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History of Translation Theories

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Chapter 8: History of Translation Theories of France from 20th Century to the Present

20世纪至今的法国翻译理论史 李双 Li Shuang, Hunan Normal University, China

Abstract

Translation activities have a long history in France and its theories occupy an important position in the West. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the emancipation of the mind, the progress of science and technology and the transformation of society have reinvigorated the study of French translation theory and entered its heyday. This paper first summarizes the development of French translation studies from the 20th century to the present, then discusses the main translation theories of this period from the perspectives of translation and interpretation, and analyzes the influence of the society and other disciplines on the formation of the theories. Finally, it aims to have a clearer and comprehensive understanding of the development of contemporary French translation theories.

Key word

history of translation theories, France, contemporary

Introduction

Language is one of the symbols of human civilization and an important feature of every nation. Language exchange is accompanied by the beginning of translation activities, which has a long history. Translation theory that comes from practices guides and refines translation activities in turn. As a big western country, France has made a mark in its history both in terms of politics and economy and in terms of culture and ideology. Its translation activities were initially concentrated in the Latin works at the end of the Middle Age, but there were no articles or works devoted to translation theory at this time. With the rise, development and gradual maturity of translation, more and more experts and scholars began to study systematically the translation and put forward their own theoretical propositions. The 20th century has been the heyday of French translation theory. The characteristics of French translation in this period are as follows: the practice of translation was unprecedented prosperous, covering politics, economy, military affairs, culture, literature and other aspects. The study of translation theory was unprecedented, and theorists who had great influence on the history of translation in the world have emerged. It was in the 1970s that ‘translatology’ began to formally exist as an independent discipline. In addition to the traditional study of theories focusing on traslation, France has made great achievements in the field of interpretation theory. The International Association of Interpreters is based in Paris.

The study of French translation theory in China is relatively late, and basically began in the 1990s. One of the main achievements is The Contemporary French Translation Theory compiled by Xu Jun and Yuan Xiaoyi, which systematically reviews the theories of translators in the second half of the 20th century, led by Georges Mounin, and makes important comments on various translation schools. Yang Jiangang from Wuhan University also sorts out the three stages of French translation studies in the 20th century and briefly introduces several major translators and their theories in the article French Translation Theory. Chen Shunyi from the School of Foreign Studies of Guangzhou University has also combed French translation theory, which he divided into five stages: origin, development, maturity, silence and prosperity. He has briefly summarized the history of French translation and introduced the famous translators and their thoughts or theories in different periods.

Based on the previous work, this paper aims to study the origin and development of the translation theories that have emerged in France from the 20th century to the present, taking into account translation practice, and to make a better summary of the relationship between various schools of thought and theories.

1.Translation Theories of School of Linguistics

At the beginning of the 20th century, Saussure's "General Linguistics", the "father of modern linguistics", was published. It was a landmark work that introduced new theories, principles and concepts of language and laid the scientific foundation for the study of language and the development of linguistics. As a special and universal linguistic activity, the study of translation was often regarded as a branch of linguistics in the early days. Although translation is actually more of a communicative activity involving various fields such as language, culture, art, aesthetics, and psychology, it is closely related to other disciplines besides linguistics such as cultural studies, literary theory, philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, and ethnography. However, in the intellectual context of the times, the emergence of linguistics was the first to give translation studies a scientific and systematic research method, and it has an important influence even today, as well as being the science that has contributed most to translation studies.

1.1Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet

In the Western translation theory circles, Fedorov of the former Soviet Union first and more systematically proposed that translation theory research should belong to the scope of linguistic research. In his "Outline of Translation Theory" published in 1953, he clearly pointed out that the process of translation is the process of using language, therefore, in translation, language issues should be put on the top priority, and believed that translation research should be studied from the perspective of linguistics in the first place, and claimed that only by adopting linguistic research means can the laws and essence of initial translation be explained scientifically. After him, the Frenchmen Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, who moved to Canada, actively supported his view and proposed that "translation is a real discipline with its own special techniques and problems", which should be analyzed by linguistic means. In 1958, they co-authored "A Comparative Study of French-English Rhetoric", which was published in Paris, marking a new beginning of the theoretical study of translation in France. Since then, the linguistic theory of translation has been gradually formed in France. People began to examine the theoretical issues related to translation in a more systematic and penetrating way, taking the research results of modern linguistics as a guide.

