NATURALNESS OF TRANSLATION?

In his article “Principles of Correspondence”, Eugene Nida discusses translation from the perspective of equivalence, formal and dynamic. While formal equivalence means the closest possible match of form and content between source-text and target-text, dynamic equivalence stands for the closest natural equivalent to the source-language message, thus the equivalence of effect on reader of target-text.

Dynamic equivalence translation is based primarily on receptive response, which makes it a communicative oriented approach. Then, the aim of translation is to maintain a relationship of equivalence between the source and the target texts (i.e., both texts communicate the same message) and this brings about various constraints on the translator, such as adherence to the rules of grammar, literary traditions and idioms of the source language. The impact of the original should be re-established in such a style that it must look natural in the receptor language. For Nida, a natural translation requires conformance to the receptor language and culture in which the quality of linguistic appropriateness is only noticeable when it is absent, resulting in a translation that does not carry any trace of foreign. This brings in the mind Lawrence Venuti’s idea of transparency effect as an outcome of the fluent discourse. Venuti holds that the absence of linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes a translated text so transparent as to give the reader illusory impression that it is the “original”. However, Nida postulates the impossibility of both creating such an illusory effect on the lexical level and eliminating the traces of foreign setting, especially when terms that identify cultural specialties come into view. He also asserts that it’s the same way with basic themes and accounts that are immune to naturalization process where two different cultures are concerned. This reminds me of a short story called “Shakespeare in the Bush” in which the anthropologist Laura Bohannan talks of her attempts at telling the story of Hamlet to an African tribe. Since they do not believe in the survival after death of any individuating part of the personality, the members of the tribe give her a hard time in trying to find a semantic equivalence of the word “ghost” in their culture to no avail. Even her oral “footnotes” are not enough to explain this phenomenon, which causes the question of translatability arise once again here. Nida’s answer to this question seems to be the employment of footnotes in such situations though, in my opinion, which might be at the expense of quality of “naturalness” of expression.

Another key to a truly natural translation for Nida is “what it avoids than what it actually states”. If the translator avoids severe anomalies, then the reader feels at home with the context. The exclusion of crude vulgarities, slang, onomatopoeic expressions and anachronisms where they would totally look out of context is what Nida suggests for a natural work. In this sense, I think, Anton Popovic’s idea of presence and absence of shifts in several layers of translation is relevant. As he puts it, “All that appears as new with respect to the original, or fails to appear where it might have been expected may be interpreted as a shift.” For Popovic, the shifts of the basic semantic units of the source text in another linguistic structure moves along the axis of faithfulness / freedom. In that respect, the translator sets out to be “faithful” but is also comparatively free in his treatment of details to achieve the ideal, the faithful reproduction, which forces him to look for corresponding expressions in the recipient language that concerns the resulting impression on reader’s perception. Anton Popovic calls this as “functional faithfulness” which I think is quite similar to Nida’s “dynamic equivalence” theory. In other words, the comparison of the relative responses of both the source-text audience and the target text receptors determines the validity of the translation in terms of both form and content. However, how this evaluation will be carried out is of question since determining the real effects on the target-text audience is not always easy. Therefore, one solution can be the equivalence of the intended message by the original author and the translator, which provides the basis for the principle of “similar response”.

Another factor that enhances the naturalness of translation, for Nida, is the level of experience and the capacity for decoding on the target audience’s part. In that aspect, although this idea somewhat bears resemblance to Schleiermacher’s view of an educated reader, it’s obvious that the reason behind it is not of romantic purposes like creating an “ideal” reader platform but of appropriateness of the message, such as the texts intended for audience’s belonging to scientific world or the ones for more general audiences. This brings us to the conclusion that the level of appropriateness may vary in accordance with not only the prospective readers’ capacity and ability of decoding but also their potential interest.