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Interstrategies in Trans英語(yǔ)論文
Abstract: The paper holds the view that the philosophical concept of intersubjectivity should be an important guiding principle for translation studies. According to intersubjective theory, the paper studies the two strategies of domestication and foreignization in translation and points out that neither of the two strategies should be adhered to rigidly and the practice of either should partly depend on the constrained factors in translation and the relationship between them is one of unity of opposites and the influence of either does not concentrate on one way only but two ways or intersubjective.
Key words: intersubjectivity; translation; domestication; foreignization
I．
From a philosophical and psychological perspective, intersubjectivity is predicated upon the possibility of sameness and upon recognition of difference. The intersubjective model of two subjects should exist in reciprocal relation to one another and establish relationships based on intersubjective mutuality, in which each partner encounters the other as an equal subject, not an object. Therein, for example, two people are said to communicate with one another as an I and a Thou if their encounter is determined by immediacy, directness and mutuality, not by domination and dependency or, both partners recognize and respond to the being of the other as a subject. Instead of taking individual autonomy as a goal, intersubjectivity assumes that the individual exists within the context of continuing relationship to others. The issue, then, is not how we dissociate ourselves from others, but rather, how we engage the other in relationship.
The merging and loss of individual subjectivities defines the nature of intersubjective relations. Intersubjectivity cannot be motivated by a cycle of domination and dependence. On the contrary, it is a relationship in which the identity of the individual subject is not only confirmed, but is allowed to develop. If intersubjectivity is not prefaced by an acknowledgement of the other’s autonomy, then the potential for mutuality will give way to a relation of domination and control. Reciprocity cannot be achieved through submission, obedience or repression; it relies on the autonomy of individual subjects. Without awareness of difference, reciprocity is not possible, because otherness is reduced to sameness.
When others are described as objects for self-realization or as the means to self-discovery and self-recognition, the language of relationships is drained of attachment, intimacy, and engagement. The self, although placed in a context of relationships, is defined in terms of separation. In other words, the possibility of my self-expansion through the other is directly related to equality and mutuality between both partners. Or to put it differently, differences and sameness must exist simultaneously.
Intersubjective reciprocity demands that the other subject be seen as different, yet alike and, recognition must always be accompanied by acknowledgement of difference. Recognition of otherness is necessary in order that two persons can continue to exist, each for themselves, in reciprocal relation to each other. The otherness of both partners in relation provides a key understanding to the nature of intersubjective reciprocity. Intersubjective reciprocity must always be predicated upon acknowledgement of the other’s alterity. Without affirmation of difference, the other will become dominated and dependent, or be reduced to a mere third person, one who stands over and against me. By elucidating the interrelation of separateness and togetherness, intersubjectivity provides a framework within which to understand the structure and importance of reciprocity in an intersubjective relation.
The turn to an intersubjective way of looking at things leads in the matter of “subjectivity” to a surprising result: the consciousness that is centered, as it seems, in the ego is not something immediate or purely inward. Rather, self-consciousness forms itself on the path from without to within, through the symbolically mediated relationship to a partner in interaction. To this extent, it possesses an intersubjective core; its eccentric position attests to the tenacious dependence of subjectivity upon language as the medium through which one recognizes oneself in the other in a non-objectifying manner.
A theory of intersubjectivity must recognize both human plurality and singularity. Acknowledgment of the radical alterity of individuals does not, though, imply that the self and other are completely impenetrable to each other. In my view, subjective and intersubjective theory should not be seen in opposition to one another—as they usually are—but as interrelated ways of understanding the nature of human reality. The crucial point is that they focus on different aspects of conscious experience that are too interdependent simply to be separated from one another. While this may seem obvious, it may have demonstrated the degree of divergence that exists between conceptualizations of the human self in terms of autonomy on the one hand, and relation on the other. The importance of relation to individual existence clearly can not be underestimated. Intersubjectively, individual self-consciousness and intersubjectivity exist simultaneously, so that there is neither the possibility of merging, nor the loss of individual separateness. Intersubjectivity, therefore, bases on caring and mutuality presupposes the capacity for listening, understanding, and resolving conflict and, reciprocity is only possible in so far as there is a willingness and ability to acknowledge the particular needs and desires of the other in his/her otherness. Human experience is at once grounded in a sense of separateness and togetherness, which is both subjective and intersubjective. Only by recognizing the complex interconnections between subjectivity and intersubjectivity can we begin to understand the intrinsic relation between ourselves and other human beings.
