Eco (2003)

 

[Nota: os itálicos são perdidos quando transfiro o texto para cá]

INTRO

• I think that in addition to having made an intensive study of translations, of course, translation scholars should have had at least one of the following experiences during their life: translating, checking and editing translations, or being translated and working in close co-operation with their translators.
• Irrespective of the fact that some philosophers or linguists have said that there are no rules for deciding whether one translation is better than another one, the everyday activity in a publishing house tells us that, at least in cases of blatant misunderstanding, it is easy to establish that a translation is wrong and deserves severe editing. [Isso é mais fácil de perceber em trads. propriamente ditas do que em trads. intersemióticas].
• I dare to say (and I hope not to trouble some simple soul) that in order to define translation proper one must even take into account economic criteria. When I buy or look for a translation in a library that a great poet made of another great poet, I am not expecting something literally similar to the original; usually I look for a poetic translation because I already know the original and I want to see how the translator has challenged and emulated his source in his own language.
• Eco acredita na fidelidade para com o texto, não em um sentido ingênuo de busca por equivalência, mas no sentido de respeitar a intenção do texto (sujeita a interpretação de textos, assunto abordado por eco em outros livros). 
• Translation studies em negociação, isto é, ambos os lados cedendo em favor de um objetivo mútuo. O tradutor é o negociador:
• In this kind of negotiation there may be many parties: on one side, there is the original text, with its own rights, sometimes an author who claims right over the whole process, along with the cultural framework in which the original text is born; on the other side, there is the destination text, the cultural milieu in which it is expected to be read, and even the publishing industry, which can recommend different translation criteria, according to whether the translated text is to be put in an academic context or in a popular one.

THE PLANTS OF SHAKESPEARE

• Transliteração: tradução de texto com base nos caracteres, ex: código Morse.
• Equivalência de significado:
• There is a widespread opinion that meaning is exactly that which remains unchanged (or equivalent) in the process of translation, but such an assumption runs the risk of entering a vicious circle. Another suggestion [isso vem do Koller] is that the equivalence implied by synonymity and translation is a referential equivalence: a given word A used in a language Alpha is synonymous with the word B used in a language Beta if both are seen to refer to the same thing or event in the real world. However, referential equivalence is no better than equivalence in meaning. We generally believe that it is correct to translate husband as mari or marito, and undoubtedly Mary’s husband refers to the same person as le mari de Mary or il marito di Mary. But one only need open a dictionary in order to see that husband, in English, can also mean a navy manager or a steward, while mari or marito cannot. [...] Plainly we must give up the idea that to translate means only ‘to transfer or turn from one set of symbols into another’ because, except for cases of transliteration like Morse code, a given word in a natural language Alpha frequently has more than one corresponding term in the natural language Beta. Besides, the problem does not only concern translation but also the very comprehension of a language Alpha on the part of its native speakers.
• Sinonímia: dois termos significam a mesma coisa.
• Homonímia: quando um termo se refere a mais de uma coisa (polissemia?)
• Semiótica:
• For Peirce, an interpretant is another representation which refers to the same ‘object’. In order to tell the content of an expression (be it verbal or other) we must substitute the first expression with another expression (or string of expressions), which in its turn can be interpreted by another expression (or string of expressions). 
• An interpretant can be a synonym (in those rare cases in which one can believe in synonymity, as happens with husband, mari, marito); a sign from another semiotic system (the word work can be interpreted by showing the photograph of an engineering structure); a given object which is shown as representative of the class to which it belongs (one can interpret the word work by indicating a real engineering structure); a definition; a description; a paraphrase; or a complex discourse that inferentially develops all the logical possibilities implied by the content of the expression.
• According to Peirce, every interpretation teaches us something more about the content of the interpreted expression. ‘Feline mammal’, ‘Felis catus’ and ‘domestic animal which miaows’ are certainly three different interpretations of the expression cat, but the first suggests a property (to be viviparous) that the second does not, and the third tells us something about the way to recognise a cat that the first did not provide. At the same time every interpretation focuses on the interpreted content from a different point of view. Thus all the interpretations of the same expression cannot be mutually synonymous, and every expression resembles a homonymous term conveying a different interpretation.

