On Linguistic Aspects of Translation by Jakobson
人间处处有真情作文-我想对老师说的话
1
Roman Jakobson (1959)
On
linguistic Aspects of Translation
According to Bertrand Russell, “no one can
understand the word „cheese‟
unless he has a
nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese.”
1
If, however, we follow
Russell‟s fundamental
precept教训，告诫 and place our “emphasis upon the
linguistic aspects of traditional
philosophical problems,” then we are obliged to
state that no one can understand the word
“cheese” unless he has an acquaintance
with
the meaning assigned to this word in the lexical
code of English. Any
representative of a
cheese-less culinary厨房的，烹调的 culture will
understand
the English word “cheese” if he is
aware that in this language it means “food made
of pressed curds凝乳” and if he has at least a
linguistic acquaintance with “curds.”
We never
consumed ambrosia特别美味的，神的食物 or nectar花蜜 and have
only a linguistic acquaintance with the words
“ambrosia,” “nectar,” and “gods” -
the name of
their mythical users; nonetheless, we understand
these words and
know in what contexts each of
them may be used.（人们对词义的理解，进而也
是对整个语言含义的理解，而并非取
决于人们的生活经验以及对世界的认
识，而首先取决于语言本身，取决于对语言的翻译。只要理解了人们
赋予词
语的意义，也就理解了语言。）
The meaning of the
words “cheese,” “apple,” “nectar,” “acquaintance,”
“but,”
“mere,” and of any word or phrase
whatsoever is definitely a linguistic - or to be
more precise and less narrow - a semiotic
fact. Against those who assign meaning
(signatum非感官性的记号义) not to the sign, but to the
thing itself, the simplest
and truest argument
would be that nobody has ever smelled or tasted
the meaning
of “cheese” or of “apple.” There
is no signatum without signum. The meaning of
the word “cheese” cannot be inferred from a
nonlinguistic acquaintance with
cheddar or
with camembert一种乳酪 without the assistance of the
verbal code. An
array 排列of linguistic signs is
needed to introduce an unfamiliar word. Mere
pointing will not teach us whether “cheese” is
the name of the given specimen样
本, or of any
box of camembert, or of camembert in general or of
any cheese, any
milk product, any food, any
refreshment点心, or perhaps any box irrespective of
contents. Finally, does a word simply name the
thing in question, or does it imply a
meaning
such as offering, sale, prohibition, or
malediction? (Pointing actually may
mean
malediction诅咒; in some cultures, particularly in
Africa, it is an ominous
不祥的gesture.)
2
For us, both as linguists and as
ordinary word-users, the meaning of any
linguistic sign is its translation into some
further, alternative sign, especially a sign
“in which it is more fully developed” as
Peirce, the deepest inquirer into the
essence
of signs, insistently stated.
2
The term
“bachelor” may be converted into a
more
explicit designation, “unmarried man,” whenever
higher explicitness is
required. We
distinguish three ways of interpreting a verbal
sign: it may be
translated into other signs of
the same language, into another language, or into
another, nonverbal system of symbols. These
three kinds of translation are to be
differently labeled:
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
Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an
interpretation of verbal signs
by means of
signs of nonverbal sign systems.
The
intralingual translation of a word uses either
another, more or less
synonymous, word or
resorts to a circumlocution委婉曲折的说法. Yet synonymy,
as a rule, is not complete equivalence: for
example, “every celibate独身者 is a
bachelor, but
not every bachelor is a celibate.” A word or an
idiomatic phrase-word,
briefly a code-unit of
the highest level, may be fully interpreted only
by means of
an equivalent combination of code-
units, i.e., a message referring to this code-
unit:
“every bachelor is an unmarried man, and
every unmarried man is a bachelor,” or
“every
celibate is bound not to marry, and everyone who
is bound not to marry is a
celibate.”
Likewise, on the level of interlingual
translation, there is ordinarily no full
equivalence between code-units, while messages
may serve as adequate
interpretations of alien
code-units or messages. The English word “cheese”
cannot
be completely identified with its
standard Russian heteronym同形异意 “сыр,”
because
cottage cheese is a cheese but not a сыр. Russians
say: принеси сыру и
творогу “bring cheese and
[sic] cottage cheese.” In standard Russian, the
food
made of pressed curds is called сыр only
if ferment is used.
