PART ONE: PERSPECTIVES ON TRANSLATION

1. TRANSLATION AS A CULTURAL PRODUCT AND PROCESS

1.1. Around the notion of (un)translatability

Translation is commonly understood as transferring the meaning of a stretch of discourse (a whole text or parts/s of it) from one language into another. It is frequently regarded as tantamount to equivalence, similarity, sameness, or correspondence. As Peter Newman acknowledges,

Most people can recognise a translation grosso modo - particularly if they find enough corresponding features between the target and the source language texts. But asked to define translation, they hesitate, and many dictionaries, which offer synonyms for the verb (render, rephrase, reword, transmit, re-express, transmute, transmogrify, interpret, convert, transform, transpose, express, transfer, run) and add ‘from one language into another’ do not state what is being translated; other authorities make use of expressions such as ‘equivalent’, ‘equivalent message’, ‘equivalent textual material’, ‘similar’, ‘like’, ‘parallel’, ‘equal’, ‘identical’, ‘comparable’, ‘synonymous’, ‘analogous’ (Newmark 1988: 5 )

Translation is a complex term, designating several processes: comprehension, conversion and rearticulation, as well as several products: the source text (the text written in its original language) and the target text (the text resulted from its transfer into a meaningful textual unit in the chosen foreign language). As a process, translation has its instrumental dimension, which grants it the status of a craft, consisting of the endeavour to replace a text written in a source language by an equivalent text in a target language.

As Newmark emphasises (1988: 7), such a craft unavoidably entails partial loss of meaning brought about by the lexical, grammatical, and cultural differences existing between any two languages. The extent to which such a loss occurs vacillates between two poles of a continuum: overtranslation (excessive detail) and undertranslation (excessive generalisation and vagueness). The higher the cultural overlap between the source language (henceforth SL) and the target language (henceforth TL), the less likely the loss, and the more predictable the ‘untranslatability’, i.e. the inability to bridge the gulfs between the SL and the TL (Newmark 1988: 25).

According to Hewson and Martin (1991: 16-18) the century-old vacillation between translatability and untranslatability has engendered several myths in relation to translation, viewed as a (dis)connector between humankind and divinity. Hence, the emergence of several myths in relation to “talking into languages”:1) The myth of the Edenic state was one of unconfined expression and comprehension,

the consequence of human beings experiencing ceaseless bliss owing to unmediated correspondence with the surrounding world and with the Creative Logos. There was no discontinuity or disruption between conception, perception and designation, all of which constituted facets of the same reality.

2) The Tower of Babel myth undermined the Edenic harmony-laden representation of signification and coherence. Once humans decided to “make a name” for themselves

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instead of abiding by the Lord’s sacred Logos, the Tower’s builders espoused verticality in discourse by initiating an ascendant interrogation, symbolised by the unfinished, unfinishable Tower itself, which aroused God’s wrath in the form of His descendant punitive response. The original all-pervasivenes of meaningfulness was consequently dismantled and humans needed to resort to the institution of translation in order to maintain meaningfulness in their lives.3) As a consequence of Christ’s Resurrection and the new bridge of love established between humankind and divinity via redemption, the Pentecost revealed the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles, presently endowed with the gift of ‘speaking in tongues’ in order to spread the Holy Writ all over the world.

As a product, translation cannot transcend language boundaries and cannot ignore the comparative and adjustable facets of cross-cultural interrogations. Translation surpasses the boundaries of interpretation and rephrasal and becomes an intricate process of mediation, liable to constant culture-rooted and context-dependent contestation. Translation is not be confined to language alone, since as an increasingly widespread cultural phenomenon, it has become essentially communicational and cross-cultural:

Semioticians, literary scholars, and specialists in translation studies realize that […] traditional text strategies do not necessarily reduce written texts to their language component. The semiotics of space and gesture plays a key role in translated communication as soon as the representation of a real or possible world is involved (Lambert 1997: 63)

As Hewson and Martin (19??: 23) point out, translation, both as a product and as a process, needs to be anchored in a System of Representation which mediates the transposition and rearticulation of a text from a source language (SL) into a target language (TL) in terms of the socially construed reality shaped by the target community’s perception of reality. Since the act of translation undeniably involves more than language, it is intrinsically culture-bound. Any translation is an activity which involves “a kind of verbal, but never strictly verbal communication,” while being “norm-bound and culture-bound” (Lambert 1997: 60). To be a successful translation, any re-presentation or transposition needs to measure up to specific culture-related requirements.

Translation implies the conversion between several axiological (value-related) and referential (related to object identification in the real world) systems. Translation is meant to simultaneously bridge gaps between cultures and emphasise existing differences. While acknowledging the tension between cultures, translation is intended to function as an operator of coherence and a facilitator of clarification.

Intertextual competence smoothes the mediation between two cultural products whose construction and reception may vary according to potentially incongruent social and cultural parameters used by the respective language users:

No two languages exhibit identical systems of organizing symbols into meaningful expression. The basic principles of translation in a receptor language can be the equivalent of the model in the <source language>“ (Nida 1964: 27)

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Along the same line of thought, Newmark underlines that historic instances of wide scale translations occur when two essential conditions are abided by:1) the acquiring culture is assimilative and receptive to new ideas2) there is continuous contact between the two languages.

History provides a plethora of such instances. The first traces of translation date back as far as 3,000 BC, during the Egyptian Old Kingdom, in the area of the First Cataract, Elephantine, where inscriptions in two languages were encountered. Starting with the year 300 BC, the Romans took over a multitude of elements from the Greek culture, which entailed massive transposition of Greek cultural concepts into the Roman culture. To begin with the 12th century AD, Western Europe came into contact with the Islamic culture in Moorish Spain and after the collapse of the Moorish supremacy, the Toledo School of translators familiarised European scholars with Arabic versions of Greek scientists and philosophers (Gentzler 1993). Later on, Luther’s translation of the Bible (1522) largely contributed to the foundations of modern German, while the British version of King James’s Bible (1611) had a seminal influence on the evolution of the English language and literature.

Any efficient and accomplished translator needs to achieve well-formedness and accuracy, adequacy of register and style, compliance with socio-cultural norms of expression during the complex transfer of cultural aspects between languages and cultures, in an endeavour to “reproduc[e] the total dynamic character of the communication” (Nida 1964: 120). As a consequence, any translation theory relying on cross-cultural variety and flexibility needs to elucidate the controversial notion of ‘equivalence’, which is to be discussed in the following section.

1.2. Translation and equivalence

Equivalence is commonly viewed as “the replacement of a representation of a text in one language by a representation of an equivalent text in a second language” (Bell 1991: 20). Lefevere (1992: 100) recommends that translators should accept the relativity of translation practices and strategies meant to enable them to bridge the discrepancy between the SL image and the TL image that the target audience is to process and comprehend. As Christiane Nord (20011: 92) emphasises, generalisation is unconceivable with successful translations, which are anchored in cultural specificity and expectations on the part of a specific community of receptors:

This is why there will never be a common translation code for all cultures. What we can achieve, though, is agreement on a general theory of translation which allows for specific variations when applied to particular cultures, taking into account the culture-specific conventions of translation and the expectations the members of a particular culture have of a translated text.

Nida (1964: 165) makes a further distinction by stating that every aspect of translation could either be formally or dynamically equivalent. One could thus speak of formal/lexical equivalence on the one hand, and of cognitive /dynamic equivalence on the other. In the case of formal equivalence the focus is on the message itself regarding both form and content. The basic premise is that the message in the receptor or target language

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(TL) should match as closely as possible the different elements in the source language. This approach is often applied to the translation of poetry.

At first sight, the main purpose of translation is to faithfully convey the meaning of the original text. Translation, nevertheless, surpasses the confinements of adequacy in deciphering the original text:

It would be wrong to think, however, that the response of the receptors in the second language is merely in terms of comprehension of the information, for communication is not merely informative. It must also be expressive and imperative if it is to serve the principal purposes of communication” (Nida 1964: 24).

By contrast, the dynamic translation approach relies on the principle of equivalent effect. In this type of translation

one is not so concerned with matching the receptor-language message with the source-language message, but with the dynamic relationship, that the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message (Nida 1964: 159).

This type of translation pursues the following goals: achieving naturalness of expression, and enabling the receptor to assimilate modes of behaviour relevant within the context of their own culture. Nida opinionates that all translation should be concerned with the response of the receptor. To substantiate his view, Nida resorts to Leonard Foster’s definition of a good translation as “one which fulfils the same purpose in the new language as the original did in the language in which it was written” (Foster in Nida 1964: 162). A successful translation is destined to capture the sense of the original rather than its mere words and could only be regarded as a successful piece of communication provided the receptor processes and internalises it effortlessly and appropriately. SL words, phrases and textual chunks with all their denotations and connotations would have to be transposed or re-created in such a way in the target text that the response of the TL receivers should – ideally - be equivalent or at least similar to the response of SL receivers. In compliance with Nida’s approach, if a translation can meet the following basic requirements:

(1) making sense; (2) conveying the spirit and manner of the original; (3) having a fluent and coherent form of expression; (4) arousing a similar response on the part of the receptor, some conflict or tension between form and content will unavoidably be generated (Nida 1964: 164). In most situations, the translator will have to decide which aspects of the source text they ought to be transferred equivalently to the target text. Such choices will determine which type of translation will be used, namely a formal or dynamic equivalent translation.

The issue of untranslatability occurs when absolute equivalence rather than relative equivalence is required. “If one is to insist that translation must involve no loss of

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information whatsoever, then obviously not only translating but all communication is impossible.” (Nida 1960: 13)

Following Nida, designating equivalence in translation theory has varied from one theorist to another. Each language has a preference for specific lexical and functional devices, preferably utilised to convey meanings and associated impressions that are rather implied than literally stated in the text. Such devices are not necessarily alike in the SL and TL. The duty of the translator in this case is multifold; first s/he needs to read and comprehend what the source text says literally, then clarify what is implied by certain utterances in specific contexts - such as rhetorical questions, understatements, instances of irony, semantic repetition and parallelism, figurative language, emphasis as a carrier of emotional overtones - in order to engage in the combined transmission of the literal as well as the implied meanings. To this purpose, the translator commits him-herself to the risky tasks of rewording, adding, omitting, providing footnotes, even rephrasing certain textual chunks in order to convey the intended sense of the original.

Newmark (1988: 10) borrows the term ‘dynamic equivalence’ from Nida and describes it as “the principle of similar or equivalent response or effect, or of functional equivalence”. In Newmark’s view, equivalent aspects include the content as well as the form, while supplying a more concise definition of a dynamically equivalent translation: “ the criterion by which the effectiveness and therefore, the value of the translation…is to be assessed” (Newmark 1988: 48). In a nutshell, a translation that attempts to be dynamically equivalent is based on the principle of bringing about an equivalent effect on the target receptor. Newmark’s view is endorsed by scholars such as Snell-Nornby (1988) and Gentzler (1993) who argue that a translation should convey the meaning of the original while being faithful to the “dynamics” of the original message. Their approach differs from Nida’s in that it looks at the textual dynamics in terms of ‘naturalness’ of language use and expected ease of comprehension on the part of the TL reader rather than in terms of similitude in TL reader’s response, mostly regarded as an attitudinal issue. A translation which transfers the meaning and the dynamics of the original text is to be regarded as a faithful translation. Such a translation should pursue two objectives:

(1) make a natural use of the linguistic structures of the TL

(2) enable the recipients of the translation understand the message with ease.

To acquire further insight into the dynamics of translation and equivalence, several perspectives on the relation between language, meaning and mental representations might prove useful.

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2. THEORIES OF MEANING

Transposition of meaning from SL into TL is likely to be achieved by reviewing several insights into contemporary theories of meaning. Starting from Stainton’s definition of language: “Language is a system of symbols which we know and use”(Stainton 1996: 4), contemporary research on meaning comprises three main families of theories regarding the relationship between word and world, between verbal meaning and encyclopedic or background knowledge, namely:1) THING theories of meaning which view language exclusively as a system of

symbols2) IDEA theories of meaning, which lay emphasis on knowledge, on language being

known via the comprehenders’ mental representations3) USE theories of meaning, which analyse language in its use, or otherwise put,

language as social action, involving a social content, participants with specific social positions and allegiances, pursuing certain communicative goals in compliance with the interlocutors’ communicative intentions (Stainton 1996)

In the lines to come, I will enlarge upon the main tenets of the afore-mentioned families of theories of meaning

2.1. ‘Thing’ Theories of Meaning

The basic claim of ‘thing’ theories of meaning is that meaningfulness exclusively lies in the relations between symbols and extra-linguistic objects of various kinds. Such theories roughly fall into two categories: ‘direct’ and ‘mediated’ theories of meaning.

2.1.1. Direct Reference Theories

This set of theories claim that any word corresponds to an external object and there is nothing mediating between the word and the thing referred to. Otherwise formulated, the meaning of a name is its bearer. The denotation of any expression thus becomes the thing named, i.e. the thing which the expression designates or stands for. For such theories to function, each meaningful expression needs being assigned a specific referent or extra-linguistic object.