• "Conhecimento enciclopédico", ou seja, além do dicionário, é necessário para escapar de falsos cognatos e fazer escolhas condizentes com o contexto das línguas em questão. Esse mesmo conhecimento que permite que o leitor reconheça erros flagrantes de tradução.
• Argumentos contra tradução: 
• 1) impossível organizar um manual de tradução: Difícil determinar o significado de um termo em uma língua desconhecido mesmo sob ação de um mesmo estímulo externo. Hipóteses externas são necessárias, mas elas não serão necessariamente as mesmas. In Quine’s words, ‘Just as we meaningfully speak of the truth of a sentence only within the terms of some theory or conceptual scheme . . . so on the whole we may meaningfully speak of interlinguistic synonymy only within the terms of some particular system of analytical hypotheses.;
• 2) incomensurabilidade das línguas: Cada língua expressa um modo de ver o mundo (hipótese de Sapir-Whorf), conforme Hjelmslev:
• According to Hjelmslev, a natural language (and, more generally, any semiotic system) consists of a plane of expression and a plane of content which represents the universe of the concepts that can be expressed by that language. Each of these planes consists of form and substance and both are the result of the organisation of a pre-linguistic continuum.
• If we consider the English language, the form of expression consists of its phonological system, its lexical repertory and its syntactic rules. Through this form of expression, we may generate various substances of expression, such as the words we utter every day. But I shall speak of substances in another essay. Let me consider here the problem of form. In order to elaborate a form of expression, English has selected (from the continuum of the sounds that the human voice can produce) a series of sounds, excluding others that exist and are pronounceable but which do not belong to the English language.
• If the sounds of a language are to be comprehensible it is necessary to associate them with contents. For Hjelmslev, the continuum of content is the totality of all that can be thought and said: namely the whole universe, physical and mental (as far as we can speak of it), including the material elements such as sounds that we use to make expressions. Each language organises the universe of what may be said and thought into a form. The system of colours, the organisation of the zoological universe in genera, families and species, the opposition of high vs low, and even the structures that linguists identify in phonological systems – all belong to the form of content. Certain cultures organise the kinship system by isolating differences that in Great Britain, as well as in Italy, are ignored: for instance, the difference between the brother of the mother and the brother of the father, who for us are both uncles.
• In this sense two semantic systems can result in being mutually inaccessible, because they segment the content continuum in a different way. Thus, according to Quine, one cannot translate the expression neutrinos lack mass into a jungle language, and one only need think how difficult it is to translate the German word Sehnsucht into English or Italian in order to understand that German culture has the precise notion of a certain passion whose ‘semantic space’ can be only partially covered by terms like nostalgia, yearning, craving for or wishfulness (and none of them renders it adequately).

• The challenge for a translator, when two languages seem to have a different segmentation of the content continuum, is to make a reasonable conjecture about the content space covered by a homonym term in a given context.
• Linear Text Manifestations carregam um sentido que é decodificado pelo leitor ou ouvinte.

