Era of philosophy (1900s to 1930s)

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin:

Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892 in Germany and died on 26 September 1940 in Spain. He
studied philosophy and his era was 20th century philosophy. He was a German Jewish literary
critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. He is the main figure
of philosophical era of translation. His main work in translation is task of translator firstly
printed on 1923. His main argument is that the role of translator is to keep all the foreignness of
the original text in target text. He mainly discussed about the afterlife of text and its continuity.
He basically focused on source text information. He argues that a true translation should be
closer to the creation of text. Moreover he discussed that translator is the co-creator with author.
He said that real translation is a transparent form of text which enlighten the basic concept or
information of original rather black its light. He claims that translator shouldn’t add his/her
concerns in the meaning of the text. Benjamin claims that mainstream and common-sense views
of language are ideological. He denied Saussure’s concept that language is an arbitrary system of
sign.The translator’s work should “ultimately serve the purpose of expressing the innermost
relationship of languages to one another” (Benjamin, “The Task” 255).

Benjamin’s writings:

1920’s-“Literay criticism of Geothe & translations of Baudelaire.”

1921-”Critique of Violence”

1926-1927- “Moscow Diary”

1927-”Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish”

1927-“Started the Arcades Project “

1928-”One Way Street”

1929-“Wrote a series of essays on Brecht’s plays & poetry”

1929-“Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of l the European Intelligentsia.”

1934 to 1935-”Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” - Considered his most influential
essay.

1938-“Revised Berlin Childhood Around 1900 which he had written in 1932.”

1939-”Some Motifs in Baudelaire”

1940 –“Theses on the Philosophy of History”

1934 to 1935-”Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” - Considered his most influential
essay.

1938-“Revised Berlin Childhood Around 1900 which he had written in 1932.”

1939-”Some Motifs in Baudelaire”

1940 – “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language and Translation Technology:

In his theory of language and translation technology he presented the concept of pure language.
He said that the language of literary text is totally pure and translator should be consistent in his
translation and make sure that language will be imprison in the re-creation. For example as
Benjamin quoted in his writing that the word Pain (French) and Brot (German) are used for word
bread (English) and they are purely different ways to show the particular object bread. These
three words are related to the scope of pure language. They are different words in nature but used
as same thing.

Jorge Luis Borges:

He is Argentine’s most famous writer, essayist, and short story writer. His works consider as the
classics of 20th century literature. He is the main figure of Spanish literature. When he was 9
years old, he done his first translation which was the short story of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy
Prince” which was later published in the local newspaper of his region. He is the first translator
who translated the writings of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner into Spanish language.
Borges when working as a translator he took the original text and after analyzing his translations,
we can say that he uses some methods:

1. He eliminate elements which is of no use and unnecessary.

2. He added changes to the translation like changing the title, for example
3. His methods also include literal translations from one text to another.
Main focus:
 Translation is not only translating the content of a language into another, from one code to
another code, it is we can say that restructuring of a text by following its principles of
writing. It is basically seeing the richness of relation and connection.
 It is necessary that the rewritten texts should have the same creative values; it should have
the same violence which the new exercise against the old and false formula that does not
correspond to our actual experience.
 In order to know a text it is necessary to read to its translations. A text is plural and it
should be read twice. It should follow the following formula:
Original text+ its translation= literary space
 These deviations in translation show that each translation and each period has his own
version and vision of work of art so translation is historical phenomena.

José Ortega y Gasset:

José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher in the twentieth century.

He also works as social theorist, essayist, politician and editor of the journals.

Major works:

Misery and splendor of translation was considered as his major works. This essay shows that
oryega’s ideas play an operative and active role in translation studies.In Miseries of translation,
he believes translation as a utopian activity, it is based on writer’s personal style, formed by
every author’s personal deviations from habitual usage. By utopian it is believed that two words
belongings to different languages and which the dictionary gives us translations of each other
refer to exactly the same objects. Since languages are formed in different landscapes, through
different experience. Ortega considers different degrees of difficulty in possibility/impossibility
of translating different types of texts; as in case of mathematics and the natural science and he
considered it a false language. He is of the view that language is a verbal signs as if the one who
is writing or speaking and the one who is reading or listening have previously and individually
come to an agreement as to the meaning of signs. That is why books are easy to translate because
in every country these are written in same language.In Splendour of translation, he is of the view
that Ortega in this he understands by translation and how translators should proceed.He is of the
view that 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
towards the reader.

