17.187, Review: Translation: Pokorn (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-187. Fri Jan 20 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.187, Review: Translation: Pokorn (2005)

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1)
Date: 17-Jan-2006
From: John Kearns < kearns at pro.onet.pl >
Subject: Challenging the Traditional Axioms 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 04:10:54
From: John Kearns < kearns at pro.onet.pl >
Subject: Challenging the Traditional Axioms 
 

AUTHOR: Pokorn, Nike K.
TITLE: Challenging the Traditional Axioms
SUBTITLE: Translation into a non-mother tongue
SERIES: Benjamins Translation Library 62
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1512.html 

John Kearns, Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City 
University, Ireland

SYNOPSIS

The eponymous 'traditional axioms' which Pokorn aims to challenge in 
her highly relevant and engaging study are those which relate to the 
received wisdom maintaining that responsible, professional translators 
should not translate into their second language (hereafter L2). To this 
end, Pokorn sets out to answer a number of more specific 
questions: ''Can the native language of the translator be considered 
as a criterion for assessing the acceptability or even the quality of a 
translation? Are translations out of one's mother tongue indeed 
inferior in quality to those carried out by native speakers of the TL 
[Target Language]? [...] Can we identify typical features of the 
translation that are the result of the translator's or translators' mother 
tongue?'' (ix).

Pokorn begins by surveying the fairly extensive research literature on 
the twin notions of ''mother tongue'' (hereafter L1) and ''native 
speaker'' to demonstrate that both are highly problematic and, as 
such, not entirely helpful in academic discourse. This is ground fairly 
well trodden in applied linguistics, though necessary nonetheless for 
her discussion. More interesting from a translation point of view, 
however, is the second chapter, in which she surveys the history of 
attitudes to inverse translation in translation theory. This she divides 
into four parts -- insistence on translation into the L1 on the grounds 
of the translator being ''owner'' of her/his native language, insistence 
on an idealised translator who is perfectly bilingual, the tacit 
assumption that translators always work into their L1, and attitudes to 
a translation team in translation practice. From her presentation one is 
led to understand that the odds are stacked heavily against inverse 
translation in Translation Studies discourse. 

>From here she moves on to discuss a series of English translations of 
literature by the Slovene writer Ivan Cankar, an analysis which takes 
up the greater part of her study. She selects a number of translations 
of selected passages by a range of translators -- both native and non-
native speakers of Slovene, as well as translators working in pairs with 
various permutations of native languages -- and discusses in 
meticulous detail both source and target texts, along with the 
biographical and linguistic backgrounds of the translators themselves. 
She then sets out her own conclusions regarding the visibility of 
nativeness and non-nativeness in these translations before presenting 
the experiment which she conducted. This involved selecting 
passages from several of these translations -- four translations of the 
same passage, two translations of another passage, and one of a 
separate passage -- and presenting them to 46 third-level educated 
native-English speakers in Britain and North America to see if they 
could identify which had been translated by native and non-native 
Anglophones. Her conclusions demonstrate that native English 
speakers are not always able to identify inverse translations as 
such: ''...the assumption that every native speaker is able to rapidly 
detect any non-member of his/her linguistic community, when 
confronted only with a written document, has no solid foundation [...] 
On the other hand [...] translations into a non-mother tongue are often 
regarded as acceptable by the target readership, with the degree of 
acceptability depending on the individual capacities of the translator'' 
(117). 

EVALUATION

Pokorn writes that translation into the L2 ''has always been frowned 
on within Translation Studies in Western cultures with a dominant 
language'' (ix). Of course we are all only too painfully familiar with the 
kind of translationese which is the product of inadequate linguistic 
abilities in the TL and, as such, we may be tempted initially to agree 
instinctively with Pokorn without even examining what Translation 
Studies discourse has said on this subject. 

