Today, we are questioning whether linguistics is an essential part of translation. In recent years, some scholars who support free translation have repeatedly raised this issue with the public and called for an end to the linguistic methods of translation. Some people firmly believe that translation is an art, so linguistics is neither useful nor useful. If we look at translation as a whole, this statement is wrong, including scientific translation. In scientific translation, meaning is strict and limited, and freedom is limited. In this case, flexibility is neither needed nor appreciated.
But even in literary translation, linguistics is hardly a burden. Wang Zongyan pointed out? If someone regards linguistics as a set of rules to regulate language, then the translator is likely to yawn bored. If it means using words and dialects to adapt to a certain situation, then nothing can stop the translator from embracing linguistics. (Wang 199 1: 38). Controversy about ... Literally? Relative to? Free? Translation has a long history and both sides have convincing supporters. For example, ancient western scholars such as Erasmus, Augustine and others all agreed with literal translation. Among the early translators in China, Kumarajiva was regarded as a liberal, while Xuanzang was rigid. In modern China, Yan Fu advocated interpretive translation, while Lu Xun preferred clumsy translation to free but inaccurate translation. There is nothing wrong with these positions. When these translators emphasize a lot of free translation, they never deny the possibility of literal translation, and vice versa. Only when the discussion turns to peer-to-peer translation will the problem arise.
The issue of equivalence has caused great controversy. Some people think that the equivalence of language elements has nothing to do with the environment in which they occur. Based on this assumption, some? Literally? Translators try to decompose the text into individual elements, hoping to find the equivalent elements in the target language. This is a naive idea. Jakobson (197 1: 262) pointed out? Difference equivalence is the fundamental problem of language and the focus of linguistics. ? He doesn't mean? Equivalence? But for what? Equivalence in difference? As the primary problem. Nida is also misunderstood by many people as his? Equivalence? He thinks this means. Translation is to reproduce the natural equivalent closest to the source information in the target language, first of all, meaning, and then style? (1969: 12). He further concluded? Absolute equivalence in translation is impossible? (1984: 14). De Bogland and dressler believe that the success or failure of either the free method or the literal method is uncertain. Literally? Translation may be clumsy, even inexplicable, and excessive? Free? People may make the original text disintegrate and disappear completely. For them, the equivalence between the translation and the original can only be achieved through the experience of the participants (see de Beaugrande and Dressler1981:216-217). Catford (1965: 27) expressed the same concern. An empirical phenomenon found by comparing the source language with the target language. ? When quoting the above example, I definitely didn't insist on untranslatability. I mean, the translator should integrate his own experience and processing activities into the text: solve problems, reduce ambiguity and explain any differences or discontinuities. Linguistic knowledge can help us treat different genres in different ways and always realize that there is no exact equivalence, only approximation. Therefore, enlargement and simplification become acceptable.
If we agree that texts can be translated, in what ways does linguistics contribute to translation? To answer this question, we should look at the acceptance of western linguistics in China and its influence on translation. It was not until the end of last century that Ma Jianzhong published a grammar book, Ma Shi Wen Tong, that a systematic and scientific study of Chinese began to appear? Ma Shiwentong? 1898, China was the first to use the grammar of Indo-European as a model. Language studies are in turn influenced by China's translation studies. In Marsh Winton, the main emphasis is on the use of morphology, which accounts for six-sevenths of the book. Influenced by the mainstream of morphological research, words are considered as the smallest meaningful unit, so sentences are logical combinations of various specific types of words. At that time, translation was mainly based on the unit of words. In the west, the translation of the Bible provides a good example, just like the translation of Buddhist scriptures in China.
It was not until the end of19th century that some linguists realized that sentences were more than a summary of the ordered words they contained. The Prague School was founded in A.D. 1920, and has made considerable contributions to syntactic research. According to the functional analysis method of Prague School, a sentence can be divided into two parts: theme and rheme. Theme and rheme are opposite, just like the difference between topic and content, it is defined as the part of a sentence that makes the least contribution to promoting the communication process. On the other hand, rheme is the part of a sentence that can promote the communication process most and has the highest degree of communicative initiative. These two terms are helpful to enlighten the process of Chinese-English translation.
In the mid-1990s, with the establishment of Chomsky's transformational generative grammar, syntactic research reached its peak. The theory of deep structure and surface structure of this language has a great influence on translation. Nida relies heavily on this theory to develop his? Analysis-transfer-reconstruction? Translation mode. At the same time, some linguists in China tried to raise language research to a higher level. Li jinxi (1982) expanded the role of sentence research in his book A New Chinese Grammar, and two-thirds of the book was devoted to sentence-making or syntax. He wrote it? No word can be recognized except in the context of a sentence. ? This study was later improved by other grammarians, including Lv Shuxiang and Wang Li.
With the development of linguistic research, some scholars put forward sentence-based translation. It was Tang who first applied this theory to translation in his article? On translation. ? He claims? ] Translation should be based on sentences ...] Translation should be faithful not to a single word, but to the meaning conveyed by the word? (Lin 1984: r 3). Therefore, the importance of context in understanding sentences is emphasized. Professor Chao, a professor at Harvard University and a scholar in China, often forgets this point and thinks that language is independent and self-sufficient. In fact, it is obvious that when we translate a sentence, we rely on its context; When we interpret a discourse, we depend on its context (see Chao 1967). When a sentence is deleted from the text, it usually becomes ambiguous due to lack of context. Therefore, translation becomes difficult.
