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CONTEXT, KNOWLEDGE, AND TEACHING TRANSLATION

Mirjana Bonačić

Faculty of Law

University of Split

 The teaching of translation will be examined here in relation first to foreign language learning and then to theories of translation. Most current theories derived from contrastive linguistics, text linguistics, or cybernetics view translating as applying a specific set of strategies after decoding the source text. Such predetermined translation strategies are also a frequent focus of training courses for translators. In contrast, the theory of communication being intertwined with the production of signs whilst the contextual principle of interpretative response articulates the relationship between signifier and signified, describes translation as a process of semiosis in which a sign of the target language interprets and also, in a new context, fragments and displaces the meaning of the sign in the source language. The role of interpretation in a theory of translation will be illustrated by examples of translating poetry and translating legal discourse. Questions will be aired regarding how to educate translators and how to design a comprehensive programme for integrating language learning with the context-specific ways of knowing which guide decision-making during translation.

1. THREE PARADOXES

This chapter will propose an approach to the teaching of translation based on a critical appraisal of the relationship between the teaching of translation versus the process of translation as a cognitive and communicative activity. Some aspects of this relationship, especially in the educational situation in Croatia, have raised significant questions and appear somewhat paradoxical in at least three ways.

In the first paradox, the formal teaching of translation has not so far been appropriately defined for the role of translation in foreign language learning. Over a long time, teachers were generally reluctant to encourage learners to use translation, mostly because of the long-established pedagogic techniques drawn from the experience and authoritative views of native speaker theorists and teachers (compare chapters by Skela and by Seidlhofer & Widdowson, this volume). Yet learners of a foreign language, especially in earlier stages, naturally and regularly rely on translation; indeed, the learning process itself requires them to do so (cf. Widdowson, 1990, pp. 45-46). Moreover, translation, in a broader sense, can be designated an important aspect of language use in communication in general, both within nature and within culture. In some views of language, e.g., Valentin N. Vološinov’s (1973) dialogic philosophy of language, human communication is a process during which a sign is always translated into a new context and therefore a new sign-response. Because no two individuals ever entirely coincide in their experience or belong to precisely the same set of social groups, every act of understanding involves an act of translation and a negotiation of values. Also, in a very different framework of scientific thought about the essential phenomena of life and change, some biologists speak of ‘translation’ with respect to genetic codes. In ‘the language of the genes’, the genetic code is not simply transmitted from generation to generation but is ‘translated’: as each new copy of the genetic blueprint, the DNA, which creates a new human, is inherited from its parents, small changes in the DNA create tiny but significant differences between parent and offspring (Jones, 1994).

Today, translation has been increasingly recognised both as a fundamental phenomenon of communication and life, and as an essential element of foreign language comprehension in early stages of learning. But its precise function in a language teaching methodology has not yet been systematically determined. No explicit or widely applicable set of techniques has been developed to reflect the theoretically established role of translation in language teaching. Instead, the formal teaching of translation in its own right is usually postponed until a fairly advanced stage, often with no methodological continuity in respect to the informal uses of translation in the earlier learning stages. This educational policy betrays the widespread notion among theorists that translation is a highly complex and problematic activity or even an artificial form of communication involving a set of specialised strategies and a new superstructure built upon normal communicative competence. So the formal teaching of translation is seen in opposition to the natural use of translation within communication in general and within foreign language learning in particular.

In the second paradox, the relationship between translation as a professional activity and the teaching of translation seems contradictory. As I have already pointed out, translation theorists often claim that no task is more complex in language use than translating. For Neubert and Shreve (1992, p. 53), any consideration of translation processes and procedures must deal with what translators know for producing and understanding texts: if a translation is the output of textual processes, what is the input? Their answer is: knowledge of language, knowledge of social interaction, knowledge of the world (and its domains), knowledge of texts, and knowledge of translation. For specific skills, the picture is even more complex. In simultaneous interpreting, for example, the interpreter is required to listen and speak at roughly the same time, maintaining a close semantic and pragmatic correspondence between the two modes. You must remember what has just been said, attend to what is being said, and anticipate what is about to be said in one language, and at the same time produce an equivalent text in another language (empirical study in Strolz, 1992).

However, the huge task of acquiring experience in many different domains of knowledge together with the ability to activate it during an integrated process has been addressed by few European university departments or graduate schools that specialise in translating and interpreting and by still fewer university language departments that incorporate translating courses in their regular programmes. None of the Croatian universities offers a degree in translation. And students in our modern language departments do not have the option of choosing elective subjects; at present, the curriculum is the same for those who will be teachers and those who will be translators or interpreters. Translation is taught as a one-year course among a number of other courses in the same year of undergraduate studies; in only a few classes a week, students can hardly gain sufficient practice to become qualified as professional translators or interpreters. Moreover, no courses in simultaneous interpreting are offered by any Croatian university or other institution. Even if the present university curricula were revised, as has been recently proposed, and if the language studies were extended by one year to give room for occupational subjects for either teachers or translators, we still face the open question of how to educate competent translators in a single year. How can we provide students with the opportunities for sufficiently varied experience to cultivate the special awareness of a professional translator, plus the capacities to engage in an interpretative task requiring a thorough understanding of the domain of knowledge covered by a particular text, and of relevant social, cultural, or emotional connotations—the entire range of context-specific ways of knowing that guide decision-making in the process of translation?

Evidently, studies in modern language departments still focus unduly on general linguistic and communicative knowledge, while their translating courses view translation competence as fairly general systemic relations between source and target languages and only cover some typical interaction patterns in the two cultural communities. Emphasis is given to units of such knowledge within a miscellaneous inventory, accompanied by a range of illustrations for corresponding translation strategies; scant opportunities are offered to gain experience in specific domains of non-linguistic knowledge and in the practice of translation as a real process of pragmatic mediation. On the other hand, an optional course on translating within a discipline, designed as part of a programme in languages for specific purposes (LSP) and taught as an adjunct or elective subject in non-language departments or in specialist colleges, is likely to focus on domain knowledge and on patterns of in-group communication, without sufficient emphasis upon the systemic knowledge of the foreign language. Under all these conditions, teachers may encounter severe problems in accessing and integrating knowledge, providing motivation, and allotting sufficient teaching time. Plainly, the complexity of knowledge and skills involved in translating is in no way accounted for by the present methods in the formal teaching of translation.

In the third paradox, the education of translators fails to reflect the social needs for translators in the modern world. Translating and interpreting can help overcome the barriers foreign languages pose to international communication. Umberto Eco (1992) has recently remarked that perhaps the Japanese would like to conquer the world—not by imposing their language but by their ability to translate. He also predicts Europe becoming a continent of translators, and ‘translation’ being the buzzword of the 1990s. Recent events show that, far from seeking the unification of its languages, Europe is multiplying them steadily as more language groups gain some measure of political autonomy, e.g., Slovene, Croatian, Ukrainian, and Catalan. In such a Europe of variegated cultures and languages, humane co-existence calls for developing a continent of polyglots who both speak and think in several languages. And here the problem of translation becomes fundamental. We can justly call it a paradox that a country like Croatia, which has to rely heavily on translation for international communication, does not recognise translation as a major intellectual discipline in its own right and has no university-level schools for translators and interpreters.

Therefore, we must urgently discuss how to move beyond the usual translation courses, and how to design a comprehensive programme of degree studies that can educate competent translators and integrate language learning with the context-specific ways of knowing which guide the decision-making in translation.

Two reciprocal issues arise here. First, our definition of ‘translating competence’ will depend on the theoretical model of translation we adopt or devise. Second, our view of translation and translating competence will determine our conception of how to train or educate translators. The distinction between a training course versus degree studies can also be related to the general difference between training versus education that Widdowson (1990) cites.

For the first issue, Eco’s brief commentary is pertinent again when he notes our lack of clear ideas about the exact meaning of translation. His final remark ‘it seems easy, but it is not’ caps all the paradoxes I have pointed out. We only know for certain that it is more than the simple substitution of one language for another by means of a dictionary. If we accept the principle that translation is not just about words but about contexts, then our theory of translation must reflect the central role of context in order to support our approach to translation teaching.

Yet most existing theories of translation define translation competence in terms of a specific set of strategies whereby a ‘message’ given in one language is rendered into another language, subsequent to the ‘decoding’ or ‘interpretative activity’. In the theory derived from contrastive linguistics and aimed at formal description, the main principle is the invariance of meaning between source and target language signs and combinations of signs at the level of sentences. Emphasis goes to translation procedures based on contrastive language constructions which are described as systemic and predictable.

In the theory derived from text linguistics, equivalence of meaning is not bound to the sentence but is distributed throughout the text, and the selection of linguistic resources is guided by the virtual translation—the ‘mental model’—in the translator’s mind. However, the ‘mental model’ is an abstract construct normatively defined as based upon the knowledge of conventional text types and upon the seven principles of textuality—cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, situationality, informativity, intertextuality—insofar as they can be used to derive translating strategies. In this theory, the linguistic resources of the target language ‘clothe’ the virtual translation and so create the translation as a real text, and translators ‘navigate’ given messages in one direction to ‘a foreign linguistic shore’ (Neubert & Shreve, 1992, pp. 23, 7).

Similarly, in theories of translation derived from the cybernetic model with ‘sender => message => receiver’ and from the structuralist model of ‘sign’ and ‘meaning’ as stable categories, translation only ‘transmits’ some ‘extralinguistic content’ within its own identity, albeit a ‘relative’ one (cf. Ivir, 1992, p. 94). Typical courses of action when translators handle a set of predictable problems are also described as translating strategies, e.g., transposing, modulating, adapting, amplifying, explicating, omitting, compensating, and so forth.

Such theories tend to isolate communication from the processes of sign production. They totalise the text into an all-inclusive meaning or interpretation that can be transmitted as a given message or predetermined ‘extralinguistic content’, although allowance is generally made for how variables can effect the communicative situation. These theories all make the implicit assumption that future situations will be fairly predictable replications of past ones. The teaching and training of translation are accordingly directed at providing solutions to predictable problems by means of highly specialised strategies.