Being focused on the denotative value of words and their combinations, ‘thing’ theories assess sentences in terms of their denoting truth values. The truth value of a sentence is indicated by its correspondence with extra-linguistic facts and its providing correct descriptions of states of affairs in the world. Such sentential truths are of an empirical nature and researchers need to benefit from access to world facts in order to verify whether a statement is true or not. Such verifications are meant to reveal the so-called truth conditions satisfying the assessment of a sentence as true or false. Furthermore, such truth conditions need to be confronted with the facts meant to enable researchers to establish the truth or falsehood of a specific sentence.

Springing out of logical positivism, such ‘verificationist theories’ professed by the Vienna Circle philosophers (such as Carnap, Schlick, Russell) revolve around the claim that “A significant assertion is one which may be tested for truth or falsity by means of experience”. Consequently, if experience is the source of meaning, sentences whose

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meaning cannot be directly verified by appeal to experience are likely to be considered meaningless.

Opponents of ‘direct’ theories of meaning question the validity of true/false as well as the meaningful/meaningless dichotomies, by invoking examples such as “The king of France is bald”. Such a sentence is not to be labelled as either true or false, since failure to identify a referent corresponding to the expression ‘the King of France’ impeaches researchers to state whether the predication ‘is bald’ holds true for a non-identifiable referent.

2.1.2. ‘Mediated reference’ theories

Such theories go beyond the univocal correspondence between a sign and the referent denoted by that sign and highlight the correspondence between signs, objects and mental representations, revolving around Frege’s distinction between sense and reference. According to Frege, the sense of a term is the concept/definition a speaker grasps and mentally activates when understanding what the term means. By contrast, the reference of a term indicates the object or set of objects denoted by the term in question. Thus, the sense of the term ‘cat’ is the idea of ‘cattiness’ as mentally represented by a comprehender of that term. The reference of the term ‘cat’ encompasses the total amount of domestic felines satisfying the description of the term.

Terms may differ in sense despite their referring to the same object. For instance, ‘Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘Norma Jean Baker’ DO NOT have the same sense although they refer to the same person, the famous American movie star in the fifties. A sentence like “It is common knowledge that Marylyn Monroe acted in <Some Like it Hot>“ is a perfectly intelligible sentence, while “It is common knowledge that Norma Jean Baker acted in <Some Like it Hot>“ fails to be comprehensible unless it is placed in a biographical context. One goes to a music store to buy a CD by Eminem, but when the hip-hop star was subpoenaed in court he was addressed not by his stage name, but by his ID name, Marshall Mathers. Consequently, Eminem and Marshall Mathers refer to the same person, but display different senses, one designating his stage persona, the other his legal persona. Hence, senses are regarded as the multifarious ways people envisage objects, the way in which objects are presented. In Frege’s words, senses provide ‘the manner and context of presentation’ of the object.

Further examples may comprise the following expressions:

Shakespeare/Old Will The Swan of Avon/the author of ‘Romeo and Juliet’Michael Jackson/The King of Pop/the pedophiliac megastarBrad Pitt/the sexiest man on the planet/Jennifer Aniston’s ex/ Angelina’s lovey-dovey

which convincingly point out that such expressions may designate the same referent yet express a different sense. Consequently, if the sense of a term is specified by means of a description, then the reference of a term is whatever satisfies the description granting sense to the term. Sense, then, mediates between. a sign and what the sign refers to.

There are also senses which do not denote a specific existing entity or, otherwise put, lack a real world referent, such as: unicorn, leprechaun, hobbit, the, but, the largest

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number in the world, the person who will invent the cure against AIDS, the likely winner of the next Oscar award.

To sum up, mediated reference theories view words in relation to sense rather than reference, starting from the premise that sense always determines reference.

2.2. ‘Idea’ theories of meaning

This family of theories argue in favour of linguistic meaning emerging from the pairing of expressions with ‘something in the mind’: the meaning of a symbol is what one mentally grasps in understanding it. ‘Idea’ theories are underlain by the unquestionable assumption that meaning initially derives from ‘inside the mind’, rather than from entities ‘in the world’.

There are three main versions of ‘IDEA’ theories of meaning:a) the mental image version, which maintains that meanings derive from ‘pictures in the head’b) the intention-based theory, according to which meanings derive from speakers’ intentions (Grice), i.e. from commonsensical intentional or propositional attitude states (believing, hoping, desiring).c) the LOT version, which defines meaning as derivable and expressible in terms of a “language of thought”In the lines to come, I shall briefly present the main tenets of the three above-mentioned versions.

2.2.1. The mental image version

An early mentalistic view on meaning could be attributed to David Hume, who in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, defines words as ‘expressive ideas’, while claiming that what is meant by an idea is similar to a complex of remembered sensations or perceptions, all of which are constitutive of mental images. For instance, mental images associated with pork chop encounters collectively engender the meaning of the word ‘pork chop’.

A strikingly radical version of mentalistic views on language is the one set forth by Edward Bradford Titchener, who claimed that there was a fixed image to correspond to each and every word. For instance, according to Titchener, a cow is mentally represented as ‘a longuish rectangle with a certain facial expression, a sort of exaggerated pout”. The word ‘meaning’ itself is to be visualised as “the blue-grey tip of a kind of scoop which has a bit of yellow about it”. Obviously, with such a radical imagistic theory, the question inevitably arises whether words like ‘seven’ and ‘from’ are meaningless.

Such a question only signals a series of flaws featuring theories exclusively based on mental representations. First and foremost, not all meanings can be captured by mental images. More often than not, certain associations between words and mental meanings are not only idiosyncratic but also culture-specific: a Muslim or a vegetarian have different mental representations of ‘pork chop’ than a regular meat eater. When hearing or reading the word ‘cat, each individual is likely to instantiate a specific mental image is specific: some have in mind a cat that is curled up, others a cat that is asleep, others a cat

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licking milk out of a saucer. It is impossible to mentally represent a cat leaving aside its colour, in other words, to visualise ‘the’ cat, one that is not particularly black, white or striped. Some mental images might not be the result of habitual interaction with the referent in question, but the consequence of some accidental association. For instance, a child’s perception of a raging bull is fright-inducing, unlike a matador’s or a farmer’s visualisation of the same animal. Unlike meaning, images may not always correspond to classes of things. Thus, it is hard to suggest some generally shared mental representations of words designating classes such as ‘vegetables’, or ‘weapons’, taking into account that such representations are always culture-specific: thus, in those communities where potatoes are staple foods, people are more likely to instantiate an image of potatoes as representative for the class ‘vegetables’ rather than an image of an ‘asparagus’ or a ‘beetroot’. In pre-industrial communities, knives or bows and arrows are more likely to activate the mental image of salient exemplars in the category ‘weapons’ than in western societies, where guns and even nuclear or biochemical weapons tend to be highly representative of this class (Stainton 1996, Saaed 1996)

The main argument brought forth by opponents of mentalistic theories is that ideas cannot resemble real life entities: one may only naturally wonder how an idea could be similar to a cat.

2.2.2. The intention-based theory of meaning

The main proponent of an intention-based theory of meaning is the philosopher Paul Grice, who distinguishes between ‘natural’ meaning, arising from a causal or logical relation between two signs and ‘non-natural’ meaning, a matter of social convention, bearing no factive or causal-logical relation between signs. The two sentences below illustrate the notion of natural meaning

a) Those spots mean measlesb) The recent budget means that we shall have a hard year

In example a) certain spots on a person’s skin are indicative of a certain disease, i.e. enable a physician to diagnose a specific ailment. In example b) a presumably low budget entails (logically) certain financial hardships for a group of persons in the year to follow.On the contrary, no cause-effect relationship can be established in relation to the sentences below:a) Those three rings on the bell mean that the bus is fullb) That remark, ‘Smith couldn’t get on without his trouble and strife’ meant that Smith

found his wife indispensable.In example a), the ring of the bell is a conventional way of signalling to passengers

that the bus is full and no further passengers are allowed to board it. The second example above, uses a conventional linguistic device, namely rhyming slang, in order to designate the referent ‘ Smith’s wife’.

As Grice emphasises, non-natural or conventional linguistic meaning is ‘cashed out’ in terms of speaker’s meaning, which, in its turn is ‘cashed out’ in terms of speaker’s intentions. By intention Grice and his followers define whatever a speaker means beyond or addition to what s/he explicitly says, what that speaker endeavours to convey to a specific hearer within a particular context of verbal exchange. In the Gricean tradition,

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meanings arise from pairing utterances with intentions. For instance, it has long become a matter of social and linguistic convention that an utterance of the kind ‘I’m terribly sorry for what I said yesterday’ is intended as an apology, while an utterance such as ‘ Thank you for your invaluable help’ in intended and is understood to count as an expression of gratitude on the part of the speaker (Stainton 1996, Saaed 1996)

2.2.3. ‘LOT’ theories of meaning

Supporters of ‘LOT’ (acronym for ‘language of thought’) theories of meaning regard public words and sentences as meaningful because they are paired with internal words and sentences, more precisely with certain expressions of the language of thought, also known as mentalese or LOT. Fodor views mental representations as ideas in the head, more likely to be sentence-like than picture-like. In his outlook, when one learns the meaning of an expression in a public language, one translates it into their LOT. A public symbol is meaningful if it corresponds to some expression in mentalese. If the public symbol in question fails to trigger a mental, sentence-like expression, it is to be judged as meaningless. Mentalists insist on the human need to constantly operate pairing between mental states and public symbols. For instance, whoever understands the word ‘cat’ must have mentally comprehended and encapsulated the ‘cattiness’, i.e. the essential feature in a cat in a sentence-like representation.

2.3. The use theory of meaning

‘Use’ theories of meaning belong to the province of pragmatics, a branch of philosophy and linguistics which analyses meaning as neither an exclusively mental representation nor as a relation between a symbol (word, phrase, sentence, text) and a worldly entity designated by it. The etymology of ‘pragmatics’ indicates its focus on language as social action, since in Greek ‘pragma’ is the equivalent of practice or action. Assessing language and linguistic expressions – from mere words to complex texts or combinations of texts – in terms of their use and social function entails situating language within specific contexts and envisaging who the users of the language are. In other words, pragmatics situates language within wider social and cultural settings and behavioural patterns and, while laying heavy stress on the context of verbal exchanges, it deals with the way people exploit words and combinations of words, with the actions actual users perform in the act of communication. The meaning of a linguistic expression is given by its use, under certain circumstances, where interlocutors nourish specific intentions and pursue specific goals. For instance, the meaning of “I’m sorry’ reveals how such a linguistic expression is employed, for what purpose, under what circumstances. Its meaning resides in what the expression does for a speaker and hearer alike, under a specific linguistic and extra-linguistic context (Nehrlich and Clarke 1996)

According to Wittgenstein, language is used in a multiplicity of ways and language users engage in a multitude of ‘language-games’, such as: giving orders, formulating invitations, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying, describing objects or persons, narrating events, speculating about happenings, making assumptions, emitting and hypotheses, fabricating lies, play-acting, singing, concocting and guessing riddles, telling jokes, and last but not least, translating from one language into another.

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2.3.1. Saying and doing as communicative acts

Contrary to truth-conditional or verificationist views on language, which equate meaning with truth and test it with reference to objects or states of affairs, pragmatic accounts regard meaning as context-dependent with reference to the possible networks of actions and the potential effects such actions may generate. Pragmatists such as Austin or Strawson disclaim the tenet that a linguistic expression solely serve to provide denotations and to stimulate researchers to check whether such expression correspond to certain states-of-affairs in the world or to certain mental representations entertained by language users. In Strawson’s view, meaning exceeds the limitations of reference and is not solely used to describe the world. Hence, Strawson’s ‘descriptive fallacy’: Since description is not the only purpose of using language, lack of reference does not necessarily entail meaninglessness (Stainton 1996, Saaed 1996) For instance, none of us has identified leprechaun or unicorns in the real world, yet we can understand a story whose protagonist is one of these fictional creatures. Nobody has a face to face encounter with Batman, yet all narratives about Batman make sense to readers, listeners and viewers of all ages.

In his seminal book, “How to do things with words’ (1962), Austin developed his pragmatic theory of language in order to overcome problems previously encountered in a truth-conditional or verificationist theories. Austin concluded that one of the century-old enigmas of philosophy – “how to bridge the gap between language and reality” - is in some cases a bogus one. This problem arises only when we regard description (or representation) as the only function of language, overlooking instances where language and reality actually collapse into one ‘deed’ accomplished with and through language. To simplify Austin’s position, instead of saying something a speaker may be doing something or be performing an action: ask questions, give order or commands, get married, baptize, excommunicate, appoint somebody in a certain social or professional position, make bets, invitations, offers and promises, congratulate, warn, apologise, threaten, curse, protest, toast, thank and bless.

As Saaed (1996: 112) emphasises, part of the meaning of an uttered expression resides in ‘its intended social function’. If interlocutors endeavour to employ language realistically and efficiently, they need to consider the goals usually pursued by uttering certain linguistic expressions within specific cultural communities, the intentions underlying the selection of such utterances over others as well as the manner in which these uses are signalled.