LOSSES AND GAINS

• There is no exact way to translate the Latin word mus into English. In Latin mus covers the same semantic space covered by mouse and rat in English – as well as in French, where there are souris and rat, in Spanish (ratón and rata) or in German (Maus and Ratte). But in Italian, even though the difference between a topo and a ratto is recorded in dictionaries, in everyday language one can use topo even for a big rat – perhaps stretching it to topone or topaccio – but ratto is used only in technical texts.
• Uma tradução deste termo deve negociar o sentido que é apresentado pela intenção do texto.
• Em muitos casos, a tradução opera desde o ínicio na perda. Autor e/ou tradutor também podem chegar a uma censura mútua.
• Estratégias para termos problemáticos: Traduzir literalmente; neologismo; [outra não mencionada são calques ou empréstimos]
• Lista de procedimentos (diferente de métodos por serem locais) de Newmark, extraídos daqui:
• Word-for-word translation: in which the SL word order is preserved and the words translated singly by their most common meanings, out of context. 
• Literal translation: in which the SL grammatical constructions are converted to their nearest TL equivalents, but the lexical words are again translated singly, out of context. 
• Faithful translation: it attempts to produce the precise contextual meaning of the original within the constraints of the TL grammatical structures. 
• Semantic translation: which differs from 'faithful translation' only in as far as it must take more account of the aesthetic value of the SL text. 
• Adaptation: which is the freest form of translation, and is used mainly for plays (comedies) and poetry; the themes, characters, plots are usually preserved, the SL culture is converted to the TL culture and the text is rewritten. 
• Free translation: it produces the TL text without the style, form, or content of the original. 
• Idiomatic translation: it reproduces the 'message' of the original but tends to distort nuances of meaning by preferring colloquialisms and idioms where these do not exist in the original. 
• Communicative translation: it attempts to render the exact contextual meaning of the original in such a way that both content and language are readily acceptable and comprehensible to the readership (1988b: 45-47).
• Outro exemplo biológico:
• Christopher Taylor meticulously analysed all the cases in which Weaver, translating Il nome della rosa, tried to find adequate equivalents for such plant names as viola, citiso, serpilla, giglio, ligustro, narciso, colocasia, acanto, malobatro, mirra and opobalsami. It was obviously easy to find violet, lily, narcissus, acanthus and myrrh. Weaver translated serpilla as thyme: serpilla is indeed a species of thyme but Taylor remarked that serpilla is more rare in Italian than thyme in English – even though admitting that it would be ‘fairly fatuous’ to argue this point and that, given the horticultural differences between English and Italian, thyme works pretty well.
• The real drama started with citiso and colocasia, for which there are no corresponding English terms. Weaver translated citiso as cystus which keeps a Latin root and a botanical flavour, and colocasia as taro which is a little more generic but, according to Taylor, correct, even though the Italian sound is more evocative. As for opobalsami, the English equivalent would be balsams of Peru, but in the Middle Ages Peru wasn’t yet discovered. Weaver chose Mecca balsam.3 [Nota 3: Schifano (and this is the only flaw in a perfect translation), pulled by his linguistic automatism, translated baumes du Perou. This anachronism can be pardoned because I say in the opening pages of my novel that the manuscript that allegedly inspired me was a French nineteenth-century translation of a lost medieval text, and thus that Perou can be attributed to my pseudo-source. In fact Schifano had chosen, as a stylistic solution, not so much the imitation of a medieval chronicler but rather the style of a nineteenth-century novelist. In any case, better Mecca than Peru.] Taylor also complains that malobatro became mallow, once again using a current term instead of an archaic one that evokes biblical psalms. But, as the author, I remember having approved those ‘losses’.
• It happens occasionally that, in order to avoid a possible loss, one says more than the original – and perhaps to say more means to say less, because the translator fails to keep an important and meaningful reticence or ambiguity.
• [...] the aim of a translation, more than producing any literal ‘equivalence’, is to create the same effect in the mind of the reader (obviously according to the translator’s interpretation) as the original text wanted to create. Instead of speaking of equivalence of meaning, we can speak of functional equivalence: a good translation must generate the same effect aimed at by the original.11 [Nota 11: Cita Nida, Basnett e vários artigos da enciclopédia de Baker].

TRANSLATION AND REFERENCE

• Referential equivalence: Uma vez que alguém sabe o significado das palavras pode fazer inferências sobre o mundo na qual foram proferidas.
• If somebody says that cats are amphibians or unicorns have a striped mantle, one should not say that these two assertions are ‘false’, but more properly that they are ‘wrong’[...]. In order to decide that cats are amphibians is a correct assertion I would have to ask the whole of society to restructure its entire system of natural classifications, as happened when the learned community decided to consider the assertion dolphins are fishes as wrong.
• On the other hand expressions like there is a cat on the mat, my cat Felix is sick or Marco Polo said to have seen unicorns are referring to situations of the actual world [...]. These assertions can be empirically tested and judged as true or false. In ordinary situations we react to cats are mammals and there is a cat on the mat in two different ways. In the first case we open an encyclopaedia in order to see if the statement is correct; in the second, if we do not trust the speaker, we check de visu, to ascertain whether the statement is true.
• A tradução não podem alterar as referências reais do mundo descrito ali (claro que exceções artísticas são permitidas).
• Thus a provocative question can be: to what extent, in order to preserve its proper effect, can a text be altered without violating the equivalence in reference?
• Given that stories are embedded in this way [micro and macro-propositions], to what extent are translators entitled to change a surface story in order to preserve a deep one?

