Intro to Translation Studies: Vinay and Darbelnet's Translation Procedures

Way back in the 1950s, two French scholars named Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet explored the linguistic aspects of translation. The field of Translation Studies didn't really exist at the time, so most of what Vinay and Darbelnet did was considered comparative literature.

When looking at the work of Vinay and Darbelnet, the term contrastive linguistics seems much more appropriate, as what they did was look at the differences between two languages in order to inform their understanding of both of them. While other scholars sought to merely compare two languages in order to inform the relationship between them, Vinay and Darbelnet looked at the process of translation.

Their efforts culminated in what is considered their seminal work in the linguistic turn of translation studies, Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais : méthode de traduction, which around four decades later was translated into an English version, Comparative stylistics of French and English : a methodology for translation. The fact that it was still worth translating into English nearly half a century later shows you just how important it was. In the book, Vinay and Darbelnet posited that there were seven main processes, or procedures, at work during any given translation. Here's the seven they came up with:

Borrowing

Unless you are one of these people that confuses borrowing and lending, then this should cause you little trouble. Borrowing is the idea of taking the word from the source language (SL) and maintaining it in the target language (TL). It is considered the simplest of the procedures and tends to be employed in two situations: either when discussing a new technical process for which no term exists within the TL, or when maintaining a word from the SL for stylistic effect, in which the translator uses the foreign term to add flavour to the target text (TT).

Calque

A calque is when an expression from the source text (ST) is transferred literally into the TT. Calques either follow the syntax of the TL while translating each word literally or ignore the syntax of the TL and maintain the syntax of the SL, rendering the calque in an awkward syntactical structure in the TT.

Literal Translation

The third translation method is only to be used under certain circumstances according to Vinay and Darbelnet. The idea of translating word for word in a way that does not alter the meaning is considered an acceptable use of literal translation by the two scholars. Literal translation, put simply, expands the scope of a calque but in a much more acceptable way.

Transposition

Vinay and Darbelnet referred to transposition as changing word class without changing meaning. This refers to when translators (often without thinking) change the word type, such as from nouns to verbs. Vinay and Darbelnet considered transposition to be either obligatory or optional, and referred to the ST as the base expression and the TT as the transposed expression.

Modulation

The fifth of Vinay and Darbelnet's procedures is modulation. Modulation refers to rendering the TT from a different point of view to that of the ST. Vinay and Darbelnet consider this procedure to be necessary when the results of the former procedures would produce an awkward-sounding translation, despite it being grammatically, syntactically, and lexically correct. Modulation is a way for the translator to find a degree of naturalness in their TT without sacrificing any meaning or accuracy originating from the ST.

A great example given by Vinay and Darbelnet shows how the double negative construction used in English is uncommon in French, and how modulation would render this in French as a simple affirmative statement using a positive modifier.

Equivalence

The idea of equivalence can be simultaneously simple and complex in Translation Studies. Vinay and Darbelnet explain equivalence as something almost inherently cultural, using the example of someone expressing pain. In English the term "ouch!" is used, while in French, a literal rendering of the sound would be of no use to the reader. Instead, the equivalent of "ouch!" in French is "aïe!". Both words would immediately indicate to readers that there is some level of pain involved.

Equivalence also relates to idiomatic expressions, whereby all the lexical and grammatical elements are there but translating literally would leave a reader confused. In fact, you can't "speak of the devil" in French, as in the equivalent expression they speak of a "wolf".

Adaptation

The beautiful city of Paris at night, complete with banlieues.

The most complex of Vinay and Darbelnet's translation procedures is the final one, adaptation. Adaptation is similar to equivalence in the way that the translator seeks to render the SL into the TL whilst ensuring it is just as relevant and meaningful as the original was. Imagine the ST mentioned something that was so undeniably English that translating it into French would have absolutely no meaning, or vice-versa. At that point the translator must use adaptation. A brilliant example of this is the term banlieue, which can be a bit of a double-edged sword when translating into English. While the suburbs of French cities can be rich or poor, the term has been increasingly used to describe run-down areas of cities with low income housing, which is not the idea that springs to mind when the English hear the term suburbs. In this case, a translator would be forgiven for translating banlieue as council estate (UK English) or even the projects (US English).

That's all of Vinay and Darbelnet's translation procedures. What did you think of them? Do they apply to translators now or are they an oversimplification of the work that translators do? Tell us in the comments below!

Europe Day: Celebrating Language in Europe

Beautiful Europe, as seen from Space.

Today we're celebrating "Europe Day", a celebration of peace and unity in Europe. The EU celebrates Europe Day today, on 9 May, as opposed to the Council of Europe, which celebrated it on Monday, 5 May, coinciding with their establishment in 1949.

9 May is celebrated by the EU as it was the day that the Schuman Declaration was proposed in 1950. The aim of the declaration was to propose a supranational community, which led to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Union (EU). 