1960 s, people began to realize that sentence-based language research was not even sufficient. The full text should be studied comprehensively. Simple sentences like this? George passed? There may be different interpretations in different contexts. If the context is the context of the exam, it means that George did well in an exam; In the card game, this means that George refused his chance to bid; In sports, this means that the ball is passed to another player. Without context, how can we decide translation? Therefore, linguists turn their attention to text research and discourse analysis. Since then, text linguistics has become more and more popular. Van Dick is a pioneer in this field, and his four-volume Handbook of Discourse Analysis is of great value. Halliday's introduction of English cohesion and functional grammar is helpful for us to better understand English at the textual level. It is worth noting that de Beaugrande and Dressler (198 1) have made a comprehensive and systematic study of the text, which is beneficial to translation studies. In 1978, De Bogland wrote a book called Factors in Poetry Translation Theory. This book didn't become very popular because it limited the discussion to translating poems. At the same time, books on linguistic translation methods were also introduced into China, such as the works of Eugene Nida, Peter Newmark, J.C. Catterford and George Muning. These books have greatly promoted the application of linguistic theories in China's translation studies.
The translation research methods of texts or discourses can't keep up with the development of text linguistics. Some studies still remain at the syntactic or semantic level, even if text devices are adopted. When talking about the translation units of words and texts, Nida wrote:
... most people naively think that language is a word, and this common default assumption leads to translation involving replacing words in language A with words in language B. Do your duty? The sharper this translation is. In other words, traditional translation focuses on words. Recognizing that this is not a large enough unit, the focus shifts to this sentence. However, expert translators and linguists have been able to prove that, in turn, a single sentence is not enough. Emphasis should be placed on paragraphs and, to some extent, on the whole text. (Nida and Tabber 1969: 152)
From this sentence, we can see that Nida believes that a text is not just a paragraph, but an article with a beginning and an end. Nida himself has never applied text linguistics to translation. If we use his terms to explain the text, it may be a little confusing, because text analysis is not only based on the study of larger language structure.
Some scholars in China really try to apply text linguistics to translation theory and practice. Wang Bingqin's article (1987) is the first of its kind. He said that his purpose is to study and discover the rules governing the internal structure of a text according to text linguistics. He analyzed countless examples by text analysis, but unfortunately, all the samples he collected were descriptions of landscapes or quotations from scholars' books-there was no dialogue, and there was no implication or force in the language. He failed to provide various examples. Therefore, his research results are largely limited to China's ancient rhetorical texts (see Wang1981; Luo 1994).
Scholars such as He Ziran apply pragmatism to translation. He's article (1992) puts forward two new terms. Pragmatic linguistics? And then what? Social pragmatics? Translated, it refers to. Research on language exertion or language use from the perspective of language source? Where to? Pragmatic research stems from the use of language in social and cultural environment. ? He explored the possibility of applying pragmatics to translation in order to achieve pragmatic equivalence between the source text and the target text. That is to reproduce the information carried by the source language itself and the meaning carried by the source language in its context and culture. In this article, he tries to distinguish? Pragmatic linguistics? From where? Social pragmatics? But finally admitted it? In fact, it is sometimes difficult to draw a line between pragmatic linguistics and sociopragmatics. ? Nevertheless, he still insists that the application of pragmatic translation method is beneficial and even necessary. Ke Liwen (1992) believes that in a broad sense, semantics combines semantics and pragmatics, and studying semantics is helpful to understand, explain and solve some problems encountered in translation. In this article, he studied four semantic terms? Meaning and reference, secondary meaning, change of meaning? And then what? Context? Examples illustrate the importance of mastering some common sense of semantics and understanding the relationship between semantics and translation. This article is so clearly written that readers can easily get inspiration from it.
These linguistic methods provide new ideas for language standards. Shindaya? Yan fu defined it. China scholars began to criticize the fuzziness of these three criteria and tried to give them concrete meaning through the theory of western linguistics. As a result, the contents of these three traditional standards have been greatly enriched, especially the theory of effect equivalence. In a broad sense, this means that the target language should be equivalent to the source language from the perspectives of semantics, pragmatics and style. But we still can't evaluate translation in a very scientific way. Therefore, China scholars Shou-Li Fan, Xu Shenghuan and Rem began to make quantitative analysis of translation, and used the fuzzy set theory in mathematics to complete their analysis. Fan has published several articles in this research field. His 1987 and 1990 articles evaluate translation according to the number of faithfulness. Xu's article? Mathematical model for evaluating translation quality? A normal mathematical model is given. He pointed out that due to the uncertainty and randomness of human thinking process, it is difficult to make an absolutely accurate evaluation of the translation with this model. To make this analysis more accurate and objective, further research is needed.
The unit in translation is a hard bone to chew. Without solving this problem, any translation study will be inadequate. So far, few people have focused their research on this field. Nida thinks that the unit should be a sentence, and in a sense, it should be a text. Barkhudarov (1993: 40), a Soviet linguist and translation theorist, holds that:
Translation is the process of converting a phonetic product (or text) produced in one language into a phonetic product (or text) in another language. ] [...] The most important task of translators who perform the transformation process and theorists who describe or create the transformation process model is to establish the smallest unit of translation, which is commonly called the translation unit in the source text.
Although he noticed the importance of the translation unit in a text and thought that it could be a unit at any language level, he did not point out what a text is and how to measure it in translation. In this case, Halliday's understanding of clauses may be very important. For him, the clause is the basic unit. He distinguished three functions of clauses: textual function, interpersonal function and conceptual function. Halliday believes that these functions are not possessed by words or phrases. But he is not very successful in analyzing the relationship between clauses and texts (see Hallida y 1985). In China, some people try to solve this problem. Wang Dechun (1987: 10) more or less agrees with Bakhudarov's view that translation units cannot be limited to sentences. In some ways, phonemes, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs and even text can be used as a unit. At this point, we can't find anything special about text translation except taking the text as the highest level in the translation unit. This is not the purpose of text linguistics or discourse analysis. If we want to apply these to the theory and practice of translation, we need a textual approach.