product (an example of this is, of course, the famous L’Oréal advert ‘Because you’re worth it’, translated in Italian 214
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‘perché voi valete’); the nostalgia technique, which emphasises consumers’ ‘I remember that’ feeling (exploited for instance in the advertisements for Nutella or products which have been on the market for a long time)11. From what we have just seen, it appears clear that advertisements often appeal to consumers’ basic instincts and psychological universals such as envy, fear and greed and therefore exploit what we call Emotional Selling Preposition, that is to say a strategic decision according to which consumers are not persuaded through an explanation of the advantages of the product in practical terms, but by acting on their feelings and their emotions. In order to do this, adverts exploits both verbal and non-verbal elements, creating a strong connection between the visual and the verbal parts of the advert itself, in an attempt to offer the potential buyer a solution to what is identified as a problem (real or imagined) 12. Thus, according to Volli (1994, 251), in an advert we can generally identify a series of non-verbal elements – the visual (that 11
Clearly enough, adverts often combine not only different functions (mainly informative/referential, conative and poetic), but also more than one technique, using for example a famous person to flatter the consumer as in the L’Oreal advertisements. 12 The problem-solution model is actually the main model on which adverts rely, according to which a problem is identified and a solution offered through the purchase of the product itself. Within this general model, we can then identify the actantial model which, on the basis of Greimas’s theory introduced in the first chapter of this book, analyses the different roles played by the various elements in an advert. In this instance, the potential buyer usually plays the role of the subject, the product itself that of the helper and all those things the product is supposed to offer a solution for, that of the opponent. We can also talk about a before-and-after model, which is often created through the use of particular patterns of colour. As David Liu and Lisa Westmoreland have noticed, in fact, the contrast between darker and brighter tonalities can help consumers to identify the advantages of a particular product almost instinctively. 215
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is the main image/picture, which consists of a setting, props and persons)13; the packshot (namely the image of product itself); and the format (understood here in general terms as the layout of the advertisment, which could be, for example, simple, that is to say that the advert essentially contains useful information, or compound, which means that the advert contains useful 13
The setting can be either interior or exterior, and in both instances, it can be familiar and real; nostalgic and/or imaginary; fantastic or exotic and highly improbable. Within the setting, the props can be functional (when the object is part of the scene); functional and metaphorical (when the object is part of the scene but also has other meanings); or metaphorical (when the object simply creates a particular association and suggests further meanings). Further to various kinds of objects, in an advert we can also have human beings that, in an analogous fashion to props, are carefully placed within a particular setting. The distance (shot) at which human beings are depicted in an advert appears particularly important (for example we can have a close shot – when we are shown the face, the head and occasionally the shoulders of a person – a medium close shot – when we see the person from the waist up – a medium shot – which means that we see the person from the head to the knees – a medium long shot, when we can see the entire figure – a long shot – when we can see the entire body of the person and what surrounds him/her – and a very long shot, when three or four people are presented in the same setting). In a similar way, the distance which characterises the product appears particularly important and can be changed in order to put more or less emphasis on specific elements. As to product distance, we can thus talk about close distance (when the object is portrayed as if readers were directly involved in the activities connected to a particular product. In this instance, the image wants to create an intimate and interactive relationship between the receiver and the object itself); middle distance (when the object is shown in its entirety and with no space around it, which suggests a personal relationship); long distance (in this case the object is shown at a distance and no interaction is possible, which explains why this distance is usually exploited for luxury items). In addition, in the depiction of objects, we could adopt different techniques such as close-ups (if the object is shown in detail); blow-ups (when a detail is enlarged); cropping (which corresponds to a technique of fragmentation); focus and depth of vision (which means that some objects appear clearly in the foreground, while others are placed in the background). 216
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information but also relies on images14 – and a series of verbal elements such as the headline; the body-copy (namely the main part of the advertising message, which is often divided into various sections under subheads); the slogan/baseline/pay-off (that is the conclusive sentence); standing details (for example cut-out coupons and utilitarian information sections, often presented in small print, which for example explain how the potential buyer can obtain further information); the logo (that is the name of the firm/manufacturer); and the trademark (that is the symbol of the firm)15. 14
Clearly, one of the most important features of the visual is colour. According to Sells and Gonzaleg, in fact, colours bear particular symbolic meanings, and consequently are able to stimulate particular feelings and suggest specific associations. For example, blue represents freshness (as in the adverts of mineral waters and/or products intended to cleanse the skin etc.); red is generally associated with dynamism, energy and, in some instances, love; yellow (and to some extent orange and brown) is the colour of light and vitality, and is therefore associated with Summer, a healthy life-style and suntanned skins; green is the colour of Spring and nature, and is therefore associated with a sense of freshness, vitality, and a life close to nature; pink is stereotypically associated with woman, and is therefore used in the adverts for many products typically addressed to a female audience; whereas black is the colour of sophistication and seduction. Generally speaking, lively colours can help highlight a product and make it stand out from a darker background. 15 Clearly, each component has a different function. For example, the visual and the headline – which might relate to each other in terms of repetition (both elements explain each other), completion (one element develops and integrates what is said by the other), or opposition (in this instance the headline and the visual clearly establish a relation of contradiction) – are meant to draw readers’ attention, giving them something unexpected, interesting and pleasing. In addition, they summarise in some way the content of the whole message and stimulate the process of memorisation. The body-copy explains and develops what is presented in the headline and the visual, in the attempt to be credible and convincing. The packshot, the logo, the trademark and the payoff all ‘put a signature’ to the advert, whereas the standing details try and solicit a response on the part of the potential buyer. 217
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Amongst the general characteristics of the verbal elements of an advertisement, as identified by Leech in English in Advertising (1966) and O’ Donnel and Todd in Variety in Contemporary English (1992, 101-114), we can identify a series of grammatical and lexical features which are quite typical. For example, within the first category, we can mention: disjunctive and abbreviated grammar, namely non-finite clauses and minor clauses; short sentences (‘Think once. Think twice, Think bike’); paratactic structures (‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’); no passive; use of second person personal and possessive pronouns; no negative forms (when they occur they usually emphasise the special merits of a product, as with ‘Nothing acts faster than Anadin’); present tense (mainly used to imply universal timelessness, as in ‘Mr Kipling makes exceedingly good cakes’); no past tense. When it occurs, it is generally to stress the long tradition associated with the product (‘we’ve taken our whisky in many ways, but always seriously’), to emphasise the reliability of the product (‘We’ve solved a longstanding problem’) and to make an appeal to authority (‘Seven out of ten children preferred these beans to the ones you probably give them’); imperative constructions (‘Go well. Go Shell’); interrogative constructions (‘Difficult morning?’); when/if/because clauses (‘When you feel low’; ‘because you are worth it’). As to the lexical features that characterise the language of advertising, we can mention: simplicity and colloquial features; comparatively few verbs (be, make, get, take, try, have, need, use, buy); small set of evaluative adjectives (fresh, right, natural, great, big, bright, soft, improved); occasional use of comparatives and superlatives (because of the British Code of Advertising Practice, however, these comparatives are not generally referred to particular products produced by other firms, but are occasionally used to refer to previous versions of the same product); reliance on iconicity which, as Cook underlines in his The Discourse of Advertising (1992, 78-88) might be by letter shape, might rely on mixed icons and arbitrary signs; 218
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might be expressed through verbal icons or might rely on indexical graphology, as in the advert below:
From a lexical point of view, advertisements are in addition characterised by: creative writing and unorthodox use of language, as for instance: alteration of spellings (‘Beanz meanz Heinz’); neologisms (‘Cookability – that’s the wonder of gas’); shift from one class to another (‘I’m Hemeling’); blending of words (‘There’s no Camparison’; ‘Schweppervescence’; ‘Be Cointrauversial’); play on polysemy (‘Ask for More’; ‘If you have the talent, we have a theatre’); puns (‘Better late than the late’); alteration of a wellknown phrase (‘Say it with flour’); orthographic modifications (‘NE14ADD’?); intertextual references (‘We take no pride in Prejudice’); figurative use of language; use of rhyme, alliteration, syntactic parallelism; condensation of meaning achieved through nominal groups16; large use of cohesive devices (repetition of words or patterns of words; synonyms; semantically related words).
16
A nominal group can be defined as a group of words which functions as though it were a noun. The actual noun of the group is called head, whereas the items preceding the head are called pre-modifiers, and the items after it post-modifiers. In these positions, we can find entire clauses and compounds (embedded noun-groups, as with ‘high fashion knitwear’, ‘the all purpose garden fertiliser’), embedded adjective groups (‘an easy-to-paint 219
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Clearly, these grammatical and lexical features of English in advertising cannot be transposed word by word in Italian. Although the language of advertising, in Italy, appears to be determined by very similar linguistic features, the syntactical differences render the job of translators specialised in this particular field very challenging17. picture’); embedded adverb groups (‘their up-to-date styling’); embedded infinitive clauses (‘the new push-button weed killer). 17 Indeed, we could say that because of the prominence of what Jakobson would call poetic function, rather often the translation of the language of advertising resorts to the same strategies exploited in the translation of poetry. As far as this specific literary genre is concerned, one of the fundamental texts of reference is Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint (1975), where Lefevre describes seven types of translation based on different methodologies, identifying: phonemic translation (according to which the translator tries to reproduce the sounds of the source language in the target language. As a consequence, this approach becomes particularly useful in the translation of onomatopoeia); literal translation (which coincides with word-for-word translation and, as a consequence, often distorts the meaning of the source text); metrical translation (in this instance the translator tries to reproduce the metre originally used in the source text. In a similar way to literal translation, metrical translation can distort the overall sense of the source text); poetry into prose (which implies a distortion of the sense, the communicative value and the syntax of the source language); rhymed translation (which, although might become useful in particular circumstances, as for instance in the translation of puns, as Lefevere emphasises it might also produce a caricature of the original poem); blank verse translation (in this case as well, Lefevere underlines the restrictions imposed on the translator by the choice of structure, while noticing the greater accuracy which could be achieved by resorting to this strategy); interpretation (Lefevere identifies here ‘versions’ of a poem – where the form of the source text is changed in order to convey the same content – and what he calls ‘imitations’, an expression which refers to the translator’s production of a poem of his/her own which has only title and point of departure, if those, in common with the source text). Lefevere’s study, then, emphasises the fact that the deficiencies typical of the approaches to the translation of poetry he describes, are determined by the fact that translators 220
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Because of the similarities existing between the language of advertising and the language of newspapers, especially the language used in headlines, translators dealing with this particular textual type18 ought to consider the strategies adopted very carefully. have focused on one (or more) elements of the poem to the detriment of the whole. We can therefore see how the structuralist notion of system is here fundamental and accounts for Scholes’s emphasis on the notion of system (at the basis of the polystystemic theory elaborated on more recently) also in the study of literature, in that: ‘Every literary unit from the individual sentence to the whole order of words can be seen in relation to the concept of system. In particular, we can look at individual works, literary genres, and the whole of literature as related systems, and at literature as a system within the larger system of human culture’ (1974, 10). In the words Bassnett uses, then, ‘The failure of many translators to understand that a literary text is made up of a complex set of systems existing in a dialectical relationship with other sets outside its boundaries has often led them to focus on particular aspects of a text at the expense of others. Studying the average reader, Lotman determines four essential positions of the addressee: 1) Where the reader focuses on the content as matter, i.e. picks out the prose argument or poetic paraphrase; 2) Where the reader grasps the complexity of the structure of a work and the way in which the various levels interact; 3) Where the reader deliberately extrapolates one level of the work for a specific purpose; 4) Where the reader discovers elements not basic to the genesis of the text and uses the text for his own purposes. Clearly, for the purposes of translation, position (1) would be completely inadequate (although many translators of novels in particular have focused on content at the expense of the formal structuring of the text), position (2) would seem an ideal starting point, whilst positions (3) and (4) might be tenable in certain circumstances. The translator is, after all, first a reader and then a writer and in the process of reading he or she must take a position.’ (1991, 77 – 78). 18 In a similar fashion to advertising texts, journalistic texts can be defined as a particular textual type only if we broaden the definitions of ‘genre’ and ‘specialised text’ discussed in the previous chapter. Indeed, what characterises the language of newspapers (and, albeit differently, advertising), is the fact that here is no specific field, as these texts move across different areas according to the issue dealt with in specific articles or the product advertised in a particular advertisement (from medical treatments and beauty products to technological items etc.). Consequently, the language adopted can borrow 221
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When confronted with a particular headline, then, the translator of journalistic texts will have to face similar problems to those faced by the translator of advertisements, in particular problems related to the use of double meanings and polysemy, puns and idiomatic expressions; problems of alliteration and rhyme; as well as difficulties connected to a different word order and the use of very dense noun groups. In an analogous fashion, the language of politics – which shares with the textual types analysed supra the importance given to the visual and which bears many resemblances with the language of advertising in general (as they both belong to what we could broadly refer to as the language of propaganda) – also calls for an attentive analysis of the implications of particular translation strategies. Indeed, political speeches, slogans, posters and manifestos often rely on the same strategies adopted by headlines and advertising. If this is so, it is because, according to Beard, Although political campaigns, with their speeches, their written texts and their broadcasts, need to inform and instruct voters about issues that are considered of great importance, ultimately all the written and spoken texts that are produced during an election campaign are designed to persuade people to do one thing: to vote in a certain way19.
Thus, language is a vital part of this process of selling and it is not by chance that political language exploits linguistic and rhetorical
heavily from different micro-languages, such as the language of economics, legal language or the language of science. 19 This persuasive purpose can be carried out in many different ways. Broadly speaking, we can identify two macro categories of political campaigns, namely: negative campaigning (where candidates attack their opponents) and positive campaigning (where candidates, usually not yet in power, sell themselves as a brand new product and highlight the better qualities of this product in comparison to the old product that is currently being used). 222
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devices similar to those adopted by the language of advertising20. Indeed, these features characterise political speeches, manifestos and slogans, as they are devised to sell products and institutions, making their appearance on posters, party broadcasts and wherever the parties are advertising themselves. For example, one of the most common means of eliciting approval is the use of a list of three, which might express itself either as a straightforward repetition, as with the following chants against Margaret Thatcher (‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – Out, Out, Out’) or Blair’s speech (‘Education, Education, Education’); or a repetition with a difference, as with Lincoln’s words ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’, or the slogan adopted by the Labour Party, then the leading opposition party, during the British election of 1997 (‘New Labour; New hope; New Life for Britain’). The list of three might also resort to different words altogether, as with Mandela’s ‘Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans. I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all’. Another common feature of political speech is the contrastive pair, which can be best observed in the speech delivered for example by Thatcher, who quotes St Francis of Assisi, stating: Where there is discord, may we bring harmony Where there is error, may we bring truth Where there is doubt, may we bring faith Where there is despair, may we bring hope.
The language of politics, then, just like the language of newspaper headlines, shares many features with the language of advertising, both form a linguistic and an ideological point of view. From a general linguistic perspective, in fact, all these languages, albeit 20
By rhetoric I mean here ‘the art of persuasive discourse’ (Cockroft and Cockcroft, 2005). Amongst the various devices exploited by politicians, it is also worth mentioning the ‘claptrap’, namely a trick or a device of language designed to catch applause. 223
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written, borrow many of the characteristics of spoken language in order to create a sense of intimacy with the addressee, thereby gaining the trust of the potential ‘buyers’. 3.3.Features of Spoken Language and Written Language Indeed, as Lombardo underlines in her essay ‘Advertising as Motivated Discourse’ (1999), linguistic features of adverts such as the use of non-finite and minor clauses, the use of the present tense and the active voice, the use of generic words, often monosyllabic words of German origin, and a large use of lexical cohesive devices can be put in relation to characteristics such as extensive use of generic terms, repetition, use of monosyllabic, generic verbs that Halliday indicates, amongst others, as typical of spoken language. When analysing any kind of discourse, in fact, it is fundamental to bear in mind the differences between written and spoken language, in so far as even though the vocabulary might be the same, the grammar is very different and fundamentally leads to a different representation of the world. It appears rather evident that the function and the mode of the language used in a particular linguistic exchange are closely related, in so far as different texts (either written or spoken) generally perform one particular function. For instance, we can say that ideational (referential function) texts are more likely to be written, that even though the textual function plays an important role in spoken language, usually it characterises written texts, especially in terms of cohesion and coherence, and that even though there are obviously many exceptions (as for example with propagandistic texts), interpersonal texts (that is to say emotive or conative), are likely to be spoken. Once again, it therefore appears evident that in modern language studies, scholars identify a close connection between functions, mode of language and texts. In order to better understand these connections, it might actually be useful to refer to Halliday’s 224
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theorisation of the different reasons for writing and reading, which he distinguishes from speaking. Halliday distinguishes in fact three main purposes for writing and reading: primarily for action and social contact, primarily for information and primarily for entertainment. As to the first sub-category (that is writing used primarily for action), we might mention public signs (on roads and stations, for example), product labels on food, recipes, maps, television and radio guides, bills, menus, telephone directories and instruction manuals. Amongst the many examples of the second sub-category (namely language used for social contact), we could mention personal correspondence, letters etc. As far as the second category identified by Halliday is concerned, that is writing primarily for information, we can refer to newspapers, magazines, non-fictional books, textbooks, public notices, scholastic and medical reports, guidebooks, travel literature and, at least in part, advertisements and political pamphlets. Finally, as to writing/reading used primarily for entertainment, we could obviously refer to light magazines, comic strips, fiction books, film subtitles etc. As it usually happens with any attempt at classification, however, it is clearly fundamental to remember that these are not clear-cut categories. Indeed, what characterises most studies carried out recently is, as we mentioned in the first chapter, the refusal of strict rules and categories. In fact, also in language studies, we are by now confronted with general trends, namely principles which do not prescribe, but describe the use of language. In general terms, as Halliday notes, writing reduces language to something that exists rather than happens, hence his definition of writing as a product as opposed to speech, which is identified as a process. This fundamental distinction clearly has important consequences in terms of the type of representation of the world which spoken language and written language can achieve, and the lexico-grammatical features involved in this representation. For
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instance, written language offers a synoptic and static representation of the world, whereas spoken language offers a dynamic one. This fundamental distinction clearly finds a counterpart in the grammatical differences between written and spoken language, in that if to refer to objects we use nouns (which explains the lexical density of written language), in order to refer to happenings we use whole clauses (which accounts for the grammatical intricacy of spoken language). This clearly accounts for the fact that written language favours nominal groups, whereas spoken language favours clauses. Indeed, clause complexes show that (and how) items hang together in meaningful ways. Thus, in spoken language, grammatical intricacy takes the place of lexical density, which on the contrary characterised written language which, as a consequence, although difficult from the point of view of the argument, is generally grammatically simple. Although the differences outlined above can be considered the most important distinctions between spoken and written language, as highlighted, essentially, by Halliday, we can identify other differences at what we could perhaps refer to as ‘micro’ level of language. 3.3.1. The Notion of Spoken Grammar As McCarthy points out in his Spoken Language and Applied Linguistics, there are other differences between written and spoken language from a grammatical point of view. One of these is related to the fact that spoken language is likely to be more context-bound than written language and, as a consequence, uses particular types of ellipsis: subject pronouns, auxiliary verbs, articles, initial elements of fixed expressions etc., tend to be omitted. Considering the importance interpersonal factors assume in conversation, and the fact that spoken language is produced, generally speaking, for a here-and-now listener and, as Chafe (1982) observes, is therefore context-bound and situation-dependent, we can say that in spoken language it is discourse that drives grammar. 226
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Another important difference is, for example, the way speech is reported in spoken and written language, where it usually takes the –ing form. According to McCarthy, speech is often reported indirectly in casual conversation either as a topic-opener or simply in support of some point being discussed. This, in part, can account for the fact that grammatical patterns in the spoken mode can be created by more than one participant and extend not only across clauses but also across turn-boundaries. Indeed, a grammar-in-discourse approach sees structure as a collaborative/negotiative process, rather than a deterministic product, and it is therefore clear that within the relevant factors of a description it includes features such as turn-taking, repetition and joint constructions by more than one party. This is the reason why, according to McCarthy, grammar becomes discourse and, in so doing, it suggests an alternative descriptive model, other than the conventional sentence-based description, which takes into account units of information and interpersonal consideration generated within real contexts. Discourse, obviously, involves speakers and listeners, not just messages, and it is therefore essential to take them into consideration in any analysis of spoken language. All this clearly has a bearing on the way we can approach the analysis of lexis and vocabulary in spoken language. Conversation, in fact, contains a large amount of vocabulary whose function is mainly relational or interactional and not simply transactional. In addition, in conversation, roles between speakers can vary, and, as Thomson (1984) emphasises, one speaker can therefore dominate vocabulary selection; similarly, roles can shifts as the conversation progresses, with subsequent adjustments in the selection of vocabulary, and even the changes occurring in topic selection determine changes in vocabulary choice. If the way lexis is organised in written texts has been the focus of various researches, most notably the work by Halliday and Hasan on cohesion, less work seems to have been done with reference to spoken language. Yet, as McCarthy and Carter (1994) emphasise, 227
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lexical reiteration and relexicalisation – according to which content is recast in different but near-synonymous words – are important factors, especially when participants try to agree on a topic. Similarly, lexical repetition – which was studied for example by Persson (1974), Tannen (1989) and Bublitz (1989) – assumes a fundamental importance, especially with reference to the participants themselves and their attitudes, although it is not always pragmatically appropriate in that it often suggests a non-increment to the topical progression of the discourse. Other lexical characteristics peculiar to spoken language seem to point to the use of vague and rather general words (for example ‘thing’, ‘stuff’ etc.), the exploitation of fixed and ready-made expressions (including phrasal verbs) and idioms. In particular, idioms seem to have attracted a great deal of attention, and were for example studied by Strassler (1982), who maintains they are used mainly when a speaker is saying something about a third person or another object/non-human entity, rather than the speaker him/herself or his/her listeners, an aspect which he explains as relating to the evaluative functions of idioms and the risks to face they seems to pose. The same issue was also studied by Labov, who equally underlines the ‘evaluative’ function of idioms and maintains that they occur at important junctures in everyday stories where tellers and listeners evaluate the events of the narrative. As with other lexical choices, however, idiom selection is shared among the participants and, as such, adds to the interactive nature of the communicative exchange. The fact that also the language of advertising, the language of newspaper headlines and the language of politics should often exploit the communicative force of idiomatic expressions does not therefore come as a surprise. Indeed, it is precisely this kind of considerations that led to the notion that spoken language is not just a ‘messier’ version of written
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language but is used to do different things21. This, basically, is the fundamental notion elaborated on by Halliday in his Spoken and Written Language (1985), where the emphasis is on the fact that the formlessness of spoken language is a myth, in that spoken language is highly structured, even though in rather different ways from written language. This is the reason why it is possible to talk about a spoken grammar, something which does not come as a surprise if we consider that, as Halliday notes, language is a tristratal system in which the semantic level interacts with the lexico-grammatical and the phonological/graphological level (in spoken and written language respectively). Thus, the phonological part is of fundamental importance. And so is, in terms of spoken language, intonation, prosody, paralinguistic, indexical and kinesic features, that become part of the meaning speakers want to convey. Actually, as we have seen above, the development of various studies has largely demonstrated that intonation – further to the attitudinal role identified by O’ Connor and Arnold (1961) and the affective meaning described by Brazil – can be said to have a grammatical function. Thus, although in written language punctuation and typographical devices exploited by authors seems at times able to express some of the prosodic and paralinguistic features of the language used, it is obvious that these features, as well as the kinesic features (non-verbal behaviours which in a text can only be described), cannot be included in written language, which therefore posits itself as fundamentally different.
21
According to Halliday, the preponderant interest in written language, when compared to spoken language, can be explained in terms of the common conception of written language as a site of power (as it is used to write laws etc.). Yet, already in the early Fifties, Firth emphasised the necessity to study spoken language. More recently, especially with the development of pragmatics and discourse analysis in general, researchers have tried to redress the balance, with the result that a plethora of articles and books have been published on the subject. 229
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Thus, according to Crystal (1996), the main differences between spoken and written language could be systematised as such: SPOKEN LANGUAGE
WRITTEN LANGUAGE
SPEECH IS A PROCESS Speech is time-bound, VS dynamic, transient. It is WRITING IS A part of an interaction in PRODUCT which both participants are usually present.
Writing is spacebound, static, permanent. It is the result of a situation in which the writer is usually distant from the reader and often does not know who the reader is.
There is an opportunity to re-think an utterance while it is in progress (starting again, adding a qualification). However, errors, once spoken, cannot be withdrawn.
Errors and other perceived inadequacies can be eliminated in later drafts without the reader ever knowing they were there. Interruptions, if they have occurred while writing, are also invisible in the final product.
SPEECH IS CONTEXT- Because participants BOUND are typically in face-toVS face interaction, they WRITING IS NOT can rely on such cues CONTEXT-BOUND as facial expression and gesture to aid meaning (feedback).
Lack of visual contact means that particiants cannot rely on context to make their meaning clear; nor is there any immediate feedback.
The lexicon of speech Because writing cannot is often characte- be context-bound, ristically vague, using most writing avoids the
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words which refer di- use of deictic expresrectly to the situation sions, which are likely (deictic expressions). to be ambiguous. The spontaneity and speed of most speech exchanges make it difficult to engage in complex advance planning.
Writing allows repeated reading and close analysis and promotes the development of careful organisation.
Lengthy coordinate sentences often of great complexity are characteristic of (especially informal) speech.
Multiple instances of subordination in the same sentence and elaborately balanced syntactical patterns are characteristic of writing.
SPEECH MAINLY HAS Speech is good at AN INTERPERSONAL establishing or mainFUNCTION taining personal and VS social relationships WRITING MAINLY and at expressing HAS AN IDEATIONAL personal opinions and FUNCTION attitudes.
Writing is very suited to the recording of facts and the communication of ideas and to tasks of memory and learning.
Clearly enough, as Crystal himself emphasises, several of these differences are trends rather than absolute distinctions, and many borderline cases can be identified. This is for instance the case with a spoken lecture, which does not share many of the features indicated as characteristic of speech, or written texts such as personal letters or, as we have seen, adverts. It is therefore obvious that, when translating a written advert or a political speech, we should be aware of the (linguistic and other) features that characterise both source and target language in both its written and spoken form.
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Thus, as Guidère suggests, translators working for example in the field of advertising and propaganda in general, are obviously called to answer to the logics of economics, but cannot reduce all their work to that sphere. Indeed, economics should not dictate what is relevant from a linguistic and cultural perspective, and it is precisely up to translators to take a precise stand on these fundamental issues. The fact that translators are involved not simply in a mechanical transposition of a text from one language to another, but act as mediators between one culture and another, is by now accepted in all fields, from literary to commercial translation, where translators have to get involved on a linguistic and a cultural level, in order to eliminate the problems that might raise because of linguistic and cultural differences. In more technical-scientific fields, however, translators’ intervention has often been considered superfluous, and it is precisely for this reason that the translation of advertisements, contrary to what many scholars have maintained, cannot be pigeonholed into a general category of ‘technical translation’. As Lombardo well demonstrates (1999), the linguistic difficulties typical of advertising texts, often turn them in almost literary and poetic texts, which clearly call for specific translation strategies. For instance, the informative function often requires a specific technicalscientific knowledge; the cultural difficulties discussed above often force translators to work within the field of sociology and sociolinguistics; if the campaign needs a change of the visual components in order to be exported successfully, translators will need to act also at the level of graphics and typographic layout. Very often it is up to translators to make sure that the advertisement is inserted within an adequate intertextual context (in order to avoid, for example, that the advert for a restaurant might appear on a page that also reproduces a social advertisement for Biafra children). Similarly, it is the translator him/herself who has to check aspects such as the length of the target text, so that a string of words does not appear cut in half when it is printed on the label of the product. 232
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All these aspects of which translators are now in charge, then, turn them into the responsible parties not only for the legality/illegality of a campaign, but also for its success/failure at marketing level. Translators thus become, in advertising as well as other fields, essential factors of the economic chain, and as such they should be increasingly involved in the creative process of international campaigns. Rather than considering, as for instance Adab does, translators as the pivots of globalisation (on the account of their creation of a sort of under-culture which aims at deleting intercultural differences), I think it would be perhaps more accurate to consider them promoters of that sort of ‘local globalisation’ mentioned above. Translators can actually become ethically responsible for those local tendencies which, despite the attempted globalisation of our world, keep existing, thereby assuming on themselves responsibility not only for particular products and their exportation, but, more fundamentally, for the very culture of a particular country. Cultural contexting, then (a term coined by Hall in 1976; Hall 1989, 85-128), becomes fundamental, and it is up to translators to mediate and help interlocutors from a low context culture (namely a culture where information is given in detail and where people tend to pack as much information as possible in a small space) to retrieve what the partner from a high context culture (that is a culture where speakers are thought to share a certain context, and therefore many details do not need to be stated explicitly) might leave unexpressed, assuming the information should be shared’ knowledge or retrievable from the context. This might be the case, for example, with advertisements produced in different countries, where the price can either be indicated or omitted. For instance, until a few years ago, in countries such as Egypt, it was unacceptable to express the price of a product in an advertisement even though, as Said Faiq maintains, even in such countries it is nowadays possible to express the price of a product without any form of official or unofficial censorship. 233
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However, the expression of price remains a fundamental difference even when we are considering countries from Europe. Indeed, until a few years ago, a contrastive analysis between property adverts produced in the United Kingdom and Italy would bring to the fore the difference in the approach property agencies had as far as the expression of price was concerned. Actually, whereas the price of a property was regularly expressed in British property advertisements, the same was not true for adverts produced in Italy, quite independently from the advert model adopted22. Today, although advertisements generally state the price of the property, it is still quite common to be confronted with sentences such as ‘prezzo interessante’, ‘Informazioni presso ufficio’ or ‘Info telefoniche’, that is pressure techniques that encourage potential buyers to contact the agency.
22
Each model is characterised by peculiar features as to the language used and the general layout of the advertisement itself. For example, the basic advert – which is generally used by private owners or agencies with tight budgets – consists of a brief description of the property, an indication of the area, a contact number and, sometimes the name of the agency and the price (no picture of the property is however provided). What is generally referred to as the traditional advert – generally used by agencies – on the contrary provides an image (usually in the superior part of the advert), a brief description of the property; an indication of the location, the price, the name and number of the agency (usually in bold). The descriptive advert, which corresponds to the property profile we find in specialised magazines, is generally characterised by a larger picture (placed either on top or on the side of the advert), and a longer text, which is divided in different paragraphs and where no abbreviations and no disjunctive language are used. Finally, we can have a standard advert, which is very similar to the commercial adverts analysed above and whose main function is to attract readers’ attention. This advert is generally bigger and presents more detailed pictures and descriptions. A typical feature of this advertisement is the presence of a headline (which usually summarises the advantages of the property on sale, as with ‘Now you really can have it all’ or ‘La serenità di vivere in campagna’) and the presence of human beings in the pictures it presents, clearly exploited so as to suggest harmony, family life etc. 234
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These differences, that might appear rather banal and simply ‘marketig’ biased, are in fact closely connected to fundamental cultural differences. In fact, it is typical of low context cultures, to incorporate, in a small space, as much information as possible (amongst which we have the price of the property and the size of the various rooms), which can only lead to an extended use of abbreviations23: 45.000 – HOUSE
3
BED
3 bedroom house A 3 bedroom end of terrace property in need of total renovation. accommodation comprises kitchen, bathroom and lounge to ground floor, cellar area to lower level and 3 bedrooms and bathroom to first floor. There is double glazing, a large garden with garage to rear and driveway parking to the front. Conveniently situated for access to M4. Cash offers invited Room Dimensions Entrance Hall Lounge 23’5 X 11’5 23
If Italian abbreviations are fairly comprehensible (as with ‘V.ze stazione’; ‘Camera matrim.’; ‘App.to al 1° piano composto da ingr., ampia cucina abit.’), English abbreviations can change greatly. Indeed, they can be fairly comprehensible (as with ‘3 bdrm mid terr’; ‘2 receps, dwnstrs bathrm, sep wc, d/glazing, elec heating’; ‘extended semi-det hse, 3 beds, off st pkg, front and rr gardens’), or rather obscure (as with ‘3 bed mid terr hse. GCH, DG, 13’6 lnge, 11’11 kit, bthrm’; ‘2 bed p. built first flr flat. Eco 7 stg htg’; ‘2 bed aptmt pos nr to Beck June stn, newly fitted mod kit with integ apps, good size rms, gdns plus gge’. In addition, readers have to face the ambiguity due to the existence of different abbreviation strategies, which account for the fact that the same abbreviation can refer to more than one thing (for example, double glazing can be ‘dble gaz’; ‘d/glazing’; ‘DG’; ‘D/G’. Similarly, semi detached can be abbreviated as ‘semi det’; ‘s/det’; ‘semi S/D’; and central heating can be either ‘c/heating’ or ‘CH’). 235
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Kitchen 8’9 X 8’ Bathroom 8’7 X 5’6 Bedroom One 11’11 X 10’ Bedroom Two 11’10 X 9’ Bedroom Three 8’10 X 8’7 Bathroom 11’11 X 10’ On the contrary, high context cultures rely more on the context itself. Consequently, they take much information for granted, as it can be retrived from the context and, as with the Italian advertisement below, where customers are asked to contact the agengy directly and fill in a long questionnaire (here shortened for reasons of space), do not feel it necessary to specify all the relevant details:
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Scheda dettagliata dell’immobile
COMUNE DI: ZONA: DESCRIZIONE: villa schiera di ampia metratura, salone con camino, cucina abitabile, 3 letto, doppi servizi, ampia lavanderia, taverna, autorimessa doppia, balconi e giardino. ottimamente rifinita. RIFERIMENTO:CONTRATTO: vendita Per richiedere maggiori informazioni compili questo piccolo modulo: Nome: Cognome: Email: If these differences appear fundamental in the translation of advertisements, we shall see below that whenever approaching other textual types, including literary texts, translators should always evaluate very carefully whether to amplify the source text by introducing explanations and annotations in order to render explicit what the author left implicit. This distinction between high/low context culture, in fact, has had important repercussions on the development of translation studies, in so far as, for example, the encoding-decoding model focussed on the surface and deeper structures of the text whereas now the emphasis is very much on heuristic processes. Contrary to the first model, which is very low context oriented, with a great emphasis on ‘text’, the latter and more recent approach is high context in orientation, which means that the emphasis has 237
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shifted to the context and the relationship between the words in the text and other frames24. In addition, it is important to consider which medium (spoken, written or visual) each country prefers (higher context communication cultures preferring more personal communication in comparison to low context cultures, which probably would opt for written, explicit information), in that this preference is bound to be reflected in the ideas each participant might have on the finality of the written or the spoken word. Clearly, first encounters are probably going to be more successful if conducted in a low context culture style, aiming at clarity (which means, in any case, that translators ought to be careful not to translate every word if that might result in redundancy and obscurity)25. In addition, because each culture will be sensitive to information load (namely, according to Larson, the speed at which new information is introduced, 1984, 438), the goal of a cultural mediator will be to vary the information load according to text function and target culture. This also means that translators should consider the level of formality/informality of a culture and, if necessary, intervene on the length of sentences, on the personal pronouns used and, in spoken communication, on the use of titles and terms of address. Indeed, as Scollon and Scollon suggest, it should be for example
24
As defined by Gregory Bateson in 1972, the frame is an internal psychological state and makes up part of our map of the world. As Goffman (1974), and Tannen (1993), emphasise, frames are culturally determined and in Wallat’s definition of 1993, refer to the participants’ sense of what s being done. 25 For business-letter writers in low context cultures writing in English to readers in high context cultures, for example, Campbell (1998) suggests the former should remember that their cultures may predispose readers to be more interested in long-term relations with reliable people than in products for their own sake. Hence, letters should begin with paragraphs that establish common ground. 238
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up to the cultural interpreter to inform people of the possible misinterpretation of friendly overtones (2001, 57 – 58). Similarly, it will be up to the mediator to advise the participants that the other culture might have a different attitude towards the expression of feelings. Contrary to expressive cultures such as Japan, in fact, which tend to be more high context culture and more sensitive to interpersonal communication which affects face, instrumental low context cultures such as German or British, generally consider displays of emotion embarrassing and, judging them in terms of a ‘loss of control’, perceive them negatively. It would therefore be very important for mediators to bear in mind that although Western societies are predominantly verbal cultures, there is a great deal of difference regarding what is verbalised. For instance, if verbalisation of emotions in instrumental societies takes place after breaking point and is a sign of communication breakdown, in expressive cultures there is a certain tolerance of expressivity, and verbalisation of emotion does not signify any form of breakdown. It is however important to remember that these cultural differences are fundamental even when the participants share the same language. Indeed, one of the major differences between British English and American English is that American culture allows for highly expressive language, which might result utterly inappropriate for a British instrumental oriented audience. Obviously, these differences will be even more marked when the intercultural encounter or the text to be translated involve two different national languages or, again, forms of English which differ rather conspicuously from the standard English spoken in Britain. Clearly, whereas when translating written texts we can double check, analyse our source text in detail in order to understand, for example, whether a particular cumulative, rhetorical style is chiefly performing a poetic function, and then decide for example whether the reduplication of adjectives could be 239
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rendered with a superlative form or whether it could be best rendered through the use of synonyms26, in spoken encounters (and the representation of those encounters we find for example in novels), cultural mediators are faced with problems of fundamental importance which have to be dealt with ‘on the spot’. This is why it is fundamental to bear in mind some of the recent finding of pragmatics, conversational analysis and discourse analysis in general which, as suggested above, have had an important bearing on the development of translation studies as well. For instance, as translators, we should always be aware of the studies of register variation which, as Biber et al. observe, have recently been used to make cross-linguistic comparisons, bringing to the fore the fact that apparently similar linguistic features can have quite different functional roles across languages. Similarly, we should bear in mind the concept of adjacency pair and turn taking, and consider the cross-cultural differences in the handling of these conversational structures – for example, according to Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, ‘Western society tends to leave little space for pauses or silences’ (1997, 74), although for example Scandinavian cultures have a much higher tolerance for silence than, say, the British. In addition, we should be aware of the differences between what Tannen terms high involvement or high considerateness conversational patterns (1992, 196), typical not only of interlingual but also intralingual varieties and which, as we shall see below, could find a representation in the fictional works analysed. According to this distinction, users of language adopting the former pattern tend to talk more, interrupt more, expect to be interrupted, talk more quickly and, at times, talk more loudly and use a wider variety of tones etc. Obviously, the adoption of one or the other style can be extremely important, especially when it comes to the 26
See for instance the contrastive analysis of Kincaid’s text above. 240
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inflection of a participant (often made explicit in written works through the graphological reproduction of spoken language). As Mead observes, in fact, ‘a voice feature which is stereotyped positive in one culture might strike the outsider very differently’ (1990, 162). Clearly, differences in the interpretation of prosodic and paralinguistic features become extremely important in any intercultural encounter, as they could be understood as a sign of anger or as a sign of sincerity. In addition, also non-verbal language and kinesic features can become fundamental, in so far as, as Hatim and Mason note in their Discourse and the Translator, might determine the strive or the end of a career (1990, 71). Another important aspect of conversation of which mediators should have to be aware of, is the importance which a particular culture might assign to the various maxims Grice described in his cooperative principle (1975). Indeed, although the principle seems universal, it is clear that the maxims do not operate in the same way across cultures. For example, Hatim and Mason relate how in English it is possible to flout the maxim of quality (i.e. ‘do not include what you know to be false’) and quantity (i.e. ‘Give as much information as needed’) and for example begin our counter-argument by citing the opponent’s thesis in order to rebut it (1997, 127). On the contrary, in Arabic cultures this could be understood by the addressee as an interlocutor’s loss of power, in that space in conceded to the addressee’s point of view. Another case in point is irony, to which mediators should be particularly attentive, as it might not work in translation due to socio-cultural factors such as the attitude to truth. Obviously, mediators must be able to context their interlocutors in order to put the right interpretative frame to the statement in question, something which, as we shall see below, translators of postcolonial literature are not always required to do. 241
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For example, as Ferraro states (1994, 52), there is a profound difference between the way Japanese use the word ‘yes’ (meaning, as often Italians do, that they understand what is being said), and the way British people use it (essentially to convey agreement). Similarly, whereas for the Japanese ‘no’ is an extremely strong statement (see Adler, 1991, 207), another culture such as the Brazilian, for example, simply takes it as a spontaneous expression of feelings. Whether to expect a ‘thank you’ or not is another issue at stake, in so far as, as Kramsch emphasises (1993, 8), there is no pressure in French to produce a reply to a compliment as, on the contrary, happens in America. Another essential aspect of pragmatics which could become extremely useful in translating cultures, is obviously Brown and Levinson’s theorisation of politeness and face and the notion of indirect speech acts elaborated for instance by Austin and Searle. For example, as Scollon and Scollon suggest (2001), whereas English people generally tend towards indirectness as a way to protect their positive face (that is their wish to be liked by others) and their interlocutor’s negative face (namely their desire not to have other people imposing on them), Italians tend to use imperative more often, as part of their high involvement culture. However, if a translator ought to render Italian imperatives with English imperatives, probably the participants would experience a breakdown in communication, due to the fact that the British tend to hear the imperative as a coercive, face threatening act. It is therefore essential for translators to realise that, as Hatim and Mason state, the seriousness of the face threatening act is a cultural variable. As a consequence, it cannot be assumed that the same act would carry the same weight in different sociocultural settings, something essential also to translators of postcolonial texts, who could be faced with the description of verbal or non-verbal rituals which might have very different meanings within the culture they stem from, being for instance a form of insult or welcome (Hatim and Mason, 1997, 81). 242
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In the case of requests, translators will thus have to resort to cushioning strategies, according to the social roles of interlocutors, the delicacy of their request, the social context and the urgency, so that what Leech has termed the tact maxim (i.e. ‘Minimise cost to hearer and maximise benefit to hearer’) can be respected27. We can therefore see how this aspect is essential towards a smooth management of the encounter28, especially considering the fact that, for example, high context cultures such as Asian cultures, faced with the possibility of losing face, tend to avoid direct negative feedback by not stating it. These are cultures in which criticism of behaviour is automatically understood as a criticism at the level of identity, whereas in low context cultures such as British or German cultures, people rarely take criticism at the level of identity, and rather than avoiding the verbalisation of criticisms, they adopt a system of cushioning in order to criticise the action itself and not the person. We can therefore see how translators, in order to act as cultural mediators, should really be able not only to mind-shift and associate with both the source text and the virtual target text, but should also be able to take a third perceptual position which is dissociated from both cultures, in order to act abovecultures, thereby improving cross-cultural cooperation and build trust and understanding.