SOURCE VS. TARGET

• Discute vários casos de domesticação vs. estrangeirização ao longo do capítulo.
• As has been said, translation is always a shift, not between two languages but between two cultures – or two encyclopaedias. A translator must take into account rules that are not strictly linguistic but, broadly speaking, cultural.
• As a matter of fact the same happens when we read a text which is centuries old. Steiner, in the first chapter of his After Babel,5 shows very well how certain texts of Shakespeare and Jane Austen are not fully comprehensible to a contemporary English reader who does not have an understanding of the vocabulary and the cultural background of their authors.
• I repeat that such a severe criterion [by Schleiermacher] perhaps holds for translation from ancient or remote literatures, but that it does not hold for modern texts. To choose a target- or source-oriented direction is, once again, a matter of negotiation to be decided at every sentence.
• das Fremde de Humboldt, sentimento de estranhamento proposital causado pela tradução, diferente de Fremdheit, que é uma escolha de tradução que parece um erro.

TO SEE THINGS IN TEXTS

• Nada muito útil aqui. Comenta os problemas de tradução que certas técnicas narrativas, como ecfrases (descrições dramáticas de imagens ou pinturas), double coding (citações veladas) e hipotiposes (descrição de cenas por meio de cores intensas), causam. O fio é o mesmo, negociação de acordo com o sentido do texto.

FROM REWORDING TO TRANSLATING SUBSTANCE

• Discute a categoria de intratradução de Jakobson.
• Fala da questão das diferentes línguas quando traduzidas gerarem textos mais ou menos longos, linguistic substances abaixo.
• Afirma:
• In cases of rewording, like definition or paraphrase or inference, where the content is interpreted in a more detailed way, we can say that:
• LS1/C1 → LS2/C1a where C1a > C1
• A Linguistic Substance1 that conveys a Content1 is transformed into a Linguistic Substance2 that conveys a Content1a where Content1a is > than Content1 (and I use > not in a strictly logical sense but as shorthand in order to say ‘the same content but more detailed’, as when I defined cocaine as an alkaloid).
• In elementary processes of translation (for instance, by satisfactorily translating I am eating a piece of bread as Sto mangiando un pezzo di pane or Je suis en train de manger un morceau de pain) a Linguistic Substance1 that conveys a Content1 is transformed into a Linguistic Substance2 that aims at conveying the same Content1
• LS1/C1 → LS2/C1
• Em poesia, substâncias extralinguísticas também entram na equação.
• This encourages me to say that every translation proper has an aesthetic or poetic aspect. If to interpret always means to respect the spirit (allow me this metaphor) of a text, to translate means to respect also its body.6
• Naturally this duty of respect becomes mandatory in every text with an aesthetic aim. But we can say that, from the translation of the Casio manual to the translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a continuum of possibilities of respecting the substance.
• We are here facing the phenomenon of the so-called horizon of the translator.15 [Nota 15: cita Even-Zohar] Each translation is received within the framework (or ‘the horizon’) of literary conventions that inevitably influence the choices of the translator.

FROM SUBSTANCE TO MATTER

• Substance: There is the properly linguistic substance, but it is conveyed and supported by many suprasegmental elements such as tone of voice, pitch, the rhythm and speed of the utterance and so on.
• Continuum or matter: There is the properly linguistic substance, but it is conveyed and supported by many suprasegmental elements such as tone of voice, pitch, the rhythm and speed of the utterance and so on. 
• Anyway, what characterises all those interpretations is the fact that the interpretant belongs to a different semiotic system from the interpretandum, and that their difference is due to the fact that their substance is produced by the segmentation of a different continuum or matter. If I recite Hamlet in Italian I change the form and the substance of the expression, but I remain within the boundaries of the same continuum or matter (sounds produced by a human throat). If on the contrary I represent Hamlet killing Polonius in a painting I have changed the expression matter.
• [...] a translator has always to tame, in some way, his or her ‘creative’ impetus.

