Philologica Vol. 6, No. 2, 2014

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae The scientific journal of Sapientia University publishes original papers and surveys in several areas of sciences written in English.

Information about each series can be found at http://www.acta.sapientia.ro.

Editor-in-Chief László DÁVID

Zoltán A. BIRÓ Ágnes PETHŐ

Main Editorial Board Zoltán KÁSA

András KELEMEN Emőd VERESS

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Philologica Executive Editor Béla BÍRÓ (Sapientia University, Romania) birobela@sapientia.siculorum.ro Editorial Board Zoltán ABÁDI-NAGY (University of Debrecen, Hungary) Neil BALDWIN (Montclair State University, USA) Attila IMRE (Sapientia University, Romania) Daniela IONESCU (Bucharest University, Romania) Géza KÁLLAY (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary) Péter PASTOR (Montclair State University, USA) Zsuzsa TAPODI (Sapientia University, Romania) Assistant Editor Zsuzsanna AJTONY (Sapientia University, Romania)

Sapientia University

Scientia Publishing House

ISSN 2067-5151 http://www.acta.sapientia.ro

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae

Philologica

Volume 6, Number 2, 2014 STUDIES ON LINGUISTICS

Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania Scientia Publishing House

Proceedings of the conference on DISCOURSE, TRANSLATION AND INTERCULTURAL TRANSFER Sapientia University Institute of Humanities, Miercurea Ciuc 11-12 April 2014

Contents Mátyás BÁNHEGYI Translation and Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Krisztina SÁROSI-MÁRDIROSZ Problems Related to the Translation of Political Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Bálint Péter FURKÓ Perspectives on the Translation of Discourse Markers. A case study of the translation of reformulation markers from English into Hungarian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Zsuzsanna AJTONY Translation of Irony in the Hungarian Subtitles of Downton Abbey . . . . . . 197 Enikő PÁL Reflections on the Status of Hungarian Loanwords in Old Romanian Translations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Enikő TANKÓ L2 Romanian Influence in the Acquisition of the English Passive

by L1 Speakers of Hungarian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Attila IMRE How (Not) to Fail as a Multimedia Translator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Imola Katalin NAGY English for Special Purposes: Specialized Languages and Problems of Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 6, 2 (2014) 139–158

Translation and Political Discourse Mátyás BÁNHEGYI

Department of English Linguistics Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary banhegyi.matyas@kre.hu Abstract. The paper describes the text linguistic research of political texts in the field of Translation Studies and presents an overview of critical discourse analysis-based studies. First, the relationship between text, power and ideology and its implications on the role of translation are explored.

This is followed by a review of a number of studies on the translation of political texts and on the power relations involved. The paper classifies such studies into the following six categories representing distinct research fields: translators’ professional roles and politics; translators acting as mediators in situations of political conflict; translators’ professional responsibilities and the strategies they apply; the inference of translators’ own historical, social and cultural backgrounds; manipulation in the translation of literary texts and other text types; and critical discourse awareness in Translation Studies.

The most recent studies in the above research fields and their results are also presented. It is concluded that these approaches exhibit quite varied research methods and their results are almost impossible to compare. With a view to the future development of this research field, it seems expedient to introduce a unified research theory, method and tool.

Keywords: Translation Studies, critical discourse analysis, political discourse, ideology, power

1. Introduction In order to provide a description of the features of translation and translated texts, one branch of Translation Studies deals with the analysis of source texts and their corresponding target texts. Apart from describing translation procedures, translation strategies and translation methods (Bednárová-Gibová 2012), Translation Studies has long been intrigued and fascinated by political discourse and as politics is increasingly done in supranational contexts, translation is inevitably part of international negotiations, struggles and political power games.

Therefore, apart from monolingual communication, translation in bilingual and

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multilingual contexts plays a vital role in gaining, establishing and maintaining political power and/or exhibiting ideology. This scenario inevitably results in an increased interest in what ways translation contributes to maintaining social power and to creating or reproducing ideology. The related research field in Translation Studies has produced numerous approaches for the description of various features of political texts and offers diverse analytical tools for research. In fact, the way translated texts are used (or misused and even abused) for political purposes has very complex social, psychological and textual implications, which, in our opinion, can and need be studied and described systematically within Translation Studies with the help of the analytical tools offered by Critical Discourse Analysis.

This paper provides an overview of the relationship between political discourse (including texts created through translation), power and ideology, to be followed by a review of Translation Studies specific research in the field of political discourse. Political discourse is interpreted here as a spoken or written act of communication used in formal or non-formal political contexts that relates to, deals with or describes any political event, organisation or actor. As we shall see, the analysis of political discourse within Translation Studies offers numerous approaches and a wide range of analytical methods. This relatively narrow research field will be described in more detail below.

2. Text, power and ideology It is a linguistics commonplace that texts exist in their social context: the understanding of the textual features of any text, including translations, will inevitably involve the creators and the audience of these texts as well as the social and cultural relationships holding between the human interactants involved. Such human relationships will also involve possible unequal statuses between the parties concerned, which will give rise to diverse relations of power. Power is interpreted as the social power of groups or institutions over persons or groups of people, through which the actions or possibilities of action available to such persons or groups can potentially be limited. Such power relations may also be exhibited by texts.

Even if power is primarily a social phenomenon (as it exists between humans), language will be a very powerful tool for obtaining and maintaining power in human communicative contexts (Fowler 1985). Once such power relations have been accepted, are taken for granted and are seen as natural in the given socialcultural context, it is possible to talk about an ideology with reference to the social groups involved. Ideology is a composite of the “basic beliefs that underlie the social representations of a social group” (van Dijk 2003: 10), that is, ideology is the set of power relations that ensure the social status of a given social group through reinforcing the social representation of this group in other social groups.

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The literature abounds in the description of the relationship between power and communication. However, as the main focus of the current paper is politics and translation, the present discussion will be narrowed down to one specific human communicative situation and text type: politics and political texts (or political discourse). Political texts in the scope of the present paper are understood as institutionalised means of communication through which political power may be obtained and retained and through which this very power and the related ideology can be maintained. Translation in bi- and multilingual contexts plays a crucial role in retaining such political power and preserving the ideology related to it.

3. Translation, power and politics In recent years, more precisely after the ‘cultural turn’ of the early 1990s (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990: 12, Dimitriu 2002: 2, Hatim and Munday 2004: 313), Translation Studies has shown intense interest in analysing the translation of political texts as well as the ideology expressed and the power relations involved in the translation of such texts. The main research areas in this field include the following directions, represented mainly by the scholars appearing in parentheses below: (1) diverse purpose cross sections of discourse analysis, translation studies and politics (Hatim and Mason 1990, Chilton and Schäffner 2002, Schäffner 2004, Bánhegyi 2008, Bánhegyi 2009); (2) the analysis of the social, cultural, ideological and political contexts of source and target texts and cultures (Pym 1992 and 2000; Schäffner 2003); (3) text typology and textual functions of source and target language texts (Nord 1997, Trosborg 1997); (4) the role of translators as intercultural agents or cultural mediators (Venuti 1992, Katan 1999, Doorslaer 2010); (5) translators being potential points of conflict during their work (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, Tymoczko 2003); (6) translators’ purposeful manipulation of target texts and translators’ textual choices reflecting ideological and/or political commitment (Álvarez and Vidal 1996, Baker 2006, Conway and Vaskivska 2010); and, recently, (7) translators’ political activism and social activism as part of their professional work (Tymoczko 2006, Baker 2007).

Apart from the field dealing with the cross section of discourse analysis, translation studies and politics, most of the above research directions do not use specific text linguistic approaches to support their text-related claims. Nor do they use textual evidence quoted from the texts under scrutiny in their larger social context to pinpoint and interpret textual differences between source

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and target language texts as part of their respective research methodology and analysis. Such approaches and their results often seem unconvincing, even perhaps methodologically inappropriate and ad hoc: if there is no systematic methodology or a theoretically well-grounded foundation of analysis with sufficient objectivity, i.e. if analysts (intuitively) pick a few expressions of their choice from the source and target texts and add some (subjective) personal comments as explanation, then the resulting analysis cannot be deemed as valid or reliable as it lacks a proper methodology, reliable theoretical foundations and a required level of objectivity.

Not denying the merits of any of these research directions (e.g. facilitation theory formulation), we often find that some of the resulting data are based on explanatory details and ad hoc descriptions of contexts rather than on a systematic analysis of hard textual data. In our view, data that can be deemed objective will be obtained the most reliably with the help of text linguistic approaches. Based on this assumption, in the next section we will describe which text linguistic approaches are present in today’s trends of critical linguistics and in the field of Translation Studies concerning the analysis of political discourse.

3.1. Research on the translation of political discourse After the above short introduction to the analysis of the translation of political discourse and the power relations displayed by such texts, the current section focuses on political discourse oriented translation research using text linguistic approaches. For terminological precision, it must be noted that in Translation Studies political discourse is also termed discourse in situations of conflict (Salama-Carr 2007). In our interpretation, translation research involving political discourse can be classified into seven distinct research fields as far as research topics are concerned. These seven research fields and their representatives are the following: 1. Translators’ professional roles and politics: Palmer (2007), Dragovic-Drouet’s (2007), Gagnon (2006); 2. Translators acting as mediators in situations of political conflict: Tang (2007), Calzada Pérez (2007); 3. Translators’ professional responsibilities and the strategies they apply: Maier (2007), Schäffner (1998), Hernández Guerrero (2010); 4. The inference of translators’ own historical, social and cultural backgrounds: Kuhiwczak (2007), Nikolaou (2007); 5. Manipulation in the translation of literary texts and other text types: Foster (2007), Williams (2007), Chadwick (2007), Baker (2006); 6. Critical discourse awareness in translation: Valdeón (2007), Chan (2007), Schäffner (2004).

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Below, these research areas will be introduced and their main findings will be summarised to show that Translation Studies does not yet have a commonly accepted and systematic analytical tool for the examination of political texts.

Depending on the nature of the research in question and on the theme of politics involved, diverse researchers apply a very wide range of analytical tools, which makes the advances of translation research on politics very difficult to compare and systematise. This, in turn, also causes the fragmentation of research efforts.

3.1.1. Translators’ professional roles and politics With the internationalisation of politics, translators’ professional roles and divided loyalties have been foregrounded by Translation Studies. Palmer (2007) deals with the different roles Iraqi people working for Western media assume and the political commitment-induced conflicting loyalties such a situation poses to these translators. Relying on Wadensjö’s (1998) Conduit Theory, Palmer traces media reporters’ and translators’ roles in the flow of information about the Iraqi situation of conflict. Palmer concludes that, even if such translators are trusted by Western media people working in the area, misinformation may happen as a result of (1) translators’ providing summaries rather than word-byword translations, (2) omissions of textual material considered irrelevant by the translator, (3) journalists’ linguistic inability to mingle in the local community and the resulting incapacity to understand the local culture, and finally (4) as a result of translators’ biased social embeddedness, social status and non-neutral contacts in the local community in question. With reference to source and target texts, Palmer considers different cultural and political backgrounds as a potential source of conflicting political orientations exhibited by these texts.

Dragovic-Drouet’s (2007) starting point in her discussion of translations related to the Yugoslavian conflict is neutrality as interpreted by Seleskovitch (1983) as well as the Newmarkian (1989) criteria of moral and factual truth.

Through a textual analysis of source and target language texts of the Yugoslavian conflict, Dragovic-Drouet aims to prove that the above-mentioned professional standards are oftentimes not observed by translators and that translators may resort to censoring or modifying texts should they perceive that, in their judgement, primary text producers (reporters, media personnel, etc.) show unwanted embeddedness (cultural bias), which potentially results in unfair communication. Turning to translation methodology, Dragovic-Drouet claims that translator training should develop in future translators the ability of coping with situations of conflict both linguistically and in terms of terminology management. This study reveals that translators can potentially manipulate texts politically and also sheds light on the issue of awareness-raising in connection with the translation of political texts.

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Gagnon (2006) describes the ways official translations are handled and performed in Canada by the Canadian Prime Minister’s Office, the Parliament and other government institutions and explores how such translations are received.

With reference to the status of originals and translations, Gagnon, discussing the hybridity of target texts (texts showing unusual, strange textual features in the target culture as a result of conscious, deliberate translator decisions), concludes that translations have a lower status than originals in Canada. In terms of the adaptation of texts and the reception of French and English parallel texts, Gagnon, relying on textual analysis performed by way of Fairclough’s (1989) Critical Discourse Analysis Model, claims that the way translations are done, i.e. what institutional translation strategies are applied, are decided by the audience to be convinced. This signals that the actual ideological aims will determine the translation strategies applied. This points towards the assumption that “Frenchand English-Canadian cultures do not often meet in translated federal speeches” (Gagnon 2006: 84), which is contrary to the expectations of a homogeneous Canadian nation. This statement seems to indicate that it is almost impossible (and probably at some points not even desired) to produce politically equivalent texts even in the case of bilingual countries, let alone other, more diverse political contexts (e.g. texts used at international levels).

The studies described above illustrate that the analysis of the translation of political texts must definitely extend to the contemporary national and/or international contexts the text under scrutiny have been created in.

3.1.2. Translators acting as mediators in situations of political conflict As politics is becoming an increasingly international activity, translators often find themselves in the role of mediators in political conflict. Tang (2007) focuses on cross-cultural conflicts surfacing as either cultural, social or ideological conflicts.

Tang, on the basis of LeBaron’s (2003) Theory of Cultural Conflicts, argues that cross-cultural conflicts can be subdivided into soft and hard conflicts on the basis of their scope, i.e. suppression or open voicing of conflict by the society (societies) involved. If discussion about such conflicts is suppressed, we talk about soft conflicts, while in case conflicts are openly addressed, we encounter hard conflicts. With reference to translation from English into Chinese and vice versa, Tang sees translators “sandwiched between Chinese and Western cultures” (Tang 2007: 139), and, through the culturally contextualised close reading of the English translation of Chinese texts, concludes that translators actually tend to eliminate soft conflicts. Given this, Tang calls for translators’ sensitisation to conflicts so that they will be able to cope with hard conflicts on an international scale in a more effective manner. This suggests that awareness-raising should be a component of translation training, for which even more extensive research is necessary.

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Calzada Pérez (2007) explores translators’ roles in situations of conflict and urges that translators tackle situations of conflicts rather than avoid them. The starting point of the discussion is that advertising is in fact a “site of ideological conflict(s)” (Calzada Pérez 2007: 149), and that advertisements can cause or settle conflicts. In this context, translators, relying on their cross-cultural skills, abilities and strategies, may become “ideal conflict mediators” (Calzada Pérez 2007: 149).

Relying on Cronin’s (2003) categorisation of censorship and zero translation and connecting this categorisation with possible translation strategies, Calzada Pérez concludes that translators, as text producers, may easily reach and create points of problem settlement with the help of their translations through “focusing on consensus” (Calzada Pérez 2007: 156), or can modify disagreements to “achieve long-lasting benefits” (Calzada Pérez 2007: 156). These findings suggest that translators can also interfere in politics.

The studies presented in this section show that the translators of political texts are often in the “frontline”: the features and the quality of their work will influence both the reception of their texts and the political events associated with such texts. Therefore, the analysis of political texts by researchers must extend to the reception and, if possible, the political events directly or closely connected to the translated text.

3.1.3. Translators’ professional responsibilities and translation strategies The professional responsibilities translators take and the strategies they apply when translating political texts have also been researched in Translation Studies.

In connection with professional responsibilities, Maier (2007) claims that even if translators have recently acquired a higher status in terms of their usefulness and visibility as compared to earlier times, they concurrently fail to recognise the need to discuss their responsibilities and to learn to account for their work in situations of conflict. In Maier’s interpretation, translators can act as intersections between two opposing sides or can function as points of resistance and conflict.

Maier claims that even today some translators are insensitive to perceiving situations of conflict, and argues that translators actually face internal conflicts (conflicts within the translator) when exposed to translating texts of conflict situations. In addition, Maier calls for an exploration and a deeper understanding of the diverse situations of conflict today’s translators might encounter during their work, and designates this as a further field of (possibly job ethical) research.

In this respect, Maier’s study touches upon the relationship between job ethics and the translation of political texts as reflected by target texts.

Schäffner (1998) explores different types of hedges in European political discourse. Relying on Lakoff’s (1973) definition, Schäffner defines hedges as words whose meaning involves “vagueness, indeterminateness” (Schäffner 1998:

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185) with reference to the phrase they modify. Schäffner establishes five types of hedges: evidentiality hedges such as I think, it seems, which refer to the speaker’s degree of commitment to the truth expressed in a text; modifying hedges such as fairly, too, typical, which “shift the scope of indeterminateness of the utterances” (Schäffner 1998: 191); quantifying hedges such as in every respect, in some respect, which “relate to characteristics of the whole scope of precision” (Schäffner 1998: 191); despecifying hedges such as kind of, roughly, which “extend the scope of indeterminateness” (Schäffner 1998: 192); and specifying hedges such as real, genuine, true, exactly, which “narrow down the scope of indeterminateness of a concept or a proposition” (Schäffner 1998: 193). Based on comparative pragmatic textual analysis, Schäffner concludes that source text hedges can be rendered as the same type of hedges in the target language, as different type of hedges causing shifts in the target text, can be deleted and even new hedges can be added in the target text. Politically contextualising the examples, Schäffner explains the effects such hedges have on the receivers of the translated texts. Schäffner concludes by noting the semantic and pragmatic problems hedges can cause to translators and calls for a more systematic description of hedging devices. This suggests that microlevel textual features must be taken into consideration in the analysis of the translation of political texts.

Hernández Guerrero (2010) studies originally foreign language interviews published in Spanish in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo and discusses in what ways such interviews, which are created through a rewriting process, are adjusted to the needs and expectations of the local readership. In addition, the paper focuses on the translation strategies applied to this end. Based on Stetting’s (1989) noting of transedition, the study explores to what extent the job of translation at a news agency entails translation and editing. In the scope of this, textual changes in target texts are qualified as modification, addition or omission, clarity enhancement, reorganisation for editorial purposes and changes suited to textual conventions. These textual alterations are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively and it is concluded that newsworthiness is the most important criterion these translated texts must primarily satisfy. Thus, fidelity to the source text is pushed to the background and faithfulness to the target audience is foregrounded in the scope of localising the target text. It is also claimed that numerous instances of recontextualisation are effected in the target text, which may increase the text’s potential to influence and manipulate its readers.

The above studies show that research must extend to the realisations of certain recurrent translation strategies surfacing in translated political texts and their pragmatic effects. This is justified by the claim that conclusions established on the basis of one-off or non-contextualised microtextual textual instances may produce misleading research results.

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3.1.4. The inference of translators’ own historical and cultural backgrounds Translators’ historical and cultural backgrounds can also interfere with the translation of political texts. Translators’ historical and cultural backgrounds, through their interpretation of the events, actors, etc. described in the target text, shape readers’ understanding of, and attitude to, historical events through the translators’ interpretation of events surfacing in target texts. In his study, Kuhiwczak (2007) attempts to show how, during the transition from oral to written Holocaust history, the translation of originally non-English oral sources into written English historical records published as English translations, altered the text type and tone of such primary historical sources. Kuhiwczak goes as far as theoretically questioning whether translation, at a universal scale, is capable of (precisely) communicating others’ thoughts. This suggests that translators’ interpretation of the texts for translation plays a crucial role in producing the finalised target text.

Nikolaou (2007), with the help of a comparative textual analysis, examines how Christopher Logue’s own personality and his life experiences contributed to his creative translation of Homer’s Iliad. Nikolaou claims that, as an artefact, Logue’s own literary piece, War Music is in fact the result of the act of translating Iliad and that Logue’s views of the situations of conflicts of Iliad evolve through a hermeneutical dialogue between the text to be translated and the translator.

Apparently, interpretation, with reference to both source and target texts, plays a vital role in the translation of political texts.

In the light of the above, it may justifiably be claimed that any reliable and valid textual analysis must allow for the exploration of the translators’ own political commitment and political attitudes as traceable in translated texts.

3.1.5. Manipulation in the translation of literary texts and other text types Manipulation in the translation of political texts has also developed into a prolific research area. Williams (2007) describes 19th century contemporary GermanEnglish national rivalry and compares biographical details of Wordsworth and his German translator, Freiligrath to reveal textual realisations of such rivalry. Apart from the textual analysis of Freiligrath’s translational practice (i.e. the translation of poems, including metre, imagery, etc.), Williams investigates Freiligrath’s selection procedure of choosing Wordsworth’s politically-charged poems for translation, and the effects contemporary German-English national rivalry and hostility had on the German reception of Wordsworth’s poetry. It is concluded that interpretation is only possible in the light of contemporary historical and cultural contexts.

Baker (2006) provides an integrative, fully developed framework for the analysis of political discourse. Due to the complexity of this approach, this framework will

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be described in a more detailed way below. This model can serve as a resource of the description of potential textual features translated political texts may display.

In fact, Baker restricts her approach practically to narratives only and does not rely as heavily on text linguistic findings as it would be desirable.

Baker’s approach is multidisciplinary in nature and is based on several theories.

Its starting point is the premise that political conflicts and the resolution of such conflicts in today’s globalised world, as a rule, stretch over national boundaries and thus inevitably involve translation and interpretation activities. According to Baker, power is present exclusively in situations in which a party or parties are forced to act contrary to their wills and interests. Conflicts, Baker (2006: 1) asserts, evolve when parties of opposing interests intend to “undermine each other because they have incompatible goals, competing interests, or fundamentally different values”.

By integrating a theory of narrative types, a theory of the assessment of the effectiveness of such narratives, and theories of translators’ attitudes towards consenting to or denying the reproduction of ideological contents in texts, Baker wishes to demonstrate that translation itself can either function as a tool in the hands of political elites by creating one single (and consequently one-sided) truth and reality and can therefore enforce a given social and political order on citizens or, quite the contrary, translation can be used as a tool for fighting against such manipulation and corruption of texts.

Baker intends to provide a framework for exploring how translators, through text production, contribute to the creation and promotion of politically-charged narratives, to the wide dissemination of such narratives or to the resistance to the production and dissemination of these narratives. By adopting a standpoint assumed in social and communication theory, Baker (2006: 3) defines narrative (or story) as a linguistic realisation of sequential events of “everyday stories we live by” and later, relying on Fisher’s (1987) claim of all human communication essentially being a narrative, extends her definition to incorporate practically every type of discourse. This broad definition allows for the investigation of several genres of discourse in a very diverse range of media.

As far as the possibilities for manipulating narratives in the translation process are concerned, Baker, on the basis of Somers and Gibson (1994), describes four techniques through which the reception of narratives can be influenced.

Temporality, relationality, causal emplotment and selective appropriation are all factors impacting the reception of narratives. Such instances of manipulation are common in mediatised communication and in translations transmitted by the mass media. Below, the four techniques established by Baker will be explored in more detail.

Not necessarily portraying a true-to-life sequencing of events, temporality is the subjective, person-specific interpretation and ordering of the sequences of events contained in a narrative. Such a narrative is created through an individual’s

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perception of the events included in the given narrative. It is the temporality of narratives that allows translators to interpret the textual material and the logical implications contained in the text. An alteration of the sequencing of events, for instance as a result of translation, can have different implications in the target language text from those surfacing in the source text.

Relationality refers to the interrelatedness of events within a narrative: events have to constitute one single narrative (the narrated events must make up one narrative logically and thematically). Furthermore, the interpretation of every event of a certain narrative is exclusively possible in the light of other events of the given narrative as a whole. Translation is of key importance here as, for instance, the choice of certain lexical items in the target language text can trigger associations of certain narratives, which are possibly different from the narrative associations of the source language community. This feature seems easy to be utilised for political reasons (e.g. for war propaganda) in case well-selected lexis is used that evokes references to well-established public narratives of political agendas.

Carrying also ethical implications, causal emplotment entails the significance of events in narratives, and is connected to the fact that narratives do not merely list events but “weight and explain” them (Baker 2006: 67) in terms of the interpretation and evaluation of events, motifs, etc., thus providing a moral reading of the narrative. Through translation, the weighting of events can be changed to produce deliberately altered patterns of causal emplotment in the target language text.

The last factor in Baker’s theory affecting the reception of narratives, selective appropriation, denotes the conscious or subconscious processes during the creation of a narrative through which certain events get included whereas others get excluded from the final version of the narrative. This, in the large scale, in terms of translation, extends to the choices of what narratives of the source culture (i.e. narratives about which events) get translated. This selection, in the hands of politics and journalists, etc. acting as political actors, might easily contribute to the creation of false images or, in worse cases, to the creation of enemy cultures through acts of deliberate appropriation, i.e. purposeful selection of events along certain ideologies or political purposes (cf. selective appropriation above).

Baker’s approach is revealing and exemplary in a way that is shows that power, ideology and politics related translation research must be multidisciplinary and based on interrelated theories.

Furthermore, with reference to the reception of narratives, Baker identifies translation as an act involving possible alterations in the features of the resulting target text: the aim of altering certain features of target texts can be to renegotiate the features of a given narrative “to produce a politically charged narrative in the target context” (Baker 2006: 105). This can function as a means of constructing a modified, influenced reality for receptors through “strategic moves that are

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consciously initiated in order to present a [social, political or other] movement or a particular position within a certain perspective” (Baker 2006: 106). Baker terms this practice framing.

Baker explores four different ways of framing selecting from among the practically endless methods available and describes the potential uses of such means in translation. The first method of framing is termed temporal and spatial framing and involves no alterations in the text for translation itself but achieves its effect by the careful selection of a suitable text for translation and by embedding such a text “in a temporal and spatial context that accentuates the narrative it depicts and encourages receptors to establish links between it and current narratives” (Baker 2006: 112). This practice is capable of exerting political influence despite the fact that the events of the narrative of the source text may actually be contained within an absolutely different temporal and spatial setting.

An especially common way of framing that appears in connection with the translation of literary pieces is selective appropriation of textual material, which also has possible political implications. In this case, omissions from or additions to the original text are effected in order to “suppress, accentuate or elaborate particular aspects of a narrative encoded in the source text or utterance, or aspects of the larger narrative(s) in which it [the given narrative] is embedded” (Baker 2006: 114). On the translator’s side, this act can happen either consciously or unconsciously and may well serve political purposes.

Another way of framing is by labelling. Labelling in this context denotes the practice of using “a lexical item, term or phrase to identify a person, place, group, event or any other key element in a narrative” (Baker 2006: 122), given that such names embody particular viewpoints, beliefs or political commitments of a community.

The fourth method of framing is termed repositioning of participants. This denotes rearranging the hierarchical positions of the characters of the narrative and the receptors of the narrative through altering partly the socio-linguistic features of the participants’ speech and partly other features used for such participants’ linguistic identification and characterisation. This also creates space for political manipulation through translation.

As a summary, it can be concluded that Baker’s theoretical framework takes account of several contextual and intertextual features as well as discusses several instances and means of (possible) political manipulation. However, it does not rely on theories to pinpoint exact textual realisations of such instances of manipulation.

Baker rather explains textual phenomena in their social, cultural and political context. We are of the opinion that for the sake of objectivity the analysis of political manipulation in translated texts must include the precise and objective pinpointing of textual elements capable of manipulation, rather than providing solely the social, cultural and political contexts of these texts as a mere backdrop.

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Using an approach quite different from the above and relying on examples from international politics, Sch채ffner (2001), in the context of international translation practice, explores the ways hybrid texts come about through the translation process. Hybrid texts are the result of conscious, deliberate decisions on the part of the translator: these texts show unusual, strange textual features in the target culture and yet fulfil their intended purpose in the communicative situation in which they exist. The reason for this strangeness of target texts is that the genre of the source text does not exist in the target culture and, consequently, there are no model texts that could guide translators. With reference to political discourse, Sch채ffner notes that one reason why hybrid texts can come about is globalisation, as internationalisation potentially facilitates the dissemination of source genres (possibly unknown) in target language cultures. Through the use of contrastive text typological analysis, it is concluded that hybrid texts often display textual features that clash with the existing norms in the target language. This could possibly allow for the introduction of socially unaccepted/unacceptable concepts in the target culture and thus play a role in power games and political persuasion.

Based on the studies detailed above, it can be concluded that translation can purposefully be used for political manipulation. With a view to this, the analysis of any translated text must extend to contemporary social, cultural, political and ideological features as well as to the textual realisation and the context-based interpretation of such features.

3.1.6. Critical discourse awareness in Translation Studies Initiatives of critical discourse awareness are identifiable in Translation Studies.

This research approach was motivated by the internationalisation of politics, which resulted in an increased number of translated political texts, accessible in diverse channels of the mass media. Once it has been theorised and later proven (e.g. Baker 2006) that source and target texts are not always equivalent in a political sense, and that target texts may be designed to realise partly different communication aims from those of the source text, an even growing concern started to surround the translation of political texts.

Related text linguistic research aimed to point out textually where and in what ways source and target language political texts were not equivalent. The ensuing ethical, political and professional need to critically relate to translated texts, translation activities and the pragmatic effects of translation activities has given rise to numerous critical approaches. In what follows, some of these approaches will be described in greater detail.

Relying on the theories of the best-known and best-established scholars of Critical Discourse Analysis and ideology (Fairclough [1989, 1995], van Dijk [1990, 2003]) as well as of media discourse analysis (Bell [1991, 1998], Schelesinger and

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Lumley [1985]), Valdeón (2007) compares written news reports aired on BBC and CNN and their translations. With ideology interpreted in this context as “a set of assumptions accepted by the participant in a given stretch of discourse” (Valdeón 2007: 101), Valdeón distinguishes two types of mediation with respect to media text producers: positive mediation, i.e. neutrality of text producers towards their subject and negative mediation, i.e. “importing external agendas that might stem from their [the text producers’] own ideological background” (Valdeón 2007: 103). Valdeón, with reference to Baker’s (1992) classification of non-equivalence at word level, examines the use and meaning of the lexical items of “terrorist” and “separatist” as well as their (alleged) equivalents. The conclusion of the discussion is that translations produced both for BBC and CNN on the Madrid terrorist attack in 2005 do not seem to “operate in the interest of the target culture, quite the contrary, they operate in their own interest, whether that is understood as personal, editorial or national” (Valdeón 2007: 116). It may be claimed that Valdeón using Baker’s taxonomy, manages to reveal instances of word-level manipulation.

Chan (2007) compares the two Chinese versions of Hillary Clinton’s Living History published by Chinese publishers China Times and Yilin Press. Chan contextualises the two Chinese versions in the different receiving Chinese cultures and, with the help of close reading, reveals numerous differences between the two translations. The differences between the source text and the two different translations in terms of the Chinese title of the work, certain textual omissions and the translation shifts identified are due to market considerations as well as the influence of Chinese censorship activities. Chan’s study perfectly exemplifies that in the case of political texts textual features must be accounted for in the backdrop of the receiving culture.

Schäffner (2004) in the framework of a theoretical proposal urges the closer cooperation of political discourse analysis (PDA) and Translation Studies.

PDA explores the link between linguistic behaviour and politics in the fields of pragmatics, semantics and syntax and tries to explain in what ways such linguistic features contribute to political persuasion (cf. Chilton and Schäffner 1997). In the scope of political texts, Schäffner reviews the most common research areas in Translation Studies and establishes the following themes as possible joint research areas of PDA and Translation Studies: research of lexical choice in the target text in comparison with that of the source text, the practice of selecting information to translate, creating new political identities by phrasing and framing (i.e. influencing readers to associate certain phrases with given social and ideological contexts). Through examples, it is demonstrated that all of these translational practices can be used for manipulative purposes, thus sensitivity to such features in the receivers of political texts is very crucial in the case of the translation of political texts.

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In the same study, Sch채ffner calls for a systematic approach to the research of the translation of political texts and urges the following: 1) the status of translations (overt or covert translation, i.e. is the target text identified as translation or not?) and the general practice of performing such translation work should be established before effecting any kind of analysis, 2) translated texts under scrutiny should be published in the original languages not only in English for the sake of clarity, 3) mistranslations or instances of translation shifts or losses should be analysed in their social-political context so that such shifts can possibly reveal ideological structures (i.e. socially accepted ideology) and 4) that the entire translation process, not only the end-product, should be reviewed in the scope of analyses.

Sch채ffner, relying on the findings of PDA and with a view to the political strategic functions of political discourse established by PDA, discusses the following four political strategies translation can serve or support when it comes to the rendering of political texts: coercion, resistance, dissimulation as well as legitimisation and delegitimisation. Putting this in perspective in her study, the following is claimed: translation can be used as a means of controlling access to information by carefully selecting texts for translation (coercion). Translators can take an active role and select texts for translation and, by making such texts available to the public, they can make voices other than the official one heard (resistance). Furthermore, a manipulative translation strategy in the hands of those commissioning translations could be either disallowing certain texts to be translated, purposefully commissioning only certain extracts of given texts to be translated or deliberately publishing inaccurate translations: this is collectively termed dissimulation. All of these strategies can prevent persons from receiving non-biased information through translation. Finally, positive self-presentation and the negative presentation of others can be effected as the fourth type of translation strategy termed legitimisation and delegitimisation.

