El presente artículo se ocupa de estudiar el problema de la equivalencia desde la perspectiva de la teoría de la traducción, y las posibles soluciones que puede dársele a esta cuestiónThis article is devoted to the study of the problem of equivalence in translation theory, and to the different possibilities available to find a solutio

García Landa, Mariano

This article is devoted to the study of the problem of equivalence in translation theory, and to the different possibilities available to find a solutionEl presente artículo se ocupa de estudiar el problema de la equivalencia desde la perspectiva de la teoría de la traducción, y las posibles soluciones que puede dársele a esta cuestió

García-Landa, Mariano

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Translation Theory and the Problem of Equivalence

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Hermēneus. Revista de Traducción e Interpretación Núm. 2 - Año 2000TRANSLATION THEORY AND THE PROBLEM OF EQUIVALENCEMariano GARCÍA-LANDAIntérprete independienteDoctor en Traducción, Sorbonne Paris IIIEmail: glanda@compuserve.comA theory  is  an  ensemble  of  concepts  which  explains  a  part  of  reality.  Theories  are  not necessary but they are very useful.  Mankind has lived for thousands of years  without knowing physics but it is useful to know physics, you can drive cars and have electricity and computers and telephones. Medicine men have cured or killed humans for thousands of years but it is useful to have hospitals and laboratories and drugs and all that the medical science has created, you can live longer and better. People have translated for thousands of years, nowadays half the planet is busy translating what the other half says. The XXth century is being called many names, the best name is the "century of translation". Never before in the course of human history, have so many translated the words of so many.  But believe or not, we still  have no theory of translation,  no science of translation although thousands of pages are being written about particular aspects of the translation activity. Practitioners, teachers and clients, we all live with wrong ideas about what translating is. Millions of people still believe that there is such a thing as a literal translation. And they pay for literal translations and then they pay again for a rewriting into journalistic language of that literal translation. We need a science to know that all translations must come already "rewritten", because all professional translations are made, not in the abstract, not in the void, but for somebody, for the professor of translations, for a revisor, for the client, preferably for a reader or a group of readers. We need a science that tells us that you can only translate for your reader, for the people we are going to read your translation,  like any other writer.  We need a science but there is no such a science.  Much  is  written  on  translation,  sometimes  useful  even  interesting,  but  there  is  no translation theory on sight as Sandra Halverston, of the University of Bergen, writes in her article "The Concept of Equivalence in Translation Studies: Much ado about Something" , published in "Target 9:2.", a very serious review. It is the most intelligent observation written on translation in the last  50 years.  Sandra Halverston says  that  none of the things which claim nowadays  to be theories can explain equivalence in translation. And, therefore, they are not theories of translation.The  problem  with  equivalence  is  this.  We  know  that  equivalence  is  the  real  thing  in translation, that there is no translation if there is no equivalence between the original text and the translated text. And we know of course that equivalence exists, that is not the real problem. The real problem is to explain how. A translation theory should do exactly that as its main task. It has to explain many other secondary things but to explain equivalence is the first  and most important thing.- 1 -Hermēneus. Revista de Traducción e Interpretación Núm. 2 - Año 2000I propose to explain equivalence in the following two theoretical moves:First move: let  us consider translating as another way of speaking.  Explanation: there are many ways of speaking, many "language games", as Wittgenstein would say: we speak to explain, to cheat, to convince, to impress, to win votes, or we speak to say again what somebody has just said in another language and that is translating. This is our first move. And included in this first move is the revelation that speaking is using sign systems to produce and convey messages, and that therefore,  as  Montaigne  wrote,  to  write  is  another  way of  speaking.  There  are  three  ways  of speaking: talking orally, talking to yourself and talking to a piece of paper. That is included in our first move.Second  move:  Speaking  is  using  a  sign  system to  produce  speech  perceptions  using  the possibilities of perceptual systems. Explanation: My perceptual system allows me to hear noises and also to hear noises which are being modulated in such a way that they become "signs". A sign is a noise  which  forces  me  to  think,  not  of  itself,  but  of  absent  things.  Sign  systems  (also  called 'languages')  are,  therefore,  perceptual  systems.  PAVLOV,  the  man  with  the  salivating  dog, remember? calls them, second degree signals. Let us call them "social perceptual systems". And this is the main tenet of our second move: to speak is to use social perceptual sign chains (which come from sign systems) to produce second degree perceptions, which are different from the sign chains. This is the heart of our theory. People produce perceptions when they speak. Speaking is producing perceptions with sign chains. But perceptions are different from the signals which produce them. Therefore, speech perceptions produced with sign chains in speech acts are different from these sign chains. That is why we can produce the same perceptions with different signs of the same sign systems. We can say that our sign systems are built in such a way that the same perception can be produced with different sign chains. This the principle of repeatability enunciated by Paul Ricoeur in  his  book  Interpretation  Theory:  Discourse  and  the  Surplus  of  Meaning  (Texas  Christian University Press, 1976).Now we can construct a theory of translation by simply saying : translating is to speak again to  re-produce  the  same  perceptions  with  a  given  sign  system  that  somebody  has  previously produced with signs of another sign system. It is as simple as that.  