27
As Hilkka Yli – Jokipii underlines in relation to the business environment (1998, 121), expert consultants tend to recommend conventional politeness (achieved for example by fixed formulae), but she emphasises that it must be very clear that the nature of distance and power affects the way requests are issued in different languages. It will be therefore up to the mediator to opt for mitigators such as the use of ‘please’, past modal auxiliaries etc. 28 Obviously, the very concept of smooth interaction is, as Pörings points out (1998, 217), culture-bound, and different assumptions on the notion of harmony may lead to evaluations of the partner’s actions that impede efforts to solve the problems may be reflected in the use of particular turn-taking strategies, mitigators and/or conflict styles of conversation. 243
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If these notes on the role of cultural mediators can be applied, as I have done most of the time, directly to the job of the translator who has to work as a link between the various participants in intercultural encounters, they can be used to analyse different textual types. Thus, the same cultural and translation strategies we have applied to mundane genres such as advertising texts, can in an analogous manner be applied to the analysis of literary texts such as those stemming from the former colonies of the British Empire, where the cultural differences between former colonisers and former colonised are generally brought to the foreground by the authors themselves. In fact, as we shall see below, one of the main characteristics of postcolonial authors coming from different areas of the world, is that in their works they try to translate their culture for their English-speaking readers. Not only, then, can authors describe, in their works, intercultural encounters (in particular between the colonised and the colonisers), but the reading adventure itself, which occurs, precisely, at the crossroad of two cultures, could be understood in such terms. Contrary to the cultural mediators partially described in previous pages, however, postcolonial authors, and even more so translators who are required to translate their works into other European languages such as Italian, ought to be very careful to the strategies adopted. As I have mentioned supra, in fact, this particular literature contravenes sometimes the general indications future translators are accustomed to receive, in that for instance strategies of chunking, amplification or deletion might have repercussion on the political and ideological impact of the works themselves. Sometimes, not even communicative translation is the most suitable option, in so far as sometimes even idiomatic expressions are best translated literally, even though the result is a text which is not easily accessible to the target reader. As suggested above, there can be no fixed guidelines in so far as every text is, literally, a world in its own terms. What remains 244
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fundamental, however, are the strategies of flexibility, adaptability and respect for the other cultures which translator as mediators should be conversant with. As Garzone emphasises, then, it becomes essential to recognise and evaluate the value and the function of particular culturemes – a term coined by Vermeer (1983, 8), to indicate the semiotic unit of cultural phenomena – and then find a way to realise their transposition within a different culture. As Niemieier noted when she said that every negotiation (even that between writer and reader) starts from different preconditions, depending on aspects such as national culture, prior experience, political situation etc. (1998, 3), so Garzone stresses the fact that even the transposition of every-day elements such as ‘to have tea’ cannot follow fixed rules, but requires a complex operation and a specific translation project which, beginning with the evaluation of various aspects (such as the type of text and its skopos, bearing however in mind that a text will, in general, be polyfunctional), can produce an adequate target text. It is not therefore by chance that the distinctions between different conceptions of culture mentioned above should find a parallel in the field of translation studies, re-appearing for instance in the categorisation proposed by Hans J. Vermeer, who in ‘Translation Theory and Linguistics’ distinguishes between paraculture (that is, the culture of ethnic and national groups) and diaculture (which corresponds to the sociological notion of sub-culture). As Umberto Eco notes, the two aspects of culture mentioned above are particularly significant (and problematical) for translators. In fact, if the hermeneutic act translators perform during the interpretation process of the source text always represents a challenge, the recodification process translators aim at coincides with the attempt to give a concrete expression to that initial interpretation (Eco, 1995, 138–9). Thus, it is not only a problem of interpreting and evaluating a particular cultureme, 245
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but it is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a question of finding adequate means to transpose that cultureme into a different culture. As we have seen in the section dedicated to the various degrees of cultural transposition, this is always a challenging process, in so far as even when the cultureme seems to be linguistically transposable (because, for example, it has been adopted as a loan world in the target language, or because it seems to have a straightforward equivalent in the other culture), it might have an altogether different meaning in the target culture. Thus, as Garzone emphasises, the practice of translation cannot follow fixed patterns, but has to be specific and different for each text. A project of translation, then, must evaluate many different aspects of the text, including the nature of the text itself, the value the text has in the source culture and the value it should acquire in the target culture. It is perhaps the kind of text on which the following pages are going to focus (namely postcolonial literary texts) that best exemplify the importance of translation in the construction of culture and the strong political and ideological implications translation can assume. In fact, if changing the language of a society means, as Roland Barthes claims, changing society itself, then translators can become stimulating and important contributors in the creation of a new reality. This is the reason why the practice of translation has become so important in the field of postcolonial studies, to such an extent that for example Maria Tymoczo considers translation as an analogue for postcolonial literature, as the two types of textual productions share many similarities29. As Inga-Stina Ewbank observes,
29
For instance, both are concerned with the ‘transmission of elements from one culture to another across a cultural and/or linguistic gap’ (Tymoczo, 1999, 23), and both are affected by ‘similar constraints on the process of relocation’ (ibid.). 246
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the idea of translation has come to be central in postcolonial thinking about permeable – or impermeable – borders, geographical, cultural and linguistic. In a discourse both critical and creative, translation can figure as a key concept in exploring otherness, exile, even belongingness (Ewbank, 2003, 14).
The fact that the disciplines of translation studies and postcolonial studies should be seen as correlated – as exemplified by the publication of volumes such as Postcolonial Translation (1999), Translation and Minority (1999), Translation and Multilingualism: Postcolonial Contexts (2001), Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (2001), Translation in the Global Village (2002) and Translation and Multiculturalism (2002) – therefore comes as no surprise. Indeed, during the last fifty years of the twentieth century, we witness the emergence of further disciplines, namely cultural and postcolonial studies which, because of their areas of interests, will soon develop into a further theory of translation. 3.4.Postcolonial Translation 3.4.1. The Development of Postcolonial Studies Because of the importance acquired by what we can loosely refer to as postcolonial theory, the discussion carried out in the following pages, is necessarily very brief and should serve simply as a general contextualisation. We can say that the notion of postcoloniality forges itself as a critical category during the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s. Clearly, as it will become apparent below, both postcolonial literature and postcolonial theory actually began to take shape long before then. It was however with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, that the field gained prominence in the Western academy. The fundamental notion the scholar puts forward in this work, is that
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the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either [...] both geographical and cultural entities – to say nothing of historical entities – such as locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West (1978, 7).
The Orient, then, began to be studied in its discursive and textual constructions, as it was considered more and more a construction of the language of the colonisers and their modes of representations. Indeed, with the development of postcolonial studies and the work of authors such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha et. al., then, during the second half of the twentieth century colonial literature has been subjected to critical revision and what Said calls ‘counterpoint’, in order to show the power it exercised in the propagation of the British Empire and its canon. Indeed, considering that the Empire was a cultural and textual – as well as a military, economic and political experience – the phenomena of colonisation and decolonisation appear closely connected to the problem of the canon30. 30
Various scholars, however, distinguish between colonial discourse studies, which focuses on the analysis of texts produced during the period of colonisation, and postcolonial studies proper, which analyses texts from the former colonies either after they achieved independence or after the dissolution of the European Empires. As I hope the present volume makes clear, however, the two categories cannot be neatly separated, as one presupposes, interacts with and permeates the other. In spite of this, for convenience we could operate further categorisations, and divide for instance the various postcolonial theoretical approaches into different models: national/regional models, which focus on features of national/regional history and culture. Examples of this approach could be identified with the subaltern studies group of which Gayatri Spivak is an important member, which focuses on Indian history, and different kinds of Caribbean studies, which highlight the important role the common experiences of deportation 248
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Postcolonial theory written in English, then, refers to a series of philosophical, political, linguistic and literary theories which and plantation slavery have had in the constitution of Caribbean culture; racial/ethnic models, which emphasise how the notion of race has determined many Euro-American practices. This is the case, for example, of Pan-Africanism and Negritude movements; comparative models, which focus on common thematic and/or linguistic concerns sometimes even irrespective of a text’s place of origin. This trend was inaugurated by the publication of the volume The Empires Writes Back, and although extremely useful, has sometimes led to the obliteration of national and individual peculiarities and idiosyncrasies; coloniser/colonised models, which mainly concentrate on the imperial-colonial dialectic, as exemplified for example by the work of Franz Fanon, in particular Black Skins, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961); hybridity/syncreticity models, most importantly exemplified by the work of Homi Bhabha which, as we shall see below, heavily relies on the category of the Other and is very much influenced by poststructuralist theories of language and identity, in particular by the work of French scholars Lacan and Derrida. As suggested above, this kind of categorisation, while perhaps useful to systematise some of the main concepts of the discipline, cannot be considered ‘real’. Indeed, as I hope the work carried out in the following pages will make clear, any analysis draws from, and relies on, more than one model at once. This is true in the case of translation studies, and is even more so in the case of postcolonial studies. Indeed, the complexity of the postcolonial world and its (literary and otherwise) products is such that it undoubtedly calls for an approach as eclectic as possible. In particular, in the study of the literature produced in the postcolonial world, all models have to be applied simultaneously, as the literature itself, highly syncretic, brings together several thematics at once and could be categorised in different ways. Having said that, it appears undeniable that a fundamental tenet of postcolonial theory and, as we shall see, literature, is, precisely, the notion of identity highlighted in the description of the last model. Indeed, with the systematisation of cultural and postcolonial studies, the close bond between the culture of a particular country, its identity and the way that society uses language, has been acknowledged, and this clearly has had important repercussions on the way translators have been able to exploit language in order to render expressions which appear particularly related to the concept of national identity. 249
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try to come to terms with the legacy of British colonial rule. Indeed, although pinning down the category of postcolonial to fixed parameters has proved impossible, we can say, in very general terms, that the discipline of postcolonial studies focuses on the (political, economic, literary etc.) results of the interaction between European nations (in our particular case, the British), and the non-Western societies they colonised. These can actually be divided into two broad categories: settler colonies (such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada), and non-settler colonies such as India, Africa etc. Because of the profound differences in the administration and the subjugation of these lands and their people, and the different struggles for independence in terms of both duration and modality, the two types of colonies appear rather dissimilar, to the extent that the former are sometimes omitted form the category of postcolonial. Although an analysis of the literature produced by authors from the settler colonies would obviously be extremely interesting and stimulating, and would result extremely enlightening in view of an in-depth study of postcoloniality, in the present volume these works are not actually taken into consideration. While not implying any ideological/political stance, in fact, this study focuses on the texts originating in non-settler colonies such as Africa or India, partly for reasons of space, and partly because I felt that this literature could serve the purposes of the present study better. Further to this main distinction, it is also essential to bear in mind the fact that, as will become evident further on, even though the term postcolonial literally indicates what comes after colonisation, in reality the word is used more loosely and can be applied to literary, political and theoretical phenomena which occurred long before the achievement of independence. Furthermore, the term might be applied to colonies which, though independent, have now to contend with neo-colonial powers and their attempts at subjugation; it could also be applied 250
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to minorities in European countries themselves, or it could be used in very generic terms so as to indicate a position against Eurocentrism. As defined by the authors of The Empires Writes Back, a text which consolidated the term ‘postcolonial’ after its emergence during the 1970s, the word postcolonial encompasses ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day’ (B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, H. Tiffin, eds, 1989, 2). This is the reason why postcolonial, migrant and diaspora authors such as Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith or Salman Rushdie, and native writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thing’o and Jamaica Kincaid amongst others, become emblematic of the blacks’ effort to assert their identity by resorting to a substandard, postcolonial ‘english’. 3.4.2. The Notion of Colonial Alienation and the Issue of Intertextuality The aim of this section is therefore to investigate, if only superficially, some of the means adopted by the British Empire in the constitution and propagation of the Western (Imperial) canon, and the ways in which the colonised countries, at a certain point of their colonial history of domination and dispossession, managed to lead to its abrogation. As we shall see, this process would be accomplished either by consciously reacting against the imposition of the culture, the language, the political and social orders of the dominant power (as with some of the early nationalist – or nativist – movements) or – with a sort of deconstructive movement – by mingling and mixing these influences with their own cultures, bending the language of the colonisers, irremediably ‘contaminating’ it through the contact with the local languages, thereby exploding the original and leading to the creation of something new, the development of
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which would finally transform the Imperial canon and its language forever. As Edward Said claims in Orientalism (1978), imperialism consolidated on a global scale an extraordinary mingling of cultures and identities. Consequently, although the aim of the colonisers was to impose their own culture onto the colonised countries and their people in an attempt to limit their ‘strangeness’ and threatening ‘otherness’, re-creating the Empire constantly, their approach and conduct, which basically originated from a fundamental fear of the Other and the sense of instability it entails, could only lead to the disruption of the imperial order. As Annah Arendt suggests in her seminal study on totalitarianism (1951), in fact, this fear of instability induces destructiveness, that is, in the case of colonialism, the attempt to destroy the history, the culture and the language of the natives in order to create a replica of that perfectly known and familiar homeland colonisers felt so comfortable in. As Thackeray observed in Vanity Fair, the English liked to make a little Britain wherever they settled down, and this attempt is also exemplified by the new topography (which in reality referred back to the old toponyms widespread in the home country) imposed onto these lands by the colonisers. The British, made strong by what they perceived as a sort of divine civilising mission, thus re-named this universe, thereby appropriating and imposing an identity onto the colonised. The fact that colonisers essentially tried to accomplish their civilising mission by bringing ‘the only true religion’ – Christianity – to the ‘pagan’ inhabitants of these regions does not therefore come as a surprise. Furthermore, colonisers tried to exploit the natives’ labour for their own economic ends by invoking the pseudo-religious truism according to which work improves the human soul, and this very cliché is at the basis of the image of the diligent colonial officer – often set in opposition to the indolent and idle native – as 252
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exemplified by Kipling’s characters or, to refer to the very first coloniser of the English novel, to Robinson Crusoe. By positing themselves as the God of the Old Testament, colonisers therefore brought this ‘new’ world into existence for the Western audience awaiting home. However, because Western readers, although eager to learn about these places of wonder, simultaneously wanted to restrain their strangeness and the subtle menace it entailed, they felt compelled to adopt from the very beginning familiar metaphors and every day names to interpret them. By so doing, colonisers tried to appropriate the native texts (a term understood here in its largest meaning), by bringing them within what Foucault calls the episteme of the Western world, a process which is similar to readers’ attempted naturalisation of the experimental, literary texts produced in Britain and on the continent during the second half of the twentieth century. According to Culler readers, while being attracted to experimental literature because it is something which surpasses the ordinary, at the same time they feel the urge to lessen its power, to recuperate and naturalise, if only partially, its strangeness, in order to make sense of it. To Western readers, the Other could actually signify anything, from delight, riches and wonders (as in adventure tales such as Ballantyne’s The Coral Island or Captain Marryat’s The Pirate) to instability, corruption and contamination (as with Bertha Mason’s madness which, in Jean Rhys’ re-writing of Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, stems from the sexuality of her Caribbean past, or the image of the degenerate white we find in Stevenson’s later tales or in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). It is precisely this practice of exploiting the familiarity of known rhetorical figures to translate, decipher and represent unfamiliar spaces, which turned the Empire, at least in part, into a textual exercise. The textuality of Empire, in fact, stemmed on the one hand from the fact that it physically relied on texts (the written reports filed by colonial officers, for example, but also 253
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some of the scripts of the colonised, which, far from being regularly destroyed by colonisers, were often searched and studied so as to legitimise colonial rule in an indigenous idiom). On the other, this textuality originates from the fact that colonialism was, from the European point of view, a metaphoric undertaking, an exercise in symbolism, a whole mythical system by which familiar figures of speech (derived for example from Herodotus, Shakespeare, the Bible and travelogues of various kinds), were applied to new contexts. With time, these rhetorical devices developed into conventions of comprehending other lands and other people, whose stereotypical characterisation played at once the double role of screening out their difference and alterity, while presenting their degradation and inferiority as natural. Precisely because culture, as Said notes in Culture and Imperialism (1993), may predispose one society to the domination of another, supporting and preparing the imperialist enterprise, many of the writings of the period (even those which were not openly about the Empire, but simply took the British global power for granted, as for example in J. Austen’s Mansfield Park), were in fact part of the imperial mission. In particular, the Victorian novels, infused as they were with imperial ideas of race pride and superiority (clearly encouraged by the spread of Social Darwinism), helped maintaining the Empire. In the works by Kipling, Captain Marryat and Anthony Trollope amongst others, the Empire found a justification in its ‘civilising’ activity, thus legitimising its essentially economic motives. All these writings and texts on which the Empire relied (to which we could refer as colonial discourse) therefore represent the whole set of textual practices which, according to Foucault and Althusser, are necessarily involved in relations of power. It appears thus clear how the imposition of the colonisers’ language and culture on the natives’ social and education system (first
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envisaged in the Minute on Indian Education, dated 1835), assumed a fundamental importance for the imperial enterprise. Through the literature produced in the home country, written in a foreign language which natives were now asked to learn, colonisers tried in fact to inculcate in the natives not only a sense of loyalty towards the Empire, but also a sense of the inferiority, inadequacy and irrelevance of their history and their culture. In these texts, in fact, the native is always constructed as the ‘Other’ against which the ‘I’ of the coloniser can define itself, the different and deviant element set in opposition to the normal, universal ‘I’ of the coloniser. In its struggle for survival and its attempt to perpetuate its power, the Empire therefore enacts the same struggle for recognition which, according to Lacan, each individual undertakes, trying to have its mastery and superiority acknowledged by the Other. The Other, then, clearly had to be constructed as the servant and the inferior. This goal was achieved first of all through the fixing and objectifying gaze of the colonisers and the idea that the natives were there just for the benefit of the Europeans as object of study and curiosity (as exemplified for example by the attempt one traveller named Speke made to take the measurements of the wife of the king of Buganda, and the terrible fate endured by the woman known as ‘the black Venus’, who was first imprisoned, abducted from her land and exhibited in a cage around Britain as if she were a rare animal, only to be cut up and have parts of her body on display after her death. The same process, however, is often given a fictional, and muffled, representation in the literary works of the period. For example, both Kipling’s and Conrad’s characters insistently ‘observe’ and ‘survey’ ‘their’ Others, in a similar way to the protagonist of the first novella of J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, who projects himself as a spherical, reflecting eye moving through the wilderness and ingesting it, thereby hinting at colonisers’ appropriation of Other land as much as Other people). 255
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In the second instance, this process of otherisation, which was used as a way of confirming the validity of the imperial enterprise and the superiority of the white man, was enacted through the language colonisers used to describe natives who, as already noted in the first chapter, were often defined as barbarians, irrational etc. For example, in 1608 John Jordain wrote: in my opinion yt is a great pittie that such creattures as they bee should injoy so sweett a country [South Africa]. Ther persons are preporcionable butt ther Facesz like an Appe or Babownne, with flat noses and ther heads and faces both beastlie and fillthye to behoulde. (quoted in R. Raven-Hart, 1967, 57-58).
As Bhabha observes in ‘The Other Question’, ‘the objective of colonial discourse was to construe the colonised as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’. The stereotypes colonisers resorted to in order to construct the natives as the Others (which again Bhabha defines as ‘ambivalent texts of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, overdetermination, guilt, aggressivity’), finally justified the discriminatory and authoritarian forms of political control adopted by the system, making them appear appropriate. Indeed, as Thomas and Sillen demonstrate, by quoting the words uttered by the Secretary of State John C. Calhoun in 1844, scientific racism was used in arguing for the extension of slavery: Here [scientific confirmation] is proof of the necessity of slavery. The African is incapable of self-care and sinks into lunacy under the burden of freedom. It is a mercy to give him the guardianship and protection from mental death (quoted in A. Thomas and S. Sillen, 1979, 17).
These characterisations then, become examples of the epistemic violence Gayatri Spivak describes. 256
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Throughout the Empire, these characterisations were helped by Social Darwinist ideas and a whole set of racist testimonies of science, which dominate the literature of the period, from Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (where we find images of racial superiority and inferiority based on the evolutionary ladder), to Kipling and Conrad, who both subscribed to theories of racial difference and supremacy (in Lord Jim, for example, it is stated quite clearly that different races have different predispositions to holding authority)31. Hence, even when the history and the culture of the colonised country was not declared non-existent by colonisers (as with Afrikaners’ historiography in South Africa), the reporters of the Empire tried in any case to convince natives that the invaders had come to lighten their darkness and, on the basis of that perverted logic by which, according to Fanon, colonialism tried to distort and disfigures a people’s past, tried to bring them to admit to the inferiority of their culture. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes, the Empire tried to control the entire realm of the natives’ language of real life in an effort to dominate their mental universe and control, through culture, the way they perceived themselves and their relation to the world. By imposing a foreign language and suppressing the native one (or at least restricting its use to the household), colonisers provoked
31
This attitude, however, continued well into the twentieth century, as Lewis Terman’s The Measurement of Intelligence (1916) demonstrates. Here we read: ‘[ethnic minority children] are uneducable beyond the nearest rudiments of training. No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens in the sense of the word [...] their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stock from which they come [...] They cannot maser abstractions, but they can bemade efficient workers [...] There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusual prolific breeding’ (quoted in W.W. Nobles, 1986). 257
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a dissociation of sensibility in the natives, and the association of their language and culture with humiliation, low status, punishment and barbarism, led to what Ngugi wa Thiong’o terms colonial alienation. This is the same experience Bhabha refers to when he says that colonialism created not only a divide between the Self and the Other, but also the otherness of the Self, obliging the black subject to perceive him/herself as Other. 3.4.3. The Language of Decolonisation From what said above, the problem of language – which since structuralism and poststructuralism is closely connected to problems of identity – appears central to both colonialism and postcolonialism. Indeed, if through the imposition of their language, colonisers created the colonised natives as inferior Others, who could therefore achieve an identity only in relation (and submission) to the mother-country, it was always through language that the ex-colonies, at a certain moment in their history of domination and dispossession, began to subvert the ideology and the myths projected by the Empire. This is why, according to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, political independence must be necessarily followed by the decolonisation of the mind, a process which clearly implies the rejection of the colonisers’ language and the retrieval of their native mothertongues and cultures. If, in fact, as Fanon states, ‘to use a language is to assume a culture’, then, claims Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who symptomatically has abandoned English in order to publish in his Kikuyu mother-tongue, natives must reject the language which appropriated their culture, a language which, being identified as the language of the criminal, according to Jamaica Kincaid, can only explain the deed from the criminal’s point of view (A Small Place, 1988). In reality, not many authors followed the example set by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, producing what Chinua Achebe (who 258
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contrary to Ngugi wa Thiong’o was a strong advocate of English as the national language of Africa) would call ethnic literatures. However, most of them – in the attempt to re-appropriate their identity – pursued that process of transformation and adaptation of the English language which authors such as Solomon Plaatjie had already inaugurated during colonialism. In fact, we cannot forget that although even after independence many writers carried on writing in the language of the excolonisers, producing what Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls an AfroEuropean literature, long before political decolonisation, colonised elites began to organise cultural revivals and oppose imperial power in an attempt to affirm their identity (this is for example with the pan-African movement, which was born in London in 1900, or the upsurge led by Mohandas Ghandi, which began in India in 1919). By the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain had in actual fact begun to show signs of severe overstretch, as the Boer War (1899 – 1902) pointed to the Empire’s vulnerability. In addition, this period is marked by the end of the epistemological innocence characteristic of previous centuries, while an unstable and dialogic reality began to be discovered behind, and in opposition to, the world which realist fictions claimed to described. As mentioned in the first chapter, the element of uncertainty that entered science thanks to, amongst others, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Planck, together with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and Saussure’s insistence on the arbitrariness and conventionality of language, had repercussions on the whole of society, and all contributed to the disintegration of universal truths and the notion of absolute knowledge, all aspects which would later become typical of postmodernism, characterised precisely by what Lyotard, one of the major postmodernist theoreticians, calls the end of the meta-narratives and universal truths propounded throughout the centuries by science, religion etc. 259
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This is the era of modernism, when in order to account for this new reality, metropolitan writers began to look for new tools, leading to the rejection of the realist type of narrative and to the experimentalism which characterised their avant-garde. It was precisely during these years that metropolitan writers, artists and scholars – while not actually questioning the basic principles of Empire and still treating the natives as a sort of commodity, representing them as somewhat obscure, primitive and divided from Europeans – began nonetheless to acknowledge in their works the presence of Others, tentatively criticising imperial wrongs and proclaiming their disillusion with the system. During this period, the arrival of the ‘stranger’ in the West was actually testified in a number of ways: in the rise of cultural anthropology, in primitivist styles of painting, in the works of Picasso, Matisse or Gaugin, in the theories of the unconscious etc. There was a suspicion that the European self might actually have something in common with the Other, and lands such as India were increasingly perceived as sources of regeneration which, through their spirituality, might save Europe from a moral and spiritual breakdown. During this period, Europe had actually to confront the first world war and writers, in an attempt to come to terms with the violence of war and the fragmentation of both culture and psyche that followed, had to face a shattered world where the progressive view of history was lost and where everything was felt to be temporary and provisional. It was precisely the sense of dislocation experienced by metropolitan writers that was appropriated by writers like Tagore, S. Plaatje, V.S. Naipaul, C. McKay and Rajo Rao. By resorting to Western genres in order to articulate their perceptions of cultural experience, writers from the colonies therefore began to, in Rushdie’s words, ‘write
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back’32, suggesting, albeit very tentatively, that the subaltern (contrary to Spivak’s most pessimistic view) could speak 33. Writers thus began to proclaim the cultural dignity and the historical relevance of their countries, in an attempt to discover – beyond the misery of colonialism – ‘some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence would rehabilitate them both in regard to themselves and others’ (Fanon, 1959). For example, in an attempt to turn the negative images of themselves and their culture projected by the colonial system into positive images and proclaim the value of what Empire had dismissed as primitive, a novel like Banjo (1930), by the West Indian Claude McKay, began to enact an inversion of European stereotypes of black people34. Similarly, Mhudi, published in 1929 by the black South 32
Originally, this served as a leitmotif for US cultural imperialism as represented in and by the blockbuster movie Star Wars and was later adopted as the title of a synoptic book about ‘theory and practice in postcolonial literatures’. 33 Although Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ mainly concentrates on the situation of Asian women, some of her observations could be read as relating to the colonised subject in general. 34 The novel Banjo: A Story Without a Plot, published by Claude McKay in 1930, does not replace the coloniser’s negative image of black people with an inverted stereotype of the black man as inherently good. Yet, the realistic depiction of the black community does not coincide with a confirmation of the stereotype. For instance, we find intertextual references to the Western description of blacks as degenerate and idle: ‘They stopped there, drinking until twilight’ (p. 9); ‘This was the great sport of the boys. They would steal a march on the watchmen or police, bung out one of the big casks and suck up all the wine through rubber tubes until they were sweetly soft’ (p. 19); ‘[Ginger] was lying on his back on one of the huge stone blocks of the breakwater. The waves were lapping softly around it […] He yawned and, pulling his cap over his eyes, went to sleep. The others also stretched themselves and slept’ (p. 22). The text is also rich of intertextaul references to the characters’ black culture: ‘Rough rhythm of darkly-carnal life […] One movement of the thousand movements of the eternal life-flow […] sweet dancing thing of primitive joy, perverse pleasure […] many-colored variations 261
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African Solomon Plaatjie, began to unsettle many of the discriminations established by colonial discourse, and, by drawing on different literary conventions (ranging from the Bible to Shakespeare and African oral forms), and inserting into the text many forms derived from African oral tradition, attempted to articulate the author’s perception of his identity. Because of their bilingualism, these authors had access to two different kinds of rhetoric, and were therefore able to develop creolised, polysemic, dialogic modes of expression, creating those very hybrid texts which, by intruding upon colonialist discourse and mingling different genres, managed to convert negative stereotypes in positive images, reversing the meaning of the colonialist division, thereby disturbing and finally dismantling the Western Canon of Empire. Authors began to adapt indigenous myths to their new postcolonial situation, adopting dominant symbols to express their marginalised view of the world and speak as Others: for example Tutuola and Soyinka, while carrying on writing in English, drew increasingly from Yoruba culture, Raja Rao began of the rhythm, savage, barbaric, refined – eternal rhythm of the mysterious, magical, magnificent – the dance divine of life’ (p. 57) or ‘ “Beguin”, “jellyroll”, “burru”, “bombé”, no matter what the name may be, Negroes are never so beautiful and magical as when they do that gorgeous sublimation of the primitive African sex feeling. In its thousand varied patterns, depending so much on individual rhythm, so little on formal movement, this dance is the key to the African rhythm of life’ (p. 105); intertextual references to the creole language spoken by this community: ‘I is an artist’ (p. 9); ‘tha’s all youse got’ (p. 39); ‘Jes’ arrive?’ asked Banjo. ‘Youse sure looking hallelujah happy like a men jest made a fortune’(p. 83); ‘I knows’ (p. 305); ‘But Ise just finish explaining to Goosey heah that Ise most gratiate to the consul’ (p. 305). This, in Banjo, intertextuality cannot be understood in its canonical sense, even though it becomes a fundamental strategy which enables the author to replace the stereotypical image of the black man with a more realistic one and depict each character as an individual (against the idea of an essential ‘Black Consciousness’). 262
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to insert in his works references to the tale of Rama, while Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo began to draw on Akan legend. Gradually, however, the strategy of subversion by imitation entailed by the appropriation of Western genres, typical of what authors such as Fanon have recognised as the first phase of postcolonial literature35, would be increasingly associated with collaboration and privilege, especially after the achievement of independence. Having being deprived of their culture by the colonisers, most of the ex-colonies still tried to rely on European models for the constitution of their new nations even after independence, it is precisely against this alienation that Fanon called for more violent strategies. Thus, the novels written during the 1930s, where no direct resistance is really opposed to the coloniser, differ tremendously from those written in the 1950s and the 1960s, which can be said to belong to the second phase of postcolonial literature. Between these decades, another war of global proportions shattered the ‘civilised’ world achieving unimaginable levels of violence. In front of its horrors, many of the Western, metropolitan intellectuals felt compelled to put under discussion the very concepts of humanity, identity, nationality etc., in the name of which the war had been fought. By the end of the conflict, writers had to face a world which was geographically, politically, socially, economically and ideologically shattered; they had to confront the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the Cold War and the military potentials of space travel. The ‘civilised barbarism’ of the Western world clearly blurred the divide between ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ societies, showing to what delirious pitches ideals such as identity, race and nation 35
Further to Fanon, other authors have attempted a classification of postcolonial literature, dividing it in different phases. Most of the time the categories of different authors correspond, but it is worth mentioning that ‘orature’, that is oral literature, is not always included in the taxonomy. 263
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could bring. In addition, precisely because World War II was fought against a racist ideology, it undermined the surviving rationales of the Empire. Not only this, but because the war was fought also with the help of the colonial subjects (India, for example, sent 1.5 million men to war), to whom Dominion status would be later denied, it stimulated further nationalist demands. Under such pressures, in 1947 Britain therefore granted India political independence, and this would be followed, in the years to come, by African and Caribbean independence. The post-1947 period, then, represents the high period of decolonisation, and it is characterised by a more confrontational approach. The writings of the time – all concerned with Fanon’s question ‘What does the Black man want?’ – thus showed signs of an increasingly angry opposition to colonial rule, leading to more combative political methods such as non-co-operation, active resistance and armed struggle (as with the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the early 1950s, the civil war in Algeria between 1954 and 1962 and Anti-apartheid protests in South Africa during the 1960s). Literature – and culture in general – was mobilised as a weapon of political liberation, thereby becoming a central arena of transformation. Unlike earlier writing, which tried to reverse racist stereotypes by adopting a mimetic strategy, now literature had, in Fanon’s words, to ‘insult and vomit up’ the white man’s values. Indeed, writers’ ability to infuse a people with a sense of their own unique identity and help them in the process of national self-making was acknowledged by various authors such as Caryl Phillips. As a result, fictional narrative, with its potential to compose alternative realities and use language in an imaginative way, appeared to fit the purpose perfectly. Indian, African and Caribbean writers focused mainly on reconstituting the cultural identity which had been damaged by the colonial experience, and concentrated on developing a 264
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symbolic vocabulary that was recognisably indigenous. By so doing, they emphasised the importance of what Ngugi wa Thiong’o would call a total de-colonisation of the mind of the once-colonised in order to enable them to name the world for themselves. This process, to which Cabral refers as ‘reafricanisation’ (in Chabal, 1983), clearly implied the complete rejection of the language of the ex-colonisers in order to retrieve the natives’ mother tongues, the cultures they carry and their history. To cancel colonial stereotypes, in fact, many authors, now deprived of the filial/colonial bond with the mother-country, which in a way provided an easy form of identity, tried to obtain a validation of their identity by turning to history. On the one hand, nationalist writers turned to cultural revivalism and tried to retrieve their own history and culture, searching for evidence of a rich pre-colonial existence which would then be expressed in smaller-scale stories such as prison notebooks and diaries, texts dramatising indigenous resistance, novels of remembering (as Achebe’s Arrow of God or Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin)36, texts where the history of the white man was given a marginal role (as in wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat or Achebe’s Things Fall Apart) and so on. On the other hand, writers such as Rushdie – who with Midnight Children really marks a point of no-return in historical narrative – turned to the history written by colonisers and denounced its fictionality, re-writing it from the point of view of the Others, thereby making it unrealistic, demystifying and unreliable. By approaching history this way, writers demonstrated that the history and the reality constructed by colonisers were simple constructions of words (and this, in a place such as South Africa, 36
Due to the high number of texts mentioned in this section, publication details shall be provided in the Bibliography only. 265
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where white colonisers claimed the land as theirs because they maintained the land was not inhabited by other people, clearly assumes a fundamental importance). It is not by chance, then, that postcolonial and postmodernist literature should be considered, by many, as sharing not only textual devices such as the reliance on intertextuality but also specific ideological perspectives, in so far as, in the definition given for example by Linda Hutcheon, postmodernism coincides with historiographic metafiction (1988), that is an imaginative re-writing of history which demonstrated that history is only a text and a mediation of words. Obviously, we cannot and we should not equate the two movements entirely, as when we deal with postcoloniality, we are not simply dealing with linguistic constructs and texts but with an often dramatic reality. In spite of this, it is undeniable that the two school of thoughts share many elements, which is why authors such as Coetzee must be analysed in all their complexity both as postcolonial and postmodernist writers. These authors, then began to re-write the nation itself which, according to Bhabha, is precisely written by marginal figures who, by disturbing the image of a community, can impose the idea of an ambivalent nation. The narratives produced on the borderline can thus be identified with counter-narratives which, by virtue of their ambiguity, can disrupt the ideological discourse at the basis of canonic, hegemonic narratives and question notions such as progress, tradition, national roots etc. on which those same narratives rely. This is actually what Rushdie does in his The Satanic Verses, where the author questions the cultural borders of Britain by proposing a narrative from the margins in which Western subjects cannot identify completely their country of origin. By developing, as Bhabha states in his ‘DissemiNation’, the narrative of cultural difference, this novel thus becomes an example of the way in which the migrant – described by Rushdie 266
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as one of the central figures of the twentieth century – obliges the Western citizen to re-draw the maps of culture. By crossing indigenous elements with European structures and images, writers therefore tried to represent the present in symbols derived from their indigenous past. Because of this, Tutuola’s use of pidgin English, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s adoption of Kikuyu oral formulae (which he used to insert in his texts before abandoning English for good), Rushdie’s exploitation of the hinglish spoken in Bombay’s bazaars and Zoila Ellis’s graphic reproduction of hybrid linguistic forms such as the Creole spoken in the Belizean communities depicted in her texts, were all meant as effective anti-colonial strategies and should be read as an attempt on these authors’ part to affirm their identity and the identities of the countries they stand for. We can therefore see how by rewriting history and making the images and stories drawn from local myth, legend, film, history, culture etc. correlate with national self-perceptions, postindependence narratives such as Rushdie’s Midnight Children actually tried to establish new metaphors of nationhood. Tellingly enough, this period is characterised for example by narratives in the form of family sagas (as in Brink’s Imaginings of Sand, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy or Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh), narratives which stage return journeys home (as in Wilson Harris’ Palace of the Peacock or Wole Soyinka’s The Road). These are tales of wandering, migration, exile and banishment (as in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses or Derek Walcott’s epic Omeros); tales in which indigenous myths are adapted to the new postcolonial situation (as in Soyinka and Tutuola); fundamentally, tales which, by virtue of their crossing indigenous elements with European structures and images, cannot but be hybrid and syncretic. This is actually further exemplified by the fact that during the third phase of postcolonial literature, another favourite decolonising strategy was the adaptation of colonial defining 267
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tales, the Western, imperial canon described by Harold Bloom which, through a careful process of adaptation, borrowing and hybridisation, would get inevitably disrupted. The powerful paradigms represented by European canonic texts were now mobilised in defence of what had once been seen as secondary. Consequently, as Lamming points out, the texts that were regarded as the icons of European culture, especially those that symbolised its claims to authority (such as, for example, The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe), became the object of repeated colonial appropriations. George Lamming himself (who in The Pleasures of Exile identifies Caliban with the colonised West Indian), Edward Braithwaite (who offers a poetic version of Shakespeare’s play), Jean Rhys (who in Wide Sargasso Sea imagines the story of Bertha Mason, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jean Eyre), J.M. Coetzee and Derek Walcott (who explicitly refer to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), V.S. Naipaul and Harris (whose A Bend in the River and Palace of the Peacock respectively bear traces of Condrad’s Heart of Darkness), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (in whose A Grain of Wheat we can detect a shadow of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes) etc., all created inverted writings which exemplify what Bachelard calls the Prometheus complex, that is the appropriation of the master narrative, in an attempt to read reality in a different way from before37. 37
Just to give but one example amongst the many, Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966) posits itself as an antecedent to Brontë’s Jane Eyre and analyses the creole character of Bertha Mason and her relationship with Rochester. Throughout Brontë’s novel Bertha is introduced as a sort of sub-human Other in opposition to the Englishman Rochester: ‘I was of a good race […] I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor refinement in her mind or manners […] I found her nature wholly alien to mine; her tastes obnoxious to me; her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher […] what a pigmy intellect she had (p. 321-3). However, through intertextuality, the alternation between 268
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From the examples above, then, we can see how, despite Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s call for a total decolonisation of the mind and the complete rejection of the language of the ex-colonisers, many authors actually opted for the politics of in-betweenness Bhabha called for in his The Location of Culture. By drawing on local cultures, by inserting in their works references to native legends and myths, by relying on words and rhythms typical of their local traditions, and by intruding upon Western defining tales, these authors therefore brought about the disintegration of the imperial canon Chinua Achebe hoped for. From what said above, it appears clear that the distinctions between different conceptions of culture mentioned in the previous pages finds a parallel in the field of translation studies. Indeed, the problem of language, and consequently of translation, is clearly fundamental to both colonial and postcolonial history and literature. Indeed, in the words Eric oppressor/victim is reversed and Brontë’s animalistic descriptions of Bertha are applied by Rhys to Antoinette’s oppressors: Brontë
Rhys
Bertha: ‘unnatural sound’; ‘something’ (p. 155); ‘almost like a dog’ (p. 219); ‘savage face’ (p. 297); ‘what it was, whether beast or human being, one could not tell […] it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair (p. 307)
Antoinette: I [Rochester] wondered why I had never realized how beautiful she was. Her hair was combed away from her face and fell smoothly far below her waist (p. 49)
Rochester: victim of a well planned scheme. Victim of Bertha’s sexual degeneration (‘the true daughter of an infamous mother dragged me through the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste’ (p. 323)
Rochester: lies to Antoinette (‘I kissed her fervently, promising her peace, happiness, safety’ (p. 48). He tries to make her mad by (intertextually) calling her Bertha, to which Antoinette replies ‘Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else’ (p. 94). He is sexually and morally degenerate (Amélie)
Thus, via Antoinette, Rhys’s novel urgently poses the question ‘Who is the traitor?’ (p. 74). The examples could obviously be several, but for reasons of space we shall limit ourselves to the examples briefly discussed above. 269
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Cheyfitz used, translation could be identified as the ‘central act of European colonisation’ (1991, 104), in so far as at the heart of every imperial fiction (at the heart of darkness) there is a fiction of translation. The colonial Other is translated into terms of the imperial self, with the net result of alienation for the colonised and a fiction of understanding for the coloniser (Cheyfitz, quoted by Wynn, 2000, 114).