Although Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet emigrated from France to Canada, the expression of their translation thought was mainly in France, where they participated in and influenced French translation theory, and where their book "A Comparative Study of French-English Rhetoric" was written in French and published in France. In addition to this book, they have published many articles in the "Bulletin des traducteurs" of the Association of French Translators and the "Méta" of the Association of Canadian Translators, and Jean-Paul Vinay has written the entry "Translation" for the French "Encyclopedia of Seven Stars" volume "Language". Jean-Paul Vinay also wrote the entry "Translation" for the volume "Languages" of the French "Seven Stars Encyclopedia".

Their contributions to translation theory research are mainly as follows: 1. The establishment of a series of univocal translation terms that are more strictly defined. The establishment of the terminology is an important step towards scientific research, which itself means the scholars' understanding and definition of the elements of the research object, laying a good foundation for the systematic construction of translation theory and translation science. 2. The object of translation is information (i.e., thoughts, emotions, etc.), so the unit of translation should be the unit of thought. This is different from the previous traditional concept of "word as a unit", which recognizes that a word does not fully represent the independent meaning of a paragraph handled by the translator in the translation process. The unit of thought should be associated with a meaningful combination of sentences and paragraphs. From the point of view of correspondence with words, they divide translation units into three categories: "simple units" (units that can correspond to a single word), "expanded units" (combinations of sentences and segments in which several words form a lexical unit of independent meaning), and "fractional units" (units of meaning that can be used in the translation process). "fractional units", (parts of a word, but with a complete meaning, such as prefixes, suffixes, etc., the similarity of which can be seen in Chomsky's linguistic view that the core of a sentence is the tense). Depending on the role of translation units in the message, they also distinguish some different types of units, such as "functional units" (consisting of elements with the same grammatical function), "semantic units" (with independent meanings), and "dialectical units" (used for argumentative reasoning and indicating relationships), "rhyme units" (composed of elements contained in the same tone), etc. 3. A strictly defined classification of translation techniques was made, and seven ways of solving translation difficulties were summarized: borrowing words, imitation method, literal direct translation, transposition, flexible adjustment, equivalence and rewriting. Although the first three are still a bit far from the real translation, and the last "rewriting" is out of the scope of translation, making the translator another creator, their exploration is meaningful to the establishment of a scientific translation theory, and they try to apply "methodology" to the study of translation theory for the first time. But their exploration is significant for the establishment of a scientific translation theory, and for the first time they tried to apply "methodology" to the study of translation theory, so that it began to break away from the traditional fragmentary translation criticism based on intuition and experience.

1.2 Georges Mounin

From Jean-Paul Vinay's and Jean Darbelnet's and Fedorov's appeals for translation, the famous linguist, translator and literary critic Georges Murnand saw a new beginning for translation studies, but he also found that if translation is to receive the same attention from the language sciences as the phenomena of bilingualism, language contact, linguistic geography or etymology It was not an easy task to make translation receive the same attention as bilingualism, language contact, linguistic geography or etymology. Moreover, in addition to the rejection by the linguistic community, many translators do not accept this concept, insisting that translation is an art and that literary translation in particular cannot be thoroughly interpreted from a linguistic point of view. George Moonan looked dialectically at the two camps of the translation community at that time, without going to either extreme, and he believed that translation was an art based on a science. Although he supported the views of Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet regarding the nature of translation, and believed that the scientific study of translation should become a branch of linguistics, he also pointed out that the translation of literary works such as novels, poems, plays, and films was not a linguistic activity that could be solved by the scientific analysis of vocabulary, morphology, and syntactic style alone, and that translation is special.

Georges Mounin can be regarded as the founder and main representative of the linguistic theory of French translation in the true sense of the word. He raised many major topics about translation studies, and although he did not give answers and researched a well-formed theory, he made great contributions to the exploration of theoretical issues of translation, as well as the study of the obstacles and feasibility of translation.