Austin regards each utterance as an act of communication or a speech act. Pragmatics is the science that analyses speech acts as major units of human communication by engaging along two directions of investigation:a) pairing linguistic expressions with speech acts (henceforth SAs) or action typesb) specifying the context that allows a certain utterance to lead to the actual performance

of the intended action.

2.3.2. Interactivity and context-dependence

Interactivity involves the simultaneous contribution of at least two interlocutors (who become in turn speaker and respectively hearer) to the successful performance of a speech act. For instance, a bet comes into existence only if two or more parties interact. If

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I say ‘ I bet you 5 $ he doesn’t get elected’, a bet is nor performed unless my addressee makes some response like OK or ‘You’re on’.

Other SAs – such as questions or greetings – may not automatically trigger explicit responses yet they however set up the expectation for some potential interactive response. Failure to respond to a question or a greeting (silence) is likely to generate certain types of compensatory behaviour: The speaker may repeat the question or even inquire why the interlocutor is snubbing them by their refusal to talk (Thomas 1995).

Within the framework of linguistic anthropology, an utterance can only become “intelligible when it is placed within its context of situation, or, otherwise put, “ the situation in which words are uttered can never be passed over as irrelevant to the linguistic expression” (Malinowski 1922 in Nehrlich and Clarke 1996). Enlarging this premise, researchers are likely to embark upon the investigation of language in the context of culture. To understand language involves understanding the culture as well as the social practices of the community of speakers in question. Meaning emerges, is clearly conveyed and disambiguated only in specific contexts of situation, which need to be defined as the site where social, cultural and psychological elements of communal life become inextricably interwoven.

Along Malinowski’s line of argument, Firth redefined context of situation as the relevant verbal and non-verbal actions of the participants, the relevant objects and the effect of the verbal action. all of which needs to be judged as embedded in a variety of wider social frameworks. Consequently, meaning relations need to be rearticulated as multidimensional and functional sets of relations between words or word combinations and the contexts of their occurrence. Word meaning is not contained in the word, it is not the ‘essence’ of the word, but lies in the use of a word in a situation. Words are not receptacles of thought, but the other way round: it is thought that depends on language and ultimately on the actions performed/mable by means of language.

With translation especially, situating words or phrases or texts within specific contexts is of primary importance. When transferring meaning from a source language into a target language, the local context of an utterance and implicitly of a speech act needs to be correctly identified in order to avoid mistranslation. Utterances may imply one reading in one specific contextual location and a totally different one in a distinct configuration of spacio-temporal elements, For instance, a very simple utterance such as “ Are you going to buy this car?” may trigger, among a variety of other responses, something like “Are you nuts?”. Such a reply could means opposite things in different contexts: If the car is a bargain and meets with the buyer’s expectations, it will obviously means “Isn’t it obvious I will?”. If the car is a write-out and the required price is outrageously high, it will mean exactly the opposite: i.e. “Isn’t it obvious I won’t?”If it is April 1, and one asks “Who are you trying to kid?” this may count as an honest question, decodable as “Who is the target of your mystification?” On any other context, “Who are you trying to kid?’ could be perceived as an expression of disbelief. (You’re not kidding anyone but yourself)

A recurrent mistake done by translators is failure to identify the context meant to elucidate whether the meaning of an utterance is literal or figurative. In a context where participants complain of the harsh winter and biting frost, an utterance such as “You’ve got cold feet” could simply be a constative remark or maybe an expression of thoughtfulness and sympathy. In the context of a wedding which is about to take place,

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telling the groom ‘you’ve got cold feet’ will indicate the groom’ experiencing pre-marital nervousness, even fright.

3. TRANSLATING AND CONCEPTUALISINGING WORDS

Translators need to bear in mind the wider context of language as social interaction and as storer and triggerer of mental representations. Concomitantly, they need to constantly assess the fluctuating role words play in the process of translating and in the translated text as a socioculturally situated product. Consequently, some perspectives on the way words may be decomposed or combined would prove enlightening. In addition, word usage and choice is equally indicative of complex mental processes such as categorisation, which translators need not overlook.

3.1. Word decomposition vs. word association

Psycholinguistic surveys reveal that using language for everyday communicative purposes involves the human capacity to store words in a mental dictionary or lexicon, out of which words are to be retrieved in order to comprehend and express meaningful chunks. (Aitchinson 1996). The question arises as to how humans can select and use the appropriate word and word combinations out of a tremendously vast number of entries in order to achieve optimally successful comprehension. There are two basic assumptions as to the way humans correlate suitable words with suitable expressed meanings:

1) the ‘fixed’ meaning assumption and 2) the ‘fuzzy’ meaning assumption.

According to the “ fixed meaning’ assumption, words have fixed, stable, cut-and-dried meanings since there exists a basic meaning for each word which individuals should strive to attain. The semantic entries in one’s mental lexicon should be clearly delineated since they need to encapsulate the essence of the entities designated by words (the ‘cattiness’ in ‘cat’ or the ‘redness’ in ‘red’). Reaching such essences is facilitated by the comprehenders’ ability to recognize essential properties of designated objects, or, otherwise put, to establish a set of ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’, a checklist of features imperiously needed to fully and faithfully encompass the meaning of a word. A good illustrative example would be the word ‘square’, which could easily and accurately be described in terms of the following set of necessary and sufficient conditions:a. a closed, flat figureb. having four sidesc. all sides are equal in lengthd. all interior angles are equal

The above-listed conditions can also be called ‘conditions of criteriality’ or ‘criterial attributes’, since they enumerate a cluster of criteria according to which a comprehender judges whether something belongs to the category ‘square’ or not. Obviously, this can be extended to less known entities such as arsenic, platinum, serotonin, magma, bipolar syndrome, etc., if comprehenders rely on the premise that words do have a fixed meaning, also regarded as their ‘core’ meaning, yet only experts know it. Ordinary people need to consult such experts and credit their definitions if they intend to probe into the ‘essential’ nature of specific entities.

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In opposition to the traditional, Aristotelian ‘fixed meaning’ assumption, a large number of linguists and psychologists have supported the ‘fuzzy meaning’ assumption. In compliance with this widely spread theory, words cannot be assigned a fixed meaning since most of them tend to have vague boundaries and fuzzy edges: “Words have often been called slippery customers, and many scholars have been distressed by their tendency to shift their meanings and slide out from under any simple definition.”(Aitchinson 1996).

Such theories regard words as fluid, fluctuant, prone to change and to unexpected combinations, on the verge of constantly acquiring new meanings or shedding old ones. Because of their ‘fuzzy edges’, words are more likely NOT to satisfy neat sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. Consequently, they can be easier to classify according to prototypical members of a certain category (e.g. birds or mammals) or to prototypical features defining representatives of that category (‘laying eggs’ with birds versus ‘delivering cubs’ with mammals’).

3.1.1. Prototypes

Promoters of ‘prototype’ theory (Rosch 1975, Mervis and Rosch 1975, Tsohatsidis et al 1990, Ungerer and Schmid 1996) resort to two major arguments in contesting traditional Aristotelian classifications:

1) For most natural categories, it is impossible to draw up a set of necessary and sufficient conditions

2) The members of a category do not all have equal status. Certain members, the prototypical members, have a privileged status as they enjoy full membership of the category. Less prototypical or more marginal members are assigned a lesser degree of membership, depending on how closely they resemble the prototype.

Prototype theorists claim that the conceptual representation of a given category is lodged in a prototype, which combines in a single mental entity the attributes of the most typical category members. Categories are internally structured, i.e. some members have a higher degree of typicality, while others are regarded as less representative, marginal members of the category. Boundaries between categories are fuzzy or ill-defined rather than clear-cut. Intercategorial boundaries change according to the context in which perceivers operate categorisation (Rosch 1975, Roth and Bruce 1995: 31-42).

Since typicality is central to the way we represent everyday categories, many categories have an internal structure, i.e. they are not homogenous in member typicality or representativeness. Thus, studies carried out by Rosch and collaborators have pointed out that fruits such as apple, banana or orange are ‘fruitier’ than olives or figs. Typicality differs with each individual perception of a category: children who have never been fed avocado or lime will obviously not mention such fruits as ‘good’ representatives of the class ‘fruits’. In addition, typicality undergoes cross-cultural variation: in Mediterranean countries, oranges rank among the commonest fruits, while in Romania apples, pears or grapes tend to come to mind instantly since people grow them widely and use them for a variety of purposes (eating them raw, making jam, producing alcoholic beverages). In

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African countries bananas are widespread and likely to be regarded the ‘fruitiest’ fruit around.

Degrees of membership or typicality ratings depend on the degree of resemblance of certain members with the prototypical members, as well as on the number of shared prototypical attributes. If ‘good’ examples share many attributes with other members of the same category and are maximally different from members of other categories, ‘bad’ or ‘marginal’ examples share only few attributes with members of the same category, yet may possess several attributes belonging to members of other categories. Thus, Alsatians or Dalmatians tend to be more representative for the category ‘dogs’ in countries where dogs are basically regarded as strong, loyal watchdogs rather than playful. With pet lovers, who keep dogs in their apartments rather than outdoors, ‘lap dogs’ such as Pekinese or even ‘Chihuahuas’ may be labelled as typical. On the contrary, hunters will be unlikely to regard lap dogs as doggy, preferring greyhounds or retrievers.

Three main variants of Rosch’s prototype theory have been proposed:1. The typical feature model, which claims that there is a list of typical properties that enable comprehenders to distinguish one category from others2. The exemplar model, which asserts that for each category, there are representations given by specific exemplars that a comprehender has encountered3. Mixed approaches, sustaining that categories are represented by a combination of typical features and exemplar information.

According to the typical feature model, properties of objects are ‘weighed’ in terms of their typicality and consequently assigned ‘a cue validity’ “which indicates how characteristically the feature is associated with the concept” (Roth and Bruce 1995: 43). Typical category members possess those features with the highest cue validity (Rosch and Mervis 1975, Rosch 1975, Roth and Bruce 1995). Thus, ‘sweet’ or ‘juicy’ are high cue validity features when typicality of members of the class ‘fruits’ is assessed. With the class of vegetables, ‘sweet’ and ‘juicy’ are, obviously, low cue validity features. While being a low cue validity feature with fruits, ‘crunchy’ is a high cue validity feature with a class such as bakeries or groceries.

The exemplar model variant (Rosch 1978) states that category representation consists of the representations an individual has encountered and stored in their memory. A study carried out by Rosch and collaborators indicated that among American subjects, the gun is regarded as the most typical exemplar for the category ‘weaponry’. Obviously, before the invention of gunpowder, the bow and arrow or even the boulder would have provided typical weapons. In a nuclear context, A-bombs and other sophisticated means of mass destruction might be judged as highly representative.

Mixed approaches combine feature-based information and exemplar information in achieving categorisation (Roth and Bruce 1995). In rural cultures, ‘good’ animals are those that provide food: hens (since they lay eggs), pigs (since they get slaughtered before Christmas) and cows (since they are milked daily). In urban communities, animal lovers tend to label as ‘good’ animals specific pets they used to interact with in their childhood or certain familiar animals with which they interact in a friendly way. Hunters may use feature-based information (animals that are easy/hard to hunt, dangerous animals, animals whose fur is valuable) as well as exemplar information (the huge grizzly

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bear they shot on a certain hunting expedition, the ferocious lion they confronted during a safari).

Such exemplifications point out that the selection of certain prototypical attributes or exemplars instead of others depends on the perceiver’s existing categorisation system as well as on the context of categorisation. Context can alter the significance of attributes regarded as relevant for a certain category or highlight attributes that are not commonly associated with representative exemplars of a specific category (Ungerer and Schmid 1996, Hinton 2000). For instance, the same person may be labelled as a ‘too young person’ when it comes to drinking spirits or having a driving licence while at the same time they are considered to be ‘too old’ to start ballet classes or gymnastics. A stone may be an object of scientific investigation for a geologist, a potential weapon for a person who is being attacked and has no gun or knife on them, a means to break an entrance for a burglar.

Apart from undergoing individual differentiation, categorisation is also flexible with respect to the goal the categoriser pursues as well as the context in which categorisation occurs. Thus, taxonomic categories, which arise from (directly or culturally acquired) experience, are to be contrasted with goal-directed categories (Barsalou 1982), which arise from functional necessities, such as: ‘ways to run away from the Mafia’ or ‘things you pack in rainy weather’. The most typical members of taxonomic categories are those with the most representative properties. The most typical members of goal-directed categories are those which best satisfy the functional purpose described by the category. For a lame person a stick is a device meant to enable them to walk better, for a shepherd it is a tool meant to goad the flock, for an abusive parent an instrument to punish an allegedly disobedient child.