As we have seen from the outset, the Empire actually posited itself not simply as an economic, military and political enterprise, but also as a textual exercise, a mythical system by which familiar figures of speech were applied to new contexts in order to interpret and translate other lands and their people, thereby bringing them within what Foucault calls the Western episteme. In particular, by imposing a foreign language and suppressing the local ones, the Empire tried to dominate the mental universe of the indigenous populations and control, through culture, the way they perceived themselves and their relation to the world. The colony as a whole was therefore constructed as an inferior, Other reality, and posited as a copy – a translation – of the mother country, which was then recognised as the great original. If this aspect was implicitly acknowledged by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, it was only in recent years that the relationship between colonialism and translation has come under close scrutiny for example in the work of Niranjana, who puts forward the notion that translation shapes ‘the relations of power that operate under colonialism’ (Niranjana, 1992, 2). It is therefore not by chance that Rushdie, in his Imaginary Homelands, defines the postcolonial writer as a ‘translated man’ (Rushdie, 1991, 15). According to Rushdie, the translation process writers from the former colonies experienced when colonisers obliged them to abandon their language, can be seen as the necessary first step towards their formation as postcolonial writers. In their attempt to reject the appellative of copy and
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translation, and assert their identity and their culture, the colonies emerging from colonialism appropriated some of the translation strategies initially exploited by colonisers. Linguistic issues then, which structuralism and poststructuralism showed to be closely connected to problems of identity, therefore appear central to both colonial and postcolonial enterprises. In fact, if through the imposition of their language, colonisers created the colonised as inferior Others, who could therefore achieve an identity only in relation (and submission) to the mother country, it was always through language that the ex-colonies, at a certain moment in their history of domination and dispossession, began to subvert the ideology and the myths projected by the Empire. Indeed, during the period of high decolonisation (after India’s independence in 1947), literature, with its potential to compose alternative realities and use language in an imaginative way, was increasingly mobilised as a weapon of political liberation, thereby becoming a central arena of transformation. In those years, Asian, African and Caribbean writers focused mainly on reconstituting the cultural identity which had been damaged by the colonial experience, and concentrated on developing a symbolic vocabulary that was recognisably indigenous. By doing so, they emphasised the importance of what Ngugi wa Thing’o would call a total de-colonisation of the mind of the oncecolonised, a process which – by implying the complete rejection of the language of the ex-colonisers and the retrieval of the local mother tongues and the culture they carry – would have enabled them to name the world for themselves. As mentioned supra, in reality, many authors opted for the politics of in-betweenness Bhabha called for in his The Location of Culture, the ‘in-between space’ Bhabha himself defines as ‘the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation’, that ‘inter’ or ‘Third Space’ which ‘carries the burden of the meaning of culture’ (Bhabha, 1994, 38). Thus, through their use of language, writers such as Tutuola and Soyinka (who in their 271
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works render Yoruba culture into English), Raja Rao (whose narratives are rich of references to the tale of Rama), and Ama Ata Aidoo (in whose work Akan legend clearly works as an intertext), translated some of the constitutive elements of their languages and cultures into what could be recognised as the language of the ex-colonisers only with great difficulty. By using in their works a hybridised, non-standard form of English (which according to Achebe had to be adapted to its new, African surrounding), these writers encouraged the emergence of a situation in which a multiplicity of englishes are able to co-exist, as opposed to a world in which one metropolitan English dominates over other allegedly deviant forms. Thanks to these authors, the language of Shakespeare got broken up and thrown about, creating a number of splinter forms which could be recognised as the language of the ex-colonisers only with great difficulty. The development of multiple literary and spoken englishes, therefore illustrates the fecundity of postcolonial adaptation; it’s a sort of cultural boomeranging where the oncecolonised take the artefacts of the former masters and make them their own. As Walcott notes, ‘by parroting our master’s style and voice, we make his language our own’, and by so doing writers, as Rushdie suggests, completed the process of making themselves free. In the hands of these writers, then, english becomes an effective anti-colonial instrument, and it is precisely to loosen it from its colonial past and make it national, that writers must subject English to various processes of syntactic and verbal dislocation, resorting to local idioms and adopting native cultural referents. It goes without saying, then, that the work of Rushdie himself, where he flamboyantly crosses, fragments and parodies different narrative perspectives, derives his style from a certain kind of Mughal paintings typical of the architecture of Hindu temples, occasionally inserts untranslatable expressions in his texts and adopts a structure of multiple mini-narratives which reflects the digressive form of the Ramayana and the 272
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Mahabharata, the two Indian sacred texts – remains an exemplary case. By establishing new metaphors of nationhood and creating new images as symbols to represent the nation, english thus becomes crucial for the constitution of the new, postcolonial nations. Hence, the introduction and the translation of elements derived from dialects, Creoles and patois, very rarely depend on innocent, purely stylistic reasons, in so far as most of the time they are made to correlate with national self-perceptions. This is also the reason why the practice of translation has come to be perceived as fundamental to the postcolonial enterprise. To a certain extent, it is actually possible, with all due caution, to detect similar trends in both postcolonial and translation studies, as theoretical elaboration in one discipline seems to reflect and penetrate that of the other. For instance, after the initial period during which postcolonial studies concentrated on what was perceived as a homogeneous and globalised idea of postcoloniality, now there is a tendency to focus on the specificity and the diversity which distinguish the ex-colonies in different parts of the world. In fact, despite the emphasis placed by first-generation postcolonial scholars on concepts such as hybridity, heterogeneity, and difference – categories which, of course, were celebrated on a discursive level – on a methodological level they simultaneously compressed and deleted differences of history and geography, homogenising them into a collective entity. On one hand, the postmodernist, poststructuralist/deconstructionist approach of authors such as Said (who was heavily influenced by Foucault), Spivak (who openly acknowledges her debt to Derrida) and Bhabha (more attentive to Lacan), was extremely useful in the elaboration of some of the experiences of the ex-colonies, for example exposing the relation between culture and imperialism, language and power. On the other, however, it also led to a flattening of the cultural idiosyncrasies of various societies, and while constituting 273
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a necessary first step, it risked engulfing postcolonialism within the Western, metropolitan theoretical debate. Thus, even though Said is careful to stress that culture and language create real oppression, and even though Bhabha claims that the Otherness of the black man is inscribed on his body through colonisers’ language, thus distancing themselves from the postmodernist stance of relishing the free play of language as a means of evading the consequences of ideological constructs, their intellectual productions nonetheless create a disconnection from the real vicissitudes of the formerly colonised nation-states. As San Juan Jr notes in his Beyond Postcolonial Theory (1998), in this kind of production, very rarely do we encounter any specific scenario of unjust domination or actual resistance from which we might gather information about the real ordeals the ex-colonies and their inhabitants had to endure, and urgent life-or-death issues are often ignored. As a result, further to the general acknowledgment of the fact that in a world of power and victimisation, colonialism and persecution, ideologies impact on the body, and the Empire’s exercise in textuality results in real segregation, exclusion from public life, economic exploitation, infliction of physical pain and even death, scholars such as Aijaz Ahmad have begun to problematise romantic and idealistic homogenisations of the ‘third world’, questioning the postcolonial denial of the histories of peoples and their distinctive trajectories of survival and achievement, and finally denouncing the fact that the systematic decay of countries and continents cannot be easily squared with notions of transnational cultural hybridity and politics of contingency. As San Juan emphasises, criticising the reduction of the social to the semiotic, in the discursive realm of floating signifiers, the asymmetry of power and resources between hegemonic blocs and subaltern groups disappears (San Juan, 1998, 7).
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Postcolonial discourse generated in the ‘first world’ is increasingly seen as another product (and not an antithesis) of post-Fordist capitalism; the much celebrated notion of versatility is recognised as part of cultural imperialism, and concepts such as hybridity and heterogeneity are seen as obfuscating the effects and practices of consumerism. Consequently, scholars have begun to express the need to re-address such trends as mutliculturalism, globalisation and the decline of the nationstates in the vicissitudes of the ‘culture wars’ which – despite the end of formal colonialism – keep taking place (San Juan, 1998, 11). Furthermore, there is a call to redirect postcolonial studies away from diasporic concerns and back to the multiple arenas within the postcolonial states themselves (Werbner, 1997, 23), and as Timothy Brennan suggests, recuperate the suppressed history of entire countries (1997, 2). The analytical simplifications in which postcolonialists have indulged are now banned in favour of a political analysis grounded in the history of the various countries (Chabal, 1997, 32, 51), and colonialism and postcolonialism, in particular as expressed in ‘third world literature’, are no longer seen as monolithic entities, as the attention is re-focussed on categories such as race and nation (Ranger, 1997, 274). According to Coopan, these two categories have actually become ‘dangerously peripheral to what many would see as the ‘real’ work of the field’ (Coopan, 2000, 7), but they are essential to an understanding of postcolonial situations such as the end of apartheid in South Africa, and provide new registers of expressions to the much acclaimed notion of hybridity which, as Loomba suggests, does not dilute the violence of the colonial encounter (Loomba, 1991, 172 – 3). Contrary to easy forms of textualisation – and the implication, recalling Derrida’s, that any context is simply another text – scholars now acknowledge that power is always situational. Any analysis is therefore increasingly spatio-temporally oriented, 275
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locating considerations about the inequality of power and control over resources, and focusing on their material consequences such as brutalisation, exploitation and genocide. This emphasis of postcolonial theory on specificity and historical analysis, in reality, reflects a more general tendency characterising recent developments in linguistics and translation studies. In these disciplines as well, in fact, we can observe increasing attention to the notion that each system is a system in itself, and that there exist various sub-systems characterised by specific aspects such as peculiar syntax and/or pronunciation. As in postcolonial studies, in linguistics and translation studies too, it is acknowledged that there no longer exists a single standard English, in that what was once known as English has now diversified into a series of micro-languages – comparable to the many englishes Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffith describe (1985, 8) – specific to a particular section of society, identified for example on the basis of class and origin. Hence, both on British soil and in the ex-colonies, these micro-languages have become determinant for the assertion of the specific identity of particular groups. This process, obviously becomes more relevant to the study of linguistic practices in postcolonial contexts, where the acknowledgments that a particular sub-system had the same rights to authority as any other sub-systems, meant the passage from a situation of colonisation (when the language of one system dominated over all other languages, relegating the other systems to the role of sub-cultures, the prefix ‘sub’ indicating here inferiority and oppression) to a situation of de-colonisation. It is precisely on the micro-languages which have become known as postcolonial englishes and the strategies translators have at their disposal when they are called to translate these nonstandard forms of English, that the remaining pages of this section focus. Because, as Barthes, Lacan et. al. have repeatedly suggested, any use of language always corresponds to an act of 276
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propaganda and an attempt to impose authority upon Others, translation studies scholars such as Tymoczo and Calzada-Perez have repeatedly pointed out the bearing ideology has on translation, especially in a postcolonial, globalised context. As Said’s insightful analyses have clearly demonstrated, no representation of culture – especially the culture of a colonised people – is ever innocent, neither in the original, nor in translation. Lawrence Venuti was actually one of the first scholars within the field of translation studies proper to emphasise the role of translation for the formation of cultural identity. In his work, he highlights the fact that translation has an enormous power in constructing foreign cultures for target readers, as they can, as often has been the case, create stereotypes which, rather than represent the foreign culture, actually reflect domestic values. Thus, as Schäffner claims, ‘Venuti complains that the fact of translation is erased by suppressing the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text’ (1995, 6). This is the reason why, according to Venuti, translation can shape domestic attitude towards foreign cultures. Indeed, as he sustains, Not only do translation projects construct uniquely domestic representations of foreign cultures, but since these projects address specific cultural constituencies, they are simultaneously engaged in the formation of domestic identities (1995, 17).
The notions referred to here, which were briefly introduced in previous chapters, are actually pivotal in Venuti’s work, whose distinction between ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignising’ translation strategies is by now famous and has assumed a fundamental importance in the field of postcoloniality. According to the scholar, in fact, translations ‘position readers in domestic intelligibilities that are also ideological positions’ (1995, 19). Yet, if translations may maintain existing social relations by making the foreign text utterly intelligible to the domestic reader, it can
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also bring about social change. Clearly, in order to elude ethnocentrism, a translation project must take into consideration the interests of more than those of a cultural constituency that occupies a dominant position in the domestic culture: A translation project must consider the culture where the foreign text originated and address various domestic constituencies [...] a nonethnocentric translation project thus alters the reproduction of dominant domestic ideologies and institutions that misrepresent foreign cultures and marginalises other domestic constituencies (1995, 23).
Not only this, but, as Venuti emphasises further down, A translation practice that is rigorously nonethnocentric would seem to be highly subversive of domestic ideologies and institutions. It, too, would form a cultural identity, but one that is simultaneously critical and contingent, constantly developing translations projects solely on the basis of changing assessments (ibid.).
Obviously, such attitude to translation is not without risk, and Venuti acknowledges the danger of unintelligibility and cultural marginality. ‘Yet’ he concludes, ‘since nonethnocentric translation promises a grater openness to cultural difference, whether they are located abroad or at home, they may well be worth the risk’ (ibid.). This practice might therefore result in a text in which the exotic element is either used by target-language users to construct source-language users as ‘Others’ (with all the implications this entails), or which is exploited by sourcelanguage users to affirm their identity and the legitimacy of their culture and their language. Thus, Gabriel Okara, in The Voice (1964), uses English as an extension of his Ijaw native language. The process through which Okara tries to render his mother tongue as literally as possible in the attempt to translate into English, almost word-for-word, distinctive idiomatic or 278
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metaphorical expressions of Ijaw, could therefore be identified as transliteration, a process in which calqued expressions play a fundamental role. Indeed, this practice enables the author to maintain many of the characteristics of the original language (using expressions which consist of target-language words and respect target-language syntax but are unidiomatic in the target language because modelled on the structure of a source-language expression), while adopting target-language conventions for the phonic and graphic representation of a source expression. In Okara’s opinion, in fact, it is essential to translate African folklore, imagination and philosophy almost literally into the European language the author happens to use, because a single African word, group of words or even a name, can express the social customs, the attitudes and the values of an entire country. In this case as well, then, translators should find a way to indicate that another language should be used in a particular segment of the text, adopting a suitable strategy in order not to betray the original text. This is the reason why I think that by translating literally some of the sentences with which Okara rendered some Ijaw expressions in English, Valerio Fissore, who translated Okara’s text into Italian, managed to maintain the flavour and the logic of the Ijaw language also in the Italian text. Clearly, if the meaning of a sentence such as ‘per il fatto che non sono andato a scuola io non ho bile, io non ho testa? Io niente so?’ (Okara, 1987, 27 – 8) is rendered comprehensible, if only intuitively, by the immediate co-text in which the expression ‘io non ho bile’ appears, and the further reference to that person’s alleged ignorance, a sentence like ‘dicevano: Okolo non ha torace. Non aveva un forte torace e non aveva ombra’ (Okara, 1987, 25) – which translates the original ‘Okolo had no chest, they said. His chest was not strong and he had no shadow’ (Okara, 1970, 23) – remains rather obscure both in Italian and in English.
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Obviously, writers themselves can resort to different strategies in order to make their texts more comprehensible and provide readers with a sort of ‘reading key’ to their work. For instance, Okara himself, in ‘African Speech...English Words’, which appeared in Transition in 1963, comments on the example given above, clarifying the mechanisms of his use of English: The equivalent [of the expression ‘he is timid’] in Ijaw is ‘he has no chest’ or ‘he has no shadow’. Now a person without a chest in the physical sense can only mean a human that does not exist. The idea becomes clearer in the second translation. A person who does not cast a shadow of course does not exist. All this means that a timid person is not fit to live (Okara, 1963, 16).
Since the language used becomes a fundamental component of these authors’ project as writers and, more fundamentally, as postcolonial subjects, it is obvious that philological approaches to translation – according to which what cannot be translated must be confined to silence – are therefore rejected as forms of cultural imperialism, in favour of a more creative approach, in which forms which are not part of the receptor system are developed to encode alternative experiences and the ‘Otherness’ inherent in the original text. Indeed, if translators really want to posit themselves as cultural mediators, they ought to make an effort to avoid the kind of standardisation of the language which stifles (yet again) the very cultures, languages and identities to which these works try to give a voice within Western discourse after years of silencing. Sentences such as You know teecha sometime we qurrel ‘mongst weself ya da dis village, but when important thing like death happen, everybody pitch in because that could happen to all ah we (Ellis, 1988, 22),
are clearly understandable in spite of grammatical irregularities such as ‘weself’ instead of ‘ourselves’, and the alterations in the spelling of words such as ‘teecha’, ‘qurrel’ ‘mongst’, ‘dis’, ‘ah’, which graphically reproduce the pronunciation of the people 280
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living in the Belizean rural communities Zoila Ellis depicts in her text. Yet, although the use of Creole does not make the text incomprehensible, and could thus be easily translated in standard forms, translators should nonetheless try and find a way of conveying the flavour that the particular orthography and grammatical constructions of the sentences convey. As Tymoczo underlines, ‘in obscuring or muting the cultural disjunctions [between source and target text], the translator ceases to be ‘faithful’ to the source text’ (Tymoczo, 1999, 21). Indeed, as Valerio Fissore states in his ‘Nota del traduttore’ to Gabriel Okara’s The Voice: una traduzione che non registrasse la diversità sistematica non risulterebbe che in una parafrasi [...] che snaturerebbe, con operazione colonialistica, la cultura dalla quale dicesse di tradurre e, infine, fallirebbe fondamentalmente l’obiettivo di accostare le due culture (Fissore, 1987, 17).
Consequently, by translating an utterance such as mummy, can you believe that everyone remembered me? And they said: ‘WAT-A-WAY-YU-GROW’ AND ‘HOW-IS-YUDAADIE’ AND ‘HOW-IS-YU-MAAMIE (Senior, 1987, 70),
with Mammina, ci credi che tutti si ricordavano di me? E continuavano a dirmi com’ero cresciuta e a chiedere come stava mio papà e come stava mia madre’ (quoted in Adele d’Arcangelo, 2003, 5),
Roberta Garbarini clearly prevents Italian readers from hearing the true voice of the Jamaican people which the author was determined to insert in her text. The translator thus perpetrates, albeit unconsciously, the kind of epistemic violence Spivak describes as part of the colonialist enterprise. Not only this, but even when writers seem to use standard English, translators should always question and further
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investigate the use of what appear to be standard forms, as authors might be using English as if it were another language. This is for instance the case of Raja Rao who, while writing in English, in Kanthapura tries to convey the rhythms of spoken Kannada (see for example Jussawala and Dasenbrock 1992, 154) and, in The Serpent and the Rope, tries ‘to adapt his style to the movement of a Sanskrit sentence’ (Nagarajan, in Mukherjee 1971, 38). Similarly, Anand claims that much of the English dialogue of his novel Untouchable (1940) should actually be in Punjabi or Hindustani, and also Achebe, as Riddy points out in his ‘Language as a Theme in No Longer at Ease’, while writing in English, indicates when conversational Igbo is supposed to be used by resorting to ‘a cadenced, proverb-laden style’ (Riddy, 1970, 39). Finally, as we have seen, Okara in The Voice (1964) uses English as an extension of his Ijaw language. By so doing, the author – who is simultaneously a translator – resorts to the strategy Malone defines as equation (1988, 15), using calques of the Ijaw language in English, that is expressions which consist of target language words and respect target language syntax but result unidiomatic in the target text. Authors have also at their disposal different linguistic levels which account for their comprehensibility, acceptability and, of course, translatability. For example Achebe, in A Man of the People (1966), resorts to standard pidgin: At that point my house-boy, a fifteen-year-old-rogue called Peter, came in to ask what he should cook for supper. ‘You no hear the news for three o’ clock?’ I asked, feigning great seriousness. ‘Sir?’ ‘Government done pass new law say na only two times a day person go de chop now. For morning and for afternoon. Finish’ He laughed (Achebe, 1988, 20-1)
As a result, the brief dialogue between the two characters is fairly easily understandable despite the omission of the auxiliary verb 282
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in the interrogative form (‘you no hear’); both definite and indefinite articles (‘government’ and ‘person’; ‘new law’); relative pronouns (‘law say’); the marker of third person singular (‘say’). The text results comprehensible also despite the use of the preposition ‘for’, which replaces both ‘at’ (‘for three o’ clock’) and ‘in’ (‘for morning’ and ‘for afternoon’); the formation of the past tense with a past participle followed by an infinitive without to (‘done pass’), instead of the standard auxiliary + past participle; the anticipation of the temporal expression (‘only two times a day’); the spelling variation of ‘de’; and the use of the expression ‘go de chop’. The only real challenge is actually posited by the last expression ‘go de chop’, which, however, the immediate co-text makes comprehensible. Thus, although Marco Grampa might have emphasised more some of the non-standard features of the original and rendered ‘news’ and the verb ‘done pass’ more precisely, the meaning is more or less conveyed in the Italian text: In quel momento il mio cameriere, un ragazzaccio di quindici anni di nome Peter, entrò a chiedere che cosa doveva cucinare per cena. ‘Non hai sentito la notizia alle tre?’ chiesi, fingendo la massima serietà. ‘Signore?’ ‘Il governo ha fatto una legge che dice che d’ora in avanti bisogna mangiare solo due volte al giorno. Mattino e pomeriggio. E basta.’ Scoppiò a ridere (Achebe, 1994, 31).
In a similar way to Achebe, Sam Selvon, in his Lonely Londoners (1956), uses not pure Creole, which would have certainly resulted obscure and difficult to understand to most readers, but a modified dialect which might be more easily understood (Selvon, 1982, 60). Hence, the sentence ‘it have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to 283
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them, far more the street, or how other people living’ (Selvon, 1972, 58) appears immediately comprehensible despite the use of ‘it’ and the verb ‘to have’ (replacing ‘there’ followed by the verb ‘to be’, as in ‘there are’), and the omission of the auxiliary ‘to be’ with the progressive form38. In these cases, however, the risk is that translators who do not have a strong background in cultural studies and are not aware of the tradition on which the author is drawing, cannot see the problems and challenges posed by the text, being for example unable to recognise – let alone convey in their translations – rhythmic parallelism, the use of pastiche or parody etc. This is the reason why the translation Adriana Motti produced of Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (published by Adelphi in 1983 as La mia vita nel bosco degli spiriti), is all the more valuable, as in the hands of this experienced and gifted translator, Italian words retain some of the expressive force which Tutuola conveys by drawing on Yoruba culture. As Itala Vivan notes in her ‘Nota’ to the Italian translation of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Tutuola actually draws on various features of Yoruba literary repertoire, in particular the folktale, the dilemma tale, the riddle, the proverb and the panegyric. Furthermore, the repetition of the leitmotif, the various epithets, and the dialogues, from which the interaction between the performer/conteur and his audience originates, are all characteristic of Yoruba oral tradition. The language Tutuola uses in his works, then, is a sort of English-Yoruba, an extremely innovative language rich of neologisms, calques and analogies, which while replicating the sounds of standard English, maintains the structures of the native language. This is, fundamentally, the process Rushdie would describe in his Imaginary Homelands, where he suggests that, by mastering
38
For a detailed discussion, see Talib (2002). 284
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the language of the former masters, the ex-colonies completed the process of making themselves free. It is precisely by briefly referring to Rushdie as an example of the migrant writer that I would like to bring this section to an end. Literature from the diaspora is actually achieving increasing relevance in our societies, and migrant writers are becoming fundamental elements in the constitution of the fairly recent socio-political and cultural reality we like to call black Britain. As mentioned above, it is specifically on the identity of the black sections of British society that cultural studies, under the impulse of Stuart Hall, has focused, thereby giving birth to what is now referred to as the discipline of Black Cultural Studies. Indeed, it was Hall who defended the need for a sustained attention to history, which also implied that when discussing postcolonial texts we should also avoid slipping into generalising and homogenising discourses about the Third World, another legacy of colonial discourse which is proving very hard to die out. All too often, in fact, postcolonial literature is addressed as a coherent and monolithic field, works are discussed without considering their local particularities and their mythical or religious background, and black subjects are amalgamated on the basis of their shared oppression and are thus once more brought into being as the indistinct crowd characteristic of much colonial writing. As Stuart Hall emphasises in ‘New Ethnicities’ – where he analyses the impact decolonisation has had on British society – it has now come the time to reject the notion of essential identity and put, in the place of a black essential subject (that is a subject identified on the basis of inescapable characteristics such as skin colour), the variety of ethnicities which he sees as constituting contemporary society. Migrant writers were in fact just a handful of the many immigrants who, just like those first West Indians who arrived in Britain under the Nationality Act in 1948, left their home 285
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country in order to reach the centre of the former Empire which, on the basis of the ambiguous colonial representations it projected, had become a sort of mythicised dream-land. Indeed, between December 1947 and October of the following year, more than 800 immigrant workers arrived in England from Jamaica, and hundreds of others arrived from Asia. As emerges from the literature and the cinema of the period (and the following decades), most of them concentrated in south London (Brixton) and in the north of England (Bradford). After the decade rendered famous by swinging London and pop-culture, towards the end of the 1960s British society was already giving signs of economic and social crisis, which would have worsened during the 1970s and the 1980s. Despite the fact that in 1967 the Labour Government tried to stop inflation, unemployment kept rising, and this of course rendered immigrants’ integration more difficult, nurturing feelings of racial intolerance and hatred. Indeed, 1966 is the year of the formation of the National Front, and it is precisely a personality from the extreme Right, Enoch Powell, who aroused the masses with his racist rhetoric based on the patriotic ideology founded on traditional values and which was directed against the Blacks and against the Welfare politics of state intervention. In the political elections of 1970, the Labour Party was defeated, and in 1971 the Race Relations Act, which forbade the immigration of other Black citizens, was approved. Throughout the decade – marked by a strong economic crisis (as exemplified by the great Miners’ Strikes of 1974), and by many fights between immigrants and police forces (most memorable are the disorders which took place on occasion of the carnival of Notting Hill Gate, London in 1976, 1977 and 1978) – the conservative government of Edward Heath (1970 – 74) was followed by the Labour government of Harold Wilson (1974 – 1976) and James Callaghan (1976 – 1979). It was in 1979 that, as a consequence of the political crisis the Left had been going though during the 286
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last few years and Callaghan’s inability to keep his promises of reducing inflation and to keep under control the social disorders which marked society, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister. Fervently endorsing traditional moral values, promoting a generalised racism and calling for a liberalisation of the market, Thatcher firmly encouraged strong individualism, with the consequence that Welfare provisions were drastically cut. The racial issue, so important in those years, was thus treated rather traumatically, and the result was the promulgation of the British Nationality Act of 1981, with which the right to British citizenship was denied to the children of immigrant couples (an exception was made in case one of the parents was British by birth). In his article ‘The New Empire within Britain’ (1982), Salman Rushdie harshly criticises this Act: This already notorious piece of legislation, expressly designed to deprive black and Asian Britons of their citizenship rights, went through in spite of some, mainly non-white, protests. And because it didn’t really affect the position of the whites, you probably didn’t even realize that one of your most ancient rights, a right you had possessed for nine hundred years, was being stolen from you. This was the right to citizenship by virtue of birh, the ius soli, or right of the soil. For nine centuries any child born on British soil was British. Automatically. By right. Not by permission of the State. The Nationality Act abolished the ius soli. From now on citizenship is the gift of government (1991).
