Transposition
March 10, 2004
HEALTH WARNING: do not proceed with reading this entry unless you are interested in translation theory in its driest form. Your brain might switch itself off in protest.
Last week, I translated a documentary on the Trojan wars, and I came across this sentence:
Achilles charged across the plain after the fleeing Trojans
This sentence contains three difficulties: charged across, after and fleeing Trojans. These are impossible to translate elegantly whilst keeping the same grammatical categories. In this case, it is better to translate by changing one grammatical category into another. This general technique is called transposition, and it can take the form of a chassé-croisé (cross translation*) or an étoffement (enrichment*).
For example, I chose to translate Achilles charged across the plain as Achille traversa la plaine à bride abattue (it was mentioned beforehand that Achilles was riding a horse). I turned a verb (charge) into a noun group (à bride abattue) and a preposition (across) into a verb (traversa): so we have a change of grammatical category and a syntaxic permutation. This is typical of the kind of challenge presented by phrasal verbs, which can rarely be translated directly. In my translation, the verb indicates the process while the nominal group indicates the manner in which this process is accomplished, and this construction is the exact opposite of the English original. This type of double transposition is called a chassé-croisé, as the semantic elements are transferred to grammatically different groups of words.
Translating after by après wouldn't have worked with traverser. Prepositions are a lot more dynamic, concise and elliptic in English than in French, and have to be treated very carefully when translating. A neglected preposition can easily upset the balance of a sentence and even lead to an undertranslation. Here, the idea that Achilles was chasing the Trojans, indicated by after, had to be made clear in French, which was impossible with après. So I opted for a transposition called étoffement (enrichment*) by replacing a preposition (after) by a noun group (à la poursuite de).
As for the fleeing Trojans, simply translating this present participle by using another would have been extremely awkward (les Troyens fuyant). Here another transposition allowed me to replace the present participle by a noun group expressing the same idea (en déroute) to end up with the more pleasing les Troyens en déroute.
So the final sentence, after three transpositions, all slightly different from one another, was:
Achille traversa la plaine à bride abattue à la poursuite des Troyens en déroute.
Phew! Told you, didn't I?
*my translation, I studied translation theory in French and am not sure of the accepted terms in English
Thanks so much for this! I started reading your blog because I was hoping for tidbits of translation theory just like this, so I found your post fascinating.
PS The English for _gérondif_ is _gerundive_; sorry to spoil a delightful post with pedantry.
Posted by Individ-ewe-al on March 10, 2004 10:51 AMDry? I'd say that was rather a juicy post, myself. But then, I think translation is inherently fascinating (and indeed juicy). Being practically monolingual, I'm in awe of translators. I suppose it's because what you're trying to do (i.e. convey nuances and shades of meaning from one language into another) is basically impossible. But you try all the same. Hats off to you.
Your 'charged across' example is particularly intriguing because phrasal verbs are so common in English that we take them for granted, and it's almost a shock to realise that translating them into French is non-trivial to say the least.
I first came across the chassé-croisé solution in this article:
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/grads/billerey/papers/humor.pdf
(If translating English is tricky at the best of times, then trying to translate a master stylist like Wodehouse must be hell.)
Re the gerundive (or the gerund as I think it's more commonly known in English grammar), I believe the term usually refers to the '-ing' form of a verb when it is used as a *noun*, as in 'Fleeing is the better part of valour', rather than when it is used as a participial adjective, as I think it is in 'the fleeing Trojans', though I could be wrong.
Oh, and as for 'étoffement', if it were up to me I think I'd translate it as 'stuffing' ;-)
Posted by Anthony Hope on March 10, 2004 11:01 PMThanks Anthony for pointing out that "fleeing" isn't a gerund but a present participle used as an adjective (oops). I've amended my post accordingly.
And "stuffing" is great, although I doubt we'll ever see it in official translation textbooks.
And yes, one can only try...
Posted by céline on March 11, 2004 8:09 AMOur language, while not strictly English any longer, but "American", is always in flux. It is difficult, even here, to maintain a semblence of what is correct. I've noticed that the "Media" people whom one would think would be the better educated, often make gramatical as well as substantive errors.
My favorite pet peve is the misuse of "Pretty". To say that an outing, vacation, holiday, was enjoyable, one might say: It was very nice. It was quite good. It was pretty nice. It was pretty good. It was a lot of fun. But to say "It was pretty fun" grinds my teeth! :o)
Anyway, the word "Charge" (as in the military action - the Charge of the Light Birgade), doesn't have many alternatives that I can think of at this moment, unless we use "pounded" or a "Western" saying: They rode hell bent for leather. Don't ask me to break that one down. The concept I know, the reasoning is yet to be discovered.
One might substite for "across": over, along...
"Fleeing" is eaisest. Retreating, running away, withdawing, cowardly, defeated, scared, frightened, and my favorite, Chicken. :o)
Achilles charged across the plain after the fleeing Trojans becomes
Achilles and his gang pounded along the prarie, hell bent for leather, determined to catch those chickened-out, yellow-bellied cowards, the Trojans. :O)
Gosh, I have fun reading this Blog!
Rym Rytr
First on the transposition question. My favourite example is the Dutch sentence:
Ik zwem graag
[I swim gladly/willingly]
which has as its translation equivalent in English:
I like to swim.
These sorts of example post problems for "transfer" theories of translation where the activity is conceived of making a representation at some level of the material and transfering between languages. The obvious mistake is to suppose that a simple syntactic transfer will work. This example shows it doesn't. The same problem arises in Spanish/English translation with some verbs of motion. Some English verbs of motion express path information:
He entered the room
(enter indicates direction of motion as well as motion itself) and others don't:
He swam out of the harbour
(The path information is in the prepositional phrase "out of the harbour). Some English verbs encode manner of movement information and some don't:
He ran out of the room
versus
He left the room running.
OK so far so inconsistent. If you think of translating these into Spanish you see that the necessity for transfer arises because manner and path information are not encoded in the same way in the two languages:
El salio el puerto natando
[he left the harbour swimming]
but not:
*El nato d'el puerto (in fact I can't even really think of what the "right" preposition would be - the sentence is just impossible).
The same happens with other examples. Spanish tends to encode path on the verb and manner by an adjunct phrase where English often has either possibility but with a preference form encoding manner on the verb *if* manner is expressed and path separately. At least, I think that's the case.
As to gerunds and gerundives...English has both the difference being simply that one is a deverbal noun and the other a deverbal adjective. For some reason people are happy to call past participle forms used in adjectival contexts gerundives but are less happy about present participle forms. I really couldn't say why.
Posted by Jim on March 25, 2004 2:31 PM