In 1953, he published The Unfaithful Beauty, which was mainly a summary of his own experience and that of other translators and writers in translating from other languages into French, and although it was guided by the linguistic theory of Fandès (the theory of the progress of language), its basic starting point was to examine translation from a stylistic and literary point of view. -Between 1956 and 1958, Georges Mounin came into contact with André Martinet's structural linguistic theory, which prompted him to rethink the problem of translation from the perspective of structural linguistics.

His national doctoral dissertation, which is also his classic masterpiece, Theoretical Problems of Translation, was published in Paris in 1963 and has had a profound influence on the French translation theory community that continues to this day. In this book, he explored the feasibility of translation from the perspectives of meaning, world reflection, levels of communication, and linguistic cohomology. From the perspective of linguistic syncretism, according to the French linguist Martina's idea of cosmic syncretism ("all people inhabit the same planet" and we can expect to find certain similarities in the various "national languages"), Georges Mounin believes that there must be linguistic syncretism. Georges Mounin believes that there must be a linguistic cohomology. This is because in the activity of translation, due to the ecological commonality embedded in the cosmic commonality, the underlying reference meaning should be the same, and the frame of reference of the external world should be the same. In other words, the co-phase of languages or the similarity existing among languages is a necessary result of the existence of cosmic, ecological, physiological and psychological co-phase phenomena. This directly explains the feasibility of translation, but from the perspective of the "world image" theory, he explains the limits of translation. Because people in different societies experience the same thing differently, the semantic portrayal of that thing naturally differs as well. Georges Mounin found that each language cuts different aspects of reality (ignoring what another language reveals, discovering what another language neglects, etc.) and that there are differences in the units that cut into the same reality. Thus, he points out that we must admit that the structure of the universe is far from being logically and universally consistent in all languages, and that these ineradicable differences, although calculated as a whole, constitute only a limited percentage, still constitute an obstacle to translation. He was the first to state explicitly that "translation is possible, but it does have limits". This he explains more clearly from the perspective of the communication hierarchy, in which contemporary linguistics plays an important role in his analysis. Contemporary linguistics defines and distinguishes between multiple functions of language: the basic communicative function, the instrumental function of logical thinking, the flow of emotional elements, the expressive or even communicative function, and the aesthetic function. Each linguistic function in the same statement can establish a network of communication at different levels, which depend both on the statement itself and on the experience of each listener. The realization of different levels of the act of communication implies that there are also different levels of translation, which clarifies even more the feasibility and limits of translation. In addition, Georges Mounin also points out that the feasibility of translation activities also depends to a great extent on the contact and communication between different cultures, and the level of communication of ideas that translation activities can achieve is changing and developing. As for the "meaning" that translators need to face in translation activities, he is influenced by Saussure's view of naming (naming as a "system") and the idea of the value of words, and he has moved away from the traditional "categorical naming set "He realized that the relationship between words and concepts in the whole language system is not an innate one-to-one correspondence, and that the meaning of words is not a simple assignment, so that the translation activity is not a simple transformation of the meaning of words, but involves the whole language system. This is a scientific explanation of why "word-to-word translation is not possible".

As a distinguished linguist, Georges Mounin is more adept at studying issues related to translation from a linguistic approach. However, translation is a complex activity involving multiple levels and factors, a feature that defines the comprehensive nature of translation theory research. He has also explored the permeability of different cultures and the communicability of semantics from the perspective of other disciplines such as ethnography and bibliography, and even this comprehensive exploration has a clear linguistic tendency. Although he did not form a complete scientific system, it is undeniable that some of his basic understanding and perspectives on translation and translation theory are useful for later generations to conduct systematic scientific research.

1.3 Maurice Pergnier

As a distinguished linguist, Georges Mounin is more adept at studying issues related to translation from a linguistic approach. However, translation is a complex activity involving multiple levels and factors, a feature that defines the comprehensive nature of translation theory research. He has also explored the permeability of different cultures and the communicability of semantics from the perspective of other disciplines such as ethnography and bibliography, and even this comprehensive exploration has a clear linguistic tendency. Although he did not form a complete scientific system, it is undeniable that some of his basic understanding and perspectives on translation and translation theory are useful for later generations to conduct systematic scientific research.