The disorders of Brixton (London), Moss Side (Manchester) and Toxteth (Liverpool), constituted a reaction against this discriminating position of the government. But in 1988, a second Immigration Act intensified the controls on immigration. Despite all this, in 1983 Margaret Thatcher was re-elected, also thanks to the military victory in the Falklands war. Yet, during the following years, the situation did not improve, and the history of the country was marked by anti-police riots, the one 287
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year Miners’ Strike (which lasted from 10th March 1984 to 5th March 1985), and more pressing tensions with the IRA. However, because of the decrease of unemployment and lower taxes, in 1987 Thatcher was re-elected. During the following years, the infamous poll tax (according to which every adult citizen had to pay equal taxes for equal services, something which in 1990 caused violent revolts in London), the economic crisis caused by the reappearance of inflation and the crash of the Stock Market in 1989, the initial refusal to enter the European Union, the problems she experienced with teachers and physicians (caused by the Education Reform Act of 1988, which enacted a marked centralisation of education, now seen in purely utilitarian terms, and an Act involving the National Health Service in 1989), led Thatcher to resign. By that time, however, British society had been deeply marked by the experience, and both the conservative John Major (Prime Minister from 1990 to 1995) and the Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, while not changing its fundamental principles, would try to get Britain out the ideological and cultural fragmentation brought about by the authoritarian centralism of her government. Writing in the 1990s, then, Hall encouraged his readers to recognise the differences between cultures and accept the fact that cultures are not always mutually intelligible. After all, as Glissant stated in his ‘Introduction’ to Poétique du divers (1996), it is not always necessary to understand Others, certainly it is not even advisable to re-connect them to our image, but it is sufficient to acknowledge their existence and their differences. The differences Hall talked about, were the differences that had been deleted by the history of slavery and transportation common to all ‘Blacks’ which, this history being a translation, could not constitute a common origin. As Hall underlines in his ‘Cultural Identity and the Diaspora’, in fact, we cannot speak for 288
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long about one experience and one identity (the true, essential Caribbeanness), as the Caribbean’s uniqueness is constituted, precisely, by the raptures and the discontinuities which characterise individual experiences. It therefore appears obvious that the notion of cultural identity as a construction which Hall introduces in this essay, is shared by different groups which are now forced to face the same loss of identity, displacement and alienation that has characterised the Blacks’ experience under colonialism. It is not by chance, then, that Hall should symptomatically begin his ‘Minimal Selves’ by welcoming his (postmodern) audience to ‘migranthood’ and the sense of dispersion he has since long experienced, insisting that it is now necessary to recognise the extraordinary diversity of the subject positions, the social experiences, the cultural identities and the linguistic distinctiveness which compose the category ‘black’. In fact, whereas early post-independence writers tended to identify with nationalist causes and to endorse the need for communal solidarity, in the 1980s and the 1990s many writers’ geographic and cultural affiliations have become more divided and uncertain. The cosmopolitan rootlessness and the condition of migranthood and dispersal which developed in urban pockets at the time of modernism, has in a sense gone global. Novels link streets of London to ‘third world’ slums; narrative dialogues criss-cross registers high and low, and mix in variegated pidgins from around the world. What began as the creolisation of the English language has become a process of mass literary migration, transplantation and cross-fertilisation, a process that is changing the nature of what was once called English literature, language and, ultimately, society. In the 1990s, the generic postcolonial writer is more likely to be a cultural traveller, or an extra-territorial, than a national. Consequently, often retracing the biographical paths of their authors, literary works by, amongst others, Derek Walcott, 289
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Salman Rushdie, Jamaica Kincaid and Ben Okri, ramify across separate geographical, historical and cultural spaces. Relying on bricolage, pastiche and polyphonic techniques, authors search for symbols and patterns with which to explain the world on various levels of experience. In migrant writing, then, the cultural metamorphoses which first began at the time of colonisation, have impacted in the West. Indeed, the transplantation of names, the mixing of languages, the diversification of tastes which developed under Empire, amplified in the new polyglot colonial and postcolonial metropolis. As Naipaul notes in The Enigma of the Arrival, one of the early migrant novels where the author describes how his arrival in Wiltshire inexorably changed the landscape by his ‘being there’, the great movement of people characteristic of the last part of the twentieth century has changed the nature of cities like London forever. It is precisely this melange resulting from immigration – which basically mirrors the diversity of the former Empire – that has put under pressure the lasting remnants of old colonialist preconceptions. To an extent, then, migrant literature seems to serve the purposes of the postcolonial project. At the same time, however, it risks producing definitions of postcolonial literature as cosmopolitan, transplanted, multilingual and conversant with the cultural codes of the West. Because it represents a retreat by writers who, in front of what Fanon called the farce of national independence, decided to leave their postcolonial countries and seek refuge in less repressive places, migrant literature is marked by disillusionment. In this context, then, migrant literature may become part of a system dominated by the powerful cultural interests centred in the Western world, and is able to win readers because, though exotic, magical and Other, it also participates reassuringly in the aesthetic languages familiar to Anglo-American culture. As such, it may offer another instance of the appropriation by Europe and 290
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America of resources of the ‘third world’. The Western, neocolonial powers which retain economic and military control, are in fact also the countries in which migrant literature is given wide support, and this clearly keeps in place a cultural map of the world as divided between the richly gifted metropolis and the meagrely endowed margin, First and Third World. Furthermore, also within the field of postcolonial theory, the postmodernist, poststructuralist approach of many scholars such as Said, Spivak and Bhabha, while extremely useful in the elaboration of some of the experiences of the ex-colonies (for example in bringing to the foreground the relation between culture and imperialism, language and power, especially in the construction of human beings into sub-human Others), has simultaneously led to a flattening of the cultural idiosyncrasies of various societies, and while constituting a necessary first step, it risked engulfing postcolonialism within the Western, metropolitan theoretical debate. As San Juan Jr notes in his Beyond Postcolonial Theory (1998), postcolonial discourse generated in the ‘first world’ is increasingly seen as another product of capitalism, while the much celebrated notion of versatility is recognised as part of cultural imperialism. It is therefore increasingly felt that if on the one hand the poststructuralist notion of identity as a linguistic construct elaborated by Lacan, Barthes and others, the postmodernist end of the ‘grand narratives’ described by Lyotard, the notion of the perpetual deferral of meaning and of the hermeneutic delay postulated by Derrida and Barthes respectively, have been useful to elaborate in rather systematic ways some of the experiences of the once-colonised countries and their people, at the same time they have led many to ignore the fundamental differences between postcolonialism, postmodernism and poststructuralism. And yet, the writing of decolonisation – while sharing some of the characteristics of postmodern texts such as their fragmentary 291
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nature, the attention paid to the workings of power within discourse, the refusal of universal truths and the reliance on pastiche – is much more than postmodern disintegration. And if this is so, it is because literary works from the once-colonised countries are fundamentally different from postmodern texts from an ideological, political and thematic point of view. This is why we should always remember that various aspects such as heteroglossia or intertextuality, which characterise both postmodern and postcolonial texts, assume different meanings in the two productions, and become effective anti-colonial, subversive strategies in postcolonial literatures. For similar reasons, we should always remember that when we deal with postcoloniality, we are not simply dealing with linguistic constructs and texts. In the world of power and victimisation, of colonisation and persecution, where ideologies impact on the body, and bodies are tortured and minds deformed, where the ‘civilised’ ability to write imposes a cruel colonial writing on the bodies of the colonised, language and culture create in fact real oppression. Contrary to Lyotard’s claims, then, postcolonial literature brings to the foreground the notion that bodies are not simply names ‘for the family of idiolects’, just linguistic realities, but concrete entities, and that, as such, they are capable of suffering. In spite of the efforts made by Derrida’s disciples, in the hands of the most capable of these writers, postcolonial literature exposes the fact that the total rhetoricity and linguistic nature of man and his world are not reasonably defensible. Unquestionably, after structuralism and poststructuralism all meta-fictions have lost their epistemological innocence and were demonstrated to be, always, partially text. In spite of this, the postcolonial world as represented in literature, reminds us that the concreteness of the extra-textual reality cannot be eliminated simply by relegating everything to the status of a pure linguistic construct. In fact, if it is true that 292
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reality, in the very moment in which it is viewed, organised or described by the subject, is irremediably mediated by language, language itself is constantly, irreparably and necessarily contaminated by the extra-textual world. Hence, if it is true that, just as Saussure suggested, the meanings of language are determined by the relationships existing amongst the various elements within the linguistic system (that is by their difference), we cannot forget that these relationships can be only partially linguistic. Despite deconstructionists’ claims, words still refer to ‘things’, concrete referents, extra-linguistic realities which corrupt every aspect of language. Language, as Saussure himself acknowledged, is actually characterised by this inconvenient and persistent duality and the fact that it could never exist independently from what is ‘out there’, beyond mere linguistic and textual reality. The efforts made to negate any kind of relationship between linguistic signs and extra-textual reality, and to demonstrate that language (and, consequently, texts), can exist completely independently from things, should have therefore been regarded, from the very beginning, as illegitimate. And this is particularly true in relation to the discourse of history and of colonialism, a world where the oppression created by language is very real and where language, ideology and theoretical structures have concrete effects on bodies which cannot therefore be conceived simply as linguistic constructs. Even though Hayden White himself, the pioneer of American post-Saussurean historiography, tried from the very beginning to demonstrate how in reality history simply corresponds to a rewriting of history, he was not able to relegate the Holocaust and Auschwitz to the role of simple rhetorical construct. This, however, has been done on several occasions, and beginning from the assumption that history coincides with hermeneutics, that it is always and only interpretation, several revisionists have re-contextualised the Auschwitz phenomenon. By observing it in 293
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a larger context – or, as Deriddean deconstructionists would say, by displacing it – they have deprived it of its exceptionality and its importance, banalising it and turning it into an insignificant event in the larger course of human history. This, for example, is what Ernst Nolte does precisely with Auschwitz and Nazism in his article ‘Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will’, what Jean Baudrillard does with the Gulf War in ‘La guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu’, Hillis Miller with every war and revolution in ‘Open Letter to Jan Wiener’. Fundamentally, this is what Jean-François Lyotard does in Le Differend, and even though in this particular case the author refers to a banal experience such as a toothache, his line of thought obviously has very worrying consequences. It therefore seems that the incredible raging of poststructuralist, postmodernist and meta/inter-textual issues, has led to a puzzling disinterest in the physical person, assigning a privileged status to the individual as the subject of enunciation and ensemble of discourses. Too often critics have tried to sweep history under the carpet, eliminating the non-textual aspect of reality altogether from their criticism, hiding themselves behind the by-now clichéd expression ‘only the text matters’ (one of the unfortunate legacies of the New Criticism). However, we should never forget that although the discourse of History is always, precisely, discourse, this text necessarily refers to a concrete raw material, to a corporeality which doesn’t simply exist beyond, but also within the text, where it inevitably leaves an undeletable sign. It is precisely for this reason that when we read postcolonial texts, it becomes imperative to acknowledge the fact that we are interacting not only with texts and interpretative problems, but also with the real histories of real, physical people, and emphasise that although ideology, rhetoric and theory are language, when this language of authority is spoken by an entire class, nation or race, it gives origin to the concrete horrors 294
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witnessed by humanity throughout history. It was actually language, turned into a political weapon, that allowed the appearance of ‘civilised barbarisms’ such as fascism, nazism and apartheid. The language of propaganda thanks to which these regimes were able to impose their myths and mobilise the masses, was in fact a significant accomplice of the system’s blind power, not only because it taught ‘elected’ people to perceive other populations as sub-humans, but also because it helped to hide the horrors perpetrated. This is the reason why, in spite of the efforts made by various authors and critics, ‘postcolonial’ cannot and should not be understood as an extension of ‘poststructuralist’ or as a parallel to ‘postmodernist’. As briefly discussed above, the Lacanian concept of the Other, the deconstruction of the notion of absolute identity and the investigation of the role that power plays in any discourse, have obviously been very helpful to postcolonial studies. At the same time, however, by maintaining the absolute rhetoricity of the process which leads to the construction of the Other, poststructuralists seem to reduce every aspect of the individual to a simple ‘signifier’. The language on which European philosophy has constantly focused throughout the last decades, cannot in fact turn everything into a linguistic construct, in so far as, because of its duplicity, language always has concrete (most of the time traumatic) effects on reality, which implies that the imposition (or acquisition) of a linguistic identity always results in precise corporeal effects, turning the individual into either the oppressor or the oppressed. The ‘Other’, just as the ‘I’, might certainly be a dialectical position, but a dialectical position pregnant with material consequences which have repercussions on the individual and his/her body. By sustaining the absolute rhetoricity of reality and confining everything to the role of linguistic construct, then, these theories leave the purely linguistic/philosophical sphere and necessarily 295
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become strong political positions, in an attempt to justify, minimise or even delete altogether, historical aberrations founded on discriminatory practices. When discussing postcolonial literature, then, we should be aware of the fact that even authors such as Rushdie or Coetzee, who can clearly be defined as postmodernist, are first of all postcolonialists, their works stemming from the history and the cultural experiences of formerly colonised countries. For example, the allegorical novel Waiting for the Barbarians, by the South African J.M. Coetzee, which was harshly criticised by critics because of its alleged revulsion from history, in reality should be analysed within the South African context it originates from. Indeed, on closer reading it appears obvious that the novel’s denunciation of the Empire’s violence and the complicity between the language used by the system and the discrimination, the violence and the politics of injustice which it perpetrates, was inspired by the situation South Africa was witnessing in the years immediately previous to the publication of the novel, in particular the increasing militarisation, the extra-judicial executions of school children and routine forms of arbitrary arrest and detention which resulted from the Soweto uprising of 1976. This need for a sustained attention to history, also implies that when discussing postcolonial texts we should also avoid slipping into generalising and homogenising discourses about the Third World, another legacy of colonial discourse which is proving very hard to die out. As we have seen before, it is precisely this attitude which, according to Stuart Hall, should be fought against, and this is the reason why, in his opinion, a film like My Beautiful Laundrette, in which Hanif Kureishi refuses to represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained and sexually stabilised, that is always and only positive, is one of the most important films produced by a black writer in recent years. 296
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If there is to be a serious attempt to understand what it means to be British today and really understand Britain, with its mix of races and colours, inherited from the former Empire, then writing about it has to be complex. It can neither sentimentalise nor represent only one group as having the monopoly on one virtue (the good white subject and the bad black subject, as in colonial writing, or vice-versa). It is always Kureishi who, in The Buddha of Suburbia, gives very clear examples of the subversive force this hybridising tendency of black Britain can assume, and creates a very accurate image of ‘the contemporary British citizen’: a new breed, as Kureishi’s protagonist, Karim Amir, states. We can therefore see how Kureishi and other black British writers39 of second-generation such as Caryl Phillips, unlike writers of first generation, who even after decades spent in Britain still identified themselves on the basis of their place of birth, problematise the concept of identity. Indeed, although Kureishi and Caryl Phillips maintain that being identified as British politically important, in reality they emphasise how, nowadays, in a diasporic world such as the one they inhabit, the term ‘British’ lacks a real referent. The transnational reality they live in, characterised by mass communication, migration and decolonisation, can therefore be understood as an exemplification of that ‘hybrid Third Space’ described by Bhabha, and coincides with an attempt to disrupt the narratives
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of the dominant culture and to ‘reconfigure the concept of all cultural identities as fluid and heterogeneous’ (Williams, 1999). The diaspora in Britain, in addition, becomes also ‘a reminder and a remainder of its historical past’ (Mercer, 1994, 7), of the fact that Blacks are in Britain because British were in their countries of origin. But the diaspora in Britain does not simply coincide with colonisation in reverse, but with true hybridisation. It is precisely by writing about himself that Karim becomes an emblem of the hybrid self of the migrant writer, of any migrant who, by becoming the subject of his own discourse, by writing himself, writes about England, thereby transforming England into Britain. This is really Empire writing back, and during this process, migrants take hold of the power of representation originally held by imperial authorities – the power which, just by the colonisers’ gaze and their language could turn natives into Others – and by describing themselves, construct a new variety of British citizen. By crossing the water, migrants have been transported into a new culture, while their native culture travelled with them, thus becoming an essential part of the new brand of Britishness characteristic of black Britain. During their journey, migrants were somehow ‘translated’, and as such were able to re-elaborate the world through new metaphors, in order to create a new reality for themselves: the fictions or ‘imaginary homelands’ Rushdie describes. Hence, in spite of the 1968 speech ‘Rivers of Blood’ given by the racist leader Enoch Powell, the 1971 Immigration Act, the 1979 victory of the Tories under Thatcher’s leadership etc., during the 1980s, the 1990s and even more so in the new millennium, black Britain has acquired unquestionable visibility and asserted its artistic vitality thanks to writers such as Rushdie, Kureishi, Ben Okri and Caryl Phillips. With the New Labour government, under Blair’s leadership, devolution was granted to Scotland and Wales, thereby giving 298
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even more signs of a certain degree of fragmentation in the once compact front of the master culture, the Englishness of tradition as epitomised by Orwell’s speech ‘England your England’. As Kureishi observes, ‘it’s now the white British who have to learn that being British isn’t what it was’, and, as Hall underlines, this new Britishness, this new identity is always in process, which implies that the search for new meanings Kureishi’s character embarks on – eventually revealing the brutality of the experience that immigration implies and the rage it creates – can only lead to the recognition that the identity he is searching for, does not exist. This is why any attempt to posit postcolonial identity as an essential identity is doomed to failure; the only form of identity available to postcolonial subjects – whether they stay in their mother-countries or set off for the Western world – is in fact a hybrid identity, an expression of the fragmentation of culture their communities endured throughout history. Hybridity, then, which was once regarded as a source of shame, as for example, for the Coloured races in South Africa, now becomes a source of salvation, and rather than being conceived as a burden to be concealed or a sin to be expiated, in the new postcolonial world and the literature which tries to account for that world, it becomes a beauty to be exhibited. From what said in the previous pages, it appears clear that unless translators possess a particular linguistic sensibility in both source and target language, they will not necessarily find an adequate way of conveying in translation the magic and hypnotic qualities which in the original text might be expressed through syntactical and lexical repetition, the use of onomatopoeia and alliteration. As the example commented on supra implicitly demonstrates, for instance, in the translation of Kincaid’s The Autobiography of my Mother (1996), the only strategy the translator actually cannot avoid respecting is lexical repetition (‘the fishermen’, ‘my mother’, ‘contentment’). 299
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Occasionally, writers can actually provide readers with clues as to the meaning of certain words, concepts or references to local history or legends inserted in their texts. This is especially typical of first generation writers who felt the need to ‘explain’ their history and culture to Western readers in the attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ themselves in their eyes. For example, Mulk Raj Anand, while resorting to various Indian metaphors, generally explains, especially in his first novels, the meaning of the words and the cultural references he inserts into his texts. Indeed, to his own admission, Anand used to ‘employ footnotes and/or glossaries to explain certain terms’ (Prasaad, in Talib, 2007, 56). As their sense of identity grew stronger, however, many of these authors abandoned this practice, and in fact Anand himself adopts, in his later novels, a sterner line and does not provide an explicit explanation of the words and expressions he introduces in his text, an attitude which is confirmed by the author himself, who states: ‘while I used glossaries of Indian words with their translations, at the end of my novels, in the first few years, I have not offered these appendices for some years now’ (Anand, 1979, 36). Similar is the case of the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. In fact, although in his later novels Achebe (while still resorting to standard pidgin which, as previously highlighted, can be quite easily understood by Western readers), does not provide readers with explicit explanations of the words from his own language, in his first works he adopts a different strategy altogether. For example, in Things Fall Apart, Achebe explains the ritual of the kola (Achebe, 1988, 19), and makes it clear within the text that the word ‘harmattan’ refers to a wind from the Sahara. Similarly, he explains the meaning of the word agadi-nwayi and how it came to indicate a particular ‘medicine’: its most potent war-medicine was as old as the clan itself. Nobody knew how old. But on one point there was general agreement – the active principle in that medicine had been an 300
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old woman with one leg. In fact, the medicine itself was called agadi-nwayi, or old woman (Achebe, 1988, 24).
In addition, he immediately gives the translation into English of words such as ndichie (‘the elders’, ibid.), and obi (‘hut’, Achebe, 1988, 25), and explains that agbala, ‘was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title’ (ibid.). By so doing the author – who, as Walder rightly observes in his Post-Colonial Literatures in English clearly wanted to address both a local and an overseas audience (Walder, 1998, 11) – simplifies the reader’s (and, the translator being fundamentally identified with a reader, the translator’s) job, as the translator can simply rely on the author’s strategy and translate his/her explanation word for word, while leaving (perhaps in italics), the words and expressions in other languages as they appear in the original. And in fact, the words which appear in italics in the original text are left unaltered in translation, in so far as their meaning is clarified by the rest of the sentence. Thus, the translator, who on this occasion appears respectful of the author’s choices, renders the second extract as: Il suo incantesimo di guerra più potente era vecchio quanto il clan stesso. Nessuno sapeva quanto. Ma su un punto tutti erano d’accordo: il principio attivo di quell’incantesimo era stata una vecchia donna con una sola gamba. Infatti l’incantesimo stesso veniva chiamato agadi-nwayi, cioè vecchia donna (Achebe, 1994, 12).
The Italian text, equally proceeds by clarifying that the ndichie are ‘gli anziani’ (Achebe, 1994, 13), that obi is ‘la capanna’ (Achebe, 1994, 14), and that agbala ‘non era soltanto un altro modo di dire donna, ma poteva indicare anche un uomo che non aveva preso titoli’ (Achebe, 1994, 13). Hence, if the author him/herself adopts a strategy of either overt or covert cushioning, the translators’ job is clearly simplified. However, when no indication is supplied by the
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author as to the meaning or the cultural/historical referent of particular words or expressions, the translator him/herself has to adopt a particular strategy. For example, in her translation for Einaudi of J.M. Coetzee’s Youth, Franca Cavagnoli renders the word ‘burgher’, as ‘i grassi borghesi di Città del Capo’ (Coetzee, 2002, 6), thus subjecting it to a process of amplification. To a certain extent, the same kind of strategy is adopted by Ettore Capriolo, who in 1998 translated Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980). In this instance, the term ‘lime’ is kept in the Italian version as a lexical borrowing (Rushdie, 1998, 21). The term (which appears in a footnote in italics), thus gives an exotic flavour to the Italian text, without however providing a foreignising effect. By now, in fact, the term has acquired a place in the Italian vocabulary. In addition, because the translator felt it necessary to amplify the cultural borrowing he resorted to in the first place and give the Italian translation as well – ‘limetto’ (ibid.) – the expression ‘lime water’ is rendered totally familiar to the target audience. Unlike the example from Kincaid briefly commented on in the second section of this chapter, then, here the repetition of the original term, while resulting slightly redundant, does not fail to convey fundamental information, and as such it can certainly be judged effective. Sometimes, the translator, in order to act as a real cultural mediator, tries to reach a compromise between the author’s text and the potential readers, by inserting his/her own glossary or his/her notes. The first strategy is for example chosen by Fissore in his translation of Okara’s The Voice, where the terms whose meaning is given in the ‘Glossario’ – including the name of the protagonist Okolo, which is here related to the title of the book itself – are left within the text in their original form. Here are some of the definitions given in the glossary: Akara: focaccia di legumi Benikurukuru: dio dell’acqua degli Ijaw 302
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Foo foo: alimento preparato con yam, la patata dolce, pestata Okolo: la voce Yam: patata dolce (Okara, 1987, 21-2).
Alternatively, the translator might add a footnote or an endnote. This is for instance what Antonioli Cameroni does in her translation of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Here, not only does the translator renders the term ‘yam’ with ‘ignami’ (Achebe, 1994, 8), but she also adds a footnote in which she expands the swift translation provided in Okara’s La Voce40, and accurately explains that Gli ignami, sono piante erbacee volubili o lianose, a fiori minuscoli, con fusto ingrossato alla base in un rizoma tuberiforme. Originarie per lo più dei paesi tropicali e diffusamente coltivate a scopo alimentare, rappresentano un cibo nutriente e gustoso, che può essere considerato succedaneo delle patate (Achebe, 1994, 8).
Both these strategies are clearly respectful of the authors’ intentions, and as such constitute discreet domesticating strategies, enabling readers to experience the texts as intended by their authors, while providing them with the necessary help to understand the meaning of particular words41. 40
Having included ‘yam’ in his Glossary, throughout his translation of Okara’s text, Fissore however leaves the word in the original language, without italianicising it. As a result, readers are not reminded that they might find an explanation of the term in the initial Glossary. In this case, while still effective, the impact of the strategy adopted by the translator is therefore lessened. 41 Translators should however carefully maintain throughout the text a certain degree of consistency, identifying with precision their target audience. For instance, it is not at all clear why in Coetzee’s Gioventù, the translator felt it necessary to insert in her text a footnote that reads ‘Pac: Pan-Africanist Congress, partito antirazzista sudafricano nato nel 1959’ (Coetzee, 2002, 41), when immediately afterwards she refers to the Anc without further elucidating readers about its meaning (‘da una scissione dell’Anc e messo al bando, 303
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For obvious reasons, translators must understand every aspect of the text, study it in depth and be aware of the context it stemmed from. In particular, they should avoid stopping at the first meaning found in a dictionary, in order to avoid translations such as that produced by Maria Baiocchi, who in her translation of J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands translates ‘crow’ as corvo (2003, 97) even though it was obvious that it should have been rendered as ‘piede di porco’ or something similar: Klawer climbed into the back of the wagon and emerged with the six-pound box of rolled tobacco and a crow. He prised off the lid and slowly began cutting two-inch joints and passing them into the outstretched hands of the Hottentots (Coetzee, 1983, 69).
This translation would indeed be absurd even if we were not dealing with a South African author, as such translation contradicts all rules of coherence within the text and, if anything, might perpetuate Western processes of ‘otherisation’ of the native people of Africa (in this specific case the Hottentots, who apparently cannot think of a better tool to open a wooden box than the beak of a bird). This mistranslation therefore becomes a good example of the ludicrous effects to which a misapplication of the convergence strategy (Malone, 1988, 15) might lead, in so far as the term chosen in the target language from a potential range of alternatives, was the wrong one. Furthermore, because of the graphic resemblance of the English ‘crow’ and the Italian corvo, this mistranslation might
assieme all’Anc, nel 1960’, ibid.)]. Another problematic issue is represented by the way some of the book titles Coetzee originally inserted in his text are rendered in translation. Occasionally, these titles are translated – as in ‘Sonetti a Orfeo di Rilke’ (Coetzee, 2002, 55); ‘Il buon soldato’ (Coetzee, 2002, 56), ‘La duchessa di Amalfi’ (Coetzee, 2002, 139) or Ulisse – whereas at other times they are left in the original, as with ‘Jude the Obscure’ (Coetzee, 2002, 162). 304
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also be understood as an example of the importance, for translators, to be aware of false-cognates and, as in this case, partial cognates. Indeed, if this is generally speaking true in standard English, it becomes even more relevant in the case of postcolonial texts, where the same words or expressions we find in English, might be used with a different meaning. For instance, whereas in standard English ‘mammy’ indicates either an affectionate appellation for ‘mother’ (translatable perhaps as mammina), or, with an offensive connotation, a black woman who takes care of white children, in postcolonial english it refers to ‘una sirena che affascina gli esseri umani, provocandone la morte per acqua’ (Okara, 1987, 20). Similarly, as Tymoczo observes, Ngugi wa Thiong’o ‘uses the term ridge in a non-standard sense to refer to villages and their territory, [and] his use of the English taste is also nonstandard: ‘Did he himself taste other women, like Dr Lynd?’ (A Grain of Wheat, p. 157)’ (Tymoczo, 1999, 26). Very often, however, authors themselves, in a similar way to the way of proceeding of Anand mentioned above, might resort to footnotes – like the South African Essop Patel, who stated that he would ‘not have a glossary, but explanatory notes relevant to history’ (Patel, 1992, 171) – or explain the non-English words in a glossary. This is for example the case of Rushdie who, while adopting a strategy similar to Achebe’s and using repeatedly the expression ‘Khattam-shud’ in association with other expressions such as ‘finito’, thus making its meaning clear (Rushdie, 1990, 53), in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) also compiles a list of names derived from Hindustani words: Batcheat is from ‘baat-cheet’, that is, ‘chit-chat’. Bolo comes from the verb ‘bolna’, to speak. ‘Bolo’ is the imperative: ‘Speak!’ Chup (pronounce the ‘u’ like the ‘oo’ in ‘good’) means ‘quiet’; ‘Chupwala’ means something like ‘quiet fellow’ [...]
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Haroun and Rashid are both named after the legendary Caliph of Baghdad, Haroun al-rashid, who features in many Arabian Nights tales. Their surname, Khalifa, actually means ‘Caliph’[...] (Rushdie, 1990, 217-8).
3.4.4. Translating First Names As readers and translators, however, we should always bear in mind that the names of the various characters depicted in a text, generally speaking are not simple names, but contribute to the meaning of the text by saying something about their personality. In order to understand this characterisation, then, the reader (both in the source and the target text) must understand the referents of the names themselves. I therefore agree with Taylor when he claims, in his Language to Language, that only naïve translators think that proper names are the easiest lexical items to be translated (Taylor, 1998, 53). As the example above shows, names often become dense knots of the text, where various linguistic, historical and cultural references cross, and must therefore be translated accordingly. Generally speaking, when dealing with names, translators can for example maintain the name unchanged as it appears in the source text. This is what Viezzi refers to as report (2004, 71), and it implies that the translator opting for this strategy or zero-translation should be aware of the difficulties readers might encounter in terms of pronounceability and spelling. In addition, this strategy might involve a great loss, in that the references activated by the original term are bound to remain unidentified by readers of the target text. Generally speaking, this is the strategy adopted when names appear for example in the title of a novel or a film. In this case, we talk about literal transfer42, namely the sort of non42
Amongst the other strategies translators have at their disposal when translating titles, we mention: faithful transfer (that is a literal translation, as 306
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translation we usually have when the title presents a person’s name or a toponym (‘Notting Hill’ or ‘Oliver Twist’)43. Another option the translator has at his/her disposal when s/he called to translate proper names, however, is to take over the name as it appears in the source language, while adding some explanation of the author’s choice of that particular name. In this case, the translator might resort to a strategy of ‘amplification’, that is the addition of some element to the source text for reasons of greater comprehensibility, either in the form of a note or of a bracketed addition. Generally speaking, amplification is required where the source language takes for granted certain with ‘Interview with the Vampire’/‘Intervista col Vampiro’; or ‘Devil Wears Prada’/‘Il Diavolo veste Prada’ (when adopting this strategy, however, we should be aware of false friends in order to avoid translating, for example, ‘Hidden Agenda’ with ‘L’agenda nascosta’. In addition, translators should always be aware of the cultural context of the source text, which could give a particular emotive charge to particular words, as with ‘Born on the Fourth of July’, translated as ‘Nato il 4 luglio’). Translators could also opt for a partial transfer, that is a partial translation which introduces some changes so as to specify particular aspects of the film (‘Broken Arrow’/‘Nome in codice: Broken Arrow’; ‘Cold Mountain’/‘Ritorno a Cold Mountain’; ‘The Virgin Suicides’/‘Il giardino delle vergini suicide’); change the emphasis of the source language title (‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’/‘Il talento di Mr. Ripley’; ‘Difty First Dates’/‘Cinquanta volte il primo bacio’) or omit irrelevant elements (‘The Getaway/‘Getaway’). Translators could also adopt a strategy of recreation or adaptation, thus creating a new on the basis of the narrative (‘Stepmom’/‘Nemiche amiche’; ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’/‘Se mi lasci ti cancello’, where the reference to the quotation by Alexander Pope (1717) is lost and the general atmosphere and style of the title/film is lost. 43 Sometimes, in order to render a title more comprehensible and/or alluring for target receivers, a subtitle can be created as to give a sort of explanation of the original title. For example, the title ‘Nixon’, is rendered in Italian as ‘Gli intrighi del potere – Nixon’, where we find first the Italian subtitle and then a non-translation of the original title. On the contrary, in such examples as ‘Dante’s Peak – La Furia della montagna’; ‘Armageddon – Giudizio finale’ or ‘Gli Incredibili – una “normale” famiglia di supereroi’, we find the original title at the very beginning, followed by a subtitle in Italian. 307
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components, but this strategy is clearly rendered redundant in those texts where, as in the example above, the author him/herself gives an explanation of his/her choices. Alternatively, the translator might decide to transliterate the name, that is to adapt the name so as to make it conform to the phonic and graphic conventions of the target language. In this case, the translator resorts to a special case of equation, which bears some resemblance to the calque, in that the source language word is adapted to the target language conventions. Translators could also decide to translate the name literally, resorting when possible to standard target language equivalent. In this case too, translators resort to a strategy of equation. Finally, translators might replace a name altogether with a different name which could however work in the target language. In this case, the translator resorts to the antithetical strategy to ‘equation’ and uses substitution instead. Obviously, because in postcolonial texts names often correspond to English translations or transliterations of names originally intended in another language, translators who are called to render these names for example in Italian, are required to investigate the references and the meanings implied by the original names, before they were inserted in an English text. This general indication, however, holds true whenever translators are called to translate proper names. Indeed, the issue of proper names can become fundamental also when approaching products meant for children and/or teenagers, from Winnie-the-Pooh to Harry Potter and a whole series of comics and animation films. It is obvious that in a text such as Winnie-the-Pooh the difficulties in the translation of names are minimal, as the names of the various characters simply indicate the animal they want to
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represent in the story44. On the contrary, in the novels by Rowling, the names of the various characters confer particular characteristics and therefore become tools the author exploits to identify them and create the magic world of Harry Potter. For example, the name of Hogwarts’ headmaster, ‘Albus Dumbledore’, in Rowling’s novels clearly suggests both the whiteness of his hair and long beard and the purity of his spirit (equated, in an archetypical division between good and evil, with the former). In her translation of this Christian name, the Italian translator adopts a zero-translation and, probably in consideration of the Latin origin of the name, she leaves it unaltered45. In her translation of the magician’s surname, however, the translator focuses on the word ‘dumb’ and translates the whole surname as Silente, without considering that ‘Dumbledore’ could, as Colbert maintains (2001, 182), also refer to the word ‘bumblebee’. The magician’s surname, then, hints at the fact that the character likes to sing to himself softly, thereby producing a constant noise similar to the buzzing noise of the insect his name refers to. Thus, the linguistic translation the translator opts for, that is the partial transference of the word we find in the source text, albeit justified by the fact that Albus is, in fact, rather quiet and does not like to make a show of
44
And yet, the translation is not completely satisfactory. For example ‘Piglet’ is translated as Pimpi, therefore obliterating the reference to the animal itself, which is not even immediately retrievable from the illustrations within the text. This is also what happens with ‘Rabbit’ (substituted in the Italian version with Tappo), and ‘Owl’, translated as Uffa, thereby adding a meaning which was left implicit in the source text. 45 This strategy of non-translation is also adopted in the case of ‘Draco Malfoy’, whose surname, of Latin origin, immediately suggests the French mal foi and the Italian mala fede. Similarly, the first name Draco is immediately associated with the noun drago and the adjective draconiano, thereby giving an adequate indication of the character’s personality. 309
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himself, communicates something different about his personality to target receivers. A similar strategy is adopted in the case of ‘Professor Sprout’, whose name, in the source text, recalls her teaching field, namely botany. In the Italian translation, however, Professoressa Sprite does not hint at any particular field. To this translation loss, however, there corresponds a translation gain for the target reader, in that, as Viezzi emphasises, not only is the name very familiar to the Italian audience, but also, thanks to its relationship with a fizzy drink, suggests the effervescent personality of this teacher. A strategy of equation is on the contrary applied, with good final results, in the translation of ‘Boot Terry’, a name which becomes Steeval Terry thanks to an orthographic adaptation of the Italian word so as to suggest the British context that works as a setting for the events described in the novels. Finally, we mention the two young men who act as Malfoy’s body-guards: ‘Gregory Goyle’ (whose name recalls the mythological figures of the gargoyles and is left unaltered in the Italian text) and ‘Vincent Crabbe’, translated in the Italian version adopting a strategy of substitution as Vincent Tiger. Besides the issues related to the translator’s choice to produce a translation which is still inserted within a British context (and language), by substituting the noun ‘crab’ with ‘tiger’ the translator has clearly added a coefficient of brutality and violence absent in the source text. It is precisely the same word, ‘Crab’, that makes its appearance in the name of a character from another text, the famous American comics The Simpsons. In this series, in fact, one of Bart’s teachers is called ‘Mrs Krabappel’, a name which hints at her nature and the fact that she likes to tease her students, Bart in particular. The reference to the animal, then, is significant and meaningful. In the Italian version of the series, however, the very same teacher is called Caprapal, which not 310
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only cannot add the secondary meaning implied by the connotative use of ‘crab’ we have in the source text, but by substituting the animal with another, very different animal such as capra, connotates Bart’s teacher as someone particularly stubborn and uneducated. The target receiver of the Italian product, then, meets a different teacher that s/he cannot appreciate in full, as her ironic and sarcastic comments might be considered an expression of her ignorance and inability to understand, rather than a subtle and witty attitude towards the people who surround her. Similarly, by substituting the name ‘Moe’ with Boe, the translator changes the emphasis of the source text. In the source text, in fact, the name of this particular character is meant to corroborate his personality and his tendency to ‘moan’ all the time. In the translated version, on the contrary, Boe, recalling the Italian boh, implies the character’s disinterest in his surroundings and his ignorance46. From the few examples introduced above, I hope it appears clear that this sort of linguistic game is very often at the very basis of the choice of a character’s proper name. Paramount, in this sense, is the case of Asterix, the French comic series written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo and 46
Clearly enough, sometimes the strategy of substitution is selected in order to avoid cultural problems of reference. This is for example the case with the sentence uttered by Lisa while she is talking to Barth and states: ‘I think you need Skinner [...] Sherlock Holmes had his Dr Moriatry, Mountain Dew has its Mellow Yellow, even Meggie has that baby with the one eyebrow’, which where translated as ‘Credo tu abbia bisogno di Skinner [...] Sherlock Holmes aveva il suo Dottor Moriatry, Beep Beep ha il suo Willy il Coyote, anche Maggie ha quel bebè con un unico sopracciglio’, where Mountain Dew and Mellow Yellow (two soft drinks hardly known in Italy) are substituted with a more famous couple of ‘enemies’ from cartoons. Similarly, the reference to Elliott Gould in Marge’s sentence ‘I wouldn’t go if you were Elliott Gould’ is substituted with a reference to an actor who, while being foreign, is well known in Italy as well, and the sentence is translated as ‘Non verrei al ballo con te neanche se fossi Sean Connery’. 311
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translated into some of the main languages of the world. The discussion of the strategies adopted by the authors of this comic strip in the source language also rises many cultural issues which, naturally, become fundamental whenever the product is translated. For example, in the episode Asterix chex les Bretons we can see how the author marks, both linguistically and culturally, the British characters, an aspect which Enrico Martines analyses in an exhaustive way in his ‘S.P.Q.T.! (Those Translators Are Fool!) ’ which appears in the Appendix.