In contrast, the theory of communication being intertwined with the socially specific production of signs and relations of signification recognises the central role of context by highlighting the contextual principle of interpretative response, as it articulates the relationship between signifier and signified. Here, translation is understood as a process of semiosis in which a sign of another language is an interpretative response translating and at the same time fragmenting and displacing the meaning of the first sign. The variability of the sign-function becomes an essential precondition for translation, which, like understanding, ‘is never complete but always approximative and relative to the purpose’ (cf. Widdowson, 1990, p. 108). Textual indeterminacy does not prevent translation but rather sets reading, writing, and translating in motion; a theory of translation that takes this factor into account is expounded in Bonačić (forthcoming).

If the experience of translation is grasped as a powerful mode of understanding textual plurality and the ways in which different realities are constructed through languages, then translation procedures cannot be easily generalised into predictable strategies. Rather, the education of translators would instil an awareness of how translation procedures themselves become interpretative decisions, and how patterns of translation equivalence are related to socially and individually specific analyses of meaning.

It is a common saying that translators aim to be ‘invisible people’—transferring content without drawing attention to the technical skills involved in the process. But can they really be invisible? They are forever assuming and enacting other individualities, but at the same time bringing their voices into dialogue with others. And developing an awareness of the dialogic nature of translation should be the most important aim in the education of translators.

Many theories of translation assign an important place to the phase of interpretation, regularly claimed to be an intermediate event between the other stages of the overall communicative process. For Steiner (1975, p. 47), in theories both of ‘sender to receiver’ and ‘source-language to receptor-language’, ‘the middle’ is held by ‘an operation of interpretative decipherment, an encoding-decoding function or synapse’. The diagram of the system of translation drawn by Nida and Taber (1974, p. 33) shows three consecutive phases: ‘analysis, transfer, and restructuring’, with arrows pointing in one direction from ‘source to receptor’. Even in the very different context of recent text linguistics and discourse analysis, theorists seem to imply that comprehension and interpretation belong only to the first, preparatory stage of the translation process. For Neubert and Shreve (1992, p. 7), ‘the translation process involves comprehending the source text and retextualising it as a target text under specific conditions’. Their model of the virtual translation being only ‘clothed’ by the linguistic resources of the target language, such that the translation is created as physical text, does not, in my understanding, imply that ‘clothing’ also means interpreting. Widdowson (1992, p. 159) too divides translation into two phases: interpretation is the first phase of translation, and the rendering process is the second.

To my mind, translation is a continuous, two-way, and two-fold dialogical process in which the rendering process involves further acts of interpretation beyond any interpretative process regarded as a separate phase. Interpretation is both a prerequisite and an effect of the rendering. Likewise, the relationship between the virtual translation as a ‘mental’ model versus the process of ‘clothing’ it in some actual patterns of language is not at all innocent. The actual rendering process forces us to engage in further processes of weighing, comparing, amending, and adjusting possibilities of interpretation. In the first phase of interpretation, we may become aware of the plurality and flexibility of meanings, and ask ourselves not only which features of context are relevant in the determination of meanings but also which textual patterns and relations have the status of meaningful expressions: ‘which identifiable features of a linguistic sequence belong to the signifier and which do not’ (cf. Culler, 1987, pp. 178f). We may believe to have arrived at a valid, responsible, or even new interpretation, but then rendering it entrains us in renewed processes of selecting, testing, adapting, and decision-making; each version of the translated text looks back and ‘reflects’ on the original, often producing a new reading of it. So you continue the process, begun by your previous readings, of diversifying the original. This process is, of course, most dramatic in translating poetry, but it is also evident in translating other modes of discourse, as I shall illustrate.

2. TRANSLATING POETIC DISCOURSE AND LEGAL DISCOURSE

I shall consider a brief example from poetic translating. It was used by Widdowson (1992) to illustrate his two consecutive phases of translation, ‘interpreting and rendering’, and his three different perspectives on meaning: ‘reference, force, and effect’. His main point was that the reference and force in a poetic text have no independent status but are only meaningful if they create an effect (1992, p. 159). A related point of emphasis is that ‘since effect is so crucial to poetry, unless it is created by the rendering, the translation is simply not a poem, no matter how textually close it might be to the original’ (1992, p. 164). These points imply that rendering is interpreting: it is a process both of deciding about the mode of meaning and considering effect to be an important perspective on meaning. This implication is highlighted by the prospect that you may entirely agree with Widdowson’s interpretation of Rilke’s poem ‘Der Panther’ (‘The Panther’) and with all his comments on the existing English translations of the poem, but not with his own rendering of his interpretation of it. Evidently, his translation solutions are acts of interpretation revealing or producing a reading which can motivate you to retranslate and reread the poem.

Here are the original text of the first stanza and two translations:

  [1] Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe

So müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.

Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe

Und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

[1a] His gaze has from the passing of the bars

Become so tired, that it holds nothing more.

It seems to him there are a thousand bars

And behind a thousand bars no world. (tr. Edward Snow, 1984)

[1b] Baffled by bars, he passes pacing by,

His sight by seeing them so atrophied

He sees just bars on bars which multiply,

A thousand bars without a world outside. (tr. H.G. Widdowson, 1989)

According to Widdowson (1992, p. 162), Snow’s version [la] ‘makes no attempt to simulate the prosodic features of Rilke’s poem’ and therefore concentrates on ‘rendering the referential content of the original’. Widdowson’s own version [1b] in turn exemplifies poetic effects of metrical regularity and rhyme. In the original poem, the repetition of sounds, words, and phrases can be interpreted as representing the panther’s lassitude stemming from the repetitive bars; the second version [1b] moves close to an equivalent effect, but ‘it does so only by using words which have no referential warrant in the original (baffled, pacing)’ (1992, p. 163). In my opinion, however, the contrast here is not entirely between poetic effect and referential content. In fact, Widdowson’s rendering interprets the content in proximate reference to the real world. In his version, the panther’s passing by the bars contrasts with the panther’s illusion that the bars are passing in front of him: an image that created a crucial poetic and signifying effect in the original text by merging the point of view of the panther with the point of view of the poet who observes the panther’s gaze (‘sein Blick’). This is a central metaphor of the poem, of ‘seeing and being seen, as the panther in the Paris zoo both sees the world and is seen by the poet—a metaphor expressed by the terms “Blick” and “Bild”’ (Kramsch, 1993, pp. 165ff). The panther’s ‘atrophied sight’ in [1b] version is another rendering which interprets the content of the poem from the standpoint of an observer who has a detailed knowledge of the real world.

Beaugrande (1978, cf. Neubert & Shreve, 1992, pp. 97f) criticised J.B. Leishman’s translation [1c]: the panther’s glance traverses ‘his cage’s repeated railing’. We lose the main image of the ‘Stäbe’ moving rather than the ‘Blick’ and end the line with an awkward break in the syntax, whilst the number of bars gets switched to ‘cages’. Beaugrande then gave his own version of the lines [1d].

[1c] His glance, so tired from traversing his cage’s

Repeated railing, can hold nothing more.

He feels as though there were a thousand cages,

And no more world thereafter than before. (tr. James Blair Leishman, 1939)

[1d] The passing of the bars has made his gaze

So weary it no longer can contain.

It seems to him a thousand bars remain;

Beyond the bars the world no longer stays. (tr. R. de Beaugrande, 1975)

Even in version [1d], where the main image, the movement of the bars, is retained, the rendering of the virtual translation into patterns of language creates new, perhaps even unwanted, signifying effects which modify the interpretation of the poem. In contrast to Leishman’s translation [1c], too much prominence is now given to the phrase ‘the passing of the bars’ as the grammatical subject placed at the very beginning of the poem, whereas ‘sein Blick’ (‘his gaze’) immediately strikes the reader of Rilke’s poem. Also, the last line of Beaugrande’s version [1d], an independent clause in which ‘the world no longer stays’, displaces Rilke’s phrase ‘keine Welt’ (‘no world’) from the dramatic close of the stanza, and interprets it into the single known world.

Whilst co-editing this volume, Beaugrande (personal communication) offered to contrast his earlier version with this one, and provided commentary:

[1e] His gaze has, from the passing of the bars,

Become so weary, that it nothing holds.

It seems to him there are a thousand bars

And behind a thousand bars no world unfolds. (tr. R. de Beaugrande, 1996)

By following the thematic and grammatical ordering of the original, Beaugrande’s English version [1e] loses the smoothness of Rilke’s German prosody (especially toward the end of the second line), even though, in contrast to Snow’s otherwise very similar version [1a], the rhyme and metre were retained. Rilke’s talent for arranging rhymes in seemingly ordinary speech (e.g. ‘Stäbe - gäbe’) can, paradoxically, be replicated only with much hidden effort; the rhyme ‘holds - unfolds’ is already less ordinary. Moreover, in the ‘theory of poetic translating’ outlined in Beaugrande (1978), such admittedly ‘unwarranted’ renderings as Widdowson’s ‘Baffled’, ‘atrophied’, and ‘multiply’ are justified only if the translator is expressly claiming to be a poet as well, as in Stefan George’s self-centred rendition of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (cf. Beaugrande, 1971). Beaugrande recently asked Widdowson if he would make such a claim; he replied he would be a poet at the moment of doing the translating.

I am of two minds about the condition stated by Beaugrande. It raises the controversial question of the norms of poetic translation or, in terms of my own line of argument, the limits of interpretation, which bears in complex ways on my concept of ‘the translator’s responsibility’. My own analysis is not offered for normative judgements, but only seeks to demonstrate the plurality of translational discourses derived from a single original text by exploring how different frames of reference are reflected in, or created by, the use of language during translation.

In view of all these versions, one feels tempted to follow one’s own understanding of the mode of meaning of the poem, and its way of combining poetic effects of image and sound. Here is my own translation:

[1f]  His gaze is from the passing of the bars

So weary, in it nothing else is held.

It seems to him a thousand bars there pass

Behind a thousand bars to bring no world.