Most frequently,
however, translation from one language into
another
substitutes messages in one language
not for separate code-units but for entire
messages in same other language. Such a
translation is a reported speech; the
3
translator recodes and transmits a message
received from another source. Thus
translation
involves two equivalent messages in two different
codes.
Equivalence in difference is the
cardinal主要的 problem of language and the
pivotal关键的 concern of linguistics. Like any
receiver of verbal messages, the
linguist acts
as their interpreter. No linguistic specimen may
be interpreted by the
science of language
without a translation of its signs into other
signs of the same
system or into signs of
another system. Any comparison of two languages
implies
an examination of their mutual
translatability; widespread practice of
interlingual
communication, particularly
translating activities, must be kept under
constant
scrutiny审查 by linguistic science. It
is difficult to overestimate the urgent need
for and the theoretical and practical
significance of differential bilingual
dictionaries with careful comparative
definition of all the corresponding units in
their intention and extension. Likewise,
differential bilingual grammars should
define
what unifies and what differentiates the two
languages in their selection and
delimitation
界定of grammatical concepts.
Both the
practice and the theory of translation abound with
intricacies, and from
time to time attempts
are made to sever分开 the Gordian knot by
proclaiming the
dogma 教条of untranslatability.
“Mr. Everyman, the natural logician,” vividly
imagined by B. L. Whorf, is supposed to have
arrived at the following bit of
reasoning:
“Facts are unlike to speakers whose language
background provides for
unlike formulation of
them.”
3
In the first years of the Russian
revolution there were
fanatic狂热的 visionaries
who argued in Soviet periodicals for a radical
revision
of traditional language and
particularly for the weeding out of such
misleading
expressions as “sunrise” or
“sunset.” Yet we still use this Ptolemaic imagery
without implying a rejection of Copernican哥白尼的
doctrine, and we can easily
transform our
customary talk about the rising and setting sun
into a picture of the
earth‟s rotation simply
because any sign is translatable into a sign in
which it
appears to us more fully developed
and precise.
A faculty of speaking a
given language implies a faculty of talking about
this
language. Such a “metalinguistic”
operation permits revision and redefinition of
the vocabulary used. The complementarity of
both levels - object-language and
metalanguage
- was brought out by Niels Bohr: all well-defined
experimental
evidence must be expressed in
ordinary language, “in which the practical use of
every word stands in complementary relation to
attempts of its strict definition.”4
4
All cognitive experience and its
classification is conveyable in any existing
language. Whenever there is deficiency,
terminology may be qualified and
amplified by
loan-words or loan-translations, neologisms新词 or
semantic shifts,
and finally, by
circumlocutions迂回累赘的陈述. Thus in the newborn
literary
language of the Northeast Siberian
Chukchees, “screw” is rendered as “rotating
nail,” “steel” as “hard iron,” “tin” as “thin
iron,” “chalk” as “writing soap,”
“watch” as
“hammering heart.” Even seemingly contradictory
circumlocutions,
like “electrical horse-ear”
(электрическая конка), the first Russian name of
the
horseless street ear, or “flying
steamship” (jena paragot), the Koryak term for the
airplane, simply designate the electrical
analogue of the horse-ear and the flying
analogue of the steamer and do not impede
communication, just as there is no
semantic
“noise” and disturbance in the double
oxymoron矛盾修饰法 - “cold
beef-and-pork hot dog.”
No lack of grammatical device in the
language translated into makes
impossible a
literal translation of the entire conceptual
information contained in the
original. The
traditional conjunctions “and,” “or” are now
supplemented by a new
connective - “andor” -
which was discussed a few years ago in the witty
book
Federal Prose - How to Write in andor for
Washington.
5
Of these three
conjunctions, only the latter occurs in one of
the Samoyed languages.
6
Despite
these
differences in the inventory of conjunctions, all
three varieties of messages
observed in
“federal prose” may be distinctly translated both
into tradition al
English and into this
Samoyed萨摩耶德 language. Federal prose: 1) John and
Peter, 2) John or Peter, 3) John and or Peter
will come. Traditional English: 3)
John and
Peter or one of them will come. Samoyed: John and
or Peter both will
come, 2) John and or Peter,
one of them will come.