With reference to the possible cooperation of PDA and Translation Studies, it may be stated in general that this approach stresses that word-level equivalence should be assessed and analysed in the ideological context of the source and target cultures; lexical choice in the target text must be analysed within the framework of the target culture; the selection of information to be translated should be interpreted with a view to the most powerful ideology of the source and target cultures; and the creation of new political identities through lexical choice and framing should be contextualised in the target culture.

As the above studies in this section have demonstrated, critical approaches to the translation of political texts must extend to the analysis of lexical-level manipulation, to the comparison of cultural aspects of source and target cultures as well as to the analysis of linguistic choices (possibly) responsible for political and/or ideological manipulation.

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4. Conclusions Based on the studies described in this article, it can be concluded and claimed that the Translation Studies focused analysis of political discourse offers numerous diverse approaches and a wide range of methodologies. This is so much true that the research methods and research results are hardly comparable with one another, and this hinders rapid scientific advancement in this field. To combat this problem, the development and introduction of a more unified approach and research methodology seem desirable. Such an approach and methodology should involve social, political, cultural, historical, hermeneutical and political mass communication contextual features and their interpretation as much and/ or relevant as possible. This may eventually ensure that all contextual features of the creation of political texts, the features and the mediatised use of the translation of such texts, as well as the interplay of these features be described and analysed within the scope of one single theory, research method and tool.

The actual development, description and testing of such a theory, method and tool are to be accomplished in the future.

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Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 6, 2 (2014) 159–180

Problems Related to the Translation of Political Texts Krisztina SÁROSI-MÁRDIROSZ

Department of Applied Linguistics Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Târgu Mureş, Romania) salusnostra_2000@yahoo.com Abstract. This study deals with the problems related to the translation of political texts in the theoretical framework elaborated by the researchers working in the field of translation studies and reflects on the terminological peculiarities of the special language used for this text type. Consideration of the theoretical framework is followed by the analysis of a specific text spoken then written in English and translated into Hungarian and Romanian.

The conclusions are intended to highlight the fact that there are no recipes for translating a political speech, because translation is not only a technical process that uses translation procedures and applies transfer operations, but also a matter of understanding cultural, historical and political situations and their significance.

Keywords: translation strategies, political language, political speech, adaptation, explicitation

Introduction This study deals with the problems related to the translation of political speeches.

The first part of the study examines some issues related to the theory of translation and presents the relationship between the source text and target text, sketching some ideas regarding equivalence in translation. The first part consists of three main subchapters: 1. The definition of translation. 2. The relationship between the source text and the target text. 3. Equivalence in translation.

The second part of the study deals with the characterization of political language, it presents the relationship between language and politics and it highlights some of the most relevant problems associated with translating political texts. This part consists of four subchapters: 1. Language and politics. 2.

Translating political texts. 3. Adapting political texts. 4. The problematic nature of translating political speeches.

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The third part of the study highlights some practical issues related to the translation of political speeches such as the exact rendering of the message without losing the spirit of the speech itself. The chosen method was that of analyzing a parallel corpus which consists of Sir Winston Churchill’s speech entitled “The Sinews of Peace” and its Hungarian and Romanian translations; we analyzed the way equivalence is created in the case of the non-translatable meanings in the two translations.

1. Theoretical framework 1.1. The definition of translation During the past quarter-century scholars have devoted a great deal of thinking, if not research, to the translation process as such. For the most part, these have been scholars of another ilk, primary linguists, aided now and then by mathematicians and psychologists. In spite of the fact that the results of their thinking proved to be simplistic when applied to highly complex entities, we should not forget the contribution of such scientists as Trubetskoy, Havranek, Mukarovsky, Levý, Proházka, Sapir, Whorf, Loundsbury, Voegelin, Harry Hoijer, Greenberg and Weinreich to the development of Translation Studies.

Research in this field with several centuries’ tradition shows that translation is neither just an act or an instance of translating nor just a product but a complex activity during which the translator transmits cultural and ideological messages as well. The enlarged perspectives and the application of the results of other domains help researchers to prove that translation is not just the expression in the target language of what has been expressed in the source language (preserving semantic and stylistic equivalences), but a more creative activity that enriches the source text with new ideological and cultural features.

To shift from one language to another is, by definition, to alter the forms.

Further, the contrasting forms convey meanings which cannot but fail to coincide completely; there is no absolute correspondence between the lexicons of two different languages. Something is always “lost” or – why not – gained in the process of translation, and still the translator has to reproduce somehow the sense of the original. That’s why (s)he needs to have a translation strategy built up of different translation techniques. The application of these translation techniques is more difficult in the case of the translation of political speeches, as this is often considered an activity subject to numerous strict norms (some of them having rhetoric character), or as an extremely complex form of translation (sometimes even moving towards adaptation). Thus if a researcher wants to analyze these translated texts, he will have to face many problems: what is the relation between the source

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text and the target text? what are the differences between them? and how these texts will fulfill their communicative and informative role among the target readers (i.e. whether they have the same impact without having the same context).

Translation is an incredibly broad notion which can be understood in many different ways. For example, one may talk of translation as a process or a product, and identify such sub-types as literary translation, technical translation, subtitling and machine translation. According to Lederer, “translation is a process which attempts to establish equivalence between two texts expressed in two different languages. These equivalents are, by definition, always dependent on the nature of the two texts, on their objective, on the relationship between the two cultures involved [....].” (2003: 3) Translation can be defined as a process and as a product. Those researchers who consider that translation is just the result of a process (a text) argue that translation is nothing more than a product determined by cultural and historical needs. Product-oriented researchers consider that the area of research should be the description of individual translations. Process-oriented researchers are concerned with the process or the act of translation itself. Admittedly, the process is an unusually complex one, during which the translator creates a new text. In spite of the fact that process-oriented researchers are interested in the process of translating, the concept of “text” is an important item of their definition as well.

This is obvious given that the end-product of the analyzed process is the text itself.

1.2. The relationship between the source text and the target text Dealing with translation as a product or a text makes it necessary to analyze the relationship between the source text and the target text. All cognitive experience and its classification are conveyable in any existing language. No lack of grammatical device in the target language makes impossible a literal translation of the entire conceptual information contained in the original. If some grammatical category is absent in a given language, its meaning may be translated into this language by lexical means. Jakobson goes on to claim that only poetry, by definition, is untranslatable since in verse the form of words contributes to the construction of the meaning of the text. Such statements express a classical dichotomy in translation between sense/content, on the one hand, and form/style, on the other. The sense may be translated, while the form often cannot (Jakobson 1966: 238). The split between form and content is linked in many ways to the major polar split which has marked the history of Western translation theory for two thousand years, between two ways of translating: literal and free. The translator is torn between form and content (Nida 1964: 2).

This is defined as the dilemma of word and spirit. Translation is art and craft in the same time.

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If all languages differ in form (and this is the essence of their being different languages), then quite naturally the forms must be altered if one wants to preserve the content. The aim of the translator is to inform the target readers by means of form. Sometimes the translator wants to influence the readers: he wants the audience to consider the translated text comprehensible and not just intelligible. The translator must pay attention to avoid ambiguity. These issues make necessary the introduction in translation studies of a new concept, that of equivalence (Nida 1964: 158).

1.3. Equivalence in translation Equivalence in translation has become one of the main areas of research for scientists.

Almost all researchers deal in one way or another with the nature of equivalence.

According to Kinga Klaudy, researchers can be divided in two groups if we regard their opinions about equivalence: the first group argues that equivalence is a basic condition for any translation, while the second group considers that texts in different languages can be equivalent in different degrees (fully or partially equivalent), in respect of different levels of presentation (equivalents in respect of context, of semantics, of grammar, of lexis, etc.) and at different ranks (word-for-word, phrasefor-phrase, sentence-for-sentence). This latter group can be divided into two further groups: the first one is called the normative group as it tries to prescribe for the translator how to reach equivalence, the second is called the descriptive group as it tries to describe how translators obtain equivalence during translation (2003).

There is another concept, that of Katharina Reiss, who considers that equivalence depends on the type of text (1995). Nida considers that translating consists of reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the sourcelanguage message, first in terms of meaning and secondly, in terms of style. The closest natural equivalent is created through dynamic equivalence. Through dynamic equivalence, we can thus cater for a rich variety of contextual values and effects, which utterances carry within texts and which a literal translation would simply compromise. The opposite of dynamic equivalence is formal equivalence: a procedure purposefully selected in order to preserve a certain linguistic/rhetorical effect. These two opposing forms of equivalence can be found when analyzing political translations (Nida 1964). Some documents, such as a contract or a land register, are highly formalized and the translator must transfer all the features of the original into the translation, thus he tries to achieve both formal and dynamic equivalence at the same time. In my opinion, communicative equivalence – a term introduced by Kinga Klaudy – is the best possible form of equivalence that can be attained by a translator dealing with political texts and political speeches. This means that the translated text will have the same role amongst the target audience as the original had amongst the source audience. In the case of documents related

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to political events the equivalence of the translated text to the original depends on the type of text as these translations meet the requirements to serve as politically valid instruments in a target country (Klaudy 2003).

Never before in the history of the world have there been so many people engaged in the translation of both literal and technical materials (Klaudy 2003). Translators translate almost everything: contracts, ID cards, birth certificates, land registers, poems and novels, medical texts, technical papers, descriptions, etc. Translators are not necessarily people with linguistic interests. In some cases the translator fails to find the perfect term or fails to use the correct translation technique while rendering the information of the source text. That’s why the specialized translations fail sometimes in fulfilling their communicative role. Even if they don’t fail totally, these translations will be different from the rest of the translated texts. In order to analyze them, the researcher must become acquainted with the characteristics of the text-type to which the translation belongs.

2. Political language and translation This part deals with the relationship between language and politics, translation and adaptation. It will present the difficulties of translating political texts and finally, it will discuss in detail one segment of this category of translation: the translation of political speeches. It will mainly underline the practical aspects of this kind of translation. This part consists of three chapters: 1. The general characterization of political language 2. Translating and adapting political texts.

3. The problematic nature of translating political speeches.

2.1. The general characterization of political language Political and diplomatic languages belong to the category of the special languages used in social sciences, and as such are closely linked to the history of political thought. Both – as technical languages – are in close contact with rhetoric, since these special languages can be considered the terminological core of many spoken genres.

The scope and intent of political language are different from that of diplomatic language. While the latter is mainly used as the protocol language of official events and ceremonies, the former is adequate for carrying the utterances of historical genres as well (depicting historical events, personages and socially significant phenomena in the history of society, and presenting past representations of recent events whose social significance is recognized by contemporaries). As such, political language is suitable for recording data and facts (e.g. highlighting important legal and territorial changes and political events in the world, wars, treaties, etc.).

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The terminology of political language is related to the special language of political philosophy, since this terminology aids the formulation of the most common questions regarding the relationship between the individual and society.

However, it is also related to political theory since political terminology is used to formulate the descriptive theories of political phenomena, too (such as social criticism, the principles of justice, law, etc.). It would not have been possible to elaborate state theories without political language, and concepts such as “good government” or “right form of government” could not have been created. The description of political ideas (doctrines, ideologies, and political programs and policy objectives) is also an important domain for the manifestation of political language. According to the foregoing ideas, political terminology can be considered a secondary discourse arising from the primary discourse, that is, a new discourse in which the primary discourse is alloyed with terminology (Sárosi 2011). Strongly related to the language of politics, the language of diplomacy is also an interesting segment of communication among different states. This is actually the language of international relations, and its character is closely related to the function it performs in the international arena. Thus, diplomatic language is closely related to the nature of the most important diplomatic tasks.

The political representations of different countries generally require the use of two or more languages and therefore the languages used on the scene of diplomacy are in permanent contact thus establishing, out of necessity, a kind of lingua franca of diplomacy. These scenes of diplomacy are: bilateral relations, relations with third countries and international organizations, international forums and non-political events with international impact.

Regarding the political issues there is a continuous relationship between the diplomatic delegation and the competent authorities of the receiving state.

The language of these relationships may also take specific forms since, in many cases, the members of the diplomatic delegation do not speak the language of the host country at an appropriate level. In such cases a third language is involved in communication, or an interpreter is used, the latter representing a special form of diplomatic communication. Meetings between the senior leadership or a political delegation of the visiting country and that of the host country – as well as international diplomatic conferences and all the other similar events – require special diplomatic language use, as do the preparation of international agreements, negotiation and the conclusion of treaties. The specialized language of politics and thus of diplomacy in many respects depends on the international actions, habits and the bilaterally agreed solutions.

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2.1.1. The political texts as specific expressions of the political language If we want to specify the nature of the terminology of political language, it is useful to examine what constitutes the core of political texts. The scope of a political text can be: persuasion, reasoning, deceit or even hustling, all of which require a specific language use. The purpose of a persuasive speech is to convince the audience to agree with an idea or opinion that the speaker puts forth. One can produce an effective persuasive speech if he/she structures the arguments as the solution to a problem.

The first job of the speaker or writer is to convince the audience that a particular problem is important to them, and then they must be convinced by the text that the speaker or writer has the solution for addressing the problem. Persuasive speeches can come in many forms, such as sales pitches, debates and political proceedings.

Persuasive speeches may utilize emotional and/or logical appeals. Factors such as body language, the willingness of the audience, and the environment in which the speech is given, all affect the success of a persuasive speech.

Persuasive texts, whether written or spoken, can be considered a process aimed at changing a person’s (or a group’s) attitude or behavior. This is a long process.

After a person is convinced regarding an issue, it is very difficult to change his/ her opinion. This requires a lot of energy. Lacking this energy, persuasion will fail and instead of persuasion we will only talk about adaptation to the expectations, or possibly about superficial acceptance of the argument, that can be considered the initial phase of persuasion (Cialdini 2001).

Successful persuasion requires the art of argumentation. A political argument is an instance of logical argument applied to politics. Political arguments are used by academics, media, candidates for political office and government officials. They may also be used by citizens in everyday interactions to comment on and understand political events. Political arguments are very often circular, repeating the same facts as premises under perhaps slightly different guises.

Argumentation should be distinguished from propaganda, in that propaganda has little or no structure or rationality. A specific type of argument is the argument based on probability, which relies on an observation, experience or finding that the majority deems acceptable and true. Probably the most important arguments are those that rely on evidence: facts, statistical data, research results, summary reports, or reference to prestige (Zemplén – Kutrovátz 2012).

If persuasion based on argument does not achieve success, then deceit, misguidance and hustling follow. This means that in order to achieve their aim, the speakers present false data, show bogus statistics and make promises that cannot be kept due to objective circumstances. Politics is saturated with speeches: citizens and politicians speak, journalists and political analysts give speeches and, last but not least, political scientists speak as well (Cacioppo and Petty 1986). Regarding political texts it can be stated that subsequent readings

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create new interpretations resulting in the same text gaining new meaning and significance, yet, the most important question remains: what is the texts’ meaning? what are they saying to us? To effectively answer this question, one must have a thorough knowledge of political jargon.

The discourse of the political sciences appears as professional language.

Nevertheless, political speech cannot be considered in isolation from different yet strongly connected political discourses. The problems related to the linguistic aspects of politics appear the moment when a preliminary idea is formulated about the role of language in politics, and when language becomes a relevant issue from the perspective of political scopes as well.

Political terminology has the following functions: – expressive function, meaning that it expresses aims that are rooted in the real sphere of politics; – objective function, meaning that it has an objective reason to influence people’s thinking, feelings, and thus their actions; – symbolic function, meaning that thoughts and feelings are expressed by political symbols.

According to the symbolic approach, if someone is talking about symbolic politics, then (s)he refers to an individual area of politics that is genuine and separate from real and actual political issues. In habitual language use, symbolic politics means a publicly displayed deception or surrogate action that is used to detract from actual political reality. In this sense symbolic politics is considered to be a surrogate for politics. Symbolic politics differs from substantial policy. As a policy of signs (terms and slogans, badges, banners and pictures, gestures, ritual acts, and political staging), symbolic politics evolves in a semantic field. Substantial policy, by contrast, consists of a revisable succession of political decisions (e.g., legislation, contracts, taxes, etc.). Symbolic politics and substantial policy can be related to each other. On the one hand, symbolic politics can have an impact on substantial policy, while substantial policy can be communicated, implemented, or averted by symbolic politics (Sarcinelli 1998). If we try to define political jargon from the perspective of language policy, we notice that this conception of language directs attention to the concept of fighting (Szabó 2003). Assumptions: – politics is primarily a linguistic arena, largely because the political struggles take place in the public space defined by the mass media; – the benefits that are obtainable in this struggle – for example, linking the positive concepts with one’s own political group and the negative ones with the opponents – can be directly converted into political gains; – the ground for further political battles will be the pre-formed political space in which the winners of the symbolic political struggle will be favoured.

When approached from the perspective of the rhetoric, the analysis of the structure, tropes, symbols and metaphors used in the political speeches will

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become essential. This is so because, presumably, in these political speeches the political objectives and means of the speaker are expressed – mainly for manipulative intent – and because the ultimate objective of political speech is of course a rhetorical one, i.e. manipulation.

The analysis of political speeches, from the perspective of communication theory, comes to a particular prominence parallel to the professionalization of politics. In political communication, we are broadly interested in the relationship between politics and citizens, and the communication modes that connect these groups to each other. This theory describes political language as a category of human behavior, that is equal with other political actions and that has become – due to the development of communication technologies and mass media – perhaps the most important form of political action. The language use has an entirely instrumental nature, the language itself being both the instrument and object of the actions. The basic question is how other political actions can be reinforced through the effectiveness of communication. Later, the idea has become prevalent that all political actions are interesting as they play a role in communication. As a result, it is obvious that the analysis of political communication refers not only to linguistic tools or matters of content but to strategies used to attain a position of power.

Proponents of the discursive approach analyze the political language because through this they wish to understand how the political actors shape the world around them. Here, the focus is not on the man acting with the aim of linguistic tools, but on the linguistically mediated interpretations, reports. Politics is a discursive process. The process consists of actors in the political system who take up problems/issues which are dealt with in other subsystems such as economy, and frame it as a political problem. In doing so, a political debate is launched in which the political problem, or to be more precise, solutions for the political problem are discussed. Those who are concerned with politics treat reality in the same way they treat symbols. People generally treat real things in the same way as they treat the referring concepts that have already been interpreted or commented somehow (Szabó 2003).

2.2. Translating and adapting political texts Scientists have considered that it is only a matter of discipline, attention and technique that allows one to navigate the labyrinth of words and reach perfect understanding. This can be true only if we consider political language as a system open for deductive analysis and concrete definitions and not a simple manifestation of natural language use (Szabó 2001: 1). The political system, just like the language, continually undergoes a process of change because it is a living entity, and that is why the state of both the language and the political system is instantaneous. This is the reason why none of them are amenable to descriptive

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methods. Political language cannot be regarded as a compact technical language, though it presents some features of the terminology. Political expressions do not have an intrinsic value, they can be defined only in relation to the discourse of which they are the elements. Herbert Lyonel Adolphus Hart in his work entitled Definition and Theory in Legal Sciences emphasizes the following: [...] the efforts for the definition of such expressions as state power, electoral system or the system of checks and balances show us that these words do not have real bonds to the conceptual world, as common words do... There is nothing out there in the real world that would conceptually suit these political expressions, there is no equivalent term or word in the everyday language (2000).

Political words cannot be analyzed in isolation, in their analysis one must take into consideration the whole sentence and even the entire discourse. If we want to analyze them, we must do it in their context, we must arrange them in phrases.

The primary function of these words is not to describe something but to set up a relationship; this fact gives rise to the difference between these words and the rest of the lexicon (Hart 2000: 104).

From the pragmatic point of view we may state that the politician breaks from the normal language used by common people and forces them into a specific language domain. The political relevance of a given term makes itself visible only in this specific language, which destroys the everyday use of human language. Political language and common language do not differ in the way foreign languages do. One may ask why political language differs from common language. The prime reason for this kind of difference is that the semantic value of the political words is richer than that of normal words. For instance, men are sentenced to death in the name of the law, properties change owners based on the words of a contract (Simpson 2000: 144). In the case of performative political expressions the most important thing is the effect of the sentences on the people.

These effects arise through the manifestation of language. Political effects are considered concrete effects (Olivecrona 2000: 174).

Political language forces us to reconstruct, through interpretation, those thoughts which are settled in the political text. This reconstruction is a mental process through which we rebuild the text according to our knowledge in order to gain a better understanding.

2.2.1. Political language and translation A feature of the political system is that it is composed of strongly related texts, so while creating a new text (e.g. translations) we must pay attention to its coherence with the rest of the political texts. This coherence is ensured by

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political terminology (party of a contract, death-penalty, etc.) and by some nonterminological elements such as: regarding, breaking a contract, furthermore, etc.

The tradition of the political text also contributes to this coherence, for which reason non-jurists may find political text impossible to understand. This is because the juridical system is a logical one, the texts of which try to avoid complex and heavy descriptions beyond the understanding of the common person, and which would require further study and analysis in order to be understood. The specific scope of these texts may explain the use of long phrases which present a hard task for the translator to deal with. To understand and, furthermore, to translate these texts one must interpret them.

One may face a situation in which the source language text (act or contract, deed of foundation or statute, etc.) is overcomplicated and unclear. Although this idea is in contradiction to that referring to the logical character of political texts, it can be seen that in practice, translators often face such situations as a result of the incompetence or lack of knowledge of those who have written the texts. The translator will become an interpreter only when faced with problems related to the act of translation, not to the content of the paper. The problem is even more considerable if the lack of clarity is due to the differences between the two language systems. During the process of translation the translator must reject creativity and instead accept the traditional specialized language. Specialized language in this study means: the terminology of a domain which mirrors that slice of reality which is the research territory of a certain circle of specialists (Kurtán 2003: 50).

It is not a simple task for the translator to deal with special terminology because he or she may have other linguistic preferences, or might not accept the existing calque-forms1 of expression. A further cause of difficulty might be the fact that documentation sources are not available to them (Várnai 2006: 48).

In the case of political translations it is important that the translator use the existing source language terminology, because this becomes in fact the code of political communication and the tool of coherent texts. If the translators face new concepts during the translation process, they must take into consideration several political, linguistic and cultural aspects in order to reach the perfect or at least the most acceptable equivalent.

In the process of political translations one may find comparative study a useful method. It can be used to make a comparative study of the two language systems. This is an intellectual process that will enrich the reference system of the translator through the study of a different reference system. Another purpose 1

A calque or loan translation (itself a calque of German Lehnübersetzung) is a phrase borrowed from another language and translated literally word-for-word. You often see them in specialized or internationalized fields such as quality assurance (aseguramiento de calidad, assurance qualité, asigurarea calităţii taken from English).

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of this kind of study is to make a comparison between the two political systems and to identify common features as well as different characteristics.

Let us analyze how comparative study can help in the comparison of linguistic and thematic knowledge, and how this method can build a bridge between two different cultures and worlds. The interpretation and re-texting of a discourse in the form of an equivalent discourse written in another language will be possible only if the translator analyses the linguistic signs according to the extra-linguistic aspects. To produce a translation the translator will need a minimal knowledge of both political systems. Using the methods of comparative political study is important not only to understand how the respective political systems work, but also to place the text correctly in the receptive culture. The comparison is a theoretical method which helps to understand the power and the limits of the political actions in the two different political systems, and it also points out the convergent and divergent aspects of the two political systems. During the process of comparative study the translator gains thematic knowledge that becomes active and useful only in the very moment of translation. Regarding political translations the most difficult issue is the translation of political realia.2 As a translation technique, adaptation can be defined as a technical and objective method. The best-known definition is that of Vinay and Darbelnet, who list adaptation as a separate translation procedure: “adaptation is a procedure which can be used whenever the context referred to in the original text does not exist in the culture of the target text, thereby necessitating some form of re-creation.” This widely accepted definition views adaptation as a procedure employed to achieve an equivalence of situations wherever cultural mismatches are encountered (1958).

Eugene Nida has noted that “language is a part of culture, and in fact, it is the most complex set of habits that any culture exhibits. Language reflects the culture, provides access to the culture, and in many respects constitutes a model of the culture.” (1964) In order to render culture specific elements and to reflect a certain model of culture, translators may use the following techniques: – omission: the elimination or reduction of part of the text; – expansion: making explicit information that is implicit in the original, either in the main body or in footnotes or a glossary; – exoticism: the substitution of stretches of slang, dialect, nonsense words, etc. in the original text by rough equivalents in the target language (sometimes marked by italics or underlining); – updating: the replacement of outdated or obscure information by modern equivalents; 2

Specific material elements that exist only in a certain political system / regime (based on analogy with the culture-specific items).

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– situational equivalence: the insertion of a more familiar context than the one used in the original; – creation: a more global replacement of the original text with a text that preserves only the essential message/ideas/functions of the original.

3. The problem of translating political speeches A political speech is a speech which relates to government matters as opposed to the affairs of an individual or organization. It gives an insight into the political views of the speaker and may either sway listeners in their favor or not.

This chapter of the paper will present the Hungarian and Romanian translations of Sir Winston Churchill’s speech entitled “The Sinews of Peace”.3 Churchill was out of office at the time of his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, after the Labour Party’s landslide victories in the July 1945 election. He was invited to give the Green Lecture, named for the John Findley Green, an alumni of Westminster College and was introduced by President Harry Truman to deliver this address on 5 March 1946.

According to Robert Rhodes-James: This speech may be regarded as the most important Churchill delivered as Leader of the Opposition (1945–1951). It contains certain phrases – “the special relationship,” “the sinews of peace” – which at once entered into general use, and which have survived. But it is the passage on “the iron curtain” which attracted immediate international attention, and had incalculable impact upon public opinion in the United States and in Western Europe. Russian historians date the beginning of the Cold War from this speech. In its phraseology, in its intricate drawing together of several themes to an electrifying climax – this speech may be regarded as a technical classic. (Rhodes-James et al. 1969) This speech is known for one of its most famous phrases, “Iron Curtain” but it’s also known as the “Sinews of Peace” speech. (Churchill never named his own speeches.) The historical context of the speech is of particular relevance. In 1946, the year following the end of World War Two, there were major shortages in jobs and housing for those returning from war in Britain. Conditions were made worse by nature’s vagaries. In 1946 a world-wide wheat shortage necessitated bread rationing, and the exceptionally severe winter of 1946–7 meant that even potatoes were rationed (both these basics had been freely available throughout the war).

3

The address, although known as the “iron curtain speech”, had been given the title “the sinews of peace” speech by Churchill. It captured the moment between the optimism at the end of the war and the deepening awareness of the risk of future conflicts.

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The nation’s finances, too, were in severe deficit, until much-needed help from the USA in the form of Marshall Aid. The international situation made a rapid return to peacetime conditions equally impossible, yet another war was knocking on the door of Europe: the Cold War that was to separate the old continent into capitalist and communist blocks for almost four decades.

The translation of such a text is certainly not an easy task. The translated versions of the speech are not spoken texts, yet their role is significant as only through the act of translation can it be understood by people all around the world. The speech was translated into many languages, among them Hungarian and Romanian. In the following part of the paper we will analyze some excerpts from the famous speech and their Hungarian and Romanian translations.

In the corpus, besides the original text, we included the Hungarian version elaborated by László Horváth and the Romanian version elaborated by Luca Octavian. The Hungarian translation is included in the book entitled Sohase engedjetek! : Winston Churchill legjobb beszédei (Never give in!), published in 2006 by Európa Publishing House (Hungary). The translation used in this book was elaborated in 1950. The Romanian text is in fact a subtitle attached to the speech accessible on Youtube. Thus the year of its elaboration cannot be stated precisely.

A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.

Árnyék borult arra a színpadra, amelyet legutóbb a szövetségesek győzelme megvilágított.

S-a lăsat o umbră peste scenele atât de luminate, până nu demult, de victoriile Aliaţilor.

(Excerpt 1) In the excerpt above the most interesting element to translate is the metaphor shadow, which is meant to express the difficulties of the era following the war.

Both the Hungarian and the Romanian translator succeeded in finding the adequate equivalent of the noun shadow, yet the feeling of the translated texts is different if compared to the source text. The original version is short and precise expressing the shock that the victorious nations had to suffer after the euphoria of the victory was over. The impact of this short and concise sentence is so strong that the audience may almost feel the shudder caused by the dark shadow. The Hungarian and the Romanian translations follow the spirit of the original, although they seem much more artificial yet they are faithful to the source text. We can say that something is lost in translation, in spite of the fact that transfer operations were successfully applied and a quite appropriate translation was elaborated.

Problems Related to the Translation of Political Texts Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies.

Senki sem tudja, mit szándékozik tenni Szovjet-Oroszország és nemzetközi kommunista szervezete a közvetlen jövőben, sem azt hol vannak a korlátai, ha vannak egyáltalán korlátai expanziós és követőket toborzó irányzatainak.

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Nimeni nu ştie ce intenţionează să facă, în viitorul apropiat, Rusia sovietică şi organizaţia sa comunistă internaţională sau care sunt limitele, dacă ele există, ale tendinţelor sale expansioniste şi de prozelitism.

(Excerpt 2) Excerpt 2 is a very interesting one from the point of view of equivalence. The Hungarian and the Romanian translations are almost perfect imprints of the original text conserving both the form and the message, the translator performing only the compulsory transfer operations without using any other kind of translation strategy or method of compensation. Thus we may characterize these translations by equivalence as named by Nida formal equivalence.

Nida (1964) argued that there are two different types of equivalence, namely formal equivalence, which in the second edition by Nida is referred to as formal correspondence, and dynamic equivalence. Formal correspondence focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content, unlike dynamic equivalence, which is based upon the principle of equivalent effect. Formal correspondence consists of a target language item which represents the closest equivalent of a source language word or phrase (communist international organisation – nemzetközi kommunista szervezete – organizaţia sa comunistă internaţională, intends to do – mit szándékozik tenni – ce intenţionează să facă, in the immediate future – a közvetlen jövőben – în viitorul apropiat). Nida makes it clear that there are not always formal equivalents between language pairs (Nida, 1964), he therefore suggests that these formal equivalents should be used wherever possible if the translation aims at achieving formal rather than dynamic equivalence. The use of formal equivalents might at times have serious implications in the target texts since the translation in some cases might not be easily understood by the target audience. The opposite of formal equivalence is called dynamic equivalence, defined as a translation principle according to which a translator seeks to translate the meaning of the original in such a way that the target language wording will produce the same impact on the target-text’s audience as the original wording did upon the source-text’s audience (Nida 1964).

The excerpt above is a good example of how these two types of equivalence can be perfectly intermingled. The phrases listed above are translated word-for-word, yet this does not influence the perfect rendering of the meaning and spirit of the text.

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From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

A Balti-tenger mellett fekvő Stettintől az Adriai-tenger mentén fekvő Triesztig vasfüggöny ereszkedik le Európára.

De la Stettin, în Baltica, la Trieste, în Adriatica, o cortină de fier s-a lăsat peste Continent.

(Excerpt 3) In Excerpt 3 another very expressive metaphor appears, which is perhaps the most important one of the speech. The term becomes the metaphor for the borderline that separates Europe and even the entire world into two totally different parts: the West with the USA as its protector and the East with the Soviet Union as its “father” and ruler. Thus the task of the translator is even more difficult as he/she must find a perfect equivalent, an adequate term which will enter the history books and even history as well. The equivalence achieved is textual since the correspondence between the source language text and the target language texts in terms of information and cohesion is created, the key metaphor is transferred in and adequate manner.

Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts – and facts they are – this is certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up.

Bármilyen következtetéseket vonjunk le ezekből a tényekből – mert ezek tények –, bizonyára nem az a felszabadított Európa ez, amelynek a felépítéséért harcoltunk.

Oricare ar fi concluziile ce pot fi trase din aceste fapte – şi faptele există –, aceasta cu siguranţă nu este Europa Eliberată pe care noi am luptat s-o realizăm şi nici nu este una care să conţină elementele esenţiale ale păcii permanente.

