Optimality-in-Translation.pdf

Optimality in translation

RICHARD MANSELL

University of Exeter, United Kingdom

Abstract. Linguistic theory and Translation Studies have a long, if some-

what turbulent, history. Even now, in some institutions Translation Stud-

ies is placed in the field of Applied Linguistics, whereas in others it is

subsumed under Cultural Studies. This is perhaps a sign of something

that now few would doubt: that the phenomenon of translation, in its

many forms, is manifold and can (and should) be approached from a

range of angles. This paper approaches the problem of analyzing source

and target texts, with the aim of identifying the translator’s strategy when

translating, and always considering translation to be a decision-making

process. To do this, it draws critically on a relatively new theory in the

study of language: Optimality Theory.

Precedents of optimality

A reaction to preceding theories and ideas is inevitable and is part of the

progress of knowledge, and our field is no different (where some say

knowledge, some may say science, although that can be another dirty word

in translation). Against the source-oriented approaches that preceded them,

target-oriented, norm-based descriptive approaches to translation have

offered many insights, placing emphasis on the role of translation in a

literary system. However, in concentrating on norms as social constraints,

these approaches tend at best to ignore the translator as an intelligent,

thinking being: the creator of texts. Social constraints are important, but it is

ultimately translators, anonymous though they may be, who make the

choices and create the translations that result, whether these are final

versions or texts that editors will submit to changes. The approach outlined

here hopes to contribute to knowledge of how translators arrive at their

translations.

The approach takes as its starting point translators: living, thinking be-

ings who read one text and create another for a different locale. Pym

describes translation competence as the following:

•

The ability to generate a series of more than one viable term [...] for a

transferred text.

•

The ability to select one target text (TT) from this series, quickly and

with justified (ethical) confidence, and to propose this TT to a particular

Optimality in translation

reader as standing for [the source text as received by the translator].

(Pym 1992)

Thus for Pym translation competence is a matter of “generating and selecting

between alternative texts” (Pym 1992). This is a simple theory with many

advantages: “[It] is restrictive but not necessarily reductive. Its relative

virtues include applicability to intralingual translation, recognition that there

is more than one way to translate and refusal of any notion of exclusive

correctness, since the criteria of speed and confidence—written into the

above definition—by no means rule out disagreement between translators or

future improvements by the one translator” (Pym 1992).

Pym does not, however, offer an explanation of how the translator

chooses between the various candidate translations, saying that he has

“absolutely nothing of importance to say about the matter” (Pym 1992).

Others have approached the matter. One example is Chesterman, who places

Pym’s theory within Karl Popper’s theory of knowledge acquisition and

attempts to explain the process of choice, explaining translation “shifts” via

“strategies” (Chesterman 1997). These strategies, however, are drawn

uncritically from Vinay and Darbelnet’s famous comparative stylistics, and

as such are open to the same criticism: among other things, that they are

labels applied to the products of translation, and not descriptions of the

translator’s state of mind when entering into the process and during the

process of translation (Mason 1994).

Kiraly takes a similar approach to competence as Pym, and suggests

that whereas some translation problems are handled by a relatively uncon-

trolled processing center, leading to more intuitive decisions, others are

solved by a relatively controlled processing center, offering more con-

sciously deliberated candidate TTs (Kiraly 1995). This would seem to

suggest that stock translations exist in a translator’s brain and are applied to

problems: where no stock translation exists, more deliberation is required.

Anybody who has translated professionally recognizes this phenomenon, as

does anybody familiar with the workings of translation memory software. It

also highlights the cognitive basis of the translation process.

Furthermore, and on a related point, Holmes talks of the fact that a

translation “can never be more than a single interpretation out of many of the

original whose image it darkly mirrors” (1968: 30). Thus we have another

base in our approach to translation: multiple translations of the same text are

possible, although the translator chooses, or creates through a series of

choices, an optimal translation in a given context. All possible translations

and texts that are based on other texts, including critical essays and works

inspired by the ST, which in Holmes’ terminology are grouped together as

“metatexts”, are linked by Wittgensteinian family resemblances. In the case

of verse translation, this form is distinct from other forms of text creation in

that it holds a dual function: as interpretation of another text, and as a text in

Richard Mansell

its own right (Holmes 1968: 24). Koster pursues this idea, also looking at the

dual role of the translator as interpreter and sender of information (Koster

2000: 35ff.), and he states that this role is revealed through ST-TT analysis.

However, Koster’s “Armamentarium” for text analysis is complex, and his

own applications tend to focus on the use of pronouns and deictic indicators

(Koster 2000: 205-230).

The roles of translator and translation are important in that neither be-

longs entirely to the source nor entirely to the target culture. This is a

paradox visited by Pym in his work on intercultures (see for example Pym

1998: 181). Pym questions bipolar notions of where the translators belong,

such that if we should question the role of the translator in a source/target

duality, perhaps we should also question the role of texts and the notion of

target-oriented and source-oriented translations. We believe that an approach

grounded in the principles of Optimality Theory can help us to understand

the phenomenon of translation better.

Optimality theory

Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 2002) is a theory of Universal

Grammar that first became established in the fields of phonology and

morphology, and research is now being carried out in the fields of syntax,

semantics and pragmatics. Unlike Chomsky’s (and Chomskyan) theories of

generative grammar, Optimality Theory is not derivative: whereas in

Chomskyan X-bar theory, rules are applied to an input (or underlying)

structure to create and output (or surface) structure, with the consequence

that there is only one possible output for an input, in Optimality Theory there

are no rules: more than one output is possible.

