Grammatical transformations in translation.

Grammatical transformations (on the sentence level) as translation techniques.

Word-for-word translation until we come to very rare cases (very simple short sentences) is impossible. In the course of translation in order to achieve translation equivalence we have to resort to different grammatical and lexical changes, which are called transformations. They can be of 4 types:

Transposition

Replacement

Addition

Omission

This classification is arbitrary, not precise, because as far as translation goes we can’t find any of the transformations in is pure form. They are usually combined with one another.

1) Transposition - it’s a change in the order of linguistic elements, which are words, phrases, clauses and sentences. Most often it is connected with the notions of theme and rheme: *A boy came in – Вошелмальчик

Within a complex sentence the same tendency is observed in Russian. So the first place is occupied by the part of a sentence which most logically precedes the second, while in English the position of both clauses though not quite fixed is for the most part governed by existing syntactical rules. In fact the main clause precedes the subordinate one, and this often causes a change in the order of clauses in translation.

*He trembled as he looked up. – Взглянувнаверх, онзадрожал.

*You goin’ to court this morning? – Said Jim. We have strolled over. – Мыподошли.“Выпойдетесегоднявсуд?” – спросилДжим.

The transposition of the sentence elements is sometimes called sentence restructuring, because the sentence is getting restructured in the process of translation. This restructuring consists in changing syntactic functions of words in a sentence.

2) Replacement - This is a very important transformation, and I can affect any kind of linguistic units: word forms, parts of speech, sentence elements, types of syntactic relations, sentence types etc.

*The struggles of the Indian people in all parts of the US” – борьба

*A novel about lives of common people” – ожизни

*She is a very good dancer.” – Хорошотанцует

Addition & omission

Addition & omission here is caused by various factors, which are need or have no use for lexical incompleteness. That means that certain word groups or sentences don’t give enough information or the lack of information sometimes depends on the insufficiency of the context or peculiarities of the language. Thus in English in many cases words, which are omitted, can be easily restored by the context. In Russian their actual presence is a necessity.

*payclaim – требованиеоповышенииЗ./платы

*gun license – разрешение на ношение оружия

*oil talk – переговоры о ценах на нефть

*State-financed” = financed by state

*US-made” = made in US

There are certain rules that every translator should observe.

Verbs can be substituted by nouns & vice versa. These substitutions are based upon 2 principles.

1. The translation must be adequate & transparent.

2. The translation must be precise & the economy should be observed.

Text as a translation unit.

Singling out and defining a unit of translation is a problem widely discussed in Translation Studies?

According to R. Bell, a unit of translation is the smallest segment of a source language text which can be translated, as a whole, in isolation from other segments (as small as possible and as large as is necessary). Should we consider a word as a translation unit? Though there exists the notion of a word-for-word translation, the word can hardly be taken for a translation unit. First of all, this is because word borders are not always clear, especially in English. Sometimes a compound word is written in one element, sometimes it is hyphenated, or the two stems are written separately as a phrase: e.g., moonlight, fire-light, candle light. On the other hand, in oral speech it is difficult to single out separate words because they tend to fuse with each other into inseparable complexes: [‘wud3э 'ko:lim?] – According to the stress, there should be two words, while in written speech we can see four words: Would you call him?

Furthermore, it is impossible to consider a phrase (word combination) as a translation unit, because its boundaries are also vague.

Thus, it is not a language unit that should be considered in translation, but a discourse (speech) unit. A translation unit is a group of words united in speech by their meaning, rhythm and melody, i.e. it is a syntagm, or rhythmic and notional segment of speech.

This definition of the unit of translation is process-oriented. If considered from a product-oriented point of view, it can be defined as the target-text unit that can be mapped onto a source-text unit.