Translating Atmosphere and Tone

In previous posts we have discoursed briefly on emotion and forcefulness in translating. (To find the posts, enter affective and forceful in the Search box on the right.) This post will deal with a third quality of text or speeches and their translations, namely atmosphere.

 

Atmosphere differs from the first two in that it is never attached to a single word or expression but is diffused over the whole. It has partial synonyms like tone that we may need to use in order to find examples.  

 

It's important most in literary translation, but not only there. Here’s an example.

 

A freshly minted graduate from the school at the University of Ottawa went to work at trainee grade in the translation bureau of the Canadian government. At that level, new translators are supervised by an experienced translator or revisor. The first task she was given was to translate letters from members of the public to one of the ministers. She did her best and was dismayed when her revisor called her in to give her a dressing down.

“Look,” he said, brandishing a letter. “Here’s a letter written in uneducated French, full of mistakes. And what have you done? Your translation is full of low-grade English. There are even bits that are insulting. Why?”

“Because,” explained the unfortunate trainee, “I was taught to preserve the style of the original.”

“Oh no,” the supervisor went on, speaking partly in French, “Le traducteur ne doit jamais oublier qu’il est le porte-parole de l’État. [Our translators must never forget that they are the mouthpiece for the state.] That’s the atmosphere that must be maintained.”

 

 Now to our main topic, literary translation.

 

One of the most famous atmospheric poems in English is Poe's The Raven. Famous not only for the poem itself but because Poe gave a full, clear, conscious account of his aims and techniques. Extraordinary also because it has not one but two famous translations into French, one by Mallarmé and the other by Rimbaud.

 

There is only space to consider one of them here, Mallarmé’s, but they have one striking feature in common: they are both prose translations. Prose and blank verse translations have their usefulness as introductions or elucidations; not knowing Italian, I first read Dante in the blank verse translation of the Inferno by William Michael Rossetti. But rhyme is a powerful poetic tool that echoes in the mind and Poe consciously exploited it. The long vowel in evermore is not only evocative in itself, it's all the more so because of its rhyming with the same vowel in other line endings. However, Baudelaire and Mallarmé could not or would not emulate him and they lost out thereby. And insofar as that long ô evokes the tone of the poem, they lost in that respect too.

 

And so we come to the tone or atmosphere of the poem, about which Poe was explicit in his The Philosophy of Composition, where he states that its highest manifestation is the one of sadness or melancholy, which “is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.” 

Without more ado, here’s an evaluation of one verse of the Mallarmé translation.

 

A symbolist, Mallarmé obsessed over evocative language. And like Poe, he had a penchant for the supernatural. In 1875, he decided to translate Poe's poem into French—and, in the process, draped an even more chilling cloak over Poe’s already creepy masterpiece.

 

The opening lines of "Le Corbeau" provide a stylistic sampling of how Mallarmé used French to make "The Raven" even spookier. The familiar “midnight dreary” we associate with Poe’s version becomes the more funereal and morbid “minuit lugubre” in French. The nervous narrator’s book collection, described by Poe as “quaint and curious,” is transformed by Mallarmé into “curieux et bizarre,” infusing the lines with an even stranger, more unsettling tone.

 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping—rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more."

 

Une fois, par un minuit lugubre, tandis que je
m'appesantissais, faible et fatigué, sur maint
curieux et bizarre volume de savoir oublié—
tandis que je dodelinais la tête, somnolant
presque: soudain se fit un heurt, comme de
quelqu'un frappant doucement, frappant à la
porte de ma chambre—cela seul et rien de plus.

 

And the poet didn't just use language in his translation: Mallarmé’s 1875 edition of "Le Corbeau" is made even more enchanting by the illustrations adorning the text. The shadowy black smudgings belong to none other than French painter Édouard Manet. Mallarmé and Manet had been friends for years (according to the Musée d'Orsay, they would meet every day to discuss painting, literature, and cats), and Mallarmé would write an impassioned article that would proclaim Manet’s influence “sways all the painters of the day.”

Mallarmé called the illustrations “so intense and at the same time so modern ... completely imaginative in their reality.