Ezra Pound:

There are around seven reasons why the similarity is inaccurate, and six more to assume it upset,
yet it might serve to liberate the peruser's brain from assumptions about the English of
"Elizabeth" and her British nursery of melody flying creatures. — And to think about language
as a vehicle of articulation.Dr Schelling has addressed about the Italianate Englishman of
Shakespeare's day. I discover two Shakespeare plots inside ten pages of one another in an
overlooked history of Bologna, imprinted in 1596. We have known about the impacts of the
voyaging Italian auditorium organizations, commedia dell' arte, and so forth. What happens
when you inactively endeavor GUIDO'S RELATIONS to make an interpretation of early Italian
into English, unclogged by the Victorian period, liberated from work fixation, yet attempting just
to sing and to forget about the dull bits in the Italian, or the bits you don't get it?

There is restriction, not just between what M. de Schloezer recognizes as melodic and beautiful
lyricism, yet in the keeping in touch with itself there is a qualification between graceful lyricism,
the passionate power of the verbal development, and the melopœic lyricism, the giving the words
a chance to stream on a melodic current, acknowledged or not, feasible or not, if the line should
be sung on a succession of notes of various pitch.
However, by taking Italian works, which are not metrically what could be compared to the
English poem, by relinquishing, or losing, or just not feeling and understanding their cogency,
their balance, and by looking for basically that a long way from rapidly or so-effectively as-it-
looks achievable thing, the ideal tune, indiscreet of exactitude of thought, or imprudent with
respect to which significant and basic thought you, at GUIDO'S RELATIONS 31 that minute,
express, maybe in exact enough expressions, by removing the clearly non-working expressions
(whose appearance misleads) you wind up in the English seicento tune books. Passing has turned
out to be musical; distress is as genuine as the nightingale's, headstones are racks for the
gathering of rose-leaves. Furthermore, there is, regularly, a Mozartian flawlessness of song, an
intelligence, maybe an extreme insight, lamentably ailing in guts. My expression is, will we say,
disgusting. Precisely, in light of the fact that it flops in exactness. Guts in medical procedure
alludes to an exceptionally restricted scope of inward decorations. A thirteenth-century
exactitude in look for the precise organ best outlining the need, would have spared me that dive.

We are not in a domain of confirmations, just, the manner by which early Italian verse has been
used in England. The Italian of Petrarch and his successors is inconsequential to the rehearsing
author or to the understudy of similar elements in language, the gatherers of bric-à-brac are
outside our area. There is no doubt of giving Guido in an English contemporary to himself, a
definitive Britons were at that date unbreeched, painted in woad, and snorting in a figure of
speech unmistakably more hard for us to ace than the Langue d'Oc of the Plantagenets or the
Lingua di Si.

1940-1950s (ERA)

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, the eldest of five children in a
wealthy aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia. ... He was inspired by his father's studies in
lepidoptery from the age of 7, and spent summers collecting butterflies in the family estate of
Vyra, near St. Petersburg. Russian poetry is affected by the following six characteristics of
language and prosody:
 1 The number of rhymes, both masculine and feminine (i.e., single and double), is
incomparably greater than in English and leads to the cult of the rare and the rich. As
in French, the consonne d’appui is obligatory in masculine rhymes and aesthetically
valued in feminine ones. This is far removed from the English rhyme, Echo’s poor
relation, a genteel pauper whose attempts to shine result merely in doggerel
garishness. For if in Russian and French, the feminine rhyme is a glamorous lady
friend, her English counterpart is either an old maid or a drunken hussy from
Limerick.
2 No matter the length of a word in Russian it has but one stress; there is never a
secondary accent or two accents as occurs in English—especially American English.
3 Polysyllabic words are considerably more frequent than in English.
4 All syllables are fully pronounced; there are no elisions and slurs as there are in
English verse.
5 Inversion, or more exactly pyrrhichization of trochaic words—so commonly met with
in English iambics is rare in Russian verse: only a few two-syllable prepositions and
the trochaic components of compound words lend themselves to shifts of stress.
6 Russian poems composed in iambic tetrameter contain a larger number of modulated
lines than of regular ones, while the reverse is true in regard to English poems.
Jean Paul Vinay & Jean Darbelnet

