Thoughts on translation theory

I started reading up on translation theory back in September. I knew pretty much nothing about this subject, having had little contact with other languages throughout my education. I studied French to "O" level and failed it (despite having been quite good in the first form - change of teacher is to blame). I did two years of Latin at the Grammar School about which I remember virtually nothing and I did a year of German, which I remember I really disliked! I am the typical science student, not arts.

First recent reading was Umberto Eco's Mouse or Rat? This has quite a few passages about the translation of his own works and provided the first clear-cut statement of the "negotiation" view of translating - a three fold model of original writer, translator and ultimate reader. I had typically held views that represent the naive view of translation i.e. that there was a fairly firm, clear and distinct meaning in the original text which is brought out by the translator. I was aware that translation was mainly about meaning retention rather than something that occured on a word-for-word basis, but I was nonetheless rather shocked to discover just how liberal this principle could be. Of particular interest were the cases where Eco showed examples of several different translation of the same piece e.g. of Dante's Inferno. The variety of translation produced was quite amazing.

This was confirmed by reading Robinson's Becoming a Translator and skim reading Lander's Literary Translation. There is a great deal of freedom involved in this process - more than I had imagined.

So when I started my Latin course at the end of September, I was very focused on the translation aspects of the course, rather than issues such as speaking Latin, or translating from English into Latin. This means that I am principally concerned with the grammar structure and the issues of how to tie together the various components of the text. So far, I have been very pleased with the course. I still haven't really learnt the noun declensions and verb conjugations but I am beginning to develop a little bit of sense of the structure (so far anyway)

And a comment from one of Emma's friends at Cambridge set me off on another track. She had said that for bulk translation work, she tended to use a software programme as this avoids the constant looking up of words in dictionaries and can also supply the complete set of alternatives to parse each word. As a result of this, I came across a programme called Blitz Latin and have been investigating this in some detail. It is not that this provides accurate translations, it is more that it does tell you the various alternatives available for each word and tells you the grammar structure. I am very interested in this as a tool

One thing I did do with Blitz Latin was some "testing" against various sources where I do have both the original Latin and a translations - for instance, Jardine's tranlation of Kepler's Defence of Tycho against Ursus and various pieces by Sheila Rabin e.g. Pico. This has confirmed just how "free" some translations are, but has also enabled me, in one or two cases, to approximate the finished text, which I'm rather please about. Indeed, in some cases, I would say that my approximation would have been worth perhaps a 7 or 8 out of 10.

And getting the gist of a passage has been a lot easier than it might have been

All this has huge implications for my PhD project. I am slowly beginning to get an idea about how this might work out in practice day to day - the need to produce a word document of the text, various ideas about the actual process of translating, my working practices, etc. All good stuff and leaving me much more confident than I might have been. What, afterall, might my standard be in, say, 18 months, given what I think I have achieved so far?

But the main area that does worry me at the moment is a statement I read somewhere that knowledge of the target language is often more important than knowledge of the source. Oddly enough, I feel less confident about this aspect. I need to consider this much more.