纽马克 翻译教程

Communicative and semantic translation (I)

1. A translation must give the words of the original.

2. A translation must give the idea of the original.

3. A translation should read like an original work.

4. A translation should read like a translation.

5. A translation should reflect the style of the original.

6. A translation should possess the style of the translation.

7. A translation should read as a contemporary of the original.

8. A translation should read as a contemporary of the translation.

9. A translation may add to or omit from the original.

10. A translation may never add to or omit from the original.

11. A translation of verse should be in prose.

12. A translation of verse should be in verse.

(The Art of Translation, T H. Savory, Cape, 1968, p 54.) In the pre-linguistic period of writing on translation, which may be said to date from Cicero through St. Jerome, Luther, Dryden, Tytler, Herder, Goethe, Schleiermacher, Buber, Ortegay Gosset, not to say Savory, opinion swung between literal and free, faithful and beautiful, exact and natural translation, depending on whether the bias was to be in favor of the author or the reader, the source or the target language of the text. Up to the nineteenth century, literal translation represented a philological academic exercise from which the cultural reformers were trying to rescue literature. In the nineteenth century, a more scientific approach was brought to bear on translation, suggesting that certain types of texts must be accurately translated, whilst others should and could not be translated at all! Since the rise of modern linguistics (philology was becoming linguistics here in the late fifties), and anticipated by Tytler in 1790, Larbaud, Belloc, Knox and Rieu, the general emphasis, supported by communication-theorists as well as by non-literary translators, has been placed on the reader -- on informing the reader effectively and appropriately, notably in Nida, Firth, Koller and the Leipzig School. In contrast, the brilliant essays of Benjamin, Valery and Nabokov (anticipated by Croce and Ortegay Gasset) advocating literal translation have appeared as isolated, paradoxical phenomena, relevant only to translating

works of high literary culture. Koller (1972) has stated that the equivalent-effect principle of translation is tending to rule out all others, particularly the predominance of any formal elements such as word or structure.

The apparent triumph of the 'consumer' is, I think, illusory. The conflict of loyalties. the gap between emphasis on source and target language will always remain as the