Yes, Pokorn is obviously right to criticise the dearth of research which 
has hitherto been conducted in mainstream Translation Studies on 
inverse translation, and is I believe (along with many others in 
Translation Studies, I suspect) also right in maintaining that the 
reputation of inverse translation is in urgent need of rehabilitation. 
Nevertheless, there is another sense in which Pokorn is being quite 
hard on Translation Studies as an academic discourse, when she 
notes, for example, how Gorazd Kocijancic refers to ''the invisible 
sclerosis of theory'' (Pokorn x). Much research from the past thirty 
years has been highly unequivocal about the need to challenge 
negative attitudes to inverse translation (and this, of course, must be 
understood with the rider that a significant proportion of L2 translation 
research will itself be subject to limited diffusion as it is likely to be 
published in 'minor' languages). Looking at three recent volumes 
devoted to inverse translation and interpreting -- Campbell 1998, 
Grosman et al. 2000, and Kelly et al. 2003 -- one can see that huge 
(albeit insufficient) progress has been made in Translation Studies 
in ''challenging the traditional axioms'' in recent years -- more than 
Pokorn acknowledges (for a survey of the trajectory of this research in 
Translation Studies, see Kearns (in press)). In fact, Pokorn's 
enterprise can also be seen to be part of a more general investigation 
into whether translated language can be identified as such (cf. 
Tirkkonen-Condit 2002), though this larger enterprise is not discussed 
in her book.

So why does inverse translation continue to have such a bad 
reputation? Rather than looking to Translation Studies for an answer, I 
would contend that it is more appropriate to examine contemporary 
professional discourse in translation. Recently a guide to buying 
translations has been co-published by three major national bodies 
representing professional translation and linguistic interests, a 
publication which subsequently gained the endorsement of FIT, the 
International Federation of Translators (Durban 2003). In it we find the 
highly dogmatic statements that ''professional translators work into 
their native language'' and that ''a translator who flouts this basic rule 
is likely to be ignorant of other important quality issues as well'' 
(Durban, unpaginated). This is particularly disheartening for those of 
us in communities of languages of limited diffusion ((LLDs) who know 
there will never be enough native English speakers to cater for the 
demand for translation into English from our communities' languages. 
Yet when we train translators to work from their LLD mother tongue 
into languages such as English, the implications of the 'traditional 
axioms' are that they will be doomed at the outset to be denied 
adequate professional recognition in major-language translation 
communities. Without in any way wishing to belittle Pokorn's 
achievement in this study, changing mindsets within the TS community 
appears far easier -- following groundwork already laid by the likes of 
Campbell, Grosman et al., Kelly et al., Pokorn herself, and others -- 
than does changing the mindset of the professional community. As 
such, I feel that the orientation of Pokorn's challenge might have been 
better refocused from academic to professional circles.

This criticism may impinge on the study more generally -- in some 
ways the focus is overly theoretical in its reliance of applied linguistic 
notions of nativeness, to the neglect of messier real-life 
considerations. For example, one extremely important point that both 
Pokorn and much of the research she quotes fail to address is the 
relevance of L1 training in second- and third-level education to the 
development of mother tongue competence (and, concomitantly, L2 
training on the part of the inverse translator, though this is a point to 
be developed elsewhere). If one were to pursue the implications of 
some of the loftier claims of those who believe that translation should 
only be into the L1, then it would stand to reason that absolutely every 
native speaker has the same literary potential as the greatest literary 
geniuses of their native literary culture. Yet practising English teachers 
will be quite ready to admit that not every student pursuing A-level 
English in England, for example, is a budding Shakespeare (or -- to 
even further emphasise the absurdity of this stance -- a budding 
Conrad, Nabokov, or any of the other non-native English users who 
have enriched the English literary canon). The wide range of abilities 
of such students in all cultures is itself testament to the fact that, put 
simply, some of us are better with language than others, just as some 
of us are better at maths, physics, geography, etc. 

