1

Translation Studies: An Overview

Writings on the subject of translating go far back in recorded history. The practice of translation was discussed by Cicero and Horace (first century BCE) and the Bible translator, St Jerome (fourth century CE); as their writings were to exert an important influence up until the twentieth century. One of the characteristics of the study of translation is that it was based on the practice of translating; much early writing was by individual translators and directed at explaining, justifying or discussing their choice of a particular translation strategy. Cicero (106 to 43 BCE) described the strategy of translation, And I did not translate them as an interpreter but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and the forms or the figures of thought, but in language which conforms to our usage. And in so doing, I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the general style and force of the language. (Cicero 46 BCE, trans. H.M. Hubbell, in Robinson 1997a: 9, ) St Jerome argued, in translating from the Greek except of course in the case of the Holy Scripture, where even the syntax is a mystery I render, not word for word, but sense for sense. (Jerome 395/1997: 25) TRANSLATION IN INDIA Literary translation existed during pre-colonial India. Ancient India may not have invented translation, but there is ample evidence of a literary text passing from one language to another. Example, Brihatkatha of Gunadhya (5th AD) in a Prakrit speech, original is lost but versions were preserved in other languages- three Sanskrit texts, two Prakrit abridgements and one Tamil fragment. An older example, the Jataka Tales, each telling of a former birth of the Buddha, first collected in Pali and forming the tenth book of Khuddanikaya. These stories were later developed in Sanskrit. Mahabharata, Ramayana, Bhagavat Purana, etc, formerly written in Sanskrit had found other versions in Tamil, Pali and the Prakrits. These are retellings rather than renderings, and in most cases the author felt free to add material of his own composition. ( Surjit Mukherjee, 2004). Then, came translation of Indian texts into English during colonial time. Shakunta (translated by Williams Jones in 1789). By late 19th century, Indians also began to contribute. Romesh Chandra Dutt translated Lays of Ancient India (1894), Maha-Bharata (1899) and Ramayana (1902). TRANSLATION STUDIES AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE The very name translation studies was first proposed by James S. Holmes in 1972 as a better alternative to translatology and to translation science, or science of translating. Translation Studies is related to the study of the theory and phenomena of translation. However, although the practice of translating is long established, the study of the field developed into an academic discipline only in the second half of the twentieth century. Translation Studies emerged in the late 1970s as a new academic discipline. Before that, translation had normally been merely an element of language learning in secondary schools in many countries had come to be dominated by what was known as the grammar-translation method. This method, which was applied to classical Latin and Greek and then to modern foreign languages, centred on the rote study of the grammatical rules and structures of the foreign language. These rules were both practiced and tested by the translation of a series of usually unconnected and artificially constructed sentences exemplifying the structures (s) being studied, an approach that persists even nowadays in certain countries and contexts.

2
The rapid development of the discipline may be attributed mainly to political and social change: the end of the ColdWar, the re-awakening of China, the emergence of the developing world, and growing self awareness among ethnic communities. In India, translation studies has been established as an academic discipline in some universities. Beside that the Sahitya Academi and the National Book Trust have been taking up translation programmes. Outstanding modern Indian novels and short stories have been translated into several Indian languages, other than that of the original work.

Issues in Translation Studies

While the Classical authors of ancient Greece and Rome exerted authority over much European thought and literature (and translation), twentieth-century translation theory reveals a much expanded range of fields and approaches reflecting the differentiation of modern culture: not only varieties of linguistics, literary criticism, philosophical speculation, and cultural theory, but experimental studies and anthropological fieldwork, as well as translator training and translation practice. During the 1960s and 1970s, linguistics-oriented theorists emphasized the description and analysis of translation operations, producing typologies of equivalence that acted as normative principles to guide translator training. However, the history of translation theory can be imagined as a set of changing relationships between the relative autonomy of the translated text, or the translators actions, and two other concepts: equivalence and function. Equivalence has been understood as accuracy, adequacy, correctness, correspondence, fidelity, or identity; it is a variable notion of how the translation is connected to the foreign text. Function has been understood as the potentiality of the translated text to release diverse effects, beginning with the communication of information and the production of a response comparable to the one produced by the foreign text in its own culture. Yet the effects of translation are also social, and they have been tied up with cultural, economic, and political agendas: evangelical programs, commercial ventures, and colonial projects, as well as the development of languages, national literatures, and avant-garde literary movements. Function is a variable notion of how the translated text is connected to the receiving language and culture. The changing importance of a particular theoretical concept, whether autonomy, equivalence or function, may be determined by various factors, linguistic and literary, cultural and social.

