Macrostructural shifts

There are many Thai words for different types of ghosts. The word ผี (phi) is a general word used to describe any type of ghost. In the fifth hemistich of TT 24, the words phi pong (ผีโป่ง) refer to a particular type of spirit that resides in the pong forest but the word ‘spirits’, a hyperonym is chosen, resulting in a generalising translation.

4.4.2 Macrostructural shifts

One would assume that the mimetic form would yield the TT whose semantic content has to be changed considerably to accommodate the foreign poetic tradition. When judging whether the semantic content is altered, the concept of equivalence, introduced in Chapter 3, Section 3.2, has to be brought to the fore. According to Koller (1979, p. 101), formal equivalence relates to aesthetic language features and he argues that the translator should produce an analogy of form in the TT by exploiting the formal possibilities in the target language or creating new forms to achieve formal equivalence (ibid., p. 103). The mimetic form is not a new product invented by Baker and Pasuk. The formal possibilities in English are exploited to accommodate an analogy of form. Semantic shift or

‘mistranslation’ is not found in the two TTs in the mimetic form, TT 1 and TT 23. Contrary to the assumption, macrostructural shifts are detected in the two TTs in an analogical form, TT 2 and TT 21.

In TT 2, the word ‘ka-ken’ in the sixth hemistich poses a translation problem as follows:

ST: อย่าเที่ยวกะเกณฑ์ตระเวนท่อง (ya thiao ka-ken tra-wen thong) (KCKP, 1917/2012, p. 7) TT: Don’t go hunting and wandering aimlessly (Baker and Pasuk, 2012, p. 11)

Based on the Royal Institute Dictionary B.E. 2542 (2003, p. 91), ka-ken means ‘to oblige, require’.

Damnern and Sathienpong (2006, p. 24) translate ka-ken in their Thai-English Dictionary as ‘to conscript, force, compel’.

The word ‘ka-ken’ rhymes with the word ‘tra-wen’ or what is called a vowel internal rhyme in Thai poetry. The word ya means ‘do not’ and it is followed immediately by four verbs thiao, ka-ken, tra-wen and thong. Thai verbs can be strung together without an overt linking word to form a serial verb construction (Iwasaki and Preeya, 2005, p. 109). The word thiao can be used to modify the verb that follows it immediately: it modifies the verb ‘ka-ken’ (to compel), together they mean ‘keep compelling’.

The literal meaning of tra-wen is ‘to wander’ and the literal meaning of thong is ‘to wade through water’.

Ka-ken possesses meaning in its own right but the position of this word in this hemistich does not lend itself any meaning. Substituting individual words with their dictionary equivalents will not lend the whole hemistich much sense. Ka-ken tra-wen is not the collocational patterning in the ST. It is not a marked collocation, which is an unusual combination of words, one that challenges our expectations as readers, often used in poetry to create unusual images, produce laughter, and catch the reader’s attention (Baker, 2011, p. 51). Most likely the word ka-ken is only used to create an internal rhyme.

Ka-ken cannot be equated with ‘hunting’ because khwan is known to flee the body and wander but it is unheard of for khwan to go hunting. Translating ka-ken as ‘hunting’ reflects the translators’ attitude to khwan, in the way that khwan is understood to be predator-like. It can be said that the translators have tried to create a rhyme since ‘hunting’ rhymes with ‘wandering’. However, the translators could have chosen another verb that is synonymous with ‘wandering’, for example, ‘travelling’. After evaluating ‘ka-ken’ in context, the meaning of this word still does not stretch from ‘compel’ to as far as ‘hunting’.

Based on Baker’s typology (1992/2011) introduced in Chapter 3 Section 3.2, the translators fail to create equivalence at word level; the word ‘hunting’ is not equivalent to ‘ka-ken’. The decision to use

‘hunting’ also reveals that the translators fail to create pragmatic equivalence. One of the notions Baker discusses in relation to pragmatic equivalence is coherence (Baker, 2011, p. 230). She explains that the coherence of a text depends on the interaction between knowledge presented in the text and the reader’s knowledge and experience of the world (ibid., p. 232). To maintain coherence, the translators have to decrease discrepancies between the model of the world presented in the ST and that with which the target reader is likely to be familiar (ibid., p. 262). The TT reader is not familiar with the concept of ‘khwan’. The translated choice ‘hunting’ only serves to widen the gap. One wrong verb, and the perception of ‘khwan’, which is equated with ‘soul’, leads to misconception. On the one hand, it can be argued that through the translated choice ‘soul’, some discrepancies between the model of the world presented in the ST and that with which the target reader is likely to be familiar, are decreased.