 

So it was not only an interlingual translation but also an equally atmospheric intersemiotic one. Manet’s visualisation of the raven, which can be seen at the head of this post, is haunting.

 

In addition, there is a secondary atmosphere in what is a complex poem. It is heralded by the opening words, Once upon a…, the typical opening of fairy stories in their mythical settings, partly echoed by Mallarmé’s Une fois derived from Il était une fois. It continues throughout, for instance in Poe's constant use of chamber instead of the modern word room, which has an effect lost by the French chambre. It’s a gothic atmosphere, in the sense of “a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious, or violent incidents.”

 

For the rest, I’ll leave it to native French speakers to judge subjectively whether Mallarmé, and for that matter Baudelaire, succeeds in preserving the melancholy atmosphere.

 

To sum up the three posts in this trilogy: Next time you want to judge a literary translation, don’t start by nitpicking whether each chunk accurately repeats the information in the original. Rather, ask yourself, “Does the whole express convincingly its emotions? Does it do so with the same forcefulness? Does it maintain the same atmosphere?” 

Sources

Edgar Poe [sic].  Le Corbeau. Translated by Stéphane Mallarmé with illustrations by Édouard Manet. Paris: Lesclide, 1875.

 

Edgar Poe.  Le Corbeau. Translated by Charles Baudelaire. In Histoires grotesques et sérieuses, Paris, 1865.

 

Poe, Edgar A. The Philosophy of Composition. Graham’s Magazine,1846.

 

Siavish Bakhtiar. Charles Baudelaire et Stéphane Mallarmé, traducteurs d’Edgar Allan Poe. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338633376_Charles_Baudelaire_et_Stephane_Mallarme_traducteurs_d'Edgar_Allan_Poe.

Jared Spears. How Poe's French translator made "The Raven" even spookier. Mental Floss, 2018. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87072/how-poes-french-translator-made-raven-even-spookier.

 

Dante Allighieri. The Comedy of Dante Allighieri ... Translated into blank verse by William Michael Rossetti, with introductions and notes. London ; Cambridge : Macmillan, 1865.

 

Gothic. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, 2022. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Gothic.

Literary Translation in India

 

 

Surprising though it may sound, I dare to say, though I don’t have the statistics to prove it, that the country with the most literary translation into English is not the UK nor the USA but India.

 

Two of the most popular posts on this blog have been the ones by Prabha Sridevan. (To retrieve them, entern sridevan in the Search box on the right.) She is representative of the current Indian translation scene. Like most literary translators everywhere, she is one of the category that we call Native Translators, that is to say translators who have not trained formally as translators but have picked up how to do it by example and by reading original literature. As she says herself, “I wandered into ‘translation’. I did not know it had a technique; or that it was both a science and an art.” But she knew Tamil literature and she knew impeccable English.

 

In the discussions of whether the Raj was beneficial or detrimental to India, an element that is generally left off the balance is the widespread and profound knowledge of the ruler’s language. By chance it provided India with a language of international communication and, even more important, it bequeathed the country a language that was not tied to any of its competing ethnic communities. We need to bear in mind that India has 22 regional languages. In spite of all the political pressure to make one of these, Hindi, the national language, use of English as a lingua franca persists: “The business in the Indian Parliament can only be transacted in Hindi or in English. English is allowed to be used in its official purposes.”

 

The success of translators like Prabha has been supported by Indian publishers, notably the Indian branch of the Oxford University Press, publisher of her Chudamani translations, and Ratna Books with its Translation Series under Dhanesh Jain. But this is not enough. A recent study concludes that “translated Indian works must be more visible to Anglophone publishers, and this also requires promoting writers and translators, and inviting publishers to India to engage with the publishing and literary ecosystem.”