I have attempted to follow the tragic simplicity of wording in a strictly regular prosodic pattern with important words foregrounded by a rhyme scheme. I have also tried to follow the mode of meaning of the poem in its patterning of rhyme, sound, and rhythm (‘Stäbe - gäbe’ ‘tausend Stäbe’, ‘tausend Stäben’), and to represent the sense of the constantly passing bars and the deadening boredom by the repetition of sounds, words, and phrases in suggestive rhythmic patterns (‘bars’ - ‘pass’ / ‘bars there pass’, ‘else is held’, ‘a thousand bars’, ‘a thousand bars’). The final phrase ‘behind a thousand bars to bring no world’ represents both sides of the bars and a feeling of being beyond hope.

My leading intention was to show how translations of a poem, to an even larger extent than its critical interpretations, stimulate new readings and new translations, because the rendering of discourse (i.e., of an interpreted text) into a text in another language entails continual interpretative decisions.

The interpretative function of translation, although most dramatic in poetic discourse, is also important in other modes of discourse. An example from my own experience of translating legal discourse will further illustrate my argument that translation is a two-way process of negotiating meaning, sometimes in a quite literal sense of ‘altering’ the original text, and will again highlight the translator’s responsibility.

The example is from the domain of legal ethics. Recently, a visiting professor from the U.S. discussed technical terms with me before his lectures to ensure I got their meanings right and translated them correctly. In one lecture about three roles of the lawyer, he intended to use the following expressions: (1) ‘partisan lawyer’; (2) ‘officer of the court’; and (3) ‘public citizen’. I found the expressions difficult to translate into Croatian, since ‘odani odvjetnik’, ‘*službenik suda’; and ‘javni graðanin’ hardly seemed adequate. So he explained them, especially the second one meaning that the lawyer had an important function in court with respect to justice. However, I still found the term ambiguous and said that the Croatian equivalent for ‘officer’, namely ‘službenik’, would also mean ‘employee’. So I suggested rendering his term ‘officer of the court’ as ‘representative of justice’ and translating it into ‘odvjetnik u službi suda’ or ‘zastupnik pravde’. When the lecture started, I was surprised to see him write on the blackboard the following expressions: (1) ‘zealous representative of his client’; (2) ‘representative of justice’; and (3) ‘representative of society’, which I could elegantly translate into Croatian: (1) ‘gorljivi zastupnik svoga klijenta’; (2) ‘zastupnik pravde’; and (3) ‘zastupnik društva’. Afterward, he explained that the need to translate into another language and the difficulty I had had with his original terms made him rethink his ideas more clearly and relate the lawyer’s functions to the central concept of being a ‘representative’ in multiple roles.

This example also highlights the importance of interaction specialists with non-specialists to collaborate in facilitating comprehension by deploying strategies for negotiating meaning. The example shows, too, how approximative translation equivalence can succeed at the level of practical functioning. So, rather than being mainly the application of a set of predetermined translation strategies in order to ‘transfer’ some given ‘extralinguistic content’, translation can be more truly regarded as a problem-solving activity, a mode of research which works out solutions to its own local problems.

We thus return to the question from section 1: how to teach translation and how to create an educational context in which the relationship between theory and practice could be balanced in research and application—in the immediate activity whereby the process of negotiating meaning is correlated with context-specific ways of knowing and interaction between specialists versus non-specialists. In a university-level school for translators and interpreters, a more efficient approach to the teaching of translation would be to reverse the traditional situation in teaching languages for specific purposes (LSP) in non-language departments or in specialist colleges. Instead of the foreign language being an auxiliary sideline of the courses in the curriculum that provide domain knowledge, the foreign language would become the main course and other courses would become auxiliary. These courses could be taught by part-time teachers who are experts in the several disciplines relevant to the areas of translation most in demand, such as business and commerce, law, tourism, etc. Such subjects could be electives within a fluctuating curriculum. The major objective would be to equip students with the fundamental knowledge needed to be more readily useful in their chosen area of translation. Ideally, subject specialists would collaborate with translation teachers: experts in the same domain of knowledge, who would teach practical classes. Native speakers would provide quality control. Training courses in computational techniques and in simultaneous interpreting would also be included.

The school could also develop its own ‘translation clinic’, a method of education similar to U.S. ‘law clinics’ where students serve clients under the supervision of a practising lawyer. The school for translators and interpreters could thus collaborate with a translation agency. Students could assume responsibility for selected translation tasks under the supervision of professional translators, actively pursue purposeful outcomes, and heighten their sensitivity toward dynamic purposes. Analytical skills in negotiating meaning, solving problems, correlating means with ends, and identifying the purposes of translation, must become reliably teachable. Critical analysis, application of theory to real situations, and decision-making would be stimulated, all of which would help to provide a conceptual foundation for the practical skills demanded of translators. The domain specialists, together with expert translators, language teachers, and students could further engage in a range of important tasks such as the unification and standardisation of terminology and the compilation of specialist bilingual dictionaries with common collocations and formulaic expressions. Finally, data banks of interlingual terminologies could be developed.

Another central question would be how the needs of translation can relate to the traditional domains of language teaching, such as grammar and vocabulary. Different answers might be given, but in the light of the entire foregoing discussion, one of the major aims should be to integrate grammar with lexis, plus semantics and pragmatics, to serve the purposes of real translation practice.

Let me conclude with my central argument that the teaching of translation demands a framework of enabling conditions most providable by a university-level school for translators. The fact that such a school does not exist in Croatia and is not likely to be established in the near future shows that, despite the readily obvious demand for translators and their increasingly recognised importance, the responsible institutions continue to underestimate the urgency of educating translators. We must redouble our efforts to give all due consideration to one of the most vital and yet most neglected fields of education in the new Europe.

REFERENCES

Beaugrande, R. de. (1971). Der Einfluss Baudelaire’s und seiner Nachfolger auf die Dichtung Stefan Georges. Berlin: Free University MA dissertation.

Beaugrande, R. de. (1978). Factors in a theory of poetic translating. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Bonačić, M. (forthcoming). Tekst, diskurs, prijevod: Semiotićki pristup poetskom prevoðenju [text, discourse, translation: a semiotic approach to poetic translating]. Split: Književni krug.

Culler, J. (1987). Towards a linguistics of writing. In N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant, & C. MacCabe (Eds.), The linguistics of writing (pp. 173-184). Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Eco, U. (1992). Wrestling with words and meanings. The European, 5-8.

Ivir, V. (1992). Lingvistička sastavnica teorije prevodjenja [the linguistic component of translation theory]. Suvremena lingvistika, 34, 93-101.

Jones, S. (1994). The language of the genes. London: Harper Collins.

Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Neubert, A., & Shreve, G.M. (1992). Translation as text. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press.

Nida, E.A. & Taber, C.R. (1974). The theory and practice of translation. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Steiner, G. (1975). After Babel: Aspects of language and translation. London: Oxford University Press.

Strolz, B. (1992). Theorie und Praxis des Simultandolmetschens: Argumente für einen kontextuellen Top-Down Ansatz der Verarbeitung und Produktion. Vienna: University of Vienna habilitation thesis.

Vološinov, V.N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language (L. Matejka & I.R. Titunik Trans.). New York: Seminar.

Widdowson, H.G. (1990). Aspects of language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Widdowson, H.G. (1992). Types of equivalence. In The role of translation in foreign language teaching. Triangle 10. Paris: Didier-Érudition. 

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LITERATURE AS COMPARATIVE DISCOURSE: PARALLEL

READINGS IN TWO LANGUAGES

Uroš Mozetič

Faculty of Arts

University of Ljubljana

Teachers of literature, especially of poetry, have traditionally occupied a rather uncomfortable and controversial position. They adopt pragmatic and eclectic strategies for speaking in readily comprehensible terms and arousing an animated discussion in the classroom. They also try to provide a conceptual framework that both allows full play to the students’ interpretative imagination and simultaneously enables them to discard misguided attempts. Deprived of the authority to accept or reject a student’s reading on the principle of ‘true or false’, the teacher seeks to establish a set of ‘objective’ criteria for assessing an ‘unusual’ reading that may be perfectly legitimate though not altogether plausible; yet the plausibility of an interpretation remains a delicate question. These issues are especially vital for dealing with poetic texts, because of the widespread belief, which I wish to refute, that poetry is the least accessible of all literary genres due to its figurative complexity. This chapter will present an alternative view focusing precisely on the problems of teaching poetry.

1. THE ‘POETENTIALITY’ OF LITERARY TEXTS

Students with little or no experience or training in reading poetry are usually  not

accustomed to looking beyond the surface-level words for a meaning on another level. Such students will appreciate the teacher’s interpretative endeavour based upon the close scrutiny of the vital textual elements and upon the demonstration of how poetic language actually works in context, rather than upon some nebulous or high-flown verbal brushstrokes that only make literary debates more confused.

Yet adopting an effective approach from among the long list of critical methods is by no means easy. Still, the list can be considerably shortened by eliminating methods that are limiting in scope or pedagogically unsuitable. The major remaining choices are the more intercultural and communicative approaches, or stylistic and heavily text-based methods for showing how the meaning is determined by the linguistic structure. In my own teaching, the latter type of method has proven much more fruitful, which does not, however, weaken my contention that students should apply global and comprehensive strategies when interpreting a poem.

A foreign-language literary classroom creates a rather special situation insofar as the students’ attention must be repeatedly drawn to instances of language patterning that would appear unproblematic to a native speaker. Any approach that ignores potential language barriers is likely to be ineffective. The issue is not merely difficult or unknown vocabulary, since the poetic text is not strictly informative, functioning solely on the denotative level. The issue is a widened range of p*ossible meanings transcending the literal and the expected, and underwrites poetentiality: ‘the potential of the poetic text to activate a wider range of possible interpretations’ (Widdowson, 1992, p. 115).

This ‘poetentiality’ should be explored as fully as possible in every literary discussion with the aims of exploiting it and setting it in relation to other texts, whether or not they were written by the same author(s), thus saluting the idea that every literary text is inherently intertextual. Yet some scholars reject that idea, drawing a sharp distinction between representational versus referential texts and arguing for the absolute autonomy of the poetic text. Their argument overlooks not merely the potential thematic interrelationship between two or more texts but, more generally, the inescapable linguistic and structural commonality that is the governing principle of strategies for reading and interpreting texts.