As a concluding remark, the meaning of words is more often than not contextually-defined, thus espousing blurred boundaries and abounding in vagueness rather than in accuracy. As Aitchinson puts it: “Words are stitched together in one’s mind like pieces on a patchwork quilt. The shape and size of the patches would differ from language to language, but within each language any particular patch could be defined with reference to those around it.” (1996: 29). In places patches overlap considerably, in places there are bare spots left. The most obvious instance of overlapping is synonymy, where the meanings of words such as chase and pursue, freedom and liberty or buy and purchase get almost completely juxtaposed. On the other hand, most languages display inexplicable gaps: if ‘corpse’ is the dead counterpart of a human or animal body, there is no word designating ‘dead plant’. Overlapping frequently occurs with groups of words that dictionaries are far from placing under the same entry. For instance, hog, sow, piglet share the common features ‘ pigs’, sow, hen, princess are all ‘female’, while piglet, chick, princeling indicates that all referents are ‘youngsters’.

3.1.2. Semantic components and semantic links

Overlaps, lexical gaps and restrictions in relation to word combinations have been explored from two fundamental viewpoints:A) the ‘atomic globule’ viewpoint, revolving around the fundamental claim that words

are decomposable into smaller constituents, called ‘semantic components’ or ‘semantic primitives’, which need to be regarded as ‘meaning atoms’. Such atoms lie

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in a ‘semantic pool’ out of which each word in a specific language extracts the semantic primitives that make up its definable meaning.

B) the ‘cobweb’ viewpoint, a theory that argues in favour of words being meaningful, comprehensible and recognizable because of the links word users build between them.

3.1.2.1. Componential analysis

The most articulate version of the ‘atomic globulae’ viewpoint is the so-called COMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS (henceforth CA) (Kempson 1977), a clear and economical method meant to provide systematic word description. CA assumes that words do not have unitary meanings, but they are clusters of semantic components, which can be decomposed into a number of constitutive elements. Humans treat words like jigsaw puzzles, assembling and disassembling them into semantic primitives. Semantic primitives are universal constructs in terms of which lexical items such as bachelor, widower, divorcee can be constructed. Consequently, supporters of CA maintain that there should be a stock of semantic primitives in each person’s mental lexicon, ready to be accessed and appropriately employed. Below there is an exemplification of the semantic field ‘human beings’, in terms of the presence and absence of specific semantic primitives such as ‘+-adult’, ‘+-male’, etc.

e.g.

ROOT MEANING: humans

human adult male

man + + +

woman + + -

boy + - +

girl + - -

It is claimed by those linguists who postulate the existence of semantic components that such components are not lexical items themselves. They are not part of a specific language but items pertaining to a meta-language, a universal inventory used in particular ways in individual languages’. Each language selects specific combinations of primitives out of the common pool accessible to the entire range of natural languages. Each language consequently chooses a root meaning to be shred by all words making up a specific semantic field and the semantic distinguishers, i.e. the features that enable language comprehenders to operate differences between the respective words. An CA description of ‘bakery products’ and ‘domestic hoofed animals’ are provided below:

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ROOT MEANING: bakery products

sweet raised yeast soft individual

cake + + - + +/-cookie + +/- - +/- +biscuit +/- +/- - +- +cracker - - - - +roll +/- + + + +bun +/- + + + +bread - + + + -

ROOT MEANING: domestic hoofed animals

bovine equine adult male

bull + - + +cow + - + -calf + - - +/-stallion - + + +mare - + + -colt - + - +filly - + - -

As a circular method, which makes use of ‘semantic universals’, CA aligns itself with Chomskyan generative grammars in that it claims that semantic components belong to a language-neutral stock of features, from which each language may choose a sub-set of features, combine and arrange them so as to yield contrasting vocabularies. As a result, semantic components required in the description of languages can be divided into two types:a) those which are universal, required in the description of all human languagesb) those which are language-specific, used only for the description of certain particular

language(s).In this respect, CA received the most scathing criticism from linguistic anthropologists, who maintain that most languages are strikingly dissimilar, because so are the cultures they reflect and consolidate via linguistic practices. Therefore, languages cannot not be using an identical stock of semantic primitives. irrespective of such justified attacks, CA proves certain advantages for the analyst:1) it provides an economical and convenient explanation for why certain words overlap

in meaning.e.g. mother, mare, aunt, waitress all share the semantic feature ‘+ female’

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hop, skip, run, jump all share the semantic feature ‘ + move2) it is congruent with other scientific approaches endeavouring to explain the way the

world appears to work (chemical substances are usually decomposed into more basic elements)

3) it simplifies explanations supplied in order to elucidate word meaning. Without resorting to CA descriptions, words are defined in terms of other words in an endless chain. Definitions typically apply in chains and only stop when reaching a primitive basis , in the case of CA semantic primitives)Yet, CA completely ignores language being anchored in social and psychological

reality and adjusting to the changes the latter undergo and unavoidably extend on to the domain of language. In addition, psychological surveys have pointed out that there is no evidence that humans actually split words into atomic globulae in their mind. People analyse words, but simple identification of mere features does not involve decomposing the word down to a finite set of features.

3.1.2.2. ‘Cobweb’ theories

By contrast, ‘cobweb’ theorists of word meaning envisage the mental lexicon as a network, an interconnected system of meaningful items, a gigantic cobweb. (Aitchinson 1996). According to Palmer, the meaning of words is contextually defined in terms of syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic relations:

By SYNTAGMATIC is meant the relationship that a linguistic element has with other elements in the stretch of language in which it occurs, while by PARADIGMATIC is meant the relationship it has with elements with which it may be replaced or substituted (Palmer 1976: 93)

A word is not defined in isolation but via the other words whose selection is acceptable in a given language: “You know a word by the company it keeps” (Firth in Palmer 1976: 94). Company or collocation is part of a word’s meaning, since co-occurrence creates ‘mutual expectancy of words’Most automatic associations within such cobwebs are generated by habit of use :e.g. bread and butter, moon and stars, envelope and stampsFrequent principles of association include:1) Clusters of words related to the same topic are stored together, particularly items

belonging to the same semantic field. Thus, needle is generally NOT associated to poker or dagger (pointed objects) but to the semantic field of sewing : thread, pins, eye, sew.

2) Converses, i.e. words that designate referents whose existence is mutually implied: e.g. husband /wife: parent/child; employer/employee; abuser/victim; doctor/patient; plaintiff/defendant

3) Opposites, such as: big/small; present/absent; dark/bright;handmade/machinemade;thick/thin; moist/dry; sea/land.

Frequent types of links comprise:

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1) coordination, which entails combinations of words either frequently combining at the same level of detail or ‘freezing’ into fixed order pairs, sometimes called quantitative hendiadys:

e.g. salt and pepper, knife and fork, bride and groom, cloaks and daggers proper and peculiar; part and parcel, every nook and cranny, left and righ, lord and master, home and abroad, sink or swim..2) synonymy e.g. starved / hungry; mean/vile; tight-fisted/stingy; clever/bright; wise/sagacious3) collocation e.g. salt water, butterfly net, bright red, homesick, street vendor, fashion victim, drug addict, rape survivor.Words that are more often than not automatically associated may lead to cliches:e.g. striking contrast, overwhelming majority, agonising decision, astronomically expensive, blissfully ignorant, stark naked, wide awakeWord combinations rely, among other things, on the human capacity to organise background knowledge in the form of hierarchical relations between entities.

3.2. Word association and the organisation of knowledge

Tversky (1990) argues that there are two fundamental ways of organising knowledge which are universal across cultures:1) division into kinds : taxonomy/hyponymy2) division into parts : partonymy/meronymy

3.2.1. Hyponymy

Hyponymy, also called class inclusion involves:

- the including term or the superordinate/hyperonym- the included term or the subordinate/hyponym

One may think of the pet stretched on the rug as a ‘dog’, a ‘terrier’ or ‘ ‘Scotch terrier, since dogs are regarded as superordinate to terriers, and terriers as superordinate to Scotch terriers – and bull terriers. Keeping in mind the bigger picture, ‘dogs’ are seen as subordinate to ‘mammals’ and ‘mammals’ as subordinate to ‘animals’ (Ungerer-Schmid 1996).

The principle underlying such hierarchies is class-inclusion, which regards the superordinate class as inclusive of all items on the subordinate level. If in science we deal with detailed classifications/taxonomies (a classical example is that of Charles Linnaeus in the 18th century), folk categorizations simplify categorisations down to three main levels of specificity: superordinate – generic/basic level – subordinate level. In most communicative situations, words designating entities included in the generic or basic level are preferred: I ‘d rather call the pet on the rug my dog than my Scotch terrier or my mammal. Describing a traffic accident would rather start with “ 2 cars crashed into each other” rather than “two vehicles” or “ a BMW and a Volvo”. Generic or basic terms are also learned first by children. At the basic level, similarities between subordinates are easily perceived. So are dissimilarities with other categories of the basic level type. It is the level where the largest amount of information can be obtained with the least cognitive

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effort: human comprehenders are ‘cognitive misers’ and seek for cognitive economy, since they strive to achieve the most informative result against the least cognitive cost (Tversky 1990) and contains the largest number of ‘typical’ instances (most prototypical exemplars). Moreover, it is hard to delineate ‘a common shape ‘ for the superordinate categories (e.g. fruit, vehicle), which, with young children are memorised much later than basic level categories. In addition, superordinate categories borrow traits from the basic levels, thus achieving parasitic categorisation.

Sometimes, suitable superordinates do not always come to mind readily (Aitchinson 1996). Thus, hail, rain, snow: fall under the category precipitation only in weather forecasts. How do we group cough, sneeze :? As noises indicating respiratory discomfort? Or under what denomination could we group bathtub, basin :? As bathroom fixtures or rather sanitary fitments?

English speakers frequently tend to use two coordinates to describe a set of items despite the existence of a technically-sounding hyperonym. Thus most speakers tend to say “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” instead of “ Do you have any siblings?”. At dinner one is more likely to ask “Where are the knives and forks?” than “ Where is the cutlery?”

Assigning a superordinate depends on the contextual needs: thus, shoes, slippers, gumboots may be grouped as footwear when organising one’s closet, while gumboots, raincoat, mackintosh may constitute rainwear if the weather requires waterproof outfit.

Psychologists sustain that humans encounter serious comprehension hindrances when endeavouring to refer to subordinate level without having acquired expert knowledge. Only an ornithologist would say “I saw a snowy owl /barn owl/screech owl”. Most people would say, “I saw an owl”. Strollers along green pastures will mention having picked a flower or ‘wild flower’ rather than a ‘daisy’, ‘buttercup’ or’bluebell’ or ‘ dandelion’ or having spotted fish in the river rather than ‘ pike’ or ‘ trout’ or ‘carp’.

Between items included within the same class, there is a relationship of co-hyponymy. All co-hyponyms are incompatible, or mutually exclusive. Thus, Monday cannot be Tuesday or a rose cannot be a tulip: a dog is not a cat and, obviously, a plant is not a metal. Languages are intricate enough to display instances when incompatibility works with certain groups and fails to work with others, more specifically in cases co-hyponyms (partially) overlap. For instance, sincerity and honesty are both virtues but they are neither synonyms nor incompatibles since they overlap; greed and selfishness are both vices but not mutually exclusive. On the other hand, hate and anger are both emotions but they can co-exist with the same experiencer.

3.2.3. Partonomy

MERONYMY or PARTONOMY establishes a relation between parts and their inclusive wholes, starting from the premise that not all parts are graspable or noticeable to the same extent in relation to wholes. Some parts are more salient than others and those are the parts most likely to be mentioned by language users. Among such parts, mention must be made of:a. perceptually salient parts ,i.e. whose appearance or shape cannot be neglected ( the

flatness of a table, the depth of a sink, the roundness of a wheel)

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b. functionally significant parts, i.e. whose function is relevant to human purposes (the seat of the chair, the blade of the saw, the leg of the trousers, the keys of the piano).

Obviously, perceptual salience may be indicative of good/bad functionality, as in the case of a warped table or a crooked fork.

Partonomy and hyponymy are different but complementary modes of investigation. Partonomy is the result of an analytic attitude (top-down investigation), in which a whole is decomposed into parts on the basis of relative integrality. By contrast, hyponymy seems a consequence of a synthetic attitude (a bottom-up enterprise) in which specimens are grouped according to common and distinctive features.

3.3. Lexical relations: contrast and affinity

In order to achieve felicitous translations of texts belonging to various registers and styles, translators need to develop a keen sense of relations of affinity and contrast underlying words and word combinations (Cruse1986). They need to be acquainted with notions such as complementarity, synonymy and antonymy in order to select the lexical items or sequences that best serve the understanding of the SL text and its subsequent transposition into the TL text.

3.3.1. Oppositeness

From Heraclitus to Jung, philosophers have remarked the dichotomous structure of the world as well as the tendency of entities to slip into their opposite states. Many thought-provoking disputes have arisen as to the thin line dividing love and hate, clean from dirty, genius from madness, sublime from ridiculous. Most folk beliefs judge the uniting or reconciling of opposites as a magical performance, an attribute of the Deity.

Lexical opposites paradoxically display simultaneous closeness and distance of the two members: opposites display distance because of their being intuitively perceived as maximally separated, while they equally exhibit closeness given their almost identical distribution or context of occurrence. Opposites typically differ along one single dimension of meaning, the extremities of which they occupy; in respect of all other features they are identical.

