Lay people are only aware of one kind of translating: the transfer of writings and utterances between natural languages. Whereas translatologists know there are many kinds, which vary as to their media, purposes, skilfulness, etc. One kind is summarising. It’s also known to academics as abstracting and to school students as precis-writing.
A seminal article about types of translating was Roman Jakobson’s 1959 article On linguistic aspects of translation. In it he distinguishes between interlingual translation (translating between languages) and intralingual translation (translating within the same language, traditionally called paraphrase). In this post we will be mainly concerned with the intralingual kind, although there is also a good deal of interlingual summarising.
Abstracting must not be confused
with extracting. In the latter, short significant passages are selected from
the source text and strung together verbatim. Extracting can be done by
algorithm. The algorithmic extracting that I receive from Academia.edu is
fairly successful, though it is affected by the type of source document. Nor
must it be confused with writing abridged translations, which are shortened by omitting
some passages in the original, and with them some details. For example, publishers
cut out the scientific disquisitions from the early English translations of
Jules Verne because they thought young readers would be bored by them.
Let’s turn now to translating. There are broadly speaking two ways of translating. There is the purely linguistic method of substituting words, phrases and syntactic structures; and the study of it falls in the domain of contrastive linguistics. And then there is the ‘deverbalisation’ procedure in which the translators first interiorise the content and integrate it into their own thoughts, and then reverbalise it to make a target text. Here we will only be concerned with the second type. According to influential French translatologist Danica Seleskovitch (see photo and Sources), it’s the form in which our thoughts are stored to long-term memory and she strongly recommended it to her student interpreters.
Translating, in
Jakobson’s broad sense, is to take a text that has been written in one text and
reproduce its content in the another text. Summarising meets this definition
but with some conditions. Here
are some guidelines for an ideal summary of the precis kind:
· Is
written in the precis writer’s own words
· Is
much shorter than the original, often many times shorter
· Is
clear, concise, coherent, and precise
· Contains
all the essential points, author’s tone, facts, opinions, thoughts and main
idea of the original passage
· Is
well-knit and makes logical sense and follows a logical order
· Won’t
contain details not found in the original passage
· Is
well-structured, has no language errors, and makes a meaningful passage.
Content therefore consists of
“tone, facts. opinions, thoughts and main idea.” Deverbalising makes it
possible to apprehend these. But summarising doesn’t stop there. It requires
that the translator apply selections and judgements to
them and only reverbalise the product of the process. It follows that there
must be some higher-order mental faculty that directs and accomplishes all
this. (Some people don’t believe we can deverbalize, anyway not completely; but
here we assume it’s possible.)
Summarising is therefore
an exceptionally complex form of
translating and a challenge for artificial intelligence.
Sources
Roman Jakobson. On linguistic aspects of
translation. In R. A. Brower (ed.), On
Translation, Cambridge MA, 1959.
A Comprehensive Guide to Write
the Perfect Precis. Bangalore: Olliveboard.
Danica Seleskovitch. Language and cognition.
In D. Gerver and H. W. Sinaiko (eds.), Language Interpretation and
Communication, New York, Plenum Press, 1978, pp. 333–342.
Arthur B. Evans. Jules Verne’s English translations.
Science Fiction Studies, vol. 32, 2005, p.80 et
seq.
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