Virgin Birth and Red Underpants:
The Translator's Responsibility in Shaping Our Worldview
The Virgin Birth and Virgin Mary are, pardon the pun, pregnant
with social symbolic significance in most, if not all, parts of the
world. Whether you believe in them or not, they are solid social
constructs, rehearsed endlessly in art, humour, everyday life, and
language. And yet their birth is due to a relatively simple mistake
in translation. The Old Testament talks about almah 'young woman,'
not bethulah 'virgin.' However, the scholars in the 3rd century BC
translated the Hebrew almah as parthenos in Greek. Thus the 'young
woman' in Hebrew metamorphosed into a 'virgin' in Greek-and she has
remained a virgin ever since in translations across the world. The
notion of 'virgin birth' was born, thanks to a mistranslation.
Mistranslation is plentiful, painful and powerful, whether it
shapes our way of seeing the world through the Bible or the bibles
of our times-films. In an American cult movie, "You'll get the pink
slip for Christmas" is translated as "You'll get red underpants in
Santa Claus' stocking." It must be a joke, I hear you say. No, I'm
afraid, it is not. The 'pink slip' (a notice of dismissal, American
slang) has metamorphosed into 'red underpants' in a famous action
movie seen by millions and millions of people. Thanks to the
translator's error, they envisage the hero in a pair of red
underpants, not as getting fired by Christmas.
Albeit the difference between getting fired or getting a pair of
red underpants may not be quite as substantial as the difference
between a virgin and a non-virgin birth, it still does serious
damage to the source text. Both examples above illustrate
relatively simple nonetheless fundamental mistakes in translation.
Objective mistakes. But a mistake is a mistake only when you become
aware of it. Otherwise mistakes become part and parcel of our
ongoing discursified thinking-of our language and thus symbolic
cultural system. As the virgin birth has, and no doubt the red
underpants will.
It is this-objective, verifiable translation criticism that
Katharina Reiss' Translation Criticism focuses on. It is a
pioneering classic in Translation Studies, in the translation of
Erroll F. Rhodes, originally published in German in 1971 under the
title Möglichkeiten and Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik. Kategorien
und Kriterien für eine sachgerechte Beurteilung von
Übersetzungen.
Reiss structures her multifarious categories and criteria into
two main parts: The Potential of Translation Criticism and The
Limitations of Translation Criticism. The potentials are elaborated
on by focussing on the relationship between criticism and the
target language text, criticism and the source language text, the
extra-linguistic components and the extra-linguistic
determinants.
The book provides many useful categories and criteria to
structure thinking about the vital issue of translation criticism.
But it is mostly locked into German references and quotes, and this
makes the book feel a bit parochial. There is no reference made for
example to the Sapir and Whorf hypothesis, although linguistic
relativity throws up important questions of codability for the
translator. The illustrative examples are taken from the "main
European languages of English, French and Spanish. [...] How far
the principles developed are relevant to non-European languages
remains open to question." (p.8. Italics mine.) Main European
languages-in what sense? Non-European languages-in what sense
non-European? These sloppy and slippery terms leave the reader
puzzled as to why they have not been picked up by the editor of the
book.
But the issues Reiss focuses on are undoubtedly vital. In
translation criticism you are looking for talent in writing,
sensitivity to language, internal consistency, semantic, structural
and dynamic equivalence, creative recreation of the cultural
allusions, the spirit of the original, precision in and mastery of
style and grammar, idiomatic usage, fidelity to the intent of the
original author and the text type-just to mention a few fundamental
aspects of the incredibly complex and complicated process.
As Reiss points out, translation is a hermeneutic process, which
is subjectively conditioned-and so is translation criticism.
Translation is, in the final analysis, an interpretation, an
appreciation of the source text. The translator infers from the
text-she reads into it. Such a subjective hermeneutic process
ultimately stands or falls not simply on the bicultural,
professional linguistic knowledge, expertise and experience of the
translator. These are naturally necessary but not sufficient to
produce an acceptable translation. Since the translator filters the
source text through herself during the hermeneutic process of the
translation, the translator's personality, mind-set and attitudes
are all vital players in the game and can subvert the translation
in many ways.
Thus the vulnerability of the source text to the translator
cannot be underestimated. Hence the choice of the translator and
translation criticism impact directly on the metamorphosis of the
source into the target text, the young maiden into virgin Mary, and
the dismissal slip into red underpants.
By Zsuzsanna Ardó
A writer/broadcaster and translator/interpreter
Ref.: B. L. Whorf, J.B. Carroll (eds.) Language, Thought and
Reality (1956)
This article was originally published at Translation Journal
(http://accurapid.com/journal).