Intelligibility and the reception of translations

ABSTRACT

In the framework of descriptive translation studies, the notions of ‘translation’ and ‘language’ are deeply influenced by socially accepted ideas, as suggested by Toury. Based on Sakai's schema of co-figuration, conceptions of intelligibility affect views on linguistic continuity and consequently may determine the reception of translation. This paper argues that for intralingual translation, intelligibility may have an impact not only on the reception of the translated text, but also on the very use of the term ‘translation’. The notion of intelligibility, normally applied on spoken texts following Smith and Nelson's paradigm, is expanded here to include written texts. It is used as a tool to examine how judgments concerning the intelligibility of a source text can determine positions about the necessity or the legitimacy of the translation as well as the effect it may have on its readers. The suggested relation between the reception of intralingual translations and opinions on intelligibility will be demonstrated using the reception of Tanakh Ram, the Modern Hebrew translation of the Hebrew Bible. This example focuses on the intralingual aspect rather than on religious or Biblical features of the text.

KEYWORDS:

• Reception
• intralingual translation
• diachronic translation
• intertemporal translation
• linguistic continuity

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Rachel Weissbrod for providing insightful suggestions concerning the paper conceptual design and structure.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hilla Karas is a translation scholar at Bar-Ilan University. She focuses on subjects related to intralingual diachronic translation and modern translations of French Medieval texts. She is particularly interested in heterolingualism, the status of the translated text and non-prototypical translations. Her articles were published in Target, Palimpsestes, Septet and Hebrew-language journals. She has translated works by several French thinkers into Hebrew, including Derrida, Kristeva, Irigaray and Barthes.

Notes

1 On a possible quantification of linguistic divergence, mainly phonetic and lexical, see Gooskens & Heeringa, 2004; Gooskens, 2007.

2 Journalist and scholar Uri Heitner used a similar term, ‘a cultural terrorist attack’, with a similar argumentation, in 2008. See discussion in Holzman & Zuckermann, 2019.

3 Walden is quoted by Bar-On, 2010 as rejecting the label translation for TanRam, claiming that it cannot be applied within the same language. However, on a personal conversation (February 2013) she explained that she had been wrongly quoted, and is well aware of intralingual translation, as is clear from the discussion of French and English historical linguistics by her and by Deutscher, above.