(Excerpt 4) Excerpt 4 poses a new set of problems that relate to the issue of translatability vs. untranslatability. In the case of this excerpt sociosemiotic untranslatability, more precisely, referential untranslatability appears. Referential untranslatability occurs when a referential element in the source message is not known or readily comparable to a particular item in the target language. The phrase Liberated Europe is a new referential element that appears in English language political discourse, thus, translating it is a very tender ground for any translator. In the Hungarian translation the attribute felszabadított is not capitalized, while in the Romanian translation – as in the original – it is. This aspect is important only if the speech is transposed in writing, since as an oral genre it is not relevant whether a lexeme is capitalized or not. In oral genres the intonation is more important as it is used

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for indicating the attitudes and emotions of the speaker, focusing attention on important elements of the spoken message. Yet, the difference shown above is not negligible as it suggests the importance of the phrase.

The safety of the world requires a new unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast. It is from the quarrels of the strong parent races in Europe that the world wars we have witnessed, or which occurred in former times, have sprung.

A világ biztonsága újfajta egységet igényel Európában, olyat, amelyikből egy nemzetet sem lehet tartósan kirekeszteni: Európa nagy alapító nemzeteinek ellenségeskedései robbantották ki azokat a világháborúkat, melyeknek tanúi voltunk, vagy amelyek korábban zajlottak.

Securitatea mondială presupune o nouă unitate în Europa, de la care nici o naţiune nu trebuie definitiv exclusă. Animozităţilor dintre puternicile rase originare ale Europei li s-a datorat izbucnirea celor două războaie mondiale la care am fost martori, s-au care s-au desfăşurat în ultima perioadă.

(Excerpt 5) Excerpt 5 is difficult to translate due to the phrase strong parent races in Europe. This phrase is translated into Hungarian with the phrase Európa nagy alapító nemzetei and into Romanian with the phrase puternicile rase originare ale Europei. The English phrase is more expressive and a lot deeper in feeling, as it appeals to the patriotism of all European nations. The Hungarian translation simply refers to the fact that there are more important and less important nations in Europe that influence the course of history. The Romanian translation is closer to the Hungarian translation in spirit than to the source language text. This suggests that both translators – without having anything in common and probably creating their translations in different milieus and eras – operated by the means of up–down text construction that made it possible to elaborate a freer and more original-like text. Regarding the excerpt we can conclude that on the textual level the translations follow the original and if necessary they explain and interpret.

Surely we should work with conscious purpose for a grand pacification of Europe, within the structure of the United Nations and in accordance with its Charter.

Tudatosan kellene dolgoznunk azért, hogy az Egyesült Nemzetek Szervezetén belül annak alapokmányával összhangban, egész Európára kiterjedően megvalósíthassuk a békét.

(Excerpt 6)

Cu certitudine, noi trebuie să lucrăm pentru a conştientiza necesitatea unei mari pacificări a Europei, în cadrul structurii Naţiunilor Unite şi în conformitate cu Carta sa.

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The Romanian translation of Excerpt 6 is almost a word-for-word translation of the source language text. Thus, regarding equivalence we may speak about rank bound translation (Catford 1965). This term is introduced by Catford, who proposed very broad types of equivalence in translation according to three criteria: (a) The extent of translation (full translation vs. partial translation), (b) The grammatical rank at which the translation equivalence is established (rank-bound translation vs. unbounded translation), (c) The levels of language involved in translation (total translation vs. restricted translation). Rank-bound translation takes place when equivalence is sought at levels lower than the sentence but shifts that occur at this level result in bad translations as the target language text will not be an easy read. This is what happened in the case of the Romanian translation of the above excerpt.

In front of the iron curtain which lies across Europe are other causes for anxiety.

Az Európát átszelő vasfüggönyön kívül más okunk is van a nyugtalanságra.

(Excerpt 7)

Alături de Cortina de Fier care se află peste Europa, există şi alte cauze de nelinişte.

In Excerpt 7 the most important translation-related issue is the translation of the adverbial phrase in front of the, that is translated into Hungarian by a postposition expressed by a present participle (átszelő), while into Romanian by a prepositional phrase (alături de). The exact meaning of the Hungarian equivalent used in the translation is crossing, and the exact meaning of the Romanian term is next to or near. None of these express exactly the meaning of the English phrase, yet they can be considered adequate as both of them express the viewpoint and attitude of their translators towards the concept of the iron curtain that separates Europe.

Nevertheless the future of Italy hangs in the balance.

Olaszország jövője egyébként sem dőlt még el.

(Excerpt 8)

Cu toate acestea, viitorul Italiei se află pe muchie de cuţit.

In Excerpt 8 the most interesting translation-related item is the translation of the verb hangs that is translated in Hungarian by a negative phrase sem dőlt még el. This transfer operation is called modulation in literature, defined by Gérard Hardin and Gynthia Picot (1990) as a change in point of view that allows us to express the same phenomenon in a different way. The Romanian translation of the same verb is even more interesting as it uses an idiomatic expression se află pe muchie de cuţit. This kind of translation has a compensating effect, as a nonfigurative expression is expressed in the target language with an idiom. Both

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the Hungarian and the Romanian translations become richer in meaning than the original text. The Hungarian text suggests that a historical problem needs to be solved in the future and the Romanian text expresses that the situation is very serious and has a great importance for the future of the entire Europe.

All my public life I have worked for a strong France and I never lost faith in her destiny, even in the darkest hours.

Amióta csak kiléptem a nyilvánosság elé, Franciaország megerősödéséért tevékenykedtem, és még a legsötétebb pillanatokban sem veszítettem el iránta érzett bizalmamat.

Toată viaţa mea publică am acţionat pentru o Franţă puternică şi niciodată nu mi-am pierdut credinţa în destinul ei, chiar şi în cele mai grele momente.

(Excerpt 9) Reading the Romanian translation of Excerpt 9 we can see that the phrase viaţa mea publică is a literal and non-adequate translation of the phrase my public life used by the speaker in the original text. The translator should have used another translation procedure like explicitation or adaptation, just as the Hungarian translator did. The phrase kiléptem a nyilvánosság elé is a more expressive option and it better renders the feelings and the purpose of the speaker. In the Romanian translation an addition should have been used to make it explicit that the speaker, as a very important political and historical personality wants to emphasize his beliefs and his faith in the future. For a more appropriate correspondence a phrase like toată viaţa mea pe scena politică or toată viaţa mea ca şi personaj politic should have been used in the Romanian translation, too. In this case appropriate translation means the adequate transposition of the source text in the target language respecting the basic rules of target-orientedness.

I will not lose faith now.

Most sem fogom elveszíteni.

Nu îmi voi pierde această credinţă acum.

(Excerpt 10) The translation of the sentence included in Excerpt 10 is once again a literal translation, yet in the Hungarian text we may observe an omission. The translator omitted the noun faith, without having any impact on the meaning of the text, as it is obvious from the context what the speaker refers to. The Romanian translation is complete, there is no omission and even the word order is preserved. Thus we may conclude that these two translations mirror the source text both syntactically and semantically.

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Conclusions The translation of political speeches can be studied from a linguistic perspective, but it can also be looked at from a broader perspective, based on the theory of the political discourse and on research related to the study of special languages.

The prominent feature of the style of political speeches is very long sentences.

This predilection for lengthy sentences is due to the need to place all information on a particular topic in one complete unit, in order to reduce the ambiguity that may arise if they are put in different sentences (e.g. There is deep sympathy and goodwill in Britain – and I doubt not here also – towards the peoples of all the Russia and a resolve to persevere through many differences and rebuffs in establishing lasting friendships.). A political speech is always phrased in a very personal manner so as to address the chosen target audience (In this country you are all so well-informed about the Far East, and such devoted friends of China, that I do not need to expatiate on the situation there. On the other hand I repulse the idea that a new war is inevitable; still more that it is imminent.)

Another feature is the flexible or vague language. Politicians try to be as imprecise as possible and use general, vague and hazy language. Metaphoric and abstract language is typical of political speeches that are ideally written to have great impact on the actual audience (What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.).

Due to these features political speeches are hard to translate and they can sometimes be included in the category of untranslatable text. Politicians do not deliver their speeches to be translated for foreign audiences. Thus in some cases translators cannot produce parallel texts that are identical in meaning, or in their political and historical effect. Thus the translator’s main task is to create a text that will transmit the core of the message included in the original text. To do so, the translator must be able “to understand not only what the words mean and what a sentence means, but also what political or historical impact could it have. They also have to know how to achieve that certain effect in the other language.” (Quentel 2006: 3) Translators must be able to use language effectively to express the most important political concepts in order to achieve the desired effect. They must be familiar with the conventional rules and styles of political speeches (rhetoric, stylistics).

Yet, there are many strategies for translating the untranslatable, like explicitation or using footnotes, but in all of these cases there is loss of the original meaning, which can be compensated for in other parts of the text or discourse. According to Gadamer “no translation can replace the original […] the translator’s task is never to copy what is said, but to place himself in the direction of what is said (i.e. in its meaning) in order to carry over what is to be said into the direction of his own saying” (quoted by Newmark 1988: 79).

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References Cacioppo, J. T. and R. E. Petty. 1986. The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 19 (1): 123–205.

Catford, J. C. 1965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation: an Essay on Applied Linguistics. London: Oxford University Press.

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Hart, H. L. 2000. Meghatározás és elmélet a jogtudományban. [Definition and Theory in the Science of Law]. In Szabó M., Varga Cs. (eds.), Jog és nyelv [Law and Language], 98–132. Budapest: PPKE. Jakobson, R. 1966. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In R.A. Brower (ed.), On Translation, 107–239. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Budapest: PPKE. Quentel G. 2006. Translating a Crucial Political Speech. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/research/workingpapers/2006/ wp20406.pdf (accessed 14 May, 2014) Reiss, K. 1995. Text Type Translation and Translation Assessment. In Chesterman, A. (ed.), Reading in Translation Theory, 58–96. Helsinki: FinnLectura.

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Sarcinelli, U. 1998. Politikvermittlung und Demokratie in der Mediengesellschaft [Politics and Democracy Seen through the Media]. Bonn: BpB. Sárosi, K. 2011. Limbajul juridic şi traducerea [Legal Language and Translation].

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Szabó, Márton. 2003. A diszkurzív politikatudomány alapjai [The Bases of Discursive Politics]. Budapest: L’Harmattan Kiadó.

Szabó, Miklós. 2000. Szó szerint: a jog és a nyelv interferenciájáról [Word by Word: On the Interferences of Language and Law]. In Szabó M. and Varga Cs. (eds.), Jog és nyelv [Law and Language], 1–98. Budapest: PPKE. Szabó, Miklós. 2001. Játsszunk! [Let’s play!]. In Szabó, Miklós (ed.), Ius humanum.

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Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 6, 2 (2014) 181–196

Perspectives on the Translation of Discourse Markers

A case study of the translation of reformulation markers from English into Hungarian Bálint Péter FURKÓ

Department of English Linguistics Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary furko.peter@gmail.com Abstract. The aim of the present paper is to explore the difficulties translators have to face when translating discourse markers in general, and reformulation markers in particular. In the first part of the paper I will attempt to answer the question of why discourse markers are notoriously difficult to translate. Next, I will look at some of the genre-specific features pertaining to the translation of scripted discourse and subtitles. In the second part of the paper, after providing an overview of previous research into reformulation and reformulation markers, I will present the results of a case study of the translation of the English reformulation markers I mean and actually into Hungarian. By way of concluding, I will argue that a wider repertoire of translation strategies is needed in order to achieve dynamic equivalence in the target text.

Keywords: discourse markers, reformulation markers, the translation of illocutionary phenomena, scripted discourse, the language of subtitles

1. Introduction: contrastive approaches to discourse markers Over the past few decades research on discourse markers (henceforth DMs) has been rapidly expanding and the theoretical appeal is amply demonstrated by the number of frameworks that have been applied to the study of these items (Relevance Theory, Rhetorical Structure Theory, Construction Grammar, coherence-based studies, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis, to mention but a few). At the same time, empirical research has yielded detailed analyses of a variety of items in a wide range of languages.

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Recently, empirical research has taken a new direction: contrastive studies have moved from their traditional linguistic fields of semantics and lexicology into the areas of pragmatics and discourse analysis. As a consequence, an increasing number of case studies are aimed at gaining insight into the functions and distributions of DMs across languages, thereby attempting to find translation equivalents and translation correspondences across a variety of languages.

Similar to an approach to content words using translation equivalents in order to establish semantic fields, a contrastive perspective on DMs is aimed at mapping the functional spectrum of a given DM across a wide range of bi- or multilingual contexts. As a result of the extreme multifunctionality and context-dependence of DMs, one can expect a larger number of correspondences between DMs across languages than, for example, between translation equivalents of nouns or verbs.

Still, many argue (cf. Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer 2004: 1786) that finding translation correspondences is in many ways a more reliable method of describing individual DMs than providing paraphrases and glosses, or establishing cooccurrence patterns, exemplified by the majority of monolingual research.

In addition, studies at the interface of DM research and translation studies can provide new perspectives for both disciplines. While finding translation equivalents is a reliable way of mapping individual DMs’ functional spectra and can also serve as a heuristic for “establishing semantic-pragmatic fields” (Degand 2009: 174), such studies can be useful for analysing translation strategies as well.

2. Preliminary considerations 2.1. The translation of discourse markers – theory and practice The translation of DMs is a notoriously difficult task because of the very properties that (prototypical) members of the functional class of DMs share, including non-propositionality, context-dependence, extreme multifunctionality and a primarily non-referential (interpersonal or textual) function. As a corollary of such criterial features, DMs do not change the basic meaning of utterances, but are essential for the organization and structuring of discourse as well as for marking the speaker’s attitudes to the proposition being expressed. In addition, they facilitate the processes of pragmatic inferences, in other words, help the hearer to find out what is not explicitly stated but is implied by a given utterance.

Since DMs do not change the basic meaning of utterances, a straightforward translation strategy is to omit them in the target text (TT). The resulting translation, in certain contexts, might not lose any of the propositional content of the source text (ST), but will definitely lose a variety of communicative effects, such as the very naturalness of ordinary, everyday conversation, or the speaker’s attitude to the

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words being uttered (cf. Furkó 2013: 23). The difference between a conversational exchange including and omitting a DM can, in several cases, be captured along various social and functional dimensions such as the solidarity / social distance or affective / referential scales (cf. Holmes 2008), as well as along the lines of the spoken / written, planned / unplanned continua. Consequently, omitting DMs in the translation conspicuously and repeatedly can result in a text that does not match either the social dynamics or the intended style / register of the ST. In addition to omission, translators have a variety of options depending on the extent to which they want to (or are able to) convey the subtleties of the ST and the linguistic means by which they choose to do so. Nida’s (1964) classical distinction between formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence is especially relevant to the translation of DMs, since a TT that “focus[es] attention on the message” (Nida 1964: 159) will yield a radically different DM equivalent from a TT where the translator has observed “the principle of equivalent effect” (ibid.).

If the translator strives for formal equivalence, he or she can use the same (at times closely corresponding) DM in the TT every time a particular DM occurs in the ST. This will invariably turn out to be a bad strategy, since research has shown that it is impossible to find one-to-one correspondences between DMs in two different languages (cf. e.g. Lewis 2006). In fact, even when it comes to the functional spectra of cognates such as Swedish alltså, Norwegian altså, and German also, we find partial overlaps rather than close correspondences (cf.

Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen 2009).

Equivalent effect is equally impossible to achieve, because of the various social, stylistic, interpersonal, and other effects that are simultaneously conveyed by a particular use of a DM. As a result, a series of compromises will occur, which is the staple of a translator’s job. However, translating pragmatic effects, i.e. non-conceptual meaning, requires a greater flexibility in handling translation options, which range from lexical items such as TT DMs, modal particles and conjunctions, through the use of whole clauses as well as grammaticalized forms (cf. Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen 2003).

With reference to the differences between English and Hungarian in terms of linguistic means of marking illocutionary force, Hervey (1998) states that, compared to English, DMs (in Hervey’s terms, illocutionary particles) are somewhat less frequent in Hungarian, and the Hungarian language has a tendency for “conveying illocutionary nuances through sequential focus” (1998: 17) rather than through intonation or the use of DMs. Hervey also formulates a strategy for translating DMs into Hungarian: “when translating illocutionary particles into Hungarian, be sure to consider possible uses of sequential focus that might be appropriate” (1998: 19). In the course of the present study, one of my aims is to examine the extent to which the translators of subtitles observed this strategy.

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2.2. From scripted discourse to the language of subtitles For the present study I used a corpus of bilingual subtitles in order to investigate the translation of reformulation markers from English into Hungarian. Several preliminary remarks are in order with regard to the study of dramatized dialogues in general and subtitles in particular.

Methodological issues concerning data gathering as well as the nature/ constitution of data for analysis have been heavily debated by discourse analysts and will most probably continue to be in the focus of research methodology.

Brown and Yule, for example, differentiate between the ‘constructed-data’ approach and the ‘performance-data’ approach (Brown & Yule 1983: 20). One of the criteria Van Dijk sets up to define the term discourse is that it must be actual language in use, i.e. authentic and not invented language data (van Dijk 1985: 2).

More recently, Chovanec has distinguished between data based on prototypical kinds of interpersonal communication such as “real-life conversations” (Chovanec 2011: 243) and data based on less prototypical types of interaction such as “television dialogue and other kinds of scripted dialogue” (ibid.). Both Chovanec (2011) and Dynel (2011) argue in favour of the legitimacy of the latter type of data in the field of language studies in general and discourse analysis in particular. Dynel (2011) observes that scripted discourse mirrors “language users’ everyday communicative patterns” (2011: 43) and invokes “an illusion of real-life conversations” (ibid.). Furkó (2010) argues that – similarly to linguists, who rely on their own intuitions in order to make grammaticality judgements –, the discourse analyst who looks at dramatized dialogues relies on “script writers’ intuitions about conversational mechanisms and communicative strategies” (Furkó 2010: 114). Moreover, since the script-writer’s intuitions and skills manifest themselves in the “verisimilitude of fictional interactions” (Dynel 2011: 43), the study of scripted data strikes up a balance between the “armchair approach” to linguistics (i. e. theorizing about the implications of linguistic phenomena on the basis of constructed examples, cf. e.g. Hudson: 2001), and field methods that rely on the study of real-life conversations.

If we accept that (good) script writers’ skills and intuitions are reliable with respect to conversational mechanisms and communicative strategies, we can presume that corpora based on film as well as TV scripts contain DMs in a wide range of communicative contexts and with an adequate range of textual and interpersonal functions. Moreover, Furkó (2011) found that co-occurrence patterns (DM clusters, collocations, speech act-DM pairings, etc.) observed in scripted data closely correspond to those established in research based on real-life conversations.

Another reason why the analysis of scripted discourse is amenable to the study of DMs is that the function of a particular DM is easier to identify in dramatized dialogues than in naturally-occurring conversations. Scripted discourse is

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“thoroughly considered before being uttered” (Mattsson 2009: 2), as a result of which scriptwriters tend to make calculated use of every single linguistic (as well as paralinguistic) means of communication, including the use of DMs. In addition, information about the previous discourse, the social background, social status as well as some of the more dynamic personal characteristics of the speaker is more readily available than in the case of naturally-occurring language data. Such information is very useful, often indispensable, in disambiguating particular uses of DMs. Naturally, we expect different patterns of use with respect to functions associated with performance phenomena such as self-repetition/self-correction, false starts and lexical search. While unplanned conversations are replete with mispronunciations, misformulations, overlaps, etc. (often marked by DMs, cf.

Schirm 2010 and 2011), such occurrences are scarce in scripted data (cf. e.g.

Richardson 2010). Dramatized dialogues are “stripped of conversational chuff such as ah, y’know, well and ummm” (Lucey 1996: 168), so that “the viewer’s understanding is not impeded or even precluded” (Dynel 2011: 45).

Performance errors notwithstanding, whether or not subtitles reflect the full battery of DM functions, is a different matter. Subtitled versions of dramatized dialogues are constrained by a variety of additional rules of the genre. Hatim and Mason (2000) group these constraints into four categories: (1) the shift in mode from speech to writing, (2) technical constraints such as available space and the pace of the soundtrack dialogue, (3) the impossibility of back-tracking, and (4) the requirement of matching the visual image (Hatim and Mason 2000: 430-431).

Goris (1993) notes the levelling effect of these constraints, as a consequence of which one can expect that DMs will tend to occur in subtitles in the ST when they have a precisely controlled effect in the dialogue and they will tend to be omitted even in the ST when no apparent significance is attached to their use. However, in the TT subtitles I expected no further levelling, because TT subtitles are based on ST subtitles rather than on the ST soundtrack, and because once an ST DM is selected for inclusion in the subtitle, the significance of its communicative effect should be duly noted by the translator.

3. Previous accounts of reformulation 3.1. Definitions and lists of reformulation markers Before I turn to describing the different stages of the empirical part of my research, a few general words about reformulation are in order. Reformulation as a linguistic phenomenon in general and reformulation markers as a subclass of discourse markers in particular have been described from a variety of perspectives.

Halliday & Hasan concentrate on the former and distinguish between avowal

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and correction; the former is “an assertion of ‘the facts’ in the face of real or imaginary resistance (‘as against what you might think’)” (1976: 254), while the latter is a process whereby “one formulation is rejected in favour of another (‘as against what you have been told’)” (ibid.). Linguistic items that express avowal include in fact, actually and as a matter of fact, while I mean and (or) rather are correction markers, according to Halliday and Hasan.

Quirk et al. (1985: 1308ff) list four types of reformulation: (1) reformulation which involves rephrasing or rewording (i.e. it is based on “linguistic knowledge”), (2) reformulation based on background knowledge (“factual knowledge”), (3) more precise formulation and (4) revision. Similarly to Halliday and Hasan, Quirk et al. take a broad view of reformulation markers and list a variety of words, phrases, or even clauses that can express one of the four types of reformulation (e.g. in other words, technically, that is, more specifically, that is to say, or … as he is usually called).

A discourse coherence approach is provided by Fraser (1999), del Saz (2003) as well as del Saz and Fraser (2003). Fraser (1999) lists reformulation markers (henceforth RMs) such as I mean, in particular, namely, parenthetically, that is to say as a sub-class of the class of elaboration markers, which, in turn, constitute a sub-class of discourse markers.

Del Saz (2003) provides the most extensive list of RMs and defines reformulation as a “recharacterization of the message conveyed by the whole previous discourse segment S1, or one of its constituents” (2003: 211ff). He also states that a reformulation holds between “a source discourse segment S1 […] and a reformulated segment, or S2” along with the presence of a reformulation marker that displays “the type of relationship accomplished between the two linked discourse segments” (ibid.)

Del Saz and Fraser (2003: 4ff) list five types of reformulation: 1. paraphrase of a constituent (expressed by e.g. that is), 2. recasting of the intended meaning by the speaker (expressed by e.g. in other words), 3. revision of an implication of the prior message (expressed by e.g. worse still), 4. correction (e.g. that is to say), 5. request for information (e.g. are you saying …).

As is apparent from the list and types of RMs, del Saz and Fraser, unlike any of the previously described approaches, differentiate between self-initiated reformulation (items 1 to 4) and other-initiated reformulation (item 5).

Table 1 provides a summary list of the RMs that are mentioned in the literature discussed above.

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Table 1. Reformulation markers listed by author and year of publication Halliday and Hasan (1976) instead, rather, on the contrary, at least, I mean, that is, in other words, to put it another way, for instance, for example, thus, actually Quirk et al. (1985) in other words, technically, that is, or…, at that, more specifically, that is to say, or rather, I mean Fraser (1999) that is to say, for example, more precisely, I mean, in particular, namely, parenthetically del Saz and Fraser (2003) in other words, technically, that is, at that, more specifically, more precisely, that is to say, or rather, I mean, namely, in a word, all in all, for instance, or better, to put it simply, on second thought del Saz (2003) (Or) better (yet/still) In sum / to summarize / to sum up Especially More accurately / to be more accurate For example/for instance, e.g.

More clearly / to be more clear / to make things I mean clear In a few words / to put it in a few words More exactly / to be more exact In a nutshell (in sum) More precisely / to be more precise In a sense (in other words) More simply / in simple(r) terms / Put more In conclusion / to conclude simply / to put it more simply In more technical terms More specifically / to be more specific In one word / In a word / in words of one syllable Or rather In other words / To put it in other words Particularly / in particular In short / in brief / in a nutshell Say (for example/for instance) Technically speaking That is / that is to say / i.e. (id est)

I mean is the only item on the lists that displays most of the properties that are usually attributed to core members of the functional class of DMs, for example, you know, well or of course. With the exception of actually, (or) rather, say and in other words, most items do not even qualify as peripheral members, since they express (relatively context-independent) propositional meaning; furthermore, they are compositional, syntactically integrated and unmarked for oral style (for an extensive list of DM features cf. e.g. Schourup 1999, Furkó 2007, Dér 2010).

Peripheral DMs such as in other words, or rather and say have no more than one or two tokens in the corpus.

Once I narrowed down the list of RMs to I mean and actually, the next step was to look at the various pragmatic and discourse functions of the two DMs based on the relevant literature. As we will see in the next section, mapping the functional spectrum of I mean and actually will be relevant in the course of part two of the research process, i.e. in the course of looking for correspondences between Hungarian counterparts of the two items and their discourse-pragmatic functions.

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3.2. The functional spectrum of I mean In Crystal and Davy (1975: 97ff) I mean is glossed as ‘in other words’, ‘what I have been saying amounts to the following’, ‘my specific meaning is that’. Its main function is in clarifying the meaning of the speaker’s immediately preceding expression, other functions include marking a restatement of the previous utterance, providing extra information and/or a fresh angle about a previous topic as well as marking a change of mind.

As we saw earlier, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976) I mean expresses correction, more specifically, an additive conjunctive relation (expository apposition) or an adversative conjunctive relation (correction of wording).

Schiffrin (1987: 296) defines I mean as a marker of the “speaker’s upcoming modification of the meaning of his/her own prior talk”. Its two main functions are “expansions of ideas” and “explanations of intention” (ibid.)

Swan (1997: 159) argues that I mean introduces explanations, additional details, expressions of opinion and corrections, while it can also serve as “a general-purpose connector of ‘filler’ with little real meaning”. Further functions include “softening” and “gaining time” (ibid.).

Jucker and Smith (1998) approach the function of I mean from the perspective of processing information. They differentiate between reception markers (e.g. oh, okay), which mark a reaction to information provided by another speaker and presentation markers, which accompany and modify the speaker’s own information.

Information-centred presentation markers, such as like modify the information itself, while addressee-centred presentation markers (I mean is included here) relate the information to the presumed knowledge state of the addressee.

González (2004) concentrates on the functions of DMs with reference to story structure. Her research shows that the two most common functions of I mean in narratives are to mark (1) reformulation of previous information and (2) internal evaluation of the events presented in the narrative.

Parallel to the functions described above, Koczogh and Furkó (2011) found that DM uses of I mean include marking topic shift, elaboration, explanation, clarification, specification, false start, contrast, disagreement, conclusion, emphasis, explanation of speaker’s intention and self-correction.

3.3. The functional spectrum of actually Lenk (1998) describes actually as a globally oriented topical marker, which performs topical actions such as closing digressions, returning to a prior topic, changing topics, introducing a new topic, and inserting a subjective aside.

Smith and Jucker (2000) provide a Relevance Theoretic account of actually and propose that, on the one hand, it marks “an apparent discrepancy between

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propositional attitudes of conversational partners” (2000: 207), on the other, it introduces “the presentation of a counterclaim” (2000: 208). Lumping actually together with in fact and well they state that conversationalists use actually to introduce repairs to the common ground.

Biber et al. (2000: 869) classify actually as a stance adverbial expressing “epistemic-actuality”. It is important to note that, according to their research, actually occurs seven times as frequently in conversational data as in fiction, news reports and academic discourse.

Oh (2000) compares the function of actually with that of in fact. Both express counter-expectation, i.e. the fact that what the speaker is about to say goes against (the hearer’s) expectations. However, while actually announces the denial of an assertion, in fact announces a strengthening of the assertion.

Taglicht (2001) differentiates between a DM and a non-DM use of actually. In its non-DM use, actually is an integral element in the sentence structure and is used scalarly and truth-insistently. Actually as a DM, on the other hand, is a marker of mild contradiction, surprise, topic change, or is used as a pragmatic softener.

4. The study 4.1. Data and methodology For the present study I compiled a translation corpus with two subcorpora: the Language A corpus (henceforth LAC) consists of the dialogues in the first four seasons of the popular TV show House (also known as House M.D. © NBC Universal Television), while the LBC is a collection of the corresponding Hungarian translations. In the course of compiling the two subcorpora, whenever possible, I made a point of comparing the scripts and the transcripts with the official subtitles. For LAC I extracted the relevant dialogues from the television transcripts database (available at tvtdb.com). In order to make electronic search and concordance easier, LBC was compiled from the Hungarian subtitles of the relevant episodes; however, a mini-corpus containing the occurrences and translations of reformulation markers was also used and was compared with the transcripts of the Hungarian-dubbed version of the show. In order to investigate the ‘translation effect’ that might influence the choice of a TT translation equivalent, I considered alternative translations of the same LAC, which were readily available in the form of different subtitles / transcripts of the Hungarian-dubbed episodes.

The second stage of the first part of the research process involved making a concordance (Key Word in Context, KWIC) of the lexical items mean and actually, eliminating content words and non-RM uses. In the course of stage 3, I extracted DM uses of I mean and actually together with their contexts, matched them

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with the Hungarian translations in the LBC and highlighted the key words that served as translation equivalents in the LBC. Finally, stage 4 involved compiling the ‘mini-corpus’ or ‘Key Word Corpus’ (henceforth KWC) by extracting the translation equivalents and their contexts in the LBC and aligning them with corresponding Key Words and Contexts in the LAC. In the course of the second part of the research process I performed both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the various tokens of the two RMs in the KWC. In the first stage of this part of the research the individual tokens were tagged according to their Hungarian translations (or the lack of a translation equivalent). In the second stage, the same tokens were tagged in terms of the pragmatic functions / categories that were identified in the course of previous research into I mean and actually (as described in the previous sections). As a last stage of this part of the process, I looked for correspondences between translation equivalents and functions as well as between functions / categories and clusters.

The third part of the research process was aimed at mapping the functional spectrum of Hungarian reformulation markers mármint and vagyis, which emerged as the most salient Hungarian RMs and which also qualify as DMs. First, I made a concordance (KWIC) of mármint and vagyis in the LBC. Next (stage 2), I tagged tokens of mármint and vagyis in terms of the pragmatic functions I identified on the basis of all the occurrences in the corpus (rather than on the basis of previous research). Stage 3 involved tagging tokens of mármint and vagyis according to the source items / meaning relations in the LAC. Finally, as a final stage (stage 4) of the third part of the process, I looked for correspondences between the functions of mármint and vagyis and the English source items.

4.2. Findings Part 2 / stage 1 of the research process yielded the following results, based on 288 tokens of actually (for easier reference, I use round percentages. Actually is translated as igazából (‘really’, ‘truly’) in 44% of the cases, while actually lacks a translation equivalent in 20% of its contexts of use. In the third place we find the expressions pontosabban (‘to be more exact’) and egészen pontosan (‘to be [quite] exact’), both of which correspond to the third type of reformulation given by Quirk et al. (1985), i.e. ‘more precise formulation’. Sőt (~ ‘what is more’) occurs as a translation in 8% of the contexts; it is interesting to consider that ‘what is more’ occurs as an expanded, emphatic form of the additive ‘and’ type of conjunctive relation in Halliday and Hasan (1976) and not as an element that expresses reformulation. Vagyis (~ ‘that is’), another typical Hungarian reformulation marker, occurs in 8% of the cases. Less frequent translations include illetve (~ ‘or rather’), tudja mit? (‘you know what?’) na jó, csak (‘all right, [I was] just […ing]’), the latter two correspond to more opaque (far-from-the-semantic-core) uses of actually.

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As for the translations of I mean, based on 130 tokens mármint, a pragmaticalized combination of már (‘yet’, ‘now’, ‘ever’) and mint (‘like’), occurs as a translation equivalent in 35% of the cases. I mean is not translated in 26% of the contexts. Úgy értem (‘I mean [it like that]’), an expression, which has not undergone pragmaticalization to the extent the English I mean has, occurs as a translation equivalent in 22% of the cases. In the fourth place we find a variety of DMs and DM-like expressions such as (úgy) gondolom (‘in my view’, ‘I think’), mondjuk (‘let’s say’, ‘one has to admit’), egyébként (‘by the way’) and például (‘for example’). Vagyis (‘that is’), a Hungarian DM, which, as we saw earlier, corresponds to actually in several contexts, appears as a translation equivalent of I mean in 9% of the cases. Less frequent translations include hiszen (‘since’, ‘surely’) and persze (‘of course’, ‘naturally’); these two could be subsumed under the category ‘miscellaneous DMs’. The reason I tag them separately was that the contexts where they serve as translation equivalents correspond to less transparent, more opaque uses of I mean.