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Conclusions
All through this book, the emphasis has been laid on the fundamental notions at the very basis of discourse analysis and translation theory. However, as anticipated in the opening section, because of the introductory nature of this volume many discussions have not received adequate treatment. In spite of this, I hope the path delineated by An Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies, the attempted systematisation of all the information introduced in the three main chapters and the many examples of analysis provided – in particular the paper by Enrico Martines on the translation strategies adopted in the Italian and British versions of Asterix – will prove useful. As with the remaining of the book, the bibliography section is divided into different categories, covering the main areas taken into consideration within each chapter of this volume. This was done in an attempt to make readers’ consultation easier, even though it proved rather difficult. If this is so, it is because categories very often overlap and texts which might be categorised under one heading, in actual fact might make their appearance also under a different category. In spite of this, I hope the many references supplied in this section, might prove useful, stimulate readers’ interest and suggest possible areas of further analysis.
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Bibliography
On Interlinguistic and Cultural Translation Adler, N. J. 1991. International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior, CA, Wadsworth Publishing. Baker, M. 1992. In Other Words, London and New York, Routledge. Bassnet, S. 1991. Translation Studies, London, Routledge. Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York, Ballantine Books. Bell, R. 1991. Translation and Translating, Harlow, Longman. Benjamin, W. 1969. ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, New York, Schocken Books. Biber, D. 1995. Dimensions of Register Variation: A CrossLinguistic Comparison, Cambridge, Cambridge UP. Biber, D., Conrad, S., and Cortes, V. 2004. ‘If you look at...: Lexical Bundles in University Teaching and Textbooks’, Applied Linguistics, 25. Boas, F. 1940. Race, Language and Culture, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Boase-Beier, J. and Holman, M. (eds). 1999. The Practices of Literary Translation, Manchester, St. Jerome Publishing. Brake et al. 1995. The Guide to Cross-Cultural Success, IL, Burr Ridge. Brennan, T. 1997. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge and London, Harvard UP. Browne, V. and Natali, G. 1989. Bugs and Bugbears: dizionario delle insidie e dei tranelli nelle traduzioni fra inglese e italiano, Bologna, Zanichelli.
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____ 1995. More and More False Friends, Bugs & Bugbears: dizionario di ambigue affinità e tranelli nella traduzione fra inglese e italiano, Bologna, Zanichelli. Campbell, C. 1998. ‘Rhetorical Ethos: A Bridge between HighContext and Low-Context Cultures?’, in Niemeier, S., Campell, C. and Driven, R. (eds.). 1998. The Cultural Context in Business Communication, Philadelphia, John Benjamins. Canepari, M. 2008. ‘Think Global, Act Local: traduzione e pubblicità nell’era della globalizzazione’, Il traduttore visibile, vol. 3, Parma, Mup editore. Davis, K. 2001. Deconstruction and Translation, Manchester, St. Jerome Publishing. Duff, A. 1992. Translation, Oxford, Oxford UP. Eco, U. 1995. ‘Riflessioni teorico-pratiche sulla traduzione’, in S. Nergaard (ed.). 1995, Teorie contemporanee della traduzione, Milano, Bompiani. ____ 2003. Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione, Milano, Bompiani. Even-Zohar, I. 1987. ‘La posizione della letteratura tradotta all’interno del polisistema letterario’, in S. Nergaard (ed.). 1995. Teorie contemporanee della traduzione, Milano, Bompiani. ____ 1990. ‘Polysystem Studies’, Poetics Today, 11, 1, special issue. Ewbank, I.S. 2003. ‘Open to Encounters’: Some Thoughts on Translation as Criticism and Creation’, Kunapipi, 25, 1. Fruttero and Lucentini. 2003. I ferri del mestiere, Torino, Einaudi. Garzone, G. 2002. ‘The cultural turn: traduttologia, interculturalità e mediazione linguistica’, Culture, 16. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, Basic Books. Giambagli, A. 1992. ‘Un aspetto particolare della traduzione tecnica: la traduzione presso la Comunità Europea. Studio di un caso’, Rivista internazionale di tecnica della traduzione. 316
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Gran, L. and Taylor, C. (eds.). 1990. Aspects of Applied and Experimental Research on Conference Interpretation, Udine, Campanotto Editore. Guidère, M. 2001. ‘Translation Practices in International Advertising’, Translation Journal, 5,1. Hall, E.T. 1959. The Silent Language, New York, Doubleday, 1984. ____ 1976. Beyond Culture, New York, Doubleday, 1989. ____ 1982. The Hidden Dimension, New York, Doubleday. Hatim, B. and Mason, I. 1990. Discourse and the Translator, Harlow, Longman. ____ 1997. The Translator as Communicator, London, Routledge. Hermans, T. (ed.). 1985. The Manipulation of Literature, New York, St. Martin’s Press. ____ 1995. Translation Studies and Beyond, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins. ____ 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Amsterdam, John Benjamins. Hofstede, G. 1991. Cultures and Organisations, Software of the Mind: Intercultural Cooperation and its Importance for Survival, London, McGraw-Hill. Hoggart, R. 1957. The Uses of Literacy, USA, Transaction Publishers, 1997. Holmes, J.S. 1972. ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’, in J.S. Homes. 1988. Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, 2nd ed., Amsterdam, Rodopi. House, J. 1981. A Model for Translation Quality Assessment, Tübingen, Gunter Narr. Verlag. ____ 1997. Translation Quality Assessment: A Model Revisited, Tübingen, Gunter Narr. Huckin, T. and Olsen, L. 1983. English for Science and Technology – A Handbook for Non-Native Speakers, New York, McGraze-Hill. 317
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Hurbin, P. 1972. ‘Peut-On traduire la langue de la publicité?’, Babel, 18,3. Hyde, G. 1981. D.H. Lawrence and the Art of Translation, London, Macmillan. Hymes, D. 1972. ‘Models of Interaction of Language and Social Life’, in J.J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds). 1972. Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication, New York, Holt, Rhinehart and Winston. Katan, D. 1999. Translating Cultures – An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators, Manchester, St. Jerome Publishing. Kramsch, C. 1993. Context and Culture in Language Teaching, Oxford, Oxford UP. Kroeber, A.AL. and Kluckhohn, C. 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, Harvard University Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology Papers. Larson, M. 1984. Meaning Based Translation: a Guide to CrossLanguage Equivalence, Lanham MD, University Press of America. Lefevere, A. 1975. Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint, Amsterdam, Van Gorcum & Co. ____1992. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, London and New York, Routledge. ____1992. Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context, New York, Modern Language Association. Lèvi-Strauss, C. 1949. Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, Paris, Plon. ____ 1958. Structural Anthropology, New York, Basic Books. Translated by C. Jacobson and B. Grunfest Schoepf, 1963. Original title: Anthropologie Structurale. Lewis, B. et. al. 2002. Translation and Multiculturalism, Manchester, St. Jerome Publishing. 318
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Lombardo, L. 1999. ‘Advertising as Motivated Discourse’, in Massed Media, Milano, Led. Malinowski, B. 1923. ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, in C.K. Odgen and I.A. Richards (eds). 1946. The Meaning of Meaning, London, Kegan Paul. Malone, J.L. 1988. The Science of Linguistics in the Art of Translation, Albany, State University of New York Press. Mead, R. 1990. Cross-Cultural Management Communication, Chichester, John Wiley and Sons. ____ 1994. International Management, London, Blackwell. Mattelart, A. 1989. L’internationale publicitaire, Paris, Découverte. Minsky, M. 1975. ‘A Framework for Representing Knowledge’, in Winston, P. 1975. The Psychology of Computer Vision, New York, McGraw-Hill. Newmark, P. 1981. Approaches to Translation, Oxford, Pergamon Press. ____1988. A Textbook on Translation, London, Prentice Hall. ____1993. Paragraphs on Translation, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters. Nida, E.A. 1964. Towards a Science of Translation, Leiden, Brill. ____ 1996. The Sociolinguistics of Interlingual Communication, Brussels, du Hazard. Niemeier, S. 1998. ‘Introduction’, in Niemeier, S., Campell, C. and Driven, R. (eds). 1998. The Cultural Context in Business Communication, Philadelphia, John Benjamins. Niranjana, T. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context, Berkley, University of California Press. Pörings, R. 1998. ‘Harmonious Cooperation in an English – German Intercultural Business Negotiation’, in Niemeier, S., Campell, C. and Driven, R. (eds). 1998. The Cultural Context in Business Communication, Philadelphia, John Benjamins.
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352
Appendix S.P.Q.T.! (Those Translators Are Fool!) Translation Problems in the Asterix Comics 1
The aim of this work is to point out some specific problems in the translation of the French-Belgian comic series of Asterix. After some preliminary remarks on the characteristics of comics as a paraliterary kind of fiction, which integrates in one system of communication both a visual and a verbal code, the attention briefly focuses on puns, a linguistic feature that constitutes a fundamental element of humour in comic books in general, and particularly in Asterix, therefore being the main problem faced by translators in their task of transferring the original message not only into a new language, but also into a new cultural system. The subject of this short study is a comic series of thirty-four albums translated from the original French into over one hundred languages. We will focus our attention on the work of English translators of Asterix, initially drawing a brief history of Asterix’s introduction into the United Kingdom and the USA and of its rendition into the language of Shakespeare, then highlighting the major difficulties with which translators are confronted in this specific case and the solutions they have found. The direct testimony of Anthea Bell and Dereck Hockridge will be helpful to make us understand the real nature of their job.
1
Adapted from the Italian rendition of Obelix’s famous catchphrase ‘Ils sont fous ces romains’, which is obviously translated as ‘Sono Pazzi Questi Romani’ (see infra). In this case the initialism stands for: ‘Sono Pazzi Questi Traduttori!’, meaning ‘Those Translators are Fool!’. 353
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Translators and Asterix have something in common: if translating means making the meeting of different languages and cultures possible, our hero often comes across foreign people and deals with foreign languages and habits. In fact, many of the stories created by Goscinny and Uderzo are set outside Gallic territory. The foreign characters met by Asterix and Obelix during their frequent journeys, in 50 BC, are comically defined by the reproduction of stereotypes normally attributed to their modern descendants. Language is one of the cultural elements explored by the authors so as to create comic effect. Foreign characters speak, in the original French, with a foreign accent and this has to be recreated in translation. Perhaps, the most brilliant example of a comic use of language and cultural stereotypes in the characterisation of foreign people is represented by the Asterix in Britain album: the final part of this work will thus be dedicated to the analysis of the additional challenge faced by English translators (both British and American) when they had to replicate a British ‘foreign’ accent into their particular target language. The solutions they opted for will be compared to the French of the original and to the work of the Italian translators. Comics as a Paraliterary Genre: Distinctive Features ‘Paraliterature’ is a definition that includes a number of different literary genres, such as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, pulp fiction, detective stories, even photo stories and comic books2. 2
See Nardin, Giorgia, La traduction italienne d’Astérix: à la recherche d’une possible équivalence, Tesi di Laurea Specialistica in Lingue straniere per la comunicazione internazionale, Università degli Studi di Padova, pp. 17-18. In this article we use a different system of bibliographic reference: since the bibliography is mostly consisting of internet pages, many of them without author and year of publication, the Author-Year system adopted in the rest of the volume is not very helpful, so a footnote style of reference is preferred. 354
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The term is used to label all those genres which are not generally considered as ‘literary fiction’ by mainstream literary standards and conveyed by mass media. Therefore, paraliterature is defined as something that is opposed to literature. Its characteristics are not found in the set of values that allows to identify a work of art as literary. Paraliterature is about the expression of a different dimension of writing, one connected with pure entertainment and leisure time; hence, it is strictly linked with the system and the ideology of an advanced industrial society. Comics are a particular type of paraliterature, since the stories are told in a progressive sequence of cartoons, in which the authors add elements of phonetic writing. Consequently, in comic books we find the combination of verbal and iconic elements. This kind of joint expression is a popular and widespread phenomenon, because any reader can understand the story, thanks to the communicative effectiveness of the images. Though newspapers and magazines first established and popularised comics in the late 1890s, narrative illustration has existed for many centuries, a clear and illustrious example of this being the Trajan Column3. In spite of this, it was only in the 19th century that the modern model of comics began to take form among European and American artists. Comics as a real mass medium started to emerge in the United States in the early 20th century with the newspaper comic strip, where its form began to be standardised (image-driven, speech balloons etc). Comic strips were soon gathered into cheap booklets and reprinted as comic books. Original comic books soon followed. Today, comics are found in newspapers, magazines, comic books, graphic novels and on the web. 3
See Comics, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics, last accessed 1 April 2010. st
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Comics are part of the cultural, intellectual and affective system of many of us. There is a huge variety of comics, destined to all types of public, from children to adults. Historically, the form dealt with humorous subject matter, but its scope has expanded to encompass the full range of literary genres. Comics are drawn and written to entertain, to provide amusement, to tell stories of any kind, to make people think, to satirize and so on. Comic stories are very varied but all in all they share a similar structure: they may differ in the set and in secondary elements but they have the same framework; the impression of novelty comes from the plot and from the diegetic organisation. Some interesting reflections on the definition and the nature of comics are available on Wikipedia’s specific web page4: Scholars disagree on the definition of comics; some claim its printed format is crucial, some emphasise the interdependence of image and text, and others its sequential nature. The term as a reference to the medium has also been disputed. In 1996, Will Eisner published Graphic Storytelling, in which he defined comics as ‘the printed arrangement of art and balloons in sequence, particularly in comic books’.5 Eisner’s earlier, more influential definition from 1985’s Comics and Sequential Art described the technique and structure of comics as sequential art, ‘...the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea’.6 In Understanding Comics (1993) Scott McCloud defined sequential art and comics as: ‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer’;7 this definition excludes single-panel illustrations such as The Far Side, Zanzibear, The Family Circus, and most
4
Ibidem. Eisner, Will, Graphic Storytelling, Poorhouse Press, 1996. 6 Eisner, Will, Comics & Sequential Art, Poorhouse Press, 1990 (Expanded Edition, reprinted 2001). 7 McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics, Harper, 1994, p. 7-9. 5
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political cartoons from the category, classifying those as cartoons. By contrast, The Comics Journal’s ‘100 Best Comics of the 20th Century’,8 included the works of several single panel cartoonists and a caricaturist, and academic study of comics has included political cartoons. R. C. Harvey, in his essay Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image, offered a competing definition in reference to McCloud’s: ‘[...] comics consist of pictorial narratives or expositions in which words (often lettered into the picture area within speech balloons) usually contribute to the meaning of the pictures and vice versa’.9 This, however, ignores the existence of wordless comics. […] As noted above, two distinct definitions have been used to define comics as an art form: the combination of both word and image; and the placement of images in sequential order. Both definitions are lacking, in that the first excludes any sequence of wordless images; and the second excludes single panel cartoons such as editorial cartoons. The purpose of comics is certainly that of narration, and so that must be an important factor in defining the art form. Comics, as sequential art, emphasise the pictorial representation of a narrative. This means comics are not an illustrated version of standard literature, and while some critics argue that they are a hybrid form of art and literature, others contend comics are a new and separate art; an integrated whole, of words and images both, where the pictures do not just depict the story, but are part of the telling. In comics, creators transmit expression through arrangement and juxtaposition of either pictures alone, or word(s) and picture(s), to build a narrative. The narration of a comic is set out through the layout of the images, and while, as in films, there may be many people who work on one work, one vision of the narrative guides the
8
Spurgeon, Tom et al., 1999, ‘Top 100 (English Language) Comics of the Century’, The Comics Journal 210. 9 Varnum, Robin & Gibbons, Christina T. editors, The Language of Comics: Word and Image. University Press Mississippi, 2001, p. 76. 357
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work. Artists can use the layout of images on a page to convey passage of time, build suspense, or highlight action. 10
Comics are a communicative system composed by three elements: the cartoon, the strip and the speech balloon.11 The cartoon is the significant unit of comics; cartoons are traditionally disposed in horizontal rows and are separated by blank interstices called gutters. The horizontal rows are largely referred to as ‘strips’. In Europe, though, comics are more often published on specialised magazines rather than on newspapers, so the page is considered as a standard unit, more than the strip, even if this term has a great importance in the specific language of comics. The speech balloon (or speech bubble), which seems to get out of the character’s mouth, is the place where the dialogue is inserted. There is a natural hierarchy between the cartoon and the balloon. Indeed, if it cannot exist a balloon without a cartoon, the opposite is not true, since there are plenty of cartoons with no speech bubble. The bubble symbolises a phonetic emission that necessarily comes from a source represented by the cartoon. Normally, the reading of the dialogue demands more time than the vision of the images. The length of the dialogues is very important to set the rhythm of the story, because it determines a pause in the narration and consequently slows down the action, adapting it to the rhythm of the words. In comics, the narration is conveyed by two different semiotic systems: an iconic one and a textual one.12 So, the fruition of comics demands an activity of both vision and reading. Obviously, the verbal element is fundamental in producing the global sense of comics, since it transmits an important amount of 10
Driest, Joris, ‘Subjective Narration in Comics’, Retrieved May 26, 2005, PDF. 11 See Nardin, Giorgia, op. cit, p. 7. 12 See Nardin, Giorgia, op. cit., p. 45-52. 358
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information which is necessary to understand the story. Therefore, the linguistic message serves at the same time as a communication among the characters and as an information to the reader. Comics are created by choosing images, assembling them, setting their topographical and chronological relations and adding to them the phonic and literary elements. Being inscribed in a particular space (namely the speech balloon), words in comics are part of the image, as they graphically come out of the character’s mouth, and still they are very different elements. Characters’ utterances, following one after the other, form a chain of information which is parallel to the sequence of images: the global sense is given by the interaction of the two communicative strings. Bubbles are placed inside the image according to specific criteria that determine the turn-taking system, as the language of the balloons mostly reproduces direct speech. The Language of Comics: Playing with Words As we mentioned in the introduction of this work, one of the basic elements of the language of comics is the wordplay, a particular kind of verbal expression which is central to the global understanding of comics texts and to their humorous effect, as we will see in the Asterix case. According to Todorov, the term wordplay (or pun) refers to a linguistic practice which is opposed to the referential use of language, the one mostly employed in everyday life.13 Marina Yaguello agreed with him, when she wrote: ‘Playing with words – sounds or meaning – any activity which has language as both subject matter and as means of expression, constitutes the survival of the pleasure principle,
13
See Nardin, Giorgia, op. cit., p. 9-10. 359
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preserving the gratuitous in the face of the utilitarian’.14 Using puns means producing a text whose aim is not only to provide information, but mainly to produce a particular effect on the reader; that is, puns are an example of a creative use of language, based on intentional manipulation of its normal phonic or semantic aspect. This refers to what Jakobson calls (in his model of communicative functions) the ‘poetic’ function of language, which occurs when messages convey not only a signified but also contain a creative ‘touch’ of their own. Wordplays also point out the ‘metalinguistic’ function of language, one which deals with the code itself. Puns are in fact a superintensive use of language: they are created using the existing words of a language, but they use them to go beyond their usual meaning, to break rules, to extend their possibilities. As for the ‘ludic’ function of language, this appears almost tautological for puns, as ‘playing with words’ naturally implies a playful aspect. When we translate a text as full of puns as comics generally are (Asterix in particular), we deal with some very specific problems. We can say that puns are the main stylistic feature of this kind of texts, so failing to render this expressive elements almost means being unsuccessful in the translation of a comic text.15 It is therefore essential to find a strategy that allows the translator to reproduce the general ‘spirit’ of the original text. As we shall see later on in this study, an approach also confirmed by British translators of Asterix, this does not mean finding an equivalent to every single wordplay, exactly at the same place. On the contrary, the most important thing is to maintain the fundamental character of the original text, and to recreate a linguistic texture that may provoke a similar effect in the readers; the distribution of puns in the text could be slightly different 14
Yaguello, Marina, Harris, Trevor A. Le V., Language through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 16. 15 See Nardin, Giorgia, op. cit., p. 11-12, 68-71. 360
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from the original, some of them may be lost, some others may be newly created by the translator, because the aim of her/his work should not be restricted to the punctual rendition of one single pun but to the recreation of a whole expressive system. In fact, one can say that wordplays are untranslatable, and most of the time this is no lie. But it would be a paradox not to try and reproduce them in another language (and a different cultural context), since every language can assume a metalinguistic function and use its codes as objects to reflect upon and to create different effects. The first restriction that affects the translation of a wordplay is language itself. Source language and target language may be somehow similar, have lexical and syntactical correspondences, but the main issues are related to their cultural systems, their inclination to the ludic function of language, their written tradition. These and other factors make reproducing a pun into another language an easier or more difficult task. Translators’ choices are obviously influenced by the resources of both the source and the target language (generally her/his mother tongue), and by the affinity of the two cultures. Another important and double factor which must be taken into account by translators of comics is the function of the original text and the intended effect on readers. A good translation of a pun should render its motivation, its purpose within the text and the aimed reaction of readers to it. To reproduce this means to respect the function of the text, its inner coherence and its very nature. The need to aim at reproducing the functional and pragmatic equivalence of both source and target texts could also be a guide to find the best possible translating solutions. A third parameter to be considered by translators is the context, one of the fundamental elements that could help them to find a good equivalent to the original wordplay. Context must be considered at different levels: it could be a verbal context (the 361
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words and the figures used in the textual environment of the pun) or it could deal with a cognitive context (the narrative plot in which the pun is inserted and its relation with it). Both verbal and cognitive contexts should be also considered at a local level (the text portion near the wordplay) and at a global level (the text considered as a whole). Possible solutions to the problems posed by the translation of puns could be very different and range between an extreme fidelity to the source text and an absolutely free reinterpretation. We can indicate four different types of translation:16 an isomorphic translation, in which a wordplay is literally reproduced; a homomorphic translation, in which a wordplay is rendered using the same linguistic procedures of the original (an anagram, for example) but with other words; a heteromorphic translation, in which the original wordplay is substituted with another kind of wordplay, more compatible with the target language; a free translation, in which a wordplay can be substituted with another linguistic solution that, even though it lacks the verbal hilarity of the original, is more adequate to the new context, or when a pun is added ex-nihilo by the translator. As anticipated in the introduction, we shall now focus on the selected corpus of this work, the comic series of Asterix, and to analyse the actual problems of its translation. Asterix, a Gaulish Hero that Conquered the World The Astérix series originated in the pages of a French comics magazine called Pilote, in 1959. The authors, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, had already drawn and written their own strip cartoons, but when their collaboration started, they found out that it was better for Goscinny to write the scripts and for Uderzo to draw the pictures. The new magazine Pilote was 16
See Nardin, Giorgia, op. cit., p. 72. 362
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looking for a new comics series, so they came up with a new character, based on the ancestors of French people, the Gauls. Headed by the fierce Vercingetorix, the Gauls were brave and noble, and they valiantly resisted the invasion of Julius Caesar’s Roman army. Of course, they were defeated in the end, but Goscinny and Uderzo decided to introduce a slight alteration to history and partially revenge the Gaul’s pride. Their Gaulish heroes live in a little village that would never surrender to Romans, always beating off their assaults thanks to the prowess of its leading warrior Asterix and the magic potion brewed by the village druid which gives anyone who drinks it supernatural strength, albeit for a limited period of time. That is the story that has become widely popular, even though, as it is well known, this series is not mainly about wars and battles, being mostly a funny subject based on a typical kind of humour. Still, probably not everybody knows that the original idea was to make Asterix a genuinely heroic Gaul, a big and strong warrior. But, on second thought, Goscinny opted for a more amusing character, making him small and frail in appearance, but in fact very shrewd and wise; secondarily, Uderzo thought that a well-mixed pair of characters would be more successful, and invented Asterix’s inseparable friend, Obelix, who is in turn big and enormously strong (indeed, having fallen into the cauldron of magic potion when he was a baby, he enjoys its permanent effects and he is consequently forbidden to drink more), but at the same time – and in contrast with his appearance – is naïve, simple-minded and kind-hearted, though extremely brave. Their penchant for food (which in Obelix becomes an insatiable appetite, especially when it comes to a roasted wild boar), their passion for a good brawl with the Romans (who invariably end up beaten) and their fear that the sky could fall upon their heads, are other recurring elements that create the spirit and the humour of this series.
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The Asterix and Obelix duo, together with a list of other funny characters, had their first story published in 1961 as a book whose title read Asterix the Gaul (Asterix le Gaulois). From that moment onwards books began to be generally released on a yearly basis. Up to 2009, thirty-four comic books in the series were printed. Quite soon, the popularity of this new series crossed the French boundaries and reached most European countries. This happened despite the fact that the subject of Asterix comics, beginning with the two leading heroes, was quite patriotic and the characters represented the basic virtues and defects of French people. Indeed, their stories have been translated in more than one hundred languages and dialects, including Esperanto, Latin and ancient Greek. English Translations of Asterix As for British English, all the stories have been officially translated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. Their first volume of the Asterix series was published in 1969, but prior to this, there had been a very interesting episode, involving Great Britain and our hero. In fact, before the first actual translation, there was an attempt at British ‘appropriation’ of Asterix or, as we should call it, a case of cultural transplantation of this comic series across the Channel. A British magazine for boys published in 1965 and 1966, called Ranger, included (starting from the edition of 18th September 1965) a version of Asterix transferred to Britain, which does not mean Asterix visiting Britain but Asterix being turned into a pre-British character and inserted into a pre-British context with the locals also struggling against the Romans. The visual element of the comics remained the same of the original, only the names and some referential elements of the story were transformed, in order to make our heroes ancient Britons rather 364
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than Gauls. Thus, at times the text looked pretty different. In this case, Ranger magazine adapted the story of Asterix and the Big Fight.17 The strip was called Britons Never Never Never Shall Be Slaves,18 with Asterix renamed ‘Beric the Bold’19 and Obelix being called ‘Son of Boadicea’.20 In 1966, Ranger was merged into Look and Learn magazine, and for a time the series was carried on in this publication in 1967, up to 22nd April, publishing a version of Asterix and Cleopatra,21 whose title changed into In the Days of Good Queen Cleo. In this case, even a visual detail had to be changed: in fact, at the end of the book, the original map of Gaul became a map of Britain. This British adaptation is not so bizarre and unacceptable as it may seem. Sometimes, when works are translated for other countries, they undergo major changes. The usual reason is to make them more accessible to the audience in terms of
17
Le Combat des chefs, first published in serial form in Pilote magazine, issues 261-302 in 1964, then edited as the seventh volume of the book series in 1966. It was finally and properly translated into English in 1971. 18 A verse from the famous patriotic song Rule Britannia!. 19 This name was taken from a patriotic equivalent of Asterix’s character, the protagonist of the book Beric the Briton, A Story of the Roman Invasion (1893), written by British author G.A. Henty, which tells of the Roman invasion of Britain through the eyes of a ‘half Romanised’ Briton named Beric. 20 ‘Boudica (also spelled Boudicca), formerly known as Boadicea and known in Welsh as ‘Buddug’ (d. AD 60 or 61) was a queen of the Brittonic Iceni tribe of what is now known as East Anglia in England, who led an uprising of the tribes against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire’. (From Wikipedia article Boudica, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica. Last accessed 15th April 2010). 21 First published in 1963 in serial form in Pilote magazine, issues 215-257, then printed as the sixth volume of the series in 1965. Officially translated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge in 1969. 365
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localisation, even though avoiding value dissonances is also a common reason.22 A similar but more unfortunate case happened in Germany, a nation which, in Astérix et les Goths (1963), was somewhat unkindly caricatured as a warlike Prussian country with a taste for torture and intrigue. The series was first translated into German, in 1965, by Rolf Kauka, who changed the Gauls into Germanics, naming the main characters ‘Siggi und Barabbas’ instead. The situation got embarrassing when Kauka inserted a political bias in its adaptation: in fact, in Siggi und die Ostgoten, which clearly referred to the situation of the then divided Germany, the Gauls were transformed into the Westgoten (Western Goths), while the original Goths, the villains of the story, were the Ostgoten (Eastern Goths). The village of our hero was called Bonnhalla (Bonn, former capital of Western Germany). The druid’s name was Konradin (an allusion to Konrad Adenauer, first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany), and the name of the chief of the Goths was Hullberick, which reminded of Walter Ulbricht, who was in a similar position in the former Democratic Republic of Germany. The Ostgoten were made speak an East German dialect, whose words were printed in red, so as to allude to the communist regime. Other details were adapted with the same intention23. The abuse came to its end when, in Siggi und die goldene Sichel – an adaptation of the La Serpe d’Or (Asterix and the Golden Sickle) album, also dated 1965 – he made the chief villain of the story (who sold overpriced golden sickles) speak with a Jewish accent. Goscinny was enraged after reading the translated comic and forbade Kauka further translations. 22
See Cut and Paste Translation, available at http: // tvtropes.org / pmwiki / pmwiki.php/Main/CutAndPasteTranslation, last accessed 11th March 2010. 23 See Asterix International! Asterix in Germany, available at http://www.asterix-international.de/asterix/germany.shtml (last accessed 15th April 2010). 366
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Coming back to Great Britain, Anthea Bell has explained the history of how the Asterix series was finally and officially translated for English-speaking readers (Asterix, What’s in a Name): several English-language publishers initially turned the series down, on the grounds that it was too French to cross the Channel successfully. Eventually Brockhampton Press, the name at the time of the children’s department of Hodder & Stoughton, decided to make the venture. To translate the books they recruited a team consisting of Anthea Bell (i.e. me) and Derek Hockridge, Derek as a lecturer in French and expert on all the French topical references, Anthea as a professional translator with, at the time, a special interest in translation for children. The first English translations were published in 1969; the latest was the story mentioned above, Asterix and Obelix All At Sea, which came out in October 1996 in the original French and also, simultaneously, in the major languages of translation. 24
Two attempts to introduce Asterix into the American market were also made. The first one was a serialised publication of five stories in a group of North American newspapers, between November 1977 and the beginning of 1979.25 Stories were divided in strips appearing in the daily comics section of some different and concurrent newspapers. The Sunday colour comics edition contained the end of one story and the beginning of the next, each taking up half a page.26 This particular type of edition required a significant adaptation of both the artwork and the dialogues. Names, puns and other textual elements were modified to get a more idiomatic and 24
Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, available at http: // www.literarytranslation.com/workshops/asterix/, last accessed 7th March 2010, p. 2. 25 The stories are Asterix the Gladiator, Asterix and Cleopatra, Asterix and the Great Crossing, Asterix and the Big Fight and Asterix in Spain. 26 See English translations of Asterix available at http: // en.wikipedia.org / wiki / English_translations_of_asterix (last accessed 7th March 2010). 367
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politically correct version, intended for the family-oriented audience of the newspapers, producing a quite different result when compared to the British translation. The second episode which concerns the United States refers to the publication of five Asterix books, translated into American English by Robert Steven Caron, with the aim of having different editions purposely realised for American readers. The volumes published are Asterix and the Great Crossing in 1984, Asterix the Legionary and Asterix at the Olympic Games in 1992, and Asterix in Britain and Asterix and Cleopatra in 1995. Most of the characters’ names were changed for copyright reasons, as we will see in detail later on, when we will focus on this aspect of the translation. But in the States, Asterix never achieved a great success, and this retranslating enterprise was finally stopped. The remaining volumes were released on the American market in accordance to the British translation, thus generating a certain confusion in the public, due to the differences existing in the five albums translated by Robert Steve Caron. Asterix’s relative lack of success in the U.S. confirms what Flinn Bjørklid wrote about the limits of this comic series: It seems as if Asterix is firstly a French comic, and secondly a European comic, at least it has never been accepted in the homeland of comics USA, where it’s been introduced several times. Maurice Horn’s The World Encyclopedia of Comics states that ‘There are a few good things in Asterix (the clever use of balloons, drawing which is clean and uncluttered, and some genuinely funny situations) but the basic plot is tiresome and Goscinny’s endless stream of bad puns and chauvinistic asides make this quite unpleasant as a strip’. 27
27
Bjørklid Finn, (translated in English by Nicolai Langfeldt), A Celtic Gaul named Asterix available at http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~janl/ts/asterix-article.html (last accessed 7th March 2010). 368
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The latter seems quite a narrow interpretation of Asterix or one should really believe that the Atlantic Ocean separates two different worlds, at least as far as comics are concerned, or else that their circulation is a one-way movement, travelling only from America towards Europe. Lost (and Gained) in Translation The main difficulty for translators working on a text based on humour, is that of transferring its spirit from one cultural system to a different one. We have already pointed out that Asterix was initially judged to be too French-specific, which was probably true (or at least partially true) for the first albums, and that this consideration delayed the translation of the books in Great Britain and elsewhere. Maybe, after the success of the first translations, the authors, bearing in mind that their audience might be foreign, tried to make them more universal. Or perhaps foreign publishers understood that the kind of humour readers could find in Asterix’s books, centred as it was on puns, caricatures and ironic stereotypes of both French regions and European nations, was not so French-specific after all. Making fun of history and traditions is something that can be shared by a wider public, especially in Europe, where history and cultural traditions have deep roots. Anthea Bell, commenting on the European nature of Asterix’s humour, states: [...] I would call the comedy not solely French, but European. French children’s history books traditionally open with a tribute to nos ancêtres les Gaulois. […] all of us in Europe enjoy making anachronistic fun of the past. Well, Western Europe, anyway: as an eminent Slavonic scholar said to me recently, it is
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inconceivable to think of the Russians showing this kind of affectionate disrespect for their history and culture 28. [...] It is European humour rather than French. It doesn’t cross the Atlantic so well, the American sense of humour is different. We and the French like the humour of historical anachronism. We have a lot of history behind us and we like to laugh at it in both nations29.