All these principles and strategies can be richly combined and explored while comparing the source-language text with the target-language text. This procedure, which exploits a special mode of intertextuality, brings into focus a range of cross-cultural and interlingual similarities and differences, thus contributing an entirely new dimension to the overall ‘poetentiality’ of the source-language text. Such intertextual comparisons can highlight distinctive features of the source-language text that otherwise pass unnoticed.

2. A DEMONSTRATION OF PARALLEL READING

To demonstrate, I shall compare a short lyrical poem by W. B. Yeats, ‘When you are old’, with its Slovene translation by Veno Taufer. I shall treat the relationship between the two texts not as a discriminatory one of a master versus servant, as some translation criticism has done in the past,¹ but rather as two relatively independent organisms sharing particular textual and aesthetic features.

               WHEN YOU ARE OLD                                        KO BOŠ STARA

1    When you are old and grey and full of sleep,           Ko boš stara, siva in zaspana

2    And nodding by the fire, take down this book,          ob ognju kinkala, po tej knjigi sezi

3    And slowly read, and dream of the soft look            na polico, počasi beri in sanjaj,

4    Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;    kako sta nežno zrli temni ti očesi;

5    How many loved your moments of glad grace,       koliko njih veselja tvoja je ljubilo

6    And loved your beauty with love false or true,          in tvojo lepoto, z lažjo ali v resnici,

7    But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,              a le eden v tebi romarsko dušo milo

8    And loved the sorrows of your changing face;         in bridkosti, ki so spreminjale ti lici;

9    And bending down beside the glowing bars,            ko se sklonila boš nad žar kamina,

10  Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled                        šepni, otožno, kako ljubezen tistih let

11  And paced upon the mountains overhead               zbežala je in zgoraj je v planinah

12  And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.                   skrila svoj obraz med čredo zvezd.

Reading this poem, I felt immediately struck by its apparent simplicity and directness. This simplicity, however, is not surprising in view of the date of the poem’s composition, 1891, only two years after the appearance of Oisin and of Yeats’ dictum to ‘make ordinary modern speech the basis of his verse’ (Ellmann, 1968, p. 119).

Yet the representation of the human condition in the poem is far from being so obvious as to leave little or no room for ambiguity. Even the title is open to varying interpretations. In one reading (hereafter ‘Reading A’), the speaker is addressing a different person that may be either male or female; in another (hereafter ‘Reading B’) the speaker and the addressee are the same person and the addressee is doubling as the speaker’s alter ego for engaging in a premature retrospective upon his or her life. Identifying the speaker as the poet himself, or as a writer at large, is prompted by the mention of ‘this book’ in line 2, possibly a book of poetry containing this very poem.

The important role of gender in interpreting this poem can be seen through comparison with the Slovene title, betraying a restriction due to basic structural differences from English. Being an inflected language, Slovene cannot preserve the unmarked gender of the adjective ‘old’. The translator had to choose, and, consulting the author’s biographical background, decided on a female addressee. The Slovene textual predisposition favours a new Reading (hereafter ‘Reading C’) more specific than Reading A or B. Thus, the Readings hinge on close examination of the ties between speaker and addressee, and specifically upon the portrayal and characteristics attributed to ‘you’.

In my own reading, repetition is used for skilled effects. It effectively carries old age from the title into the opening lines. It also stylistically marks the first stanza by six uses of the conjunction ‘and’, perhaps to invoke a more colloquial register and also to slow down the rhythm almost to the threshold of immobility, symbolic for the physical incapacity of persons in extreme old age. The flow of speech is additionally minimised or obstructed by a disproportionate number of commas. The first Slovene stanza, in contrast, lacks repetition or effective compensation, thus achieving little co-operation between the phonetic and semantic levels.

As we proceed from the first to the second stanza (line 5), the clock is turned back. The addressee, transferred to an earlier location, regains a social role as an object of unstinting general admiration (5-6). This shift goes aptly hand in hand with a shift in rhythm and a smoother and more elegant patterning of sounds. We still have dual options of taking the lines to be either an expression of the speaker’s reproach to the addressee on his or her youthful indifference (Reading A), or an indulgence in self-pity and sentimental longing (Reading B).

The Slovene text does not respect the rhythmic change between stanzas. It also retains Reading C with a female addressee. To some extent, it partakes of the A and B Readings while failing to realise part of their ‘poetentiality’ of meaning.

At the beginning of the last stanza (line 9), the return of the addressee to the location of the first stanza is accompanied by restoration of the rhythmic pattern of the first stanza, e.g., in the lines beginning with ‘And’ (11 and 12 vs. 2 and 3). The break in line 10 goes with a shift in focus from speaker or addressee over to ‘Love’, personified as an active agent of male gender. In Reading A, ‘Love’ can be associated with the speaker himself, and in Reading B with an unidentified male person. Reading A seems to me more plausible: the speaker uses the poem to reproach the beloved for frivolously not appreciating his or her deeper affection (not just moved by ‘grace’ and ‘beauty’) in the past, and causing him or her to withdraw into lofty seclusion. The reproach is enacted in the (ironically ‘little’) ‘sadness’ (10) which the memory will evoke and by the vast distance between the person ‘nodding by the fire’ (2) and the one ‘pacing’ ‘overhead’ ‘amid a crowd of stars’ (11-12), as if on Mount Parnassus. For Reading B, however, it is the speaker who repents his or her own misguided frivolity in times of youth.

The Slovene Reading C provides a quite divergent perspective upon the relationship between speaker and addressee. The trace of irony in the original ‘little’ is missing. The collocation ‘a crowd of stars’ (12) has been rather casually rendered as ‘čredo zvezd’—in back translation, ‘a herd of stars’, which together with the mountains in the line 11, may invoke an atmosphere of pastoral poetry. And most important, the rendering of ‘love’, namely ‘ljubezen’ (line 11) is written in lower case and, in accordance with the Slovene grammatical system, put into the female gender. This result either prevents an identification of speaker with poet, which should follow from the collocation ‘this book’ (2); or else depersonifies ‘love’ as an abstraction that fled far away from both speaker and addressee.

On the whole, the atmosphere generated by the Slovene text seems to me much more placid and less abundant in powerful feelings than by the English. In the Slovene poem, the speaker seems defensive, and the tension between the two persons seems alleviated. The most ominous effect of such diminishing strength appears in the diluted ending of the poem.

3. CONCLUSION

I hope to have demonstrated how the ‘poetentiality’ of a literary text can be explored by means of parallel readings and comparisons between source-language text with a target-language text. The method may have some weak points, such as not devoting enough attention to communicative issues. But the method does have pedagogic benefits in leading toward literary interpretations that sensitise the students to vital similarities and differences between the two languages, thus refining their language competence and enhancing their intercultural awareness.

NOTE

¹ On the traditional and discriminatory conception, see Bassnett (1991, p. xv).

WORKS CONSULTED

Bassnett, S. (1991). Translation studies. London: Routledge.

Beaugrande, R de. (1978). Factors in a theory of poetic translating. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Ellmann, R. (1968). The identity of Yeats. London: Faber and Faber.

Hatim, B., & Mason, I. (1990). Discourse and the translator. London: Longman.

Holmes, J.S. (1988). Translated! Papers on literary translation and translation studies, with an introduction by Raymond van den Broeck. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Peer, W. van (Ed.). (1991). The taming of the text: Explorations in language, literature and culture. London: Routledge.

Snell-Hornby, M. (1988). Translation studies: An integrated approach. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Widdowson, H.G. (1992). Practical stylistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6

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PARALLEL TEXTS AND PARALLEL WORLDS: ASSESSING VALIDITY IN INTERPRETATION AND TRANSLATION THROUGH DESCRIPTIVE TEXT CORPORA

Rosanna Masiola Rosini

Università Italiana per Stranieri, Perugia

Each time she failed, the landscape leaped lovingly. They were driving under the telephone wires.

She could have translated any message into the language of peace

--- Patrick White, The Burnt Ones (1988, p. 315)

Setting up specific corpora of descriptive parallel texts is an important resource for mapping out how descriptive strategies operate within the process of translating and how quality can be assessed. One approach to teaching translation as an integrated cultural system will be illustrated with geographic descriptions of landscapes in literary texts.

1. TRANSLATING AS A CROSS-CULTURAL EVENT

Translating  is  an interactional  communicative  process  within  a  cross-cultural event (Snell-Hornby, 1988, pp. 40-63; compare also Baker, 1992; Hervey & Higgins, 1992; Hewson & Martin, 1991; Lefevère [Ed.], 1992a, 1992b; Venuti [Ed.], 1991; Zlateva, 1993). Translation should accordingly be taught from an interdisciplinary and intercultural perspective, covering language and literature, terminology, and ESP, as well as other sciences like history or geography (cf. Grosman, this volume).

A valuable resource here would be to set up specific corpora of descriptive parallel texts in order to map out how descriptive strategies operate within the process of translating. The corpora can also provide the texts for developing a procedural scheme of solecisms or errors.

Such a corpus can cover descriptive literature and terminological texts. The texts might be centred on the same set of thematic referents, describing the same world or place in parallel. Students can thereby enhance their sense of validity in interpretation and translation by engaging with existing words for existing worlds.

Following the work of House (1981) on ‘quality assessment’, Spillner’s (1991, p. xiii) study of ‘error analysis’ provided an extensive bibliography on error detection and automatic correction during translation, and proposed the following methodical steps:

(1) locating errors: identifying, comparing with the linguistic norm, reconstructing the communicative intention;

(2) describing errors: analysing and classifying by linguistic criteria;

(3) hypothesising about the causes of errors: psychological or psycholinguistic interpretation of probable sources of error;

(4) inquiring into communicative effects: interpreting the consequences of errors in communicative settings;

(5) didactics: evaluating errors, preventing errors, providing remedial techniques.

Didactics and error prevention or self-initiated correction are attractive topics (see also Dodds, 1990), and bear on issues of pragmatic adequacy in translation and of evaluation and validity in interpretation (see also Sager, 1983).

Yet works on ‘quality assessment in translation’ or ‘error analysis’ often convey more problems than solutions. Errors are detected and classified according to a scheme of univocal language uses and functions and a restrictive typology of texts. Covert and overt errors are treated apart from the text and the process of translating it; a textual profile would call for a more subtle, qualitative, and descriptive assessment (House, 1981, pp. 56f). Classifying errors comes to be seen as a task with a high status for translatologists, and as an incentive for subservient teachers to develop tests of more and more sophisticated mistakes.