Instead of a history lesson on the EU, let's instead take a look at some of the languages in Europe... this is a language blog, after all. Rather than discuss the main languages, which have all been covered in their respective language profiles, we thought we'd take a look at the "genesis" of language in Europe, travelling right to the roots of Europe's language tree, where we find Indo-European languages.

So the "European" from Indo-European refers to Europe, but what about "Indo"? Indo actually refers to India and if India's included you know this is a big family of languages. However, linguists believe that there is a shared ancestry among the over 400 languages that are considered to be part of this heritage.

Indo-European languages make up the majority of the world's languages, with 45% of the world's population speaking an Indo-European language. In fact, Indo-European languages make up 12 of the top 20 most-spoken languages in the world.

With nearly half of the world speaking an Indo-European language and "European" being in the name, surely every language in Europe belongs to this language family, right? Wrong!

Ignoring languages spoken in Europe due to current immigration trends, such as Chinese, for example, many of the "native" languages of Europe are not Indo-European. We've already seen that Basque is a language isolate with no strong evidence to support its relation to any other language in the world.

While Basque is a well-known exception, there are also the Karvelian languages, which include Georgian and several related languages. There is also not a strong consensus on which family the North Caucasian languages belong to, or whether they are in their own family at all.

There's also the Uralic languages, including Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian, which all reside in Europe, though this language family is also contested. Turkic and Mongolic languages are also not Indo-European languages, and once you get to the Semitic languages of Cypriot Marionite Arabic and Maltese, spoken in Cyprus and Malta respectively, you begin to get a sense that  Europe is not as linguistically homogeneous as you may think. The final Semitic language, Hebrew, has been spoken by Jewish communities throughout Europe for years, and nicely brings us to the end of the exceptions.

So celebrate Europe with us today! Whether you love or loathe the EU, celebrate the beautiful linguistic diversity of this continent, then be ashamed of it tomorrow as you watch near-monolingual monstrosity that is Eurovision!!!

Why Must Eurovision Be So Monolingual?

Last night, we watched the first of this week's semifinals in the lead up to Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest. Despite our best intentions, we actually enjoyed it. What we didn't enjoy was the way in which a Europe-wide competition of music, for lack of a better description, seemed to lack any kind of linguistic diversity.

As we watched 16 countries vie for a place in the final, it was pointed out to us by the show's commentators that only two of these countries would actually be singing in a language other than English.

Copenhagen, the beautiful host city of this year's Eurovision.

The whole evening was aired live from Copenhagen, Denmark. Watching from the UK, we viewed it on BBC3, which quickly had its own commentators interrupt the three Danish hosts, despite them speaking in English, as if it would have been an atrocity for the British audience to hear near-perfect English from non-native speakers.

Performances in English

As a bit of a flag enthusiast, I did enjoy the country introductions, in which the performers made a version of their own flag out of something. After some pomp and ceremony, the first performance was Armenia's entry, "Not Alone", which as you can guess from the title is in English, rather than Armenian, the official language of the South Caucasus nation.

Though we salivated as Latvia made their flag out of cake, they didn't bother with Latvian. Their English-language song was a quirky number about cake, which I admit would have been lost on me had it not been in English. While I found the Estonian entry fairly forgettable, it would have probably been more memorable had it been in Estonian, or even the regional languages Võro and Setu, just to mess with everybody's heads.

As a big ABBA fan, I can hardly complain about Sweden's entry being in English, but after three songs in English, another language, especially Swedish, would have been nice change for the international competition. On a personal note, I loved Iceland's entry and was delighted when they made it through to the final, though I also think the performance was vibrant enough and the tune was catchy enough to have been in any language, except maybe Klingon...

I thought Albania's entry was so dull that I would have preferred it in Albanian so I could have at least researched the lyrics later, and perhaps even learn a tiny bit of the language whilst I was at it.

The Russian entry, complete with blonde twins on a see-saw, was bound to cause some controversy. Even though it wasn't in Russian or any of its 27 regional languages, it was still quite sad to see the Copenhagen crowd boo the performers. The 2012 hosts, Azerbaijan, didn't bother to promote their own language either, with their entry "Start a Fire", which made it through to the finals on Saturday.

The Ukranian entry, despite having a guy run in an over-sized hamster wheel, progressed through to the final. The song entitled "Tick-Tock" is English onomatopoeia rather than Ukranian or any of the 18 regional languages of the country, though as onomatopoeia, it is probably the most universal of the English-language semifinalists from Tuesday night.

Belgium, despite its three official languages, still picked a song in English. This is especially odd as two of Belgium's official languages, French, and German, are considered to be two of the most important languages in Europe, whilst the other official language, Dutch, is a personal favourite of mine.

