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基于功能語(yǔ)言學(xué)的翻譯評(píng)估模式構(gòu)建上

2021-02-11 23:32 作者:灝瀚曦和 0人讀過(guò) | 我要投稿

Abstract

This essay aims to explore the standard of a classic goal for translation -- “equivalence of meaning” through the perspective of language functions. Through exploration and study, this essay is about to put forward a preliminary and reasonable translation assessment model and method. In the essay, the studies of functionalist translation theorists are briefly reviewed. During the revision, drawbacks of traditional functionalist theories are pointed out. In the first stage of exploration, Halliday’s language function theory is used as theoretical basis. In the third part, the articles elaborates the origin of “equivalence in meaning” and clarifies the inherent disadvantage of traditional structuralist approach in translation studies. Through philosophical analysis, the rationality of functional approach is strengthened and further analysis structure on the basis of Halliday’s language function theory is put forward. Finally, through the practice of translation assessment, the evaluation results generated by the structure meet our expectation and common sense, thus being reasonable to some extent.

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Key Words: language function, equivalence in meaning, translation quality assessment

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Chapter I Introduction

?? This essay aims to study the “equivalence of meaning” during translating with the perspective of language functions and tries to establish a practical standard for translation quality assessment with functionalism approach. However, it doesn’t mean that this essay will introduce a structure that contains everything. Actually, there has not been any “one solution fits all” in the history of translation studies. Therefore, in order to make the structure more pragmatic and meaningful, this essay only focuses on non-literary written translation.

Overall, the main body of this essay contains five parts. The first part is introduction. The Second part is literature review, in which many influential functional theory from home and abroad are comprehensively discussed. The third part is theoretical analysis. In this part, the philosophical basis of functional approach in translation studies is discussed and a brief introduction of Halliday’s systematic functional grammar theory is given. Also, in this part this essay combines Halliday’s theory with other functionalism scholars’ methods to produce a relatively reasonable evaluation model. In the fourth part, this essay examines the model with empirical method and the results of assessment are reasonable and within expectation. In the last part, this essay gives an overall self-reflection.

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Chapter II Literature Review

Achieving “equivalence in meaning/sense” has long been the essential element that directly determines the quality of translation activities. While there are many approaches to evaluate whether this goal is reached, the functionalist approach remains one of the most prominent among both translators and translation theorists. This chapter mainly introduces both foreign and domestic theories that link language functions with translation studies, especially translation quality assessment.

2.1 Overseas Studies on Language Functions and Translation.

Many famous translation theorists have tried to link translation with language functions to build their own theory system. One of the big names is Eugene A. Nida. Nida always uphold the idea that translation is a kind of cross-culture communicative activity and the quality of translation is determined by the extent that the target text fulfills its communicative functions. In his book From One Language to Another, he defined the communicative function of language into nine categories: expressive function, cognitive function, interpersonal function, informative function, imperative function, performance function, emotive function, metalingual function and aesthetic.(Tan, 2005:136-138) Then he developed his functional equivalence which is based on the principle of equivalent effect where the relationship between massage and receptor should be the same as that exists between the original receptors and message. (Nida, 1964 a:159) According to his theory, Nida put forward four fundamental standards to identify what is successful translation: (1) making sense;(2) conveying the spirit and manner of the original; (3)having natural and easy expression;(4) producing similar response. Although Nida’s suggestions and standard are very insightful in guiding translation activities, they are still too vague and subjective since there is no scientifically set parameters and they are at least not enough to guide scientific translation quality accessment.

Peter Newmark in his A Textbook of Translation takes Bühler’s functional theory of language which was adapted by Jakobson and puts forward five most useful language functions in translation activities: the expressive, informative, vocative, phatic, aesthetic and metalingual function. (Newmark, 1988:39-43) However, unlike Nida, Newmark thinks it’s an illusion to achieve equivalent response and functional effect during tranlsation practices and he thinks that the extent to which the gap between the original text and the tranlation can be narrowed is determined by various factors. Then he categorizes translation into two kinds: semantic translation and communication translation. The former aims at the accuracy of reproducing the significance of the original text and the latter focuses on achieving the accuracy of communication of source text in target text. Typically, Newmark points out that word-for-word translation is appropriate for both kinds of translation. (Newmark 1981:39) Newmark successfully takes one step forward in achieving equivalence in meaning more scientifically, but he has also long been criticized by his strong prescriptivism which means he usually prescribes what is the right way to carry out translation under a certain situation.

Although Nida and Newmark both carefully and precisely defined multiple language functions in order to cover every situation in translation activities, their functional theories have similar drawbacks. Firstly, in their books, they only describe what a certain kind of language function is like and do not tell how to evaluate how big proportion a certain language function takes in a text. Secondly, they just “borrow” ideas from linguists or philosophers because they think it is useful to apply such ideas in translation. As a result, they can only provide a perspective to look into translation instead of a way to carry out translation or translation assessment, because according to their theory people have to grasp text type by their sense instead of by a set of relatively objective standard.

Catford was one of the earliest scholars who adopted Halliday’s SFG(systemic functional grammar) in translation study. Catford makes an important distinction between formal correspondence and textual equivalence. The former emphasizes the correspondence of linguistic code units of the ST and TT and the latter the equivalence in meaning of linguistic expressions. He typically stresses the shift of category which includes structural shift, class shift, rank shift and intra-system shift. Here he adopts several concepts and ideas derived from Halliday’s theory to build his theoretical structure but many criticized his theory as too idealized and subjective as most of his case study are invented and not taken from actual tranlation practice. (Munday, 2012:P88-90) Also his theory always focuses on small linguistic units like the “a”, “the” in English and “l(fā)e”, “l(fā)a”, “l(fā)es” in French and seldom studies translation at sentence or text level.