 

Ratna is the publisher of Prabha’s latest volume of translations, Meeran’s Stories. It’s a collection of Tamil short stories by Thoppil Mohamed Meeran (1944-2019). Both Chudamani and Meeran are skilful short story writers. The first story in the Meeran collection has a surprise ending worthy of O. Henry. However, there’s a major difference between the backgrounds of Chudamani and Meeran and it’s that the latter was a Muslim. Here we come up against a major Western misconception about the Indian subcontinent: it’s that India is all Hindu and it’s Pakistan that’s Muslim.  The fact is, India contains a large Muslim minority, about 14% of its population. So here we have two authors writing in Tamil and brought up in Tamil Nadu with backgrounds that are in large measure the same but with a noticeable difference.

“Meeran’s stories give us a glimpse, a once, of the inner life of two entities, two identities. First, of South India. Second of Muslim South India. They are about a particular people but more, they are about people. They are about a particular place but more, about the place of feeling in the desert of custom.”

 

Sources                                     

Translated Indian works must be more visible to Anglophone publishers: Study. New Delhi: Devdiscourse, 2022. 

 

R. Chudamani. Seeing in the Dark. Translated from Tamil with translator's introduction by Prabha Sridevan. New Delhi: OUP India, 2015.

 

Thoppil Mohamed Meeran. Meeran’s Stories. Translated from Tamil by Prabha Sridevan. Delhi: Ratna Books, 2022.

 

Gopalakrishna Ghandi. Rear dust jacket of Meeran’s Stories.

Religion in India. Wikipedia, 2022.

The Natural Translation Hypothesis is 50

 

To all readers of this blog

A belated Happy New Year and Better 2022!

The blog has been desultory in the past few months due to an effect of ‘long Covid’, but I hope to get it back on track before long.

2022 marks an anniversary. It’s just 50 years since the inception of the concept and term Natural Translation (NT). To most people the inception came with publication of the paper The Importance of Natural Translation in 1977. However, the term and concept had already appeared in 1973, not in English but in French as traduction naturelle. It was in French because it was in a paper read at a conference at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), a French-speaking university. But even that wasn’t quite the beginning, because although the French paper wasn’t published until 1973, the conference had taken place the previous year, 1972. It was a conference at which several of my colleagues of the machine translation project at the Université de Montréal (TAUM) also read papers and it was my final academic contribution before moving to Ottawa. Hence 1972-2022, fifty years.

 

In the beginning encouragement mainly came not from translators but from psychologists: Wallace Lambert (pioneer of Canadian bilingual education) invited me to his graduate seminar at McGill, Kenji Hakuta (educational psychologist at Stanford) supervised the thesis of Marguerite Malakoff, David Gerver (clinical psychologist) invited me to the fabulous 1977 NATO conference in Venice. But then some bold translatologists joined in: Gideon Toury invited me to write something for Target; Fritz Pöchhacker and colleagues in Vienna were advisors for the thesis of Petra Beckmannova; Raffaela Merlini (Trieste) and Cecilia Wadensjö (Linköping) were advisors for the thesis of Diana Cossato; Ricardo Muñoz invited me to Granada; María Jesús Blasco organised a conference in my honour at Castellón; María Gracia Torres sponsored my honorary doctorate at Malaga, and Boguslawa Whyatt produced a developmental model of translation competence quite similar to mine.

 

If I had to distinguish a turning point in all that has happened so far, I would unhesitatingly pick the First  Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation (NPIT), which Rachele Antonini organised at Bologna in 2012. The number and scope of the papers showed that NPIT was an area that could no longer be considered maverick. The ensuing NIPT conferences have confirmed it, although NT has never obtained the primacy – with everything else in translatology being “the icing on the cake” – that I polemicised for it in my spat with Hans Krings in Target.

 

Meanwhile there are two important aspects of NT that are still little recognised and therefore  under-researched. The first is its innateness; for this the abundant proof that children can start to translate very young is important but not sufficient. Anyway innateness is a bone of contention in all linguistics. The other is the place of translating in the broad spectrum of transfer of information and emotion from any form of human expression to another, a process not necessarily linguistic that I have called conversion.

 

References

Bibliographic references for all the publications mentioned above can be found in the Annotated Bibliography of Natural Translation Studies at https://independent.academia.edu/BHARRRIS.