If some
grammatical category is absent in a given
language, its meaning may
be translated into
this language by lexical means. Dual对偶形式 forms
like Old
Russian брата are translated with the
help of the numeral: “two brothers.” It is
more difficult to remain faithful to the
original when we translate into a language
provided with a certain grammatical category
from a language devoid of such a
category.
When translating the English sentence “She has
brothers” into a language
which discriminates
dual and plural, we are compelled either to make
our own
choice between two statements “She has
two brothers” – “She has more than two”
or to
leave the decision to the listener and say: “She
has either two or more than
two brothers.”
Again in translating from a language without
grammatical number
into English one is obliged
to select one of the two possibilities - “brother”
or
5
“brothers” or to confront the
receiver of this message with a two-choice
situation:
“She has either one or more than
one brother.”
As Boas neatly observed,
the grammatical pattern of a language (as opposed
to its lexical stock) determines those aspects
of each experience that must be
expressed in
the given language: “We have to choose between
these aspects, and
one or the other must be
chosen.”
7
In order to translate accurately
the English
sentence “I hired a worker,” a
Russian needs supplementary information, whether
this action was completed or not and whether
the worker was a man or a woman,
because he
must make his choice between a verb of completive
or noncompletive
aspect - нанял or нанимал -
and between a masculine and feminine noun -
работника or работницу. If I ask the utterer
of the English sentence whether the
worker was
male or female, my question may be judged
irrelevant or indiscreet,
whereas in the
Russian version of this sentence an answer to this
question is
obligatory. On the other hand,
whatever the choice of Russian grammatical forms
to translate the quoted English message, the
translation will give no answer to the
question of whether I “hired” or “have hired”
the worker, or whether heshe was an
indefinite
or definite worker (“a” or “the”). Because the
information required by
the English and
Russian grammatical pattern is unlike, we face
quite different sets
of two-choice situations;
therefore a chain of translations of one and the
same
isolated sentence from English into
Russian and vice versa could entirely deprive
such a message of its initial content. The
Geneva linguist S. Karcevski used to
compare
such a gradual loss with a circular series of
unfavorable currency
transactions. But
evidently the richer the context of a message, the
smaller the loss
of information.
Languages differ essentially in what they must
convey and not in what they
may convey. Each
verb of a given language imperatively raises a set
of specific
yes-or-no questions, as for
instance: is the narrated event conceived with or
without reference to its completion? Is the
narrated event presented as prior to the
speed
event or not? Naturally the attention of native
speakers and listeners will be
constantly
focused on such items as are compulsory in their
verbal code.
In its cognitive function,
language is minimally dependent on the grammatical
pattern because the definition of our
experience stands in complementary relation
to
metalinguistic operations - the cognitive level of
language not only admits but
directly requires
recoding interpretation, i.e., translation. Any
assumption of
ineffable无法形容的 or untranslatable
cognitive data would be a contradiction in
terms. But in jest开玩笑的, in dreams, in magic,
briefly, in what one would call
6
everyday verbal mythology and in poetry above
all, the grammatical categories
carry a high
semantic import. In these conditions, the question
of translation
becomes much mare entangled and
controversial.
Even such a category as
grammatical gender, often cited as merely formal,
plays a great role in the mythological
attitudes of a speech community. In Russian,
the feminine cannot designate a male person,
nor the masculine specify a female.
Ways of
personifying or metaphorically interpreting
inanimate nouns are prompted
by their gender.
