Abstract:
Intercultural Empathy and Egocentric/Other-Centred
Translating
Patrick Boylan, University of Rome III
(Italy) <>
The
full paper will appear here when published / La versione estesa
apparirà qui quando sarà pubblicata.
"All communication is translation," as Steiner
reminds us (in Katan 1999). For even when we explain an event to
someone using our native language, we end up translating (or
transposing) one order of representation into another — turning
mental imagery into verbal concepts — in function of our
interlocutor's capacity to understand.
If this is so, then
interlingual translation may be termed the systematic practice of
intercultural communication. The present paper adopts just such a
view and uses it to answer four key questions raised in the
Conference announcement:
1. "How are we to understand
and theorise the experiential role of translation in Language and
Intercultural Communication (henceforth, LAIC)?"
2. "How
should our pedagogic practices develop so as to reflect new
theories?"
3. "To what extent does our new theorising
impact on notions of the nature, quality and accuracy of a
translation as traditionally dealt with?"
4. "Should
translation be a core feature of a LAIC curriculum? What form should
it take?"
Briefly put:
1. The act of
translation is not the transposition of lexical items or pragmatic
units (speech acts) but rather a transposition of existential states.
Good translators "live" a source text as a communicative
event by introjecting the cultural values of the epoch or milieu in
which the text was framed. Like actors, they acquire a new identity
with every text they live. Translating, then, is the search for
functionally homologous "roles" (existential states) in a
target culture -- after, of course, having first introjected the
cultural background and expectancies of the target public. In
rendering this second existential state in the target language,
translators create a text capable of producing effects functionally
homologous to the original, i.e. a "translation" (Boylan
1999).
It is clear then that, at its core, the act of
translating has nothing to do with "words" or the
production of texts: it is simply the search for functionally
homologous existential states within the target culture. Once
translators have found such states, they then become authors, not
translators: their activity closely parallels the creative writing
process that the author of the original text undertook within the
framework of the source culture.
2. The pedagogical
consequences of this view of the translation process are two: 1.
translators must learn languages, not just as formal systems of
representation, but in particular as modes of being; 2. translators
must learn to be creative writers in the target language they intend
to use (generally their native tongue). Both kinds of knowledge may
be termed empathetic. Translation -- as all intercultural
communication -- is founded on a displacement of the self through
empathy.
Traditional university programs for translators
generally fail to teach either knowledge: they teach L2 linguistics
and pragmatics instead of L2 ethnolinguistics and participant
observation; moreover, they take for granted that students are
naturally competent as creative writers in their native tongue and
need no training (rarely the case). See Byram & Fleming.
1998.
3. The specific kind of education received tends to
produce a specific kind of translator. Traditional programs,
emphasising language-as-a-conceptual-system and neglecting creative
writing, tend to produce egocentric translators, i.e. translators
unable to displace themselves into the cultures of the source text
and the target public. Egocentric translators reproduce their own
experience of a text from within their native cultural framework;
moreover, they use words the way they (and not necessarily their
readers) react to them. Little wonder that they communicate mostly
themselves.
Instead, the pedagogy indicated in point 2. can
help students become other-centred translators, capable of the double
transformation of consciousness described in point 1. This enables
them to communicate the otherness of texts to readers with
backgrounds other than theirs.
4. Learning to translate
professionally constitutes a speciality discipline and should NOT be
a core feature of a LAIC curriculum: it simply requires too much
time to become creative in the L1 and to acquire the tools of the
trade (how to create glossaries, how to define clients' needs, etc.).
On the other hand, a course focused on the core of the translation
process -- the equating of existential states -- could be quite
useful in a LAIC program. One such course, conducted at the
University of Rome III, is described in this paper. Students narrate
(in an L2) culturally-connotated real-life events. This means
translating their "Italian" experiences into words and
imagery that create a homologous effect on a native speaker of
English. Success is measured by testing if the observed reactions of
native speakers of English, upon hearing or reading the target text,
are similar to those of Italians when hearing or reading the original
culturally-marked event narrated in the source text.
Bibliography
P. Boylan. 1999. "La
traduzione in un corso di laurea in Lingue" [Translation in a
University Language Degree Course]. In: P. Pierini (Ed.), L'atto del
Tradurre, Rome: Bulzoni, pp. 129-151.
M. Byram & M.
Fleming. 1998. Language Learning in an Intercultural Perspective:
Approaches through drama and ethnography. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
D. Katan. 1999. Translating Cultures: An
Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators. Manchester:
St. Jerome Publishing.