Text Analysis in Translation
You have been translating for years, you arrive in class armed with examples, and experience, communicative methods, didactics and dialectics, and soon your students are floundering in a a of disparate problems, competences and skills. Some kind of life raft is needed, for both teachers and students. Christiane Nord's model of translation-oriented text analysis, translated and adapted from her Text analyze und Übertzen of 1988, is a very uful raft in such situations. Designed for application to all text types and language pairs, Nord's approach aims to provide "criteria for the classification of texts for translation class, and some guidelines for asssing the quality of the translation" (p. 2). It has numerous clear examples, some very complete box-and-arrow diagrams, and coffins around the key statements that students tend to underline anyway. It should be of extreme interest to anyone eking a solid basis for the training of translators.
The book has five ctions. Part one outlines a ries of theoretical principles relating source-text analysis to German Skopostheorie. Part two describes the role of source text a
nalysis. Part three then runs through the extratextual and intratextual factors involved in the analysis. Part four discuss the didactic applications of the model. Part five applies the model to an analysis of three texts and their translations. The approach is nothing if not systematic.
Nord's adherence to what German knows as Skopostheorie目的论 阅读书签制作means she ranks target-text purpo (the "skopos") above all other determinants on a translation. For Nord, the skopos is "a more or less explicit description of the prospective target situation" (p. 8). It is thus to be derived from the instructions given by the "initiator," the person for whom the translator is working (not to be confud with authors or readers, although authors and readers may become initiators). The skopos is in a n the pragmatic content of the initiator's instructions. As such, Nord's u of the term differs from previous usages in Vermeer, for whom the translator fixes the安神补脑液的副作用 skopos on the basis of the initiator's instructions. Nord does not accord the translator the freedom to decide such things alone. For her, the skopos remains "subject to the initiator's decision and not to the discretion of the translator" (p. 9). Although no reasons are given for this variant on other
versions of Skopostheorie, one suspects that
the relatively subordinate position of Nord's translator is due to the classroom situation for which she is writing. Perhaps her translator is ultimately a student. At this point Nord negotiates at least one theoretical problem. If the main factor determining a translation is the target-text function as fixed by the initiator, why should any translator engage in extensive source-text analysis? Surely it would be enough to analyze the prospective target-text function and then take whatever elements are required from the source text. Indeed, if the two texts are to have different functions anyway (Nord argues that equivalence or functional invariance is merely an exceptional a), why venture into the previous function of the source text at all? This argument is not entirely perver for tho of us who have had to translate texts that are so badly written as to be inadequate even to their ascribed source-culture functions. And yet Nord, here differing from Holz-Mänttäri, excludes free rewriting from the domain of translation (p. 28), without asking if it is something we should nevertheless be teaching. Although Nord justifies this exclusion on the basis of "the conventional concept of translation that I have grown up with" (p. 28),
her position is also strategically necessary for a source-text analysis aspiring to "provide a reliable foundation for each and every decision which the translator has to make in a particular translation process" (p. 1). Yet even granting the exclusion, if the initiator's purpo is truly dominant, how can source-text analysis also be sufficiently dominant to make translation静脉炎用什么药 an entirely determinate process? An Aristotelian might accu Nord of opting for both initial and final causation at the same time. Nord's solution to this problem is to insist on a specifically "translation-oriented" mode of text analysis. When establishing the function of the source text, the translator "compares this with the (prospective) 'function-in-culture' of the target text required by the initiator, identifying and isolating tho source-text elements which have to be prerved or adapted in translation" (p. 21). The most我的妈妈 concrete illustration of this method is a three-column table (p. 143) in which the various text-analysis categories are applied to the source, the target, and the moment of transfer as a comparing of functions. By filling in the three columns the student should discover the changes to be made. All practical and theoretical problems are thus solved.
Or are they? Consider the effort required for anyone to work through Nord's categories. The model incorporates 17 levels or factors; her checklists prent some 76 questions to be asked in order to produce a text profile, and all this should perhaps be done for at least two of the three columns. Nord cannot be accud of having left much out. The problem is rather that she has put everything in. As uful as 76 questions might be the first time around, students also have to be trained to work quickly. The model's main virtue is thus that it can eventually lead to some kind of global awareness that texts carry out functions. Consider, too, the way the theoretically dominant role of the initiator's purpo gradually disappears as Nord advances into the practical aspects of source-text analysis. This shift first appears in the idealist postulate that there must be "compatibility between source-text intention and target-text functions if translation is to be possible at all" (p. 29). We then discover that, given this compatibility, "the translator must not act contrary to the nder's intention" (p. 48). And when analyzing the final examples of literary translation we find that "the translation skopos requires equivalence of effect" (p. 202). All the statements go against the absolute 一只鸟primacy of initiators' purpos and the
theoretically exceptional nature of equivalence. Further, they are all explicitly located as norms of "our culture" (pp. 29 and 72), as "our culture-specific concept" (p. 73), and even, lest anyone suspect this "our" is specifically German, "our 'average Western cultures'" (p. 182). Within this frame, Nord's text analysis becomes a way of applying the prevailing norms. There is little question of translators changing the norms in the name of some higher or future rationality. As in Snell-Hornb/s "integrated approach," Nord's final analys turn out to be pedagogically normative, conveniently forgetting the initial theorizing about specific initiators and the exceptional status of functional invariance. She is a teacher after all.
棒球比赛规则Although the nature of translation norms is mostly intuited in this book, Nord's more recent work (1993) us the ca of translating titles in order to indicate how norms can be located, systematized, and integrated into her general approach. The analys are solid and stimulating. In both books, however, the main hermeneutic component is a pronounced will to system. Nord sometimes ems afraid to recognize any indeterminism or subjectivity in translation. Indeed, the fact that individuals might actually interpret texts i
n individual ways is regarded as a difficulty to be averted: "The only way to overcome this problem is, in my十五渡 柯达伊手势opinion, first to control source-text reception by a strict model of analysis [...] and cond, to control target-text production by astringent 'translating instructions' which clearly define the (prospective) function of the target text" (p. 17). All this "control" should enable the translation class to produce anonymous technicians able to apply the same method to come up with the same or similar answers. Without such control, says Nord, the "function and effect of target-text structures will be purely accidental" (p. 236).