In the above analyses of the role and significance of language in human self-development and intersubjective relations, the perspectives offered by philosophy and psychology are rich in potential. They have fostered a deeper understanding of the complex relations that exist between language, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In the course of examining the views of subjectivity and intersubjectivity from a philosophical and psychological perspective, questions have been raised about the ways in which they carry out the linguistic turn in translating work. Although the above analysis is chiefly philosophical and psychological in scope, it is my hope that it will enable us to recognize the considerable parallels between philosophy and psychoanalytic theory and its application to the field of translation study. Intersubjectivity should be a general guiding principle for the subjectivities in modern society and especially should be an important guiding principle for translation and a new perspective for translation studies.
II．
Most translators in translation history chose a fluent, domesticating method that inscribes the foreign text with target-language values, both linguistic (fluency) and cultural (for example, in a Judeo-Christian monotheism - “writing ‘God’ for ‘Zeus’” by Fitts in One Hundred Poems From the Palatine Anthology 1938) in spite of a varied range of concepts, beliefs, and ideologies in source language. It was regarded that the reader ought, if possible, to forget that it is a translation at all, and to be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work. Of course a necessary inference from such a principle is, that whatever has a foreign color is undesirable and is even a grave defect. The translator, it seems, must carefully obliterate all that is characteristic of the original, unless it happens to be identical in spirit to something already familiar in target language. The few translators who chose to resist these values by developing a foreignizing method, taking up the innovations to signify the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, from time to time encountered condemnation and neglect and thus, the ways in this cultural situation constrained the translator’s activity. Certainly in translation the translator should desire the reader always to remember that his work is an imitation, and moreover is in a different material; that the original is foreign, and in many respects extremely unlike our native compositions.
There are two maxims in translation: one requires that the author of a foreign nation be brought across to readers in such a way that readers can look on him as theirs; the other requires that readers should go across to what is foreign and adapt ourselves to its conditions, its use of language, its peculiarities. Interestingly, from the translation history,it can be learned that the domestic cultural and political agenda that guided the work of these translators did not entirely efface the differences of the foreign texts. On the contrary, the drive to domesticate was also intended to introduce rather different foreign ideas and forms into target language so that it would be able to compete internationally and struggle against the hegemonic countries. As a result, the recurrent analogies between classical target culture and modern foreign values usually involved a transformation of both. In fact translation is a process by which the chain of signifiers that constitutes the source-language text is replaced by a chain of signifiers in the target language which the translator provides on the strength of an interpretation. Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences among signifiers along a potentially endless chain (polysemous, intertextual, subject to infinite linkages), it is always differential and deferred, never present as an original unity. Both foreign text and translation are derivative: both consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the foreign writer nor the translator originates, and that destabilizes the work of signification, inevitably exceeding and possibly conflicting with their intentions. Accordingly, a foreign text is the site of many different semantic possibilities that are fixed only temporarily in any one translation, on the basis of varying cultural assumptions and interpretive choices, in specific social situations, in different historical periods. Meaning is a plural and contingent relation, not an unchanging unified essence, and therefore a translation cannot be judged according to mathematics-based concepts of semantic equivalence or one-to-one correspondence. Appeals to the foreign text cannot finally adjudicate between competing translations in the absence of linguistic error, because canons of accuracy in translation, notions of “fidelity” and “freedom”, are historically determined categories. Even the notion of “l(fā)inguistic error” is subject to variation, since mistranslations, especially in literary texts, can be not merely intelligible but significant in the target-language culture. The viability of a translation is established by its relationship to the cultural and social conditions under which it is produced and read. This relationship points to the violence that resides in very purpose and activity of translation: the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that preexist in the target language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, reception of text. Translation is the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target-language reader. This difference can never be entirely removed, of course, but it necessarily suffers a reduction and exclusion of possibilities. Whatever difference the translation conveys is now imprinted by the target-language culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies. The aim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self-conscious projects, where translation serves an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political. Of course, at the same time, foreignizing translation method could never be entirely free of domestic values and agendas. If the foreignizing strategies deviated too widely from prevailing domestic values in the reception of archaic texts, for example, especially scholarly annotation and fluent discourse, omitting annotations can of course signal the cultural difference of the foreign texts, insisting on their foreignness with all the discomfort of incomprehension.