Prototypical instances are easily grasped, early learned and widely used, such as : good/bad; large/small; true/false; top/bottom. Yet, most opposites could be labelled as impure, displaying various degrees of oppositeness, since they encapsulate an elementary or prototypical opposition in their meaning. Thus, the opposition dwarf/ giant encapsulates the prototypical opposition small/big, the opposition shot//whisper embeds the binary pair loud/soft, while criticise:praise contain the elementary opposition good/bad to the same extent to which stalactite/stalagmite relies on the up/down opposition.

The so-called peripheral examples are those semantic instances where perfect consensus is not reached and which apply situations where speakers have only two-way choices. Such peripheral examples might include : mother/father (as the only two-way choice a child about to be granted custody may have between two parents within a former nuclear family); town/country (as the only choice one may have as to choosing a

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residence); clergy/ laity (as an only choice in terms of a +-secular lifestyle), gas/ electricity (as the only choice in terms of fuel) or tea/coffee (as the only choice in terms of hot beverages to be served by an air-hostess during a flight)

Conceptually speaking, complementarity is the simplest and purest variety of oppositeness, since a pair of complementaries exhaustively divides a specific conceptual domain into two mutually exclusive compartments, so that whatever does not fall into one of the compartments must necessarily fall into the other. Complementarity excludes the presence of any ‘no man’s land’, since it envisages no possibility for a third term lying between the two complementaries. Conclusive examples are. true/false; dead/alive;open/shut;hit/miss (a target); pass/fail (an exam).With complementary terms, a test that easily applies is the following: “Asserting one term implicitly implies denying the other”. Consequently, John is not dead entails and is entailed by John is alive.Specification such as “under normal circumstances” is needed when comprehenders face dilemmas of the kind: Are vampires or ghosts dead or alive? Are hermaphrodites or transsexuals male or female? How do we explain the acceptance of such expressions as ‘He was more dead than alive”.

3.3.2. Relational opposites : converses

Converses or relational opposites are a cross-culturally significant subclass of opposites, since languages display lexical pairs expressing a relationship between two entities by specifying the direction of one relative to the other along a specific axis. Relational opposition or converseness implies that interchanging the two entities yields logically equivalent sentences.

Basic converses imply a spatial relational opposition as is the case of: above/below; in front of /behind; before/after. Via analogy or metaphorical extension, the following pairs of converses have emerged in the lexis of most languages: ancestor/descendant (A is the ancestor of B is logically equivalent/entails/is entailed by to B is the descendant of A); father/son; husband/wife; master/servant; predator/pray;guest/host;teacher/pupil; doctor/patient; precede/follow; give/receive; bequeath/inherit.

Nevertheless, despite clear-cut mutually exclusive oppositions, most complementary adjectives are not normally gradable, since expressions such as *more married than most?, *a little shut, *moderately female do not make sense. Although certain idioms involving unrealistic oppositions have been assimilated in the common lexis ( more dead than alive, more alive than before, wide open), many entities and/or properties are to be conceptualised in terms of ‘more or less’. Otherwise put, such entities are gradable lexical items and apply to an astounding variety of fields from texture to morality:clean/dirty;smooth/rough;drunk/sober;straight/bent;honest/dishonest, fresh/stale

Such ‘more or less’ lexical items fall into the category ANTONYMS and display the following semantic characteristics:a) They are fully gradable (long/short; fast/slow, easy/difficult;good/bad;hot/cold)b) The members of a pair denote degrees of some variable property (length, speed,

weight, accuracy)

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c) When intensified (by means of adverbs such as very, extremely, highly, utterly, quite), members move along a scale representing degrees of the respective property

d) The two members do not bisect a domain ; there is a range of in-between valuesIt’s long stands in a relation of contrariety (not contradiction) with It’s short since saying something like It’s neither long nor short is not paradoxical. Along the scale ranging from extreme length to extreme brevity, there is an area of in-betweenness called ‘ a pivotal region’. Certain notions (e.g. heat) display a range of lexical terms located on various points along this pivotal region, such as hot tepid lukewarm cold in terms of temperature or scrawny skinny thin slender slim of average weight plump sturdy stout fat overweight humongous in terms of bodily weight.

Conceptualising scales varies widely according to the entities they apply to. For instance, long/short river entails differences measured in miles or kilometres, while long/short eyelashes need high accuracy measurements if literally measured. Isn’t that tall? is understood differently when describing a person than when describing a tree or a building

3.3.3. Synonymy

Synonyms are lexical items whose senses are identical in respect of ‘central’ semantic traits, but differ, if at all, in terms of ‘minor’ or ‘peripheral’ traits. Synonyms must not only manifest a high degree of semantic overlap, they must also have a low degree of implicit contrastiveness. Denying one member is a pair of synonyms (honest:truthful) implicitly denies the other. Synonymy is often signalled by ‘or’/’that is to say’ as in He was fired, that is to say, dismissed.When synonyms are used contrastively, the fact is signalled by ‘more exactly’ or ‘or rather’as in: He was murdered, or rather executed.

Two lexical items are absolute synonyms or ‘cognitive synonyms’ on condition all their contextual relations are identical, Such is the case of mutually interchangeable pairs such as. begin/commence;munch/chew;hate/loathe;scandalous/outrageous whose contextual distribution is identical. Yet, this is not the case with hide/conceal whose contextual distribution may differ as in the example below:Where is he hiding?*Where is he concealing?

Unlike cognitive synonyms, plesionyms designate pairs/groups of only partially overlapping synonyms, since the assertion of one member of the pair/group does not simultaneously trigger denying the othere.g. It wasn’t foggy last Friday – just misty.You did not trash us at badminton – but I admit that you beat us.He is by no means fearless, but he is braveThe loch where we were fishing is not a lake – it’s open to the sea.She isn’t ravishing, but in her way she is pretty

Although two lexical items may display the same semantic traits and may occur within the same distributional context, they may differ with respect to their expressive traits.e.g. daddy/fathermummy/mother

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paw (in the sense of ‘hand’)mug (in the sense of face’)blubber (in the sense of ‘weep’)cat/ pussyvery/jolly (adverb)

All the first terms in the above-listed pairs are indicative of some emotional attitude on the part of the utterer, ranging from endearment to derision. Certain lexical pairs of words, such as horse/nag; car/banger; a smart alec/ a clever chap; mean/ careful with one’s money differ by their embedding evaluative judgements, such as neutral stance, appreciation or deprecation.

The choice of one word within a synonymic range implies subtle knowledge of the collocational restrictions each word may or may not take.. Thus, if fresh may occur with any of the following edible items: fresh milk, fresh eggs, fresh bread, fresh meat, addled only occurs with eggs, sour with milk, rancid with butter or bacon, stale or rotten with meat and mouldy with bread! We say a spoilt child but not a stale child! We say odd jobs and odd numbers, but when expressing their opposites we cannot say even jobs and regular numbers, since the only accepted collocations are regular jobs and even numbers. We describe sore throats and sore losers, but it never crosses our minds to say sore failure instead of pitiable failure or vain attempt. We acknowledge rough talk as well as smooth talk, rough patches (in one’s life) as well as smooth patches, yet the opposite of rough sea is not smooth sea, but quiet sea. We say stiff neck as we say stiff punishment, yet we cannot conceive of any lenient neck as we cannot fancy supple or flexible punishment. One may have a soft voice or a soft spot, yet one can only conceive of harsh voices and not harsh spots. An intelligent person is bright and sharp; an unintelligent person is indeed dim but not blunt, and may be described as thick while a brainy individual is never labeled as thin in terms of their IQ!

Collocations are very strict when it comes to wide range of synonyms delimited by an often fuzzy line, as in the case of verbs designating noises. Thus, wheels screech, while floors creak. Doorbolts click, so do stilettos, but ordinary shoes squeak. Chains rattle and so do certain baby toys, unless they squeak. A sack falls with a thumb on the ground yet a pebble drops into a lake with a plop. The fire may roar, so may a lion. It may also crack so may one’s fingers. The wind howls and so do wolves. Synonyms pertaining to the range of light-emitting verbs also obey strict collocational restrictions: thus, stars twinkle, candles flicker, embers glow, lightning flashes, diamonds dazzle, fireworks sparkle.

Finer distinctions need to be operated at the level of dialectal synonyms : autumn/fall; lift/elevator; glen/valley; wee/small, which implies careful location of the sociotemporal setting of the text and the participants in the textual verbal encounters. Even subtler choices need to be made in terms of register, one of the pitfalls of translation being the choice of a too formal synonym in a colloquial context, or, viceversa, or a slangy word in a text permeated with formality. The synonymous ranges below indicate gradual transition from high formality (right-hand terms) to informality and slangy register (left-hand terms)

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FORMAL <----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------> INFORMAL

decease pass away die perish expire pop off cop it snuff it kick the bucket

croak

urinate pass water

point Percy at the porcelain

spend a penny

wee-wee

pee piss

mentally disturbed

deranged insane crazy nuts nutty fruity barmy bonkers cuckoo having a screw loose

having bats in the attic

3.4. Understanding idioms

Frequent – and hilarious – instances of mistranslation occur when idioms are translated literally. In the TV series “Judging Amy”, a law –infringer was thought to be ‘drawing a buck of the back of his victims”, which was translated as ‘sketching the outline of a goat on the rear side of the victims’. In a series adapted from Dickens’s David Copperfield the expression ‘by hook and by crook’ was translated as ‘with the help of Mr Hook and Mr Crook”. To avoid such gross distortions, a translator needs to be equipped with a keen sense of discrimination between literal and idiomatic expressions.

The question inevitably arises as to what an idiom is. Traditionally, idioms used to be considered to originate in “dead metaphors” (Gibbs 1994:273-175), which, through frequent use and conventionalization, lose both their recognizability and their freshness. Contemporary views, supported by scholars such as Gibbs (1994), claim that idioms still retain much of their initial metaphoricity:

People make sense of idiomatic speech precisely because of their ordinary metaphorical knowledge which provides part of the link between these phrases and their figurative interpretations. There is now much evidence from cognitive linguistics and experimental psychology to support the idea that idiomatic language retains much of its metaphoricity. (Gibbs 1994: 268)

Even if an idiom like spill the beans is a hackneyed metaphor, comprehenders need to resort to metaphorical conceptualization: the mind is a container in which there are secrets, which look like beans, and when one is not careful, the beans may get spilt, i.e. the secrets are revealed. But for this metaphorical inference, we would find it difficult to comprehend and use the idiom.

Idiomatic speech is amply used owing to its suggestiveness, colourfulness and the creative associations it brings to mind. Undeniably, the idiom is likely to activate an image to which the synonymous word does not even come close. An idiom is perhaps not as striking as an expectation-challenging metaphor in a poem, but it is definitely striking and appealing enough for everyday speech not to labelled as dead or frozen. An example given by Gibbs is the students’ slang idioms for vomit: blow chunks, lose one’s lunch, kiss the porcelain god, which may sound more intriguing nowadays than the traditional throw up or toss one’s cookies. In compliance with the context and especially the register,

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there are several idioms for the same literal paraphrase. Thus, to die can be verbalised as follows:

give up the ghost (dated) breathe your last (formal) go the way of all flesh (humorous) meet your maker (humorous) kick the bucket (informal) bite the dust (informal, humorous) push up the daisies (informal, humorous)Such idioms cannot be interchanged without an alteration to their meaning

any more than different synonyms can. I must announce with deep regret that His Majesty has breathed his last. – *His Majesty has kicked the bucket. (in a formal announcement about the monarch’s death on the radio)‘What happened to your pal Joe?’ ‘He kicked the bucket in a bank job.’ *’He breathed his last in a bank job.’ (in a conversation between two robbers about their friend Joe who was shot by the FBI. such a sentence might be acceptable if ironical, but it fails to render the suddenness of the shooting and it belongs to a different register)

Broadly speaking, idioms have been analysed in the light of two major approaches: the compositional and the non-compositional approach (Titone & Connine 1999: 1655-74).

3.4.1. The non-compositional approach to idioms

According to the non-compositional approach (Titone & Connine 1999:1656), idioms are viewed as one single word; they are stored in the lexicon and retrieved similarly to long words, without paying heed to the constitutive parts. Syntactically, idioms behave as one word, e.g. the expression kick the bucket is an intransitive verb, just like its word counterpart die. Idioms have an internal semantic structure. “The individual words in many idioms can be changed without significantly altering the meanings of these phrases” (Gibbs, 1994: 283). Otherwise put, an idiom is not processed as a whole, but its parts are recognizable not only syntactically, as shown above, but also semantically. For instance, in let the cat out of the bag, or spill the beans, cat and beans stand for secret, the object of disclosure. Semantic productivity plays a significant part in idiom usage and comprehension: for instance, the idiom break the ice has been altered to shatter the ice, which means “break down an uncomfortable and stiff social situation flamboyantly in one fell swoop” (Gibbs 1994:283).

