Dolet’s Five Principles to Translate Well
1. Perfectly, the translator must understand the material and sense of the
original author, although he thus should feel free to clarify obscurities.
2. The translator should have a perfect knowledge of both target language and
source language, so as not to lessen the majesty of the language.
3. word-for-word renderings must be evade.
4.Latinate and unusual forms must be evade
5.The translator should assemble and liaise words eloquently to avoid clumsiness.
the concern is to reproduce the sense and to evade word-for word translation,
but the stress on eloquent and natural target language form was rooted in a
desire to reinforce the structure and independence of the new slang French
language.
Tytler
In English, perhaps the first systematic study of translation after Dryden is
Alexander Fraser Tytler's 'Essay on the principles of translation' (1797).
Rather than Dryden's author-oriented description ('write as the original author
would have written had he known the target language'), Tytler's definition of a
'good translation' in TL-reader-oriented terms to be:
Tytler definition: “That in which the merit of the original work is so completely
transfused into another language as to be as distinctly apprehended, and as
strongly felt, by a native of the country to which that language belongs as it is by
those who speak the language of the original work”.
Tytler general 'laws' or 'rules':
Tytler has three general 'laws' or 'rules':
1. A complete transcript of the ideas of the original work must be given in the
translation.
2. The style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of
the original.
3. All the ease of the original composition should be in the translation.
Tytler himself, recognizes that the first two laws represent the two widely
different opinions about translation. They can be seen as the poles of faithfulness
of form and faithfulness of content, or even reformulations of the sense-for-sense
and word-for-word died of Cicero and St Jerome.
However, Tytler ranks his three laws in order of comparative importance. Such
hierarchical categorizing gains in importance in more modern translation theory;
for instance, the discussion of the 'loss' in translation and the 'gain' is in some
ways presaged by Tytler's suggestion that the rank order of the laws should be a
means ofdetermining decisions when a 'sacrifice' has to be made. Thus, ease of
composition would be sacrificed if necessary for manner, and a departure would
be made from manner in the interests of sense.
Schleiermacher and the valorization of the foreign
While the 17th century had been about imitation and the 18th century about the
translator's duty to recreate the spirit of the source text (ST) for the reader of the
time, the Romanticism of the early 19th nineteenth century discussed the issues of
translatability or untranslatability.
The German theologian and translator Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote a highly
influential treatise on translation (On 1813): On the different methods of
translating', Schleiermacher is recognized as the founder of modern Protestant
theology and of modern hermeneutics, a romantic approach to interpretation
based on the individual's inner feeling and understanding, not only on the
absolute truth .
Schleiermacher distinguishes two different types of translator working at first on
two different types of text, these are:
1.the 'Dolmetscher', who translates commercial texts.
2.the 'ubersetzer‘, who works on scholarly and artistic texts.
According to Schleiermacher, the real question is how to bring the source text
(ST) writer and the target text (TT) reader together. So he moves beyond the
issues of word-for-word and sense-for-sense, literal, faithful and free translation,
and considers there to be only two paths open for the 'true‘ translator:
Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the
reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and
moves the writer toward the reader."
(Schleiermacher 1813/1992: 41-2)
Schleiermacher's preferred the first strategy, (moving the reader towards the
writer). This entails not writing as the author would have done had he written in
German but rather 'giving the reader the same impression that he as a German
would receive reading the work in the original language' to achieve this, the
translator must adopt an 'alienating' as opposed to 'naturalizing' method of
translation, orienting himself or herself by the language and content of the source
text (ST). He\she must valorize the foreign and transfer that into the TL.
There are several consequences of this Schleiermacher's approach:
1.If the translator is to seek to communicate the same impression which he\ she
received from the source text (ST), it will also depend on the level of education
and understanding among the target text (TT) readership, and this is likely to
differ from the own understanding of the translator.
2. A special language of translation may be necessary, for example compensating
in one place with an imaginative word where elsewhere the translator has to
make do with a hackneyed expression that cannot convey the impression of the
foreign.
Schleiermacher's influence has been enormous. Indeed, Kittel and Polterman
(1997: 424) claim that 'practically' every modern translation theory – at least in
the German-language area, in one way or another, responds to Schleiermacher's
hypotheses.