On the other hand, it is important not to view either the strategy of domestication or foreignization as simple inaccurate translations. Canons of accuracy and fidelity are always locally defined, specific to different cultural formations at different historical moments. A ratio of loss to gain inevitably occurs in the translation process and situates the translation in an equivocal relationship to the foreign text, never quite faithful, always somewhat free, never establishing an identity, always a lack and a supplement. Domesticating and foreignizing methods are thus viewed as the most effective way to control this equivocal relationship and produce versions adequate to the source text. Therefore, neither domestication nor foreignizaton should be adhered to rigidly and the practice of either should partly depend on the constrained factors mentioned above. The relationship between them is one of unity of opposites.
III．
Translation strategies can be defined as “foreignizing” or “domesticating” only in relation to specific cultural situations, specific moments in the changing reception of a foreign literature, or in the changing hierarchy of domestic values. In other words, determined by different factors, translations aim to be faithful to the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text to serve different factors and thus different strategies are led to translation.
1) If a translator is apt to adopt a foreignizing strategy, his idea may be that the discourses in translation should be as heterogeneous as possible. Here attention should be paid to “as heterogeneous as possible”. If translation makes the reader stop to think, or unduly attracts attention by difficulty or peculiarity, or disturbing the effect of the surrounding language, no word, however expressive and exact, should be employed. The foreignness must make the reader reassuringly familiar, easy to read. And this is the reception that the translations continue to get. If upon publication, a translated text is not an instant critical and commercial success in the culture for which it is translated, it probably wouldn’t be sought by target-language publishers. The project languages to translate it, therefore, should be controlled by the translator, who, in effect, must invent for target-language readers a foreign text that would otherwise be nonexistent to them.
In order to give the reader the sense that the text is a window onto the author, translators must manipulate what often seems to be a very resistant material, i.e., the language into which they are translating, in most cases the language they learned first, their mother tongue, but now also their own. When the translation is a poem in free verse, for example, varied rhythms that avoid jogtrot meters are needed to give the language a conversational quality, to make it sound natural. Linebreaks should not distort the syntax so much as to hinder the reader’s search for comprehension; they should rather support the syntactical continuity that gets him or her to read for meaning over the lines, pursuing the development of a coherent speaking voice, tracing its psychological contours. If the translation is too foreign to readers’ incomprehension, if anticipating this risk, glossary may be appended to the translation that provided definition for the words. Readers no doubt will find it useful when they take up other papers, in various genres, periods, dialects. In this way, foreignness can be preserved and at the same time the translated text can be easily accepted be readers. The translation may be also accompanied by bilingual publication if studied by some special readers, students or people who want to learn the source language or people who especially are keen on seeking the foreignness, for instance. It signifies the cultural difference of the foreign text by deviating from current target language usage and thereby sending the reader across the page to confront the foreign language. Driving the reader’s perception further into the original than it would without them have penetrated. But it must also be mentioned that readers can still feel that domestication translation is also powerful in delivering strangeness.
No doubt, the different reception of foreignness is due to many factors, cultural, economic, and ideological. And here I want to say that the fact that the films directed by Zhang Yimu like “Red Sorghum” and “Old Wells” were awarded international prizes accounting for the films satisfying the Westerners’ false impression of poverty and backwardness on China, is, of course, not the foreignness a translator should convey.
The traditional view of translation as an imitation or copy of an original text in a second language proves inadequate not only in practice, however, it also rests on falsely static view of language. Neither the assumption that a language (even a “dead” language)is unchanging and completely defined, nor that an individual work is complete, whole and identical to itself, if held up under scrutiny. For one thing, historical changes occur in the original language: the meanings of words change, and even idiomatic forms and expressions change over the years. There is also the likelihood that the visible features of a writer’s style will change in the eyes of posterity; seemingly obvious stylistic tendencies may become less perceptible, while those that were only immanent may become more evident or important to later generations of readers. Therefore the foreignness of the foreign text can only be seen what currently appears “foreign” in the target language culture.
2) If the translation wants to seek a foothold in foreign market and target readers are not familiar with the source culture, the translator might not ignore cultural differences by adhering too closely to its own values. In order to achieve cross-cultural communication, for example, in Chinese-English translation, domestication should be used as much as possible. The strategy, of course, is used in view of current situation that “Anglo-American readers are not so familiar with Chinese culture as Chinese readers are familiar with Anglo-American culture”(Zhang Nanfeng, 2000). For English readers, therefore, the English version of Chinese translation should not be too difficult for them to understand. To some degree it should let the English readers find the same other in the Chinese translation at the linguistic level and to find the foreignness at the cultural level so as to get as equal a communication as possible (But not to convey some backwardness purposefully as “Red Sorghum” mentioned above just to satisfy foreigners curiosity falsely). In this way sentences, and sometimes even groups of sentences, must often be turned inside-out and wherever references are incomprehensible to anyone not closely familiar with the Chinese scene, a few words of explanation have to be brought up into the text that would normally appear in a footnote.