As mentioned above, part 3 / stage 3 of the research process was aimed at investigating the back translations of the most frequent translation equivalents of English I mean and actually. I found that Hungarian vagyis occurs 270 times, while mármint occurs 66 times in the LBC. In 43% of the cases vagyis is a translation of a compositional / propositional item (i.e. non-DM) with the verb mean; in 11% of the contexts vagyis is a translation equivalent of you mean and is used for correcting the interlocutor’s utterance. In such cases it is not used for self-correction, which means that it is considered a reformulation marker only in the framework of del Saz and Fraser (2003), where RMs of type 5 are ’requests for information’. In 11% of the contexts vagyis is a translation of a (non-propositional) use of so, while, based on the LBC, the functional spectra of actually and vagyis overlap in 9% of the contexts. This stage of the research also revealed that there are a number of contexts where the translator felt the need to include vagyis in the Hungarian version even though there is no RM, DM or any linguistic expression of reformulation, self- or other correction, etc. in the original text. The functional spectra of vagyis and I mean overlap in only 2% of the contexts. Other, less frequent contexts include utterances where we find meaning, basically, at least and that is in the original.

Despite the small number of occurrences, it is clear from the corpus that mármint serves as the translation equivalent of I mean in the majority of its functions (68%). In 20% of the cases it expresses other correction (you mean), while in a few cases it is the translation of the discourse marker like as well as meaning and meaning what?, which serve as requests for specification addressed to the interlocutor. Similarly to the case of vagyis, there are a number of contexts where mármint is used in the translation but there is no explicit expression of reformulation in the original.

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4.3. Discussion, translation strategies and implications On the basis of the large number of tokens (both in the case of I mean and actually) and the small number of ST DMs that are not translated we can observe that compared to previous research into the use of DMs in subtitles (cf. e.g. Chiaro 2000 or Mattsson 2009) there seems to be less of a levelling effect in English subtitles and their Hungarian translations than in other language combinations.

As for translation strategies, the data suggest that translators strive for formal equivalence in the majority of cases, and they achieve it by using one or two TT counterparts of an ST DM. However, as we can see above, the functional spectra of TT and ST DMs show only a partial overlap, as in the remaining contexts translators either choose an alternative, conceptual-compositional linguistic device to convey reformulation, self-correction, elaboration, etc., or omit the DM in the TT altogether.

Moreover, even in the former case translators do not avail themselves of the Hungarian language’s capacity to convey “illocutionary nuances through sequential focus” (Hervey 1998: 17), thus, they do not observe Hervey’s guidelines for the translation of illocutionary phenomena from English into Hungarian. A possible reason is that they concentrate on the textual rather than the interpersonal functions of the DMs under scrutiny. A salient counterexample is (1) below, where the ST DM is omitted and focus is expressed through fronting the personal pronoun in the TT: (1) Tommy: [stops playing] It’s been, like, two hours.

Brandy: And we will keep waiting. I mean, you’ve heard this guy play and you know what he does, so can you just shut up, Tommy? És tovább is várni fogunk. [no DM] Te is hallottad őt. Tudod, hogy mire képes.

Szóval pofa be, Tommy! (House M. D. © NBC Universal Television) Another creative, dynamic equivalence strategy can be observed in utterances when I mean is used emphatically or as a booster of the force of its host utterance, in such contexts hiszen (‘since’, ‘surely’) appears as a Hungarian translation equivalent: (2) What does it matter where they are? I mean he’s in pain. You gotta do something.

Mit számít, hogy hol vannak? Hiszen fájdalmai vannak. Tenniük kell valamit!

(House M. D. © NBC Universal Television) (3) Mom: Is it possible the problem isn’t his blood? It’s just psychological? I mean, he almost killed himself.

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Lehetséges, hogy a baj nem a vérével van? Hogy csak pszichológiai? Hiszen majdnem megölte magát. (House M. D. © NBC Universal Television) In addition, the strategy of omitting the DMs in the TT is especially salient in narrative discourse. The data revealed that I mean (unlike you know) is usually not translated even when it marks a new unit in the narrative structure: (4) You know he just started school when Anne died? I was a mess. Still adjusting to being a parent, much less a single parent. You know I used to put cold pancakes in his lunchbox [chuckles]. I mean, that was the only thing that I could make that he would eat.

Tudja, akkor kezdte az iskolát, mikor Ann meghalt. Össze voltam zavarodva.

Szülőnek lenni is nehéz, nem hogy egy egyedülálló szülőnek. Tudja, mindig hideg palacsintát kapott tízóraira. [no DM] Ez volt az egyetlen, amit meg tudtam csinálni és meg is ette. (House M. D. © NBC Universal Television)

5. Conclusions, limitations, directions for further research In the present paper I have explored the problems translators have to face when dealing with illocutionary phenomena, such as the use of discourse markers in general and reformulation markers in particular. I argued that, even though DMs do not normally convey conceptual meaning, their omission in the TT may result in increased processing effort, unintended conversational implicatures, misrepresented interpersonal dynamics, or, what is even worse, the absence of the naturalness of ordinary conversations. This last effect is highly undesirable when translating dramatized discourse, since dramatized discourse is, by definition, scripted discourse designed in a way that it does not sound like scripted discourse.

The case study in the second part of the paper has hopefully shown that there is a lot to be gained by the cross-fertilization of DM research and translation studies for both fields of inquiry. More specifically, we saw that translators should be increasingly aware of dynamic equivalence strategies that are specific to the translation of illocutionary phenomena, for example, the strategy of using sequential focus to convey a particular DM’s emphatic function.

Because of the genre-specific constraints posed by the translation of subtitles (outlined in section 2.2. above), further research is needed to investigate strategies for translating DMs that appear in a variety of other, scripted and non-scripted, discourse types. In addition, it is important to consider a wider range of DM types,

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since the different subgroups of DMs (reformulation markers, evidential markers, general extenders, etc.) have different degrees of communicative transparency, and, as a result, cause different degrees of difficulty for the translator.

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Translation of Irony in the Hungarian Subtitles of Downton Abbey Zsuzsanna AJTONY

Department of Humanities Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Miercurea Ciuc, Romania) ajtonyzsuzsa@yahoo.com Abstract.This paper proposes to analyse ironic utterances in the British TV series Downton Abbey (Season One) by comparing the English source text (ST) irony found in the script of the film to its subtitled variant of the Hungarian target text (TT). First the literature of the domain is surveyed in order to draw attention to the difficulty of rendering irony in audiovisual subtitles which emphasises that, as a multidisciplinary area, it involves not only audio and visual, but also verbal and non-verbal factors. This section is followed by a brief survey of irony theories highlighting the incongruence factor of irony, which also needs to be rendered in the TT. After offering an outline of the story, several examples of ironic utterances are discussed, applying the dynamic equivalence method.

Keywords: audiovisual translation, irony, English, Hungarian

Introduction Linguistic relativity (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) claims that each language reflects a separate social reality. This reality is therefore different from the one reflected in/by another language. Different languages reflect social reality in different ways. As a result, translation is not simply a matter of substituting words of one language with those of another and adapting the syntax to suit it. For a translation to be successful, the translator has also to convey a whole store of added meaning belonging to the culture of the original language. (Chiaro 1992: 77) This is especially true in the case of translating irony. Scholars have underlined the particular difficulty in translating ironic statements (cf. Chiaro 1992, Chiaro 2010, Zabalbeascoa Terran 2003, De Wilde 2010). Understanding

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irony first involves its interpretation, i.e. the proper identification of the ironist’s intention. From a pragmatic point of view, this means the identification of the illocutionary force of the predication in the SL (what the ironist means by saying something). This illocutionary force will then be transposed into the TL, rendering the necessary linguistic means to convey this message. In the case of a successful translation, the implied ironic meaning will be equivalent with the ironic meaning inferred by the translator and, as a result, by the audience. As Chiaro (1992: 92) claims, “any translation is by its very nature an interpretation of the source text rather than its perfect reflection.” Translating irony is exactly the case in point.

Moreover, in interlingual screen translation (as is the case of Downton Abbey) the process of intercultural transfer must also be taken into account. The case of English-Hungarian screen translation especially raises interest if one considers that irony and humour are key features of Englishness. Receivers of the screen translation (readers of the Hungarian subtitles) might not fully understand it in a similar way as the script writer intended it, especially if culture-specific elements also appear in the ST. Audiovisual translation (AVT) is an area of translation studies with a hybrid and multidisciplinary nature. AV humour and irony are the products of the interdependence of both visual and verbal elements (Veiga 2009a, 2009b). When comparing the spoken word or the script of an audiovisual product (a film, in our case) with its subtitles, Chaume’s integrated model of analysis will be considered.

This model combines translation studies and film studies (Chaume 2004: 13, 16, quoted in Munday 2008: 188). Chaume enlists ten codes, out of which the linguistic code proves to be relevant for our comparison of ironic utterances both in the source and target languages. He claims that “features of the linguistic code in audiovisual texts are that they are most often scripted, but ‘written to be spoken as if not written’ which poses considerable demands on the translator to conform to a similar register.” (ibid.)

When analysing translated irony in AVT, one needs to consider that in order to successfully render the ironic meaning as properly as possible in the TL, both the translator and the audience are faced with the mixture of verbal and nonverbal (audiovisual) communication. Zabalbeascoa Terran’s research (2003: 309) shows that an AV text has four components, each of which contributes to the constitution of the final meaning, of the final effect: both audio and visual, but also verbal and non-verbal elements.

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Table 1. The 4 components of the audiovisual (AV) text (cf. Zabalbeascoa Terran 2003: 309)

Audio Visual Words Words Verbal heard read Music + Picture, Non-verbal special effects photography When evaluating the translation of irony in Downton Abbey, three of these components will be taken into account: the words heard (the original English soundtrack), the words read (the Hungarian subtitles) and the picture (the film).

The viewer is faced with all three elements and the perlocutionary effect of the communicative input results from the combination of these three. The triad of picture-sound-words must complement each other in any screen translation, and this is especially true in the case of irony translations, as in those cases when situational irony is involved, the facial expression of the character adds meaning to the ironic intention and helps the viewer to identify the utterance as ironic.

Naturally, further constraints are added to the difficulties a translator and subtitler might face: not only of linguistic but also of technical nature, that are called space and time constraints. Maximum two lines may be seen on the screen, consisting of around 36 Roman characters, with a duration of around 6 seconds for each caption. Obviously this leads to a necessary reduction of the number of words on the screen. The subtitler must also try to respect aspects of the cinematography (e.g. camera cuts) and match the duration of subtitles to the rhythm of the dialogue (Munday 2008: 185).

1. Theories of irony Several theories of irony have emerged within the literature of the domain, most of which emphasise the contradiction or incongruity element existing between what is said and what is meant, also referring to “defeated expectations” (Zabalbeascoa Terran 2003: 315). It is very important to make a distinction between verbal irony and situational irony. According to Gibbs (1994: 363), “both verbal and situational irony involve a confrontation or juxtaposition of incompatibles, but in verbal irony an individual presents or evokes such a confrontation by his or her utterance(s), whereas situational irony is something that just happens to be noticed as ironic.” Both verbal and situational irony employ incongruity in order to distinguish between facts and expectations (saying one thing and meaning another) while keeping in mind the audience’s (reader’s) awareness of both.

While situational irony highlights events that appear as ironic, regardless of the

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speaker’s intention, in the case of verbal irony the speaker creates a juxtaposition of incompatible actions or words with a view to conveying an attitude.

Verbal irony is a linguistic phenomenon exploiting the incongruity between reality and expectation, and consequently, unveiling an attitude towards such an incongruity. According to the rhetoric perspective (cf. Corbett 1971: 489, Booth 1975), irony is an antiphrasis, i.e. an utterance expressing the opposite of its literal meaning. It is in fact a semantic inversion between the primary (literal) meaning and the implicated (non-literal) one.

The translation of irony is a very difficult task because the interpretation of irony presupposes a two-stage processing: first, the processing of a meaning of a specific utterance is rejected, and, second, a reinterpretation of the utterance through inferring an implicature is triggered. This view is based on Grice’s Cooperation Principle and its maxims. In Grice’s view, irony is a case of conversational implicature. By flouting the Maxim of Quality, the speaker implies the opposite of what is said. The ironist says something s/he does not believe to be true although it is not in his/her intention to tell a lie. The intention conveyed by the ironist’s implicature urges the hearer to look for an additional meaning. The addressee feels inclined to reject the literal meaning and to subsequently decipher the implied meaning, highly likely to “be some obviously related proposition; the most obviously related proposition is the contradictory of the one he purports to be putting forward” (Grice 1989: 34). In a later study, Grice (1989: 41–58), broadens the definition of irony by incorporating the notion of an attitude into it: “To be ironical is among other things, to pretend (as the etymology suggests),1 and while one wants the pretence to be recognized as such, to announce it as pretence would spoil the effect.” (ibid. 54) Here, irony is recognised as a verbal resource meant to convey an evaluative position on the part of the speaker.

Later, two post-Gricean attempts have been put forward to provide a rationale for irony. One approach (Sperber and Wilson) treats verbal irony as a type of echoic allusion to an attributed utterance or thought. According to this view, the speaker interprets an earlier thought or utterance and uses an utterance interpretively (cf. Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory 1986). He/She “is expressing her own reaction to a thought or utterance with a similar content which she tacitly attributes to someone else (or to herself at another time), and which she wants to suggest is ludicrously false, inadequate or inappropriate” (Wilson 2006: 1724). The aim of such a reaction is to express a critical or mocking attitude to such a false utterance and it actually dissociates the speaker from this tacitly attributed utterance.

1

The etymology of the word itself means pretence. The word “irony” derives from the Greek eirōneía (cf. also Latin: ironia), which means “simulated ignorance”, “the pretence of ignorance”. The Greek term eironia describes the main characteristic of the stock characters (the “ironic man”) in early Greek comedies. Source: Glottopedia, accessed 10.04.2010.

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The second post-Gricean approach is suggested by the etymology of the word “irony” and treats verbal irony as a type of pretence. According to this approach, the speaker is not asserting but merely pretending to assert a proposition, and expects his/her audience to see through the pretence and recognise the critical or mocking attitude behind it (Wilson 2006: 1725, further developed by Clark and Gerrig 2007).

2. Downton Abbey – a brief outline of the story The story revealed by the film (and the script) is based on the life and concerns of the English aristocratic Crawley family and their servants living in the Edwardian mansion called Downton Abbey. Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham, “custodian” of Downton, soon learns that he lost his heirs in the tragedy of the Titanic (we are in 1912). A distant cousin, Matthew Crawley, a Manchester lawyer, is the next to inherit his property. Matthew moves to Downton together with his mother, Isobel Crawley, who has quite modernist and feminist views.

This is enough reason to clash with the Dowager Countess, Robert’s mother, Lady Violet, a conservative and domineering elderly woman. Another concern of the Crawleys, Robert and his American wife, Cora, is to marry their three daughters, Mary, Edith and Sybil. Robert considers his outmost duty to preserve Downton the way it is but the social and historical changes (the WWI, the ever stronger emergence of women’s emancipation, etc.) bring several obstacles to carry out this noble plan. The “under the stairs” group of characters – the staff – living in the servants’ quarters also have their more tradition-bound vs. more liberal representatives, with Charles Carson, the butler, as the head of the servants’ social ladder, who watches that good manners and respectability are preserved on both levels of the house and who also supervises the work of different male servants (the valets, first and second footmen and the chauffeur), Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper and head of the maids of different rank and status, Mrs Patmore, the cook of the house together with her aid, Daisy, the lowest in rank in the house.

3. Comparative analysis of script and subtitles in Downton Abbey Analysing the interlingual translation of Downton Abbey may be of interest for several reasons. Firstly, because of the high frequency of references to culturespecific elements in the ST, which makes this series so English. Secondly, as it is irony and humour (typical English humour) that is a stereotypical, recurrent and pervasive feature of British culture and proves to be great challenge even for the

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competent translator. This paper proposes to discuss both of these characteristics, by comparing several examples of irony and socio-cultural specificities in the original script and the Hungarian subtitles. I am dealing with them together as ironic utterances frequently make allusions to social and cultural references which must be rendered in the target language in a proper way so that the foreign language viewer can make similar inferences and can understand irony more or less similarly as the English-speaking audience who are socialised within this socio-cultural background. This is underlined by Chiaro as well, when she claims that “when sociocultural constraints are combined with linguistic restraints, translating becomes an arduous task” (Chiaro 1992: 84).

In this paper a dynamic pragmatic approach to irony is followed (see De Wilde 2010). This methodological approach functions on the basis of the descriptive paradigm, i.e. it takes “the existing and empirically observable texts as the starting point for the analysis, without having previously adopted fixed criteria and minimum conditions according to which a given text is considered a translation of another text” (De Wilde 2010: 29, my emphasis). On the other hand, as a comparison is carried out between ST and TT, the comparative procedure involves looking at similarities and differences between two different entities, two texts in two languages (ibid. 30).

As translating irony is a special kind of task, which – to a certain degree – is untranslatable (partially due to its linguistic and socio-cultural rootedness), in the process of interpretation, when comparing the ST and TT irony, the ‘invariant core’ (Popovič 1976) has to be found, while the ‘formal’ equivalence will be sacrificed for the ‘dynamic’ equivalence (Nida 1964, quoted in Chiaro 1992: 92).

This is the case of the first example from Downton Abbey, in which Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper criticises Daisy, the kitchen maid, for being too slow in her regular work of lighting the fire.

Original English text

Hungarian translated/subtitled version MRS HUGHES Oh, heavens, girl!

MRS HUGHES Az égre, te lány! Tüzet You’re building a fire, not inventing it. rakj, ne máglyát!

(Episode 1, Act One) [Oh, heavens, girl! Build a fire, not a bonfire!]

In both the ST and the TT the main aim of the speaker is to scold her interlocutor for her slow work. In the ST she employs an indicative phrase in the present continuous referring to the tedious work of fire building. She implies that inventing the fire in man’s history took much longer than building one in the fireplace. The Hungarian text is based on imperative sentences, but this historical reference is missing; it is replaced by a textual reference to a much larger type of

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fire (a bonfire) which obviously takes much longer to build. So while the syntactic and morphologic structure was changed, the semantic core of the ST has been retained in the TT. A similar ironic utterance appears in the following example where the servants discuss the arrival of the Crawleys’ new relative, who might become the new heir to the estate.

WILLIAM Are we to treat him as the heir?

MISS O’BRIEN Are we heck as like.

A doctor’s son from Manchester?

Humph. He’ll be lucky if he gets a civil word out of me.

ANNA We’re all lucky if we get a civil word out of you.

(Episode 2, Act One)

WILLIAM Aztán örökösként bánjunk vele?

[Then should we treat him as an heir?]

MISS O’BRIEN Még csak az kéne! Egy manchesteri ügyvéddel? Örülhet, ha egy normális szóra fogom méltatni.

[You just wish! A lawyer from Manchester? He may be happy if I speak normally to him.]

ANNA Mi is örülnénk a szép szónak magától [We would also be happy to get some nice words from you.]

Miss O’Brien’s irony is targeted towards the possible heir as she despises the newcomer who does not belong to the aristocracy, like her master and mistress; he is just an upper-middle class lawyer coming from an industrial city. Therefore, in her view, he is not a respectable gentleman. The saying “are we heck as like” is not translated literally, but its meaning is retained (see the meaning of ‘the heck’ as ‘azt már nem!’; ’nehogy már!’; ‘toll a füledbe!’ in Kövecses 2005: 208).

‘A doctor’s son from Manchester!’ (31 characters) is shortened because of space and time constraints. In the Hungarian subtitle (‘Egy manchesteri ügyvéddel?’) the father’s job is left out (25 characters); instead the job of the heir is mentioned (lawyer) and the city’s name. Both are civil jobs, not aristocratic pastimes, so the basic idea is maintained. The question is whether the toponym ‘Manchester’, as a busy industrial city, has the same connotations for the Hungarian viewers as for those from the Anglo-Saxon culture. Further on, the interjection ‘humph’ is omitted, as it is heard in the soundtrack, while the facial expression of the character also adds to her attitude of despise and displeasure. The English version of the next sentence contains an indicative in the future form, while its Hungarian variant contains a conditional, which might suggest that while in English the speaker takes the heir as an unavoidable reality, the Hungarian version still considers him as a possibility. This sentence forms the starting point for the next character’s ironic utterance, which, as an interference into the

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two earlier speakers’ conversation, is targeted against the former speaker, Miss O’Brien. The Hungarian translation continues the use of the conditional mood, while the English utterance contains an indicative.

Mrs Patmore, the cook is one of those women in the story who – as a woman in power (in the kitchen) – frequently employs irony which aims at mocking those in her subordination. So she often criticizes Daisy, the formerly mentioned kitchen maid, for different reasons. For instance, in the following examples, she uses irony with an evaluative edge because Daisy fails to instantly obey her orders: MRS PATMORE Daisy, did you hear me call, or have you gone selectively deaf?!

DAISY No, Mrs Patmore.

MRS PATMORE Then might I remind you we are preparing dinner for your future employer, and if it goes wrong, I’ll be telling them why!

(Episode 2, Act One)

MRS PATMORE Daisy, nem hallottad, hogy hívtalak, vagy netán szelektív a hallásod?

[Daisy, haven’t you heard me call you or perhaps you’ve got selective hearing?]

DAISY Nem, Mrs Patmore.

[No, Mrs Patmore.]

MRS PATMORE Akkor emlékeztethetlek arra, hogy a leendő munkáltatónknak készítjük a vacsorát? És, ha nem sikerül, elmondom nekik az okát!

[Then might I remind you that we are peparing dinner for our future employer? And if it goes wrong, I’ll tell them the reason.]

In both sides of the question of the English text the speaker uses an interrogative, while in the Hungarian version this has been changed into a negative interrogative. On the other hand, the term “go + adjective” suggests a process which the Hungarian translation renders in the form of a state (‘you are selectively deaf’). The irony continues in the following turn as well where the cook gives the reason why she urges the maid to follow her orders. While in the English version the 1st person plural ‘we’ is combined with 2nd person singular ‘your’, more emphatically putting the blame on Daisy for the possible lack of success, the Hungarian text keeps the 1st person plural personal pronoun markers all through the utterance, which suggests sharing the blame with the interlocutor (inclusive ‘we’, which includes the speaker as well). It must also be added that while the English text contains one single complex sentence which connects the subordinate clauses with the coordinative conjunction ‘and’, the Hungarian version starts a new sentence with ‘and’, thus trying to render the dynamics of oral speech.

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Similar examples can be further enlisted: MRS PATMORE Daisy! What’s happened to you? I said you could go for a drink of water, not a trip up the Nile.

(Episode 3, Act One)

MRS PATMORE Daisy! Mi történt veled? Aszontam, elmehetsz vizet inni, nem pedig egy nílusi körútra.

[Daisy, what’s happened to you? I said you could go for a drink of water, not a cruise on the Nile.]

DAISY Do these biscuits go up?

DAISY Ezek a kekszek is felmennek?

MRS PATMORE No, I put them out for [Do these biscuits go up?] the fairies.

MRS PATMORE Nem, félretettem a DAISY Oh. jótündéreknek.

MRS PATMORE Of course they’re [No, I put them away for the good going up. What’s wrong with you? fairies.]

You’re always dozy, but tonight you’d Persze, hogy felmennek! Mi bajod make Sleeping Beauty look alert. van? Folyton álmos vagy, de ma este (Episode 6, Act Three) kész Csipkerózsika lettél!

[Of course, they go up! What’s the matter with you? You are always sleepy, but tonight you’ve become a real Sleeping Beauty.]

In both examples there are some socio-cultural references which the ironic utterance relies on. In the first case, ‘a trip up the Nile’ has a typical British cultural background, the British aristocracy often travelling for pleasure in their colony in Egypt (let us not forget that the plot of Downton Abbey takes place in the first decade of the 20th century, when Britain was still at the height of its power). The cultural connotation might be missing for the Hungarian viewers.

The second example also contains a reference to a fairy tale (Sleeping Beauty) which is so well known in other European cultures as well that its interpretation does not cause any difficulty to the Hungarian viewers either. However, while the Hungarian version contains direct criticism at Daisy’s expense (‘tonight you have become a regular Sleeping Beauty’), the English text is more indirect in this respect, containing a hyperbole, so typical for ironical language use. The phrase ‘make sy look alert’ implies that the person under scrutiny (in this case, Daisy) surpasses the Sleeping Beauty state by being more dozy than the fairy tale character.

Nevertheless, the Hungarian subtitles of Downton Abbey also contain examples where the translator is in a much more difficult position, i.e. where the irony lies on verbal play that can be interpreted properly only by the English audience.

This is the case of the following exchange where Lady Sybil, the youngest of the Crawley daughters, expresses her intention to take active part in the elections by helping the candidates get more political support. Obviously the elder family

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members, especially the grandmother, the dowager countess, do not approve of this, so they express their dissatisfaction about it in an ironical tone.

LADY SYBIL I want to do some canvassing. The by-election isn’t far off.

[Robert and Violet stare open mouthed at Sybil.]

VIOLET, DOWAGER COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM Canvassing?

LADY SYBIL Oh, it’s quite safe. You’re in a group and you knock on doors.

VIOLET, DOWAGER COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM Yes, I know what canvassing is.

LADY MARY I think that Sybil is— VIOLET, DOWAGER COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM What? Are you canvassing, too? Or would you rather take in washing?

(Episode 6, Act One)

LADY SYBIL Szeretnék korteskedni.

Nemsokára itt a pótválasztás.

[I’d like to do some canvassing. The by-election is soon here.]

LADY VIOLET Korteskedni?

[Canvassing?]

LADY SYBIL Ó, az elég biztonságos.

Csoportosan járjuk a házakat.

[Oh, that’s quite safe. We go to houses in groups.]

VIOLET Tudom jól, mit jelent a korteskedés.

[I know very well what canvassing means.]

LADY MARY Szerintem Sybil…

[In my opinion, Sybil …]

VIOLET Mi az? Netán te is korteskednél?

Vagy inkább mosnál?

[What is it? You would like to do some canvassing, too? Or would you rather do some washing?]

In this case, the irony is based on the different meanings and interpretation of the word ‘canvassing’. While Sybil and Mary use the term in its political sense, i.e. ‘to go around the area asking people for political support’, Lady Violet (intentionally or unintentionally?) employs the term in its other, related meaning, i.e. ‘to peddle, to hawk, to offer one’s services by knocking on other people’s doors’. Moreover, there is a semantic relation between the words ‘canvas’ (a type of cloth) and ‘washing’. The English text exploits the homographic use of the term to the maximum, but obviously, for linguistic reasons, the Hungarian version does not (cannot) contain a similar verbal play, therefore the Hungarian viewers will probably not understand the presence of the phrase ‘Vagy inkább mosnál?’ (‘Or you’d rather wash?’) as it is not relevant to the previous context at all.

Another instance of a socio-cultural item present in the ST is the ironic mention of Guy Fawkes, who is notorious historical figure from the early 17th century, famous for the Gunpowder Plot (1605).

Translation of Irony in the Hungarian Subtitles of Downton Abbey WILLIAM There they go, Guy Fawkes and his assistant.

GWEN Which is which?

(Episode 7, Act One)

207

WILLIAM Ott mennek… A cselszövő és a szárnysegédje.

[There they are going… The schemer and his adjutant.]

GWEN Melyik melyik?

[Which is which?]

As in Downton Abbey there are two characters who keep conspiring against other servants, the reference is clear. However, the Hungarian audience might not be familiar with the historical background of the 17th century event, therefore what the TT mentions is not Guy Fawkes’ name, as a historical realia, but “the invariant core”, the common noun ‘cselszövő’ [‘schemer’, ‘shifter’], which makes the reference more explicit. Moreover, a similarly strong historical and cultural connotation of the term ‘cselszövő’ might be mentioned in Hungarian, the source of which is a famous line from the Hungarian composer, Ferenc Erkel’s wellknown opera, Hunyadi László: ’Meghalt a cselszövő, nem dúl a rút viszály’ [The schemer is dead, there’s no more ugly hostility2].

Idioms or proverbs typical to English may cause difficulty for the audiovisual translator, mainly if they are mingled with ironic utterances. One such instance can be found in the following exchange, where the Hungarian variant cannot render the strangely ironical stance of the idiom ‘as dead as a doornail’.

MR CARSON (…) He was a handsome stranger from foreign parts one minute, and the next he was as dead as a doornail. It’s bound to be a shock.

(Episode 3, Act Three)

MR CARSON (…) Egyik pillanatban itt van egy jóképű külföldi, a következőben meg meghal. Ez óhatatlanul sokkoló.

[One moment we have this handsome foreigner, the other moment he dies.

This is inevitably shocking.]

Similarly, another proverb appears in Robert Crawley’s utterance which – quite stereotypically – refers to the way one needs to act when far from home.

CORA, COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM Don’t listen when His Lordship pretends not to enjoy the Season.

ROBERT, EARL OF GRANTHAM When in Rome.

(Episode 7, Act One)

2

My translation.

CORA, COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM El ne higgye, hiszen őlordsága nagyon is élvezte a szezont!

[Don’t believe it, His Lordship was really enjoying the season.]

ROBERT, EARL OF GRANTHAM Mikor Rómában…

[When in Rome…]

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There is just a reference to the proverb ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’. The English ST contains only the beginning of the proverb, which – as it is frequently used in English – is well-understood by the receivers. The same shortened version appears in the Hungarian translation (‘Mikor Rómában…’), but for the Hungarian viewers this does not make sense as the proverb is non-existent in the TL. Finally, there are cases when the conscious viewer can detect Hungarian translations which do not always render the English text properly, i.e. the TT does make reference to the ST but it drives the meaning in an utterly new direction.

ROBERT, EARL OF GRANTHAM (…)

If it had been left to that bloody fool, Branson.

(Episode 6, Act Four)

ROBERT, EARL OF GRANTHAM (…)

Ha arra a véres szájú bolond Bransonra maradt volna…

[If it had been left to that bloodymouthed Branson…]

The phrase ‘that bloody fool’ seems to have been translated into Hungarian as ‘blood-mouthed fool’. While the ST employs an informal use of a judgement or comment, meaning ‘extremely’ or ‘absolutely’, the Hungarian text uses the same word in a figurative sense, ‘véres szájú’ referring to somebody who talks in a way that stirs anger, full of passion, instigating (see MÉK 1992). It seems that the translator gives a more explicit description of Branson, the Irish nationalist chauffeur employed by the Crawleys, the Hungarian translation referring to his ethnic and political background.

The last example to be offered is another case of mistranslation. While the English ST makes an indirect, but quite clear reference to a church aisle where the bride and the groom go down without having told everything about their previous affairs to their future spouses, the Hungarian translation speaks of a ‘dead end’ (‘zsákutca’) from where there is no way out.

VIOLET, DOWAGER COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM She reads too many novels. I mean, one way or another, everyone goes down the aisle with half the story hidden.

(Episode 6, Act Four)

VIOLET, DOWAGER COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM Túl sok regényt olvas. Így vagy úgy, de mindenki bemegy abba a zsákutcába, hogy féligazságokat mond el.

[She reads too many novels. One way or another, but everybody enters the deadend of telling half-truths.]

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Conclusions With the comparison of the English and the Hungarian variants of ironic statements in Downton Abbey I tried to prove that the translator needs to be both competent and creative, possessing not only linguistic, but also socio-cultural and technical competence. The success of an English language television series in non-Englishspeaking countries depends to a great extent on its successful subtitling. It is the translator’s task to achieve a good quality translation by paying attention not only to the verbal rendering of the source text into the target language, but also to conveying the more indirect, ironic, and therefore, ambiguous utterances as well.

This is especially important in the case of a series like Downton Abbey, because irony is one of the most defining, stereotypical features of the English culture that this series aims to transmit to its target audience.

References Audiovisual reference: Downton Abbey, Season 1 (creator Julian Fellowes, 2010, UK)

References: Booth, Wayne C. 1975. A Rhetoric of Irony. London/New York: The University of Chicago Press.

Chiaro, Delia. 1992. The Language of Jokes. Analysing Verbal Play. London: Routledge.

Chiaro, Delia (ed.). 2010. Translation, Humour and the Media: Translation and Humour. London: Continuum.

Clark, Herbert H. and Gerrig, Richard J. 2007. On the Pretense Theory of Irony.

In R. Gibbs, H.L. Colston (eds.), Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader, 25–33. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Corbett, Edward. 1971. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. New York: Oxford University Press.

De Wilde, July. 2010. The analysis of translated literary irony: Some methodological issues. In Lievois, Katrien and Pierre Schoentjes (eds.), Translating Irony.