Yet even Pokorn herself makes statements which seem to challenge 
this, such as when she claims that adults approach learning a foreign 
language differently to children because of their ''...having a perfect 
knowledge of at least one language, their mother tongue...'' (15). 
Without even mentioning more anomalous examples such as 
language attrition (though language attrition is far from an anomaly for 
many L1 translators working in L2 environments) the mere fact of 
variable student performance on second-level language and literature 
courses puts paid to many of the myths of native-speaker authority, 
such as that of a 'perfect' knowledge. 

While I would not wish to claim a close parallel between the two 
discussions, I can see discourse on this subject following a slightly 
similar path to that surrounding native speaker authority in L2 
teaching. For example, many of us still recall the time, following the 
collapse of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s and early '90s, when 
native Anglophones flocking to Eastern Europe to teach English could 
often claim a huge, and often largely unearned, authority within the 
educational establishment there, simple by dint of their authority in 
their native language. Sixteen years on, many involved in the TEFL 
industries in these countries now realise that native competence in a 
language is often no replacement for methodological competence as a 
language teacher. Of course the native translator debate is different 
to this in many ways, but one can see it oriented towards the same 
horses-for-courses conclusion (which is also Pokorn's conclusion): the 
best person for the job is the person who does the job best. 
Attempting to guess who this may be at the outset on the sole basis of 
mother tongue background is often as fallacious as it is 
presumptuous. 

There are other shortcomings in Pokorn's study. While some 
presentation of Cankar's biographical and literary background is 
desirable, too much space is devoted to it, and, arguably, to the 
author's own analysis of his translations in general. More significantly, 
however, I had a problem with her decision that the texts to be 
analysed were to be literary. Pokorn defends herself on this point with 
the post-structuralist claim that traditional boundaries between fiction 
and non-fiction are blurred in twentieth-century literature and with the 
argument that '''literature' is a functional term and not an ontological 
one [...] which echoes Toury's definition of translations as texts 
presented or regarded as translations within the target culture'' (41). 
Nevertheless, the selected passages were all linguistically highly 
suggestive of their providence being fiction. Also in Pokorn's defence, 
one could add that her decision to choose Cankar (in spite of it 
probably having been born of necessity -- there are simply more 
translations of his works than of any other Slovene writer apparently, 
thus more easily facilitating comparison between multiple translations) 
is significant in another respect as well. Cankar is a writer with a highly 
distinctive literary style: he ''admitted that if having to choose between 
grammatical correctness and stylistic clarity and beauty, he would 
immediately opt for grammatical irregularity'' (52). Initially I was 
concerned that this would skew results of the experiment, with 
duplication of this grammatical irregularity in English being 
misinterpreted as non-native translation strategy. My fears in this 
respect ultimately proved unfounded -- far more relevant were the 
strategies of foreignisation and domestication adopted by individual 
translators. 

Yet more worrying is the manner in which literature is a discourse 
which naturally privileges the native speaker in the first place in its 
common assumption of a native-speaker audience. (It could be 
argued, for example, that Pokorn's decision to replicate this receptive 
environment by using exclusively native-speaker subjects itself 
indirectly valorises native-speaker authority, just as the subjects are 
called on to valorise the translations in their assessments of their 
authorship.) Literary translation represents such a small and rarefied 
position within the translation industry that translators who work in this 
area are often highly exceptional themselves (linguistically, 
'interculturally') in the first place. As such, whether one wishes to 
''challenge the traditional axioms'' of TS (as Pokorn does), or of 
professional translation practice (as I want to), it would be more 
interesting to investigate the functionality of inverse translations of run-
of-the-mill, non-literary texts. Better still, one could investigate, say, 
non-native technical texts which display language which is *obviously* 
that of an L2 translator, but which nonetheless function efficiently in 
their target cultures. 