We should emphasise, as House (1981) has advocated, that didactic praxis in teaching translation should centre on the text with its situational pragmatics. Discussing questions of cross-cultural translatability could be more constructive than devising typologies of errors. Translating is subtly affected by the problem of cultural equivalents in respect to the thematic objects being described or invoked through imagery (cf. Newmark, 1988, pp. 83f).

The interface between translation and discourse, and specifically descriptive discourse, has been explored by Hatim and Mason (1990), adapting the cognitive properties associated with text types outlined by Beaugrande and Dressler (1981). In his Contrastive Textology, Hartmann refines the notion of parallel texts, used since the late 1950s as an informal label for advanced language practice:

Only in a second phase, several research projects adopted the procedure of comparing translationally equivalent texts to arrive at contrastive descriptions. Refinements in the classification of parallel texts depended on progress in intra-lingual discourse typology and inter-lingual equivalence criteria. (1980, p. 37)

These ‘parallel texts’ appear to be translated in ‘parallel equivalence’ but not grouped by subject-matter or theme, whereas the approach suggested here calls for selecting groups of subject-oriented texts.

The need for such an approach to replace the random menu currently offered by ‘how-to’ books has been expressed in recent publications with a view to setting up text corpora (e.g. Laurén & Nordman, 1991, pp. 218-230; Schroeder [Ed.], 1991). Far from being prescriptive, the corpora could serve to make a pocket-sized data-base lexicon and terminology for the such domains as language of science in literature, the semantics of natural phenomena and of spatial classification, or the descriptive stylistics and didactics of H.G. Widdowson (1990).

When translating from English into their native language, students can be supplied with a comprehensive charted itinerary through the usage of a corpus of descriptive image-based texts, correlating cross-cultural equivalents that can be readily visualised. Visualising descriptive items can support the process of choosing or deducing options, and also the elaboration of transfer and translation skills.

In terms of cognitive models and mental representations, description activates frames of knowledge, with constraints related to the attribution, differentiation, and interrelation of perceptions and cognitions in location and space (cf. Minsky, 1975; Schank & Abelson, 1977). These frames can provide a basis for assessing quality and validity in translation and interpretation, and for relating them to the pragmatic economy of discourse and to the analysis of errors.¹

Another cognitive factor, emphasised in such domains as Gestalt theory and the semiotics of description,² is the importance of vision: eye, sight, perspective, and observation. So far, this factor has not been adequately analysed in respect to the theory and practice of multiply mediated translation, though some useful groundwork has been laid, e.g., in Lucien Taylor’s (1994) edited collection on ‘visualising theory’ (with a paper by Blanchard) and Richard Strassberg’s (1994) work on ‘inscribed landscapes’ (compare also Blanchard, 1980).

2. TRANSLATION AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

Regarding global knowledge of cultural geography, English literature offers a wide-ranging panorama of descriptions of natural phenomena for the exploration and perception of metaphor and locality, from the Old World to the New World, from the arctic to the equator: landscape, cityscape, seascape, and sensory ‘scapes’, e.g., ‘odour-scape’ for botanical or ornamental gardens (cf. Rosini, 1990, 1993).³ Authoritative English texts also describe Italian landscapes, cityscapes, and architectural scenarios, thereby providing us with cultural parallels and global equivalents. Linguistic, semantic, and encyclopaedic knowledge can be assessed in natural interaction with perception and other cognitive processes monitored during debates or testing and screening sessions.

A corpus of parallel texts can assemble literary works already published in the two languages and judged suitable for being analysed as wholes. These texts may entail a diversity of functions and typologies, and yet be centred on the same subject-matter or thematic description of place: the same spatial reality or parallel world represented in parallel texts (compare Hamon, 1981, p. 3, on ‘parallel descriptions’). Interdisciplinary didactics may draw upon a corpus for texts of literary geography describing one place and its literary metaphors. For example, the metaphor of death in a set of readings and visual renderings of Niagara Falls was examined as an intratextual history of this landscape by McGreevy (1992, pp. 50-72), within a volume significantly entitled Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (Barnes & Duncan [Eds.], 1992). The same method could also be applied to oceanography, cosmography, satellite geodesy, and global observation systems (cf. Seeber, 1993). The linear sequence of metaphors and the cluster of ‘similative’ clauses (i.e., with similes and metaphors) renders the perception of the observer and needs to be reproduced by the translator. Competence and performance converge when the target-language text enables a parallel experience of mental imagery and visualisation (Beaugrande, 1978, 1979; but compare Kaplan & Grabe, 1991, who question the replicability of experience through descriptive texts).

In cosmographical description, images can strictly conform to the progression of what is seen and perceived in linear succession through technological instruments, e.g., for observations of Mars and Venus being analysed and translated in English for Specific Purposes. Yet even in such texts, the images interact with a series of metaphors and similes to excite our curiosity and expectancy. The language of science often carries a sense of marvel in progressively exploring, discovering, and verifying. A corpus of texts from science and from fiction, describing the same planet, can invoke an interactive ‘polysystem’ (Evan-Zohar, 1979), or Blanchard’s (1980) configuration covering ‘description, sign, self, and desire’.

A famous case relates to the origin of modern Science Fiction. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed Mars and wrote a description of observations in progress—a recurrent text type in the descriptive typology of explorations and navigation of the new continents, as found in English and Spanish literature and as compared to modern satellite geodesy with its simultaneous multimedia transmissions (Seeber, 1993). Schiaparelli used the Italian term ‘canali’ to describe a system of lines and signs on Mars which appear connected. The American astronomer Percival Lowell translated the term with ‘canals’, obeying his own desire to interpret them as artefacts of life forms instead of the soil erosion which is caused by the windstorms we have discovered today and which would call for the accurate equivalent term ‘channels’. The older term ‘canals’ has fostered a vast literature describing Martian landscapes in Science Fiction and seems to still be influencing some scientists.⁴

Validity in translation and interpretation can be reassessed with the support of a corpus of texts that induce the translator to visualise the progression of similes and metaphors for a landscape. Verisimilitude, realism, and mimesis in fiction provide us with a testing ground for visual experience ‘in the eye’s mind’ (Turner, 1994) or for translating through the ‘eye of the beholder’ (Blanchard, 1978), as a potential model for more abstract text typologies, where the objects of science are described in poetic terms, as often has occurred in the history of botany and of travel, and in English colonial literature (cf. Rosini, 1990, 1993).

3. IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING

The teaching of translation can also be reconsidered in a cross-cultural and contrastive perspective on landscape and imagination, including spatial orientation, description, and metaphor. How a translator adjusts metaphors and draws similes can affect wider spheres of knowledge and cognition.

Our own programme is currently surveying how students of translation can be monitored in their awareness of cultural influences and differences in spatial perception during ‘world writing’ and in their capacity to compare the same world in different words, either using their own translation or published translations.

We assume that, for a teacher of translation, a micro-text within the whole discourse can profitably be used as a passage to be translated and segmented into translational units. In the domains of narratology and semiotics, Hamon (1981) has proposed a segmentation and diversification among items constitutive of a descriptive text or micro-text or para-narrative. One characteristic constellation included a progression of specialised terminology, a progressive expansion of the description within the narrative texture, and a focus upon the semio-analysis of the descriptive passage into detailed aspects of location. I have experimentally adapted these ideas to teaching the translation of descriptive passages.

During these experiments over a period of some 15 years, student monitoring has been carried out with corpora of texts describing places which are commonly held to possess cultural relevance, such as monuments and architectural styles, and which support the interaction of visual images with world-knowledge or encyclopaedic knowledge. We have developed an interdisciplinary method of research and practice relating literature, interpretation, description, and translation to issues in human geography and to theories of perception and visualisation. Also, several unpublished dissertations, notably Costanzi (1992), have dealt with translation of descriptive texts at the University of Trieste.

We have also acknowledged that what are currently termed ‘discourse strategies’ for such domains as description in narrativity and narratology, closely resemble major concepts of classical rhetoric. We recall the latter’s exercises for descriptive techniques with an impressively wide range: portraiture, topography, chronography (describing with a focus on the time dimension), hypotyposis (describing emotions and passions), ethopoeia (describing customs), and prosopopoeia (personifying inanimate things). Parallel descriptions were specifically treated in rhetoric as combinations of two descriptions by resemblance or antithesis. These topics can be insightfully merged with updated concepts from topography, geography, cosmography, landscaping, and cityscaping.

4. A SAMPLE DEMONSTRATION

The following samples can illustrate the texts we use: the English original (the ‘a’ versions), the published Italian translation (the ‘b’ versions), and a student-made English back-translation (the ‘c’ versions).

Sample 1. E.M. Forster, A Room With A View, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. p. 23; M. Caramella, Camera con Vista, Milano: Mondadori, 1991, pp 44f.

(1.1a) Certainly they had seemed a long time in reaching Santa Croce, the tower of which had been plainly visible from the landing window. […]

(1.1b) In effetti il percorso per raggiungere Santa Croce, della quale si vedeva chiaramente il campanile dalla finestra del pianerottolo della pensione, era sembrato un po’ lungo, a Lucy. […]

(1.1c) In effect the route to reach Santa Croce, from where could be seen clearly the steeple from the window of the landing floor of the pension, had seemed a bit long, to Lucy. […]

(1.2a) Accordingly they drifted through a series of those grey-brown streets, neither commodious nor picturesque, of which the eastern part of the city abounds. […]

(1.2b) E così percorsero una serie di quelle strade grigio-marroni, né spaziose né pittoresche, delle quali abbonda la parte orientale della città. […]

(1.2c) And so they routed a series of those streets grey-browns, neither spacious nor picturesque, abounds the oriental part of the city. […]

(1.3a) For one ravishing moment Italy appeared.

(1.3b) Per un incantevole istante le apparve l’Italia.

(1.3c) For one enchanting moment to her appeared Italy.

(1.4a) She stood in the Square of the Annunziata and saw in the living terra-cotta those divine babies whom no cheap reproduction can ever stale.