Linguistics Antverpiensia: Themes in Translation Studies, 25–44. Asp / Vubpress / Upa. https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/article/view/260/162.

Retrieved 12 March, 2014.

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Gibbs, Raymond. 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Grice, Paul. 1989. Further Notes on Logic and Conversation. In: Grice, P. (ed.), Studies in the Way of Words, 41–57. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2005. Angol-magyar kifejezéstár. Budapest: Magyar Könyvklub.

Juhász, József et. al. (eds.). 1992. Magyar Értelmező Kéziszótár (MÉK). Budapest: Akadémiai.

Munday, Jeremy. 2008. Introducing Translation Studies – Theories and Applications. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge.

Popovič, Anton. 1976. Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation.

Edmonton, Alberta: Department of Comparative Literature. University of Alberta.

Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deidre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Veiga, José Maria. 2009a. Linguistic Mechanisms of Humor Subtitling. Oral Presentation. New University of Lisbon: Portugal. www.clunl.edu.pt/.../ linguistic%20mechanisms%20of%2... Retrieved 12 March 2014.

Veiga, José Maria. 2009b. The Translation of Audiovisual Humour in Just a Few Words. In Díaz Cintas, Jorge (ed.), New Trends in Audiovisual Translation, 158–175. Briston, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters.

Wilson, Deidre. 2006. The Pragmatics of Verbal Irony: Echo or Pretense? Lingua 116: 1722–1743.

Zabalbeascoa Terran, Patrick. 2003. Translating Audiovisual Screen Irony. In: Luis Perz Gonzales (ed.), Speaking Tongues: Languages across Contexts and Users, 305–322. Edicions Universitat de Valencia.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 6, 2 (2014) 211–226

Reflections on the Status of Hungarian Loanwords in Old Romanian Translations Enikő PÁL

Department of Humanities Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Miercurea Ciuc, Romania) enikopaldr@gmail.com Abstract. Translation has always been important for religion as a way of preaching God’s word. The first Romanian translations of religious texts, including the first (although incomplete) translation of the Bible, date from the sixteenth century. In this early period of Romanian writing, Romanian translators encountered several problems in conveying the meaning of these texts of a great complexity. Some of the difficulties were due to the source texts available in the epoch, others to the ideal of literal translation, to the principle of legitimacy or to the relatively poor development of Romanian language which limited the translators’ options. The present study focuses on the causes and purposes for which lexical items of Hungarian origin interweave old Romanian translations. In this epoch, Hungarian influence was favoured by a complex of political, legal, administrative and sociocultural factors, sometimes even forced by these circumstances. On the one hand, given the premises of vivid contacts between Romanians and Hungarians in the regions where the old Romanian translations (or their originals) can be located, a number of Hungarian loanwords of folk origin penetrated these texts. On the other hand, when using Hungarian sources, translators have imported useful source language calques and loanwords, which have enriched Romanian language.

Keywords: folk, elitist, (Hungarian) loanwords, translation strategy

1. “Translations are facts of target cultures” (Toury 1995: 29) and, as such, dealing with old Romanian translations we shall start from the contextual reasons for what these are and do, relating certain features of the sociocultural context constraining them. First of all, we shall point out the fact that the first translations into Romanian language date from the sixteenth century and, as a matter of fact, these translations are also (one of) the first texts written in Romanian language, at least among those preserved until the present day.1 Therefore, these translations 1

Writing in Romanian naturally precedes the oldest Romanian translations since the need to convey a message of any kind other than spoken would certainly precede translation phenomena.

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provide us the first, relatively overall view on old Romanian language. Given the circumstance that Romanian writing itself had been in a somewhat precarious condition, the first translations in this vernacular language naturally confronted several problems due to certain disadvantages pertaining to the target language per se. On the other hand, and what is more important to translation phenomena, these translations are translations of religious texts,2 which once again determined the nature of translation into Romanian in the old period. Hence, these translations reflect some common features that characterise all Bible translations, but, apart from that, they also have certain particular characteristics.

In the case of old Romanian biblical translations we might speak of individual rather than collective translational norms, models and behaviour, since they may be regarded as “isolated practices which do not pertain to a unitary activity” (Gafton 2009: 1). There existed a general principle which governed the process of rendering holy books, i.e. literal translation. However, in the case of old Romanian translations, unlike Bible translations in other vernacular languages, the ideal of literal translation, apart from continuing a tradition meant to legitimate the target text for the Church and for the readers, was also determined by the relatively poor condition of old Romanian language. On the one hand, the translators’ main concern was not to alter God’s words, thus showing less regard for the requirements of the target language or for the readers. On the other hand, they sometimes apply word for word translation partially because Romanian language lacked in means of expression appropriate for the translation of the biblical texts (Rosetti 1931: 138).

Although a well-defined translation theory did not exist in the sixteenth century yet, certain direct or indirect traces regarding the translators’ conception of translation phenomena may be found in either their testimony expressed in the Preface of a translation, or in their concrete translation solutions they adopted (see also Gafton 2011a: 205–207; Gafton 2011b: 261–272). For instance, the process of source selection was also an issue of legitimacy for Romanian translators, as in the sixteenth century the Romanian translators’ choice for one source over another was guided by several factors. Adopting a model for Bible translation available at the time (Slavonic, Latin, Hungarian, German) was determined, on a restricted level, by the local authority, represented by the dominant confession (orthodox or protestant), and, on a larger level, by the

2

On the other hand, these translations dating back to the sixteenth century are, in turn, copies of older originals, which show that a certain translation tradition and, previously, writing in Romanian must have existed prior to this century as well, only those writings have perished.

The texts we shall refer to in the present study are: fragments of the Acts of the Apostles, of Gospel and of Apostolic Letters: cv, cb, cp, cs; books of psalms: frag. tod.; homilies: cc1, cc2; a prayer book: mo; Bible translations: po, ntb, bb (for the abbreviations see References at the end of the paper). These belong to the sixteenth century except for the last two composed in the seventeenth century.

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cultural sphere of influence (Eastern, Greek-Slavonic in Moldavia and Wallachia vs. Western, Latin influence in Transylvania) to which the region where the translation had been carried out belonged to (Gafton 2009: 3). In this regard, we shall point out that many of the first Romanian translations were made in BanatHunedoara, where they appeared under the auspices of Calvinism, propagated first by Hungarians. Another important aspect to be taken into account is that, due to particular historical, political, cultural etc. conditions, in the region of Banat-Hunedoara, Hungarian language enjoyed a high prestige, which could confer authority to the Bible versions written in this vernacular language. In addition, in these regions there existed long term and vivid contacts between Romanians and Hungarians, thereby Hungarian language could have been even more accessible for Romanian translators than the acknowledged worship languages. As a consequence, translators of sacred texts frequently appeal, in different proportions, to Hungarian sources in Banat-Hunedoara.

In the present study we shall focus on the micro-level data (Lambert & van Gorp 1985) included in old Romanian translations, insisting on the matter of word selection, in this case of those of Hungarian origin, the main goal being to describe the status of Hungarian loanwords in these texts. In this regard, their assessment is made based on whether these loanwords are simply translation solutions or, beyond that, they reflect a certain translation strategy.

2. Old Romanian translations record a considerable number of Hungarian loanwords, which represent the second most important lexical stratum of foreign origin in these texts, after the Slavonic elements. Naturally, their proportion also varies according to the source language of the translation. Romanian translations of Hungarian sources record the largest number of Hungarian loanwords for obvious reasons, but they are found in translations of Slavonic sources as well and with quite a frequency, which we believe not to be random. For the first case, it can be stated that “tolerance of interference (…) tends to increase when a translation is carried out from a ‘major’ or highly prestigious language / culture, especially if the target language / culture is ‘minor’, or ‘weak’ in any other sense” (Toury 1995: 278). As stated above, Hungarian language enjoyed prestige at the time, a high regard, which could have been provided also by the prior existence of a Bible version in this vernacular language, whereas Romanian “had a poor vocabulary and with no sufficient terms at hand to correspond to all the terms in the Slavonic or Hungarian versions of the Bible” (Rosetti 1931: 138).

Translation engages the translator in selection operations in order to respond to the requirements of the source meaning and to his own language system. During translation not only the target language interacts with the source language, but in turn, it operates within itself imposing selection from a wide range of possible correspondents. If the target language lacks an appropriate equivalent, translators

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may recourse to borrowing. Hence, translations of Hungarian sources3 recorded several Hungarian loanwords of bookish origin, which penetrated into Romanian language and through these translations some of them were preserved in the following centuries as well, eventually entering the spoken use too, at least in certain regions. On the other hand, translators also appealed to a priori linguistic data, i.e. Hungarian loanwords of folk origin, borrowed in previous epochs, which interweave old Romanian translations. In each case translation appears as a problem-solving event, but applying a direct or an oblique translation technique is not always determined by linguistic constraints only. In other words, the use of Hungarian loanwords in these translations does not always respond to a real necessity imposed by a need for equivalence (for examples see infra 3.4.4).

3. In a target-oriented approach, the target text is interpreted as a result of the constraints and influences of the target linguistic (and cultural) context, or as a cause for the introduction of changes into the target system. In this regard, Hungarian loanwords function to fill a conceptual gap, to express a nuance of an existing notion or, in other cases, to enrich or to refine the Romanian language system by enlarging its synonymic series in order for it to become an instrument of culture capable of rendering the biblical texts. The former two cases may reflect a linguistic necessity, while the latter one seems more like a strategy, especially in certain contexts, as we shall see in the following.

The translator as a target culture agent negotiates contextual constraints pertaining to the target culture in its historical, geographical, social and ideological coordinates. In this regard, Hungarian loanwords are fully justified, especially given the context of Romanian–Hungarian bilingualism in the region of Banat-Hunedoara, where the majority of the analysed Romanian translations belong to (exceptions being cb, cc2, cp and certain texts from cs). In other words, in these translations, Hungarian loanwords – even if they do not reflect a necessity of the system – are neither futile nor peripheral since they are part of the regional norm, which not only accepts or tolerates Hungarian elements, but in which these are quite natural.

In order to determine whether Hungarian loanwords represent solely required elements of the translation, i.e. they solve a problem arising in the source text, 3

See Molitvenic [The Prayer Book] (1564), whose original is considered to be the Hungarian Agenda azaz Szentegyházi chelekedetec, Mellyeket követnek közönségesképpen a keresztényi Ministerec és Lelkipásztoroc [Agenda i.e. holy deeds of Church which are commonly pursued

by Ministers and Pastors, my translation] (Drăganu 1921-1922: 267; Gheţie 1982: 13-15; Gheţie & Mareş 1985: 267). Another Romanian translation which has Hungarian sources is Cartea de cîntece [The Book of Psalms] (1570-1573) (Gheţie & Mareş 1985: 114). Probably the most complex old Romanian translation is Palia de la Orăştie [The Old Testament from Orăştie] (1581-1582) which, beside a Latin edition of Vulgata, follows Heltai’s Pentateuh, a Hungarian version of the Bible (see the demonstration of M. Roques, in the Preface of his edition po 1925: III – LXIII).

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or, beyond that, they reflect a deliberate and assumed strategy, we shall continue with a few examples.

3.1. Hungarian loanwords of bookish origin do not need particular explanations since their use is quite evident. They solve an immediate problem either because Romanian language did not have a proper term to denote a notion encountered in the source text, or because, for some reason, the Hungarian word seemed more suitable. They co-occur with their etymons from the source text, being characteristic especially of Calvinist Romanian texts from Banat-Hunedoara.

They have relatively few derivatives, inflections and compounds and their functionality is limited to only one sequence of the target text, namely in which they appear. This is the case of words such as: batăr ‘at least, though’; gheman ‘diamond’; jemblă ‘white bread’; lepiniu ‘pita, crumpet’; mereu ‘(of gold) authentic, pure’; rudă ‘pole’; siriu ‘tool’, ‘instrument’, ‘weapon’; a sucui ‘to accustom’; şinor ‘string’, ‘snare’, ‘braid’, ‘cord’ (in po); and nemzet ‘nation’; uluită ‘confession’ (in frag. tod.).

In a few cases the distinction between folk and elitist Hungarian loanwords is somewhat difficult to make since their co-occurrence with their etymons from the source text may only reinforce a term already in use. This might be the case of: a aldovani ‘to sacrifice (oneself), to offer (oneself)’; a aldui ‘to bless’; berc ‘grove’, ‘copse’, ‘thicket’; giolgiu ‘shroud, fine cloth’ (in po). The first two have a common root which proved to be quite productive in Romanian, which may imply their folk origin and a spoken usage however restricted. The term berc ‘grove’ had been recorded in the previous century as well as subsequently, which may reflect its spoken use. As for giolgiu ‘shroud’, it has no other attestations from the sixteenth century but it has been noted in nowadays’ speech. In these cases, inserting the Hungarian loanword might not represent a constraint due to the source text, or, in any case, not exclusively imposed by it, but perhaps the translator’s decision, an option as natural as the choice for any other element of his active vocabulary as a bilingual speaker.

There are some cases in which the Hungarian etymon does not appear in the source text or it does but in another passage, different from the context in which the loanword is included in the target text. Here we could mention words such as: alnic ‘cunning’, ‘sly’, ‘treacherous’; naşfă ‘binding’, ‘ornament (of clothing)’, ‘jewellery’; a văndăgi ‘to precipitate, to throw’, ‘to besiege’ (in po). The fact that these are used relatively independent of the source text, preceding or following their etymons, may be regarded as a clue for their folk status, not certainly though, since the translator’s mind is able to retain, during translation, data which then can be employed independently of the source text. Thus, considering their isolated occurrences (recorded only in po), we shall regard them as loanwords of bookish origin rather than otherwise.

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There are some other loanwords, which are used relatively independent of the source text too. This is the case of a adăvăsi ‘to ravage, to perish’ with a single occurrence in po (Gen., 49/7), where it corresponds to Hung. el szelesztem ‘to perish’. Similarly, pochiolat ‘veil (to cover the head)’ renders, in the passage in which it appears (Ex., 29/9), another Hungarian word: föketöket ‘veil’. Different correspondents in the source text also has the Romanian word of Hungarian origin a (se) (în)tîlni ‘to meet’, ‘to cross’, ‘to overlap’, which translates various Hungarian expressions, such as: összue ér ‘to meet’ (Ex., 28/27, 39/20) or leszec szömbe vele ‘to cross’ (Gen., 32/20). Another interesting case is that of the Romanian word of Hungarian origin aleaniş (see also aleaneş) ‘enemy’, ‘opposer’ which, in all its occurrences, corresponds to Hung. ellenség ‘enemy’. As a matter of fact, the latter Hungarian word is, in turn, the etymon of another loanword in Romanian, i.e. alenşig ‘enemy’, recorded in another Romanian translation of Hungarian originals (in frag. tod.). Although the bookish origin of aleaneş ‘enemy’ may not be excluded, what is remarkable is that translators have chosen this form over alenşig ‘enemy’, which has its etymon in the source text as correspondent to the former one.

3.2. Perhaps easier to deal with are those Hungarian loanwords which are savant neologisms belonging to the Hebrew terminology of the Bible and which translators could have borrowed, sometimes without any formal adaptation, directly from the Hungarian source. This is the case of words such as: pint ‘measure for liquids’; sicluş ‘old Hebrew coin’ (in po); amen ‘Amen!’ and joltar ‘psalm’ (in frag. tod.), which appear as an immediate replica to the source text.

The last two ones do not respond to a real necessity, since the Romanian language already possessed conventional terms for the notions they denote. Thus their presence might be explained either by the bilingual status of the translator, whose speech combines the two linguistic systems in such a manner in which he no longer considered necessary to replace the Hungarian words with their Romanian correspondents, or by the regional norm, in general, which had been strongly influenced by the Hungarian language accepting such forms. On the other hand, it is not excluded either that these loanwords reflect a certain acquaintance with Hungarian liturgical terminology, a habituation preserved, to a certain degree, in the seventeenth century as well.

3.3. The folk or elitist nature of one and the same Hungarian loanword may also vary according to the region referred to. In other words, the same lexical item may be considered of folk origin and usage in an area of direct contact between Romanians and Hungarians and gain strictly or mainly elitist usage in another area, where there were no contacts or, in any case, less vivid relations between the two nations. In the latter case, the term in question could not have been familiar to use and, thus, it has been retained in the Romanian translation due

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to other considerations than where it possibly belonged to the regional norm.

For instance, it is interesting to see how the word alcam ‘wickedness, trap’ of Hungarian origin was recorded in the sixteenth century, in a region where it would be less motivated. It appears in two South-Transylvanian texts of Coresi, in cp and in cc2 (173/30), though the term was attested thereafter especially in North-Transylvania. Thus, its presence in the Coresian texts might have been due to the influence of some Northern originals.

In principle, the bookish origin of a Hungarian loanword encountered in a translation which had no Hungarian sources may be verified, to a certain degree, by collating the linguistic data available for the region where the text was written.

For instance, the words recorded in cb or in Coresian texts, which have isolated occurrences, not found in any other texts belonging to the region of SouthTransylvania, most probably have a bookish origin. Although these elements might be explained by the influence of some Northern originals, it still represents a curiosity how and why these words have not been removed, or replaced by the author, typographer or reviewer of these texts. For instance, the word a otălmăzui ‘to defend, to safeguard’ retains our attention. It was recorded in mo and in cc1, where it might be due to some Hungarian originals, as it was suggested (Gheţie & Mareş 1985: 239, 267). Nevertheless, its preservation by the quite meticulous reviewer (Coresi) requires some further explanations, not entirely clarified yet.

The word hition ‘poor, miserable’ raises more questions which was recorded in cb (1Cor., 6, 2) in the sixteenth century. Its distribution includes NorthTransylvania and Moldova (Gafton 2001: 244), being less motivated thereof in the text mentioned above.

3.4. Hungarian loanwords of folk origin represent a much more complex situation than that of the elitist loanwords. These may be found not only in translations of Hungarian sources, but also in those Romanian translations which have had a Slavonic original. Compared to loanwords of bookish origin in which case the translation decision has been somewhat linguistically conditioned either by the source text or by the target system with certain shortcomings, in the case of those Hungarian loanwords which had been previously retrieved from a territorial variety of the spoken Hungarian language, the selection of this a priori material must have been governed by other factors. In this case, the translation decision might have been less constrained in the sense that translators could have granted themselves certain liberties in selecting what the most appropriate word was assumed to be, especially considering that for most of them there were Romanian correspondents to what these loanwords denote. In other words, the use of folk Hungarian loanwords may constitute not only a problem-solving decision, strictly speaking, as it has been for elitist loanwords, but also a technique or rather a strategy to accomplish a translation as felicitous as possible.

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3.4.1. Whether the translation was made from Hungarian or it had a Slavonic source, lexical units of the source language are substituted by corresponding units in the target language. Naturally, a descriptive study “should start from the empirical fact, i.e. from the translated text itself” (Hermans 1985: 13), but in assessing these equivalences we shall take into account the fact that the target text is not a mere reproduction of the source text. Given the systemic nature of translational phenomena, selection of words is governed by various principles. Thus the network of textual relations present in the source text tends to be transformed or ignored in translation, being substituted by habitual target repertoire options (Toury 1995: 268). This might be observed in cases in which the Romanian translation does not apply the correspondent of Hungarian origin, although its etymon is found in the source text. In this case, the choice is made in favour of another correspondent in use which is of Latin or Slavonic origin. But there are also cases in which the translator alternatively uses different synonyms of the same word, among these being those of Hungarian origin too.

Thus, Hungarian loanwords enter various synonymic series within the same translation. For instance, Hungarian loanwords in cv are alternatively used with their synonyms to denote the same extralinguistic reality, forming series such as: chin – muncă – pănătare ‘torment, pain’; chip – obraz ‘face’; feleleat – răspuns – cuvînt ‘answer’; gînd – cuget ‘thought’; hicleşug – sfadă – ferecare – întorcătură ‘cunningness’; a lăcui – a prebîndi ‘to reside, to live’; a (se) mîntui – a (se) spăsi – a izbăvi ‘to redeem’; a ponoslui – a ocări – a defăima – a oblici – a cleveti ‘to reproach, to insult’; neam – sămînţă ‘nation, ancestry’; tar – sarcină ‘load’; a tăgădui – a lepăda ‘to deny’; vamă – preţ – mită ‘customs’ etc. where the forms in bold are folk Hungarian loanwords. Similarly, in cs Hungarian loanwords appear as synonyms to Romanian words inherited from Latin or borrowed from Slavonic: alămojnă – pomeană ‘alms, pittance’; beteag – nevolnic ‘weakling’; bratăş – soţ ‘companion, fellow’; hiclean – diavol – drac ‘devil’; fel – rînd ‘kind (of)’; hasnă – folos ‘utility’; a îngădui – a ogodi ‘to allow’; marhă – avuţie ‘wealth’; samă – număr ‘number’; oraş – cetate ‘city’ etc. In po we could mention series such as: bărătaş ­– priiatnic ‘friend’; beseadă – cuvînt – glas – grai – limbă ‘discourse, word, language’; biruiţi – domniţi ‘to reign’; buduşlău – nestătoriu ‘wanderer’; ciurdă – turmă ‘herd’; a sălăşui – a răposa – a odihni ‘to repose’ etc.4 As mentioned before, these Hungarian loanwords function as equivalences to the lexical items found in the source text either Hungarian or Slavonic. At this point, it is interesting to see what the factors were which determined or influenced, in a way or another, the selection of these equivalences over others 4

The given examples are only illustrative. The number of these synonymic series would increase if we selected each and every Hungarian loanword within a translation and gave their synonyms, on the one hand, and if we regarded them in the larger context of old Romanian language, comparing the translations and also other writings of the epoch among them, on the other hand.

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possible within the system of the target language. It is known that in a peripheral, less prestigious position within the system, translation will tend to replicate existing models while in a central, prestigious position, translation will be allowed to bring innovation into the system. In this regard, we may observe the fact that, in some cases, the Hungarian loanword appears in the translation as counterpart of an older synonym, which seems to have lost its position within the system, at least in frequency, being concurred, competed and, ultimately, replaced precisely by the former one. This is the case of the Romanian word of Hungarian origin a (se) mîntui ‘to redeem’ which, eventually, replaced in modern Romanian language its older synonym of Slavonic origin a (se) spăsi ‘to redeem’, still in use, but weakened in the sixteenth century. It is also interesting that the Hungarian loanword, in turn, has been rivalled by Sl. a izbăvi ‘to redeem’ in later stages of the Romanian language evolution. In other cases, the Hungarian loanwords function as regional synonyms for older Romanian terms. For instance, beseadă ‘discourse, word’, a buduşlui ‘to wander’, feleleat ‘answer’, hasnă ‘utility’, marhă ‘wealth’, samă ‘number’, tar ‘load’ are loanwords characteristic of the region of Banat-Hunedoara, where these probably corresponded to the regular use and norm of the local dialects. Hence, in this equivalence situation, Hungarian loanwords have been employed in the target language material “not because they are important in any inherent sense, but because they are assigned importance, from the recipient vantage point” (Toury 1995: 12).

3.4.2. Naturally, the selection of a Hungarian loanword is not always up to the translator’s free choice. There are cases in which these lexical items have been introduced in the target text as a consequence of the translator’s applying “techniques of adjustment” (Nida 1964), whose aim has been to produce correct equivalents, adjusting the message to the structural requirements of the target language, producing semantically equivalent structures and providing stylistically appropriate equivalents. Rarely, in translations of Slavonic originals, the choice for a particular Hungarian loanword has been determined by the translators’ attempts to render a meaning of the source text as precise and faithful as possible, while the Hungarian term adopted has been probably of bookish origin, previously acquired from Hungarian sources or from other Romanian translations consulted. This might explain, for instance, the use of the Hungarian verb a pesti ‘to linger’ in cb (FA, 20, 16), selected in order to render the meaning assumed by the translator (Gafton 2001: 246). As a matter of fact, the term was recorded in two other translations as well, in cv, whose original is supposed to belong to Banat-Hunedoara, and in cp, a South-Transylvanian text.

In all the three texts, the Hungarian loanword appears in the same passage to render the same meaning.5 5

See also its derivatives: pesteală ‘delay’ (cb, FA, 25, 17) and pestit ‘slow’ (cb, FA, 27, 7).

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3.4.3. A completely different situation may be observed in the case of those Hungarian loanwords used in Romanian translations of Slavonic originals, which are preferred even to their Romanian synonyms of Slavonic origin. Such a preference may be observed in cb, where sometimes, apparently unmotivated, Hungarian loanwords are selected for a certain notion to be translated with instead of a Slavonic one (Gafton 2001: 242-243). Moreover, this choice is made even in situations in which other translation versions included, in the same passage, a term of Slavonic origin. For instance, the Romanian word of Hungarian origin celuitor ‘deceptive’ is preferred in cb (Sp. la 2Ioan) to its synonyms of other origin prilăstitori ‘alluring’ and înşelătoriu ‘deceitful’ (2Ioan, 1, 7) recorded in cp. Similarly, the verb a făgădui ‘to promise’ seems to represent a free option of the cb’s translator since, in the sixteenth century, it had its synonyms: a giurui ‘to swear’ (cv) and a jura ‘to swear’ (cp), recorded in the other versions of the biblical text.

As a matter of fact, a certain degree of propensity with respect to Hungarian loanwords may be observed in the seventeenth century as well, particularly in religious texts. This kind of deliberate disposition to Hungarian loanwords, especially in passages where other versions of the same text prefer other terms, may be traced, for instance, in ntb (Gafton 2005: 146). Thus, the Romanian word of Hungarian origin oraş ‘city’ is almost generally used in ntb, whereas its synonym of Latin origin cetate ‘city’ prevails in cb, cp and bb; similarly, chipurele ‘faces’, which is of Hungarian origin, is preferred in ntb (FA, 7, 43) to obrazele ‘faces’ (cb, cp) which is a word of Slavonic origin; tîrnaţ ‘porch’ (ntb, FA, 3, 11) of Hungarian origin is preferred to tindă ‘porch’ (in cb, cp) of Latin origin; and the word of Hungarian origin viteaz ‘valiant’ prevails in ntb (FA, 10, 7) over voinic ‘brave’ (in cb, cp) of Slavonic origin. Besides these, ntb records other Hungarian loanwords too, such as: beseadă ‘discourse’; a cebălui ‘to stun, to (be) bewilder(ed)’; a murgui ‘to reprove, to trouble, to tease’. Most probably, some of the Hungarian loanwords have been perceived by translators as part of the “cult norm” in bb as well (Gafton 2005: 137). In this regard, we shall give only one example, that of the Romanian verb of Hungarian origin a birui ‘to command, to govern, to dominate’, which also has different derivatives, such as those written in bold in the following contexts: biruitoriu şi judecătoriu ‘conqueror and judge’ (bb), chosen over jude ‘judge’ (cb, cp) or domnu ‘lord’ (ntb); biruinţa limbilor ‘reign over languages (or peoples)’ (bb) as opposed to ţinearea limbilor ‘holding of languages (or peoples)’ (ntb); or întru a ta biruinţă ‘in your command’ (bb) instead of în putearea ta ‘in your power’ (ntb).

3.4.4. Sometimes the motivation which stays behind the use of a Hungarian loanword in a certain segment of the target text seems to exceed the translation task itself. In other words, some of the lexical items do not correspond to a meaning found in the source text, but they appear as fillings, not entirely unjustified though.

They seem not to satisfy an actual translation need, but rather other Skopos. Old

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Romanian translators seem to assume roles other than that of a translator, strictly speaking. While in the case of the segment: Nestătoriu şi buduşlău ‘Restless and wanderer’ (po, Gen., 4/12), the use of the Hungarian loanword written in bold does correspond to a translation task since the source text imposes the presence of both terms (cf. Nyughatatlan es Budoso ‘Restless and wanderer’) and, furthermore, there is a slight difference in nuance between the two synonyms; the presence of a Hungarian loanword in the context of its partial synonym is not always imposed by the source text, neither by linguistic requirements of the target language. For instance, the use of hasnă ‘utility’ (< Hung. haszna), although in Romanian there existed folos ‘utility’, and especially in the context of the latter one – see in: Folosuri şi hasne ‘Utilities and utilities’ (po, Preface) – seems to have its explanation beyond the requirements of the Romanian language system since neither of these synonyms has specialized its meaning, nor have they semantically overloaded (Gafton 2010: 79). Nevertheless, the use of the Hungarian loanword is not superfluous nor parasitic, not even in the context above (somewhat independent of a source text), since, at that time, the term in discussion was in use in the spoken local dialect, perceived, probably, as according to the regional norm. Thus, Romanian translators might have intended here to enrich a certain synonymic series, endowing Romanian language with a means of expression appropriate to religious content. An argument of this claim might be the fact that the Hungarian loanword follows its Romanian synonym, as an addition to it. There are other examples too, in which a Hungarian loanword is included in the same context as its Romanian counterpart, being used as synonyms in the given passage. This is the case of samă ‘number’, in: Sama şi numărul ‘Number and number’ (po, Preface); of sălaş ‘shelter’, in: Numărul sălaşelor şi locurelor ‘Number of shelters and of shelters (places)’ (po, Preface); or of aleaneş ‘adversary’, in: protivitoriu va fi aleaneşului tău ‘adversary shall be to its adversaries’ (po, Ex., 23, 22).6 In these contexts, there are multiple explanations for the use of the Hungarian loanwords. On the one hand, they may reflect the current use of the regional norm and, as such, they are common and natural elements either in the creative process of elaborating a message, in the first two examples, or in the course of a translation task, in the latter example. On the other hand, it is not excluded that translators were aware of the regional character of these Hungarian loanwords and, as a consequence, they intended to clarify their meaning, repeating it by their Romanian synonyms. This explanation by the Romanian synonyms following the Hungarian loanwords might have been necessary, since translators’ intention 6

The structure is, in fact, a calque of a Hungarian expression. It is interesting, however, that while the Hungarian source repeats the same word (cf. ellensege leszec a te ellensegednec ‘I shall be enemy to your enemy’), the Romanian translator chooses to apply two different synonymic lexemes (protivitoriu ‘enemy, adversary’ and aleaneş ‘enemy’). This fact may show a tendency to refine the utterance.

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had been to address to all Romanians, including those who did not belong to the region of Banat-Hunedoara and, thus, for whom these loanwords might have been unknown. As a matter of fact, this need for an additional explanation may be found in the case of the word băsău ‘revenge’ too, included in the passage: Sta-voiu băsău sau în alean ‘I shall take revenge or (be) against’ (po, Gen. 9, 5). In this passage, the Hungarian loanword appears, in fact, as a result of a Hungarian calque (cf. boszszut álloc ‘I shall take revenge’) and, therefore, it probably required certain clarification. It is interesting, however, that this clarification is made by the use of another Hungarian loanword (în alean ‘(be) against, adversary’), which shows that this latter word had been previously acquired occupying a stronger position in the system being more common than the former one. Additionally, it is not excluded either that by these Hungarian loanwords translators could have intended to refine and nuance the means of expression in Romanian, since they might have felt their native language to be less developed in this respect, at least compared to the source languages.

4. Overall, Hungarian loanwords function both as strategy, i.e. a planned, explicit, goal-oriented procedure, adopted to achieve a certain objective, and as tactics or (sequence of) steps, locally implemented.7 As a strategy, they stand for the whole translation event including what is happening before and after the translation itself, while as tactics they play a role in the translation act.

Sometimes Hungarian loanwords are used as “procedures” (Newmark 1988), applied to smaller units of language, whereas in other cases they may be regarded as “methods” based on the whole text. For instance, in po, Hungarian source language structures are, occasionally, so conspicuously imitated in the target text as if “the Romanian translator needed to show someone that a Hungarian source has been used” (Arvinte & Gafton 2007: 87).

The translator may manipulate the linguistic material in order to produce an appropriate target text segment. Some of these strategies are globally implemented, others are of local impact, both contributing to comprehension or production (see also Chesterman 1997: 92). Hungarian loanwords of bookish origin usually appear as a result of controlled, conscious processes employed to solve local problems.

In case of folk Hungarian loanwords there is yet another possibility. Sometimes the selection of these lexical items could have been an uncontrolled or automated process since it is quite hard to tell what is going on in the “black box” of the translator. Being a bilingual speaker and an exponent of a certain regional dialect, he might not always have taken into account attentively which Hungarian loanwords would not be understood by speakers of another dialect, whether monolinguals or not. Hence, there could have been situations in which a loanword of Hungarian origin recorded in the target text was presumably less consciously included, i.e.

7

For terminological explanations of strategy, technique, tactic etc. see also Yves Gambier.