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Translating Forceful Language

 

 

A recent post on this blog dealt with the translating of emotional language (to retrieve it, enter affective in the Search box on the right.) Among the less studied attributes of language there's another that can pose a problem for translators: its force. The same information, even the same emotion, can be imparted with varying force.

 

The most obvious modulators of force are the so-called intensifiers, of which the most frequent in English is very. But very also shows us that there are different degrees of force. Compare he is rich / he is very rich / he is extremely rich / he is a billionaire. Literal Spanish translations are possible, e.g. es muy rico / es extremadamente rico or (perhaps stronger because more compact) es riquísimo. Simple cases like this one are not a problem for the expert translator, so let’s turn to something more subtle.

 

In Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion there’s a famous scene in which the transformed flower girl Eliza blurts out, “Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.” At the first night of the play in 1914,”Not bloody likely” on the lips of the famous actress Mrs Patrick Campbell brought the house down. It had a shock effect on the Edwardian audience that it wouldn’t have today – which also illustrates how force of language changes over time. But Shaw’s wording was deliberately chosen for dramatic effect, and a translation that’s not equally forceful and shocking could be said to betray him. So Miguel Cisneros, the most recent Spanish translator of Pygmalion, instead of  a relatively inoffensive translation like puñatero, opts for puto coñazo. Puto is very vulgar.

 

Don’t think, however, that language force comes only from vocabulary. Consider the most famous passage in the most famous speech by Winston Churchill, a speech that inspired a nation:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…

 

The linguistic force of the passage comes from its syntax, its short simple sentences, and from the hammering of the parallelism. This structure can be reproduced in French:

Nous irons jusqu'au bout, nous nous battrons en France, nous nous battrons sur les mers et les océans, nous nous battrons avec toujours plus de confiance ainsi qu'une force grandissante dans les airs, nous défendrons notre Île, quel qu'en soit le coût, nous nous battrons sur les plages, nous nous battrons sur les terrains d'atterrissage , nous nous battrons dans les champs et dans les rues, nous nous battrons dans les collines ; nous ne nous rendrons jamais… 

 

Indeed it’s a structure already used by Georges Clemenceau in a speech he gave in Paris in 1918 and which Churchill had heard:

 

Oui les Allemands peuvent prendre Paris, cela ne m'empêchera pas de faire la guerre. Nous nous battrons sur la Loire, nous nous battrons sur la Garonne, s'il le faut, et même sur les Pyrénées ! Si nous en sommes chassés, on continuera la guerre sur mer, mais quant à faire la paix, jamais ! 

 

However, notice too Churchill’s use of shall, which is stronger as an indicator of intention than the more everyday will. This distinction can not be reproduced in French, so it poses a problem.

 

Sources

George Bernard Shaw, Pigmalión, ed. and translated by Miguel Cisneros Perales. Madrid: Cátedra, 2016.

We shall fight on the beaches. French Wikipédia, 2021.

Image

A scene from the original 1914 production of Pygmalion. Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza on the left.

Source: The Times.

George Smith, Translator of a Civilisation

 

It’s been some time since there’s been a historical post on this blog, so here’s one.

 

There are translators who are justly famous for introducing an author or a work into another culture: Constance Garnett for Tolstoy in England, Rimbaud for Poe in France, Rabassa for García Márquez in the United States, and so on. And then there are translators whose fame is at a transcendent level because they introduced not just a single author but a whole culture or civilisation.  Such were Hunain ibn Ishaq and his colleagues and acolytes at the Bait al-Hikma in ninth-century Baghdad who transferred the wisdom and science of the Greeks to the Arabs; or Young and Champollion, translators at the graphemic level, who unlocked the mysteries of Ancient Egypt; or Sir William Jones, who made the first English translations of several classical Indian works.

 

One translator in the second category is much less well known today, although in his own day his most important translations drew even the prime minister of England to come and listen to him lecture. Yet curiously enough he isn’t mentioned in the otherwise admirable Translators Through History. And if you are looking for him with a browser you have to distinguish him from the dozens of others with the same very common English name: George Smith.

 

He was a native, self-educated translator with excellent mentors.