(1.4b) Si fermò in piazza della SS. Annunziata a guardare, nella terracotta viva, quei putti divini che nessuna brutta riproduzione riuscirà mai a svilire.

(1.4c) She stopped in piazza of the Most Holy Annunziata to look at, in the terracotta alive, those ‘putti’ divine whom no ugly reproduction will ever debase.

(1.5a) There they stood, with their shining limbs. […]

(1.5b) Eccoli là, con le membra lucenti. […]

(1.5c) There they were, with the limbs shining. […]

(1.6a) The hour was approaching at which the continental breakfast begins, or rather ceases, to tell, and the ladies bought some hot chestnut paste out of a little shop, because it looked so typical.

(1.6b) Si stava avvicinando l’ora in cui sul continente comincia, o meglio, finisce di farsi sentire, l’effetto della scarsa colazione, e in un negozietto, dall’aria caratteristica le signore comperarono del castagnaccio caldo.

(1.6c) There was approaching the hour in which on the continent begins, or better, finishes to make itself felt, the effect of the scarce breakfast, and in a little shop, with a characteristic air the ladies bought some hot castagnaccio.

(1.7a) It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair-oil, partly of the great unknown.

(1.7b) Sapeva un po’ della carta in cui era avvolto, un po’ di brillantina, e un po’ di non si capiva bene cosa.

(1.7c) It tasted a little of the paper in which it was wrapped, a little of hair-gel, and a little of not to be easily understood.

(1.8a) But it gave them strength to drift into another Piazza, large and dusty, on the farther side of which rose a black-and-white façade of surpassing ugliness.

(1.8b) Ma diede loro la forza di arrivare fino a un’altra piazza, grande e polverosa, all’altra estremità della quale sorgeva un edificio dalla facciata bianca e nera di incomparabile bruttezza.

(1.8c) But it gave them the strength to arrive to another piazza, large and dusty, at the other end of which rose an edifice with a white and black front of incomparable ugliness.

(1.9a) Miss Lavish spoke to it dramatically. It was Santa Croce. The adventure was over.

(1.9a) Miss Lavish apostrofò la costruzione in toni drammatici. Era Santa Croce. L’avventura era finita.

(1.9c) Miss Lavish addressed the construction in dramatic overtones. It was santa Croce. The adventure was finished.

Sample 2. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, p. 319; B. Boffito Serra, Le Ali della Colomba, Milano: Rizzoli, 1995, p. 378.

(2.1a) This colloquy had taken place in the middle of Piazza San Marco, always, as a great social saloon,

(2.1b) Questo colloquio aveva avuto luogo in mezzo a Piazza San Marco, sempre favorevole ai conversari come un grande salone da ricevimento,

(2.1c) This colloquy had taken place in the middle at Piazza San Marco, always favourable to conversations are a great hall of reception,

(2.2a) a smooth-floored, blue-roofed chamber of amenity, favourable to talk, or rather, to be exact, not in the middle,

(2.2b) un centro di riunione e di spasso dal liscio pavimento e dal soffitto azzurrino; o meglio, per essere esatti, non nel mezzo

(2.2c)  a gathering point of reunion and fun with a smooth floor and a ceiling light-blue; or better, to be exact, not in the middle

(2.3a) but at the point where our pair had paused by a common impulse after leaving the great mosque-like church.

(2.3b) ma nel punto dove la nostra coppia si era fermata per comune impulso, uscendo dalla grande basilica simile a una moschea.

(2.3c) but on the spot where our couple had stopped itself for common impulse, going out from the great basilica like a mosque.

(2.4a) It rose now, domed and pinnacled, but a little way behind them,

(2.4b) Si ergeva, la basilica, con le sue cupole e i suoi pinnacoli, a poca distanza dietro di loro,

(2.4c) It rose, the basilica, with its domes and pinnacles, a little distance behind of them

(2.5a) and they had in front the vast empty space, enclosed by its arcades

(2.5b) che avevano dinanzi il vasto spazio vuoto, chiuso dalle arcate

(2.5c) which had in front the vast space empty, enclosed by the vaults

(2.6a) to which at that hour movement and traffic were mostly confined.

(2.6b) sotto le quali era quasi del tutto confinato, in quell’ora, il movimento e il traffico di Venezia.

(2.6c) Under which was almost wholly restricted, in that hour, the movement and the traffic of Venice.

(2.7a) Venice was at breakfast, the Venice of the visitor and possible acquaintance

(2.7b) La Venezia dei turisti e dei possibili incontri faceva colazione,

(2.7c) The Venice of tourists and of possible encounters was making breakfast

(2.8a) and, except for the parties of importunate pigeons picking up the crumbs of perpetual feasts, their prospect was clear

(2.8b) e tranne gli stormi degli importuni colombi che becchettavano le briciole delle feste perpetue, la vista era sgombra,

(2.8c) and, except the swarms of the importunate pigeons which were pecking the crumbs of feasts perpetual, the view was clear,

(2.9a) and they could see their companions had not yet been, and were not for a while longer likely to be, disgorged by the laceshop, in one of the loggie,

(2.9b) ed essi vedevano che le loro amiche non erano state ancora e quasi certo non lo sarebbero state ancora per qualche tempo, ‘rigettate’ dal negozio di merletti, in una delle loggie

(2.9c) and they saw that their female friends had not been yet and almost certainly would not be still for some time, ‘rejected’ from the shop of laces, in one of the loggie,

(2.10a) where, shortly before, they had left them for a look-in—the expression was art-fully Densher’s—at St. Mark.

(2.10b) dove poco prima le avevano lasciate per dare una guardatina—l’astuta espressione era di Densher—a San Marco

(2.10c) where shortly before they had left them to give a quick look-in—the artful expression was of Densher—at San Marco.

Sample 3 (Chart 3): D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, p. 389 (1923). S. Rosso Mazzinghi, Canguro, Milan: Mondadori, 1962, p. 500.

(3.1a) The bush was in bloom, the wattles were out. […]

(3.1b) La boscaglia era in fiore, le acacie specialmente, erano già tutte fiorite. […]

(3.1c) The undergrowth was in bloom, acacias especially, had already all flowered. […]

(3.2a) with here and there, on long, thin stalks like hairs almost, beautiful blue flowers […]

(3.2b) qua e là sostenuti da lunghi gambi, esili quasi come capelli, bei fiori azzurri […]

(3.2c) here and there sustained by long stalks, feeble almost like hairs, beautiful flowers light blue […]

(3.3a) Then comes a hollow, desolate bare place with empty greyness and a few dead, charred gum-trees, where there has been a bush fire.

(3.3b) Più in là un altro posto, un avvallamento del terreno nudo e desolato, grigio e deserto in cui si rizzavano alcuni morti eucalipti che portavano i segni di un incendio.

(3.3c) A little way off another place, a depression of the terrain nude and desolate, grey and barren where there stood straight some dead eucalyptus which bore the marks of a combustion.

(3.4a) At the side of this bare place great flowers, twelve feet high, like sticky dark lilies

(3.4b) Attorno a questa radura così spoglia, dei grandi fiori alti dodici piedi simili a gigli, scuri e appiccicosi

(3.4c) Around this clearing so barren, some great flowers high twelve feet resembling lilies, dark and sticky

(3.5a) in bulb buds at the top of the shaft, dark, blood-red.

(3.5b) con dei bocciuoli tondi all’estremità degli steli, di una scura tinta sanguigna.

(3.5c) with blossom round at the extremity of the stems, of a dark tinct sanguine.

(3.6a) Then over another stream, and scattered bush once more,

(3.6b) Poi, ecco un nuovo corso d’acqua e ancora la rada boscaglia

(3.6c)  there is a new course of water and still the scanty scrub

(3.7a) and the last gold red bushes of the bottle-brush tree, like soft-bristly golden bottle-brushes standing firmly up, and the queer black-boys on one black leg with a tuft of dark-green spears

(3.7b) e gli ultimi strani cespugli, d’un rosso dorato, della pianta delle scope, simili a spazzolini morbidamente dorati e rigidamente eretti, altre piante strane, dallo stelo nero e un ciuffo fatto come di frecce verde-scuro

(3.7c) and the last strange bushes, of a golden red, of the plant of brooms, like tooth-brushes softly golden and stiffly erect, and other plants strange, with a black stem and a tuft made as of arrows green-dark,

(3.8a) sending up the high stick of a seed-stalk, much taller than a man.

(3.8b) il quale stelo, simile a un lungo bastone, è assai più alto di un uomo.

(3.8c) which stalk, resembling a long staff, is much taller than a man.

(3.9a) And here and there the gold bushes of wattle with their narrow dark leaves.

(3.9b) E qua e là i cespugli dorati delle acacie, dalle strette foglioline scure.

(3.9c) And here and there the bushes golden of acacias, with narrow small leaves dark.

Intercultural differences were reflected in various ways at several points. The Italian translator felt impelled to alert readers that tourists accustomed to the heavy English breakfast would find a ‘continental breakfast’ rather ‘scarsa’, and the back-translator misrendered the change as ‘scarce’ (1.6). Cultural unfamiliarity also prevented the Italian translator from identifying ‘queer black-boys on one black leg’, which got vaguely specified as ‘altre piante strane’, whilst the metaphoric ‘leg’ became ‘stelo’ (3.7).

More surprisingly, our Italian students aspiring to become literary translators proved rather insensitive toward their own Italian culture. One back-translator was so unfamiliar with the spatial arrangement of Florence that, by misreading ‘della quale’ as ‘from where’ instead of ‘of which’, the ‘seeing’ of the ‘steeple’ got oddly placed at Santa Croce, and ‘the window of the landing floor of the pension’ got left somewhere in limbo (1.1). Equally insensitive was the implication that the tourists in the first narrative would be conversant with special Italian terms: ‘divine babies => putti divini => “putti” divine’ (1.4), or ‘chestnut paste => castagnaccio => castagnaccio’ (1.6); and that the tourists in the second narrative would be ‘making breakfast’ (from the ambiguous ‘faceva colazione’) (2.7).