3) Generally speaking, the two characteristics of a good translation are, that it should be faithful, and that it should be unconstrained. Faithful means rendering correctly the meaning of the original and exhibiting the general spirit which pervades it; unconstrained, means not betraying by its phraseology, by the collection of its words, or construction of its sentences that it is only a copy. The first thing, without doubt, which claims the translator’s attention, is to give a just representation of the sense of the original. This, it must be acknowledged, is the most essential of all. The second thing is, to convey into source language, as much as possible, in a consistency with the genius of the language that the author writes, the author’s spirit and manner, and, the very character of the author’s style. The third and last thing is, to take care, that the version has at least, so far the quality of an original performance, as to appear natural and easy, such as shall give no handle to the critic to charge the translator with applying words improperly, or in a meaning not warranted by use, or combining them in a way which renders the sense obscure, and the construction ungrammatical, or even harsh. But in practice, critical categories like “fluency” and “resistancy”, “domesticating” and “foreignizing”, can only be defined by referring to the formation of cultural discourses in which the translation is produced, and in which certain translation theories and practices are valued over others. In the light of translation history, the canons of translation underwent changes, requiring a translation to be both fluent and exact, to make for vivid and compulsive reading, but also to follow the foreign culture, especially hegemonic culture more closely. The case shows that the aim of translation is not to assess the “freedom” or “fidelity” of a translation, but rather to uncover the canons of accuracy by which it is produced and judged. Fidelity cannot be explained as mere semantic equivalence: on the one hand, the foreign text is susceptible to many different interpretations even at the level of the individual word; on the other hand, the translator’s interpretive choices answer to a domestic cultural situation and so always exceeds the foreign text. This does not mean that translation is forever banished to the realm of freedom or error, but that canons of accuracy are culturally specific and historically variable. Thus the translators’ different motives and methods used in translations can be more fully understood in the context of their other work, their lives, and their different historical moments.
IV．
Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and poetics and as much manipulate literature to function in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation, undertaken in the service of power, and in its positive aspect can help in the evolution of a literature and a society. Rewritings can introduce new concepts, new genres, new devices and the history of translation is the history also of literary innovation, of the shaping power of one culture upon another. But rewriting can also repress innovation, distort and contain, and in an age of ever increasing manipulation of all kinds. On the one hand, translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures, and hence it potentially figures in ethnic discrimination, geopolitical confrontations, and colonialism terrorism war. On the other hand, translation enlists the foreign text in the maintenance or revision of literary canons in the target-language culture, inscribing poetry and fiction, for example, with the various poetic and narrative discourses that compete for cultural dominance in the target language. Translation also enlists the foreign text in the maintenance or revision of dominant conceptual paradigms, research methodologies, and clinical practices in target-language disciplines and professions, whether physics or architecture, philosophy or psychiatry, sociology or law. The study of the manipulative processes of literature as exemplified by translation can help us toward a greater awareness of the world in which we live. It is assumed that English culture has already attained a significant level of development, presumably in classical and romantic literature, which must be protected from foreign contamination and imposed universally, through a specifically English foreignization of world literature. Obviously this is not the case. In general, it can be said that Anglo-American culture has reaped the economic benefits of successfully imposing Anglo-American cultural values on a sizable foreign readership and it seems that they westernized the people concerned while it has been instrumental in producing domestic readers to be aggressively monolingual and culturally parochial.
Translation is the sheer play of difference: it constantly makes allusion to difference, dissimulates differences, but by occasionally revealing and often accentuating it, translation becomes the very life of this difference by the both strategies at both home and abroad. Since the domestic in developing countries tends to be a hybrid of global and local trends, translation can revise hegemonic values even when it seems to employ the most conservatively domesticating strategies -– strategies, in other words, that are designed to reinforce dominant indigenous traditions in the translating culture. Recall Lin Shu’s remarkable transvaluation of the imperialist subtexts in Rider Haggard’s novels: Sinicizing translations on behalf of the emperor eventually eroded the authority of imperial culture. And translation discourses that are radically foreignizing, that pursue linguistic and literary heterogeneity to promote cultural change, can reach beyond the narrow elite for which they were initially intended and exert a wider influence on vernaculars and popular forms. Recall Lu Xun’s reliance on the German romantic translation tradition, which ultimately contributed to the emergence of a Chinese vernacular literature that was both modernist and socialist.
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