Optimality Theory proposes that a grammar has two parts: a generating

component, which generates a series of candidate outputs on the base of an

input, and an evaluating component which evaluates input-output pairs to

ascertain an optimal candidate out of the set. This assessment is done via a

hierarchy of universal but violable constraints, constraints that are always

“active”, yet that can be violated in order to satisfy a more highly ranked

constraint. This means that although constraints apply to all languages, their

hierarchy is language-specific. Furthermore, these constraints comprise two

groups: faithfulness constraints, which demand fidelity to the input, and

markedness constraints, which demand unmarked outputs. In other words,

faith constraints demand that things stay as they are, and markedness

constraints demand change. Something must give, thus we have violability.

This basic model is applied to translation thus: The input is the text that

the translator has to translate, and the process of translating is covered by the

generating and evaluating candidates: the generating component produces

candidate TTs, and the evaluating component assesses the problem-solution

pairs. This corresponds to Pym’s theory of translation competence. The

Optimality in translation

potential of this approach is that it offers a cognitive basis for the explana-

tion of the decision-making process: candidate ST-TT pairs would be

assessed according to a hierarchy of violable constraints. There are certain

recurrent themes in translation studies that can be linked, and possibly

explained, by this approach.

Universals of translation

Since in Optimality Theory a constraint is taken to be a universal (one which

is always present but not necessarily always dominant), constraint violation

indicates a marked state of affairs. This basic theoretical consideration could

be extremely useful in describing the so-called laws, or universals, of

translation. According to Laviosa, universals of translation “are linguistic

features which typically occur in translated rather than original texts and are

thought to be independent of the influence of the specific language pairs

involved in the process of translation” (1998: 288). This description

corresponds with the notion of recurrent dominant constraints in this

approach. We can propose the following definition of likelihoods in

constraint hierarchies: “If X dominates the hierarchy, then the greater the

likelihood of Y”. This formulation is similar to the formulation of laws

proposed by Toury: “If X, then the greater/the lesser the likelihood Y”

(1995: 265). Also, in saying “typically”, Laviosa indicates that these

universals are not 100% sure: there seems is a certain violability of these

universals. The theoretical location of constraints themselves would be

somewhere between laws and possibilities as described by Toury (1995:

260): laws are more likely to be the expression of particular constraint

hierarchies. Note, however, that they are not “directives” (Toury 1995: 261)

in the sense of orders to translators that they must translate in a particular

way. In isolation, constraints do not tell us much about a translator’s

strategy: rather it is their interaction that gives insight into the translation

process.

Unit of translation

The unit of translation is another recurrent area in Translation Studies that

has not provided a satisfactory consensus. Text-based approaches question

whether there is a single unit of translation below the level of the text itself,

if a unit is taken to be a stretch of ST on which a section of TT can be

mapped without anything remaining. Translators, however, intuitively feel

that while translating they work with something smaller than the whole text.

Unfortunately, intuition takes us no further than that, since focus is some-

times primarily drawn to syntax, sometimes to semantics, sometimes to

features of prosody, sometimes even phonology and morphology, in the case

of the Zukofsky’s infamous translation of Catullus. The problem is how to

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define the unit of translation when the evidence seems to indicate that its

material basis is so wide-ranging.

Since different constraints assess different features, they also assess

different units, ultimately starting at the start of the ST-TT pairs and ending

at the end, although with no guarantee that borders correspond anywhere

throughout the analysis. As such, the unit of translation in this approach is a

multiple concept, which at various points of the translation process tends

towards one feature (constraint) or another, but is never exclusively

syntactical, or semantic, or prosodic. Furthermore, and following this

concept of multiplicity, when translators revise their texts they will perhaps

make different choices, since they will have a more global view of the text

and as such a more constant hierarchy of constraints.

The nature of constraints

The basis for constraints is that faithfulness constraints demand a certain

relationship between input and output features, and that markedness

constraints demand a certain feature in the output, regardless of whether or

not it is present in the input. Faithfulness constraints clearly prohibit the

relationships that Pym identifies between textual quantity and semantic

material: deletion, abbreviation, addition and expansion (Pym 1992). It must

be noted though that, in context, constraints are violable (to satisfy more

highly ranked constraints), and so in effect they keep these relationships

under control, ensuring that there is the lowest deletion, addition etc.

possible to achieve the TT’s aims. Markedness constraints, on the other

hand, do not explicitly provoke deletion, abbreviation, addition and

expansion since these are ST-TT relationships, and markedness constraints

take into account not ST features, but rather TT structures.

By their nature, constraints will need to be fairly general, that is non-

language specific, and will need to analyze the possible ST-TT relationships

and TT features. It would be a very lengthy and possibly infinite task to

make a list of all precise factors to which translators may restrict themselves.

And equally, in generalizing things detail is lost. We believe that a limited

set of constraints would be manageable enough to apply to the analysis of

translations and also powerful enough to offer insights into the translator’s

strategy—since that is what we are identifying here. Let us then look at a

small corpus of translations, consider the relationships and how the

constraints interact.

A brief case study

The texts that we shall analyze here are all translations of the first stanza of

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” into Spanish and Catalan (see Appendix). If

we look solely at the TTs themselves, there are clearly similarities between

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