WHAT IS TRANSLATION?
Every translation activity has one or more specific purposes and whichever they may be, the main aim of translation is to serve as a cross-cultural bilingual communication vehicle among peoples. In the past few decades, this activity has developed because of rising international trade, increased migration, globalization, the recognition of linguistic minorities, and the expansion of the mass media and technology. For this reason, the translator plays an important role as a bilingual or multi-lingual cross-cultural transmitter of culture and truths by attempting to interpret concepts and speech in a variety of texts as faithfully and accurately as possible. Literary translation aims to re-create the original as best it can in another language. Two issues need attention here: what we actually mean by translation and what disciplines or activities fall within the scope of translation studies. Central to the development of translation studies is the tripartite definition of translation advanced by the structural linguist Roman Jakobson:
1. Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. 2. Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language.

3
3. Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems. (Jakobson,1959/2004: 139)

Intralingual translation thus refers to a rewording or rephrasing in the same language (most explicitly introduced by phrases such as in other words or that is), and intersemiotic to a change of medium, such as the translation that occurs when a composer puts words to music. or, even more notably, when the musical sound completely replaces the verbal code. For Jakobson, interlingual translation, between two verbal languages (e.g. Chinese and Arabic, English and Spanish), is translation proper. This is the most prototypical form of translation. Translation refers not just to the written text on the page, the product of the translation process also. Defining what we mean by the word is notoriously slippery: in the Dictionary of Translation Studies, Shuttleworth and Cowie begin their entry for translation by acknowledging this fact: Translation : an incredibly broad notion which can be understood in many different ways (1997: 181), while Baker and Malmkjr (1998) do without a specific entry for translation in their longer Encyclopedia. Hatim and Munday prefer to talk of the ambit of translation, defined as:
1. The process of transferring a written text from SL (Spoken Language) to TL (Target Language), conducted by a translator, or translators, in a specific socio-cultural context. 2. The written product, or TT, which results from that process and which functions in the sociocultural context of the TL. 3. The cognitive, linguistic, visual, cultural and ideological phenomena which are an integral part of 1 and 2. (Hatim and Munday, 2004: 6)

However, such definitions still do not answer the question of the limits on translation, and the boundaries between translation, adaptation, version, transcreation, etc. that have key implications for the criteria by which the target text is judged. For example, adaptation, again, has been variously defined as: a set of translative operations which result in a text that is not accepted as a translation but is nevertheless recognized as representing a source text of about the same length. (Bastin 1998: 5) but also as: a term traditionally used to refer to any TT in which a particularly free translation strategy has been adopted. The term usually implies that considerable changes have been made in order to make the text more suitable for a specific audience (e.g. children) or for the particular purpose behind the translation.(Shuttleworth and Cowie 1997: 3) Because of the crossover between translation and creative writing , the phenomenon of transcreation emerges, a term used by the Brazilian Haroldo de Campos (1981, inVieira 1999: 110). Transcreation is not to try to reproduce the originals form understood as a sound pattern, but to appropriate the translators contemporaries best poetry, to use the existing tradition. The transcreative use of the original in order to nourish new work in the target language breaks the notion of faithfulness to the original text as a necessary criterion for translation. Interestingly, the term transcreation has recently come to be used in the very different context of video games to denote a type of translation that frequently rewrites the sound track in order to create new, target-culture appropriate effects of humour, especially. There is a broadening of the scope of the word translation to include conceptualization from non-Western languages: in India, rupantar (change in form) and anuvad (speaking after), in Arabic tarjama (biography), in Chinese fan yi (turning over), each indicating a different form of engagement with the process. This would have important implications for the relation between STs and TTs, for instance further challenging the prominence of the concept of equivalence in Western-based studies. Thus, if we expand what we understand by and research as translation, the conventional requirement of the TT to resemble the source will no longer hold. This would then entail broadening the study of translation to include different modes, namely transference, representation and transculturation: transference, as

4
an alternative and broader alternative to translation, can be physical or symbolic and involve a different medium; representation entails the construction and exhibition of an image of the Other, and transculturation involves not only the transmission but also the performance of other cultural facets and forms, which may not be linguistic at all. (Tymoczko) Another important question for the discipline is the distinction between written translation and spoken translation (often equated to interpreting). However, the difference between translation and interpreting cannot always be one of the written versus the spoken: for example, interpreters are routinely asked to produce TL versions of written documents such as witness statements and other exhibits in the courts and formal speeches that are written to be read, etc., thus blurring the boundaries between the modes.