The study of sociolinguistics focuses on the communicative nature of language, and the main object of study is speech rather than language; function rather than structure; context rather than information itself; and language acceptability rather than language arbitrariness. Maurice Pergnier uses sociolinguistic principles to link "information parametres" to translation, which is of great significance for translation research. There is no single occurrence of information, and all information cannot exist independently of the external environment background. Based on this, he proposes four parameters of the process of sending information: the sending subject, the sending object, the receiver and the sending medium. So the process of information transmission is the process that the sending subject transmits the sending object to the receiver through the sending medium. These four parameters are closely related to the generation and reception of information, and when any one of them changes, the information transmission will be changed and the meaning of the whole statement will be changed. Projected into the translation activity, the translator is both the receiver of the original text and the sending subject of the translation, and the sending object goes through the process of decoding first and then encoding. In addition to these four parameters, Maurice Pergnier identifies four linguistic variables that influence the transfer of information in the overall linguistic context: phonological variables, lexical variables, grammatical variables, and declarative structures. Language is socially constructed and these linguistic variables vary according to the social context or genre, making it impossible to communicate directly through a homogeneous bridge. By examining the linguistic environment from these four perspectives, it is possible to receive information and feedback more accurately and to address barriers in communication activities.

In addition, Maurice Pergnier argues that the original language and the translated language, which are the medium of the translation activity, have an influence on each other when they come into contact with each other, thus creating linguistic interference. That is, the linguistic structure of the original language affects the translator so that he or she cannot express the meaning of the original in a natural translation. This is because the translator does not consider the whole statement as a message in the translation process, but as a field, focusing on the meaning of scattered words. In fact, the meaning of language is not only expressed in grammar, but also in practical use, and he proposed the concept of "idiomatic unit", which refers to the overall denotative meaning, although an idiom consists of several words, it is equivalent to the meaning of only one word. Therefore, when a translator is given a passage of the original text, he should first divide it into idiomatic units, and only when the idiomatic units are correctly divided can he understand the meaning of the original text correctly. The more the two cultures are close to each other, the more the translator understands the socio-cultural background of the two languages, and the more the idioms can be classified correctly.

In fact, from the concept of "idiom" and other discussions on the relationship between vocabulary and translation, meaning and reference, grammar, and linguistic syncretism in The Sociolinguistic Foundations of Translation, it is easy to see that he was influenced by Georges Mounin, especially the study of world image, linguistic syncretism and translation. There is no breakthrough. However, he uses the research results of sociolinguistics to study translation more comprehensively, broadening the methodological means of translation studies and making up for the deficiency of using structural linguistics to depict pure language.

2. Literary Translation Theories=

In the first half of the twentieth century, there was no systematic translation theory in France in the strict sense of the word, but only critical discussions and scattered opinions of some writers and translators on a certain translation. Translation itself was regarded as a genre of literary aesthetics, stylistics and literary criticism. Most of the writers' comments are also from a literary point of view and are purely subjective in nature, involving more literary feelings or intuitions without any basis or examples. For example, the French poet Paul Valery thinks that translation should be viewed through the eyes of a poet, and emphasizes that the translator must break through the constraints of the original form, especially the syntax of the original text, so that the translation will have the same strong sense of music and literature as the original text. Generally speaking, these translation ideas lacked systematic and strictly defined concepts and terms, and belonged to a kind of "craft empiricism" on translation. In the second half of the 20th century, although linguistic tendencies swept through much of the translation community, a number of translation theorists focused more on the literary nature of translation and developed their own research.

2.1Edmond Cary

Edmond Cary was a full-time translator for UNESCO, the head of the French Translators Association, and an active advocate and organizer of the International Federation of Translators. His major works include "Translation in the Modern World", "The Translator in France", "On the Quality of Translation", and two important articles "Translation Theory in the Soviet Union" and "Poetry and Translation" published in the journal Babel. This series of articles and writings have made positive contributions to the promotion of translation theory research.

