Invariance orientation: Identifying an object for translation studies

ABSTRACT

It is argued that a central object of translation studies should be the mental stance of translators who spend most of their time trying to produce wordings which they hope will be taken by readers to mean more or less whatever they think the source means. These translators are oriented toward sameness of meaning except in a few passages where they vary meaning to make their translations receivable. Adoption of this object of study will bring the field in line with most work in the global translation industry. It will avoid a situation where this approach to translation is shunted into the background of our field, in favour of “difference”.

KEYWORDS:

• Invariance
• variance
• translation studies
• object of study
• translation industry
• meaning sameness

Note on contributor

Brian Mossop is a certified translator. After working as a full-time salaried translator for the Canadian government for 40 years, he retired in 2014 but still accepts occasional freelance contracts and does volunteer translation. He is also a part-time instructor at York University’s School of Translation in Toronto, where he has taught since 1980. He is the author of the widely used textbook Revising and Editing for Translators, as well as some 50 articles in the field of translation studies.

Notes

1 In Mossop (1998), I stipulated a set of characteristics: translating, I suggested, was sequential imitative quoting of the source text. However, when I followed up by looking for types of writing (involving either two languages or just one) that met all three criteria as opposed to two or one, the result was a complicated mess (see http://www.yorku.ca/brmossop/SociallyNeutralDefinition.htm). I therefore no longer want to define the object of study in terms of these or any other stipulated characteristics of process or product. Instead, I simply identify the kinds of work most common in the translation industry as a starting point for investigation.

2 In a given passage, the translator’s conception of “meaning” might focus on one feature or include several, such as cognitive content, cultural connotations, formality and technicality of language, genre features, implications or tone. The invariance-oriented translator may entertain, consciously or unconsciously, various theories about meaning in translation; for example, translating as transferring meaning across a linguistic or a linguo-cultural border; translating as a pragmatic activity that replaces the source-language relationship between wording and context with a similar relationship between target-language wording and context.

3 Reliable and representative quantitative data on the various fields of translation worldwide are simply not available. Katan (2009, 119–120) compares two sets of data: a count of texts translated in Europe in 2006, and an online questionnaire from 1150 self-selected translators and interpreters (mostly European) about the fields in which they work. Both these datasets suggest that technical, business and legal materials account for most texts translated and most fields of work. Perhaps the proportion of traditional invariance-oriented “plain text” work has decreased as website/software/computer game localization as well as audiovisual work more generally has increased, but there is no reason to think the absolute quantities of financial, technical, legal, medical and administrative texts have declined or that they no longer account for most translation work. Moreover, some of the newer kinds of work are invariance-oriented.

4 For a given passage of the source text, there may of course be more than one “moment of production”: an initial moment followed by one or more revision moments that may be influenced by other people.

5 Michael Schreiber’s (1993) attempt to distinguish translation from adaptation, while very interesting, flounders because he tries to make the distinction on the basis of completed texts (is this TL wording a translation or an adaptation of that SL wording?) whereas I distinguish on the basis of mental stances.

6 I have no list of objects to propose. Within variance-oriented work, one might, for instance, want to separate interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic work rather than investigating them together. Similarly, the sociological aspect of translation might or might not be divided into several objects of study: the commissioning process, the workplace process, the reception process by users, and so on. I take no position on the question whether some objects (such as perhaps variance-oriented intersemiotic transformations) should fall outside translation studies.

7 An interesting question is whether the summarizing nature of traditional film subtitling means that the subtitler’s stance is not one of invariance-orientation. One could argue that in view of the limited space on screen and the limited time available for viewers to read each subtitle, the mental stance involved is invariance-orientation within those physical limitations.

8 Equivalence theories concerned after-the-fact comparisons of source text and translation wordings, not the mental stance of the translator at the moment of production.