Indeed, Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge have certainly succeeded in their English version of the Asterix series, for they have proved capable of maintaining the spirit and humour of the source text even when direct translation was impossible – especially when puns between languages were not closely related. But, how does the process begin? Which tools do translators use? Do they have a set of principles guiding them in their difficult task? Peter Kessler explains all this in his Complete Guide to Asterix, which directly quotes the detailed explanation offered by Anthea Bell in relation of what she calls their ‘translating kit’: When a new Asterix book is in production, the translators are sent a copy of the text so that they can start work on their version. Often, at this stage, they are working ‘blind’, without the artwork. In recent years, Uderzo has compiled detailed lists of the wordplays and cultural jokes in his texts. These he circulates to all foreign translators, so that they can be sure of not missing a single trick when combing through the narrative. Anthea Bell describes the process: ‘Besides the French original, we have what might be called our translating kit around us.
28
Bell, Anthea, Asterix, my love, in Electronic Telegraph, Thursday 25th February 1999, available at http://www.asterix-international.de / asterix / mirror/asterix_my_love.htm, last accessed 7 th March 2010. 29 Pauli, Michelle, Asterix and the golden jubilee, in The Guardian, Thursday th 29 October 2009, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk / books / 2009 / oct/29/asterix-golden-jubilee, last accessed 7 th March 2010. 370
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There’s a folder labelled ‘Asterix – Names, Jokes, Oddments, Etc.’, full of things that might come in useful some day. There are reference books. It’s amazing how often people say, ‘But you’re a translator; surely you don’t need dictionaries?’ Translators need the biggest, best dictionaries going. Translators wear out their dictionaries. Among our old favourites are Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Roget’s Thesaurus and the new Concise Oxford Dicitonary, easily the best of the Oxford English Dictionary range for this purpose, being the most up-to-date and ‘colloq.’, as the entries put it. Any of these may set the mind jumping from word or phrase (a) in the original French, to a related subject, to word or phrase (b) which will provide a comparable bit of wordplay in English’. Also, part of the Bell-Hockridge kit, is a set of six principles, which they always employ when translating Asterix: 1. The idea is to render, as faithfully as possible, the feel of the original. 2. With humour of this intensely verbal nature, the translation must follow the spirit rather than the letter of the original; we must therefore often find jokes which are different, though we hope along the same lines as the French jokes. 3. They must, of course, suit Albert Uderzo’s wittily detailed drawings. In particular they must fit the expression on the speaker’s faces. 4. From the purely technical point of view, they must be about the same length as the original wording, or we shall create difficulties for the letterer trying to get the English text into the speechbubbles. 5. Very important: we will try for the same kind of mixture of jokes as in the French, where Asterix appeals on a number of different levels. There’s the story-line itself with its ever-attractive theme of the clever little fellow outwitting the hulking great brute; there is simple knockabout humour, both verbal and visual, which goes down well with quite young children; there are puns and passages of wordplay for older children; and there is some
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distinctly sophisticated humour, depending on literary or artistic allusion, for the adult or near-adult mind. 6. We will also have the same number of jokes as in the French. If we just can’t get one in at the same point as in the original, we’ll make up for it somewhere else.30 If there is an obvious gift we’ll use it, even if there was no counterpart in the French. 31
So, the first important principle is that the translation must be faithful to the feel of the original, rather than to its letter. As point two properly emphasises, this is due to the intense verbal nature of the humour, full of cultural and linguistic jokes, and to the constraint represented by the drawings, as it is pointed out at points three and four. Elsewhere, Anthea Bell speaks about the challenges translators have to face: As a task of translation, the Asterix stories present a fascinating set of challenges all of their own. The pictorial element is inseparable from the text. But, and paradoxically, translation of the text, if it is to be faithful to the spirit of the original, has to be very free, indeed unusually free, where the letter is concerned. The reason for this is that the French text is crammed with puns, wordplay and verbal jokes of all kinds, which will not translate straight. Often the task is one of adaptation rather than ordinary translation (and everything is carefully read in France before it is approved for English publication).32
Puns are the main concern of Asterix’s translators, for, as Bell says: ‘Puns abound in the French. Whether or not one agrees with Freud that puns are the lowest form of humour, they are certainly difficult to translate, and will not usually translate 30
Hockridge said about it: ‘I’d like to feel the level of punning is about the same as the French, so if you groan that seems about right’ (Kessler, Peter, The Complete Guide to Asterix, London, Hodder Children’s Books, 1997, p. 61). 31 Idem, p. 59-60. 32 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 2. 372
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straight at all’.33 Still, Bell and Hockridge managed to find suitable solutions by using their experience, which led them to the conviction that their work was more about recreating rather than just translating. Their target language (and culture) offered reasonable resources in order to fill the inevitable gaps created in the translation process: For we Brits, again like the French, enjoy the dreadful puns in which the Asterix stories abound. But if you translate a pun straight, it is no longer a pun. You have the situation, you have the facial expressions of the characters and the size of the speech bubble, and you must devise a new pun to fit. 34
The target text must produce the same effects on readers, must have the same balance of humour and adventure. In order to achieve this result, sometimes the translators add humorous remarks of their own, either when a direct translation of the original French is not possible, or simply when they have the chance to put in a joke that would get, in the target language, an effect which is appropriate and coherent to the spirit of the text. That is not only the case of the English translation. A wonderful example of this is evident in the work of Italian translators as well35, where the Roman legionnaires speak in 20th century Roman dialect, which is a real additional benefit to the Italian albums. Their colourful expressions in the modern Roman vernacular seem to fit exceptionally well the drawings, giving to those most unfortunate characters – always on the losing side of the story, always playing the fools and getting hammered by 33
Idem, p. 4. Bell, Anthea, Asterix, my love, cit. Peter Kessler wrote about it (op. cit., p. 61): ‘Fortunately English, with a lexicon twice the size of any other European language, is arguably the language of puns. And sure enough, Hockridge and Bell have always delivered’. 35 Asterix’s albums have been translated in Italian by Marcello Marchesi (3 albums), Luciana Marconcini (17), Alba Avesini (12), Carlo Manzoni (1), Fedora Dei (1), Natalina Compiacente (1), Tito Faraci and Sergio Rossi (1). 34
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everyone – more liveliness and expressivity. Just as the Gauls embody the qualities and the defects of the modern French (and the same applies to any other foreign character depicted in the series), Roman characters are more realistically linked to the wit of their contemporary descendants, thanks to the Italian translators’ genial idea, which perfectly matches the genuine spirit of the source text. To mention but one example, we can observe the way in which, in Asterix in Britain, the Roman soldiers react when their British opponents repeatedly interrupt the fight because of the week-end: the original French relies more on the visual aspect of the drawings and on the size of the characters in the speech-bubble to express the soldiers’ anger and frustration, while Italian readers can also benefit from the verbal strength of the dialect expressions, that clearly makes this Roman soldier much more ‘Roman’ than the original one.
Another famous addition to the Italian version, is the rendition of Obelix’s famous catchphrase ‘Ils sont fous ces romains’, which is obviously translated as ‘Sono Pazzi Questi Romani’: the extrajoke is that the initials are printed in a way that clearly alludes to the Roman abbreviation SPQR,36 a pun that is added to the original, evidently serving the general purpose of the text. 36
An initialism from the Latin phrase ‘Senatus Popolusque Romanus’, which means ‘The Senate and the People of Rome’. Both the graphic aspect of this catchphrase and the dialect characterisation of the Roman soldiers 374
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As we read at point five of the above mentioned list of principles, Asterix’s humour works at different levels. Sometimes the books contain rather simple wordplays which aim at amusing fairly young children. At other times, however, they are extended cultural references. Some important literary works (such as Cervantes’ Don Quijote) are ironically referred to and there are visual allusions to Renaissance’s paintings and classical sculptures. After all, Asterix’ stories are full of cultural references, mainly, as it is obvious, to French culture. Despite being full of references to French history and modern French society (in fact, many supporting characters turn out to be caricatures of famous French people), Asterix has become widely popular and it is understood and appreciated outside France as well. Even without speaking French, or without a good knowledge of French society, readers can decode symbols and characters, all of which are not necessarily specific to France37, present both in the pictures and the verbal text.
were introduced in the first album of the series, Asterix il Gallico, translated by Marcello Marchesi in 1968. 37 See, Bjørklid Finn, art. cit. 375
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Translating cultural references may also pose particular problems. Bell and Hockridge’s technique when dealing with cultural humour, is to focus on those aspects that English readers will understand. But not all cultural references resist the passage of time: if a hint to the above-mentioned Quijote can still be understood in one hundred years, other allusions are so closely connected to contemporary aspects and figures that they seriously face the risk of obsolescence. How must translators act in cases such as these? Let’s see again Anthea Bell’s suggestion: what is to be done when a reference becomes obsolete? Should this play on words be rethought, and if so with what? […] But obsolescence can be a real problem in translating this kind of material – for the series uses the humour of anachronism to introduce twentieth-century themes into the time of Julius Caesar. What if anything should be done when a series has proved popular enough to remain in print for nearly forty years, in France, thirty years in the UK, and around the same length of time in other major European languages? Some visual themes cannot be changed: cf. the faces of characters [for ex. the Beatles in Asterix in Britain]. But should verbal topical references be allowed to stand as witnesses to their period, or should some attempt at revision be made? 38
In fact, as Anthea Bell suggests, transposing a modern idea into the world of 50 BC is one of the most exploited jokes in Asterix, a kind of cultural humour which both entertains readers, and make them reflect on some aspects of their modern, ‘civilised’ lives. Translating Names Puns are not just an essential part of the comics dialogues, in so far as, in actual fact, they begin with names. Names play an 38
Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 5. 376
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essential role in Asterix’s humour and they are the very first elements that contribute to the comic depiction of a character.39 Some names are funny because they are simply absurd and do not even refer to a character’s quality, but most of the time they introduce a humorous comment on the central trait of its personality. In any case, names are puns and they have to be translated into an equivalent that could have the same effect on target readers, so as to maintain the spirit and the flow of the story. The names of the two leading characters have not posed any problem for the English translators, as Asterix (from the French ‘astérisque’, rendered in English as ‘asterisk’) and Obelix (from the French ‘obélisque’, ‘obelisk’ in English) can be easily retained in the target language, because the two words upon which the names are created have the same Greek etymology in both French and English (as well as in Italian), so the wordplay works in both cases and there is no need for a translation. Maybe Goscinny and Uderzo purposely chose two names with a classic origin, so that they could be maintained in most European languages without any loss of meaning, thinking about the international distribution of their series. Anyway, it is a very fortunate circumstance that the implication of the name of the hero that gives the title to the whole series can be understood by most readers. Obviously, the same applies to the name of his big fellow. Anthea Bell dedicates a comprehensive paragraph of her article Asterix, What’s in a Name to the problems faced in this delicate task: Names: the books to date contain some four hundred proper names of people (and some place names), nearly all of which have had to be changed in translation, since they are not really names, but comic spoofs on names made up out of French words in the original. For instance the village bard 39
See English Translations of Asterix, available at http://en.wikipedia.org / wiki/English_translations_of_asterix, last accessed 7 th March 2010. 377
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Assurancetourix = assurance tous risques, ‘comprehensive insurance’. As with all the Gauls, his name ends in the suffix –ix, to echo the genuine Vercingetorix. But translated straight the phrase sounds nothing like a name of any kind. In English he becomes Cacofonix because he is tone-deaf and sings and plays so badly out of tune that his music is mere cacophony. Then there is the chieftain Abraracourcix whose name is from the phrase à bras raccourcis = literally ‘with foreshortened arms’, i.e. doubled up ready for a fight; to attack someone violently is tomber sur quelqu’un à bras raccourcis. Again, this was impossible to translate into a convincing name. The chieftain is rather stouter than is good for him, and was therefore called, with reference to his girth, Vitalstatistix in English. Asterix and Obelix remain the same, as far as I know, in all languages, but the druid Panoramix retains his French name in many other languages, and we too have the adjective ‘panoramic’ available in English. However, the name of ‘Getafix’ seemed a gift, having more than one double meaning: not only does the druid’s magic potion give the Gauls a temporary ‘fix’ (of a perfectly innocuous kind) to help them defeat the Roman aggressors, but there is also the theory that the druids of ancient Britain may have used circles of standing stones (like Stonehenge) as astronomical observatories, to help them ‘get a fix’ on the sun. There are tentative proposals for revision of the Asterix translations. Does political correctness require that the present name of the Druid be scrapped? If so, what might replace it, or should one go back to the French Panoramix? This is but one of the issues to be raised. Roman names end in -us, to resemble the real Latin names which they are not, with a very few exceptions in historical figures like Julius Caesar and Brutus). Most Britons end in -ax, possibly because the real Caesar, in his real historical work De Bello Gallico, mentions a king of Kent called Segovax – e. g. Jolitorax in French becomes Anticlimax in English. (Astérix chez les Bretons/Asterix in Britain). The Gaulish women end in ine in French, e.g. Bonemine the village chieftain’s wife, but in
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the English versions, Gaulish and Roman alike, end in the usual feminine -a (the chieftain’s wife becomes Impedimenta). 40
This testimony by Bell raises many interesting questions. She refers to the names of some of the recurring characters of the series. Most translators obviously chose to create new names with new jokes that may produce a comic effect in the target language. But, for example, Italian translators, made a different choice. Their editions tend to maintain the original names even if the wordplays are completely lost and the characters’ monikers result quite difficult to read and understand for an Italian reader. Think about an Italian boy reading ‘Assurancetourix’ or ‘Abraracourcix’: if the boy is not studying French, the original pun is missing and so is the correct pronunciation. Coming back to the English versions, we have already referred to the fact that in the American editions most of the characters’ names were changed, to adapt them to an American audience or even for copyright reasons, as with Robert Steven Caron’s translations. Here is an interesting table41 that lists the names of the major characters, comparing the French source text to the English and American versions; a column with the Italian names has been added here: Original name (French)
Meaning
Descript Italian ion name
British name
Astérix
asterisk (because he is the star), also
Gaulish warrior
Asterix
Asterix
40
Ameri- American can name name (Newspap (Album) er) Asterix Asterix
Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 3. For the wife of the fishmonger, the translators prefer to create a new name with the feminine ending in –a, Bacteria, rather than keeping the unmotivated homage to the Beatles’ song Yellow Submarine, which is implicit in the original French, Iélosubmarine (see table above). 41 From the Wikipedia article, English translations of Asterix, cit. 379
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the medical term asterixis refers to a periodic loss of muscle tone, the opposite of what Astérix displays when he drinks the magic potion Obélix
obelisk (An Menhir obelisk is delivery similar to a man menhir; and the obelisk symbol † often follows the asterisk.)
Obelix
Obelix
Idéfix
idée fixe (theme Obelix’s or obsession) dog
Idefix
Dogmatix Dogmatix Dogmatix
Panoramix Panorama (wide view)
Druid
Panoramix Getafix
Obelix
Obelix
Readymix Magigimmi x
Village Abraracour à bras cix raccourcis: (hit, Chief lambast) violently
Abraracour Vitalstatisti Vitalstatis Macroecon cix x tix omix
Bonemine
Beniamina Impedime n/a o Mimina nta
Bonne mine (healthy look)
Chief’s Wife
Belladonna
Agecanonix âge canonique Village (canonical age) elder
Matusalemi Geriatrix x
Geriatrix Arthritix
Assuranceto Assurance tous Bard urix risques (comprehensive insurance)
Assuranceto Cacofonix Cacofonix Malacoustix urix
Blacksmit Automatix Fulliautom Cétautomat c’est h atix ix automatique (it’s automatic) Ordralfabé- ordre tix alphabétique (alphabetical order)
Fishmong Ordinalfabe Unhygieni Fishtix er tix x
Iélosubmari Yellow ne Submarine
Wife of Ielosubmari Bacteria Fishmong ne er
380
Epidemix
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Falbala
Piece of Minor Falbalà clothing added recurring to a dress, character usually seen as a bad taste luxury
Panacea
n/a
Philharmoni a
As we can see, the only case in which the Italian translators change a character’s name in order to create a joke referring to its main trait, is that of the village elder, ‘Agecanonix’, which in Italian becomes ‘Matusalemix’ (alluding to the patriarch Methuselah – Matusalemme in Italian – who is the eldest man cited in the Bible, having lived for 969 years), in British English ‘Geriatrix’ and in American albums ‘Arthritix’, all the names relating to his age. As for the remaining names of the recurring characters, Italian translators keep the original names, limiting their interventions to a slight adaptation, when the similarity of the Italian vocabulary to the original French allows to reproduce the pun without a complete recreation. This, in spite of the fact that, in the two cases mentioned above (Abraracourcix and Assurancetourix) their conservative choice means the loss of any kind of wordplay. In another case, Italian translators give to the chief’s wife an existing name which is similar to the original French (Beniamina for Bonnemine), but in doing so, they completely loose the pun created by Goscinny and Uderzo (Bonnemine stands for ‘healthy look’); so, they generally privilege similarity to the original rather than the humorous expressivity given to the names by the authors. Bell and Hockridge’s attitude is entirely different, as we have seen before. They try to replicate in the target language the same sort of ‘comic spoof on names’. Naturally, the same applies to minors or one-story characters. The translators accept the challenge to play the authors’ game, a game with some rules, of course. For example, as Bell says, Gauls’ names normally end in -ix, while Britons’ end in -ax, Egyptians in -is (ex. Numerobis) and Romans in -us. The latter happens to be, rather than a 381
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constraint, quite a productive feature in the English version, since it allows Bell and Hockridge to create new wordplays for some Romans’ names: Roman names end in –us, to resemble the real Latin names which they are not, with a very few exceptions in historical figures like Julius Caesar and Brutus. They include, for instance, a legionary called Plutoqueprévus = plus tôt que prévu, ‘sooner than expected’, who becomes in English Infirmofpurpus (from Lady Macbeth’s speech to her husband: ‘Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers.’). […] And in the first book of all Astérix en Hispanie/Asterix in Spain, p. 9, a centurion who is Claudius Nonpossumus in the French (from Latin, non possumus, we cannot) and becomes Spurius Brontosaurus in English. The translators were pleased when they recollected that Spurius was a genuine Roman name: cf. Spurius Lartius, one of the brave allies who helped Horatius keep the bridge in the brave days of old (Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome).42 We are pleased when, like Goscinny, we can make a whole phrase into a Roman name [Sendervictorius and Appianglorius, a couple of Roman soldiers],43 but owing to the difference between the normal word order of noun and adjective in English and French, it is generally much harder to make up such compounds in English. We do however have quantities of English adjectives ending –ous, which can sometimes be used on their own to make a name approximating to its bearer’s character (‘Insalubrius’ in Gladiator) or combined with a noun to give a Roman two names (‘Nervus Illnus’ in Banquet).44
42
Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 4. These are characters from Asterix the Gladiator, and their names form a sentence from the British national anthem, God Save the Queen (‘Send her victorious, happy and glorious’). Note that the second name ingeniously relates also to the Roman road known as the Appian Way. In the original French, the couple is named Ziguépus and Rictus. 44 Anthea Bell in Kessler, Peter, op. cit., p. 63. 43
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Fictional toponyms are also created with the purpose of creating a humorous effect. For example, the four camps (castra) which surround Asterix’s village are named: Compendium, Aquarium, Laudanum and Totorum (Tot o’ rum, colloquial English for shot of rum). In French, this camp is called ‘Babaorum’, a pun on baba au rhum or rum baba, a popular French pastry. 45 In earlier translations, such as in Ranger/Look and Learn (dating from 1965 to 1967), other versions of names have appeared. Panoramix remains the name of the Druid, while the village chieftain becomes Tunabrix (ton of bricks), rather than Vitalstatistix. Some of these were used in early English-language versions of cartoon movies. We shall discuss later on some of the choices made by English translators for the names of the characters in Asterix in Britain. These choices have clearly been always discussed by the translators and they had to be finally approved by the authors themselves. Asterix Travels: Dealing with Foreign People and their Characterization About fifty per cent of Asterix’s adventures takes place in Gaul, in various parts of the Roman-occupied region, around the village or in more distant districts (like Lutetia, Corsica etc.). In the rest of the stories, Asterix and Obelix visit countries such as Spain (Astérix en Hispanie, 1969 / Asterix in Spain, 1971), Egypt (Astérix et Cléopatre, 1965 / Asterix and Cleopatra, 1969), Britain (Astérix chez les Brétons, 1966 / Asterix in Britain, 1970), the area of present-day Germany where the Goths live (Astérix et les Goths, 1963 / Asterix and the Goths 1975), Switzerland (Astérix chez les Helvètes, 1970 / Asterix in Switzerland, 1973), Greece 45
In the American translations, one of these camps is named Nohappimedium. 383
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(Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques, a book written for the 1968 games and translated into English Asterix at the Olympic Games on the occasion of the Munich games four years later), Belgium (Astérix chez les Belges, 1979 / Asterix in Belgium, 1980), even India (Astérix chez Rahazade, 1987 / Asterix and the Magic Carpet, 1988), America (La Grande Traversée, 1975 / Asterix and the Great Crossing, 1977, although they do not know it is a real New World and believe they are in some Roman colony, maybe Crete or Thrace), and in a more recent book (La Galère d’Obélix, 1996 / Asterix and Obelix All At Sea, 1996) the fabled continent of Atlantis. They also visit several times ancient Rome and their historical enemy, Julius Caesar, whom they treat with cheerful disrespect. In another story, Astérix et les Normands (1966, translated as Asterix and the Normans in 1978) they do not travel but they receive the ‘visit’ of a foreign people, actually Vikings from the North of Europe. These contacts with their close neighbours represent an important reason for Asterix’s European success. Indeed, our heroes sometimes have a direct influence on crucial historical events or peculiar habits to these countries. For instance, in this fictional re-writing of history, Asterix teaches Spaniards bull fighting, the Swiss mountain climbing, he takes part in the Olympic Games in Greece, causes a civil war in Germany, drops by Rome a couple of times, follows the route of the Tour de France, gifts the British with their first tea.46 Indeed, a very particular level of humour in Asterix corresponds to the retelling of historical facts, which is another way to create humour using anachronism. The authors defy the authority of history and make jokes on it. There is also a nationalistic perspective to this kind of humour: Goscinny and Uderzo are describing the French as the initiators of habits and ideas that would then become a strong part of other countries’ traditions. But this is obviously a joke 46
See Bjørklid Finn, art. cit. 384
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which only works in a comic context; furthermore, this is mostly a way of laughing at the Frenchman’s natural assumption of his own national superiority47. The authors made a parody of every population encountered by Asterix and Obelix, exploiting the most popular stereotypes generally attached to their European fellow citizens.48 The Goths are depicted as martial and disciplined, warring and goosestepping, recalling the Germans of the Empire and to a certain extent those of the Third Reich, which makes them the only people represented as characterised by a certain degree of hostility. The British, as we will see in detail later on, are shown as polite and phlegmatic, with their weird habits (like driving the chariots on the left side of the road) and their terrible cooking (like boiled boar with mint sauce or warm beer). The Swiss are methodical and keep discreet bank accounts for secret investors. The Spanish are very hospitable but, at the same time, hot tempered; Portuguese are tiny and chubby, and so on. These modern stereotypes are humorously and affectionately satirized, but all these European populations (apart from Germans who, especially in early albums, represent the only exception), are generally described in a positive way. The French themselves are not let off the authors’ satire. All these people have one thing in common with the Gauls: they all hate the Romans, because they are the invaders. But even the Romans are portrayed with a certain degree of sympathy. After all, Goscinny and Uderzo were not making fun of foreign people, they were more caricaturising the habit of identifying other people through sticky labels, they were almost celebrating European capability of laughing at their own tics and at their own little rivalries. No-one could possibly feel offended 47
See Kessler, Peter, op. cit., p. 84. See Humour in Asterix, available at http://en.wikipedia.org wiki/Humour_in_Asterix (last accessed 7 th March 2010). 48
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by their jokes. In fact, despite some isolated accusations of chauvinism,49 the series has been very well received outside France. Dealing with foreign people clearly involves problems as to their characterisation. A very productive solution found by the authors is – in some way – to make characters speak with the accent of their modern descendants. This means that, in the source text, the authors try and reproduce the modern foreign accent of those foreign characters who use French words to express themselves, thereby making them speak, for example, as a modern German person would speak French. Reproducing these foreign accents is therefore a fundamental task for translators. Anthea Bell states: Accents are also a problem. The French are familiar with a Belgian accent; we have no way of reproducing one in English, although we can do a German accent. […] To date, policy has been not to try substituting British regional accents for French regional accents – and for Belgian and African accents, for instance – but instead to substitute extra jokes for those accents not readily imitated in English. 50 The thinking behind this procedure is that if one substitutes regional English accents, the whole delicate illusion of translation is endangered: ‘What’s this man with the Yorkshire or Somerset accent doing in the middle of Ancient Gaul?’ thinks the reader. ‘Surely it’s France now. Why aren’t they speaking French anyway? This is only a translation! Why am I bothering to read something in translation anyway? 51 49
For example, in 1983, the Council of the North London Borough of Brent removed all Asterix books from the library shelves because Asterix was seen as racist, but after a public controversy and some well-reasoned newspaper articles the books were reinstated (see Kessler, Peter, op. cit., p. 87). 50 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 5. 51 Kessler, Peter, op. cit., p. 73. 386
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A general example of this, involves a recurring character in most Asterix volumes, the black pirate from the unfortunate pirate ship that ends up being inevitably drenched after any encounter with either Asterix or the Romans. In the original French edition, the black pirate speaks with the accent of an African French colony. Most remarkably, the African lookout cannot pronounce the ‘r’. This joke is carried over to many translations, mostly literally: in the Italian edition, the black pirate pronounces ‘v’ instead of ‘r’. The first English editions had an adaptation of the accent to the British context. Nowadays, however, the translators do not think this to be funny, and they changed the text. Look at an example from Asterix in Britain:
As we will discuss soon, much of the humour in the book Asterix in Britain comes from Goscinny’s faithful rendition of the English language, while using French words. Co-author Uderzo declared: While I like all that we have made, I have a little preference for Asterix et Les Bretons, for the way that René made the British speak with the structure of the English language transformed into French. I found it an extraordinary idea. For René, who knew English perfectly, it was like a child’s game. 52
It was pointed out that one important level of humour in Asterix comes from the use of speech-bubbles. What was generally 52
Quoted in Pauli, Michelle, Asterix and the golden jubilee, in The Guardian, Thursday 29th October 2009, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk / books / 2009/oct/29/asterix-golden-jubilee (last accessed 7th March 2010). 387
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deemed as a necessary evil in comics, as it got in the way of the artwork, becomes a point of strength in Goscinny and Uderzo’s work: in fact, the latter often adds visual work in the speechbubbles so as to make them more expressive, as with the graphic reproduction of foreign languages. Indeed, although the authors always use French, to make any character’s communication comprehensible for readers, they nonetheless add graphic elements to make a particular language appear ‘foreign’. In fact, the speech of some foreign characters is written using different lettering according to the language spoken. As a result, the Gauls cannot automatically understand these languages even though the reader does understand. Here are some examples: 53 – Iberians: Sentences start with upside-down exclamation marks (‘¡’) or question marks (‘¿’), as in real Spanish; – Goths: Gothic script is used (which constitutes a language barrier with Gauls); – Vikings: Ø and Å characters are used for O and A (language barrier with Gauls); – Native Americans: Pictograms are used (language barrier with Gauls); – Egyptians: hieroglyphics, accompanied by footnotes, are used (language barrier with Gauls); – Greeks: words are written as if carved, with no curves and a minimum of strokes. Asterix Visits his British Neighbours Asterix in Britain (Astérix chez les Bretons) is the eighth in the Asterix comic book series. It was published in serial form in Pilote magazine, issues 307-334 in 1965, and in album form in 1966. It tells the story of Asterix and Obelix’s journey to Romanoccupied Britain. At that time, the Gaulish village was pretty 53
See Humour in Asterix, cit. 388
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quiet and the life of their inhabitants quite dull, because the Romans were busy trying to conquer Britain, which they actually managed to do. But, as for Gaul, there was a little village in Cantium (Kent) still resisting the invaders. A cousin of Asterix named, in the English version, Anticlimax, being aware of the prodigies of the magic potion brewed by the druid Getafix, decides to leave Cantium, his home-village, and go to Gaul to ask for support in the struggle against the common enemy. Anticlimax’s request is very well received by Asterix and Obelix, always in search of a good scuffle with the Romans, who are then sent to Britain by chief Vitalstatistix, taking a barrel of magic potion with them. In this story, most of the humour is based on making fun of British culture and habits. People from across the Channel are presented as being very close to the Gauls. In fact, as the narrator states at the beginning of page two, ‘Britain had often helped Gaul fight the Romans’ and ‘The Britons were rather like the Gauls, many of them being descended from Gaulish tribes who had settled in Britain’. Goscinny and Uderzo fool around the historical love-hate relationship between France and Britain54 and reproduce all the relatively unflattering stereotypes that French people share about British culture.
54
For a comprehensive study on this subject, see Tombs, Robert, Tombs, Isabelle, That Sweet Enemy: Britain and France, The History of a Love-Hate Relationship, Vintage, 2008. 389
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For example, as mentioned above, Britons interrupt the battle against the Romans at five o’ clock for their ‘hot-water break’ (since tea has not been introduced yet) and seemingly take two days off at the weekend: as we have seen in the cartoon reproduced above, this habit initially irritates the Romans, until Julius Caesar decides to attack the Britons right during their customary stops, taking them by surprise and provoking a rather indignant but quite phlegmatic reaction in the Briton chief Cassivellaunos (see the cartoon above). Another unfavourable cliché about British lifestyle deals with the alleged distastefulness of their cuisine, repeatedly highlighted by Obelix’s comments on the boiled boar (with mint sauce), or on the drinking of warm beer and chilled red wine. Such gastronomic practices are naturally unbearable from the French point of view, especially in consideration of the fact that the Gauls’ descendants consider themselves as the trend-setters of universal gastronomy and oenology. Of course, it is Obelix who assumes the role of the critic, since he represents the average French man in his chauvinistic approach to foreign cultures, while his fellow mate Asterix is more open-minded. Let us have a look at the dialogue between them, when they are served with the famous boiled boar for the first time: Obelix: ‘This is a bit of a jolly old bore, what!’ 55. Asterix: ‘Eat up Obelix, and don’t pass remarks. In Britain you must do as the Britons do’. Obelix: ‘But boiled with mint sauce, Asterix! Poor thing!’.
It is also ironic that Anticlimax should be quite sure that the foreigners are bound to like British gastronomic habits: when Obelix, before leaving Gaul for Britain, suggests ‘We should have brought some food with us’, Asterix’s cousin replies ‘Good gracious me, old chap, what for? British food’s delicious, you’re 55
See infra for a comment on the wordplay created between ‘boar’ and ‘bore’. 390
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sure to like it, what!’. Indeed, if British cuisine is mocked, so is the French sense of superiority and – through Obelix’s character – the French incapability (or unwillingness) to adapt to others’ habits (nevertheless, in this adventure even the Romans are disgusted with warm beer, which obviously again surprises Anticlimax). Speaking about food and drink, in this adventure the Gauls are made responsible for bringing tea – the national beverage – to the British: we already know that at the time Britons drink just hot water, sometimes with a drop of milk; before leaving their home village, Asterix is given some strange herbs by Getafix; when the magic potion that is being carried to the British village is destroyed by the Romans, Asterix, instead of telling the truth, decides to pretend that those herbs could be used to brew the magic potion, hoping that the Britons’ morale would be boosted by this. When they return to Gaul, Getafix informs Asterix that the herbs are called tea. So tea works as a sort of magic potion for the Britons and the habit of drinking it finally substitutes that of drinking hot water at five o’ clock. In this story, set in 50 B.C. Britain, there are references to modern sporting traditions, which in fact were all created by British people: the text says that Anticlimax is from the tribe of ‘the Oxbridgenses, famed for their skill in rowing’, an allusion to the annual Boat Race held between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. An important episode of the story is a rugby match (although the name of the game is never mentioned) between the teams of Durovernum (ancient name for Canterbury) and Camulodunum (now Colchester). We can see here the British passion for the game, as well as some traditional corollaries surrounding the match such as the selling of flags with the teams’ colours, the entrance of the teams’ mascots and the performance of a band of bards before the game. The game itself is depicted as extremely violent, which provokes Obelix’s enthusiastic commentary: ‘We must take this nice game back to 391
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Gaul!’, clearly referring to the fact that France is now one of the strongholds for rugby in Europe. In the original French version of the story, Anticlimax says that the match is part of a Five Tribes tournament (‘Une rencontre comptant pour le Tournoi des Cinq Tribus’), obviously a hint to the Five Nations rugby tournament, held between England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France from 1910 to 1931 and from 1940 to 199956. Many other elements of British culture and society are evoked, most of the time making fun of them: for instance, Asterix and Anticlimax engage in a dispute in an attempt to decide on which side of the road it is ‘correct’ to drive (as people in Britain drive on the left, whereas in other European countries, they drive on the right). However, at Julius Caesar’s time, this debate would be anachronistic, because in those days both Britain and Gaul used to drive on the left side of the road57, as the habit of driving on the right side of the road comes from Napoleonic times. After this debate, on one of the panels seven pages later on, we have a double-decker chariot driving on the right side of the road, as in Continental Europe (obviously an Uderzo’s mistake). At some point, Asterix’s cousin speaks about building an underwater tunnel from Dover to France and says that it’s a dream project which he hopes he will achieve some day. This is an allusion to the modern channel tunnel (which hadn’t been built yet at the time the album was published). There are also references to the measuring systems peculiar to the British: the British pre-decimal currency system (in use in 56
From 2000, after the admittance of Italy, the tournament is known as Six Nations. Before the inclusion of France, the tournament was played among the four British Home Nations between 1883 and 1909 and afterward, between 1932 and 1939. 57 See Asterix in Britain, available at http://en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Asterix_in_Britain (last accessed 7 th March 2010). 392
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the UK when the book was published58), the British imperial measurements (feet, acres, ounces, stones gallons and so on). Obelix’s invariable comment naturally is ‘These Britons are Crazy!’. On these occasions, British poise is repeatedly caricatured: we have seen for example Cassivellaunos’ reaction to the Roman attack, and another humorous illustration of Britons’ phlegm can be appreciated in the following dialogue between Anticlimax and a pub keeper called Surtax:
At the end of the book, when the Romans are beaten in battle, Anticlimax exclaims ‘Victory’, while making the V sign, a clear reference to Winston Churchill, whose face we can recognise caricatured in the character of the Britons’ chief (with a moustache added). The building where Obelix and Dipsomaniax are incarcerated clearly reminds us of the Tower of London. Furthermore, when our friends are in Londinium (Latin name for the British capital), they see four bards that can easily be identified as caricatures of the Beatles, the famous pop band who reached the 58
Anticlimax explains the currency system to Asterix as being ‘really awfully simple, old boy… we have iron ingots weighing a pound which are worth three and a half sestertii each, and five new bronze coins which are worth twelve old bronze coins. Sestertii are each worth twelve bronze coins and…’. Awfully simple indeed, for a British of course! Obelix’s reaction is illustrated next. 393
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top of their popularity in 1966, the publishing year of Asterix’s album. Other British icons that appear in this adventure are doubledecker buses and pubs, where customers drink warm beer and play darts; umbrellas (which, according to Anticlimax’s explanation, are used to avoid that the sky falls on their heads, which also represents one of the Gauls’ biggest fear), obviously related to the unpleasant, ever-changing and mostly humid climate; the almost manic care of lawn gardens; the residential neighbourhoods, with identical houses aligned etc. The satire is mainly at the expense of the English; but also the Scottish and the Irish are represented, particularly by the characters of McAnix and O’veroptimistix. The most famous stereotype related to the highlanders is introduced at one point: when Asterix, Obelix and Anticlimax seemingly buy only one cup of wine for the three of them (simply to see whether it was actually wine, and not the magic potion from their barrel, which was confiscated by the Romans and then stolen by a thief), the landlord assumes they must be Caledonians (Scots), because of their alleged parsimony. Goscinny and Uderzo feared that British readers might feel offended by such a satiric picture of their country. So, when the book was first translated into English, they decided to add the following message, in order to prevent any possible complaint: As usual, we caricature what we are fond of, and we are fond of the British, in spite of their strange way of putting Nelson on top of their columns instead of Napoleon. However, when it comes to presenting this skit on the British to the British, we feel we owe them a word or two of explanation. Our little cartoon stories do not make fun of the real thing, but the ideas of the real thing that people get into their heads, i.e., clichés. We Gauls imagine the British talking in a very refined way, drinking tea at five o’clock and warm beer at the peculiar hours of opening time. The British eat their food boiled, with mint sauce; they are
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brave, phlegmatic, and always keep a stiff upper lip. Suppose we were British, caricaturing the Gauls, we would say they all wore berets, ate frogs and snails and drank red wine for breakfast. We might add that they all have hopelessly relaxed upper lips, and that phlegm is not their outstanding characteristic. And most of all, we should hope that the Gauls would have as good a sense of humour as the British.59
In fact, the authors testified that, in comparison to the reaction of other people whose countries were visited by Asterix & co., they received no protest from the British as far as the book was concerned, which in the United Kingdom is by far the most popular album of the series. Indeed, comics seem generally immune to the danger of hurting sensibilities, as Anthea Bell rightly states: And there are the national stereotypes, with their funny foreign accents. I suppose the comic-strip cartoon is about the only genre that can still make harmless use of politically incorrect, xenophobic attitudes. On the whole, we in these islands share the French view of such stock figures as the obsessively tidy Swiss and the proud Spaniard – but what about those phlegmatic characters, our own ancestors, the ancient Britons? 60
Language and Translation in Asterix in Britain As we said, characterization of Britons is based mainly on the way they talk. In the presentation of this particular foreign people, so close to the Gauls, to which we referred above (page 2 of the album), the narrator carried on and stated: ‘They spoke the same language, but with some peculiar expressions of their own...’. The fact that language peculiarities should be so central therefore doesn’t come as a surprise. Much of the humour in the 59 60
Kessler, Peter, op. cit., p. 34. Bell, Anthea, Asterix, my love, cit. 395
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original French versions is based on the mistakes British people usually make when they try to speak French.61 For example, when Anticlimax talks to his cousin Asterix, he repeatedly uses the more formal ‘vous’, instead of the familiar ‘tu’, which should be appropriate since they are related (and in fact, Asterix uses it when addressing Anticlimax); this obviously refers to the fact that English has lost the second-person singular pronoun ‘thou’ and only has one word for ‘you’, which was originally the second-person plural pronoun, like ‘vous’ is in French. We can also find jokes that reproduce the typical phrases taught in elementary classes of English. For example, when Obelix asks if the tweed worn by Anticlimax is expensive, the Briton replies ‘Mon tailleur est riche’, which means ‘My tailor is rich’: this was the very first phrase spoken in the first Anglais sans Peine vinyl record English course, published by the Assimil company in the sixties. Another example, is when Asterix observes that his cousin’s boat is small, and Anticlimax replies obscurely ‘Il est plus petit que le jardin de mon oncle... mais il est plus grand que le casque de mon neveu’ (‘It’s smaller than the garden of my uncle, but larger than the helmet of my nephew’), a French adaptation of a phrase from the same highschool English method in France. Similarly, when a Briton, holding a spear, deters the Romans pursuing the Gauls because they are ruining his well-groomed lawn, the Decurion furiously asks the Briton if he is actually so brave as to oppose Rome, he responds ‘Mon jardin est plus petit que Rome mais mon pilum est plus solide que votre sternum’ (‘My garden is smaller than Rome, but my pilum is harder than your sternum’), another example taken from the English lessons on comparatives.