Edmond Cary's main ideas are embodied in Translation in the Modern World, an exhaustive survey summarizing the various forms of translation in the 20th century, briefly describing the history of each form and providing a meaningful classification of translation. His central conception of translation is reflected in his view of its nature as not a science but an art, and an art that varies according to the discipline involved. Distinguishing himself from the linguistic views of his Soviet contemporaries, Fedorov believed that although translation involved linguistic statements, literary translation was not a linguistic activity, but a literary one. To translate poetry, the translator himself needed to have the talent of writing poetry; to translate plays, one had to focus on the dramatic art to meet the requirements of the performance; to translate films was a cinematic art activity, and the choice of words and phrases had to respect the actors' diction, speech flow, movements and the film's music, picture and visual prescribed scenario, and even the social reaction of the group audience, etc. These are things that in his opinion cannot be explained by linguistics. But this is actually an extreme description of a correct view. On the one hand, he only saw the nature of literature in translation, and on the other hand, he had a very limited understanding of linguistics, thinking that linguistics is all about depicting language in its various features in isolation from all other factors, focusing on formal analysis and avoiding meaning, not distinguishing between ordinary linguistics and descriptive linguistics, and not knowing that there actually existed stylistics devoted to the study of translation, which was his concern.

Edmond Cary is a pioneering figure in the development of French translation theory, and he was one of the first translators to begin a comprehensive and systematic examination of translation activities, and his efforts have contributed greatly to the study of French translation theory.

3.Translation Theory of Hermeneutics

Antoine Berman is a leading contemporary French theorist and translator of Latin American literature and German philosophy, known for his consistent philosophical stance in translation studies. He advocates the rejection of ethnocentrism in translation and opposes the "localization" of translations through distortion and adaptation. His major works are L'épreuve de l'étranger, culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique and Pour une critique des traductions, John Donne. The former is an excavation of German translation activities and translation theories since Luther, while the latter is an attempt to theorize the spontaneous and confusing translation criticism with modern hermeneutics as its philosophical foundation.

Antoine Berman's philosophy of translation is closely related to hermeneutics, and he follows Schleiermacher, the founder of classical German hermeneutics, in his view of alienation in which the reader of the translation influences the author, while also incorporating his experience as a translator. In "The Test of Otherness," he refers to "the test" as having two meanings: first, the test of foreign words and texts experienced by the target culture in receiving the translation; second, the test of survival in the new environment after the foreign text has been removed from its original context. Antoine Berman blames previous translations for pursuing a high degree of reader acceptance, overly suppressing the element of "difference" and "localizing" it. He argues that the ethical goal of the act of translation should be "to accept the different as different," and that the system of textual distortion prevents the entry of the different. He analyzes in detail the various types of deformation tendencies in translations (mainly translations of literary prose, novels and essays) and classifies them into 12 types: rationalization, clarification, expansion, elegance and vulgarization, loss of quality, lack of quantity, destruction of rhythm, destruction of the potential indicative network of the original, destruction of linguistic patterns, destruction of dialectal networks or their exoticism, destruction of fixed expressions and The destruction of idioms and the elimination of multilingual overlap. His analysis of these deformations is divided into two categories: negative and positive parsing. Negative parsing focuses on ethnocentric and annexationist translations, as well as hypertextual translations (e.g., parodies, imitations, adaptations, and arbitrary rewrites of works). The positive analysis refers to the analysis of translations that restore and embody the "other". He points out that his analysis is concerned with the general principle of distortion inherent in translation, that the tendency to distort mentioned in the text is ancient, and that Western translations have been from the beginning a revisionary restoration of meaning. Although Antoine Berman does not accuse this, he argues that it is more valuable to work on the literal aspects of translation than on the recovery of meaning. Formally by working on the literal, translation restores the distinctive indicative process of the work, not only the meaning, on the one hand, and changes the transliterated language on the other. It is translation that stimulates the generation and regeneration of the Western language. Therefore, he advocates a literal direct translation and believes that a good translation should pay respect to the "otherness" in the language and culture of the original work.

References

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