THE SCOPE OF TRANSLATION STUDIES

The scope of the discipline of translation studies has been transformed since James Holmess time. Holmess map of translation studies divides the discipline into a pure and applied side, with much the greater emphasis being placed on the former. Pure is then subdivided into theoretical and descriptive, and these in turn subdivided according to the objectives and subjects of inquiry. He also uses the term theoretical translation studies to refer to the goal of which is to develop a full, inclusive theory accommodating so many elements that it can serve to explain and predict all phenomena falling within the terrain of translating and translation, to the exclusion of all phenomena falling outside it. But most theorists these days would accept that the number of situational variables in the translation process is so vast it would restrict an absolute theory to the very bland, such as translation involves shifts (Toury 2004). Translation theory is focused for an occasion on a particular set of translation tasks that should be useful for the practising and trainee translator (Peter Newmark). This is typical of the theoretical work in the linguistic and functional frameworks which has sought to answer key questions, such as equivalence, more or less prescriptively and in line with what was useful for translator training. Equivalence is now established on the basis of: analysis of the linguistic and situational particularities of source and target texts a comparison of the two texts an assessment of their relative match. These were all important developments in taking translation studies away from a static concentration on individual STTT word equivalence, incorporating additional elements of context, participants and culture (Vermeer 1986, 1989). German attempts at setting foundations of a general theory of translation based on text type and skopos (purpose) and function. Skopos (Greek: purpose, goal), is an appropriate name for a theory which focusses on such aspects of the translation process as interactional dynamics and pragmatic purpose. The theory holds that the way the target text eventually shapes up is determined to a great extent by the function, or skopos, intended for it in the target context. Such a strategy can and often does run counter to orthodox equivalence-based procedures since, under skopos, the end essentially justifies the means. The skopos idea relies on key concepts in pragmatics, such as intention and action. Two basic assumptions are entertained: one is - interaction is determined by its purpose; second is purpose varies according to the text receiver. Translators and translation scholars try to redefine the importance of translation in literary history, trace the genealogy of translation in their own individual cultural contexts, and explore more fully the ideological implications of translation and the power relationships that are involved as a text is transferred from one context to another. Polysystem theory studies translated literature as a system that interrelated dynamically with the source system. Translations were studied, not as isolated texts, but within their cultural, literary and socio-historical contexts, and as facts of target cultures (Toury 1995: 29).

5
Although skopos theory had also proposed a target-culture oriented definition, Toury and the descriptivists stood out by their rejection of value-laden evaluations of TTs in relation to their STs. The focus moved away from the prescriptive (X must be translated as Y) and firmly towards the descriptive (in text A, produced under conditions and constraints B, X is translated as Y). Polysystems theory was primarily concerned with literary translation, but other translation scholars whose work included the non-literary were pursuing parallel paths. The skopos theory postulates that the objective or function of a translation determines the translation strategies to be employed. Hence the translators subjective takes precedence, and the function that a translation is meant to fulfil in the target culture enables that translator to make certain choices. INTERDISCIPLINARY NATURE OF TRANSLATION STUDIES By its nature it is multilingual, international and interdisciplinary, encompassing languages, linguistics, communication studies, philosophy and a range of types of cultural studies. Most characteristic features of translation studies are cross-fertilisation and interdisciplinarity. Without interdisciplinarity, translation studies would not be able to function. Culture and Translation The 1980s and 1990s also saw the growing influence of cultural studies on translation, the so-called cultural turn as it was coined in Bassnett and Lefeveres edited volume Translation, History and Culture (1990). These are descriptive translation studies itself; work on ideology, poetics and patronage and on translation as rewriting; postcolonial and feminist/gender translation theory; the concepts of norms, constraints and rules that operate in the translation system; and ethics and identity formation. The shift in research paradigms has had several major consequences: one has been the interrogation of long-held tenets of translation, such as the very notion of STTT equivalence, which has been rejected, or revisited, by deconstructionists and postcolonialists. This interdisciplinarity is clearly highlighted how major developments in translation studies, such as polysystems theory and the concept of textual grids, coincided with developments in literary/cultural theory and postcolonial studies. As a result, a student of translation should be as much interested in textual issues as in the study of how cultures construct their prevailing tastes and myths. Translation is an intercultural communication. That translation is an act of communication, and one should also know the existence or relevance of cultural differences in translation. So, a translator is an intercultural mediator, applying a culture filter to the foreign text and negotiating meanings for the target text reader. One cannot overlook translation as an intercultural phenomenon. Indeed, the cultural turn ushered in a stream of investigation that transformed the discipline and today continues a process of recontextualization. Now there is a shift to non-Western perspective of translation theory challenging some presuppositions that have dominated the discipline: on translation as a mediating form between cultures, overlooking the fact that differential language use is often a marker of identity for a group; on the trained, professional translator in highly literate societies rather than the more informal, oral translator in many cultures. Linguistics and Translation There is an asymmetrical relationship between two disciplines: that of translation and linguistics. There is an ongoing interaction between the two, each drawing on the findings of the other whenever mutually beneficial. This mutually beneficial and pragmatic relationship