61
See Asterix in Britain, cit. 396
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The French book is full of odd-sounding literal translations of English syntagmas such as ‘I say’ (‘Je dis’), ‘that’s a bit of luck’ (‘Ça c’est un morceau de chance’), ‘all that sort of thing’ (‘Toute cette sorte des choses’), ‘Goodness gracious!’ (‘Bonté gracieuse!’), ‘My goodness!’ (‘Ma bonté!’), ‘I beg your pardon’ (‘Je demande votre pardon’), ‘let’s shake our hands’ (‘secouonsnous les mains’), ‘jolly good chap’ (‘joyeux bon garçon’), ‘Sure’ (‘Sûr’), ‘Gentlemen’ (‘Gentils hommes »), ‘ I am grateful to you’ (‘Je suis reconnaissant à vous’), ‘How strange!’ (‘Combien étrange!’), ‘Very good’ (‘Très bon’, instead of the correct ‘Très bien’), ‘Keep a stiff upper lip’ (‘Gardez votre lèvre supérieure rigide’), ‘he’s gone completely nuts’ (‘Il est devenu absolument noix’ instead of ‘fou’), ‘to be out of one’s mind with worry’ (‘être en dehors de ses esprits avec l’inquietude’), ‘Fair play’ (‘Franc jeu’), ‘It’s great!’ (‘C’est grand de vous avoir ici!’). Britons’ speech in the original French is thus full of anglicisms – as for instance with ‘Plutôt’ (‘Rather’ or ‘Indeed’), ‘Assez’ (‘Quite’), ‘Choquant’ (‘Shocking’), ‘Revoltant’ (‘Appalling’), ‘Ennuyeux’ (‘Annoying’) – and we also note this kind of wordplay in the typical home inscription ‘Foyer doux foyer’, which is a literal translation of ‘Home sweet home’. Sometimes, Goscinny purposely plays with the different meanings of a word, as we have already seen with ‘nut’>‘noix’, often playing with and mis-applying the strategies identified by Malone (1988) as ‘divergence’ and/or ‘convergence’: first, he looks at the English translation of the word he is going to use in French; then, he reverses the process and chooses, from the 397
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possible translations of that English word in French, one that does not have a direct semantic relation with the original French word, thus creating a comic effect.62 Other examples of this can be ‘rotie’ for ‘toast’, and ‘joyeux’ for ‘jolly’. In addition, the speech patterns of the British characters are changed to resemble English grammar. For instance, dismissing yet another translation strategy (Malone’s ‘re-ordering’), ‘potion magique’ becomes ‘magique potion’ (magic potion), thereby signalling the fact that in English, adjectives are posited before the noun, rather than after, as in French. Other examples are the use of the English tag-question structure in the French speech uttered by Britons, as in ‘Il est, n’est-il pas?’ (‘It is, isn’t it?), or the repetition of the main verb of the question in the following answer, as in ‘Puis-je avoir de la marmelade pour les roties?’, ‘Sûr, vous pouvez’ (‘Can I have some marmalade for the toasts?’, ‘Of course you can’), or else the sporadic use of the Saxon genitive, as in Anticlimax’s assertion ‘Allons essayer de récupérer la magique potion’s tonneau’. We finally reached the main issue of this work: how did the English translator reproduce the linguistic characterisation of Britons in their target language? How do Britons speak in the English version, in a way that could possibly maintain a similar comic effect to that of the original version? How could a comic characterization of English be rendered, in English? As usual, we can make use of Anthea Bell’s answer to this question: The French version of a British accent is extremely difficult to translate into English, and has been done with a dated upperclass-twit style of English in Asterix in Britain and elsewhere.63
62
See Rivière, Stéphane, Astérix chez les Bretons: dossier. My tailor is rich: l’anglais selon Goscinny available at http://www.mage.fst.uha.fr / asterix / bretons/anglais.html (last accessed 29 th April 2010). 63 Bell, Anthea, Asterix, What’s in a Name, cit., p. 5. 398
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In Astérix chez les Bretons, they speak French with a truly dreadful English accent. This was a huge problem in translation. We visited the genial René Goscinny, whose own English was excellent, to discuss the proposed solution: a stilted English style, the language of the upper-class twit as encountered in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse. ‘I say, jolly good, eh, what?’ ‘What ho, old bean!’ ‘Hullo, old fruit.’ […] Since Goscinny’s death, all translations published are still rigorously scrutinised at the French end of the operation, and the freedoms we translators take must be approved. Luckily it is appreciated that, in this case, it is far more important to observe the spirit than the letter of the originals.64
In fact, the language of the Britons in the English version is full of ‘I say’, ‘old chap’, ‘old boy’, ‘jolly good’, ‘what ho!’, ‘Old fruit’ and all this kind of dated style of vocabulary, which linguistically defines the Briton characters, thus replacing the untranslatable anglicisms of the French source text. In fact, the stereotypes recreated by Goscinny and Uderzo undoubtedly refer more to the traditional and conservative British people one can find in P.G. Wodehouse’s novels, than to the ‘swinging London’ of the sixties, which in actual fact works as the extra-textual context from which the album stems. So, the linguistic characterisation chosen by Bell and Hockridge perfectly suits the original spirit of the story. However, when in 1995 Robert Steven Caron worked on his translation of Asterix in Britain for American readers, he had to face a different set of problems. Indeed, he had to render the story in a different variety of the same language. So, he generally characterises the Britons just by making them speak in modern British English, which is obviously felt as linguistically different by American readers. In a way, his task is therefore easier in comparison to that of his British counterparts, because British
64
Bell, Anthea, Asterix, my love, cit. 399
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English is indeed a foreign accent, almost as it is for French readers. In this sense, to American readers, what the narrator says about the British when he compares them to the Gauls looks very appropriate, in that ‘They spoke the same language [...] but had a peculiar way of expressing themselves’. However, in some circumstances, Robert Steven Caron exploits some forms of the dated vocabulary inserted by his British predecessors, like ‘what!’ or ‘old chap’. Probably, he chooses to do so when modern British expressions are not sufficient to mark the Briton characters from a linguistic point of view. The Italian publication of this story dates back to 1969. The translator was Carlo Manzoni, who limited his contribution to Asterix’s success in Italy to this album.65 Carlo Manzoni was a writer, a journalist, a painter and a humorist; he wrote novels, short stories, plays and satiric cartoons. Not a professional translator, he was nonetheless without doubt a person with a great sensibility for humour and puns. The linguistic distance between Italian and English is very similar to that between French and English. Therefore, the Italian version can reproduce a linguistic characterisation of the Britons which is similar to the original one. Carlo Manzoni’s experience as a humorist leads him to add some characterising traits, not to rival with Goscinny’s wit but rather to compensate some of the losses which necessarily marked his translation and generally to serve the original spirit of the story. We will now see some examples of linguistic characterisation in the French original, followed by their translation in British English, American English and Italian. The marking traits will be underlined. A short comment will be added, when needed. 65
Actually, this story – which represents the very first Italian publication of Asterix comics – previously appeared, at the hands of a different translator, in the 1967 Asterlinus supplement to Linus Magazine. This anonymous translation is very faithful to the original French, but lacks the creativity that characterises Manzoni’s version, which we shall discuss shortly. 400
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Scene First appearance of Briton characters in the story. Two Briton soldiers watch, from Dover’s cliff, the Roman Fleet approaching the island’s coast. FR Narrator: ‘Les Bretons ressemblaient aux Gaulois et beaucoup d’entre eux étaient les descendants des tribus venues des Gaule pour s’installer en Bretagne. Ils parlaient la même langue que les Gaulois, mais avaient une façon un peu spéciale de s’exprimer’. Briton 1: ‘Bonté gracieuse! Ce spectacle est surprenant!’. Briton 2: ‘Il est, n’est-il pas?...’. UK Narrator: ‘The Britons were rather like the Gauls, many of them being descended from Gaulish tribes who had settled in Britain. They spoke the same language, but with some peculiar expression of their own...’. Briton 1: ‘Goodness gracious! This is a jolly rum thing. Eh, what?’. Briton 2: ‘I say, rather, old fruit!’. USA Narrator: ‘The Britons resembled the Gauls. In fact, many of them were the descendants of Gaulish tribes that had settled in Britain. They spoke the same language as the Gauls, but had a peculiar way of expressing themselves...’. Briton 1: ‘Goodness gracious! This spectacle is ever so astonishing!’. Briton 2: ‘It is indeed’. ITA Narrator: ‘I Britanni somigliavano molto ai Galli perché molti di essi erano oriundi. Tribù galle si erano trasferite in Britannia poi non se ne erano più andate. Parlavano la stessa lingua dei Galli ma avevano un modo un po’ particolare d’esprimersi...’. Briton 1: ‘Del cielo numi! Questo spettacolo è sorprendente!’. Briton 2: ‘Lo è, esso è nevvero?’.
The marking traits in the original French correspond to the anglicism used by the first soldier and the tag question in his comrade’s reply. British translators, as noted above, replace this with the upper-class-twit style, while their American colleague prefers a formal register which is typically British. The Italian translator Carlo Manzoni works on the exclamation of the first character, making it sound old style and English-like, thanks to the inversion of the syntagmatic order (‘Numi del cielo’ would be the unmarked one). Then, he uses the effect of the tag question structure, just like in the French original, making it even more caricatured by introducing the ‘nevvero’ adverb, which emphasises the formal and obsequious tone of the Britons’
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speech. A printing mistake however turned the correct ‘galliche’ into ‘galle’. Scene Britons and Romans are engaging in battle. At five o’ clock the Britons stop the fight for the teatime break. FR ‘Aoh! Je pense qu’il va être l’heure, n’est-il pas?’. ‘Je demande votre pardon. Nous continuerons plus tard’. UK ‘I say, old chap. I think it’s getting on for time’. ‘Awfully sorry! We’ll be back later’. USA ‘Oh dear! I believe it’s almost that time again, is it not?’. ‘I beg your pardon. We shall resume shortly’. ITA ‘Eouh! Io penso che sia venuta l’ora, che non sia?’. ‘Chiedo venia. Continueremo più tardi!’.
It is interesting to observe that the American version, just like the French, can use the tag question structure and a stereotyped expression like ‘I beg your pardon’ as a foreign trait. Robert Steven Caron also substitutes the initial interjection with a British expression like ‘Oh dear!’ and marks the final sentence using a typical British register in ‘We shall resume shortly’. The Italian translator follows Goscinny in using a marking interjection and the tag question structure. This time, contrary to other examples of the same anglicism that occur further on in the text, Carlo Manzoni does not translate ‘I beg your pardon’ literally – as in the French source text – but opts for the very formal and old-style ‘Chiedo venia’. Scene Teatime break. Tea is served to the Briton soldiers by Briton women. FR Briton man 1: ‘Je prendrai un nuage de lait, je vous prie’. Briton woman 1: ‘S’il vous plait, faites!’. Briton man 2: ‘Puis-je avoir de la marmelade pour les roties?’. Briton woman 2: ‘Sûr, vous pouvez!’. UK Briton man 1: ‘Just a spot of milk, please!’. Briton woman 1: ‘Righty-ho luv’. Briton man 2: ‘Please may I have some marmalade?’. Briton woman 2: ‘Marmalade’s off!’. USA Briton man 1: ‘I’ll take a drop of milk, please’. Briton woman 1: ‘In a jiff, duckie!’. Briton man 2: ‘May I have some jelly for the toast?’. Briton woman 2: ‘Jelly? Jolly!’. ITA Briton man 1: ‘Io gradirei un velo di latte, per favore’. Briton woman 1: ‘Prego, fate pure!’. Briton man 2: ‘Potrei io avere della marmellata sui crostini?’. Briton woman 2: ‘Sicuro, voi potete!’.
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The French original characterises the women’s answers by using odd-sounding literal translations of English expressions such as ‘Please, do’ and ‘Sure, you can’.66 The English translation (‘Righty-ho luv’ and ‘Marmalade’s off’) changes the register considerably, making the formal English spoken by the Britons in the source text, much more informal; but only the waitresses and later the thief use this casual level of English. In the second short dialogue, the English version not only loses the syntactical structure that characterises the speakers in both the original French and the Italian version, but decides to reverse the sense of the answer. The American translator chooses for the first answer the old colloquial expression ‘In a jiff, duckie’. The register, once again, is old British slang. Furthermore, he prefers ‘jelly’ to ‘marmalade’ in order to create the wordplay ‘Jelly? Jolly!’. Carlo Manzoni renounces a proper linguistic characterisation of the first woman’s answer, while for the second, he reproduces the syntactical structure of both English question and answer (‘Can I have...?’ ‘Of course you can’). Scene The panel shows the reaction Cassivellaunos has when the Romans decide to attack during the Britons’ breaks.67 FR Cassivellaunos: ‘Aoh! Choquant. Ce ne sont pas des gentils hommes’. UK Cassivellaunos: ‘Oh, I say, the cads!’. USA Battleax: ‘Oh! How shocking! What cads!’. ITA Cassivellaunos: ‘‘Eouh! Scioccante! Essi non sono affatto dei gentili uomini’.
Robert Steven Caron uses ‘shocking’ because, just as for French and Italian readers, this word (just like its French and Italian equivalents) represents a British trait. Carlo Manzoni expresses the subject ‘Essi’ as a defining trait of the English language which, contrary to Italian, does not admit the implied subject. Then, he chooses the syntagma ‘gentili uomini’, which reproduces the English syntactical order, instead of opting for 66 67
As far as the use of the word ‘roties’ is concerned, see supra. This panel has been reproduced above. 403
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the customary adjective ‘gentiluomini’. Thus, on this occasion, the Italian translator adds two characterising traits. Scene The chief of the Briton village asks Anticlimax to go and visit Asterix in order to ask him for help against the Romans. FR Zebigbos:68 ‘Jolitorax! Va en Gaule voir ton cousin et rapporte-nous de la potion magique. C’est notre dernier espoir’. Jolitorax: ‘Aoh, cela me permettra de revoir mon cher cousin Astérix: je ne l’ai pas vu depuis longtemps, quoi?’. UK Mykingdomforanos: ‘Anticlimax, you’d better go to Gaul to see your cousin and bring back some of this magic potion!’. Anticlimax: ‘Oh, I say, jolly good show! This is my chance to see my dear cousin Asterix again. Haven’t seen him for ages, what!’. USA Unionjax: ‘Brasstax! Go and see your cousin in Gaul, and bring us back some of that magic potion. It’s our only hope’. Brasstax: ‘Oh! That will give me the chance to visit my dear cousin Asterix whom I haven’t seen in ages, eh, what?’. ITA Zebigbos: ‘Beltorax! Va’ in Gallia a vedere tuo cugino e portaci quello magico pozione. Esso è la nostra ultima speranza’. Beltorax: ‘Eouh! Ciò mi permetterà di rivedere il mio caro cugino Asterix. Non lo vedo da quando avevo i calzoni corti; non lo vedo?’.
In this instance, Bell and Hockridge add the typical exclamation ‘jolly good show’ to mark even more Anticlimax’s speech. The American version follows the British one in the use of the ‘what’ trait and adds a British nuance by using the relative pronoun ‘whom’. The Italian translator once again emphasises the linguistic characterisation of the Briton characters: the syntagma ‘quello magico pozione’ not only repeats the inversion of the order noun-adjective (which this time is absent in the French source text), but adds a trait by using the wrong gender of the
68
The names of the two characters that star in this panel are different in the four versions analysed here: the chief of the Briton’s village is Zebigbos in the French source text and in the Italian target text, Mykingdomforanos in the British version and Unionjax in the American version. Asterix’s cousin is Jolitorax in the French original, Anticlimax in the British version, Brasstax in the American version and Beltorax in the Italian version. We will comment on the translators’ choices of these names later on. 404
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words, thus stressing the absence of the morphological expression of this category in English, thereby alluding to one of the common mistakes that British people make when speaking in Italian. Furthermore, Carlo Manzoni uses the old-style subject ‘Esso’ (which again is wrong in gender, as it refers to the feminine noun ‘speranza’), to hint at the English obligation to utter the subject. When translating Beltorax’s response, he chooses a figurative expression such as ‘da quando avevo i calzoni corti’, instead of the plain ‘Je ne l’ai pas vu depuis longtemps’; the correct question tag to the assertion ‘Non lo vedo da quando avevo i calzoni corti’ should be affirmative (‘lo vedo?’) rather than negative. Scene FR UK USA ITA
Asterix’s cousin takes leave of the chief of the village. Zebigbos: ‘Bonne chance et toute cette sorte de choses’ Mykingdomforanos: ‘Jolly good luck, old boy, and all that sort of thing...’. Unionjax: ‘‘Good luck, and all that sort of thing, old chap...’. Zebigbos: ‘Buona fortuna e tutta questa specie di cose!’.
The literal translation of ‘and all that sort of things’ works as a characterising trait in both French and Italian versions. On the contrary, English editions must replace it with old-style expressions. Scene The Briton arrives at Asterix’s house and asks for him. FR Jolitorax: ‘Je dis messieurs : pourriez-vous m’indiquer la résidence de Mer Astérix?’. UK Anticlimax: ‘I say, gentlemen, could you tell me where Mr. Asterix lives, what?’. USA Brasstax: ‘I say, my good men. Could you tell me where Mr. Asterix lives?’. ITA Beltorax: ‘Dico, signori: potreste voi indicarmi la casa di Mr. Asterix?’.
This is a standard situation in which we can observe the most common strategies adopted in the four versions of the story: Bell and Hockridge compensate the loss of the comic effect implicit in the literal translation of the intended anglicism ‘Je dis’, by adding the ‘what’ trait. The American translator renounces this
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feature and tries to add a British nuance by using the vocative ‘my good men’. Carlo Manzoni’s ‘Dico’ works exactly like the original French ‘Je dis’; moreover, he can use the inversion of verb and subject in the following question – which is unmarked in the other languages – as a characterising literal translation of the English structure. Scene Anticlimax has just ‘shaken hands’ with Obelix (see infra)
UK
Anticlimax: ‘What strength! I suppose you get it from the magic potion, what?’. Anticlimax: ‘Actually, cousin Asterix, your magic potion is just what we need to help us fight the Romans, what!’. Obelix: ‘What do you keep on saying what for?’. Anticlimax: ‘I say, sir, don’t you know what’s what, what?’. USA Brasstax: ‘What strength! Do you get it from the magic potion?’. Brasstax:
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ITA
‘Precisely, cousin Asterix, we need some of that magic potion to fight the Roman armies’. Obelix: ‘How come you talk so funny?’. Brasstax: ‘I beg your pardon?’. Beltorax: ‘Che forza! Vi viene essa forse dallo magico pozione?’. Beltorax: ‘A proposito, Asterix cugino, abbiamo bisogno dello magico pozione per combattere le romane armate’. Obelix: ‘Ma si può sapere perché avete parlato a rovescio?’. Beltorax: ‘Io domando il vostro perdono?’.
Bell and Hockridge characterise the Britons’ language by repeatedly inserting ‘what’ at the end of a sentence, thus substituting the inversion of the French syntactical order nounadjective (highlighted in the panels above). Thus, when in the source text Obelix asks Asterix’s cousin ‘Why do you talk in the opposite way?’, English translators opt for ‘What do you keep on saying what for?’. The Briton’s answer in the source text is the French literal translation of ‘I beg your pardon?’, which in this context has a comic effect, as it is obviously replaced in the English version with the more adequate and very funny ‘I say, Sir, don’t you know what’s what, what?’. As far as the American translation is concerned, it seems that, actually, Brasstax’s utterances prior to Obelix’s question are not that funny, so his curiosity appears to be slightly out of context. Of course, Robert Steven Caron does not use the ‘what’ trait to depict the Briton’s language, so Obelix’s question and Brasstax’s answer follow the French source text, the latter being typically British for an American reader. Carlo Manzoni, as usual, also adds the trait of the incorrect gender in the adjectival syntagma ‘dello magico’, which is masculine, even though it refers to the feminine noun ‘pozione’. Then, he inserts another inversion of the syntactic order nounadjective, in ‘Asterix cugino’, to go with the analogue ‘magico pozione’ and ‘romane armate’, thus giving emphasis to this trait. In the following dialogue between Obelix and Beltorax, the Italian version can effectively follow the original French. Scene After talking with the chief of the Gaul village, Asterix invites his cousin back to his place. Obelix is with them.
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FR
UK
USA
ITA
Astérix: ‘En attendant viens chez moi, Jolitorax’. Jolitorax: ‘Je serai ravi, j’en suis sûr, d’aller dans la vôtre maison!’. Obélix: ‘Vous avez vu mon chien petit?’. Asterix: ‘Come and see round my house and garden while we’re waiting, Anticlimax’. Anticlimax: ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, god wot!’. Obelix: ‘What’s wot, what?’. Asterix: ‘In the meantime, do you want to see where I live, Brasstax?’. Brasstax: ‘I should be delighted. There’s no place like home sweet home!’. Obelix: ‘Want to see my little dog?’. Asterix: ‘Intanto vieni con me, Beltorax’. Beltorax: ‘Sarò incantato, ne sono certo, di venire nella casa, la vostra!’. Obelix: ‘Voi avete visto il mio cane piccolo?’.
In the French source text, we have the pronoun form ‘la vôtre’ instead of the correct adjective ‘votre’, which represents a common mistake made by foreigners speaking French. Obelix seems to get confused by Jolitorax’s way of speaking and inverts the correct sequence ‘mon petit chien’. English translators add jokes and other cultural references to maintain the original spirit and compensate some translation losses: for example, having renounced reproducing the ‘pronoun vs. adjective’ trait, they make Anticlimax say ‘A Garden is a lovesome thing, god wot!’, quoting the first line of a famous 19th century poem by Thomas Edward Brown called My Garden; to make this utterance coherent, they also introduce the reference to the garden in Asterix’s invitation. In the English version, the subsequent question posed by Obelix refers to Anticlimax’s line, rather than to the dog, and it is a reprise of the ‘what’ issue between Obelix and Anticlimax, which opened a few strips above and which becomes a characterising trait in Bell and Hockridge’s version. Maybe, the T.E. Brown’s verse was purposely chosen to replace the linguistic mistake of the French original, in that the archaic verbal form ‘wot’ – namely the third person singular of the present tense of ‘wit’ – allowed the wordplay with the much repeated ‘what’. The American version of Brasstax’s utterance is clearly characterised by a typical English style of language. Obelix’s turn 408
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is faithful to the original French, since there is no other linguistic connotation to emphasise. The Italian version follows the source text, emphasising an irregularity in the possessive construction, as the pronoun is postponed to the name to which it refers. Maybe, it would have be more effective to create a literal translation of the English structure ‘in this house of yours’, something like ‘in questa casa delle vostre’. The translation of Obelix’s marked question also follows the original French. Scene The Druid gives Anticlimax a barrel of magic potion to take to Britain. Asterix’s cousin shows his gratefulness. FR Jolitorax: ‘Je suis très reconnaissant à vous, druide Panoramix’. UK Anticlimax: ‘I say, I’m most frightfully grateful, o druid Getafix’. USA Brasstax: ‘I’m terribly grateful to you, druid Magigimmix’. ITA Beltorax: ‘Io vi sono molto riconoscente, druido Panoramix…’.
In the French source text, Jolitorax makes another typical mistake for a foreigner, as the correct form should be ‘Je vous suis très reconnaissant’. Obviously, English translators replace the incorrect form of the original with the usual old-style language. The American version is in line with the general characterisation of the Britons. In the Italian translation, no particular linguistic trait can be found. Scene The three travellers walk toward the Gaulish coast, when Obelix remembers about food. FR Obélix: ‘Nous aurions du emporter quelques vivres’. Jolitorax: ‘Bonté gracieuse! Pourquoi faire? En Bretagne, la nourriture est délicieuse. Elle vous plaira j’en suis sûr. Quoi?’. UK Obelix: ‘We should have brought some food with us’. Anticlimax: ‘ Good gracious me, old chap, what for? British food’s delicious. You’re sure to like it, what!’. USA Obelix: ‘We should have taken along some food’. Brasstax: ‘Goodness gracious! What for? The food in Britain is divine. I’m quite sure you’ll adore it’. ITA Obelix: ‘Avremmo dovuto portarci da mangiare’. Beltorax: ‘Del cielo, numi! Per che farne? In Britannia il cibo è delizioso. Vi piacerà ne son sicuro! Ecché?’.
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Another example of the translators’ strategies observed so far: the anglicism ‘Bonté gracieuse!’ is adapted in the different renditions. The tag question structure is applied as a marking trait in both French and Italian versions. American translator makes use of a British style of language using expressions as ‘divine’ and ‘I’m quite sure’. Scene The three travellers reach the coast where Anticlimax has left his little rowing boat. FR Jolitorax: ‘Ah! Voici mon bateau’. Astérix ‘Il n’est pas gros!’. UK Anticlimax: ‘There’s my little jolly-boat’. Asterix: ‘It’s a jolly little boat!’. USA Brasstax: ‘Ah! Here’s my little rowboat’. Asterix: ‘What a dinky little thing’. ITA Beltorax: ‘Ecco la mia barca!’. Asterix: ‘Non è poi tanto grossa!’.
The British target text adds a wordplay referring to the ‘little jolly-boat’ – meaning a small sailing boat – which Asterix thinks is a ‘jolly little boat’ – meaning an extremely small boat – using ‘jolly’ (a very frequent word in the old-style English spoken by the Britons) as an adverb. Scene Asterix, Obelix and Anticlimax had to hide in the pub’s cellar, while they were eating, because of the Romans break-in, which led to the confiscation of all the barrels. As they resurface, Anticlimax exchange a typical British comment on the event.
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Dipsomaniax69: ‘Poor show, what!’. Anticlimax: ‘Rather trying’. Dipsomaniax: ‘Bit of a bore!’. Anticlimax: ‘I say it is, a bit!’. USA Relax: ‘Rather disturbing, what?’. Brasstax: ‘Rather’. Relax: ‘Quite’. Brasstax: ‘I should say so’. ITA Relax: ‘Questa è una bella scocciatura!’. Beltorax: ‘Effettivamente lo è!’. Relax: ‘Vero!’. Beltorax: ‘Scocciaturissima, direi!’. UK
In this quick and haughty exchange between the two Britons, the Italian translator makes some changes: in the first utterance, he chooses the rather colloquial ‘scocciatura’ for ‘ennuyeux’ (‘annoying’), when a more severe word like ‘seccatura’ could have been more appropriate to the Britons’ tone; then, he replaces the quite sober ‘Assez’ with a calqued expression from the English form ‘in fact it is’; ‘Plutôt’, so far duly translated with ‘Piuttosto’, is replaced with ‘Vero’; the typical ‘Je dis’, generally rendered as ‘Dico’, is put in the conditional mode (‘direi’) and accompanied by the irregular superlative form of the noun chosen for the first utterance. Moreover, the exclamation mark is always used, while in the original French it only appeared in the first sentence: a punctuation which is not perfectly adequate to the phlegmatic (and very British) tone of this dialogue. Scene At dawn, our heroes try and get back the barrel of potion, confiscated by the Romans with all the others barrels of wine. FR Jolitorax: ‘Allons essayer de récupérer la magique potion’s tonneau. Relax nous prête sa charrette. C’est un joyeux bon garçon’. UK Anticlimax : ‘Now try and get back the barrel of potion, what! Dipsomaniax will lend us his cart. He’s a jolly good chap, don’t you know!’. USA Brasstax: ‘Let’s try and find the cask of magic potion. Relax has lent us his cart. He’s such a good chap, eh, what?’. ITA Beltorax: ‘Cerchiamo di recuperare la magico pozione’s botte. Relax ci presta il suo carro. Egli è un gran caro ragazzo’.
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Both British and American versions do not reproduce the Saxon genitive, which obviously can be a characterising trait only in a non-English target text. The Italian translation repeats the insertion of the Saxon genitive in a foreign language and adds again the lack of concordance in gender between noun and adjective. Furthermore, Carlo Manzoni uses the explicit rendition of the subject ‘Egli’ as a characterising trait. Scene Our heroes arrive to the Governor’s palace in Londinium. FR Astérix: ‘Attends-nous là, Jolitorax. Si nous ne sortons pas, tu iras chercher du renfort’. Jolitorax: ‘Très bon‘. UK Asterix: ‘You wait here for us, Anticlimax. If we don’t come out, go and get reinforcements’. Anticlimax: ‘Right ho!’. USA Asterix: ‘Wait for us here, Brasstax. If we don’t come out, send for reinforcements’. Brasstax: ‘Very well’. ITA Asterix: ‘Aspettaci qui, Beltorax. Se non ci vedi uscire, vai a cercare rinforzi’. Beltorax: ‘Molto buono!’.
The French source text attributes to the Briton character the literal translation of the English form ‘very good’, instead of the correct ‘Très bien’. The Italian translator follows the same path, putting ‘Molto buono’ in the mouth of Asterix’s cousin, instead of the usual collocation ‘Molto bene’. This cannot be rendered in English, but while the British version connotes the sentence by using the customary upper class register expressed by ‘Right ho!’, the American version just looses any kind of linguistic depiction and plainly translates ‘Very well’. Scene Asterix and his cousin leave the cart to go and help Obelix, who is drunk and is fighting with some Roman soldiers. A thief takes advantage of the situation. We can read his thoughts: FR ‘Une abandonnée charrette! Quel morceaux de chance pour un voleur de charrettes!’. UK ‘An unattended cart! What a bit of luck for an unattended cart thief!’. USA ‘An untended cart! What a bit of luck for a cart thief! Now I can make a barrel!’. ITA ‘Uno abbandonato carretta! Quale pezzo di fortuna per uno ladro di carrette!’.
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In this example, the characterising trait represented by the inversion of the syntactic order noun-adjective is not substituted in the two English versions, where the syntagma ‘an unattended cart’ reproduces the unmarked structure for English readers. The same occurs with the literal translation of the calqued expression ‘Quel morceaux de chance’, with the inevitable loss of the marking trait. On the contrary, Carlo Manzoni not only reproduces the characterising features of the French source text, but again adds the lack of concordance in gender between the adjectival syntagma and the noun; furthermore, he uses an inappropriate indefinite article, ‘uno ladro’ instead of ‘un ladro’. Robert Steven Caron creates a wordplay out of the different meanings of the noun ‘barrel’: the thief is obviously stealing a cart full of barrels, but the word, in an informal register, also means ‘a large quantity’ (thus, he is making a barrel of barrels) or ‘an act or instance of moving rapidly’ (as he has to act quickly to sneak the cart). Scene Asterix and his cousin discover that Relax/Dipsomaniax’s pub has been burnt down by the Romans. FR Astérix: ‘Oh! L’auberge de Relax!!’. Jolitorax: ‘Ma bonté!!!’. UK Asterix: ‘Hey! Look at Dipsomaniax’s place!’. Anticlimax: ‘Oh, I say, my goodness!’. USA Asterix: ‘Look! That was Relax’s pub!!!’. Brasstax: ‘My goodness!’. ITA Asterix: ‘Ma quello è l’albergo di Relax!’. Beltorax: ‘My goodness!’.
Both English and American versions – ‘My goodness!’ – simply translate the intended anglicism of the French original without substituting its comic effect. The Italian translator’s choice of putting it directly in English – ‘My goodness!’ – is a novelty. Scene Asterix and his cousin are informed that the Romans have taken Obelix while he was sleeping. FR Astérix: ‘Mon Obélix prisonnier des Romains!’. Jolitorax: ‘Courage Astérix! Gardez votre lèvre supérieure rigide!’. UK Asterix: ‘Poor old Obelix, taken prisoner by the Romans!’. Anticlimax: ‘I say, cheer up, Asterix, old boy! Keep a stiff upper lip, what!’. USA Asterix: ‘My Obelix, a Roman prisoner!’. Brasstax: ‘Don’t despair,
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ITA
Asterix! Keep a stiff upper lip!. Asterix: ‘Obelix prigioniero dei Romani!’. Beltorax: ‘Coraggio Asterix… Self-control, vi prego!’.
Both English and American versions – ‘Keep a stiff upper lip’ – simply translate the intended anglicism of the French source text, thus losing the marking effect. The Italian translator again chooses to replace the original calqued expression with an English form – ‘Self-control, vi prego’ – even if this one is normally used by Italian speakers. Scene Obelix is in prison, together with another Briton convict. FR Obélix: ‘C’est vrai, j’ai la bouche pâteuse et je me sens un peu faible. Sortons’. Briton prisoner: ‘Pauvre garçon... Il est devenu absolument noix!’. UK Obelix: ‘I’ve got a mouth like sandpaper, and I feel quite weak. Let’s get out of here’. Briton prisoner: ‘Poor fellow… He’s gone completely bonkers!’. USA Obelix: ‘I’m feeling faint and my mouth’s like sandpaper. Let’s get out of here’. Briton prisoner: ‘Poor chap… He’s gone completely nuts!’. ITA Obelix: ‘Ho la bocca impastata e mi sento un po’ debole’. Briton prisoner: ‘Povero ragazzo! È diventato completamente scemo!’.
Rather than using the expression to which the original French refers to by using this anglicism (‘he has gone completely nuts’), the English translators prefers to replace ‘nuts’ with the adjective ‘bonkers’, which is, if not slang, at least extremely informal. On the contrary, Robert Steven Caron simply translates the calqued expression. In this instance, the Italian translator renounces any kind of wordplay and renders the expression as ‘È diventato completamente scemo!’. Scene Relax/Dipsomaniax takes our three heroes to another publican in order to find the stolen barrel of the magic potion. FR Relax: ‘Je vous conduis chez un de mes cousins aubergiste comme moi. Il s’appelle Surtax. Peut-être pourra-t-il nous aider’. Jolitorax: ‘Joyeuse bonne idée’. UK Dipsomaniax: ‘I’m taking you to see a cousin of mine. He keeps a pub too. His name’s Surtax. He may be able to help us’. Anticlimax: ‘Jolly good wheeze, what!’.