Now we have a conceptual system which allows us to explain equivalence as the identity of two speech perceptions produced with different sign structures.Please note that in this summing up of the theory,  we never use words like "meaning" or "sentences" or "utterances" or " languages". We go beyond linguistics to a territory where there is only people speaking, that is, producing perceptions. This is not a linguistic theory, it is a perceptual theory of speech.The rest of the theory consists of developing a model of the speech act which shows how speech perceptions are produced. Let us call it the First Speech Act. The model describe how some one, the Speaker, has a Speech Perception which he wants to transmit to somebody else, the Hearer, and he does so by producing a series of sign chains in a social field integrated by three systems, the system of signs, the system of knowledge and the system of social rules. The Hearer understands what the Speaker is trying to say and this means that he, the Hearer, produces a Speech Perception which has to be identical to the Speech Perception the Speaker wanted to convey. There must be identity,  otherwise there  is  no comprehension.  Now, the facts  of  social  life  shows that  society - 2 -Hermēneus. Revista de Traducción e Interpretación Núm. 2 - Año 2000functions,  therefore there is  comprehension,  and therefore there must  be identity between what people say and what people understand. It is useless and a bit silly, a waste of time really, to pretend for a moment that there is no possibility of comprehension. There are of course misunderstandings but  they  are  elucidated.  Speech  comprehension  is  not  made  out  of  incommunicable  subjective experiences. True, natural perceptions are private experiences in all animal species, except in our species because we have language (sign systems) which allow us to discuss whether what you have seen or heard is the same as what I have heard or seen. We share experiences and that is why they become public property.  The same applies, only more so, to speech perceptions. They are what, among others, Searle 95 calls "objectivized subjective experiences".The main thing is that there must be perceptual identity between what I mean and what you understand. Can you deny, my dear reader, that you are getting my point right now? Identity is communication. No identity, no communication. And if there is identity between what I say and what you understand, than there is identity between what that Speaker or Writer says and what the interpreter or translator understand and what they resay and what their clients understand. There can be no doubt about it. How to explain it?We just did. We try it again.First Speech Act: The Speaker/Author speaks to say something (Speech Perception 1 = SP1) and this something is understood by the Interpreter/Translator who produce a Speech Perception 2 which is identical to SP1. Allow me to write this in shorthand to see clearly what I mean:(1) SP2 = SP1Let us call (1) the principle of identity or of comprehension in normal speech.Second Speech Act: the interpreter/translator opens his mouth or his keyboard to resay SP2 (what they have understood, which is equal to SP1) using another sign system and addressing a public  who  produced  a  SP3.  If  SP3  is  equal  to  SP1  there  is  "translation",  that  is,  there  is communication between people using different sign systems.(2) SP3 = SP1Let us call (2) the principle of identity or of communication in translation theory.Translation  theory allows us  to  see translation  as  the relationship  of  two Speech Acts  in different sign systems which share the same Speech Perceptions.This is the first stone of translation theory. On this stone one can build many things. Without it there is no theory. Let me finish with an anecdote. I developed this theory for the first time in my Doctoral Sorbonne thesis in 1978 but the first time it was presented to the public was in the Mons Interpreters School in 1979. Since then I have tried to develop its possibilities in several articles. See my bibliography below. This brief declaration is a development of a presentation made at the recent World Congress of the International Translators Federation, held in the Mons Interpreters' School in August 1999.- 3 -Hermēneus. Revista de Traducción e Interpretación Núm. 2 - Año 2000BIBLIOGRAPHY OF M. GARCÍA-LANDA’S ARTICLES ON TRANSLATION THEORY1) La "theorie  du sens", theorie de la traduction et  base de son enseignement,  in University of Ottawa Quarterly, Vol.51, Nº 3, July-September 1981, 418-4372) Práctica y Teoría de la interpretación,  in Cuadernos de Traducción e Interpetación,  E.U.T.1., Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Num. 4, 1984,31503)  Análisis  del  concepto  de  traducción,  in  Traduçao  e  Communicãção,  Revista  Brasileira  de Tradutores, Sao-Paulo, n.4, julio 1984, 59-704)  La  teoría  de  la  traducción  y  la  psicología  experimental  de  los  procesos  de  percepción  del lenguaje, in Estudios de Psicologia, Universidad de Madrid, nº 19-20, 1985, 173-1935) L'oralité de la traduction orale, in META, Vol.30, Nº l, mars 1985, 30-366) A General Theory of Translation, in META, September 1990.7) "Notes on the Epistemology of Translation Theory", in META, in September 95.8)  A  THEORETICAL  FRAMEWORK  FOR  ORAL  AND  WRITTEN  TRANSLATION RESEARCH, en The Interpreters' Newsletter, Nº 8, 1998.9) In Preparation: A book entitled "General Theory of Translation".GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHYSEARLE 95: John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press 1996.SANDRA HALVERSTON, The Concept of Equivalence in Translation Studies: Much Ado About Something, in TARGET 9:2,  TARGET, International Journal of Translation Studies,  Vol 9:2, 1997, John Benjamins Publishing Company- 4 -

Translation Theory and the Problem of Equivalence

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