Moldova's "Wild Soul" wasn't enough to get them to the final, and by this point I was pretty sick of English-language songs and would have happily welcomed a song in either Romanian, Ukranian, Russian, or even the Gagauz language, a Turkic language spoken by the Gagauz people native to parts of both Ukraine and Moldova.

While the Principality of San Marino didn't sing in Italian, they made it through to the final and their entry, "Maybe (Forse)", was performed in English, though an Italian version was also recorded.

As I have a soft spot for the Dutch language, it was a shame to hear that their entry was also in English. The Hungarian entry was sung by András-Kállay Saunders, a Hungarian American, though from the language choice and accent, you can tell he doesn't speak English as a second language, though he probably could sing in Hungarian.

In Their Own Language

The only two entrants to bother with their own languages were Portugal and Montenegro, who were both drawn to perform late in the running order. While the Portuguese entry "Quero Ser Tua" failed to make the final, the Montenegrin entry "Мој свијет", which was rendered using the Latin alphabet as "Moj svijet", made it to the final, making it the only finalist from the first semifinal to not be in the English language.

Did you watch the first semifinal? Will you be watching the second? Which of the acts were your favourite and would you prefer they sing in their own languages? Tell us in the comments below.

April 30: International Jazz Day

Today we have another obscure holiday for you. It's International Jazz Day, which is organised and recognised by UNESCO. UNESCO considers the objectives of this holiday to celebrate the "virtues of jazz as an educational tool, and a force for peace, unity, dialogue and enhanced cooperation among people". While this seems like a good reason to celebrate jazz, as per usual, we are more interested in the linguistic elements of jazz. First though, we need to really understand what jazz is.

You should already know that jazz is a type of music, shamefully dismissed by some as a way to be a pretentious hipster. In fact, jazz couldn't be farther from the pursuit of twenty-something white guys who sport vintage knitwear and enjoy only the obscurest of coffee-based beverages.

Jazz music started in the southern United States during the dawn of the 20th century as a lovechild between African and European music. When the harmonies of European music got together with African syncopation, swung notes, and improvisation, jazz was born.

New Orleans, one of the best places to enjoy jazz music.

As jazz was cultivated in a number of places, a number of subgenres arose, in addition to later fusions created from being mixed with a number of other musical genres. Whilst jazz has all these subgenres and fusions, the origin of the word jazz has a number of contested origins.

Jazz as a noun in the English language used in reference to music is thought to have come from the Creole patois word jass which either means "strenuous activity" or refers to the act of love-making, which while strenuous, is also incredibly enjoyable, just like jazz music.

While the name for jazz shares its etymological roots with the ethnic roots of the music, the word for one of the most important aspects of jazz, improvisation, is wholeheartedly European in origin. Improvisation, like many musical terms, comes from Italian improvviso, then improvvisare, making its way into French as improviser, before finally arriving in the English language as improvisation. However, it wasn't until 1786 when this word had a musical connotation in the English language. From the fifteenth century, the word actually referred to the unpredictable or an "unforeseen happening", which pretty much perfectly describes improvisation.

As you can see, these two words have both African and European origins, like jazz. In fact, the relation between jazz and language runs much deeper than mere etymology. Unfortunately, jazz music came about due to the deplorable slave trade in the United States in the nineteenth century. We think the slave trade was absolutely horrific, but the resulting jazz music is one of the very few good things to come from it. The obscure rhythms of jazz are inspired by the speech patterns of the African languages, so while music has shaped a lexicon, a family of languages could be said to have shaped jazz music entirely.

More on the Voice

On Wednesday, we celebrated World Voice Day. As a result of this obscure holiday, we looked at the vocal cords, which are found within the larynx and are arguably the most important part of the body when it comes to making the human voice.

That said, the vocal cords are fairly useless without the assistance of the lungs, which push air through the vocal cords, thereby vibrating them and making a sound. Of course, not every sound we make requires the lungs, at least not the variety of clicking sounds that are common in a large number of African languages.

Once air passes through our vocal cords and causes them to vibrate (or not in the case of unvoiced phonemes), it then passes into our mouths where our mouths and tongues act as filter. This filter changes how well certain frequencies of sound are omitted from the mouth.

Various mouth positions for vowel sounds.

Whilst the vocal cords dictate whether or not the phoneme is voiced or unvoiced, the mouth is mostly responsible for vowels, particularly in the English language. The tongue also plays a part in the formation of vowels, whilst the lips and teeth play a more important role in the production of consonants.

Unsurprisingly, for sounds like th in both "think" and "though" in which the tongue sits against the teeth, the phonemes are known as dental. For sounds like the letters f and v in English, they are known as labiodental as both the teeth and lips play a role in making the sounds.

When phonemes are made by placing the tongue on the alveolar ridge, the point in the mouth behind your upper incisors, the sounds are known as alveolar phonemes. When you use your voice to make a sound by pressing your tongue just behind this point, it's known as post-alveolar.