Idiomatic meaning is a distributed representation and not a single lexical entry. The overall meaning emerges however not in compliance with the compositional meaning of the parts, but “on the basis of knowledge of the frequency of co-occurrence of idiom parts” (Titone & Connine 1999:1660). For instance, let the cat out of the bag already triggers reveal a secret not because one associates cat with secret and let out with reveal, but because one anticipates the final word which triggers the idiomatic meaning as a whole, based on one’s familiarity with the co-occurrence of these words in the respective idiom. Suspending the literal processing may depend both on the

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compositionality of the idiom and on the context, if the context contradicts the literal meaning. Nevertheless, literal comprehension may still persist in an appropriate context: e.g. The two kids used to fight like cat and dog, literally scratching and biting each other.

Since the non-compositional approach proves too restrictive to satisfactorily explain the syntactic, lexical and semantic behaviour of idioms, the compositional approach has been judged to provide a more flexible insight.

3.4.2. The compositional approach to idioms

The compositional approach classifies idioms into several classes. Nunberg (1978, in Titone & Connine 1999: 1661-1662) proposed classifying idioms according to the extent to which the meaning of the parts contributes to the overall interpretation of the idiom meaning. Such a classification includes: normally decomposable idioms (e.g. work like a dog, where work is used literally), abnormally decomposable idioms (the referents can be identified metaphorically, e.g.

buck in pass the buck), semantically non-decomposable idioms (the meaning of the whole cannot be derived

from the meaning of the parts, e.g. cook somebody.’s goose).Empirical surveys have highlighted (Gibbs and Nayak, 1989, Gibbs and O’Brien, 1989) that decomposable idioms are processed faster than non-decomposable ones. This would suggest that literal meanings facilitate comprehension because they partially overlap with the idiomatic meaning. Moreover, decomposable idioms are rated as more flexible both syntactically and lexically.

However, even with non-decomposable idioms, literal meanings may sometimes constrain an interpretation. Titone and Connine’s (1991:1662) example is kick the bucket, where the semelfactive kick prohibits the continuous form with the die meaning and denotes a sudden event, as opposed to breathe his last, for instance: Henry kicked the bucket in the car crash.? Henry lay kicking the bucket because of his terminal illness. John lay in bed breathing his last.

As pointed out by Gibbs, Nayak and Cutting (1989, in Gibbs 1994:286), certain decomposable idioms are literally ill-formed (e.g. pop the question, since in a literal context the noun question is not a suitable direct object to the verb pop), as opposed to many semantically non-decomposable idioms which are semantically well-formed at the literal level (e.g. chew the fat, give the sack). Empirical studies have emphasised that comprehenders spend less time to understand the ill-formed idioms than the well-formed ones, since, apparently, people only need to assign figurative meaning to certain parts of the idiom.

Compositionality takes into account the ease with which the literal meanings of the parts can be mapped onto the idiomatic meaning and such ease varies with the comprehender’s familiarity with the idiom: for an idiom like grease your wheels, the mapping is quite apparent, while with cook your goose is less apparent. Thus, an idiom like till the cows come home is transparent (its motivation is obvious: do something till the cows come home; the coming of the cows will never happen as a result of what you do, so what you do is useless), but not compositional (till, cows, and come home do not map in any way onto uselessly).

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Titone and Connine (1999:1666-1670) envisage idioms both as unitary word configurations and as compositional word sequences. Activation of literal and idiomatic meaning is a function of both conventionality and compositionality. Literal meaning does have a noteworthy contribution to correctly processing decomposable idioms. As for conventional idioms, highly recurrent in everyday speech, they are overlearned: the frequent association between their form and their meaning becomes much too familiar to the language user not to allow direct retrieval of the idiomatic meaning without resorting to the literal meaning. In other words, “idiom predictability significantly correlates with idiom frequency.” (Titone & Connine 1999:1667).

Inevitably, the question arises whether both the idiomatic and the literal meaning are activated during comprehension.. Gernsbacher & Robertson (1999) sustain that with polysemous words or phrases, unwanted meanings are overlooked during comprehension via the cognitive mechanism of suppression, meant to temporarily annihilate engaging in processing superfluous information. When understanding idioms, such a mechanism allows suppression of the literal meaning is suppressed during the comprehension of an idiomatic phrase. According to Giora (1999), literal and idiomatic meanings are activated simultaneously, but in a graded way, depending on which interpretations are more salient. The salient meaning of a word or expression is its lexicalized meaning, the one retrieved from the mental lexicon rather than from the context; research has demonstrated that this meaning is always accessed, and such access is prioritary. Thus, with familiar idioms, the salient meaning is the idiomatic one, and this meaning is likely to be activated first, even in literal contexts. On the contrary, with unfamiliar idioms, it is the literal meaning which is salient and which is activated both in literal and in idiomatic contexts. Therefore, with familiar idioms, a literal interpretation will necessarily involve suppression of the idiomatic meaning. When hearing something like John kicked the bucket to the other side of the room, comprehenders will need to suppress the die meaning. As expected, with unfamiliar idioms, the literal meaning will first surface before being suppressed even in idiomatic contexts.

3.4.3. Idioms and conceptual metaphors

Gibbs (1994) emphasises the permanent metaphoric quality of idioms, underlain by conceptual metaphors. The analysability of idioms supports the argument that the figurative meaning of idioms may be motivated by conceptual knowledge and that the idiomatic meaning emerges through the metaphorical mappings between two domains recognisable by language users.Gibbs uses the arguments put forth by Lakoff & Johnson (1980), according to whom the human conceptual system is “fundamentally metaphorical in character”, and most concepts and notions used by people in understanding the surrounding world are underlain by conceptual metaphors. The most widely-spread are orientational metaphors, since everything can be understood in terms of space: for example: GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN; LIFE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS A JOURNEY; THE BODY IS A CONTAINER, FEELINGS ARE A LIQUID, etc.

In Gibbs’s view, metaphors underlying the idiom are not perceived as frozen and forgotten; on the contrary, they are active in the language user’s mind, which is why the idiom is easily processed. The example given by Gibbs is spill the beans; it appears that

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speakers map the mental image of some container tipping over and overflowing its contents onto the image of somebody accidentally revealing a secret. In the process, speakers are likely to make use of the underlying conceptual metaphors THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE PHYSICAL ENTITIES. In the section to come I will enlarge upon f figurative language as indispensable to our conceptualisation of the world, while insisting on the role played by metaphor in everyday language and thought.

3.5. The metaphorical nature of our conceptual system

The recent proliferation of theories on metaphor has opposed, traditional Aristotelian view according to which metaphor is exclusively a device of poetic imagination and of rhetorical flourish, a matter of extra ordinary rather than ordinary language. Cognitive theories of meaning have emphasized the all-pervasiveness of metaphor in everyday life, in language as well as in thought and action. (Lakoff 2001). In compliance with such cognitive views, our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature: the way we think and we experience life is very much a matter of metaphor. Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language provides an important source of evidence for the metaphoricity inherent to our ordinary conceptual system (Lakoff &Johnson 1980 : 3-4).

The main contribution of cognitive views resides in their acknowledging the complementarity of reason and imagination. Reason involves categorization, entailment and inference. Imagination involves picturing one entity in terms of another entity. By reuniting reason and imagination, metaphor appears as an instantiation of ‘imaginative rationality’(Lakoff &Johnson 1980 : 5-12).

By examining the examples below, whose occurrence is frequent in everyday speech, the conclusion may be easily reached that language users categorise the concept of LOVE in terms of the concept of journey, by drawing specific correspondences between the domain of LOVE and that of JOURNEY.Look how far we’ve come.We’re at a crossroads.We’ll just have to go our separate ways.We can’t turn back now.I don’t think this relationship is going anywhere.Where are we? We’re stuck. It’s been a long, bumpy road.This relationship is a dead-end street.We’re just spinning our wheels.Our marriage is on the rocks.We’ve gotten off the track.

This relationship is foundering.(Lakoff & Johnson 1980 : 44-45)The linguistic instantiations of the metaphorical mapping LOVE IS A JOURNEY are

deeply entrenched in our speech, but also in our thoughts and activities . This cultural scenario is sketched along the following systematic correspondences:

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The lovers are travellers on a journey together, with their common life goals seen as destinations to be reached. The relationship is their vehicle, and it allows them to pursue those common goals together. The relationship is seen as fulfilling its purpose as long as it allows them to make progress towards their common goals. The journey isn’t easy. There are impediments, and there are places (crossroads) where a decision has to be made about which direction to go and whether to keep travelling together. (Lakoff 2001)

Metaphorical mappings enable comprehenders to achieve understanding of relatively abstract concepts in terms of those that are more concrete (Lakoff 2001). In the LOVE IS A JOURNEY correspondence, the metaphor involves understanding one domain of experience, i.e. love, in terms of a very different domain of experience, i.e. journeys. Otherwise formulated, the metaphor can be understood as a mapping from a source domain (in this case, journeys) to a target domain (in this case, love). There are ontological correspondences, according to which entities in the domain of love (e.g., the lovers, their common goals, their difficulties, the love relationship, etc.) correspond systematically to entities in the domain of a journey (the travellers, the vehicle, destinations, etc.). Hence, the LOVE IS A JOURNEY mapping generates ontological correspondences of the kind:

# The lovers correspond to travellers.# The love relationship corresponds to the vehicle.# The lovers’ common goals correspond to their common destinations. etc.The scenario about travel is mapped onto a corresponding love scenario.

Consequently, this metaphor maps the ontology of travel onto the ontology of love. It is via such mappings that we transfer knowledge about travel onto love relationships ( Lakoff 2001). By performing this mental operation, we constantly perform ‘metaphorical conceptualisations’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1980 : 6). Metaphors are not random or arbitrary occurrences, to be treated as isolated instances, they display cross-cultural systematicity (Lakoff & Johnson 1980 : 40)

3.5.1. Highlighting and hiding

Systematicity of metaphors involves two simultaneous processes: highlighting and hiding. To comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another ( e.g., comprehending an aspect of love in terms of a journey ) we highlight certain features (headway or hindrance, partnership, obstacles, speed) while concomitantly hiding other, inconsistent aspects of the concept (such as travel equipment or schedule) Viewing love as a journey that two partners undertake in order to reach their common goals will automatically conceal another facet of love: love is a state of tension and/or of conflict , highlighted in the conceptual metaphor LOVE IS WAR:He is known for his many rapid conquests.She fought for him, but his mistress won out.He fled from her advances.She pursued him relentlessly.He is slowly gaining ground with her.He won her hand in marriage.

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He overpowered her.She is besieged by suitors.He has to fend them off.He enlisted the aid of her friends.He made an ally of her mother.Theirs is a misalliance if I’ve ever seen one.

Metaphorical structuring involved is partial, not total. If it were total, one concept would actually be the other, not merely understood in terms of it. Strictly speaking, love is not a journey, it can only be understood in terms of a journey by metaphorical mapping. Neither is love a sick person in need of medical assistance in the metaphorical mapping LOVE IS A PATIENT , equally prolific in everyday language. We can speak of a sick relationship, a strong, healthy marriage. A marriage can be dead, or it can no longer be revived. Yet, no correspondences occur at the level of hospitalisation redtape, health insurance or simply admission to hospital: Their marriage is on the mend.We’re getting back on our feet.Their relationship is in really good shape.They’ve got a listless marriage.Their marriage is on its last legs.It’s a tired affair. (Lakoff & Johnson 1980 : 49)

3.5.2. Classification of metaphors from a cognitive perspective

According to the cognitive view, metaphors divide into three main classes, which are to be defined and illustrated in the lines to come.

1) Structural metaphors structure one entity or concept in terms of another, without any constraint as to the concrete of abstract nature of either.We unawarely conceptualise time as a valuable commodity, available in limited amounts and which we risk wasting by misusee.g. TIME IS A VALUABLE COMMODITYYou’re wasting your time.There’s little time left – let’s hurry.Come on, we’re running out of time.Sorry to take away some of your precious time...This project is not worth considering for a second.Lucky him – he’s got so much time on his hands!2) Orientational metaphors organize a whole system of concepts with respect to one another, focusing on spatial orientation: up-down, in-out, front-back, on-off, deep-shallow, central-peripheral, near-far. Such spatial orientations arise from the way our bodies which function within our physical environment. The following metaphorical mappings frequently underlie the way we conceptualise moods, quantities, virtues, emotions or reason.HAPPY IS UP vs SAD IS DOWN

I’m feeling up. My spirits rose. He’s really low these days. I fell into a depression.CONSCIOUS IS UP vs UNCONSCIOUS IS DOWN

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Get up. He rises early in the morning. He dropped off to sleep. He’s under hypnosis.HEALTH AND LIFE ARE UP vs SICKNESS AND DEATH ARE DOWNHe’s at the peak of health. Lazarus rose from the dead. He’s in top shape. He fell ill.