Jean-paul vinay and jean darbelnet:

At first the different methods or procedures seem to be countless, but they can be condensed to
just seven, each one corresponding to higher degree of complexity. In practice, they may be used
either on their own or combined with one or more of the others.

Direct and oblique translation

Oblique Translation Techniques are used when the structural or conceptual elements of the
source language cannot be directly translated without altering meaning or upsetting the
grammatical and stylistics elements of the target language. Oblique translation techniques
include.
Borrowing:

Borrowing is a translation technique that involves using the same word or expression in original
text in the target text. The word or expression borrowed is usually written in italics. This is about
reproducing an expression in the original text as is. In this sense, it is a translation technique that
does not actually translate…

Calque:

When a translator uses a calque, he or she is creating or using a neologism in the target language
by adopting the structure of the source language.

Literal translation:

Usually this is called a literal translation or metaphrase. This means a word-for-word translation,
achieving a text in the target language which is as correct as it is idiomatic. According to Vinay
and Darbelnet, a literal translation can only be applied with languages which are extremely close
in cultural terms. It is acceptable only if the translated text retains the same syntax, the same
meaning and the same style as the original text.

Transposition:

Transposition involves moving from one grammatical category to another without altering the
meaning of the text. This translation technique introduces a change in grammatical structure.

Modulation:

Modulation is about changing the form of the text by introducing a semantic change or
perspective.

Equivalence:

This is a translation technique which uses a completely different expression to transmit the same
reality. Through this technique, names of institutions, interjections, idioms or proverbs can be
translated.
Adaptation:

Adaptation, also called cultural substitution or cultural equivalent, is a cultural element which
replaces the original text with one that is better suited to the culture of the target language. This
achieves a more familiar and comprehensive text.

Willard V.O. Quine

Empirical meaning is what remains when, given discourse together with all its stimulatory
conditions, we peel away the verbiage. It is what the sentences of one language and their firm
translations in a completely alien language have in common. So, if we would isolate empirical
meaning, a likely position to project ourselves into is that of the linguist who is out to penetrate
and translate a hitherto unknown language. Given are the native’s unconstrued utterances and the
observable circumstances of their occurrence. Wanted are the meanings: or wanted are English
translations, for a good way to give a meaning is to say something in the home language that has
it.

The linguist’s finished jungle-to-English manual is to be appraised as a manual of sentence-to-

sentence translation. Whatever be the details of its expository devices of word translation and
syntactical paradigm, its net accomplishment is an infinite semantic correlation of sentences: the
implicit specification of an English sentence for every one of the infinitely many possible jungle
sentences. The English sentence for a given jungle one need not be unique, but it is to be unique
to within any acceptable standard of intrasubjective synonymy among English sentences; and
conversely. Though the thinking up and setting forth of such a semantic correlation of sentences
depend on analyses into component words, the supporting evidence remains entirely at the level
of sentences.

Roman Jakobson

Jakobson. Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) was one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century. He
was born in Russia and was a member of the Russian Formalist school as early as 1915. ... In
1943 he became one of the founding members of the Linguistic Circle of New York and acted as
its vice president until 1949.These three kinds of translation are to be differently labeled:
Intralingual:

Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs

of the same language. Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal
signs by means of some other language.
Interlingual

Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs

of the same language. Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal
signs by means of some other language.

Intersemiotic
The act of translating from one language to another involves a political, culturally embedded
process that can impact both the originating and the receiving culture. In literary translation, a
text is translated into another text using purely verbal means.