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Discussion Translation Theory in the Context of Online Political Communication

SlaterFromCuba

varishangout.com
Translation Theory is a niche facet of communication theory in which the sender is the translator; the messages are the original and translated texts; and the receiver is the intended audience. In communication theory and interpersonal communication (how two or more people interact with each other), there are more factors into how messages are encoded and decoded:

Sender -> Message(s) -> Receiver
Here's the interpersonal communication model, according to most communication scholars:

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Katrina Leonoudakis, the primary inspiration for this essay, pulls stuff out of her ass, like many internet nobodies who spout out theories and other academic terms to make themselves appear smarter than they really are. People like Katrina give translators a bad name by using these terms to an audience unfamiliar with translation, much less communication. As I will state repeatedly in this thread, poor translations lead to poor communication between the sender and receiver. If possible, I will pick apart Katrina's thread on "Translation theory, ethics in localization, and capitalism."

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Other sources of inspiration for this essay include: my background with online political communication, communication in general, and journalism. Another source of inspiration includes my curiosity with translated texts and my feeble attempts to learn Japanese.

I will discuss other factors of translation theory: ethics (for the sake of argument, let’s assume translators have some); politics (because we’re talking about international texts and media); and online political communication (it’s more than just slap-fighting on twitter). Because this is an informal essay with an academic bent to it, I have a few disclaimers: English is my primary language; Present research focuses on French and Arabic translations, even though this forum focuses on Japanese translations; Present research implies that censorship and poor localizations are unethical; and this essay will assume localizers and translators are journalists or microbloggers in some way. Just as journalists influence what news gets covered, translators/localizers influence what is translated/localized.

I’ll do my best to explain any technical or theory-heavy terms. I will also note that online political communication mostly deals with polarization and partisan political ideologies by way of polling, tweeting, commenting in blogs, and news coverage (especially with what gets covered and what we think the news should cover). This essay is written in American Psychological Association (APA) style in its most recent edition.

What is Translation?
Saroukhil et al. (2018) broadly define translation as one of three concepts:
  1. The practice of rendering the source text into the target text.
  2. A technique for teaching foreign languages. Particularly in the old Grammar Translation method.
  3. An academic field comprising other language related disciplines.

Saroukhil et al. (2018) give more definitions of translation. According to Catford, “translation is the replacement of textual material in source language (SL), by equivalent textual material in the target language (TL) (Catford, 1965).” Nida and Taber (1969) define translation as “the reproduction of the closest natural equivalent, in terms of meaning and style, of the source language.”

To Koller (1979), translation is a transposition, or substitution, of a source-language material into a target-language text. Koller writes, “The relationship of the source text and the target text is that of an equivalence (Koller, 1979).” Meanwhile, Newmark (1998) believes that translation is the substitution of the meaning of a text into another language as intended by the author.

Saroukhil et al. (2018) give a few types of translation:
  • Literal vs Free (concerns the closeness emphasizing loyalty to the source text (ST))
  • Literary vs non-literary (presupposes, or assumes, the source message to be conveyed in a different form)
  • Semantic vs communicative
  • Static vs dynamic
Saroukhil et al. (2018) categorize Catford’s classifications of the types of translation:
  1. Full vs. Partial (in terms of the extent of submission of source language (SL) text to the process of translation)
  2. Total vs. Restricted translation (in the sense of the levels of language involved in translation)
  3. Rank of Translation (concerning the rank in a grammatical hierarchy to which translation equivalence is established).
In the context of translation and culture, Saroukhil et al. (2018) write, “Translation is a mediator between cultures.” According to Torop (2009), “culture functions mainly through translational activity; culture can undergo innovation by the inclusion of new texts into it.”

When it comes to cultural manipulation, Saroukhil et al. write, “Cultural manipulation is involved with the exploration of the symbolic relationship between language and culture in colonial conditions with an emphasis on the western translation as leading to the expansion of post-colonial ideology. Cultural manipulation deals with politics and ideology forming the post colonial identity of decolonized communities (2018).” To Saroukhil et al. (2018), cultural manipulation involves: (a) the colonizers generation of cultural knowledge about the colonized communities and (b) how that Western cultural knowledge was applied to overcome a non-European people.

Further Reading:
Catford, J.C. (1965). A linguistic theory of translation. Oxford University Press.

Koller, W. (1979/1989). Equivalence in translation theory, translated by A. Chesterman, in A. Chesterman (ed.).

Newark, P. (1998). More Paragraphs on Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Nida, E. A. and C. R. Taber (1969). The Theory and Practice of Translation, Leiden: E. J. Brill

Saroukhil, M. A., Ghalkhani, O., & Hashemi, A. (2018). A critical review of translation: A look forward. International Journal of Education and Literacy Studies, 6(2), 101-110.

Torop, P. (2009). Social aspects of translation history or forced translation. Kielen ja kulttuurin saloja, 239-248.

For a post-colonial perspective:

Spivak, G. (1993). The Politics of Translation : Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London: Routledge.
Thank you for reading this far, and expect more to come. (For the sake of not page stretching, this is a multi-post project)
 
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