On the other hand, through the lexical choice ‘hunting’, more discrepancies are unnecessarily created.

The use of ‘hunting’ is not determined by the chosen poetic metre in English; medial rhyme is not a formal property of the chosen analogical verse form. While grammatical and stylistic patterns of the target language are not distorted, the message is.

In TT 21, a verb in northern dialect, soei (เซ้ย), is replaced by an English noun ‘whirl’ as follows:

ST: โอ้หนออ่อเจ้าสาวคําเอ่ย ข้อยอยากเซ้ยสาวเวียงที่เชียงแสน

(o no o jao sao kham oei khoi yak soei sao wiang thi chiang saen) (KCKP, 1917/2012, p.

517)

TT: Oh young lovely golden girl,

I want a whirl with a Chiang Saen maid, (Baker and Pasuk, 2012, p. 610)

The translators annotate the word ‘whirl’, explaining that the ST lexical item is soei which is “a northern Thai word meaning to tease or flirt” (ibid.). The word ‘whirl’ denotes a rapid movement and is chosen because it rhymes with the word ‘girl’ in the previous hemistich. In TT 21, the translators create medial rhyme, a rhyme between the last word of the hemistich and some word in the middle of the following hemistich, such as hill/will and gladly/ceremony. The meaning of soei is sacrificed within the verse passage itself. Clarification comes in the form of paratext where the ST dialectal feature is quoted and explained.

It should be noted that neither equivalence at word level nor grammatical equivalence is achieved in TT 21. The difference in grammatical structure of the source and the target languages in this case does not result in some change in the content of the message during the process of translation. More specifically, the use of Thai dialectal vocabulary in this segment makes the search for equivalence more challenging. The translators were able to identify the dialectal feature in the ST. Facing the strategic decision, the translators decided not to use any TL dialectal features. It is likely that the translators were aware that the dialect gives vital local colour to the ST but unaware that the important ST effects produced by dialect will have to be rendered through compensation. One of twelve

‘deforming tendencies’ proposed by Bermans (1985/2012) is the destruction of vernacular networks or their exoticisation. It refers to the eradication of vernaculars, which are used in the ST, in the TT (ibid., p. 250). Berman suggests that the translator preserve the vernaculars by exoticisation (italicising) and popularisation (rendering a foreign vernacular with a local target language one) (ibid.). In TT 21, the Thai northern vernacular is neither exoticised nor popularised. The analysis reveals that none of TL dialectal features are found in TT 21. Many ST dialectal words are not texually compensated. In the case of ‘soei’, through the paratextual presence, the translators explicitly supplement information by

pointing out the dialectal feature and explaining its meaning and implicitly comment on the translation process by overtly admitting that ‘soei’ cannot be equated with ‘whirl’.

In short, TT 2 is not the only segment about ‘khwan’ and TT 21 is not the only segment composed by using dialectal vocabularies. They are both recast in English in an analogical form. The translators constrain themselves by implementing rhyme-scheme ‘aabb’ for TT 2 while neither couplet-rhymed quatrains nor monorhymed quatrains are employed for TT 21. After Baker and Pasuk decided to render these two segments into verse forms, what constituted a poem in their view is reflected in their translated verse. Their poetic understanding can be gleaned from contrastive textual analysis. None of the translated choices ‘hunting’ and ‘whirl’ is an end rhyme. Their positions are not strictly determined by poetic rule. ‘Hunting’ is created to rhyme with ‘wandering’ within the same hemistich and ‘whirl’ is used as a medial rhyme. The poetic constraints Baker and Pasuk imposed upon themselves in these two verse passages are a result of their poetic understanding. The make-up of a poem in their opinion requires this assonance and medial rhyme.

4.5 Culturally Specific Items (CSIs)