Palatal phonemes are made pressing the tongue against the palate, and velar phonemes are when the tongue is against the soft palate. Right at the back of the mouth pharyngeal phonemes are made against the pharynx and epiglottal phonemes against the epiglottis, but neither of these are present in the English language.

In addition to the vocal cords, mouth, tongue, lips, and teeth, the nose and nasal cavities can also play a part in the production of sounds. The sounds for the letters m and n are both produced nasally, which is why they are really difficult to say when you have a cold or blocked nose.

Although the vocal cords are pretty neat, the entire system that makes up our voices is incredible. We'll see you on Monday for our weekly language profile.

April 16: World Voice Day

As we love celebrations here at The Lingua File, today we're celebrating one of the more important obscure holidays for language lovers, World Voice Day.

World Voice Day is an international holiday organised as part of an effort by both European and American otolaryngologists, more commonly known as ear, nose, and throat (ENT) specialists. The goal of World Voice Day is to celebrate the huge importance of the human voice. In this vein, we thought we'd do our part and aim to establish what the human voice actually is.

A diagram including the vocal cords, because
an actual photo makes them look disgusting.

Most people have a vague understanding of the human voice. We all know that the voice is made using our vocal cords, which can be found in our throats. If you have ever seen Police Academy, and we're sorry if you have, then you will know that these vocal cords are capable of some amazing things.

The cords themselves are incredibly impressive. They differ in size between men and women, with men's vocal cords being longer than women's, which is why men generally have lower voices than women. Though the size difference accounts for the tonal range of men and women, the cords can alter the pitch within those ranges.

The muscles that operate the folds in the vocal cords are amongst the fastest in the body, allowing the vocal cords to change the quality of sound rapidly. It is this rapid movement that helps us to speak in our respective languages.

When the vocal cords get together with our lungs, mouths, and tongues, we can make an incredible range of noises. The difference between certain phonemes, such as voiced and unvoiced phonemes, is due to a phenomenon in the vocal cords known as abduction.

Abduction is when the vocal cords separate, rather than adduction, when they come together. If the act of abduction is sufficient enough to stop the vocal cords vibrating, the result is a voiceless phoneme, like the sound of the letter s in English, at least in most words. When the vocal cords are allowed to vibrate, the result is a voiced sound, like the letter z in English.

When the effect of adduction is strong enough to almost fully stop the vibrations, the result is a glottal stop. If you remember our post on the IPA, the system used to identify almost every phoneme used in human language, then you'll remember that the human voice is much more capable than reproducing all the sounds of just your language.

So we know the vocal cords are important, but what about the "voice"? We'll get to that on Friday. See you then!

Day of the Finnish Language: Part 2

On Wednesday, we celebrated the Day of the Finnish Language with a look at Mikael Agricola, the Finnish clergyman who is considered to be the founder of literary Finnish. While the celebration of the day coincides with the death of Mikael Agricola, it also coincides with the birthday of Elias Lönnrot, a Finnish physician and philologist. We feel a birthday is a much better reason to celebrate than somebody's death.

Sammatti, Elias' birthplace.

Elias Lönnrot was born in 1802 in the Grand Duchy of Finland. He studied his first academic year in the very same place that Agricola was acting bishop. However, the fire of Turku destroyed the university, forcing Lönnrot to move to Helsinki and graduate from the newly established university there which replaced the one in Turku.

He studied medicine and became a district doctor in Kajaani, in eastern Finland. Sadly, he was the only doctor for a population of around 4,000 people who lived across the length and breadth of a wide geographical area.

While his work in medicine seems depressing, it was really his work in linguistics that earned Lönnrot his fame. Lönnrot loved the Finnish language and collected folk tales in the language. He was a founder of the Finnish Literature Society in 1831 and as a result received financial support for his work.

He often took leave from his work as a physician to tour areas of Finland, including Lapland (where Santa lives) and part of Russian Karelia. His travels led to the writing of several books, and he was appointed to the Chair of Finnish Literature at the University of Helsinki thanks to his work preserving Finland's oral traditions.

He worked on the the Finnish-Swedish dictionary between 1866 and 1880, compiling over 200,000 entries in the process. Thanks to his experience with Finnish poetry he was considered a respected figure when it came to the Finnish language. Many of his translations had never been seen before and he coined many of the translations seen in the dictionary. Lönnrot also coined a number of neologisms when it came to scientific terminology with Latin or Greek roots.

Lönnrot's work with Finnish language is the second reason Wednesday was the celebration of the Finnish language. The work conducted by both Agricola and Lönnrot has been incredibly influential in the history of the Finnish language, and that is why Finland celebrated both of these great men in their efforts to preserve their mother tongue.

Part 1 | Part 2