Passing through the Italian translation led to some routine problems occasioned by incompatible overlaps among lexical fields in English versus Italian: ‘arcades => arcate => vaults’ (2.5); ‘confined => confinato => restricted’ (2.6), ‘wattles => acacie => acacias’ (3.1); ‘thin => esili => feeble’ (3.2); ‘blue => azzurri => light blue’ (3.2); ‘hollow => avvallamento => depression’ (3.3); ‘bush => boscaglia => undergrowth’ (3.1) and later ‘scrub’ (3.6); and ‘spears => frecce => arrows’ (3.7). The change was intensified when the back-translators were insensitive toward the cultural context or the English phrasing or both: ‘bare => nudo => nude’ (3.3); ‘bulb buds => bocciuoli tondi => blossom round’ (3.5); ‘top of the shaft => estremità degli steli => extremity of the stems’ (3.5); ‘dark, blood-red => di una scura tinta sanguigna => dark tinct sanguine’ (3.5), and, most absurd of all, ‘bottle-brushes => spazzolini => tooth-brushes’ (3.7).

Other changes came from Italian idioms getting mechanically back-translated, at times again into unidiomatic English: ‘charred […] there has been a bush fire => portavano i segni di un incendio => bore the marks of a combustion’ (3.3); ‘stream => corso d’acqua => course of water’ (3.6). However, some such changes were the fault of the Italian translator giving vague renderings that got back-translated into English, e.g., ‘ravishing => incantevole => enchanting’ (1.3); ‘stale => svilire => debase’ (1.4); ‘visitor => turisti => tourists’ (2.7); ‘parties => stormi => swarms’ (2.8); ‘disgorged => rigettate => rejected’ (2.9); ‘empty greyness => grigio e deserto => grey and barren’ (3.3); ‘standing firmly up => rigidamente eretti => stiffly erect’ (3.7); ‘high stick of a seed-stalk => lungo bastone => long staff’ (3.8). A misreading by the Italian translator was to blame for ‘acquaintance [a person] => ‘incontri [an action]’ => encounters’ (2.7). Here too, the changes were intensified by some unidiomatic usage in the back-translation, e.g., ‘of the great unknown => di non si capiva bene cosa =>  of not to be easily understood’ (1.7).

Some changes in style also deserve notice, with the back-translators idiosyncratically taking cues from the Italian translator: ‘spoke to it dramatically => apostrofò la costruzione in toni drammatici => addressed the construction in dramatic overtones’. The interference from Italian led to some phrasings in the back translations that would be stylistically quite marked in English, like ‘in the terracotta alive’ (1.4), ‘crumbs of feasts perpetual’ (2.9a), and ‘clearing so barren’ (3.4). In contrast, some marked style in the English original got toned down into the prosaic: ‘drift => arrivare => arrive’ (1.8), or ‘chamber of amenity => centro di riunione e di spasso => gathering point of reunion and fun’ (2.2).

5. CONCLUSION

In our programme, we have been trying to work out a system for classifying translation problems according to whether they would concern encyclopaedic knowledge or world knowledge such as cultural artefacts and cityscapes, and terminology or nomenclature such as botany, building upon the scheme proposed by Hamon (1972).

In the future, we hope that translation studies may be able to productively continue expanding the boundaries of didactics to cover the processes of cultural contact, and developing new means for assessing validity.

NOTES

¹ For a pioneering contribution on perception and error analysis, see Rossipal (1972) and his own chart on p. 68 there.

² Specific applications of translation science to the semiotics of description were hardly considered in the volume on Semiotik und Übersetzen (Wilss [Ed.], 1979). And the volume Il Paradosso Descrittivo of the Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale (published in Naples in 1980) is exclusively literary and impressionistic.

³ On landscape and imagination, see Wyatt (1991). On cultural geography, see Jackson (1989). On geography in literature, see Bunce (1994); Lando (1993); Rodaway (1994); Simmons (1991); Simpson-Housley & Preston (Eds.) (1994). On specific regions, see Simpson-Housley (1992) on Antarctica, Price & Price (1992) on Equatoria, and Short (1991) on Australia. On post-colonialism and textuality, see Tiffin & Lawson (eds.) (1994). For parallel descriptions of the New World in two languages, see Pratt (1992) (English) versus (1994) (Italian). Margaret Drabble’s (1979) account of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age does not adopt a semiotic approach, but does model a useful chronological sequence in text presentation.

⁴ But lunar descriptions in Latin, from Galileo onwards, do not introduce similes for the dark spots on the moon (‘maculae’).

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THE GENESIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF DICTIONARY ILLUSTRATIONS

Sabine Langridge

Faculty of Arts

University of Ljubljana

1. PICTURES AND WORDS: A BRIEF HISTORY

Today more than ever, the most commonly used channels of information combine pictures with words. Yet this combination is far from purely modern and reaches far back through the ages, as attested by the picture poems of Hellenistic times, where an outline drawing was filled with text. Antiquity also produced the rebus, a riddle consisting of a combination of pictures and language, which has amused generations ever since (Hupka, 1989a, p. 11f).

The Middle Ages contributed illustrated manuscripts dealing mainly with Christian themes in the form of prayer books, books of hours, books of gospels, and so on, but also with mythology, astronomy, medicine, and botany. Fine examples include the illuminated manuscript of the Gospel Book of Henry the Lion (Helmarshausen Abbey, 1173-1175); the Biblia Pauperum, which first appeared in southern Germany in the 13th century, combining illustration and text on the same page; and the Bayeux Tapestry, recording the history of the Norman conquest of England.

Following the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century, book illustrations became the leading domain for combining picture and word. La Fontaine’s Fables, Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, Goethe’s Werther, and Dickens’ Pickwick Papers were all provided with illustrations that achieved great popularity. Literature innovated by amalgamating text and shape as well, as in Easter  Wings by the metaphysical poet John Donne, A Long Tale by Lewis Carroll arranged in the shape of a tail, Calligrammes - Poèmes by Guillaume Apollinaire, and eventually concrete poetry. Since the middle of the 19th century, newspapers and magazines have made use of illustrations; comics became widely popular in the 1930s, to be followed by the photo novel in 1947.

2. TECHNIQUES AND TECHNOLOGIES IN BOOK ILLUSTRATION

Prior to the invention of the printing press, the production of illustrated books was largely confined to monasteries. These books were laboriously copied by hand and painstakingly decorated with designs, decorative patterns, illuminated initials, and minute pictures. Naturally, copies were produced in extremely limited quantities.

The earliest illustrations accompanying print were crude, simple pictures produced by means of wooden blocks cut in relief to form an inking and printing surface. This process, which permitted text and picture to be printed on the same page, was invented at the beginning of the 15th century and first used to illustrate a book in 1461, the fables of Ulrich Boner, titled Edelstein and printed by Albrecht Pfister in Bamberg with 203 woodcuts (cf. Hupka, 1989a, p. 15).

Other techniques of illustration included the intaglio method of copperplate engraving, which appeared at the same time as the woodcut; and lithography, which was invented toward the end of the 18th century. Neither of these permitted illustrations to be printed on the same page with the text. Hupka’s (1989a, p. 467) detailed history of the technology of lexicographical illustration comments:

For three centuries this difference [in print face] determined the way in which all kinds of books were to be illustrated. Thus the two oldest lexicographical works, dating from 1656 and 1658, have woodcuts and text on the same page while the third (1692) has copperplate prints on separate pages.¹

These techniques also affected the use of illustrations in dictionaries. Often, the illustration and the relevant entry were not placed on the same page, even when the mass-production of illustration plates became technically feasible.

A final technique to be mentioned here for combining picture and word is painting, which combines a canvas with a title, and can also incorporate passages from such texts as poems and the Bible. Eventually, clippings from newspapers, magazines, books, tickets, and so on, were also integrated into the 20th-century collage. Paul Klee was noted for exploring the medium of ‘script pictures’ (‘Schriftbilder’), wherein he grouped squares of colour and letters to produce a poem and a painting at the same time, as in his Once Emerged from the Grey of Night (1918).

3. ILLUSTRATIONS² IN PRESENT-DAY DICTIONARIES

When illustrating a dictionary, publishing houses confront several fundamental decisions concerning such criteria as these:

(a) the selection of headwords to be illustrated;

(b) the relation between the illustration and the verbal definition;

(c) the scope of the headword in isolation versus in a typical context;

(d) the captions for illustrations;

(e) the media of drawing versus photograph;

(f) the decor of colour versus black and white;

(g) the respective styles of the artists and the potentially striking differences in method; and

(h) the age, cultural background, and education level of prospective users.

The choice of media includes photograph, ‘halftone’ (with minute dots for a gradation between light and dark), line drawing, detailed drawing, hatched drawing (with parallel lines for shading), and colour prints. The line drawing is preferred by most dictionaries.

A successful illustration should be general and free of accidental idiosyncrasies that might be mistakenly attributed by users to all instances of the meaning. This is particularly important when representing entries of flora and fauna which are foreign to our own culture. A portrayal of a guanaco (a wild llama) with unduly long legs would suggest that all guanacos have them. A famous example was Albrecht Dürer’s misrepresentation of a rhinoceros with plates and scales, which achieved immense notoriety and was treated as an accurate zoological representation, being reproduced in printed works up to the end of the 18th century, well after it had been established that the animal has no armour plating.

When several artists are employed in illustrating a dictionary, striking differences in method might result. To encourage uniformity of style throughout, criteria should be determined at the start regarding (a) degree of detail, (b) shading, (c) groundlines and horizons, and (d) heavier lines to highlight a particular part of an image. Clear guidelines should also specify how to draw illustrations to scale, and how to display perspective and comparative size. The illustration of a hummingbird may be the same size as that of a giraffe, but the respective sizes can be clarified by including of reference objects, such as the one getting food from a flower and the other getting food from a tree.

In determining the weight of line, the reduction in drawing size for the final insertion in the dictionary must not be overlooked. Certain techniques produce lines which are quite light and fine but become indistinct in reduction. So finer details must often be left out and heavier weights of line must be preferred.