Scholars in German functionalism school of translation studies deeply combine language function and text typology with translation research. On the basis of Karl Bühler’s functional theory, which defined language functions into three kinds: expression, representation and appeal (Bühler, 1990:35), Reiss develops three types of text: content-focused, form-focused and appeal-focused, which were then further identified as expressive, informative and operative text (Reiss, 1971:24-38). Reiss thinks that translation techniques and rules were chosen on the basis of text type. Different techniques and rules are applied to different text types. At the same time, Reiss thinks that many texts are mixed-type. Reiss develops the basic structure for translation practice and translation assessment by clarifying the relationship among translation practice, translation standard and text types on the basis of language function. One thing brilliant is that she notice that there is something “outside” the text and she distincts her standard as intralinguistic criteria which focuses on semantic, grammartical and stylistic features and extralinguistic criteria which highlights situation, theme, time and place, etc. But her theory also has obvious drawbacks. One of the criticism is that her three functions can not cover all functions of language (Munday,2012:115-116). More importantly, what Reiss’s theory wants to achieve is a set of completely dominant standard throughout a certain translation task. For example, once we identify one text as informative text, then we should carry out the standard of informative text translation at each level of the text regardless of the linguistic material itself. Besides, many texts are mixed-type and sometimes even one sentence contains more than one types like Chinese prose. Reiss’s theory does not offer solutions for such mixed-type texts.

Other German functionalist scholars put forward more inclusive theories on the basis of Reiss’s theory. One of the most important figures is Chritiane Nord who establish the theory called “Skopostheory plus rule of fidelity”. Nord highlights the communicative function of language and points out that “what translator should do is to produce a text that is at least likely to be meaningful to target-culture receivers, which means the receiver should be able to understand it and it should make sense in the communicative situation and culture in which it is received” (Nord, 2001:32). Overall, the German functionalists notice the important role of language functions in translation process but do not use language function to build an relatively objective translation assessment structure.

Juliane House combines text typology with Halliday’s systemic functional grammar (SFG) to build her translation assessment model. She uses transitivity, modality and cohesion as three major parameters to evaluate the transformation of field, tenor and mode of the original text, by which the equivalence of the three metafunctions of language: ideational, interpersonal and textual function can be examined. House holds the view that equivalence in meaning means equivalence in linguistic functions and thinks that equivalent functions should be achieved with equivalent linguistic methods. The more equivalent function and methods are achieved, the closer the meaning of TT is to that of ST. (Heng, 2011:46) But House focuses too much on the effect of equivalent effect of linguistic units and neglects the meaning of the overall text and there are too many parameters in her assessment model(eight in total) which makes the whole system too complicated and non-operational. (Si, 2005:79-84).

2.2 Domestic studies on Language Functions and Translation.

Professor Hu Zhuanglin is one of the earliest scholars who link translation with language functions. In his book A Survey of Systemic Functional Grammar, he points out that translation aims to achieve equivalence in meaning between the ST and TT and such equivalent relationship contains not only equal information but three layers of equivalent meaning: ideational meaning(information); interpersonal meaning (modality, purpose etc.) and textual meaning (coherence and cohesion). Typically, he thinks that a good version of translation should achieve good equivalence in all three layers. (Hu et al, 1989:188-189) But Hu mainly gives a SFG perspective to look into translation study and does not go further to build an evaluation system on the basis of Halliday’s theory. Also, most of his discusion looks at macro and general perspective of translation instead of actual translation practice, though it is still very meaningful for the perspective it already pointed out. (Si,2005:61-65)

Professor Liu Miqing also talks about translation and functions. He thinks that in terms of English-Chinese translation, there are three layers of functions that good translation needs to achieve: the basic level (the transformation of information), middle level (to achieve communicative purpose) and top level (achieve similar aesthetic effect). (Liu 1989) Here, it is obvious that his opinion is very much the same as Yan Fu’s faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance.?

Professor Si Xianzhu is a very important scholar in combining translation study with SFG and register analysis. He has published over 10 essays on Chinese Translators Journal and Journal of Foreign Language Teaching. Most of his ideas in his essays are concluded in his book Translation Studies: A Functional Linguistics Approach. His assessment model is based on several assumptions. Firstly, he assumes that the three meta-functions of language and the elements like transitivity and mood that reflect the meta-functions have universality. Secondly, he thinks the meaning or function of an entire text is shaped by the organic combination of multiple clauses. Thirdly, he assumes that the text typology’s theory on the basis of language functions is still applicable.（Si, 2007:7-9）Basically, he agrees with Hu Zhuanglin’s idea that equivalence can be achieved when the three layers of meaning (ideational, interpersonal and textual) are all achieved. He mainly focuses on achieving the first two equivalence as he believes that once the ideational and interpersonal function are achieved, the textual function is thereupon automatically achieved. In terms equivalence of ideational function, it means to reach similar effect in the transitivity system in ST and TT. As for interpersonal function, the assessment system examines the effect of the mood and modality system in ST and TT. Therefore, in this sense, once the ST and TT achieve close effect in both transitivity and modality system, we can say that the meanings of the two texts are to some extent equivalent. Undoutedbly, Professor Si has provided a practical and systemetic model for assessment which actually contributes major part of the theoretical basis. However,? the system stress too much about its universality and it assumes that the three functions are purely harmonious during translation process so that we can achieve them one by one without any conflict or contradiction. Such assumptions are not what is happening during translation activities, so the system needs to have an overall principle when conflicts and contradictions appear. Also, it needs to illustrate more clearly about the text type categorization and the nature of translation.

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