He came down with the flu. His health is declining. He dropped dead.MORE IS UP vs LESS IS DOWNMy income rose last year. The number of errors he made is incredibly low. He is

underage. If you’re too hot, turn the heat down.GOOD IS UP vs BAD IS DOWNThings are looking up. Things are at an all-time low. He does high-quality work.VIRTUE IS UP vs DEPRAVITY IS DOWN She has high standards. She is upright. She is an upstanding citizen. That was a low

trick. I wouldn’t stoop to that. That would be beneath me. RATIONAL IS UP vs EMOTIONAL IS DOWNThe discussion fell to the emotional level, but I raised it back up to the rational

plane. He couldn’t rise above his emotions ( Lakoff & Johnson 1980 : 14-19).3) Ontological metaphors enable us to view events, activities, emotions, ideas as entities and substances. Humans tend to understand the world by imposing boundaries on physical phenomena and dealing with entities as if they were delimited by a surface. Thus, many entities that can be conceptualized as containers: land areas, human beings, rocks or substances, the visual field, events or activities:

There’s a lot of land in Kansas. (=land area)He’s out of sight now. The ship is coming into view. (=the visual field).Halfway into the race, I ran out of energy. (=event/race as container object)He’s immersed in washing the windows right now. (activity as substance and

therefore as container)I put a lot of energy into washing the windows. (action as container).A typical example of ontological metaphor is THE MIND IS A MACHINE, which

underlies everyday expressions such as: “My mind just isn’t operating today!”, “I’m a little rusty today “We’ve been working on this problem all day and now we’re running out of steam”

(L&J, 1980:27)Besides entity and substance metaphors, ontological metaphors also comprise

container metaphors. People are physical beings, bounded and delineated from the rest of the world by the surface of our skins, and our bodies are viewed as containers endowed with an inside and an outside.

When hearing the outrageous news, he blew his top.She was steaming with repressed anger.Let him simmer if he is so mad.John had an outburst of rage/laughter/despair.You need to vent out your feelings for a while.They stifled their indignation.A special type of ontological metaphors is represented by those metaphors where the

physical object is further specified as being a person. Personification allows us to make sense of phenomena in the world in human terms by ascribing human qualities to entities that are not human, such as theories, diseases, inflation, etc.This allows for the

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comprehension of a wide variety of experiences with non-human entities in terms of human motivations, goals, characteristics and activities.

Life has cheated me.The experiment gave birth to a new theory in genetics.Cancer finally caught up with him.Inflation has attacked the foundation of our economy.Our biggest enemy right now is inflation.

3.5.3. The experiential grounding of our conceptual system

Cognitivist scholars sustain that our natural conceptual system is metaphorically structured, that is most concepts are partially understood in terms of other concepts, this being assured by the directionality of metaphor, the phenomenon of structuring concepts pertaining to one domain in terms of concepts of another domain. Hence the question of the possible grounding of our conceptual system. The most salient sources for concepts that are understood directly are spatial concepts, such as UP/DOWN, FRONT/BACK, IN/OUT, NEAR/FAR. Such landmarks of our spatial experience are enlightening as to our ceaseless everyday bodily functioning, which makes them prioritary over other possible structurings of space. Our spatial concepts and their structure emerge from our spatial experience, our first interaction with the surrounding environment. Some of the central concepts in terms of which our bodies function, e.g. UP/DOWN, IN/OUT, FRONT/BACK, LIGHT/DARK, WARM/COLD are better delineated than others. While our emotional experience is as basic as our spatial and perceptual experience, it is much less clearly defined in terms of bodily stances or actions. If spatial concepts are directly emergent from our perceptual-motor functioning, no clear-cut conceptual structure designating emotions emerges from our emotional functioning alone. Since there are systematic correlates between our emotions (like happiness) and our sensory-motor experiences (the erect posture), these form the basis of orientational metaphorical concepts (such as HAPPY IS UP).

One important aspect to stress about experiential grounding is the distinction between an experience and the way we conceptualize it. It cannot be claimed that physical experience is in any way more basic than other kinds of experience, whether emotional, mental or cultural. Yet, more often than not, the nonphysical is typically conceptualized in terms of the physical. In other words, we conceptualize the less clearly delineated, i.e. usually less concrete and inherently vaguer concepts in terms of the more clearly delineated, i.e. usually more concrete concepts (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 56-59).

Orientational and ontological metaphors relying on simple physical concepts are basic to our conceptual system, but they are not overabundant. Abundant processings are supplied by structural metaphors (such as LOVE IS A JOURNEY) , which enable us to use one systematically structured and clearly delineated concept in order to structure another. Such structural metaphors emerge naturally in our culture because the aspects they highlight are revealed by our collective experience and mirror the coherent structuring of our experience (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 61-68).

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4. TRANSLATION, COGNITION AND CULTURE

In addition to previously discussed issues regarding word meaning, word combination, intentionality and purpose of utterances, translation entails a process of cultural de-coding, re-coding and en-coding. Translation should be conceptualised as ceaselessly involving the transposition of thoughts expressed in the SL by one social community into the appropriate TL expression of a similar or dissimilar community. The process of transfer should consequently take into consideration re-coding across cultures and systematic correspondences between SL and TL notions and formulations, meant to ensure credibility in the eyes of the target reader. The “cultural” appurtenance of the text is weightier than ever, given that cultures are increasingly brought into greater contact with one another, In the early 80s, in his “Writing from the World II “, Paul Engle insisted on the socially active, even politically urgent aim of translation in the contemporary world:

As this world shrinks together like an aging orange and all peoples in all cultures move closer together (however reluctantly and suspiciously) it may be that the crucial sentence for our remaining years on earth may be very simply: TRANSLATE OR DIE. The lives of every creature on the earth may one day depend on the instant and accurate translation of one word. (Engle and Engle, 1985)

Multiculturalism, a ubiquitous present-day phenomenon, plays a significant role in this respect since it has borne an undeniable impact on linguistic and cultural phenomena worldwide as well as on the international relations emerging from current developments. Cultural, ethnic and linguistic boundaries are disappearing and distinctions among communities engaging in language-based social practices are being increasingly blurred. As a result, transcoding should focus not merely on language transfer but also on cultural transposition. Such transposition involves trans-(re)lating not only language structures but mental representations from the source text into the target text, from the author’s cognitive environment to the receptor’s rational and cultural background. According to contemporary cognitive psychological outlooks, such mental representations constitute cognitive schemata and are investigated by the so-called ‘schema-theory’. In the following lines, I will enlarge upon the main tenets of schema theory, since I consider it a valuable instrument for any operator of successful translations.

4.1. Schema theory

Like prototype theory, schema theory investigates simplified mental cognitive structures, stored in memory and activated whenever comprehension of new input requires it. In contrast with prototype theory, which is hyponymy-based and envisages single categories or simple hierarchies of categories, schema theory considers

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representations of concepts as organised in complex spatio-temporal structures. (Rumelhart (1980), Eysenck and Keane (1990), Cook (1994), and Semino (1997, 2001).

A schema is a structured cluster of concepts; usually, it involves generic knowledge and may be used to represent events, sequences of events, precepts, situations, relations and even objects (Eysenck and Keane 1990, my emphasis).

As ‘cognitive misers’ (Fiske and Taylor 1984: 12), humans need to be equipped with mental shortcuts, best achieved by activating schemata, which are simplified and systematic representations of knowledge. Schemata are similar to computer files: humans create them in order to deposit items of knowledge inside them. Such items may range from simple objects (shoes, buildings, stationery) to events (going on a date, having a barbecue, delivering a child), natural phenomena (earthquakes, rainbows, tornadoes) and eventually to complex intercultural processes and notions (globalisation, terrorism, the hothouse effect, gender or race discrimination). Schemata enable comprehenders to retrieve generic concepts from memory and accommodate incoming input into existing conceptual structures. They undergo constant enriching and reorganising, just like computer files may be modified by inserting new material or rearranging existing data.

Cognitive psychologists such as Rumelhart regard schemata as higher-order cognitive structures defined as “fundamental elements upon which all information processing depends” (Rumelhart 1980: 33). Schemata constitute the ‘building blocks of cognition’. During the process of comprehension humans activate higher-order mental structures which involve variables, variable constraints and default variables related to the situation/object/event/person to be conceptualised (Rumelhart 1980: 35-39). Rumelhart likens variables in a schema to characters in a play. Different values can realise the same variable; the same way different actors can play the same character. The variable constraints specify the ‘typical values of the variables and their interrelationships’ (Rumelhart 1980: 35). Variable constraints enable comprehenders to operate a shortcut search for elements that realise the variables in a schema they instantiate. As for variables that are not explicitly specified in an input, constraints enable comprehenders to supply missing values or default values meant to fill in the gaps in the activated schema. (Rumelhart 1980: 36). Such ‘default values’ can be inferable on the basis of shared expectations, i.e. expectations that are common among a group of individuals. Rumelhart states that default variables are suppliable because schemata are not rigid, but flexible structures, whose suppleness springs from the human propensity to tolerate vagueness, and imprecision.

The total set of schematic cognitive structures instantiated by a comprehender while processing a certain input yields the comprehender’s model of the encountered situation/object/event/person (Rumelhart 1980: 37). I will illustrate the previously mentioned terms with a BEACH schema. Normally, a BEACH schema involves, among others, variables such as ‘people temporarily located on the beach’ and ‘ongoing beach activities’. Depending on the context, the ‘people’ variable can take values such as ‘holiday makers’ (i.e. people getting a tan, swimming, loitering in the sands) or ‘fishermen’ (i.e. people preparing their fishing instruments on the beach before going out to sea to catch fish). Likewise, the ‘activities’ variable could take different values according to the context. A ‘holiday’ context would make comprehenders realise this

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variable by such values as: swimming, sunbathing, playing ball, building sandcastles. A ‘fishing’ context would imply different values meant to realise the ‘activities’ variable: checking a fishing net, hurling it on to a boat during a pre-fishing stage and separating the fish from the residuals during a post-fishing stage. Regarding the variable constraints of a BEACH schema in a ‘holiday’ context, the values realising the ‘holiday makers’ variable would be ‘human beings’ (and not animals or plants). The same constraint applies to the ‘fishing’ context.

Default variables in the BEACH schema (e.g. sand, waves, shells, etc) are easy to supply whenever there is some familiarisation with the concept ’beach’. An Eskimo or a bushman could not supply such default variables because they are not normally associated with beaches. However, cross-cultural variations are likely to occur. Thus, a Romanian activating a BEACH schema would not consider ebb and flow as a default variable, as there are no tidal phenomena in the Black Sea bordering the south-eastern Romanian coast. Most probably, a British person may include ebb and flow among the default variables of their BEACH schema.

4.1.1. Schema activation, background knowledge and inferencing

The joined contribution of linguistic input and background knowledge enables text readers to achieve coherence in text comprehension, and I would venture to add, text translation. According to Semino,

It is one of the basic tenets of cognitive psychology that comprehension crucially depends on the availability and activation of relevant prior knowledge. We make sense of new experiences - and of texts in particular - by relating the current input to pre-existing mental representations of similar entities, situations and events (Semino 1997: 123).

Coherence in text comprehension heavily relies on deduction and anticipation on the part of the reader. Besides drawing inferences, schema activation enables comprehenders to develop expectations and/or predictions about incoming input and consequently incoming mental representations. Once textual elements trigger the activation of certain schemata in the readers’ minds, expectations are generated and (dis)confirmation of those expectations is anticipated. Halasz (1991) stresses how the process of text comprehension involves the reader in accessing (via ‘reminding’) not only personal experience but discursive - including fictional intertextual - experience as well. This view is also endorsed by Schmidt (1991: 275) who states that understanding is “a subject-dependent, strategy - guided, intentional, and flexible process oriented towards efficiency” (Schmidt 1991: 275) and that text comprehension arises from the interaction between readers’ knowledge and text information.

Schema theory operates complex links between individual minds and socially shared representations, since schemata “exist in the minds of individual subjects as psychic structures, but they are linked to the socio-cultural and historical realities” (Hoijer 1992: 289). Moulded under the impact the afore-mentioned socio-cultural factors, schemata acts as flexible structures, since they accommodate cognitive processes such as developing expectations and inferencing while simultaneously suspending useless

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representations. Once credible evidence has been gathered against the utility of a certain schema for comprehension purposes, the reader ‘suspends‘ that schema and allocates their mental resources towards a ‘more promising schema’ (Rumelhart 1980: 42).

4.1.2. ‘Schema-refreshment’ versus ‘schema-reinforcement’

As already pointed out, schemata facilitate coherence of to-be-comprehended input by supplying simplified and prototypical clusters of knowledge on situations, objects, events, persons. Serving the purpose of cognitive economy, schemata enable perceivers to select those portions of existing knowledge and to develop those expectations that normally provide smoother and shorter paths towards the successful processing of incoming social stimuli. A common theme running through all the schema research is that people remember information that confirms their schemata and forget information that disconfirms them (Fiske and Taylor 1984: 162).

Schema-consistent information is favoured by natural retrieval processes, while schema-inconsistent information requires effort-consuming integration into memory. As people spend less time and make less effort in decoding and interpreting information that is consistent with their expectations, it is natural to assume that schema-consistent information generally requires less effort in processing than schema-inconsistent information (Augoustinos and Walker 1996: 45). On the other hand, as Eysenck and Keane (1990: 279) argue, comprehenders may also spend less time and pay less attention to those elements they find familiar and dedicate more time and focus more on the unexpected elements:

Since there is no need to spend very long looking at expected objects, this frees up resources for processing more novel and unexpected aspects of any given scene (Eysenck and Keane 1990: 279).