The scope of a drawing concerns whether the item is shown in isolation or in a typical context. If a drawing shows, say, bagpipes in isolation, the size of the instrument and the way it is played may not be understood. But if it is shown in a typical context, additional, possibly distracting information may intrude, such as the dress of the player in a tartan kilt, sporran, and beret. A drawing should seek a happy medium between offering too little information versus offering too much.

Instead of drawings, photography may be chosen for illustration. Although this technology has been available since the mid-19^th century, English dictionaries did not employ it until fairly recently, doubtless due to preliminary technical difficulties in translating the photograph into a satisfactory printed image. From a user’s point of view, photographs are undeniably closer to reality and more authentic, capturing a certain object, place, person, or event at a particular moment in time and reproducing them in a design for the purpose of illustrating. A photograph is like a documentary whose factuality cannot be denied. Also, the style of the artist is less likely to intrude into a photograph than into a drawing, though care must still be taken not to risk misrepresenting facts.

At all events, employing photography as a medium of illustration imposes its own limitations. Whereas photography is particularly well-suited to rendering the likeness of people, the image of art works, and the documentation of events, it is unsuited for conveying motion, showing how an apparatus or machine is assembled, revealing things behind or below surfaces, or providing cross-sections.

Photographs also tend to date more quickly, due to the subject itself being overtaken by technological advances, e.g., models of cars, aeroplanes, or trains; or due to the inclusion of peripheral dated reference objects, e.g., fashions in clothing.

Photographs may suffer too in both foreground and background detail when reduced to the size suitable for dictionary illustration; or, they may be too detailed, distracting the user’s attention from relevant features or offering an excess of information. To circumvent such problems, details can be touched up and brushed out, but doing so may leave visible traces or may lend the image an artificial or unsatisfactory appearance.

In contrast, line drawings can select or adapt the details in order to suggest the more relevant information and to avoid details that might compete for attention. Drawings can also choose constituents carefully to produce a more timeless, although visually less appealing, image. In addition, symbols and signs such as arrows and path lines can be employed to indicate time, movement, and direction.

Whatever the motives, most dictionaries are illustrated by line drawings. Some publishing houses have chosen to use both line drawings and photographs, depending on what seems most suited for the explanation of the headword. This method has been used, for example, in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (third edition)  and the Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of the English Language.

The publishers of the Longman Photo Dictionary have taken the unusual step of using coloured photographs throughout. Colours might appeal to prospective buyers and can be quite helpful for concepts that are extremely difficult to define verbally, such as ‘colour’ itself. Colour is vital for helping to identify flora and fauna, as well as metals, minerals, and gemstones, and in clarifying schematic representations, e.g., of nitrogen exchange or blood circulation, as well as structural diagrams, e.g., for ‘catenary’ (a curve formed by a heavy line suspended from two points of a vertical line). Other areas would be the depiction of flags, maps, charts, and tables, and the reproduction of works of art.

To be sure, colours are costly and more expected in an encyclopaedia than in a regular dictionary. Colours also present their own special difficulties. Colours might draw attention away from the essentials of the image, or suggest undue generalities, e.g., that all roses are red, and all cows are black and white. In representations using only two colours, it might be unclear whether one of the colours is intended to represent real life or to highlight a particular feature of the image.

Still, some recent dictionaries aimed at adult users have adopted colour illustrations and used background colour to draw attention to tables and charts, for example, the Reader’s Digest Reverse Dictionary. Children’s dictionaries too have adopted colour to appeal to children’s strong visual sensibilities. These factors are concerned more with marketing points than with the degree, amount, and clarity of information they convey as compared to black and white.

Here, we might consider such factors as whether a colour illustration speeds up the intake of information and exerts a positive effect on memory retention of the meaning of the headword. A number of studies conducted in this field over the years have yielded some significant results (cf. Dwyer, 1976, p. 60; Espe, 1984, p. 750; Fleming & Sheikhian, 1972, p. 439; Spaulding, 1955, p. 43). Although far from conclusive, the results indicate that not colour but form is the more decisive carrier of information in both colour and black-and-white illustrations. We might conclude that colour plays no decisive role in comprehension and memory.

But some results of research do suggest that the memory of a word is enhanced when it is accompanied by an illustration of the object (e.g. Levie & Lentz, 1982, p. 225). These results should strongly argue for including illustrations in dictionaries. So far, however, the number of illustrated English dictionaries and the number of illustrations they include have remained small, more so in Britain and less so in America.

4. TYPOLOGIES OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Various typologies for classifying the illustrations in dictionaries have been suggested, e.g., by Hupka (1989a, 1989b), Ilson (1987), and Werner (1982). This work has variously proposed to classify according to functions (e.g. Werner, whose examples are drawn from foreign dictionaries, mainly Spanish) or according to aspects of lexical meanings as well as captioning and labelling (e.g. Ilson). For Hupka, the type of illustration should depend on the type of headword; and his typology is largely independent of the technical aspects of illustration, apart from the function of schemata that have to be drawn, as for ‘catenary’. The typology gives a short characterisation of each type together with sample example illustrations, wherever possible one drawn from contemporary dictionaries and another from earlier works.

These typologies are far from complete, and each contains flaws. But they should be welcomed as indicators of a rising awareness of the importance of making such classifications.

5. PROBLEMATIC FACTORS

We need to consider the problematic factors which may have led to the dearth and limited variety of illustrations in mainly British dictionaries and to the diverse views held by several major English publishing houses about illustrations in dictionaries.

The cost of hiring people to make the illustrations might be assumed to be a leading factor, although illustrated dictionaries are not necessarily more expensive than others. The cost of production might also be influential. Ironically, the past technical problems in producing text and illustration on the same page, cited in section 2, have a modern counterpart in modern dictionary production with typesetting by computer. The arrangement of the text in the computer mode is fully automatic, but the drawings have usually been incorporated into the text manually.

Then again, the field of lexicography has, for quite some time, adopted a conservative stance; innovations, such as new policies on illustration, tend to be regarded with scepticism. Also conservative is the view, not uncommon in the academic humanities, that illustrated texts are for children or uneducated adults.

Moreover, publishing houses may have an unclear perception of the needs and preferences of native speakers and of the educational purpose that illustrations can serve. Longman, the publishing house in the vanguard of dictionary illustration, has also taken the lead in conducting research. The findings indicate that native-speaking adults are mainly interested in dictionaries having as many words as possible, whereas native-speaking children are more motivated by pictures. Plainly, far more research is called for, including general research into the relation between cognitive processing of language versus the effects of illustrative imagery, as cited in section 3.

A factor on a quite different level might be that alphabetical ordering,  which is adopted by the majority of dictionaries, is not fully compatible with the implications of illustration. Thus, most illustrations are limited to single, distinctive objects, even though one illustration could certainly serve to provide images of several objects, e.g., when the illustration for ‘sporran’ could also help to define ‘tartan’ and ‘kilt’. Complex illustrations like this either might either require lexical items to be lifted out of alphabetical ordering, or else might have to be included at multiple points.

Also, illustrations are not well-adapted to expressing the meaning of abstract items in general, like ‘freedom’ or ‘density’, and even of many concrete items, like ‘city’ or ‘protest march’. The majority of illustrations are restricted to noun entries for items that belong to well-behaved classes, such as animals, plants, and musical instruments. Verbs are rarely illustrated, due to the difficulty of portraying whole actions comprising a set or sequence of movements.

It is difficult to assess in what proportion these various factors may have hindered the development and progress of dictionary illustration, but the hindrance has been quite a real one. The results of studies and experiments lending support to the simultaneous presentation of word and picture have not yet altered the guarded stance of most publishing houses.

6. CONCLUSION

All in all, the inclusion of illustrations in dictionaries remains a complex and uncertain issue. But we may feel encouraged to see that it is steadily gaining in recent English-language publications, and that the topic of dictionary illustrations is finally receiving some of the professional interest and attention it has long merited (see Langridge, 1991, for details). Future work can be expected to strengthen the case for including illustrations and to provide a sounder basis for informed decisions about the criteria and factors we have explored in this chapter.

NOTES

¹ Hupka was presumably referring to Blount’s Glossographia (1656), Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), and Chauvin’s Lexicon Rationale Sive Thesaurus Philosophicus (1692) (cf. Hupka, 1989a, pp. 72f, 76).

² ‘Illustration’ may of course mean ‘example’ as well as ‘picture’, ‘pictorial matter’, or

‘embellishment’. In this chapter, however, the term denotes only pictorial or graphic illustration.

REFERENCES

Dwyer, F.M. (1976). The effect of IQ level on the instructional effectiveness of black-and-white and colour illustrations. Audio-Visual Communication Review, 24, 49-62.

Espe, H. (1984). Fotografie und Realität: Empirische Untersuchung über die Eindrucks-wirkung von schwarz-weißen und farbigen Fotografien. In K. Öhler (Ed.), Zeichen und Realität (Vol. 2, pp. 743-751). Tübingen: Öhler.

Fleming, M.L., & Sheikhian, M. (1972). Influence of pictorial attributes on recognition memory. Audio-Visual Communication Review, 20, 423-443.

Hupka, W. (1989a). Wort und Bild: Die Illustrationen in Worterbüchern und Enzyklopädien. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.

Hupka, W. (1989b). Die Bebilderung und sonstige Formen der Veranschaulichung im allgemeinen einsprachigen Wörterbuch. In F.J. Hausmann, O. Reichmann, H.E. Wiegand, & L. Zgusta (Eds.) Wörterbücher/Dictionaries/Dictionnaires: International Encyclopedia of Lexicography (Vol. 1, pp. 704-723). Berlin: de Gruyter.

Ilson, R. (1987). Illustrations in dictionaries. In A.P. Cowie (Ed.), The Dictionary and the Language Learner (pp. 120-125). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer,.

Langridge, S.A. (1991). The genesis and development of illustration in the English dictionary. Exeter: University of Exeter MA thesis.

Levie, W.H., & Lentz, R. (1982). Can illustrations aid learning of text material? Educational Communication and Technology, 30, 195-232.

Spaulding, S. (1955). Research on pictorial illustration. Audio-Visual Communication Review, 3, 35-45.

Werner, R. (1982). Das Bild im Wörterbuch: Funktionen der Illustration in spanischen Wörterbüchern. Linguistik und Didaktik, 49-50, 62-94.

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