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USA ITA
Relax: ‘I’m taking you to see my cousin Surtax. He runs a pub like me. Perhaps he can help us’. Brasstax: ‘Jolly good idea’. Relax: ‘Vi porto da un mio cugino che fa l’oste come me. Si chiama Supertax. Forse ci potrà aiutare. Beltorax: ‘Felice buona idea: non è buona?’.
Even if on many occasions the odd-sounding literal translations of English syntagmas such as ‘Ma bonté’ or ‘Toute cette sorte des choses’ are maintained in the English version (‘My goodness’ or ‘All this sort of things’) – thereby losing their comic effect – sometimes Bell and Hockridge substitute them and add an upper-class trait to their English rendition. That is the case with this example, where the plain translation ‘Jolly good idea’ is put aside and replaced with the use of the more refined ‘Jolly good wheeze’, followed by the inevitable ‘what!’ (‘wheeze’ is a Briticism meaning a clever or amusing scheme or trick, or an elaborate and systematic plan of action). In the American version, Robert Steven Caron plainly translates ‘Jolly good idea’. Carlo Manzoni not only follows the original French reproducing an anglicism, but he also adds a tag question to make it even more English-like: ‘Felice buona idea; non è buona?’. Scene Surtax receives his Briton cousin, our Gaulish heroes and their Briton friend in his pub. FR ‘Relax, mon cousin! Je suis follement heureux de vous voir. J’ai appris votre arrestation par les Romains. J’étais en dehors de mes esprits avec l’inquiétude!’. UK ‘I say, cousin Dipsomaniax, I’m fearfully pleased to see you! I heard about the Romans arresting you. It gave me quite a turn’. USA ‘Well, if it isn’t cousin Relax. I’m frightfully happy to see you. I heard the Romans had arrested you. I was rather upset, old chap’. ITA ‘Mio caro cugino Relax! Sono follemente felice di vederti. Ho saputo del tuo arresto ed ero fuori dei miei sentimenti dalla preoccupazione’.
The modified adjective ‘follement heureux’ is another ironic reproduction of an English expression (‘madly happy’), which is rendered in the English version with the quite pompous ‘fearfully pleased’. The intended anglicism of the original expression
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‘J’étais en dehors de mes esprits avec l’inquietude’ (‘I was out of my mind with worry’) is replaced with the more refined, albeit idiomatic, ‘It gave me quite a turn’. Carlo Manzoni follows the source text but uses the second person singular instead of the plural which characterises the addressing form of the Briton characters. Scene Surtax says that he had the thief followed and that he knows his address. Asterix’s cousin answers: FR Jolitorax: ‘Bon garçon!’. UK Anticlimax: ‘Stout feller!’. USA Brasstax: ‘Nice going, old chap!’. ITA Beltorax: ‘Sei un ragazzo in gamba’.
Another example of the English translator’s strategy of not plainly reproducing the expression referred to by the original anglicism (‘Good boy’), instead substituting it with an upperclass form. Again, the American translator makes use of an oldstyle briticism. No linguistic characterisation in the Italian version. The British edition chooses to introduce an additional factor of linguistic representation in relation to the characters of McAnix and O’Veroptimistix70. As mentioned above, the first is Scottish while the second is Irish. As a consequence, Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge characterise their language by inserting elements from their respective dialects, especially the Scottish dialect. Quite obviously, both Robert Steven Caron and Carlo Manzoni cannot be concerned about such a linguistic connotation, that can be significant only within a British context. As a consequence, the lines uttered by these two characters, are generally translated by applying the same strategy chosen for the rendition of the Britons’ language as a whole. Let us focus on 70
The names of this two characters change in the other editions: they are originally Mac Anoterapix and O’Torinolaringologix and become Mac Alomaniax and O’Torhinolaryngologix in the American version, Mac Anoterapix (as in French) and O’Torinolaringoiatrix in the Italian one. 416
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some specific examples of the (rare) appearances of these characters and their intra-national geographical dialects. Scene The two characters meet Asterix’s cousin outside the house of the village chief, where they have been summoned. FR Mac Anoterapix: ‘O’Torinolaringologix et moi même avons été convoqués par le chef, Jolitorax’. Jolitorax: ‘Oui, Mac Anoterapix, la situation est assez sérieuse, plutôt’. UK McAnix: ‘Och aye, Anticlimax! O’Veroptimistix and myself were bidden here by yon laird’. Anticlimax: ‘I say, McAnix, we’re in a bit of a fix, old boy!’. USA Mac Alomaniax: ‘Both O’Torhinolaryngologix and I have been summoned by the chief, Brasstax’. Brasstax: ‘Yes, Mac Alomaniax, we’re really in a stew, what’. ITA Mac Anoterapix: ‘O’Torinolaringoiatrix ed io siamo stati dal capo, Beltorax’. Beltorax: ‘Sì, Mac Anoterapix, la situazione è piuttosto seria. Preoccupante, direi’.
‘Och aye’ is the Scottish equivalent to ‘Oh yes’. Similarly, ‘yon laird’ is Scottish for ‘that lord’. As for the remaining trait – ‘plutôt’, replaced by Bell and Hockridge with the typical ‘old boy’ – the American translator decides to characterise the entire utterance by choosing an old-fashioned style of language. The Italian translation of this dialogue is quite neutral; as a matter of fact, the first line seems to be misunderstood by the translator, as he writes ‘we have visited the chief’, when in fact they haven’t got to his house yet. Scene The Britons are gathered inside the house of the chief who, while speaking, offers his guests some tea. FR Mac Anoterapix: ‘Merci. Pas de sucre. Du lait. Un nuage’. UK McAnix: ‘Nae sugar, mon. Just a wee drappie o’ milk’. USA Mac Alomaniax: ‘Thanks. A spot of milk, please, no sugar’. ITA ‘Grazie. Niente zucchero. Latte: un velo’.
We therefore find here more Scottish traits in the words uttered by McAnix: ‘nae’, for ‘not’; ‘mon’, for ‘man’; ‘a wee’, for ‘a little’, and ‘drappie o’’ for ‘drop of’. Scene We are again at the chief’s house, where the Britons, who know that the barrel of the magic potion is lost, are getting ready to face the Romans with Asterix
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and Obelix’s help. Zebigbos: ‘Vous avez donc perdu la magique potion?... Alors, nous sommes perdus. Apprenant la nouvelle, les romaines legions vont nous envahir’. Mac Anoterapix: ‘Nous mourrons les armes à la main, je dis!’. O’Torinolaringologix: ‘Joyeuse bonne idée!’. UK Mykingdomforanos: ‘You’ve lost the magic potion? Then we’re done for! When the Romans hear about it they’ll attack, what!’. McAnix: ‘Dinna fash, we’ll die wi’oor boots on!’. O’Veroptimistix: ‘Sure and begorrah we will!’. USA Unionjax: ‘So you lost the magic potion?... Now we’re in for it. When they find out, the Roman legions are going to attack!’. Mac Alomaniax: ‘I say, we have nothing to fear but fear itself!’. O’Torhinolaryngologix: ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’. ITA Zebigbos: ‘Se non avete con voi lo magico pozione, siamo perduti. Apprendendo la notizia, le romane legioni ci invaderanno’. Mac Anoterapix: ‘Moriremo con le armi alla mano, dico!’. O’Torinolaringoiatrix: ‘Gioiosa buona idea!’. FR
In the British edition, we find ‘Dinna fash’ (which is a Scottish expression meaning ‘Do not worry’), and the idiomatic phrase ‘to die with one’s boots on’ (which means to die from violent as opposed to natural causes, indicated by the expression ‘to die in bed’) – which orthographically reproduces Scottish pronunciation. O’Veroptimistix is Irish, thus he says ‘begorrah’, which is an emphatic exclamation (sometimes spelt as ‘begorra’), used as a mild oath and regarded as typical of Irishmen. The American translator, who clearly has Bell and Hockridge’s version as a reference, feels the need to add a particular connotation to both Scottish and Irish characters. Mac Alomaniax’s statement quotes a famous phrase uttered in 1933 by American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his first inaugural address to the American people. O’Torhinolaryngologix’s exclamation is a famous quotation attributed to Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia, from a speech he made to the Virginia Convention on March 23rd, 1775. The Italian version translates the original French, with all its elements of linguistic depiction generally applied to Briton characters, thereby dismissing Scottish and Irish peculiarities. As per usual, the translator adds the trait of the lack of concordance 418
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in gender between the name and the adjective; moreover, the preceding masculine article ‘lo’ is grammatically incorrect, as it should have been ‘il’. As we have already pointed out in former paragraphs, rendering the original puns and cultural references in the target language is one of the main difficulties for translators. This cannot be more evident than in Asterix en Bretagne, a story based on linguistic humour and cultural stereotypes. We will now take into consideration some particularly representative examples. Scene Asterix meets his Briton cousin who came to Gaul to ask him for help. The guest is introduced to Obelix.
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UK
Asterix: ‘I’m Asterix’. Anticlimax: ‘Oh, I say what a bit of luck! I’m Anticlimax. Let’s shake hands, old boy’. Asterix: ‘Anticlimax! My first cousin once removed!’. ‘And this is my best friend Obelix!’. Anticlimax: ‘Any friend of Asterix is a friend of mine! Sir, I should be very proud if you would shake me by the hand!’. Obelix: ‘Right!’. Asterix: ‘Obelix!’. Obelix: ‘But he’s been removed once anyway, and he asked me to...’. Asterix: ‘He’s my first cousin once removed from Britain, and they don’t talk quite the same as us!’. Anticlimax: ‘Jolly good show, what!’ USA Asterix: ‘Asterix? Why, that’s me’. Brasstax: ‘I say. What a bit of luck! I’m Brasstax! Let’s shake hands!’. Asterix: ‘Brasstax! My cousin!’. Asterix: ‘And this is Obelix, my best friend!’. Brasstax: ‘Shake!’. Obelix: ‘All right!’. Asterix: ‘Obelix!’. Obelix: ‘But he told me to shake...’. Asterix: ‘He’s a Briton and they sometimes have a problem expressing themselves!’. Brasstax: ‘Splendid! Splendid!’. ITA Asterix: ‘Asterix sono io’. Beltorax: ‘Dico, questo è un pezzo di fortuna! Io sono Beltorax! Scuotiamoci le mani!’. Asterix: ‘Beltorax! Il mio cugino germano!’. Asterix: ‘Questo è Obelix, il mio migliore amico’. Beltorax:
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‘Scuotiamoci le mani!’. Obelix: ‘Bene!’. Asterix: ‘Obelix!’. Obelix: ‘Ma è stato questo germanico, a dire…’. Asterix: ‘Non è un germanico: non parla proprio esattamente come noi. È un britanno!’. Beltorax: ‘Fantastico! Fantastico!’.
In order to create the wordplay which appears in the preceding and following panels, English translators change the degree of relation between Asterix and Anticlimax. In fact, the original French uses the word ‘germain’, which means first cousin, while the expression ‘first cousin once removed’ indicates the child of one’s first cousin. If we compare the following panel to the original French, we see that Anticlimax is very formal to Obelix, as he even calls him ‘Sir’. It is not by chance that Bell and Hockridge choose the extended phrase ‘I should be very proud if you would shake me by the hand’, instead of the more informal ‘Let’s shake hands’: in fact, Obelix literally shakes Anticlimax by the hand. Having misunderstood the expression ‘once removed’, Obelix tries to justify his behaviour by saying ‘But he’s been removed once anyway’. Translators play with the different meanings of the word ‘removed’, while the original French plays with the polysemy of the word ‘germain’, which of course also means ‘german’. Robert Steve Caron completely renounces the pun related to the word that indicates relation and reduces the comic effect to the misunderstanding of the expression ‘Let’s shake hands’. Contrary to the English version, Brasstax’s way of addressing Obelix is very concise, and his reaction to Obelix’s violence repeats the adjective used in the French original. Contrary to French where, as we mentioned above, the word ‘germain’ has a double meaning, in Italian the translator, in order to convey the second meaning of the French word, must use the almost identical adjective ‘germanico’: in this case, the misunderstanding is therefore not direct and presupposes Obelix’s flawed reception of the word pronounced by Asterix, which is due more to his ignorance than to a lack of hearing. To
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explain the misunderstanding, Carlo Manzoni thus feels compelled to add a footnote that reads ‘gioco di parole tra germano e germanico’ (‘wordplay between ‘germano’ and ‘germanico’’). Scene Obelix asks Asterix’s cousin about his clothes: FR Obélix: ‘C’est cher?’. Jolitorax: ‘Mon tailleur est riche’. UK Obelix: ‘Does it cost a lot to make up?’. Anticlimax: ‘Rather! My tailor makes a good thing out of it’. USA Obelix: ‘But how do you know what’s in style?’. Brasstax: ‘One must cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth!’. ITA Obelix: ‘È caro?’. Beltorax: ‘Per te sì. Dipende dalla quantità’.
The English translation slightly differs from the source text, as the reference to English classes is not significant to British readers (see supra): so, instead of the rather inconsequent response of the original French, Bell and Hockridge prefer a more explicit answer. The American version completely changes the subject of the dialogue, losing the reference to the price of the cloth and replacing it with a hint to the style of the outfit. Brasstax’s response reproduces a British proverb meaning ‘to plan one’s aims and activities in line with one’s resources and circumstances’. The Italian version respects the general sense of the source text, but does not translate it literally, since the sentence ‘Il mio sarto è ricco’ does not have any kind of effect in terms of wordplay or cultural reference. Anyway, the use of the informal ‘tu’ seems incongruent, given that Beltorax always uses the second person plural ‘voi’, which is chosen by Goscinny as a characterising trait of the Briton’s language, being a calque of the English ‘you’ form, which is a second person plural. Scene Asterix and Obelix are having their first dinner in Britain at a local pub called ‘Le rieur sanglier’ (translated as ‘The Jolly Boar’ in the British version). They are of course having boar, but Obelix does not seem to appreciate the way Britons cook it. FR Obélix: ‘C’est ça le rieur sanglier?... Il n’y a pas de quoi rire!’.
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UK USA ITA
Obelix: ‘This is a bit of a jolly old bore, what!’. Obelix: ‘Now I know why they call this place the laughing boar! These portions are a joke!’. Obelix: ‘E questo sarebbe il cinghiale che ride?... Non c’è proprio niente da ridere!’.
English translators create a pun with the almost homophonic words ‘boar’ and ‘bore’. Obelix alludes to the name of the pub where they are having their first Briton meal. In the original French, the name of the pub means ‘The laughing boar’, so Obelix’s complaint is, literally, ‘Is this the laughing boar?... There is nothing to laugh about!’. Having opted for the much repeated adjective ‘jolly’ to ‘laughing’ for the pub’s name, Bell and Hockridge have to create a different kind of pun, based on the noun, rather than on the adjective. Again, Obelix seems to be influenced by the Britons’ language, and ends his utterance with the marking exclamation ‘what!’. Robert Steven Caron follows the French source for the name of the pub but changes Obelix’s remark, whereas the Italian version appears identical to the original French. Scene Obelix, Asterix and his Briton cousin are travelling to Londinium on a cart. FR Astérix: ‘Ils ne nous suivent pas! Londinium est encore loin?’. Jolitorax: ‘Nos, quelques pieds... Les Romains mesurent les distances en pas, nous en pieds’. Obélix: ‘En pieds?’. Jolitorax: ‘Il faut six pieds pour faire un pas’. Obélix : ‘Ils sont fous ces Bretons!’. UK Asterix: ‘They’re not following! Is it far to Londinium?’. Anticlimax: ‘No, only a few hundred thousand feet... You measure distance in metres, we do it in feet’. Obelix: ‘Feet?’. Anticlimax: ‘Yes, you’ll find it quite easy once you get your hand in’. Obelix: ‘These Britons are crazy!’. USA Asterix: ‘They’re not following us! Is Londinium much farther?’. Brasstax: ‘No, just a few hundred thousand feet. You measure your steps in meters, we do it in feet’. Obelix: ‘In feet?’. Brasstax: ‘Yes, it might change but we’re still dragging our feet’. Obelix: ‘These Britons are crazy!’. ITA Asterix: ‘Non ci seguono più! È ancora lontana Londinium?’. Beltorax: ‘No... ancora qualche piede e ci siamo. I Romani misurano le distanze coi passi, noi coi piedi’. Obelix: ‘Coi piedi?’. Beltorax: ‘Ci vogliono sei piedi per fare un passo’. Obelix: ‘Sono Pazzi Questi Britanni!’.
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The English version does not refer to the pace (passus), namely the ancient Roman unit of measurement, but to the modern metre (one passus equals 1.48 metres). So, the subject of the sentence is not the third person plural ‘The Romans’, but the second person plural ‘You’, meaning ‘you, who are not Briton’. Then, instead of translating the equivalence between feet and metres, as the French source text does for feet and paces, Bell and Hockridge attribute to Anticlimax a generic remark, expressed from a point of view of a Briton (or a modern British, we should say) who is convinced that, sooner or later, everybody will adopt that system of measurement. Also the American translator refers to metres (or ‘meters’, as they spell it) rather than to paces. Still, the point of view of Brasstax’s final utterance is reversed, and a new pun is added: while in the British version the Briton character is sure that their system of measurement is quite simple for a foreigner, in the American version Brasstax assumes it might actually change and implicitly recognises British difference as a symptom of backwardness. In fact, ‘to drag one’s feet’ means ‘to act or work with intentional slowness; delay’. Italian version is identical to the original French. Scene In order to discover where the magic potion is, Roman soldiers must have a taste of all the confiscated barrels of wine. They inevitably end up getting drunk and sing in general disorder. FR ‘ Vive la Rome, vive la Rome, vive l’aroooome du bon vin! ’. UK ‘ Roll out the barrel ’. USA ‘Barrel of wine, fruit of the vine!’. ITA ‘ Viva la Roma, viva la Roma, viva l’aroma del buon vin! ’.
Obviously, the pun introduced in the verses sung by the Roman soldiers (identically reproduced in the Italian translation) does not work in English. So, Bell and Hockridge refer to Beer Barrel Polka, also known as Roll Out the Barrel, namely a song which became popular worldwide during World War II. The American
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version lacks the musical notes in the balloon, so the soldiers are not presumably singing the rhyme created by the translator. Scene Our heroes are passing by the streets of Londinium and notice some characterising elements of its urban landscape.
UK
Asterix: ‘What a funny double-decker chariot’. Anticlimax: ‘It’s a goadassisted two-ox-power numerous quartus run by Londinium transport’. Asterix: ‘And what are those little portable roofs?’. Anticlimax: ‘They’re to stop the sky falling on our heads!’. Greengrocer: ‘Oh, so this melon’s bad is it?’. Customer: ‘Rather old fruit’. USA Asterix: ‘These double-decker carts sure look weird’. Brasstax: ‘It’s our rapid transit system. It’s cheap and clean. No graffiti, lots of seats, safe, rarely a breakdown’. Asterix: ‘And those little portable roofs?’. Anticlimax: ‘That’s to prevent the sky from falling on our heads’. Greengrocer: ‘My melon’s a lemon?’. Customer: ‘Indeed’. ITA Asterix: ‘Guarda che strani carri... sono a due piani!’. Beltorax: ‘Sono
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carribus. In omaggio all’Impero Romano li chiamano Imperiali’. Asterix: ‘E queste piccole tettoie portatili?’. Beltorax: ‘È per impedire che il cielo ci caschi addosso’. Fruttivendolo: ‘È troppo caro il mio melone?’. Cliente: ‘Lo è!’.
In the panel which portrays the double-decker bus, the description given in the British version is more accurate than the original one. As far as the following panel is concerned, it is an example of the strategy of amplification / compensation which the translator successfully adopts by adding a good pun to the original: in the scene where a greengrocer argues with a buyer, in the original French the shopkeeper enquires ‘Il est trop cher mon melon?’ (which means ‘Is my melon too expensive (for you)?’) and the customer answers ‘Il est’ (‘It is’); the dialogue is not comic in itself and it mostly serves to create a link with Obelix’s comment in the next panel (see infra). The English translation makes a pun on the quaint English expression ‘old fruit’ which, on this occasion, works both as a form of address and as a comment on the melon itself. Anthea Bell recalls Goscinny’s reaction when he saw their version: ‘A gleam came into his eye. ‘Old fruit’, he said. ‘Ah, I wish I’d thought of that. Vieux fruit’. It is one of our nicest memories of him’.71 As far as the bus description is concerned, the American translation is more modern-oriented and, as to the melon, it creates another type of wordplay. The Italian version is closer to the original French with a touch of Latin reminiscence in the word ‘carribus’. Scene Obelix looks back to the scene involving the greengrocer and the buyer and makes a comment about it (on the scene represented in the French source text). FR Obélix: ‘Tu as vu, Astérix? Ce londinien est coiffé d’un melon!’. UK Obelix: ‘I say, Asterix, I think this bridge is falling down’. USA Obelix: ‘That sign says Piccadilly Circus! Can we go to the circus, Asterix?’. ITA Obelix: ‘Hai sentito Asterix? Quel londinese è innamorato d’un melone!’.
71
Bell, Anthea, Asterix, my love, cit. 426
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We have to assume – since it is not shown by the panels – that the quarrel between the greengrocer and the customer has embittered and that the first has put the melon on the buyer’s head, thus motivating Obelix’s comment which creates a wordplay: this relies on the fact that the French word for melon is also the name for the traditional bowler hat which has become an icon of British culture. With no way to convey this in the English translation, in the British edition Obelix makes a different remark referring to ‘London bridge is falling down’, a well-known traditional nursery rhyme and singing game. The American translator faces a similar problem and creates a wordplay on the double meaning of ‘circus’. Just like the French text (and unlike the two Anglophonic versions), the Italian rendition of Obelix’s utterance refers to the melon which is the subject of the previous panel. Being unable to adapt to the Italian language the pun which in the source text exploits the double meaning of the French word ‘melon’, Carlo Manzoni makes Obelix misunderstand the word ‘caro’, which he intends as ‘loved’ instead of ‘expensive’, therefore being surprised that someone should feel this way about a melon. Scene Obelix gets drunk and sings loudly, while Asterix and Anticlimax are carrying on the cart all the barrels that the Romans had confiscated. FR Obélix: ‘ Ils ont des tonneaux ronds, vive la Bretagne... ’. ‘ Ils ont des tonneaux ronds, vivent les Bretons! ’ UK Obelix: ‘ Ha ha ha, hee hee hee ’. ‘ Little Brown cashk don’t I love thee ’. USA ‘ Roll out the barrel... We’ll have a barrel of fun! ’. ITA ‘ Viva le panciute botti della Britannia... Viva le botti dei panciuti Britanni! ’.
When Obelix gets drunk, in the British translation he sings a verse from Little Brown Jug, a well known drinking song written by Joseph A. Winner in 1869, while in the French original it was the French song Ils ont des chapeaux ronds, vive la Bretagne!, where ‘tonneaux’ (‘barrels’) purposely substitutes the original ‘chapeaux’. Of course, the English version also replaces the 427
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original ‘jug’ with ‘cask’ (written ‘cashk’ to reproduce the accent of a drunk person), so as to adapt it to the story. The American version makes use here of the above mentioned song Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun, which Bell and Hockbridge have put in Roman soldiers’ mouth some panels before. The Italian translator creates two new verses sung by Obelix. Scene Obelix, Asterix and his Briton cousin are visiting every pub in Londinium, looking for the barrel filled with the magic potion. They have seen a lot of wine and Obelix comments about it. FR Obélix: ‘Voir un petit coup c’est agréable, mais à la longue, c’est monotone’. UK Obelix: ‘Drinking only with mine eyes is all very well, but it does get a bit tedious!’. USA Obelix: ‘This is rough. Wine, wine, everywhere, nor any drop to drink’. ITA Obelix: ‘‘Vederne un po’ è piacevole, ma alla lunga stufa’.
Obelix’s utterance in the British version alludes to Drink to me only with thine eyes, a popular English song, set to the lyrics of Ben Jonson’s 1616 poem Song To Celia. This cultural reference substitutes the pun which, in the French text, is created using the first line of the song Boire un petit coup (words and music by Félix Boyer, 1915). Similarly, Robert Steven Caron modifies a line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (1798), where the word ‘water’ appeared in the place of the ‘wine’’ we find here. The Italian translation manages to convey the sense of Obelix’s statement while losing the cultural reference. Scene Asterix’s cousin explains the reference made to the Camulodunum team. FR Jolitorax: ‘Une rencontre comptant pour le Tournoi des Cinq Tribus doit avoir lieu demain, près de Londinium’. UK Anticlimax: ‘There’s a match for the Tribal Crown near Londinium tomorrow’. USA Brasstax: ‘Tomorrow, near Londinium, there’s a match for the crown in the Five Tribes’ Tournament’. ITA Beltorax: ‘L’incontro è valevole per il Torneo delle Cinque Tribù e avrà luogo domani vicino a Londinium’.
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English translators prefer to replace the original ‘Five Tribes’ with the more specifically British ‘Tribal Crown’, a designation which is a pun alluding to the existing ‘Triple Crown Trophy’ attributed to the British team that defeats all three other British contenders (coming from England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland) in the same Five (now Six) Nations tournament. Robert Steve Caron, who probably had on his desk the English version, renders the original designation of the tournament, but also mentions the crown. The Italian translation follows the French source text. Scene The Romans have sunk our heroes’ boat, hitting it with a big stone thrown by a catapult. The magic potion is wasted in the Thames. The Roman captain comments on his launch. FR Roman captain: ‘J’ai fait musca*’. Footnote: ‘*Nom latin de mouche’. UK Roman captain: ‘Oculus tauri!*’. Footnote: ‘*Bull’s eye’. USA Roman captain: ‘Bingo*’. Footnote: ‘*Now the name of a game of chance’. ITA Roman captain: ‘Ho fatto musca!*’. Footnote: ‘*Nome latino della mosca’.
Bell and Hockridge perfectly adapt to Latin the expression ‘to hit the bull’s eye’ which is the English equivalent to the French ‘Faire mouche’, meaning ‘to be right on target’. Robert Steve Caron prefers a more modern expression, while Carlo Manzoni repeats the French version even though it has no meaning in Italian. Scene After the sinking, our heroes swim to the shore. Asterix’s cousin comments on the Roman’s behaviour. FR Jolitorax: ‘Ils n’ont pas été franc jeu!’. UK Anticlimax: ‘I say, that’s not cricket!’. USA Brasstax: ‘Rather unsporting of them, what?’. ITA Beltorax: È stato un gioco sleale!’
In the British version, the French original is not replaced with the equivalent ‘fair play’ but with ‘that’s not cricket’, which is a common phrase with the same meaning (an anachronism, given that cricket wasn’t developed until the 16th century). Both 429
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American and Italian translations simply follow the original, but the American version adds the characterising ‘what?’ while the Italian rendition lacks any kind of marking trait. To bring this short analysis of the issues related to the translation of the album Asterix en Bretagne to a conclusion, it is worth spending a few words on the rendition of the names of some specific characters in this story. We have already noticed in the examples above that there are important differences among the various editions. We know that the American edition changed most of the names because of copyright problems. For the main Briton character, we have four different names: the French original, Jolitorax, has been adapted to Italian as Beltorax, keeping the same kind of meaning (nice chest); British translators, being unable to convey the same attribute adequately, choose an existing word, Anticlimax, which has the advantage of the -ax ending that characterises most Briton names. Perhaps, the most interesting case concerns the name of the rebel Briton chief, Zebigbos in the French original: this, graphically reproduces the way most French people pronounce the English syntagma ‘The big boss’, due to their difficulties in articulating the ‘th’ sound. This is therefore a way of making fun of the problems French people have in pronouncing some English words, but at the same time is a typical French expression of mockery about the English way of speaking. All this is hardly understandable by Italian readers, yet Carlo Manzoni decides to maintain the same name in his version, probably losing a great part of the original effect. Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge obviously decide to change this name, finding a great solution in Mykingdomforanos: this is a reference to the line ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’ from Shakespeare’s play Richard III, which however reproduces the cockney pronunciation, ‘My Kingdom for an ‘Os’, leaving off the ‘h’ sound and thereby having to use ‘an’ before a vowel instead 430
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of ‘a’ before an ‘h’. An alternative interpretation for this name is ‘my kingdom for a nose’. Interestingly, the British chief is the only character in the entire book with a small nose. In fact, compared to the nose sizes of every other character (Gauls, Brits, and Romans) his nose is so small that it almost looks like he does not have a nose at all72. The choice of the way they should translate this name was particularly hard, as we can see from a letter Anthea Bell sent to the editor, where she wrote: The situation is a bit complicated because Zebigbos, on the analogy of Cassivellaunos [a historical Briton figure who fought Julius Caesar in 54 BC], of course, is the only British -os ending in the book. So having once decided to alter the name (I stick out for this myself, because that Z is no longer amusing in itself once the book’s all in English, and Thebigbos doesn’t look right) do we try for an -os name, or do we use an -ax name, as for all the other Britons?. We tried various names like Attalos, Neverattalos, Ratherattalos; and I have by me a beer-stained piece of paper bearing the contributions Ridakokos and Banberikros, and Mykingdomforanos. I rather feel that if it’s an -os name it should be a -nos ending, just to make the isolated analogy clear to all and sundry. And it would be possible to use an English -nous ending, such as we use for Roman names, and spell it -nos. (Fair enough, since Cassivellaunos often ends -us himself). Which provides us with a few efforts such as Simpliravenos, Indigenos, Verivoluminos. Or then we could make the chief an -ax ending, like the other Britons; we have a good many -ax names left over, none of them specially applicable to the chief’s character. Sealingwax, Beeswax, Nervusattax, Biliusattax, Vacuumpax, Unionjax, Hijax and Halfbax are among the -ax compounds we have left. 73
72
See Chandrasekharan, Sudhakar Thaths, Dippold, Ron, Asterix Annotations, English and American Translation, Version 4, available at http://asterix.openscroll.org/ (last accessed 7 th March 2010). 73 Kessler, Peter, op. cit., pp. 63-64. 431
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Goscinny himself was involved in the decision. In a letter dated 15th July 1969 to Antony Kamm, then Chief Editor at Brockhampton Press, he said: ‘Concerning the name Zebigbos, I don’t think you should keep the -os ending, which I used to make a pun (even if I like very much Verivoluminos). Any name ending in -ax would be just as good’.74 Eventually, that wasn’t Bell and Hockridge’s option. Other characters that are given different names are the Scottish and Irish representatives. The first one is changed in the two English editions: the original Mac Anoterapix derives from the French word ‘mécanothérapie’, ‘mechanotherapy’ in English, which is the treatment of disorders or injuries by means of mechanical devices, a name which is maintained in the Italian version as well. This is transformed by Bell and Hockridge into McAnix (from ‘mechanics’) and by Robert Steven Caron into Mac Alomaniax (from ‘megalomaniac’). The name of the Irish character has the same meaning in French, Italian and American versions, with little differences in the spelling (O’Torinolaringologix, O’Torinolaringoiatrix and O’Torhinolaryngologix); however, the British translators are more coherent than their American colleague, in the sense that, having renounced the medical reference for the Scottish character (as Robert Steven Caron did), they do the same with his Irish partner, whose name becomes O’Veroptimistix, meaning over optimistic, too favourable in prediction. The Roman Governor is named Caius Roideprus in the French source text, the first being a typical Latin name and the second deriving from ‘Roi de Prusse’, King of Prussia, presumably referring to the French expression ‘travailler pour le roi de Prusse’, meaning ‘to work for free, without reward’. The Italian version simply adapts the original name to the target language, resulting in Caius Rediprus, which loses the possible 74
Idem, p. 64. 432
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hint to the motto. In the British translation, the Roman Governor becomes Encyclopaedicus Britannicus, with an obvious reference to the extremely comprehensive encyclopaedia. The Britton landlord of the pub, who hides the barrel of magic potion in his cellar, is called Relax in French, Italian and American versions. Once again, however, Bell and Hockridge change his name into Dipsomaniax, from the word dipsomaniac, which designates someone who drinks too much. The woman who lives in the house where inadvertently Asterix, Obelix and Anticlimax irrupt during their search for the barrels’ thief, is called Boadicea, instead of the original Petula, which is maintained in both Italian and American translations75. So many problems, so many challenges to face, in the translation of one of the most successful comic series on the European scenario, which focuses so much on linguistic and cultural humour. During this work, we have tried to point out some of these issues, having almost as much fun in the process as when reading the stories created by the genius of Goscinny and Uderzo. And, finally, let’s join our Gaulish friends for the usual banquet that ends all their adventures. Yes, Obelix, ‘Ils sont fous, ces traducteurs!’...
75
See footnote 20. 433
Asterix – Bibliography
Internet Articles with no indication of author Asterix, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Asterix, available at http: // tvtropes.org / pmwiki / pmwiki.php / Main/Asterix (Last accessed 11 th March 2010). Asterix and his travels around the world, available at http://www.asterix.co.nz/review/travels/index.html (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Asterix around the world, Asterix speaks English (US), available at http://www.asterixobelix.nl/manylanguages/languages.php?lng=us (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Asterix around the world, Dossier: English & American, available at http://www.asterix-obelix.nl/hjh/dos-engl.html (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Asterix, Articoli dalla stampa americana, available at http://www.iafol.org/schede/asterix/Dicono_US.html (Last th accessed 7 March 2010). Asterix il gallico, available at http: // it.wikipedia.org / wiki / Asterix_il_gallico (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Asterix in Britain, available at http: // en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Asterix_in_Britain (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Asterix in Britain (1966), in Alea Jacta Est. Gareth Thomas’ Asterix site for grown-ups, available at http: // www. gthomas. pwp. blueyonder.co.uk/main.html (Last accessed 28 th April 2010). Asterix in Britain, the untold story (or How Asterix crossed the channel and was published in English), available at
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http://www.asterix.co.nz/review/englishpublishing/index.html (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Asterix International! Asterix in Germany, available at http://www.asterix-international.de/asterix/germany.shtml (Last accessed 15th April 2010). Asterix International! English, available at http://www.asterixinternational.de/asterix/languages/english.shtml (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Beric the Briton, A Story of the Roman Invasion, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beric_the_Briton,_A_Story_of_the _Roman_Invasion (Last accessed 15th April 2010) Boudica, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica (Last accessed 15 th April 2010). Comics, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics, Last accessed 1st April 2010. Comics vocabulary, available at http: // en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Comics_vocabulary, Last accessed 1st April 2010. Cut and Paste Translation, available at http: // tvtropes.org / pmwiki / pmwiki.php / Main / CutAndPasteTranslation (Last accessed 11 th March 2010). English translations of Asterix available at http:// en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/English_translations_of_asterix (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Humour in Asterix, available at http:// en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Humour_in_Asterix (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Mistakes: Asterix in Britain, available at http:// www.asterix.co.nz /mistakes/britain/index.html (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Nationalities in the Asterix books, available at http:// www.asterix.co.nz/review/cultures/index.htm (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Ranger (magazine), available at http:// en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Ranger_(magazine) (Last accessed 7 th March 2010). Rule, Britannia!, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Rule,_Britannia! (Last accessed 15th April 2010). 436
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Authors Bell, Anthea 1999. Asterix, my love, in Electronic Telegraph, Thursday 25 February 1999, available at http://www.asterixinternational.de / asterix / mirror /asterix_my_love.htm (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Bell, Anthea. Asterix, What’s in a Name, available at http://www.literarytranslation.com/workshops/asterix/ (Last th accessed 7 March 2010). Bjørklid, Finn (translated in English by Nicolai Langfeldt). A Celtic Gaul named Asterix available at http:// heim.ifi.uio.no /~janl/ts/asterix-article.html (Last accessed 7 th March 2010). Chandrasekharan, Sudhakar Thaths and Dippold, Ron. Asterix Annotations, English and American Translation, Version 4, available at http://asterix.openscroll.org/ (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Corbetta, Giorgio 1976. La traduzione (from Asterix al Cinema, Vallecchi Editore, 1976), available at http:// www.iafol.org/ schede/asterix/Traduzioni.html (Last accessed 7th March 2010). Driest, Joris 2005. ‘Subjective Narration in Comics’, available at http://www.secretacres.com/ce/snicthree1.html (Last accessed 15th July 2010) Eisner, Will 1990 (Expanded Edition, reprinted 2001). Comics & Sequential Art, Tamarac, Poorhouse Press. _____ 1996. Graphic Storytelling, Tamarac, Poorhouse Press. Goscinny, René and Uderzo, Albert 1966. Astérix chez les Bretons, Paris, Editions Hachette. _____ 1969. Asterix e i Britanni, Milano, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. _____ 1970. Asterix in Britain, London, Hodder Dargaud,. _____ 1995. Asterix in Britain, Greenwich, Dargaud Publishing International Ltd.
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