The kind of research I have in mind here dates as far back as 1978, 
when Karl-Johan Ahlsved published an excellent paper on why 
Finnish translators were better at translating Finnish forestry texts 
than non-Finns -- what one might lose on grammaticality, one would 
often gain in clarity, with Finnish translators being less inclined to 
introduce literary caprices or more idiomatic turns of phrase than 
might native English-speaking translators. Non-literary translation into 
English presumes a native-Anglophone readership to far less a 
degree than does literary translation. In this respect an interesting 
point has been noted by Gerard McAlester in his criticism of Christiana 
Nord's skopos-theory account of translation evaluation: ''it seems to 
equate adequacy with (near) perfection. [...] She does not indicate 
that there may be some level of adequacy that is acceptable without 
being complete'' (McAlester 233). Such considerations are not within 
the remit of Pokorn's study however, which is a shame as their power 
to legitimise inverse translation might well be greater than those of 
native assessments of inverse literary translation.

Yet, this is not to detract from the significance of Pokorn's study -- as 
only the second monograph in English devoted to this subject (to my 
knowledge), it is extremely significant and points the direction for 
much of the future research which needs to be conducted in this field. 
To end on a positive note, I found it interesting that at no point is it 
stated as to whether Pokorn herself is a 'native speaker' of English -- 
the brief biographical snippets which we can ascertain lead us to 
suppose that her first language is probably Slovene. If so (and making 
obvious allowances for the distinction between linguistic competence 
in writing and translation) the book itself stands as an eloquent 
testament to the abilities of non-native speakers working in their L2, 
presenting a prose style which never fails to be clear and engaging. 

REFERENCES

Ahlsved, Karl-Johan. (1978) ''Translating into the Translator's Non-
Primary Language.'' Translating -- A Profession: Proceedings of the 
Eighth World Congress of the International Federation of Translators, 
ed. Paul A. Horguelin. Paris: FIT / Ottawa: Conseil des traducteurs et 
interprètes du Canada. 183-188.

Campbell, Stuart. (1998) Translation into the Second Language. New 
York: Addison Wesley Longman Ltd.

Durban, Chris. (2003) Translation, Getting it Right: A Guide to Buying 
Translations. Milton Keynes / London / Paris: Institute of Translation 
and Interpreting / The National Centre for Languages / Société 
Française des Traducteurs. Available online at 
http://www.fit-ift.org/download/getright-en.pdf

Grosman, Meta, Mira Kadric, Irena Kovacic, & Mary Snell-Hornby 
(eds.) (2000) Translation into Non-Mother Tongues: In Professional 
Practice and Training. Tübingen: Stauffenberg.

Kearns, John. (in press) ''Translate and Be Damned! Professional 
Recognition for Translators Working into Their Non-Native 
Languages.'' Warsztaty Translatorskie V / Workshop in Translation 5. 
Lublin / Ottawa: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu 
Lubelskiego, Lublin / Slavic Research Group, University of Ottawa.

Kelly, Dorothy, Anne Martin, Marie-Luise Nobs, Dolores Sanchez, 
Catherine Way (eds). (2003) La direccionalidad en traducción e 
interpretación. Perspectivas teoréticas, profesionales y didacticas. 
Granada: Atrio.

McAlester, Gerard. (2000) ''The Evaluation of Translation into a 
Foreign Language.'' Developing Translation Competence, ed. 
Christina Schäffner and Beverly Adab. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John 
Benjamins. 229-241.

Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja. (2002) ''Translationese -- A Myth or an 
Empirical Fact? A Study into the Linguistic Identifiability of Translated 
Language.'' Target, 14:2, 2002. 207-220. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

John Kearns studied at the Universities of Kent and Manchester in 
England and subsequently worked for several years as a translator 
and translator trainer in Poland. He is currently researching curriculum 
design for translator training in the context of the Bologna Process 
and divides his time between Ireland and Poland. He is on the 
committee of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association (ITIA), 
and editor of a forthcoming ITIA publication on translator and 
interpreter training. He also edits the quarterly Bulletin for the 
International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies 
(www.iatis.org). Currently he is also developing a bibliography of 
Polish translation studies, in association with St. Jerome Press in 
Manchester and UJ and APK in Kraków, Poland.





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