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translators being less aware of the possible reactions of the reader. On the other hand, a feature given in the source text segment might not represent a difficulty to the translator, but the chosen solution might become problematic for the reader (see Lörscher 1991). As mentioned before, the translators belonged mostly to a region strongly influenced by Hungarian, which may explain the considerable number of Hungarian loanwords in these Romanian translations. Among them there were many loanwords which were familiar in other regions less influenced

by Hungarian too. But, definitely, there were terms which were unknown not only for readers from other linguistic areas, but also for the ones belonging to the same region. This is the case of many calques of Hungarian structures too. Some of them were probably understood without any particular problem by readers of BanatHunedoara who had been acquainted with the Hungarian way of expression and, thus, even if they encountered an unknown word in a passage, they could unravel the meaning of the given passage. For readers of other areas, on the contrary, a difficulty might have posed not only a given lexical item but also the unusual association or order of certain lexemes, whether familiar or not.

Naturally, translation decisions are the final outcome of a rational activity, based upon consideration of risks, benefits, alternatives, comparisons, previous solutions from earlier translations, etc. Hence, in overall, Hungarian loanwords have been selected with great care, especially due to the religious content of the translations. Thus, translators had to ensure the readers about the credibility of the text, on the one hand, and to provide them intelligibility, on the other hand, which also presumed to discard, as far as possible, of all unnecessary or regional elements since God’s words had to be conveyed to everyone, regardless of their territorial affiliation.

The selection of Hungarian loanwords corresponds to both initial, i.e. of semiotic priority and operational translational norms (see Toury 1995: 54–55). In the first case, translators favoured the choice for a certain Hungarian loanword in order to accomplish either adequacy, i.e. adherence to source culture norms, since the Hungarian Bible translation and language were given high regard, or acceptability, i.e. a preference for the norms of the target culture whenever the need to intelligibility prevailed.

Undoubtedly, there existed textual-linguistic norms too, which governed the choice of target textual-linguistic material to replace the one found in the source text. Some of the target language solutions provided by the translators are retrieved through automatic or routine processes, given their bilingual status.

The frequent use of certain solutions can become routine, although a boundary between routine and non-routine translation strategy and solution is sometimes difficult to draw. The translators’ actions lie between unconscious, preconscious or potentially conscious and conscious strategies, according to their situation.

For instance, the choice to name the first two books of the Bible translation po as

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Bitia ‘Genesis’ and Ishod ‘Exodus’, which follow the Slavonic tradition, despite the fact that the Romanian translation did not have a Slavonic but Latin and Hungarian sources, shows the translators’ intention to justify and legitimate the target text since, in that time, Slavonic was the acknowledged church language.

In the majority of the cases, the choice for Hungarian loanwords as literal and / or free translation, formal and / or dynamic equivalences is goal-oriented, focused on facilitating the translation task (see Lörscher 2002). Hungarian loanwords in this perspective function as problem-solving techniques, aiming at particular choices about specific points of the translated text. As such, their use is due to constraints either of the source text, in which case they appear as a response to a need for adequacy, or of the target language system, where they are needed in order to fill certain lacunas. Less commonly, the use of a given Hungarian loanword appears as a preference for a model, i.e. Hungarian, which has been considered superior in one respect or another. Finally, Hungarian loanwords, though rarely, seem to reflect a strategic decision, whose aim exceeds the translation per se.

References Text editions bb = Biblia

1688 [Bible 1688], edited by V. Arvinte, I. Caproşu, Al. Gafton, Laura Manea, N. A. Ursu, 2. vol., Iaşi, 2001, 2002. cb = Codicele Bratul [Codex of Brat], edited by Alexandru Gafton, Iaşi: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Press, 2003. cc1 = Coresi, Cazania I, cca 1567 [1st Homiliary, aprox. 1567], edited by Vladimir Drimba, Bucureşti: Romanian Academy Press, 1998. cc2 = Coresi, Cazania a II-a, Braşov, 1581 [2nd Homiliary, Braşov, aprox. 1581], edited by Sextil Puşcariu & Alexe Procopovici, Bucureşti, 1914. cp = Texte de limbă din secolul XVI [Texts of (Romanian) language from the sixteenth century], reproduced in facsimile, edited by I. Bianu, Romanian Academy member, IV. Lucrul Apostolesc. Apostolul tipărit de diaconul Coresi la Braşov în anul 1563 [IV. The Apostolic Act. The Apostle printed by Coresi in 1563 at Braşov], Bucureşti, 1930. cs = Codex Sturdzanus [Codex Sturdzanus], philologic and linguistic study, text edition and glossary of words by Gh. Chivu, Bucureşti, 1993. cv = Codicele Voroneţean [Codex from Voroneţ], critical edition, philologic and linguistic study by Mariana Costinescu, Bucureşti: Minerva Press, 1981. frag. tod. = Fragmentul Todorescu [Fragment of Todorescu], philologic and linguistic study, text edition and glossary of words by Ion Gheţie. In: Texte româneşti din secolul al XVI-lea. I. Catehismul lui Coresi. II. Pravila lui Coresi.

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III. Fragmentul Todorescu. IV. Glosele Bogdan. V. Prefeţe şi epiloguri [Romanian texts of the sixteenth century. I. Catechism of Coresi. II. Laws of Coresi. III. Fragment of Todorescu = The Book of Psalms. IV. Glosses of Bogdan. V. Prefaces and Epilogues], Gheţie, Ion (coord.), Bucureşti: Academy Press, 1982. 259–364. mo = Coresi, Molitvenic rumânesc, cca 1567 [Romanian Prayer Book, aprox.

1567], edited by Vladimir Drimba, Bucureşti: Romanian Academy Press, 1998. ntb = Noul Testament [The New Testament], first printed in Romanian in 1648

by Simion Ştefan, Bishop of Transylvania, reedited after 350 years with the blessing of His Grace Andrei, archbishop of Alba Iulia, Alba Iulia, 1998. po = Palia de la Orăştie (1582), I., Textul [The Old Testament from Orăştie (1582), I., The Text], text edition by Vasile Arvinte, Ioan Caproşu and Alexandru Gafton, Iaşi: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Press, 2005. po 1925 = Palia d’Orăştie 1581-1582, I (...), Préface et Livre de la Genèse publiés avec le texte hungrois de Heltai et une introduction par Mario Roques [The Old Testament from Orăştie 1581-1582, I (...), Preface and the Book of Genesis published by Mario Roques, accompanied by the Hungarian text of Heltai and by an introduction], Paris, 1925.

References Arvinte, Vasile & Alexandru Gafton. 2007. Palia de la Orăştie (1582). II. Studii [The Old Testament from Orăştie (1582). II. Studies]. Iaşi: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Press.

Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. John Benjamins Publishing.

Drăganu, Nicolae. 1921–1922. Din cel mai vechiu molitvenic românesc [From the Oldest Romanian Prayer Book]. Dacoromania, II: 253–326.

Gafton, Alexandru. 2001. Evoluţia limbii române prin traduceri biblice din secolul al XVI-lea [Romanian Language Evolution through Biblical Translations from the 16th century]. Iaşi: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Press.

Gafton, Alexandru. 2005. După Luther. Traducerea vechilor texte biblice [After Luther. Translation of Old Biblical Texts]. Iaşi: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Press.

Gafton, Alexandru. 2009. Relaţia dintre sursele traducerilor biblice şi concepţia de la baza acestora [The Relationship between the Sources of Biblical Translations and their Basic Translation Theory]. In: Gafton, Alexandru; Guia, Sorin & Milică, Ioan (eds.), Text şi discurs religios [Religious Text and Discourse], 125– 134. Iaşi: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Press. http://media.lit.uaic.ro/gafton/relatiacusursele.tdr1.pdf (25 July, 2012).

Gafton, Alexandru. 2010. Consecinţele profunde ale contactelor lingvistice [The Profound Consequences of Linguistic Contacts]. In Chivu Gh., Oana Uţă-

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Bărbulescu (eds.), Studii de limbă română. Omagiu profesorului Grigore Brâncuş [Romanian Language Studies. Festschrift for Professor Grigore Brâncuş], 77–100. Bucureşti University Press.

Gafton, Alexandru. 2011a. Asupra unei traduceri din Noul Testament de la Bălgrad (1648) [About a translation from The New Testament of Bălgrad (1648)]. In Gafton, Alexandru; Guia, Sorin & Milică, Ioan (eds.), Text şi discurs religios [Religious Text and Discourse], 205-207. Iaşi: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Press. http://www.cntdr.ro/sites/default/files/c2010/ c2010a20.pdf (25 July, 2012).

Gafton, Alexandru. 2011b. Particularităţi ale traducerii în Biblia de la Bucureşti şi în Noul Testament de la Bălgrad. Cu ilustrări din Epistola lui Iacov [Translation Peculiarities in the Bible of Bucharest and in The New Testament of Bălgrad. With Examples from St. James’ Epistles]. Limba română [Romanian Language], LX(2): 261–272, http://media.lit.uaic.ro/gafton/Gafton.LR.Ursu.pdf (25 July, 2012).

Gheţie, Ion, ed. 1982. Cele mai vechi texte româneşti. Contribuţii filologice şi lingvistice [The Oldest Romanian Texts. Philologic and Linguistic Contributions]. Bucureşti: University Press.

Gheţie, Ion & Alexandru Mareş. 1985. Originile scrisului în limba română [The Origins of Writing in Romanian Language]. Bucureşti: Scientific and Encyclopedic Press.

Hermans, Theo (ed.). 1985. The Manipulation of Literature. Studies in Literary Translation. London/Sydney: Croom Helm.

Lambert, José & Hendrik van Gorp. 1985. On Describing Translations. In Hermans, Theo (ed.), The Manipulation of Literature, 42–53. London and Sydney: Croom Helm.

Lörscher, Wolfgang. 1991. Translation Performance, Translation Process and Translation Strategies. A Psycholinguistic Investigation. Tübingen: Narr.

Lörscher, Wolfgang. 2002. A model for the analysis of translation processes within a framework of systemic linguistic. Cadernos de Tradução 10 (2): 97–112. http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/traducao/article/view/6146/5704 (13 April, 2010).

Newmark, Peter. 1988 (1995). A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall.

Nida, Eugen. 1964. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill.

Rosetti, Al. 1931. Limba română în secolul al XVI-lea [Romanian Language in the 16th century]. Bucureşti: Romanian Book Press.

Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Yves Gambier: Translation Strategies and Tactics. https://www.benjamins.com/ online/hts/ (4 March 2014).

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 6, 2 (2014) 227–248

L2 Romanian Influence in the Acquisition of the English Passive by L1 Speakers of Hungarian Enikő TANKÓ

Department of Humanities Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Miercurea Ciuc, Romania) tankoeniko@sapientia.siculorum.ro Abstract. The main question to be investigated is to what extent native speakers of Hungarian understand and acquire the English passive voice, as there is no generalized syntactic passive construction in Hungarian. As we will show, native speakers of Hungarian tend to use the predicative verbal adverbial construction when translating English passive sentences, as this construction is the closest syntactic equivalent of the English passive voice. Another question to be investigated is whether L2 Romanian works as a facilitating factor in the process of acquiring the L3 English passive voice. If all our subjects, Hungarian students living in Romania, were Hungarian-Romanian bilinguals, it would be obvious that knowledge of Romanian helps them in acquiring the English passive. However, as it will be shown, the bilingualism hypothesis is disconfirmed. Still, passive knowledge of Romanian influences to some extent the acquisition of the English passive voice.

Keywords: passive, SLA, parameter resetting, L2/L3 influence

1. Introduction This paper investigates the acquisition of the English passive voice by native speakers of Hungarian. Furthermore, it investigates the question whether L2 Romanian has any influence on the acquisition of the English passive voice. More specifically, the paper compares L2 or L3 English passive acquisition by learners who have contact with Romanian, a language which has a well-developed passive voice, and by learners from Hungary, who know no other language with a generalized passive voice.

The outline of the paper is as follows: the second section throws light upon the problems of expressing the passive meaning in Hungarian, the third part enunciates the main hypotheses, followed by the research methodology and the results of the experiment on the acquisition of the English passive voice by L1

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speakers of Hungarian. The paper ends with the conclusions based on the data of the empirical research.

2. The problem There is a debate among specialists as to whether Hungarian does or does not possess a passive. Some linguists (see Siewierska 1984, MacWhinney, Pléh and Bates 1985, de Groot 1987, A. Jászó 2000, Kálmán 2001, among others) argue that there is no ‘real’ passive construction in Hungarian, others (e.g., Alberti 1996, 1998; Márkus 2008 and others) claim that the predicative verbal adverbial construction (henceforward PVAC) is a real passive construction. It is true that the PVAC resembles passivization in several respects: the internal argument is externalized, it contains an auxiliary (usually the existential verb) and the main verb undergoes certain morphological changes, losing its case assigning ability. Yet, as opposed to the English or Romanian passive constructions, the Hungarian PVAC has a low productivity due to numerous constraints. Furthermore, the agent can be overtly expressed only with the auxiliary lett/lesz ‘become’, which is quite infrequent.

Nevertheless, under the hypothesis that the PVAC is the closest equivalent1 of the English passive, we could have expected it to be described as a ‘passive’ in the grammars of Hungarian, since this is the case of the passive voice in English.

Though it seems that the connection between the PVAC and passive meaning has been established for a long time, this point of view has not made its way in the official textbooks (cf. Keszler 1999, A. Jászó 2000, Kálmán 2001, among others).

Besides the PVAC, there are several other counterparts of the English passive which (partly) capture certain syntactic or discourse function properties of the English passive. Knowledge of these structures has activated certain parametric options assumably accessible during the acquisition of L2 English. These parametric options may be reset in the acquisition process. We were interested in to what extent the PVAC was given any preference by learners of English.

This was interesting since, on the one hand, this construction is not described as a ‘passive’ form in Hungarian grammar, and on the other hand, it appears that there are significant dialectal differences in its use by different communities of Hungarian speakers (cf. Kádár and Németh 2010).

1

We use the term ‘equivalent’ or ‘counterpart’ for the structures which capture at least one (possibly all) of the properties of the English passive voice: (i) the external argument is internalized, becoming a focused VP adjunct; (ii) the internal argument is externalized; (iii) the passive construction uses a special verb form (the proper Tense/Aspect form of the auxiliary and the past participle form of the main verb); (iv) the passive is (almost) fully grammaticalized in English.

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2.1. Equivalents of the English passive in Hungarian One of the counterparts of the English passive in Hungarian is the third person plural form of the verb in Present Tense which captures one of the main properties of the English passive construction. Namely, it has a generic reading, in which the agent is not expressed. Thus, in this respect, it resembles the English short passives.

(1) Megvizsgálják a gyermeket.

prtmeg.examine:3rd.pl the child.Acc

‘They examine the child. / The child is examined.’

The example in (1) literally means ‘They examine the child.’, but it is more commonly meant like ‘The child is examined.’ This is shown by the fact that the above (third person plural) form can be used even when only one agent is meant (i.e. ‘The child is examined by one doctor.’).

Another Hungarian equivalent to be observed is the active sentence with the direct object in topic position in which the internal argument occupies sentence initial position.

(2) A könyvet becsomagoltam.

the book.acc prtin.pack:1sg.past

‘I have packed the book.’

As shown in (2), the active verbal form is not altered, and the external object is kept as the subject. Only the internal object moves in topic position. However, it retains the accusative case, as opposed to the passive voice in English. Thus, the active sentence with the direct object in topic position is an equivalent which resembles the English long passives.

The other active structure which corresponds to the English passive from an informational point of view is the active sentence with the direct object in topic- and the subject in focus position. Here the internal argument occupies the sentence’s initial position, followed by the focused external argument.

(3) Ezt az autót ÉDESAPÁM

this the car.acc father.my

‘This car has been bought by my father.’

vásárolta. buy.3sg.past

Again, the active verbal form is not altered, and the external object is kept as the focused subject. Thus, the active sentence with the direct object in topic and the subject in focus position is a counterpart which resembles the English long passives where the agent is focused on, since it brings new information.

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The Hungarian PVAC2 is the closest structure, in characteristics, to the English or Romanian passive voice. It is formed with the auxiliary van ‘to be’ or lett/lesz ‘become’ and the adverbial participle form of the verb (ending in -vA3).

(4) Az ajtó le

the doorNom perfdown

‘The door has been painted.’

van is

fest-ve. paint-vA

(5) Az ajtó le lett

the doorNom perfdown became

‘The door got painted yesterday.’

fest-ve tegnap. paint-vA yesterday

Though the English passive voice is (almost) fully grammaticalized, the Hungarian PVAC has several constraints. First of all, there are certain lexical constraints, related to the class of verbs which can appear in the construction.

Only transitive verbs and unaccusatives are compatible with the PVAC, but not unergatives (see 6.a,b vs 6.c).

(6) a. A kávé meg van

the coffee perf be:3sg

‘The coffee has been ground.’

b. A tó be van

the lake perfin be:3sg

‘The lake is frozen.’

c. * Mari énekelve van.

Mary sing-vA be:3sg

* ‘Mary is sung.’ (Kertész 2005: 2)

őrölve. grind-vA fagyva. freeze-vA

Aspectual constraints on the PVAC are connected to telicity. Only telic verbs are compatible with the PVAC, that is accomplishments and achievements (see 7.c,d vs. states and activities in 7.a,b).

(7) a. * Mari szeretve van.

Mary love-vA be:3sg

‘Mary is loved.’

b. * Az eső zuhogva van.

the rain pour-vA be:3sg 2

3

See Groot 1987, 1989; Komlósy 1994; Alberti 1996, 1998; Laczkó 1994, 1995, 2000, 2005; Tóth 2000; Bene 2005; Kertész 2005; Németh 2007; Bartos 2009; Márkus 2008, Tankó 2011.

The capital letters of the vowels signal that they have variable forms according to the vowel harmony: -va/-ve and -ván/ -vén, the choice depends on the phonological properties of the vowels of the stem (Bartos 2009: 75).

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‘The rain is pouring.’ c. A levél meg van the letter perf

be:3sg ‘The letter has been written.’ d. Az üveg el van the glass perfaway be:3sg ‘The glass is cracked.’ (Kertész 2005: 16-17)

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írva. write-vA pattanva. crack-vA

Finally, syntactic constraints are connected with the presence/absence of an overtly expressed agent-phrase. Only the be-PVAC allows an overtly expressed agent (see 8.b). Consequently, only the be-PVAC allows event-related manner adverbs (as shown in 9.b).

(8) a. *A fal le van fest-ve a fiú által.

the wall prtdown is paint-vA the boy by

‘The wall is painted by the boy.’

b. A fal a fiú által lett lefestve.

the wall.Nom the boy by become:3.sg.past perfdown .paint-vA

‘The wall has been painted by the boy.’

(9) a. *A levél gyorsan van meg-ír-va.

the letter quickly is perf -write-vA

‘The letter is written quickly.’

b. A levél gyorsan lett meg-ír-va.

the letter quickly become perf -write-vA

‘The letter got written in a hurry.’ (Tóth 2000: 241-242) Though the Hungarian PVAC is the closest syntactic equivalent of the English (or Romanian) passive, native speakers are not aware of the passive-like properties of the structure. This is due to not learning about the PVAC during Hungarian classes. On the other hand, in L2 or L3 acquisition of the English passive students have neither positive nor negative evidence for considering the PVAC the Hungarian counterpart of the English (or Romanian) passive. Consequently, when translating an English passive sentence, Hungarian learners of English have to choose from several equivalents of the passive which retain the characteristics of certain parameters, observing the discourse functions of the passive. Passive might be difficult on several levels: there might occur comprehension problems or problems in the formation of the passive (selection of appropriate auxiliaries, participial form, tense and aspect), but also problems related to the syntactic equivalent, namely which pattern is the closest structural equivalent of the English passive.

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2.2. The status of L2 Romanian with the tested subjects L1 speakers of Hungarian from Transylvania learn Romanian passive structures (or at least learn about them) which are functionally and structurally very similar to the English passive constructions. However, students seem to make mistakes when using the passive, while in essays and other freely composed texts they tend to avoid using it. In an account for the facts one must check to what extent the respective Hungarian learners of English are indeed bilingual.4 One assumption is that Hungarians from Romania are bilingual, and as such, their knowledge of Romanian would be a facilitating factor in acquiring the English passive construction. Another hypothesis is that very few subjects of the mentioned group of speakers can be considered bilingual speakers of Hungarian and Romanian. In order to decide on the Romanian influence on native speakers of Hungarian from Miercurea Ciuc, we need to analyze the issue by looking first of all at the characteristics of the area of Miercurea Ciuc from a linguistic perspective, furthermore, we need to have a glimpse at the educational system.

In the Romanian education system Hungarian children start learning Romanian quite early, at the age of 3, in kindergartens. They have about five Romanian activities every week. Later, in elementary school the situation is similar, children have four or five Romanian classes weekly. This would be fairly reasonable.

However, in Romania there are certain geographic areas where Hungarians are in majority. In these regions Hungarian children do not speak Romanian in their homes. Furthermore, they have limited contact with Romanian. This is the case of Miercurea Ciuc (Csíkszereda in Hungarian), where over 80% of the population is Hungarian.5 The majority of the subjects from Miercurea Ciuc do not have ‘nativelike control’ of Romanian (cf. Bloomfield 1933) and they cannot ‘interchangeably use’ Romanian and Hungarian (cf. Mey 2009). As such, children with L1 Hungarian from the area above described can be considered, at most, receptive bilinguals (cf.

Bhatia and Ritchie 2006).From the fifth grade (at the age of 11-12) children learn literature and grammar, but they do not have communication classes. Those children 4

5

Bilingualism is defined differently by different authors. Bilinguals are most commonly defined as individuals who have ‘native-like control of two languages’ (Bloomfield 1933: 56). Haugen (1953: 7) defines them as individuals who ‘can produce complete meaningful utterances in the other language’. In the Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics we find the following definition: “The word ‘bilingual’ primarily describes someone with the possession of two languages. It can, however, also be taken to include the many people in the world who have varying degrees of proficiency in and interchangeably use three, four or even more languages.” (Mey 2009: 38) Broader definitions of bilingualism focus on the daily use of two languages among bilinguals (Bhatia and Ritchie 2006: 115). Some authors make a distinction between receptive (or passive) bilingualism, and productive (or active) competence. Receptive bilinguals understand a language, but cannot produce it themselves (Bhatia and Ritchie 2006: 10).

According to the latest census (2011), the population of Miercurea Ciuc was of 37,980 inhabitants: 81.39% Hungarian, 17.4% Romanian, 0.9% Romani and 0.33% other nationalities. See http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miercurea_Ciuc#Demographics, last visited on 31 March, 2014.

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who have limited contact with native speakers of Romanian have difficulties in acquiring Romanian. The overwhelming number of the Hungarian children where the Hungarian population is in majority learn and use Romanian exclusively at school. Furthermore, they have limited contact with native speakers of Romanian.

However, from the fifth grade children with L1 Hungarian are expected to know as much Romanian as their native speaker of Romanian colleagues, as they learn by the same curriculum. What is more, at the different exams they are expected to have the same level of Romanian. Under these circumstances it is quite difficult to learn the language properly during school hours.

Nevertheless, we must point out that subjects need not be bilingual in order to be influenced by Romanian to some extent. More exactly, even if students do not speak the language fluently, when they learn about the passive voice in Romanian, they become aware of the passive, as a grammatical category, in any case. They also have some exercises connected to recognizing and forming the Romanian passive constructions. Consequently, they get some idea about how passive structures function. This knowledge, no matter how poor or rich, might influence them later in the acquisition of the English passive voice.

3. The hypotheses The primary aim of the experimental research is to investigate parameter setting in L2 English6 by speakers of Hungarian as L1, regarding the parameters of the passive / passive-like constructions. The first task is, thus, to correctly identify dimensions of parametric variation characterizing the English passive on the basis of which Hungarian speakers select an equivalent. On the other hand, it is not conceived of these as passive counterparts. The issue is even more important, as it provides evidence/ counterevidence for the hypotheses regarding the influence of the first language parameters on second language acquisition (White 2003).7 We will adopt the hypothesis that the mother tongue has influence on SLA. According to the Parameter Resetting Hypothesis (Finer and Broselow 1986; Finer 1990; MacLaughlin 1996, 1998), in the initial stages of SLA interlanguage grammars are impregnated by L1 parameters. Thus, L1 speakers of Hungarian 6

7

Note that English is actually the third language of most of the participants (i.e., subjects from Romania). However, for reasons of convenience, the term â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;second languageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (L2) is used throughout this study.

There are theories according to which only L1 parameter settings are exemplified in interlanguage grammars (Hawkins 1998; Hawkins and Chan 1997) and they cannot be reset (i.e., No Parameter Resetting Hypothesis). Others assume the contrary, namely that interlanguage grammars can realize parameter values distinct from those found in the L1, i.e., that parameters can be reset (Finer and Broselow 1986; Finer 1990; MacLaughlin 1996, 1998, among others). We will adopt this latter hypothesis of parameter resetting in L2.

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are expected to make mistakes, at least in the initial stages of learning English.

However, in later stages, L2 learners adopt parameter values distinct from those found in their L1 (i.e., reset parameters). In our case, Hungarian learners of English will be expected to apply the parameters valid for the PVAC to the L2 English passive constructions (provided we accept that the Hungarian PVAC is the closest syntactic counterpart of the English passive).

Another point of interest represents seeing whether the subjects who know Romanian more or less will solve the test using approximately the same structures as the subjects from Hungary or there will emerge important differences. To put it differently, we want to test whether Romanian L2 influences English L3, thus facilitating access to the English passive. A further step in our research will be involving native speakers of Hungarian (also learning English) who have unlimited contact with Romanian, being able to use it not just at school, but in everyday life conversations as well. Comparing the result of the groups having different degrees of contact with Romanian will lead us to establish whether knowledge of Romanian really facilitates learning the English passive. Our hypothesis is that subjects from Romanian districts will have better results in the tests involving the English passive voice, as we believe there is transfer from L2 Romanian. As such, we expect that the group of subjects from Budapest, Hungary will make more mistakes when using the English passive.

Another issue to investigate is whether subjects will use the Hungarian PVAC when establishing a correspondent for an English passive sentence (even without being aware of the similarities between the two mentioned structures) or will resort to some other structure carrying the passive meaning. A further issue we shall look into is related to dialectal variations of Hungarian, namely whether the same constraints apply for the PVAC in the different dialects spoken by the subjects involved in our research (i.e., the dialect spoken in Budapest, in Miercurea Ciuc and in BraĹ&#x;ov).

Summarizing, the main questions to be investigated in this research are the following: 1. Which parameters of the passive are activated / determine the selection of an equivalent?

2. To what extent preference is given to the closest syntactic equivalent (i.e., PVAC) rather than an equivalent which reflects only the discourse parameters of the passive?

3. Is there any dialectal variation in the acquisition of the passive by Hungarian speakers (differences due to the fact that they speak a slightly different variation of Hungarian, in contact with a third language (i.e., Romanian))?

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4. Research methodology 4.1. Subjects Data has been provided by a number of 113 subjects grouped according to the three types of linguistic backgrounds. One group was that of tenth-graders and eleventh-graders attending different secondary schools in Miercurea Ciuc (n=48, 17-18-year-olds, mean age: 17.3). There was a second group of tenth-graders (n=43, 16-17-year-olds, mean age: 16.7) from a secondary school in Budapest, Hungary. A third group included 22 eleventh-grader subjects from Braşov, aged 17-19 (mean age: 18.1).

Respondents from Budapest and those from Braşov formed the control groups, as the former group lacked Romanian influence, the latter had unlimited contact with Romanian in everyday life.8 The group of students from Hungary had learnt only English as a foreign language, and as such could not be influenced by knowledge of any other languages regarding the passive structures. The two groups of respondents from Romania had learnt English two hours per week since third grade; the subjects from Hungary had learnt English since first grade.

Testing was conducted in Romania and Hungary; the subjects were recruited from several schools and tested during their English classes. In order to differentiate between the three distinct groups, we used abbreviations: IM for learners from Miercurea Ciuc; IB for students from Braşov; and IH for respondents from Budapest, Hungary.

4.2. The data Originally we have administered and analyzed several, more elaborate tests as part of a doctoral research, including rephrase and elicited production tasks, picture-identification and grammaticality judgement tasks. However, in this paper we will present only the data of two translation tasks.

4.2.1. Translation from English into Hungarian Among the sentences to be translated, there were English passive sentences with and without an overtly expressed agent in the by-phrase, containing both progressive and non-progressive passive forms. In this task we wanted to find out which structures L1 speakers of Hungarian found to be the counterparts of the 8

According to the last Romanian census (2011), the population of Braşov was of 253,200 inhabitants: 91.3% Romanian, 7.1% Hungarian, 0.5% German, 0.4% Romani and 0.7% other ethnicities. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%C8%99ov#Demographics, last visited on 31 January, 2014.

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English passive. We expected respondents to use the PVAC whenever possible, though several other structures were available, each with certain constraints. The task was the following: (10) Translate the following sentences into Hungarian. a. The boy was visited by the doctor. b. The cat is called out by the little girl. c. The cat has been bitten by the dog. d. Tom was shown the dog by Mary. As Table 1 shows, even without being aware of the similarities between the Hungarian PVAC and the English passive, many subjects associate them in translation tasks.

Table 1. Results of the first translation task (E-H), given in percentages Translation No Active transl, Transl. with Regular translation DO in topic the PVAC active transl.

IM 10.40 6.30 83.30 – A IH 2.30 62.80 4.70 30.20 IB – 9.00 90.90 – IM 10.40 8.30 81.30 – B IH 2.30 62.80 2.30 32.60 IB 4.54 9.00 81.80 4.54 IM 10.40 12.50 77.10 – C IH 2.30 67.40 2.30 27.90 IB – 9.00 86.30 4.54 IM 10.40 12.50 77.10 – D IH 2.30 46.50 16.30 34.90 IB 4.54 9.00 77.20 9.00 IM 10.41 9.89 79.68 – TOTAL IH 2.32 59.88 6.39 31.39 IB 2.27 9.00 84.05 4.50 A considerable number of respondents from Romania (79.68% (IM) and 84.05% (IB), as compared to 6.39% (IH)), regardless of the school attended, resorted to PVAC. Interestingly, according to contemporary standard Hungarian, this type of construction is incompatible with the verbs from the first three sentences (i.e., the verb class is not compatible with the PVAC, since only telic verbs with affected object can enter the structure).

Though the presence of the overtly expressed agent is ruled out in the PVAC with the be-PVAC, Romanian respondents still resorted to this translation equivalent in the

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first two sentences. Furthermore, they used the PVAC with the existential auxiliary with verbs that normally are not allowed with this type of construction (e.g., atelic verbs, like hív ‘call’ in or verbs with non-affected direct object, like látogat ‘visit’).

The subjects from Hungary chose active sentences with the direct object in topic position when translating the same sentences (59.88% (IH), as compared to 9.89% (IM) and 9% (IB)). On the one hand, we could think that this is because of the Romanian influence, but, on the other hand, this could be due to dialectal variations as well.

In a study regarding the differences between the PVAC in contemporary standard Hungarian vs. in the Csángó dialect,9 Kádár and Németh (2010) notice that the number of occurrences of the structure differ significantly. “The database of approx.

160 million words of the HNC [Hungarian National Corpus – our remark] gives a hit list of 13,674 entries for VAN + V-vA (date of query: spring 2005). This means that while in the Csángó texts [a corpus of 537,061 words – our remark] we find a PCC for every 365 word, in the HNC it is only for every 11,700 word that a PPC occurs. This frequency index supports the conclusion that the use and function of the PPC in the Csángó dialect is wider than it is in standard Hungarian” (Kádár, Németh 2010: 201).

It seems that the PVAC is not just more frequent in the Csángó dialect, but it is less constrained, as compared to standard Hungarian. The most important differences concern the type of verbs which enter the structure, as well as their aspectual class. While in standard Hungarian unergative verbs cannot enter the PVAC, the Csángó dialect is more permissive (as in 11). Furthermore, in standard Hungarian only telic verbs with affected object can be used in the PVAC, yet in the Csángó dialect atelic verbs are acceptable as well (see 12 below).

(11) ...a férje el volt futva

the husband-Poss.3SG PVaway was run-vA

‘...her husband was (=has) run away from home.’

hazulnét. from.home

(12) ...megkérdték merrefelé vagyunk utazva...

Pvmeg-asked-3PL whereabout are-1PL travel-vA

‘...they’ve asked where we were travelling to...’ (Kádár & Németh, 2010: 204) Another difference concerns the presence of an oblique agent. In standard Hungarian, the presence of an overt agent is not allowed in constructions with 9

The Csángó people (Romanian: ceangăi, Hungarian: csángók) are a Hungarian ethnographic group of Roman Catholic faith living mostly in the Romanian region of Moldova, especially in Bacău county. Their traditional language, Csángó, an old Hungarian dialect is still in use, though the larger part of them speaks Romanian. For further information, see also http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Csangos, last visited on 31 March, 2014.