6
concentrates on those points of contact or interaction between the two disciplines that have proven most fruitful since the 18th century. This includes the most recent developments in corpus linguistics, and the ongoing research on contrastive analysis and language universals. Throughout the ages, translation as well as linguistics, the formal study of language, have attracted comments and speculation. The implications for translation arising from the groundbreaking work of philologists of the 19th century in grouping together into families the Indo-European languages as we know them today were aptly illustrated a century later by the observation made by translation theorists Vinay and Darbelnet that literal translation is a unique solution [ ... ] It is most commonly found in translations between closely related languages (e.g. French/Italian) (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1995: 34). Another, recent but fast-growing field of linguistics that has already provided translation theorists with valuable information, is that of corpus linguistics. The study of language on the basis of text corpora can be traced back to around 1960 with the launch of the Survey of English Usage (SEU) at London University and the advent of computers which made it possible to store large amounts of material. The first machine-readable corpus compiled at Brown University in the early 1960s was soon followed by others such as the LondonOslo/Bergen (LOB) Corpus. Since its beginning in the 1960s, the corpus as a source of systematically retrievable data, and as a test bed for hypotheses, has become widely used by linguists, resulting in findings that include some with obvious implications for translation. Using a corpus consisting of 75 novels, half of which were novels originally written in Swedish and half were translations, Martin Gellerstam of the University of Gothenburg has systematically compared original texts with texts in translation. His early 1986 study points squarely to the influence in translation of the source on the target text and also revealed previously-unobserved cross-linguistic differences between the two languages involved in the translation process. Then there are glossology and sociolinguistics. Glossology refers to language (in French: "langage") appears as a dialectic between (implicit) grammatical analysis and (explicit) conceptualization. Sociolinguistics refers to language as an idiom (in French: "langue"), i.e. a dialectic between divergence (separating ourselves by language) and convergence (coming together by language). In glossology, we are concerned with saying something ("expressing ideas"): saying "water" means water; the universe appears as a representation or as an object. In sociolinguistics, we are concerned with saying ourselves ("expressing our own identity"): saying "water" means I belong to an English speaking group; the universe appears as my universe, i.e. my environment. "Tell me how you speak, and I tell you who you are" may be considered as the key sentence of sociolinguistics. Minimising these two levels means understanding equivalence as a logical equivalence: translation means changing an equivalent content from one code into a different code, and it appears as the solution of an equation: the same equals sign is to be put between "eight times five = forty" and "a bachelor = an unmarried man". (Michael Herrmann, 2004) Technology and Translation Since the 1990s, translation as a commercial activity has become a global business. The rapid expansion of the internet has been a major factor in allowing even smaller companies to market and sell their products internationally. And the demand from consumers for product information, software, user manuals, games, educational materials and so on in their own language has fuelled in its turn the demand for translation. As the translation market grows, so does the share taken by translation companies, or language service providers (LSPs). This means in effect that the practice of individual translators working directly with clients is in relative decline. Only one of these technologies, machine translation (MT) is intended to automate the core task, i.e. the production of a string of words that will count as a translation of the source text. Others, grouped under the heading

7
of computer-aided translation (CAT) tools, are designed to increase productivity while leaving the core task to the human translator. Screen translation inevitably brings into play the impact of technology on translation. Dubbing, subtitling and revoicing thus creates an excellent opportunity to reflect on the enormous impact of technology on translation in the course of the last decade. But research in screen translation should not be solely concerned with the study of technological advances to the detriment of the linguistic, pedagogical, cultural commercial and political issues which continue to lie at the heart of screen translation in its various forms. Politics and Translation However, nowhere else has interdisciplinarity been more vital than in the study of translation in a political context. Christina Schffner makes this very clear when she explains the complex nature of political discourse: In an increasingly globalised world, processes of text production and reception are no longer confined to one language and one culture The universality of political discourse has consequences for intercultural communication, and thus for translation. Political communication relies on translation, it is through translation (and also through interpreting) that information is made available to addressees beyond national borders. Translation negotiates meanings and thus creates an intermediary zone of mediation which is socially necessary in densely populated multicultural centres. Without it, communities remain partitioned and shut up in their own mental worlds, and proximity will breed alienation and violent conflict. This discussion of translation within a great many different disciplinary contexts shows that it is a dynamic discipline which can provide invaluable insights precisely because of its ability to interact with other disciplines.

Works Cited
Bassnett, Susan. Translation Studies. New York: Routledge, 2002. Kuhiwczak, Piotr and Karin Littau. A Companion to Translation Studies. Toronto: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 2007. Monday, Jeremy. Introducing Translation Studies. New York: Routledge, 2001. Mukherjee, Surjit. Translation as Recovery. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2004. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translation Studies: Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.