1.3.3. Some Aspects of the Translator's Responsibility
The purpose of including the translator's responsibility issue
in this review is to further justify the significance of this study's concern.
As a matter of fact, consciousness of the actual responsibility of translators
is generally limited. This is why improving awareness of this issue appears to
be necessary.
As already explained, there exist limits within the universal
act of understanding (Schleiermacher, 1999; Mounin, 1976). Every act of
understanding depends upon personal perception (Osimo, 2001). As an
attempt to understand, translation is no exception. From this
perspective, there is no way to ignore the fact that the translator is likely
to project some personal dimensions onto the target text, especially when it
concerns the translation of polysemous or controversial texts. In this respect,
Hatim and Mason (1990) state that:
"The translator's reading of the source text is but one among
infinitely many possible readings, yet it is the one which
tends
to be imposed upon the readership of the TL version."
(p.11) As difficult as it may be, the translator ought to
avoid imposing his perspective on the target reader. Hatim and Mason (1990)
give the example of poetry:
"[...] since an important feature of poetic discourse is to
allow a multiplicity of responses among SL readers, it follows that the
translator's task should be to preserve, as far as possible, the range of
possible responses; in other words, not to reduce the dynamic role of the
reader."
Another important issue of the translator's responsibility is
related to source and target cultures. Through the act of translation, the
translator has an important contribution in shaping and reshaping his own
culture's identity. This is also true of the foreign culture (Delisle and
Woodsworth, 1995). Indeed, the translator's personality, culture and attitude
towards the foreign culture are inevitably reflected, in a way or in another,
in the process of translation. This occurs through decision-making and problem
solving operations (Cordonnier, 2002). In this sense, it seems justifiable to
say that peoples perceive each other, to a large extent, through the
translators' perspective. If the translator, for instance, decides to eliminate
the cultural difference, intercultural communication may not be promoted. The
target readership would be less exposed to the actual difference of the source
culture, which may, through time, generate an ethnocentric attitude(Cordonnier,
2002). The translator's task is thus not to choose between a source
text-centered and a reader-centered approaches to translation. This would be a
too simplistic attitude. It is in fact a matter of communication and
understanding, and priorities should be directed this way (ibid.).
Darbelnet (1966), on the other hand, draws the translator's
attention to the linguistic responsibility. He states that the quality of the
language in which we talk and write depends on that of translations. He
attempts to establish that the protection of the target language from
distortion is the translator's responsibility. In other words,
preserving what is called the genie of the language should be one of
the translator's main concerns. In fact, translations that adopt an imitating
or a too literalistic method may alter the way the receiving community uses its
own language, in favour of foreign ways of expression. Darbelnet (1966) calls
genie of the language the way a language prefers to combine its
elements to express thought while other ways are still possible. He also calls
this set of language-specific devices the sum of a language's idiomatic
constructions. He points out that a translation may well be grammatically
correct but not idiomatic. One of the examples he gives is the common use of
the expression air climatisé in French to render the English
one air-conditioned. He explains that, in French, there is no need to
add the word air since we already know that climatisé
concerns the air and not something else. This is not the case of
conditioned in English, which needs a particular precision. He
comments that one of the results of such translations is the spread of the
Anglicism phenomenon among the French language community. The overuse of
literal translation, he explains, is partly due to the belief people have that
it is the most accurate. And it is partly due to the fact that it doesn't take
too much time, which helps translators finish their work on time. Darbelnet
(1966) insists that translators should learn to deal cautiously with this kind
of
practice, and that this issue should be at the centre of any
translation course objectives.
Another important issue concerns the ideological implications
of translation. Here appears another instance of decision-making
responsibility. The ideological issue may imply, at least, three points as far
as the translator is concerned.
The first is linked to whether or not the translator discerns
the existence of any ideological implication (Bassnett, 1991). The translator
needs thus to make sure he does not convey an ideology without being conscious
of that. This entails a lot of knowledge and analytical competence.
The second concerns the translator's autonomy of thinking.
Schleiermacher (1813) insists on the fact that any person whose intellectual
work is susceptible to be made public is imperatively required to be
intellectually independent (Schleiermacher, 1813, p. 15).
The third issue is related to objectivity. The decision to be
made is on whether or not to accept to translate a given text. This being done,
the ideological content of the text to be translated is, by no means, to be
altered. Hatim and Mason (1990) highlight, however, that risks of subjectivity
are hard to be radically eliminated, although they "are reduced to the
maximum in most scientific and technical, legal and administrative translating"
(p. 11). They draw attention to the fact that
"cultural predispositions can creep in where least expected"
(ibid.). This is why the translator should be extremely cautious.
Given the implications the act of translating can have, the
translator's responsibility appears to be seriously critical. This
responsibility constitutes the challenge of translator training. It seems thus
only natural that student translators upon whom this huge responsibility is to
depend need, at least, to be carefully selected.
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