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the auxiliary van ‘be’ (as opposed to the lett/lesz ‘become’ auxiliary). The Csángó dialect is more permissive in this respect, too, allowing the agent-phrase with the be-PVAC (see 13).

(13) Akár hogy es tőlem nincsen soha elfelejtve.

any how also from.1SG is.not never Pvaway.forget-vA

’Anyway, I never forget that (lit. It is never forgotten by me).’ (Ibid., 206) Finally, the eventive reading of the PVAC is only possible with the auxiliary lett/lesz ‘become’ in standard Hungarian. Yet, the Csángós use the PVAC with the auxiliary van ‘be’ for eventive reading (as illustrated in 14).

(14) Mikor meg volt halva Magda, erős szépen álmodtam akkor. when partmeg was die-vA Magda strong beautifully dreamed.1SG then ‘When Magda died I had a very beautiful dream.’ (Ibid. 209) Returning to the data of our experiment, we could assume that there are some differences between standard Hungarian and the dialect spoken by Hungarians from Transylvania, possibly due to Romanian influence. Similarly to the Csángó dialect, in the dialects spoken in Transylvania, the PVAC seems more frequent and less constrained, as compared to the dialect spoken in Budapest. This could explain why respondents from Romania, mostly resorted to PVAC even in cases when they were not expected to, according to contemporary standard Hungarian.

Since Romanian speakers are closer to the Csángó dialect, as compared to IH speakers, the same differences occurred in their production data. Namely, they extended the domain of the PVAC to unergatives, furthermore, they used the byphrase in sentences exhibiting the be-PVAC. In what follows, let us have a look at the Hungarian sentences provided by the two groups of respondents.

As already mentioned, there is a tendency in choosing from the available equivalents for the English passives; namely respondents from Romania tend to choose the PVAC (see 15.c, 16.c, 17.b and 18.b), though in most of the cases erroneously, while subjects from Hungary tend to use a translation with a sentence containing an active verb (as in 15.a, 16.a and 17.a), in the majority of the cases with the direct object in the topic position (illustrated in 15.b, 16.b and 17.a).

(15) The boy was visited by the doctor. a. Az orvos meglátogatta a fiút. (neutral active sentence) the doctor.Nom prtmeg.visit.past.3.sg the boy.Acc b. A fiút meglátogatta az orvos. (active sentence, DO in topic) the boy.Acc prtmeg.visit.past.3.sg the doctor.Nom

L2 Romanian Influence in the Acquisition of the English... c. *A fiú the boy.Nom

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meg volt látogatva az orvos által. (PVAC) prtmeg be/become.past.3.sg visit.vA the doctor by

(16) The cat is called out by the little girl. a. A kislány kihívta a macskát. (neutral active sentence) the little.girl.Nom prtOUT.call.past.3.sg the cat.Acc b. A macskát hívta ki a kislány. (active sentence, DO in topic) the cat.Acc call.past.3.sg prtOUT the little.girl.Nom c. %A macska a kislány által lett/?van kihívva. (PVAC) the cat.Nom the little.girl by become/be.past.3.sg prtOUT.call.vA (17) The cat has been bitten by the dog. a. A macskát megharapta a kutya. (active sentence with the DO in topic) the cat.Acc prtmeg.bite.past.3.sg the dog.Nom b. ???A cica meg lett harapva a kutya által. (PVAC) the cat.Nom prtmeg become.past.3.sg bite.vA the dog by Based on these results, we can say that subjects from Romania mostly used the PVAC (which resembles the most the English passive) when translating an English passive sentence, though in certain cases, the translation with the PVAC was not even acceptable, as compared to standard Hungarian, since the verb was not compatible with the PVAC due to aspectual constraints. It seems that respondents put aside all constraints and still used the PVAC, as it seemed the closest structure to the English passive. Note that among all the translations with the Hungarian PVAC in this task, only the sentence in (16.c) is acceptable according to contemporary standard Hungarian.

In sum, subjects identified two translation equivalents for the passive sentences in English, namely the active sentence with the direct object in topic position (chosen mostly by IH respondents) and the PVAC (chosen mostly by IM and IB subjects). It seems that even without being aware of the similarities between the Hungarian PVAC and the English passive, many IM and IB subjects associate them in translation tasks. This could be due to Romanian influence.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, subjects need not be bilingual in order to be influenced by Romanian to some extent. Even if they do not speak the language fluently, when they learn about the passive voice in Romanian, they become aware of the passive as a grammatical category and they get some idea about how passive structures function. This knowledge, no matter how poor or rich, might influence them later in the acquisition of the English passive voice.

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4.2.2. Translation from Hungarian into English In the second translation task we asked the respondents to translate four sentences: three exhibiting the PVAC and one active sentence with the direct object in topic position to be translated into English in order to ascertain to what extent there is equivalence between PVAC and the passive in English: (18) a) Az ablak be van törve. the window.Nom prtIN be:3sg.present break.adv.part ‘The window has been broken.’ b) A kutya el van veszve. the dog.Nom prtAWAY be:3sg.present lose.adv.part ‘The dog has been lost.’ c) Anna magyart tanított Palinak.

Anne.Nom Hungarian.Acc teach:3sg.past Paul.to ‘Anne taught Hungarian to Paul.’ d) Az asztal tele van rakva könyvekkel. the table.Nom full be:3sg.present put.adv.part books.with ‘The table is loaded with books.’

When translating the Hungarian sentences into English, we expect subjects to resort to different translation strategies. We expect them to provide passive translation for the sentences exhibiting the PVAC and active translation for the active sentence with the DO in topic (i.e., 18.c). PVAC is expected to be associated with passive sentences in English, as it is its closest syntactic equivalent (it disposes of a special verbal phrase, it selects the internal argument as subject, it implies an auxiliary and it may or may not overtly express the agent). Consequently, we expect that L1 Hungarian will influence the respondents’ interlanguage grammar, thus they will resort to a passive construction when translating a Hungarian PVAC. Table 2. Results of the second translation task (H-E), given in percentages Translation No Active Passive Passive, problems translation translation translation (aux/tense/asp) A IH 2.30 11.60 67.40 18.60 IM 12.50 8.30 79.20 – IB – – 54.50 45.50 B IH 2.30 9.30 58.10 30.20 IM 12.50 14.60 72.90 – IB – – 63.60 36.30

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Translation C

IH IM IB D IH IM IB Total IH IM IB

No translation 2.30 12.50 – 2.30 12.50 – 2.32 12.50 –

Active translation 53.50 25.00 63.60 46.50 16.70 40.90 30.23 16.14 26.07

Passive translation 20.90 60.40 4.54 27.90 70.80 22.70 43.60 70.83 36.33

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Passive, problems (aux/tense/asp) 23.30 2.10 31.64 23.30 – 36.10 23.83 0.52 37.38

Table 2 provides a list of frequency of the constructions used in translation.

Most students used a passive structure when translating the Hungarian sentences into English, though the percentages slightly differ. Interestingly, in the case of sentences (18.a,b) the majority of both groups translated the PVAC with an English passive structure. In the case of sentences (18.c,d) around half of the respondents from Hungary (53.5% and 46.5%) provided active sentences in the translation, though only sentence (18.c) was active. The majority of respondents from Romania chose the passive translation in case of sentences (18.c,d) as well.

In the first two sentences to be translated in this task (18.a,b), we had two PVACs, both with the auxilary van ‘be’. As the closest English equivalent of the Hungarian PVAC is the passive voice, it was expected that the majority of respondents would use passive voice in translating these sentences.

Only 11.6% and 9.3% of the respondents from Hungary, respectively 8.3% and 14.6% of the IM subjects provided translations in the active vs. none of the IB respondents. 86% and 88.3% of the IH students, respectively 79.2% and 72.9% of the IM respondents used the passive voice as opposed to 100% of the IB subjects. An ANOVA test on these data reveals that the difference between IM and IH subjects is statistically significant, p< 0.001.

As expected, there occurred minor mistakes connected to passive morphology (18.6%, respectively 30.2% of the IH respondents and 45.5%, respectively 36.6% of the IB subjects failed in maintaining the proper tense and aspect or provided an erroneous participial form, as in 19.a,b or 20.a,b).

(19) Az ablak be van the window.Nom prtIN be:3sg.present ‘The window has been broken.’ a. *The window is broked. b. *The window was broke.

törve.

(PVAC) break.adv.part

242 (20) A kutya el the dog.Nom prtAWAY ‘The dog has been lost.’ a. *The dog is losed. b. *The dog is losted.

Enikő TANKÓ van be:3sg.present

veszve. (PVAC) lose.adv.part

However, we are not interested in mistakes connected alone to passive morphology, as these type of mistakes are not characteristic for Hungarian learners. As shown by Pinker, Lebeaux and Frost’s (1987) experiment, among others, even native speakers of English make mistakes in providing the correct past participle forms.

From an SLA point of view, a much more intriguing problem is that of translating sentence (18.c) into English. Though the given Hungarian sentence contains an active verb form, its direct object is in topic position. Probably this topic position influenced some of the subjects in choosing a passive equivalent for this sentence (44.2% (IH), 62.5% (IM) and 35.2% (IB), as in 21.c). Still, 53.5% of the subjects from Budapest provided active sentences (e.g., 21.a,b), while only a quarter of the IM students did so. A possible explanation for providing a passive equivalent for the active sentence in 21 would be that respondents overgeneralize in providing passive equivalents for each Hungarian sentence. After a series of tasks connected to the passive voice, they might have thought that passive was the correct answer in each case.

(21) Anna magyart tanított Palinak. (active sent., DO in topic) Anne.Nom Hungarian.Acc teach:3sg.past Paul.to ‘Anne taught Hungarian to Paul.’ a. Anna taught Hungarian to Paul. b. Anna taught Pali Hungarian. c. Pali was taught Hungarian by Anna. d. *Anna teached Hungarian to Paul. e. *Pali was teach Hungarian by Anna.

In case of this sentence, as well, mistakes connected to passive morphology occurred (as in 21.d,e). However, we will not insist on them, but go on to discussing the last sentence of this task. Sentence (18.d), repeated in 22, contains a PVAC with the auxilary van ‘be’, just like the first two sentences in this task. As such, we expected the same translation strategy to be applied (i.e., respondents choose a passive equivalent this time, as well). Yet, this did not happen in both groups.

About half of the subjects from Hungary (46.5%) and 40.9% of the IB subjects provided an active sentence (as in 22.a), while only 16.7% of the respondents from Miercurea Ciuc did the same. In turn, around 65% of the students from

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Romania and 51.2% of those from Hungary chose the passive voice as the English equivalent for the Hungarian PVAC, as in 22.b, though sometimes minor mistakes occurred (as in 22.c). An ANOVA test on these data reveals that the difference between IM and IH subjects is statistically significant, p< 0.001.

(22) Az asztal tele van the table.Nom full be:3sg.present ‘The table is full of books.’ a. The desk is full of books. b. The table is loaded with books. c. *The table is put full by books.

rakva könyvekkel. (PVAC) put.adv.part books.with

Concluding, we must remark that the majority of the subjects involved in the experiment used the passive voice when translating the Hungarian PVAC into English. However, when it came to translating a Hungarian active sentence with the direct object in topic, subjects from Hungary mostly resorted to active translation equivalents. The most common mistake observed in the sentences provided by the respondents was connected to passive morphology. However, this type of mistake is not characteristic for Hungarian learners, but it can be found in the case of young native speakers as well (see Pinker, Lebeaux and Frost 1987).

4.3. Discussions If we compare the sentences provided by the three groups of subjects (i.e., IH, IM and IB), we notice that respondents from Hungary tend to use active sentences with the direct object in topic, as counterparts of English passive sentences, while respondents from Romania (both from Miercurea Ciuc and Braşov) use the Hungarian PVAC more frequently when translating an English passive sentence.

A possible solution could be connected to differences between standard Hungarian and its dialects, as referred to by Kádár and Németh (2010). Their discussion of the differences between the PVAC in contemporary standard Hungarian vs. in the Csángó dialect points out three very important differences: (i) The PVAC is much more frequent in the corpus of the Csángó dialect than in the database of standard Hungarian (Kádár, Németh 2010: 201). (ii) In standard Hungarian the PVAC has more constraints, e.g., constraints on the class of the input verb, on its telic/atelic nature and affectef/non-affected DO, and on the appearance of an oblique agent (see Kádár and Németh 2010 for the Csángó dialect). (iii) The Csángó dialect shows the influence of Romanian.10 10

“The geographical dispersion of the Csángó settlements and their relative isolation resulted in a non-homogeneous language. The oldest sub-dialect, northern Csángó, preserves numerous

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Firstly, based on the above enumerated information, we could imply that in the dialect spoken in Romania (i.e., the Székely dialect), too, the PVAC is more frequent than in the dialect spoken in Budapest. As such, respondents from Romania feel more free in using it as the equivalent of the English passive. That would explain the differences between the results of respondents from Budapest and those from Romania.

Secondly, under the hypothesis that in the dialects spoken in Trasylvania the PVAC has fewer constraints, we could explain why a considerable number of respondents used the PVAC with input verbs that were not compatible with the structure according to standard Hungarian, (see 23 below).

(23) %A számítógép gyakran the computer.Nom often ‘The computer is used frequently.’

van használva. (PVAC) be.pres.3.sg use.vA

Thirdly, based on the findings of Kádár and Németh (2010) regarding the Csángó dialect, we must take Romanian influence into account, as a facilitating factor in the acquisition of the English passive voice by native speakers of Hungarian from Braşov. Being bilingual speakers of Hungarian-Romanian, they more easily identify the Hungarian equivalent which fits best the English passive construction. Namely, they resort to the PVAC when translating a passive construction, since the PVAC is the closest syntactic equivalent of the passive in English or Romanian.

Though the majority of students from Miercurea Ciuc cannot be considered bilingual speakers, it seems that Romanian still influences them to some extent.

In other words, even if students do not speak fluent Romanian, they become aware of the passive, as a grammatical category, once they learn about the passive voice in Romanian. Consequently, they get some idea about how passive structures function and this influences them later, in the acquisition of the English passive voice. This is why the majority of respondents from Miercurea Ciuc resorted to the PVAC when looking for a counterpart of the English passive. In contrast, students from Hungary, first of all, have to deal with understanding the grammatical category of (passive) voice. This is why the majority of respondents from Budapest chose an active sentence with the direct object in topic when looking for an equivalent of the English passive.

elements of the Hungarian language of the late Middle Ages. The southern Csángó and SzékelyCsángó sub-dialects are less archaic, and all sub-dialects show the influence of Romanian, specific to that language area.” (Kádár, Németh 2010: 200)

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5. Conclusions Comparing the production data of respondents with different language background, we saw that respondents from Hungary mostly used active sentences with the direct object in topic, as counterparts of English passive sentences, while respondents from Romania (both from Miercurea Ciuc and Braşov) used the Hungarian PVAC more frequently when translating an English passive sentence.

The explanation is connected to differences between standard Hungarian and its dialects. It seems that in the dialect spoken in Transylvania the PVAC is more frequent and has fewer constraints than in the dialect spoken in Budapest. As such, respondents from Romania feel more free in using it as the equivalent of the English passive. This could be due to Romanian influence which works as a facilitating factor in the acquisition of the English passive voice by Hungarian students from Romania. Being bilingual speakers of Hungarian-Romanian, subjects from Braşov identified more easily the Hungarian equivalent which fitted best the English passive construction. Namely, they resorted to the PVAC when translating a passive construction, since the PVAC is the closest syntactic equivalent of the passive in English or Romanian. In contrast, the majority of respondents from Budapest chose an active sentence with the direct object in topic when looking for an equivalent of the English passive.

As shown in the study, the presence of an overtly expressed agent was an important operator in the process of providing Hungarian equivalents for the English passive sentences. The majority of the subjects used active sentences with the direct object in topic position when translating long passives, in contrast, they resorted to the PVAC when it came to translating short passives. Consequently, the presence of an overt agent does not make native speakers of Hungarian use the second type of PVAC with the auxiliary lett/lesz ‘become’ which would allow the agent-phrase, as we would have expected.

We have analysed the results of each test using the SPSS 14 software for checking statistical significance. In the case of the translation tasks where subjects had to translate Hungarian sentences into English, the differences between the groups of learners were statistically fully/marginally significant. In case of the translation tasks where subjects had to translate English sentences into Hungarian, we did not get statistically significant results.

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How (Not) to Fail as a Multimedia Translator Attila IMRE

Department of Applied Linguistics Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Târgu Mureş, Romania) attilaimre@ms.sapientia.ro Abstract. The article is trying to highlight the major skills of a presentday translator, without which failure is assured. Although we start with general (classical) requirements, particular ones will be discussed, such as the gradual shift from PRAT (paper-and-rubber-assisted translation) to CAT (computer-assisted translation). We argue that professional translators in the 21st century must make use of personal computers and specific software designed to support translation: translation memories (TM), term bases (TB) and translation environments (TE), which already have builtin machine translation (MT) possibility as well. This shift also entails that translators have to deal with further impediments as well: the so-called “text”-to-be-translated has changed to “whatever”-to-be-translated. We argue that would-be translators are hardly ever prepared for this new type of multimedia challenge (e.g. surtitles), thus leaving room for technical experts to discover their skills in translating multimedia. It is our belief that managing translations is directly linked with managing translators, and there are more traps for translators in the 21st century than a layman would think. Consequently, we would like to offer some tips how to build and acquire translation databases in order to catch up with the 21st century rush hour in the field of translation.

Keywords: multimedia, translator’s skills, CAT-tools, memoQ

1. Introduction The present article focuses on a specific area of translations, namely multimedia translations. The necessity to discuss this aspect of translations derives from the emerging demand for this type of translation, which often causes a real headache for many translators.

Our starting point is that a skilled translator must have the basic “know-how” how to approach this type of translation as well, even if the technical skills required seem to be rather challenging. But without a few preliminary definitions, even the previous statement is debatable: why should technical translation – or

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at least involving technical background knowledge regarding software – be more challenging than a literary one?

One might have the feeling that a translator – by nature – is not “compatible” with technical challenges, if we have in mind a “stereotypical” translator, that is, a translator with philological background. However, in our times this is a rather misleading approach. Thus, in the following we will discuss various definitions of multimedia, the skills of a translator, so that we can lead up to multimedia translations and possibilities of CAT-tools.

2. Definitions We have argued in the introductory part that certain definitions seem to be inevitable. We think that the definition of multimedia, skill and translator is important to discuss the possibilities of a successful multimedia translation.

2.1. Multimedia It is rather strange that the keyword multimedia is not even listed in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED) published in 2002 (Trumble and Stevenson 2002). However, the online version1 already offers a definition, according to which multimedia is “an extension of hypertext allowing the provision of audio and video material cross-referenced to a computer text”. No details are provided in the definition, but – for a start – we can realize that text is combined with auditory and visual elements. The Free Online Dictionary offers further details:2 1) The combined use of media, such as movies, music, lighting, CD-ROMs, and the Internet, as for education or entertainment.

2) The combined use of media, such as television, radio, print, and the Internet, as for advertising or publicity.

These two definitions already mention clearer aspects of multimedia (movies, music, the Internet), but we think that a technical definition from Techterms3 will complete the picture: … multimedia is the integration of multiple forms of media. This includes text, graphics, audio, video, etc. For example, a presentation involving audio and video clips would be considered a “multimedia presentation.” Educational software 1 2 3

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/multimedia, 15. 06. 2014. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/multimedia, 15. 06. 2014. http://www.techterms.com/definition/multimedia, 15. 06. 2014.

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that involves animations, sound, and text is called “multimedia software.” CDs and DVDs are often considered to be “multimedia formats” since they can store a lot of data and most forms of multimedia require a lot of disk space.

Thus multimedia is connected to computers, after all. We can say that “computers have pervaded our lives, practically it is hard to find a field where they are not present, so in our opinion it is non-productive to discuss their raison d’être” (Imre 2013: 103). As one of the consequences, computers are more and more used in translations as well, thus we witness – in Bowker’s words – “a dramatic increase in the use of CAT tools and note that this increase will be needs-driven” (Bowker 2002: 12). She further mentions the trendy software localization industry, relying on Thibodeau, who explains that the major reason for localizing software products is economic, hence we have the “pressure on translators to work more quickly with maintaining high-quality output”.

Consequently, translators have to participate in launching Web sites, product releases in multiple languages simultaneously, which results in “simship”, that is simultaneous shipment (Bowker 2002: 13).

Of course, arguments for and against this (r)evolution in technology are constantly brought up. We would like to offer Gouadec’s approach, as he divides this revolution into a “friendly” and a “not so friendly” one (2007: 286). In his view, even the most ardent supporters of this revolution should accept certain drawbacks. One of them is that “computerisation has changed translation from an amateur pursuit into a cottage industry and now, into an industrial process”, leading to an increased volume of translatable material (by providing the tools needed to process such large volumes). Naturally, due to this, translators are faced with “increasingly heavy investments if they want to meet their work providers’ requirements and deserve the ‘technologically efficient’ label”. A possible fail of translators, in Gouadec’s terms – is when they are labelled as ‘pure text translators’, not being able to handle more or less sophisticated software or computer code processing. Although Gouadec’s book was published in 2007, he already mentioned the standard: 1. word processor; 2. desk publishing; 3. translation memory management; 4. terminology management; 5. full Internet functionalities.

What he mentions above standard is image processing, voice recognition, HTML, XML, XHTML, XSL editors, and new types of translation markets, which – in our opinion – is multimedia translation.

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2.2. Skills of a Translator Seemingly, it is important to clarify major skills of a present-day translator, deriving from the previous section.

As there are overlapping terms, we have searched for the definition of competence, which may be “a specific range of skill, knowledge, or ability”, or in linguistics “the knowledge that enables one to produce and comprehend a language”.4 The SOED defines competence as the “power, ability, capacity for a task” (Trumble and Stevenson 2002: 467), but the majority of specialized literature focuses on the skills of translators, as its definitions are closer to what is expected from a translator. Thus skill may be defined as “proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through training or experience” or “a developed talent or ability”,5 whereas the SOED equals it with “knowledge” or an “ability to do something (esp. manual or physical) well; proficiency, expertness, dexterity; an ability to do something, acquired through practice or learning (freq. in pl.)”. Consequently, a skilled person is “highly trained or experienced, esp. in a particular accomplishment” (Trumble and Stevenson 2002: 2857).

The skills of a translator are – seemingly – very clearly described by the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) for the European Commission, one of the largest translation services in the world.6 They offer a translator profile with a guideline for basic requirements (e.g. initiative, capacity to work under pressure, self-discipline), but what is more interesting from our point of view is that they mention specific skills, divided into three parts: 1. language skills (at least three languages: mother tongue and two more, one of which must be English, French or German); 2. thematic skills, which means “familiarity with economics, financial affairs, legal matters, technical or scientific fields”; 3. translation skills with various capacities: “understanding texts in the source language and to render them correctly in the target language” with proper style and register, “researching topics and terminology quickly and efficiently”, and “a capacity to master computer-assisted translation and terminology tools, as well as standard office-automation software”.

The above-listed skills briefly summarize the requirements for present day translators described in various books on translation. This means that failing any of them should lead to the failure of the translator as such. Naturally, language skills vary, let alone their combination in case of translators. Yet, we 4 5 6

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/competence, 15. 06. 2014. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/skill, 15. 06. 2014. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/workwithus/staff/profile/index_en.htm, 15. 06. 2014.

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may observe that the more languages one can ‘master’, the higher the chance to remain competitive. Still, some will argue that the knowledge of more than 4 or 5 languages is to the detriment of the earlier learned languages.

Thematic skills may also vary, as the ones described above only refer to the European Commission’s needs. Yet, only a limited number of translators are employed at DGT, however large it is, so the majority of them should consider further fields as well. Experts have been constantly signaling the popularity of text types to be translated (Kis and Mohácsi-Gorove 2008), and even if McKay (2006: 22) analyses the US segment alone, the statistics are discouraging: “Americans don’t tend to read literature in translation, so there is a small market for the work of literary translators; in 2004, only 891 of the 195,000 new books printed in English were adult literature in translation.” This is no more than 0.004% of all published books in the USA, whereas this may be around 1% in Romania, as Rodica Dimitriu estimated it during a conference (Imre 2013). No wonder that the market for literary translations is declining, but if this is true, one might ask, what part of the translation industry is growing?7 A possible answer is given by Gouadec, who offered a further not-so-friendly aspect of the technological revolution, namely globalization, which, in his opinion, is “the logical outcome of computerization”. As he explains, “whoever can offer the lowest rates anywhere in the world has a good chance of getting the contracts, or at least that competition is now putting pressure on rates the world over” (Gouadec 2007: 286). Furthermore, we may add that the form(at) of all specialized texts should be considered, as technical texts may take the shape of multimedia texts for various types of gadgets (descriptions, help files for mobile phone applications, tablets, phablets and what not).

As a result, a different type of skill a translator should master is connected to finances. A translator not capable of handling clients efficiently will certainly lead to failure. This skill includes both the “acquiring” of new clients and preserving the older ones, so an extra skill is also needed: negotiation skills, guided by a proper knowledge of people leading to emotional intelligence (EQ).

3. Multimedia translation Multimedia translation is different from ‘classical text’ translation in the sense that the so-called “text”-to-be-translated has changed to “whatever”-to-betranslated. This ‘whatever’ includes sources from the four types of media (TV, radio, printed and Internet), completed with audiovisual and mobile devices as well. Audiovisual translation may include subtitling, dubbing, voice-over, surtitling, scanlation, fan translation or (software) localization (Imre 2013: 191– 7

The fact that it is expanding is reported in numerous studies regarding the translation industry.

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200). However, other types should also be considered, such as closed captioning (CC), various adaptations, respeaking, mobile translation (machine translation for hand-held devices). The immense industry of video games has led to a much larger video games translation (as instead of the usually English language, multiple languages are involved).

The question is whether a translator is capable of handling these types of translation or not. Some of them are rather reluctant to enter this field, whereas others are more than enthusiastic about. Maybe around two decades ago a proficient translator had to deal with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, which involved a certain level of computer-literacy: starting the computer and the office software, but the bulk of the job was still centered on the text. When the translation was ready, saving options and sending attachments (occasionally in zipped form) would have sufficed. High level formatting options were not available, let alone quality assurance from the point of view of consistency. Nevertheless, translated texts were – on average – of better quality as the majority of translators had a solid basis of the languages, and the focus was on the text anyway. However, in our times when the text is only one part of the translation job (combined with sounds and images in various layouts), this is much more complicated. We have faster computers with much more improved desktop publishing possibilities on various platforms, as Microsoft has serious competitors, such as Apple or different Linux distributions with OpenOffice or LibreOffice. The technical know-how requirements are much more difficult, struggling hard to maintain the balance between the technical and actual translation part. Somers mentions keyboard layout, word-processor (text justification, automatic hyphenation programs, auto-correction facilities – spell checker), date and time stamps, contents list and index creation for longer documents, word counting, font types, desktop publishing, optical character recognition (OCR), spell-checker, grammar-checker, dictionary mono, dictionary bilingual, dictionary multilingual, localization tool, translation, speech products (Somers 2003), and his list can never be complete.

For instance, in the age of ‘multi’, a proper investment for a translator is a multifunctional machine with printing,8 scanning, copying and faxing options, but even when scanning, ADF9 is more than welcome.

A Hong-Kong based translation agency is looking for people who are familiar with software localization (screenshot capture, InDesign, Passolo, Wintrans, etc.), website/webpage engineering expertise (HTML, ASP, XML formats), flash engineering (support for European and Asian double-byte languages), voice recording and post-production software, multilingual DTP and graphic typesetting (Photoshop, CorelDraw) and the good knowledge of both PC and Mac computers. We cannot estimate how many translators in Europe are familiar with 8 9

Preferably duplex, that is the automatic printing on both sides of the paper.

Automatic Document Feeder.

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the above listed items, but we draw the conclusion that the stereotypical image of a translator is fading.

This means that those above forty are inclined to think that the majority of translators have philological background, who can handle technology (more or less). However, it has already been mentioned (McKay 2006) that more and more engineers switch to translation, as they are much more familiar with technology and they also know at least two languages, including the technical specialization.

We believe that philological translators accustomed to synonyms and antonyms, metaphorical expressions and wordplays are not prepared for this type of ‘invasion’ of the industry, and can handle only with difficulties technical texts full of abbreviations, stock phrases of rules and regulations (cf. Help files, product descriptions, etc.). What is more, laypeople still think that a bilingual person can translate without any problems (Simigné Fenyő 2006: 9), although it has long been proven that this is not the case. The UNESCO General Conference in Nairobi10 (1976, section V.14.d) stated that “a translator should as far as possible translate into his or her own mother tongue or into a language of which he or she has a mastery equal to that of his or her mother tongue”, but we tend to think that this recommendation is looked over.

There is no place for presenting further misconceptions here regarding translators, but spell-check, proofreading are not taken for granted during translation/creating texts (cf. Samuelsson-Brown 2010: 2–3). Newmark (1969: 85) states that only intelligent people can become translators, and we know that the target text has become much more important than the source text (cf. fidelity, equivalence, two masters), especially focusing on the cultural background.

Gouadec talks about PRAT, which is Pencil and Rubber-Assisted Translator, concluding that this is “clearly on the way out”, as computer-based translation has taken over (2007: 109). If one might think that his statement is similar to sounding the alarm or drawing the blinds, then we are in trouble. Albert also highlights the importance of technology, which cannot be looked over by professional translators any more (cf. Albert 2011: 9).

A possible way out is – in our opinion – the good knowledge of an advanced computer-assisted translation tool (CAT-tool), which leads us to the next section.

4. Possibilities of CAT-tools against failure Computers have released our minds from the constraints of retention to a great extent and instead of keeping things in mind we can focus on much more important activities and programs involving innovation, reflection, creativity, comparison, construction, combination, etc. (Fodor 2013: 8).

10

Accessible at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0011/001140/114038E.pdf, 09.03.2013.

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Since technology entered the field of translation, we can talk about machine translation. Even if the infamous ALPAC report from 1966 (Hutchins 2003) seemed to stop further research, today both machine translation (MT) and its initial rivals – CAT-tools – are thriving. Due to globalization, internationalization and localization, machine translation is a common aspect of CAT-tools, which have already encapsulated MT. For instance, a top quality CAT-tool vendor, Kilgray commercializes memoQ, which has built-in features to provide machine translation. As of 2014, a regular memoQ can activate no fewer than nine types of MT compared to only six in 2013 or none in 2008. But it is more than that.

Present day CAT-tools can offer almost all the necessary technical tools a skilled translator may need, listed below: 1. We can include multiple documents of various formats having the possibility to translate them in parallel, even partially within a single project.

2. A translation memory (TM) is also provided, which can store all the source and target sentences in pairs (called segments). TMs are highly effective as they can be exported, imported, constantly signaling previously translated units, directly contributing to quality. Furthermore, memoQ has a very specific type of TM, called LiveDocs, into which we can upload document pairs that can be easily used later as a TM for a new, similar document to be translated.

3. A term base (TB) may be either created, exported or imported allotted to a translation job (project). As of 2013, memoQ can incorporate dual column Excelbased lists of terms as TB, which is of immense help for specialized terminology.

4. There are many further features that directly contribute to productivity, depending on the type of CAT-tool. memoQ can download various dictionaries and activate them during translation, improving spell-check and correcting typo-mistakes. A built-in Statistics option will help visualize the workload and possible gain of a translation, even in different formats.11 The Pre-translate function will search for in the TM and insert all the matches (based on a previously established threshold match percentage) into the new translation job. Many TM and TB plugins can be activated, as well as error-correction functions or various keyboard shortcuts, and so on.

5. What we would particularly highlight is the format-friendly aspect of CATtools, being able to use multiple document formats (including pdf) and the almost perfect capability of preserving the original layout (at least in case of memoQ), which is not a negligible aspect for multimedia translations.

The logical question is whether ‘average’ translators can handle CAT-tools. We tend to think that we have a positive answer as we are directly involved in CATtool instruction, and the above-listed possibilities may be acquired in a relatively short period of time. Of course, the investment price should also be considered.

11

For instance, it can show statistics in memoQ or TRADOS-like style, which is the world leading CAT-tool provider.