A test in the Moscow Psychological Institute
(1915) showed that
Russians, prone to
personify the weekdays, consistently represented
Monday,
Tuesday, and Thursday as males and
Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday as females,
without realizing that this distribution was
due to the masculine gender of the first
three
names (понедельник, вторник, четверг) as against
the feminine gender of
the others (среда,
пятница, суббота). The fact that the word for
Friday is
masculine in some Slavic languages
and feminine in others is reflected in the folk
traditions of the corresponding peoples, which
differ in their Friday ritual. The
widespread
Russian superstition that a fallen knife
presages预兆 a male guest and
a fallen fork a
female one is determined by the masculine gender
of нож “knife”
and the feminine of вилка
“fork” in Russian. In Slavic and other languages
where
“day” is masculine and “night” feminine,
day is represented by poets as the lover
of
night. The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to
why Sin had been depicted as
a woman by German
artists: he did not realize that “sin” is feminine
in German
(die Sünde), but masculine in
Russian (грех). Likewise a Russian child, while
reading a translation of German tales, was
astounded大吃一惊 to find that Death,
obviously a
woman (Russian смерть, fem.), was pictured as an
old man (German
der Tod, masc.). My Sister
Life, the title of a book of poems by Boris
Pasternak, is
quite natural in Russian, where
“life” is feminine жизнь, but was enough to reduce
to despair the Czech poet Josef Hora in his
attempt to translate these poems, since
in
Czech this noun is masculine život.
What
was the initial question which arose in Slavic
literature at its very
beginning? Curiously
enough, the translator‟s difficulty in preserving
the
symbolism of genders, and the cognitive
irrelevance of this difficulty, appears to
be
the main topic of the earliest Slavic original
work, the preface to the first
translation of
the Evangeliarium, made in the early 860‟s by the
founder of Slavic
letters and liturgy,
Constantine the Philosopher, and recently restored
and
interpreted by A. Vaillant.
8
“Greek, when translated into another language,
cannot
always be reproduced identically, and
that happens to each language being
translated,” the Slavic apostle states.
“Masculine nouns „river‟ and „star‟ in Greek,
7
are feminine in another language
as река and звезда in Slavic.” According to
Vaillant‟s commentary, this divergence effaces
the symbolic identification of the
rivers with
demons and of the stars with angels in the Slavic
translation of two of
Matthew‟s verses (7:25
and 2:9). But to this poetic obstacle, Saint
Constantine
resolutely opposes the precept of
Dionysius the Areopagite, who called for chief
attention to the cognitive values (силе
разума) and not to the words themselves.
In poetry, verbal equations方程式 become a
constructive principle of the text.
Syntactic
and morphological categories, roots, and affixes,
phonemes and their
components (distinctive
features) - in short, any constituents of the
verbal code are
confronted, juxtaposed,
brought into contiguous relation according to the
principle
of similarity and contrast and carry
their own autonomous signification. Phonemic
similarity is sensed as semantic relationship.
The pull, or to use a more erudite, and
perhaps more precise term - paronomasia,
reigns over poetic art, and whether its
rule
is absolute or limited, poetry by definition is
untranslatable. Only creative
transposition is
possible: either intralingual transposition - from
one poetic shape
into another, or interlingual
transposition - from one language into another, or
finally intersemiotic transposition - from one
system of signs into another, e.g.,
from
verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting.
If we were to translate into English the
traditional formula Traduttore,
traditore as
“the translator is a betrayer,” we would deprive
the Italian rhyming
epigram of all its
paronomastic value. Hence a cognitive attitude
would compel us
to change this aphorism格言警句
into a more explicit statement and to answer the
questions: translator of what messages?
Betrayer of what values?
Notes
1 Bertrand Russell, «Logical Positivism,»
Revue Internationale de Philosophie,
IV
(1950), 18; cf. p. 3.
2 Cf. John Dewey,
«Peirce‟s Theory of Linguistic Signs, Thought, and
Meaning,»
The Journal of Philosophy,
XLIII (1946), 91.
3 Benjamin Lee Whorf,
Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.,
1956), p. 235.
4 Niels Bohr, «On the
Notions of Causality and Complementarity,»
Dialectica,
I
8
(1948), 317f.
5 James R. Masterson and Wendell Brooks
Phillips, Federal Prose (Chapel
Hill,
N.
C., 1948), p. 40f.
6 Cf. Knut Bergsland,
«Finsk-ugrisk og almen språkvitenskap,» Norsk
Tidsskrift
for Sproavidenskap, xv (1949),
374f.
7 Franz Boas, «Language,» General
Anthropology (Boston, 1938), FP, 132f.
8
Andre Vaillant, «Le Préface de l‟Évangeliaire
vieux-slave,» Revue des
Études
Slaves,
XXIV (1948), 5f.
The Translation Studies
Reader 2000 (ed. Lawrence Venuti).
London &
New York: Routledge, 113-118.