A CONCLUSION ON PERFECT LANGUAGES AND COLOURS

• In many of the most notable projects for mechanical translation there exists a notion of a parameter language, which shares many of the characteristics of a perfect language. There must exist, it is argued, a tertium comparationis, which might allow us to shift from an expression in language Alpha to an expression in language Beta by deciding that both are equivalent to an expression of a mental language Gamma. If such a tertium comparationis really existed, it would be a perfect language; if it did not exist, it would remain a mere postulate on which every translation ought to depend.
• [...] in order to realise that the sentences Io ti amo, Je t’aime, I love you, Ich liebe dich, Te amo express the same proposition, we ought to be able to express that constant proposition in a sort of mental language common to every culture and independent of the single tongues. Such a mental language would meet the requirements of that Perfect or Adamic or Universal Language that so many have dreamt of over the centuries [...]
• But such a solution cannot avoid the classical objection of the Third Man. If, in order to translate a sentence A, expressed in a language Alpha, into a sentence B, expressed in a language Beta (and to say that B is a correct translation of A, and is similar in meaning to A) one must pass through the mental language Gamma, then one is obliged first of all to decide in which way A and B are similar in meaning to a sentence X in Gamma. But, to decide this, one requires a new language Delta, and so on ad infinitum.

• I am not saying that it is impossible to isolate, for two different sentences A and B in two different languages, a proposition X that expresses the same content as A and B. Such a proposition can be found (and made perceptible as a sentence in any third language, be it formalised or not) and it would be a reasonable interpretation of both A and B. What I am trying to say is that such a proposition will not be the parameter for establishing a similarity in meaning between A and B, as if such a similarity existed in a sort of Platonic world before the process of translation was started. The recognised similarity will rather be the final result of a successful act of translation.
• Um linguagem perfeita resolveria esse problema, mas as coisas que poderiam ser expressadas por ela não poderiam ser traduzidas para a língua alvo.
• One way out of this dilemma is to assume, as certain authors have recently done, that translation is a matter to be resolved entirely within the destination (or target) language, according to the context. This means that it is within the framework of the target language that all the semantic and syntactic problems posed by the source-text must be resolved. This is a solution that takes us outside the problem of perfect languages, or of a tertium comparationis, for it implies that we need to understand expressions formed according to the genius of the source language and to invent a ‘satisfying’ paraphrase according to the genius of the target language. Yet how are we to establish what the criteria of ‘satisfaction’ should be?
• If different linguistic systems still look mutually incommensurable, they remain mutually comparable. [Isto pode ser feito com instrumentos de comparação (metalinguagem), que são formas de partir de signos conhecidos para chegar aos desconhecidos, ou seja, explicar um termo sem equivalente em outra língua. Isso leva a duas possibilidades:]
• Existe uma forma universal de segmentação do continuum que é confundida pelas línguas ou existe um "núcleo duro do ser" ou "linhas de resistência" do continuum que permitem a descrição de alguns atos em todas as línguas.
• Após um estudo de caso com cores, Eco conclui: o continuum pode ser segmentado de maneiras diferentes, não existe uma linguagem universal (pelo menos para cores) mas isso não impossibilita a tradução por meio da comparação possibilitada por uma metalinguagem.
• This is what I have tried to say, more or less, in the course of this book. Faithfulness is not a method which results in an acceptable translation. It is the decision to believe that translation is possible, it is our engagement in isolating what is for us the deep sense of a text, and it is the goodwill that prods us to negotiate the best solution for every line. Among the synonyms of faithfulness the word exactitude does not exist. Instead there is loyalty, devotion, allegiance, piety.