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5. Conclusions We have seen that in the age of technology, there are no more ‘simple’ text translations, but ‘projects’ with multiple functions. Although one or two decades ago the debate over MT or CAT seemed important in relationship with human translators, today the problem is irrelevant: we tend to think that the first step was taken when MT became a built-in function of CAT-tools, and instead of witnessing an MT versus CAT-tool fight, we are slowly but surely getting to understand that both MT and CAT-tools are potential aids for human translators.

Ede Teller, a famous theoretical physicist, once said that “A person who cannot use a computer will be considered illiterate in the 21st century”.12 Today his words are very timely. If everybody should be able to use a computer, then translators have to be experts in using it, especially specific translation tools.

The key to success may lie in the combination of respecting deadlines (the managing aspect of translation), keeping in touch on forums,13 joining associations of know-how,14 pleasing the clients in a new way, discovering that we are “living in a crowd” (Gouadec 2007: 219).

As mentioned in a previous work (Imre 2013: 104), our ‘global world’ seems to undergo a complete technological change, our free time is more and more connected to powerful online activities (education, socializing, games), which are aided by technology (Lambert 2006a: 102–103). As for translation, we can witness an intensifying interest towards marginalized people as well, such as translating for the blind and the deaf, but more and more monolingual written versions and monolingual subtitles appear, which clearly mark the growing importance of translation in the world of technology (Lambert 2006b: 144). On the other hand, the growing number of amateur translators and translations is also facilitated by the ease of access via computers (cf. fantranslations, fansubbing).

Snell-Hornby mentions the new McWorld, in which “virtually unlimited quantity of parallel texts as a potential aid in translation” may be found (SnellHornby 2006: 132–133), leading to a certain McLanguage, “a particular brand of American English”, that is “reduced in stylistic range and aided by abbreviations, icons, acronyms and graphic design” and “tailor-made for fast consumption”.

Yet, a translator must be above ‘standard’ language use, even if colloquial forms are spreading, and there is a greater “tolerance of language mistakes/ typing 12

13 14

The saying widely circulates in Hungarian: “Az olyan ember, aki nem ért a számítógépekhez, a XXI. században anafabétának fog számítani.” The English version was used by Rózsa Hoffman, the Minister of State for Education, Hungary, greeting the 19th Central European Olympiad in Informatics, 2012: http://people.inf.elte.hu/szlavi/CEOI2012/NL0/NL0_Tata_v12.pdf, 15. 06. 2014.

An aspect which has been neglected before, as a stereotypical translator is a “detail-oriented introvert” (McKay 2006: 32).

As encouraged by Tibor Környei, the founder and moderator of the Translators’ Electronic Forum in Hungary (mfefo).

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errors” (Snell-Hornby 2006: 128). She also adds that multimedia communication resulted in many layout tricks, images, sounds and advertising techniques, which can be handled excellently in CAT-tools, as previously mentioned.

Although the bulk of all text-types to be translated is technical, we are certain that translators are not ‘lost in translation’ as their competence is “invariable” (Snell-Hornby), albeit its content is changing.

In our view, the ultimate challenge for translators (whether they are of philological or non-philological background) is to ‘keep up with the Joneses’, in which case the Joneses stand for the technical know-how of translations.

Failure may be avoided if a proper CAT-tool is used, which should be considered indispensable for a proficient translator.

References Albert, Sándor. 2011. “A fövényre épített ház”. [“The House Built on Sand.”]

Budapest: Áron Kiadó.

Bowker, Lynne. 2002. Computer-Aided Translation Technology: A Practical Introduction. University of Ottawa Press.

Fodor, László. 2013. Gondolatok a nevelésről. [Thoughts about Education.]

Magiszter 11(1): 5–11.

Gouadec, Daniel. 2007. Translation as a Profession. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.

Hutchins, John. 2003. ALPAC: The (In)Famous Report. In: Readings in Machine Translation. Nirenburg, Sergei et al. (eds.), 131–136. Cambridge, MA; London, England: The MIT Press.

Imre, Attila. 2013. Traps of Translation. Braşov: Editura Universităţii “Transilvania.”

Kis, Balázs, & Anna Mohácsi-Gorove. 2008. A fordító számítógépe [The Translator’s Computer]. Bicske: Szak Kiadó.

Lambert, José. 2006a. Literatures, Translation and (de)colonization (1995). In: Functional Approaches to Culture and Translation, 87–104. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Lambert, José. 2006b. Problems and Challenges of Translation in an Age of New Media and Competing Models (1997). In: Functional Approaches to Culture and Translation, 131–146. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

McKay, Corinne. 2006. How to Succeed As a Freelance Translator. Two Rat Press.

Newmark, Peter. 1969. Some Notes on Translation and Translators. In: Incorporated Linguist 8(4): 79–85.

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Samuelsson-Brown, Geoffrey. 2010. A Practical Guide for Translators.

Multilingual Matters.

Simigné Fenyő, Sarolta. 2006. A fordítás mint közvetítés. [Translation as Mediation.] Miskolc: STÚDIUM Rendezvények és Nyelvtanfolyamok.

Snell-Hornby, Mary. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.

Somers, Harold. 2003. Translation Technologies and Minority Languages. In: Somers, Harold L. (ed.), Computers and Translation: A Translator’s Guide, 87–103. Benjamins Translation Library, 35. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Trumble, William R., & Angus Stevenson (eds.). 2002. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, vol. I-II. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Online sources http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/workwithus/staff/profile/index_en.htm, 15.

06. 2014. http://people.inf.elte.hu/szlavi/CEOI2012/NL0/NL0_Tata_v12.pdf, 15.06.2014. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0011/001140/114038E.pdf, 09.03.2013. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/multimedia, 15. 06. 2014. http://www.techterms.com/definition/multimedia, 15. 06. 2014. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/competence, 15. 06. 2014. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/multimedia, 15. 06. 2014. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/skill, 15. 06. 2014.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 6, 2 (2014) 261–273

English for Special Purposes: Specialized Languages and Problems of Terminology Imola Katalin NAGY

Department of Applied Linguistics Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Târgu Mureş, Romania) nimolkat@gmail.com Abstract. This paper deals with some aspects of English for professional purposes. After a short historical overview of theories related to LSP (language for special purposes), we focus on some of the linguistic peculiarities of English for Specific Purposes. Our aim is to make a synthesis of the main theories and debates upon the issue of specialized languages, as the number of articles and writings on the topic is tremendous. We also wish to make a brief presentation of the most important contributions (still, we have to admit that the list of authors and articles is much longer, we had to make a selection, due to the editorial limitations of this article). We have gathered and synthesized what authors like Cabré, Celce-Murcia, Crystal, Croitoru, Motos, Strevens and others have said and we have also tried to make a comprehensive list of the names given to specialized language or language for specific purposes over time. Still, we have to state that it is not our goal to come up with examples or conclusions regarding our own personal ESP experience and/or previous research. The goal of this present study is to make a synthesis of the theories and writings on the topic of English for specific purposes (i.e. metaelemzés/metaanalysis in Klaudy’s words or szekunder kutatás/secondary research in Fóris’s words).

Keywords: specialized languages, English for special or specific purposes– ESP, linguistic features, terminology

Introduction English for Specific Purposes has been developed to meet the needs of those learners who intend to use English in professional contexts and for professional purposes. Languages for specific purposes, or, in this case, English for Specific Purposes (hereinafter referred to as ESP) can be dealt with from at least two perspectives: on the one hand, from a didactic perspective, as ESP is a sphere of language teaching. On the other hand, we must approach the issue of specialized language(s) from a linguistic viewpoint, as English for Specific Purposes is

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a peculiar segment of language, with its major component – terminology, to which some authors add the science specific grammar, i.e. linguistic issues and particularities. In this article, we intend to cover the most important theories and approaches of ESP and special languages, implicating both didactic and linguistic peculiarities. The first part of the article is dedicated to the evolution of the didactic aspects of ESP, while the second part deals with some of the most important approaches to the linguistic peculiarities of English for Specific Purposes over the past decades.

The first major issue is connected to the plurality of names given to what we call here English for Specific Purposes. In English several terms are used, among which specialized languages, special languages, specialized communication, technical English, scientific English, English for special or specific purposesESP, English for Occupational Purposes, Professional English or, more recently, Academic and Professional Languages. In Romanian, researchers use the following names: limbaj specializat, limbaj profesional, comunicare specializată, comunicare profesională, tehnolect, while in Hungarian there are two competing terms, szaknyelv and szakmai nyelvhasználat (see Kurtán 2003).

1. The historical background of English for Specific Purposes The history of the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) movement can be traced back to the 1960s, though several books and materials designed to teaching English for specialists in different fields (especially business and economics) were published even in the first decades of the 20th century. As Marianne CelceMurcia (1991) puts it, “almost 30 years ago, ESL/EFL practitioners in many parts of the world began to convene on order to discuss the development of systematic analyses of students’ needs, particularly as they related to the features of the English that students must employ in the real world.” (Celce-Murcia 1991: 67) There are four important phases in the history and development of the ESP movement. The first phase covers the 1960s and 1970s, when teaching ESP focused on the sentence-level. The needs analyses that were carried out concentrated on the lexical and grammatical features of professional registers, such as the language of engineering or the language of law. Researchers discovered, among the most striking characteristics of EST (English for Science and Technology), for instance, the extensive use of Present Tense Simple, of passive constructions and of noun compounds. In what Business English was concerned, the focus was on the rules of writing business letters, rules that stated the use of a set format, formulaic expressions, a limited set of vocabulary and conjunctions. “After careful analyses of identified spoken or written discourse, practitioners organized their grammar-

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based curricula around the features of these special registers. One of the most famous volumes to appear during this period was Swales’s Writing Scientific English (1971), where chapters are based principally upon the grammatical forms most commonly found in the scientific English register.” (ibid. 68) The late 1970s and early 1980s brought about the second phase in the career of ESP, in which the sentence level analysis and the focus on grammatical forms started to integrate rhetorical functions as well. In 1981 Tarone et alii (1981) published a study that intended to examine the function and frequency of passive voice within astrophysics. When comparing the functions of passive structures in these astrophysics journal articles with active voice, they practically performed a rhetorical analysis, stating that passive voice was used by the scientists/ authors of the articles when “a. they are following established procedures rather than discussing their own procedural choices, b. they are discussing others’ work in contrast to their own, c. they are referring to their own future research, or d. they wish to front (i.e., topicalize) certain information in sentences.” (ibid.

68–69) Tarone et alii were pioneers of rhetorical analysis in ESP, as they did not simply state that a particular feature (namely the passive voice) was frequently used in a certain type of text, but they also asked why this specific item was employed, identifying different rhetorical functions. Moreover, they started to take into consideration the differences within larger ESP registers, as they did not refer to the whole range of scientific disciplines, to English for Science, but to a particular branch of it, i.e. astrophysics. Thus, in this second phase the focus of register analysis became more rhetorical, and, when talking about understanding language use in ESP, mere counting of grammatical and/or lexical features was not enough any longer.

The third phase of the evolution of ESP integrated the discoveries of the previous two phases (linguistic features and rhetorical elements), as the focus was on the target situation and the oral communication students may need in different professional contexts, which led to the implementation of the so-called notional-functional curriculum. The main pillars of this notional-functional approach were: the communicative purposes (or functions) of the speaker, the setting for language use and the mode of communication and the keyword of the whole approach is the functional nature of communication. “Therefore in Notional-Functional Syllabuses, instead of having textbook units which are organized grammatically (as in Phase 1), such as The Present Perfect, or which consider the purposes of written discourse (e.g. Article Introductions or The Sales Letter), as in Phase 2, there are chapter headings such as Agreeing and Disagreeing or Paying Compliments. Within the chapters, students are provided with sample dialogues taking place in different contexts among different people, thereby exemplifying the language which realizes a speaker’s communicative purposes within a specified context.” (ibid. 70)

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The fourth phase started in the second half of the 1980s. If earlier the focus had been on the discourse and its grammatical features, on the communicative situation or the communicative purpose, now the attention shifted to the strategies used by learners to acquire the language (the contribution pf psycholinguistics).

Hutchinson and Waters (1987) were the first who claimed that the needs analysis had to include issues like the measurement of the learners’ existing knowledge, their interest in the materials presented, the learners’ modalities of storing and retrieving information and their active involvement in curriculum design.

More recently, lexicographers and terminologists have started to focus less on the didactic aspects and more on the problem of specialized languages, this time the main question being not necessarily how to teach specialized languages, but what such languages look like. Raquel Martinez Motos (2013) seems to opt for a new term, Academic and Professional Languages, a term created and introduced

by Alcaraz in his articles El ingles profesional y academico/ Academic and Professional English (2000), El lenguja de la farmacia. Lexicologia y lexicografia/ The Language of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Lexicology and lexicography (2005) and Consciousness in Life and Law (2007).

The first decade of the 2000s can be called the society of knowledge, as “one of the defining features of this society is interdisciplinarity… And (it) is also characterized by a tendency toward specialization. As a result, both interdisciplinarity and specialization have a great influence on what has been named as Academic and Professional Languages.” (Motos 2013: 4) Thus, the term Academic and Professional Languages is the most recent term with which we refer to what has been called technical language, special language, specialized language, language for specific purposes, professional language so far. “This term, coined by Alcaraz, refers to the type of language used by specific knowledge communities or groups of professionals, such as chemists, lawyers, physicians, etc. that share similar values and institutions that use the same genres and terminology to communicate. We are aware of the lack of consensus among scholars regarding the boundaries of concepts transmitted by other terms such as ‘Language for Specific Purposes’ or ‘Specialized Language’. In order to avoid any controversy, the term `Academic and Professional Language` will strictly be used here to refer to any type of language used in specialized communication, in an academic or professional setting and characterized as having a restricted number of users.” (ibid. 4)

2. Linguistic peculiarities of specialized languages In order to teach specialized languages, one must know what special language stands for, what its main linguistic features are. Defining the principles that govern the physical world requires a special linguistic code. The language of science(s) is

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precise, clear and unambiguous. Impersonal statements, logical thinking, clear and accurate descriptions prevail, while metaphors, humour or affective connotations are completely absent. According to Crystal (1997), English for Science(s) involves a special vocabulary, which often means a large set of words of Latin or Greek origin, but the development of sciences and new discoveries impose the continuous renewal or enrichment of this scientific vocabulary. There is also a “science-specific” grammar: this means that the language of science prefers very accurate and unambiguous expressions, which leads to a higher rate of repetitive expressions, to the frequent use of relative pronouns (which, that, of which) or adverbials. Linking words that express contradiction, explanation, and conclusion are unavoidable. Such linking words are the conjunctions (and, although, though, since, as), prepositions (despite, during) or adverbs (usually, meanwhile, firstly, secondly).

Scientific texts in English often use long and complex sentences, with complex noun phrases. Another particular feature of scientific English is the use of passive voice, which allows the speaker/writer to be more impersonal, to withdraw from his role of doer and put the emphasis on the experiment or phenomenon that has been carried out or presented. Another aspect that must be mentioned is the use of non-verbal items such as graphics, models, images, tables, etc. Yet, the interpretation or explanation of these non-verbal segments of scientific discourses is verbal. “The methodology of science, with its demand for objectivity, systematic investigation, and exact measurements, has several linguistic consequences.

There is an overriding concern for impersonal statement, logical exposition and precise description. Emotional comment, humour, figurative expression, and other aspects of personal language are avoided (except in writing for a lay audience).” (Crystal 1997: 384) David Crystal also describes the features of science specific grammar, i.e. the large technical vocabulary, largely based on Latin or Greek terms, with a lot of compounds which can be very long, imposing abbreviations for practical use, long sentences with a complex internal structure (sentences based on noun phrases), and the use of passive constructions. Neologisms are inextricably linked to language evolution, thus to special languages. “Moreover, scientific vocabulary requires continual updating in the light of the process of discovery. Science is in fact the main birthplace for new words in a language: in a comprehensive English dictionary, the vast majority of the words would be scientific (or technological) terms, more than 750,000 species of insects have been discovered […] and if all their names were incorporated into the largest available dictionaries, the books would immediately double in size.” (ibid. 384) M. Teresa Cabré (2003) differentiates specialized languages from artificial languages. In her book entitled Terminology. Theory, Methods and Applications she speaks about special or specialized languages to refer to a set of subcodes (that partially overlap with the subcodes of the general language), each of which

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can be ’specifically’ characterized by certain particulars such as subject field, type of interlocutors, situation, speakers’ intentions, the context in which a communicative exchange occurs, the type of exchange, etc. According to her, special languages have many features in common with the general language, so that a definition of special languages must include the following characteristics: a. The distinctive elements of special languages are not isolated phenomena, but rather interrelated sets of characteristics. b. The purpose of communication is more important than other, complementary functions. c. The special nature consists of differences in subject field, user knowledge, and area of usage. (Cabré 1999: 62) In her book, Cabré uses the term special languages meaning a subcode of the general language, characterized by the following features: 1. “Special subject fields are those that are not a part of speakers’ general knowledge; they are the object of a specific learning process.

2. Speakers who have this type of knowledge are users of special languages, in other words, subject field experts, although here we make a distinction between originators and recipients of specialized communication. Originators who produce specialized communication must have knowledge of a specific subject field, which they have acquired through training. In contrast, recipients can be other experts or the general public, which passively receives special communication while acquiring knowledge.

3. Communication in special languages is usually formal and occurs in situations governed by professional or scientific criteria.

4. Special languages are characterized by a number of language-based features (units and rules) and text-based features (text and document types).

5. A special language is not a structurally monolithic subset, but rather permits the following variations depending on usage and the communicative situation: a. The degree of abstraction, which depends on the subject field, the recipients of the information, and the sender’s communicative purpose. b. The communicative purpose, which determines variations in text type. c. Geographic, historic, and social dialects. d. Personal style.

6. Special languages share a number of pragmatic and language-based characteristics, thus allowing us to refer to them as a subset of the general language that presents a degree of unity.

7. Special languages are a subset of the language as a whole. They intersect with the general purpose language, with which it not only shares features but also maintains constant exchange of units and conventions.” (ibid. 65–66) The greatest divergences between general language and specialized language are found in the vocabulary. The words in the general language texts are much

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easier to understand for most speakers of the language than those in the special texts. There are three groups of lexemes in special language texts: a. general language lexical items b. specific lexical items that can be attributed to a borderline area between general language and special language c. lexical items specific to special texts, the so-called terminus technicus items.

Technical terms are characterized by univocity and accuracy; they are subject to a higher degree of normalization and standardization. They are used in specific contexts; they are listed in specialized dictionaries or glossaries. “Also known as terminology or subject specific terms, they refer to those lexical units exclusively used by a given knowledge community in a specific domain.” (Motos 2013: 9) Semi-technical terms are subject to polysemy and they are often created due to the extension of meaning through analogy. Their usage is not restricted to specific or scientific contexts; on the contrary, they can be common to several fields. Semitechnical terms are lexical units “that come from the general language but have acquired one or more different meanings when used within a specific area.” (ibid. 9) General vocabulary units are words from the general vocabulary of a language that are used in a specialized context, without losing their original meaning.

Certain structures and categories appear more frequently in special texts than in general language texts: a. Morphological structures based on Greek or Latin formatives b. Abbreviations and symbols c. Nominalizations based on verbs d. Straightforward sentence structure with little complex subordination.

Certain units and structures characteristic of the general language are not found in special texts: certain affixes (those which are deemed colloquial), some verb forms (the second person forms, imperatives, etc.), some pronouns (second person pronouns), and some sentence types (exclamations, etc.) (Cabré 1999: 74–75).

Yet, Cabré (1999) and Alcaraz (2000) have shown that one cannot assume the monosemic and univocal nature of terms from specialized fields: we simply cannot take it for granted that specialists from a certain field will understand each other without being forced to rely on the help of specialized dictionaries, just because the majority of the terms they use are of Greek and/or Latin origin and because the terminology is standardized according to international bodies’ conventions. The explanation is that “not every unit belonging to a specialized area can be labelled as being highly technical and univocal…. Lexical units of any given specialized domain can be classified into three different categories: technical terms, semi-technical terms and general vocabulary frequently used in a specialized domain.” (Motos 2013: 9) Elena Croitoru (2004) provides a set of criteria that distinguish technical texts, her approach focusing on the translation of specialized languages. Translating

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specialized texts is a process of text taming, which involves the linguistic analysis of the text, but also the consideration of the socio-cultural background.

The translation of such texts involves two steps, i.e. decoding the message as a receptor and encoding it for other receptors. Technical translations focus on the first step, as it implies understanding of the peculiarities of technical and scientific discourse, while the latter step involves “the use of adequate terminology, the knowledge of the problems, phenomena, processes, etc. dealt with, and the collaboration with the specialist in the field.” (Croitoru 2004: 22) Croitoru mentions the following features of scientific English: – Nominative + infinitive with present and past reference, pointing to both simultaneity and anteriority relationship – it was considered to be, it proved to have been; – Accusative + infinitive with simultaneity relationship: the Talmud considers wine to be the most efficient; – preposition +gerund and verbal nouns; – verbal adjectives; – gerund as a subject (usually rendered in Romanian by prin faptul că or used after instead of and translated şi nu; – passive constructions, which have the highest frequency in specialized texts…

The use of the subjunctive mood is specific to formal English, hence to specialized texts (ibid. 21). Among other peculiarities she mentions emphatic use which lays stress on a certain element or comparative sentences and comparative constructions, post-modification rendered by the –ing form (wine containing or people suffering from translated into Romanian through attributive clauses vinuri care conţin or oameni care suferă de), or wh-marked relative clauses (separated by a comma from the main clause), which is also a syntactic characteristic of specialized texts.

Marian Aleson’s study (2013) links the issue of specialized language to the discourse community that uses it, stating that earlier only the language of science and technology was found scientific enough to become subject to ESP concerns.

Nevertheless, “one of the key features that characterize specialized languages is its close relation to the needs of the Discourse Communities that use them.”

(Aleson 2013: 15) Aleson relies on the definition offered by Alcaraz when attempting to circumscribe the levels and features of scientific language: “Technical or highly technical vocabulary is still defined as the lexicon belonging to a subject specialty, whereas semi-technical vocabulary consists of words and expressions that belong to the given general-core vocabulary of a language but that are frequently employed on a given specialized field with an added specific sense… Furthermore, specialized lexicon had to comply, as a result, with the ideas of univocity and prescription; that is to say, there is one word (or lexical unit) per concept and a discourse community that prescribes that relation as such.” (ibid. 16)

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More recently a significant shift has occurred in the perception and teaching policies of ESP, as the previous reading skill focused tendency has given way to a more modern and rather holistic approach, which takes into account issues of pragmatics (ways of expressing hints, the role of presuppositions), functional grammar (the use of qualitative adjectives and adverbs), and discourse analysis (the use of specific genres in a specific setting and a specific goal). ESP is no longer only an issue of reading and understanding specialized texts from books and manuals.

“Vocabulary, for instance, is not just regarded under the two-fold classification of technical and semi-technical language. On the contrary, there is a strong interest by researchers to analyse the non-specific vocabulary from the general-core language that is conventionally employed in specific professional and academic contexts at high frequency rates. Concerning syntax, most of the research done highlights the notion of the existence of certain grammatical and syntactical traits that are more frequently used than others, and reinforces the idea that it is very difficult to find syntactic structures whose use is essentially specific. Thus, ESP with regard to syntax abides by the same syntactic rules of general language, notwithstanding the fact that they establish a certain preference for some structures (…) Consequently, lexicon is given again a preferred status in ESP studies. Summarizing, modern perspectives have gone back to the idea that context in professional and academic settings determine, in a way, the language we use.” (ibid. 18) The question Lowe asks in his article Characteristics of the Language of Science is whether the language of science is less culture-bound and more special than any other subject. He quotes Strevens, who states that scientific discourse uses a lot of symbols, numbers (largely international in character), a lot of words, roots and affixes of Greek and Latin origin. The features of scientific prose are: rather long sentences containing many clauses and with much embedding; long nominal groups containing strings of adjectives or nouns acting as adjectives each providing greater specificity; frequent passives having the effect of putting important ideas in initial position where in English they carry salience of meaning. Strevens defines scientific English as “simply the English used by scientists or for the purpose of those engaged in science. It has the same grammar, pronunciation and spelling as are found in all kinds of English; it includes much of the general vocabulary of English, though with a large number of specialized items or of familiar words used in specialized ways; it also carries an array of linked symbols and visual symbolizations which nevertheless can be verbalized by those who know the rules for doing so. What then is different or special about scientific English? A brief and oversimplified answer is that the particular mixture of grammatical and vocabulary items typically found in scientific English may display some or all of an array of features, including… long and complicated noun-phrases, a higher proportion of logico-grammatical items, a high proportion of items of specialized vocabulary. Equally important is

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the fact that the argument, the rhetoric, the communicative function of scientific English is chosen so as to serve the particular purposes of the writer or speaker.”

(Strevens apud Lowe 2009) Thus, the main features of specialized language are logic, linkers and specialized vocabulary.

On the other hand, Robinson (1980) denies the possibility of establishing and clearly differentiating a register of science. “There is broad agreement that scientific English is general English plus the extra components of science. She says that there is a great need for less generalization and greater precision that could account for differences of opinion. Swales, for instance, has advocated that the main verbs in scientific texts are generally in the present simple tense whereas Close emphasizes the continuous form of the verb. A broad agreement that the discourse markers and connectives (link words) are important does seem to exist. […] though ironically Robinson remarks of connectives that they are important perhaps not because they are special to ESP but because the general ELT has so far ignored them.” (Robinson apud Lowe 2009: 4) Terry Copeck et al. (1997) have attempted to make up an inventory of the features that render a text technical. “When someone calls language technical in everyday life, it is usually understood to mean that its message is hard to grasp. In scientific circles however the modifier has a happier connotation … researchers generally understand technical text to mean writing which is more tractable because, for example, it lacks figurative language and can be understood in its literal sense.” (Copeck et al. 1997: 1) After presenting some definitions of the term technical text that they have found on the internet, the authors of this article suggest that due to the difficulty of providing a generally accepted definition, we should use the term text technicality instead. Linguists categorize written materials according to genre. Some authors seem to use this term and text type interchangeably […] is technical text a genre, or a type or something else? […] We came to the conclusion that technicality is not a genre; that it is a feature of a number of genres.” (ibid. 4) Based on the categories in the international Corpus of English, Copeck and his fellow authors concluded that literal public writing would be roughly synonymous with technical text. (Literal public writing includes the following features: literal = public writing employing the dictionary meanings of words; information = literal writing relating a sequence of events or the particular details of a thing; instruction = literal writing communicating a set of related concepts; persuasion = literal writing developing an argument). Therefore, a minimal definition of technical texts would be the following: “a symbolic record on a medium in a generally-understood system of communication employing glyphs and the rules to combine them.

These broadly disseminated records are intended for a general readership; they employ words in their literal sense and assume only objective, generally available knowledge about the world and the domain of discourse.” (ibid. 6)

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After conducting the research and analyzing the data, the researchers have formulated a definition of technicality and have removed some of the items from the list, namely the ones that have proved to be weak predictors of technicality.

Surprisingly enough, some of the items removed are the ones previous authors mentioned as being features of scientific-ity. Among the weak predictors of technicality, the authors have identified and removed from the list we mention: increasing complexity in the content, grammatical writing, connotative language, examples, complex sentences, passive constructions, and statements of opinion or belief. Additionally, terms defined in the text, non-textual elements (such as figures) and lists have also been found as not relevant for text technicality. Still, despite the removed items, the researchers state that each removed item was a plausible candidate to indicate technicality.

Still, what makes a text technical? According to Copeck’s rather long and narrative-like definition, a technical text is a text “quite like to have an identified topic on which it is focused. It will communicate knowledge about that topic in a serious and objective manner, developing its thoughts in a logical, orderly way. This produces a document with hierarchical organization in which information can be accessed at random. Sections in such documents often bear titles or headings.

Authors typically use terminology specific to the domain and avoid colloquialism and humour or invective. Their writing is likely to use same-sense domain verbs and to make generic references (talk about classes rather than individuals).

Technical texts frequently have an introduction and a table or contents or index.

They may use citations but avoid quoted dialogue. Material may be presented with special fonts or punctuation or according to some commonly understood convention. It avoids vague terms or figurative language and tends to use explicit analogies, unambiguous references and nominalizations.

A number of syntactic characteristics suggest technicality. Technical writing uses few interrogative or imperative sentences, but sentences incorporating some form of ‘be’ are common. Statements are often couched in the third person and the present tense and employ subordination suggesting cause and effect. Binders and hedges are used to knit the narrative together. Writing can be dense: ellipses are frequent, particles or empathics rare.” (ibid. 22)

Conclusions It seems obvious that the senior branch of ESP is English for Science and Technology, as it received the biggest amount of attention, it was the first to be included in English teaching curricula, and it has had the greatest number of practitioners and the most numerous volumes of publications. The majority of scientific papers and books have long been printed in English: no wonder that

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Copeck’s research has also focused on technical texts and that they use the term technical text in a broad sense. Another explanation of this concentration on EST is that “science, especially at the discourse level, is more regular across languages” (Celce-Murcia 1991: 71), which means that there are many similarities between scientific English and Scientific Romanian, for instance, especially with terms of Latin or Greek origin, names of chemical substances, etc.

Thus, we can conclude that, if in the early years of developing and implementing methods and materials for teaching ESP, the interest was oriented towards English for Science and Technology and English for Business and Economics, in the 1990s a new branch of science emerged and gained importance, thus English for Information Technology and English for the Internet became fashionable. In the 2000s, due to the spread of mass tourism and to the changes that occurred in the labour market, which made more and more people take up jobs (even if only summer jobs) abroad, the need for other “Englishes” grew, and several course books on English for Tourism or English for Medicine, for instance, were published.

The diversification of ESP teaching materials and fields is accompanied by an increase of the interest in the lexis, terminology and grammar of English for Specific Purposes, also called scientific English (Crystal), technical English (Copeck et al), specialized language, special language, specialized communication (Cabré), Professional English or, more recently, Academic and Professional Language (Motos). Specialized communication seems to have become the focus of a wide range of studies and we assume that research in the field of specialized languages will expand in the future.

References Alcaraz, E. 2000. El inglés profesional y académico [Professional and Academic English]. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

Aleson, M. 2013. An overview of the evolution of English lexicography in the industries of leisure and tourism. In Isabel Balteiro (ed.), New Approaches to Specialized English Lexicology and Lexicography, 15–46. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Balteiro, I. (ed.). 2013. New Approaches to Specialized English Lexicology and Lexicography. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Cabré, T. M. 1999. Terminology. Theory, methods and applications. In: Helmi Sonneveld, Sue Ellen Wright (eds.), Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice (1st ed. 1992 Barcelona, Emuries). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Cabré, T. M. 2003. Terminology. Theory, methods and applications. Terminology 9(2): 163–199.

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Carver, D. 1983. Some propositions about ESP. The ESP Journal 2: 131–137.

Celce-Murcia, M. (ed.) 1991. Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language.

Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó – Newbury House.

Copeck, T. et al. 1997. What is technical text? Language Sciences 19 (4): 391–423.

Crystal, D. 1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Croitoru, E. (ed.) 2004. English through Translation. Interpretation and Translation-Oriented Text Analysis. Galaţi: Editura Fundaţiei Universitare Dunărea de Jos. Hutchinson, T. – Waters, A. 1987. Developments in ESP. A Multidisciplinary Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kurtán, Zs. 2003. Szakmai nyelvhasználat [Professional Language Use]. Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó.

Motos, R. M. 2013. The role of interdisciplinarity in lexicography and lexicology.

In Isabel Balteiro (ed.), New Approaches to Specialized English Lexicology and Lexicography, 3–13. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Robinson, P. S. 1980. English for Specific Purposes: The Present Position. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Strevens, P. 1988. ESP after twenty years: A re-appraisal. In M. Tickoo (ed.), ESP: State of the Art, 1–13. Singapore: SEAMEO Regional Centre.

Strevens, P. 1976. Problems of learning and teaching science through a foreign language. Studies in Science Education 3: 55–68.

Tarone, E., Dwyer, S., Gillette S., Icke, V. 1981. On the Use of the Passive in Two Astrophysics Journal Papers. ESP Journal 1(2): 123–140.

Widdowson, H.G. 1974. Literary and scientific uses of English. English Language Teaching Journal 28(3): 282–292.

Online resources Copeck, T., K. Barker, S. Delisle, S. Szpakovwicz & J..Delannoy. What is technical text? www.researchgate.net. (12 May 2014) Gatehouse, K.. Key Issues in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Curriculum Development, www.khae-service.com (15 March 2011) Laurence, A. English for Specific Purposes: What does it mean? Why is it different? http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/abstracts/ESParticle.html. (15 March 2011) Lowe, I.. 2009. Characteristics of the language of science, www.scientifilanguage. com/esp/characteristics-language-science.pdf (10 May 2014)

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