Target text: with linguistic and cultural differences from the source text

With regard to linguistic differences, the main problems reside in the obligatory grammatical and lexical forms. Jakobson expounds the nature of linguistic meaning in his renowned paper “On linguistic aspects of translation” (1959, in Venuti ed. 2000). He points out that “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” (1959, in Venuti ed. 2000: 116; emphasis in original). The contents of “what they must convey” refer to the obligatory grammatical and lexical forms, which, according to Jakobson (1959, in Venuti ed. 2000: 116), occur at the level of gender (e.g. house being feminine in Romance languages; however, it has no gender in English), the level of aspect (e.g. in Russian, the verb morphology varies according to whether the action has been completed or not), and the level of semantic field (e.g. the German Geschwister can mean brothers and sisters in English1). Deutscher (2006)offers an interesting example to illustrate the obligatory linguistic differences.2 He takes the English sentence “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbour” as an example. According to his analysis, the addressee is not informed of the gender of the

1 _{Actually, siblings means brothers and sisters.}

2 _{By Guy Deutscher, published online on August 26, 2010;}

33 addresser’s companion, i.e. the addresser can keep it as a private issue; yet in French or German, the addresser must tell exactly the gender of the neighbour through the use of either

voisin or voisine, or either Nachbar or Nachbarin.

Differences between languages, however, do not necessarily prevent interlingual translation. In Jakobson’s viewpoint, interlingual translation involves “substitut[ing] messages in one language not for separate code-units but for entire messages in some other language” (Jakobson, 1959, in Venuti ed. 2000: 114; emphasis added). Maintaining the entire messages – not the strictly identical language code-units – tends to be achievable in interlingual translation. For instance, in Chinese it is not obligatory to identify the linguistic aspects; but this does not mean that the Chinese are not able to understand the concepts of time and tense; the concept of time is embedded in the context.1

The linguistic differences, however, pose a great challenge in literary translation. The exception to the translatability of linguistic differences is poetry, Jakobson argues. Poetry is considered “untranslatable” and requires “creative transposition”, since “phonemic similarity is sensed as semantic relationship” (Jakobson, 1959, in Venuti ed. 2000: 118), i.e. form makes sense. In effect, in prose the linguistic differences should also be carefully considered. For instance, the pun is an extremely language-dependent wordplay. Considering the fact that the pun rarely works in the target language due to the linguistic differences, some translators simply omit a pun or maintain one aspect and jettison the parallel one when translating. These translation strategies are problematic, because at the same time they prune the aesthetic value

1 _{Actually, Chinese has a set of adverbial markers to hint at the aspect, e.g. aspect markers 了, 着, 在,}

and 过 roughly equivalent to markers of the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects. They are, however, always ellipses.

34 of playing with words. What is more important, care needs to be taken in translating a pun for a specific function, e.g. to express humour, satire, sympathy etc. Delabastita (1996: 34) proposes some creative translation strategies “PUN → PUN: the source-text pun is translated by a target-language pun, which may be more or less different from the original wordplay in terms of formal structure, semantic structure, or textual function; PUN → RELATED RETORICAL DEVICE: the pun is replaced by some wordplay related rhetorical device (repetition, alliteration, rhyme, referential vagueness, irony, paradox, etc.) which aims to recapture the effect of the source-text pun”. These strategies involve more effort for the translator, yet they are worthwhile in translating literary texts.

Apart from the linguistic differences, culture differences are also great challenges in literary translation. Language is inseparable from culture, and vice versa. The Sapir-Whorf

Hypothesis places great emphasis on the determining influence of language on culture. Sapir

claims:

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. (Sapir, 1929, in Mandelbaum ed. 1949: 162)

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis tends to be radical, and most scholars hold the mutual position that language and culture are interdependent. Lotman (1978, in Bassnett, 2002: 22) declares that “No language can exist unless it is steeped in the context of culture; and no culture can exist which does not have at its centre, the structure of natural language”, which argues for the interdependence between language and culture. Similarly, Bassnett underscores this argument:

35 Language, then, is the heart within the body of culture, and it is the interaction between the two that results in the continuation of life-energy. In the same way that the surgeon, operating on the heart, cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator treats the text in isolation from culture at his peril. (Bassnett, 2002: 22)

Bassnett’s analogy vividly expounds that language is the core of culture and at the same time culture is the vital environment for language.

Intercultural translation challenges are categorised from the extralinguistic and intralinguistic aspects, according to Leppihalme’s (1997) Culture Bumps, An Empirical Approach to the

Translation of Allusions. The extralinguistic phenomena range from natural (topography, flora,

fauna, etc.) to man-made (social institutions, buildings, trademarks, etc.) (Leppihalme, 1997: 2). An oft-quoted example is the word for cheese in English and in Russian in Jakobson’s essay. He points out that the English cheese is not identical to the Russian syr, (or the Spanish

queso, the German Käse, etc.) since the Russian “code-unit” does not include the concept of

cottage cheese, which is tvarok instead of syr in Russian. The intralinguistic challenges involve pragmatic issues such as idioms, puns, and wordplays or, for instance, ways of addressing a person, complimenting him or her, or apologising (Leppihalme, 1997: 2).

It is interesting that the extralinguistic challenges sometimes become entangled with the intralinguistic challenges in literary texts. Namely, the effects of the techniques or craft of literary language are highly context-dependent and culture-dependent. Boase-Beier argues that “Cognitive approaches to style and translation rely on the interplay of stylistic universals with stylistic characteristics particular to an individual language, culture or view” (Boase- Beier, 2006: 81). In other words, the stylistic universals are interlinked with the linguistic or

36 cultural uniqueness. She suggests that even though stylistic figures – such as ambiguity, foregrounding, metaphor, iconicity, and mimesis – are universal, their poetic effects may be culture-specific. For instance, some metaphors of the source text are hard for target readers to understand in that the two things or ideas involved are culture-specific.