Processing of schema-consistent versus schema-inconsistent information in relation to comprehenders’ processings of texts have been discussed by linguists such as Cook (1994) or Semino (1995, 1997) in the light of two concepts: schema-reinforcement and schema-refreshment. Schema-reinforcement largely accompanies the processing of schema-consistent information, while schema-refreshment relates to the processing of schema-inconsistent information.

Whenever an input, be it textual or not, can be accommodated within existing schematic representations of events, situations, persons, and the comprehender’s expectations are relatively readily met with, there is likelihood for the comprehender to undergo ‘schema-reinforcement’, i.e. strengthening schema-consistent representations. A recurrent example would be the ‘happy end’ of most Hollywood-style romances or tearjerkers, consisting of the rescue of the hopeless victim of circumstances (be it illness or the target of a serial killer) and/or the reconciliation of the couple(s) having undergone a crisis and surmounted obstacles.

Cook (1994) regards schema-refreshment as inextricably linked to the effect of unexpectedness or unfamiliarity that is generally brought about by literary texts (unlike, he claims, advertising texts, which tend to be schema-reinforcing). Cook tends to associate schema-refreshment with deviation from textual norms and implicitly with

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literariness (Cook 1994: 182). Cook’s view is partially criticised by Semino, who proposes that texts – be they literary or non-literary - should be located along a continuum whose two ends are schema-reinforcement and schema-refreshment:

If a text reinforces the reader’s schemata, the world it projects will be perceived as conventional, familiar, realistic and so on. If a text disrupts and refreshes the reader’s schemata, the world it projects will be perceived as deviant, unconventional, alternative, and so on (Semino 1997: 155).

Semino refines Cook’s definition of ‘schema-refreshment’ by underlining that schema refreshment rather includes “unusual instantiations of schemata and/or the simultaneous activation and interconnection of schemata, that, in my case at least, were not normally activated together” (Semino 2001: 350-351). A relevant example would be the final twist of fate in a ‘whodunit’, where the murderer proves to be the least expected person and the evidence against them is supplied by the least reliable detective mind. Or the scene in recent slapstick teenage comedies where the guy who is overeager to have a hot date ends up in the aggressive company of an enchanting transvestite!

The schema-reinforcement and the schema-refreshment potential of a text can account for the “degree of alternativity, possibility, conventionality, etc., that readers attribute to text worlds.” (Semino 1997: 176). Semino insists on regarding schema refreshment as a potential and in most cases non-predictable effect of the text upon the reader’s pre-existing knowledge structures, since, she argues, readers may ignore expectation-challenging textual elements or may accept them solely for purposes of text comprehension (Semino 1997: 213). Later on, taking on board Jeffries’s criticism as to the presence of a cline with schema reinforcement at one end and schema refreshment at the other (Jeffries 2001), Semino proposes introducing the notion of a schema-refreshment cline as an analytical tool. Such a cline would have “no schema refreshment at one end and dramatic schema refreshment at the other” (Semino 2001: 352).

Bartlett, the founding father of schema theory, proposed (1932) that schemata should be related to emotional phenomena, thus blazing the trail for research that explores the relationship between cognition and affect. A comprehensive theory of the mind should envisage not only cognition but also imagination and affect and should rely on factors such as emotions, concerns and attitudes (Semino 1997, Augoustinos and Walker 1996, 1998).

Schema-refreshing discourses effect changes in existing schemata and the schema-changing function of such discourses is thought to be sometimes related to emotional reactions and attitudinal changes: “Sensations of pleasure, escape, profundity, and elevation are conceivably offshots of this function” (Cook 1994: 191).

Attitudes are concomitantly a part of cognitive life and a part of social discourse (Augoustinos and Walker 1996: 14-15). Attitudes denote a person’s orientation to some object of reference that acts as a stimulus to that person’s evaluation of the object in question (Augoustinos and Walker 1996: 13). Since attitudes involve judgements of the ‘like/dislike’ or ‘good/bad’ kind, they inevitably trigger an affective or emotional response in individual attitude-holders. Attitudes display cognitive dimensions because they imply categorization as a necessary stage prior to evaluation, thus being not only a cognitive process but also an evaluative one. Affect and evaluation may be instantly cued

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by categorisation and social categories are inherently value-laden because they instantly fit an object/event into a schema that bears emotional connotations (fear of dentists, disgust inspired by demagogical politicians).

I have discussed the above tenets of schema theory in order to highlight the ceaseless interaction and unavoidable complementarity between individual cognitive structures and culturally shared representations, concurring with the claims set forth by scholars such as Shore (1996), Quinn and Strauss (1997), Augoustinos and Walker (1998). A schema-based approach to the process of text comprehension and, inevitably text translation and re-creation in a target language, may shed further light on the intertwining of intra- and extra-personal knowledge and, implicitly the mutuality between individual cognition and socially available cultural models.

4.2. Cultural models

Being simultaneously individual and social representations, schemata could be likened to the idealised cultural models proposed by Lakoff, who, in his seminal book “Women, Fire and Dangerous Things”, argues that we organize our knowledge by means of structures called idealized cognitive models (henceforth ICMs) and that category structures and prototype effects are by-products of this type of organization. All idealized cognitive models can be roughly defined as mental spaces and models that structure those spaces. The differences lie in what those spaces relate to and the manner in which they are structured. Lakoff takes the example of the concept of “week” in English culture and in the Balinese calendric system and proves that our model of “week” is an idealized one. The days of the weeks and the weeks as such, do not exist objectively in nature; they are not separate entities, but creations of our own minds.

Lakoff goes on to prove that even if the categories defined by the ICMs are classical, there would still be prototype effects that would stem from the interaction of the given schema with other schemata in the system. By discussing the concept of “bachelor”. he makes it clear that: “An idealized cognitive model may fit one's understanding of the world either perfectly, very well, pretty well, somewhat well, pretty badly, badly, or not at all.” (Lakoff: 70)

It is in Lakoff’s intention to dismantle the traditional view of categories: that categories are defined by common features of their members; that thought is formed by abstract symbols; that concepts are internal representations of external reality; that symbols have meaning by virtue of their correspondence to real objects.

The dissemination of schemata or in their wider societal articulation, of cultural models, can be seen as an ‘epidemic’ (Sperber 1996). Sperber’s ‘epidemiological’ approach to public representations analyses the spread of cognitive schemata in terms of contagion of mental representations among individuals belonging to a like-minded communities. Sperber addresses the re-evaluation of individual and local receptions of globalised concepts, a standpoint which translators should not disregard. Cognitive definitions of culture such as that provided by Sperber and Hirschfeld may prove extremely useful to translators, unavoidably placed within a cross-cultural environment (1999). Such (re)definitions of culture advocate that:

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From a cognitive point of view, it is tempting to think of culture as an ensemble of representations (classifications, schemas, models, competencies), the possession of which makes an individual a member of a cultural group (Sperber and Hirschfeld 1999: 14).

Sperber and Hirschfeld’s definition of culture ties in with the espousal of social and cultural practices, including language practices. Hence the imperious need for translators to be both bilingual and bicultural if not multicultural. Back in 1983, Ted Hughes highlighted the necessity of translation triggered off by the multifarious emergence of alternative representations of reality and axiological systems:

The boom in the popular sales of translated modern poetry was without precedent. Though it reflected only one aspect of the wave of mingled energies that galvanized those years with such extremes, it was fed by almost all of them ... Buddhism, the mass craze of Hippie ideology, the revolt of the young, the Pop music of the Beatles and their generation. That historical moment might well be seen, as ... an unfolding from inwards, a millennial change in the Industrial West’s view of reality. (Hughes, 1983)

4.3. Cultural transposition and translation types

When dealing with the issue of multiculturalism, the relationship between cultural transposition and interpretation requires further insight. Both translation and interpretation deal with the rendering of a given text into another language. If translation refers to written texts, interpretation designates “live and immediate transmission” ( Metzger ??:18) of –usually spoken - discourse. Yet, beyond the realm of language per se, all texts can be seen to be “evidence of a communicative transaction taking place within a social framework” (Hatim and Mason 1990: 22). It is the social framework that urges analysts to dismantle the ‘myth of neutrality’ (Metzger 1999: 51).

A translator’s influence on and possibly reshaping of a text clashes with their endeavour to maintain neutrality. Hence, the emergence of the age-long dilemma in translation studies: literal versus free translation. Proper communication only occurs if and when the receptor gets the messages which the emitter intends to convey. The distortion of the message in the mind of the receptor is more likely to happen if the receptor belongs to an audience that is wholly different from the readership the original writer envisaged.

In compliance with Hatim and Mason’s discursive view on translation (1990), a translator facilitates an act of communication between SL speakers/writers and TL hearers/readers while concomitantly seeking to reconstruct perceived meaning for TL receiver(s) as a separate act of communication. As shown in the previous sections, the choice and the combinations of words, the grammatical structure, the contextual meaning as well as the communicative purpose of the source text are important guidelines, empowering the translation to decide on their grammatical, lexical and communicative choices in the TL text. Yet, far from being mere linguistic conversion or transformation between languages translation involves accommodation in terms of a plethora of domains such as culture, politics or aesthetics.

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If linguistic or cultural reasons prevent the translator from transferring the source text into the target text, accommodation tends to be preferred to literal translation, since it implies minute adjustments brought to original meaning as well as the original style and/or register. In outlining his dynamic theory of equivalence regarding translation, Nida insists that, if content is prioritary, translation should incorporate accommodation or adjustment to a considerable degree resulting in ‘free’ translation. A prototypical free translation would be, in Nida’s view, that of the Bible, where the comprehension and perception of the translated text requires loyalty to the original text, proffered by a stable source, God, inspired with a stable intention. As far as the translation of the Bible is concerned, Nida equates translation with revelation, emphasising that the original message takes on archetypal status;

He must understand not only the obvious content of the message, but also the subtleties of meaning, the significant emotive values of words and the stylistic features which determine the ‘flavor and feel’ of the message ... In other words, in addition to a knowledge of the two or more Ls involved in the translational process, the translator must have a thorough acquaintance with the subject matter concerned. (Nida, 1964).

By contrast, Nida specifies, ‘faithful’ translations privilege form and tend to espouse literalness to a remarkable degree. Along the same line of argument, starting from a statement made by Nabokov: “ To my ideal of literalism I sacrificed everything (elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even grammar) that the dainty mimic prizes higher than the truth”, Newmark finds it necessary to clarify upon the distinction between semantic and communicative translation. Semantic or overt translations that require the primacy of literalness - the case of the so-called ‘sacred’, authoritative texts – while communicative or covert translations lie closer to interpretation or accommodation, this being largely the case ‘run-of-the-mill’ texts. The chart below is a simplified display some of the basic distinctions between the two types of translations, as highlighted by Newman:

Semantic translation Communicative translationAuthor-centred Reader-orientedRelated to thought Related to speechFaithful EffectiveMore awkward, more detailed Simpler, clearer, morePersonal SocialSl-biased TL-biasedTendency to overtranslate Tendency to undertranslateInferior to the original Better than the originalEternal, decontextualized Existential, context-dependentWide, universal Tailor-made, targeted for a specific

readership True version Felicitous versionMeaning-centrered Message-centrered

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A middle-of-the-road theory of translation, attempting to reach a compromise between literalness and effectiveness is the one proposed by Christiane Nord (2001). Her distinction is between: documentary translation – a type of translation meant to preserve the original frame of mind and style of expression and instrumental translation - a type of translation meant to adapt source frame and style to target audience/readership. A translator needs to carefully weigh the cultural and historical elements before deciding in favor of an instrumental or a documentary translation. If a translator is keen on preserving the original flavor of the text, documentary translation is preferred; if the translator’s intention is to adequately convey specific information for successful communication with a specific audience/readership, instrumental translation is a better option.

In my view, the types of trannslation discussed before overlap both within the process of transposing one text from a language (and implicitly culture)into another and within the product of such transposition, namely the text in the target language, meant to be comprehended and assimilated by the target cultural community of intended readers. The translated text is a new creation, a reconstruction rather than a faithful copy of the original. I wholly agree with Snell-Hornby (1988: 16) who emphasises that, while translation is indeed achieved between two languages, it would be more accurate to state that translation is achieved between two texts. Any endeavour to translate a text presupposes” a degree of symmetry between languages which makes the postulated equivalence possible” (Snell-Hornby 1988: 16). To this purpose, I invite the readers to engage in the effort-consuming yet potentially rewarding task of translating a corpus of literary texts I have selected according to the very challenge they posed to the would-be translator in terms of such symmetry and the long-pursued equivalence accompanying it. As you will see in the sections to come, the corpus consists of fifty texts to be translated from Romanian into English (PART TWO) and fifty texts to be translated from English into Romanian (PART THREE). A key or rather a set of tentative verso ions is provided for each corpus of texts. A word of caution is necessary at this point: the solutions I have provided for the respective translations are my own, which naturally entails they are neither unique nor optimal. Needless to say that many of my fellow translators, colleagues and students are likely to provide more faithful, more inspired and more enticing versions. All suggestions and critical comments are more than welcome.

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