 

As the son of a working-class family in Victorian England, Smith was limited in his ability to acquire a formal education. At age fourteen, he was apprenticed to a London publishing house to learn banknote engraving, at which he excelled. From his youth, he was fascinated by Assyrian culture and history. In his spare time he read everything that was available to him on the subject. His interest was so keen that while working at the printing firm, he spent his lunch hours at the British Museum, studying publications on the cuneiform tablets that had been unearthed near Mosul in Iraq by the great archaeologists Austen Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson, and Hormuzd Rassam during the archaeological expeditions of 1840–1855.   These expeditions were part of a mid-19th century initiative by European institutions and governments to fund expeditions to Mesopotamia to find physical evidence to corroborate events described in the Bible. What the explorers found instead, however, was that the Bible - previously thought to be the oldest book in the world and comprised of original stories - actually drew upon much older Sumerian myths.

 

Smith's natural talent for cuneiform studies was first noticed by Samuel Birch, Egyptologist and Director of the Department of Antiquities, who brought the young man to the attention of Rawlinson, who was a renowned Assyriologist. As early as 1861, he was working evenings sorting and cleaning the mass of friable fragments of clay cylinders and tablets in the Museum's storage rooms. The work of piecing together the thousands of fragments was a colossal jigsaw puzzle.

 

By 1871, Smith published the Annals of Assur-bani-pal, which he had transliterated and translated, and he had communicated to the newly founded Society of Biblical Archaeology a paper on The Early History of Babylonia, and an account of his decipherment of the Cypriote inscriptions that had been discovered in 1800 (see Sources below).

 

Smith’s greatest discovery came the following year, 1872,  when he achieved worldwide fame by his translation of the Chaldaean account of the Great Flood, which he read before the Society of Biblical Archaeology on 3 December and whose audience included the Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.  According to the accounts of his co-workers in the reading room of the Museum library, on the day of the discovery, when Smith realized what he was reading he "began to remove articles of his clothing" and run around the room shouting in delight. (This must have happened in Panizzi’s magnificent new Reading room, seated in whose broad wooden armchairs I too did research when I was a student at nearby SOAS.)

 

The text that excited Smith so much is better known today as the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh (/ˈɡɪlɡəmɛʃ/) , one of the oldest known works of literature. It had been discovered by Hormuzd Rassam in 1853 on an archeological mission for the British Museum on behalf of his colleague and mentor Layard. He found it in the ruins of the  library of the seventh-century BC Asssyrian king Ashurbanipal. The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, regarded as the earliest surviving notable work of literature. By this translation Smith single-handedly opened up to the West the literature and civilisation of Sumeria from around 2100 BC.

 

The tablet describes how the gods sent a flood to destroy the world and how one man, Utnapishtim, was forewarned and tasked by the god Enki to abandon his worldly possessions and build a giant ship to house and preserve living things; and how after the flood he sent out birds to look for dry land. It came as a bombshell to the fundamentalist-minded Victorians, for here was an account unmistakably similar to the story of Noah’s Ark in the Hebrew Pentateuch but several centuries older.

 

A London newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, was moved to finance another expedition. It arranged for Smith to go to Nineveh  and carry out excavations with a view to finding the missing fragments of the Flood story. This journey resulted in the discovery of some missing tablets. Smith spent most of the year 1875 fixing together and translating the fragments relating to the Creation, the results of which were published in The Chaldaean Account of Genesis (1880, co-written with Archibald Sayce).

 

In March 1876, the trustees of the British Museum sent Smith once more to excavate the rest of the Library of Ashurbanipal. At Ikisji, a small village about sixty miles northeast of Aleppo, he fell ill with dysentery, the bane of many Middle Eastern travellers, and died from it aged only 36.

 

Sources

George Smith (Assyriologist). Wikipedia, 2021.

British Museum reading room. Wikipedia, 2021.

Massimo Perna. Corpus of Cypriote syllabic inscriptions of the 1st millennium BC. Kyprios Character, 2020.

Epic of Gilgamesh. Wikipedia, 2021

Utnapishtim. Wikipedia, 2021.

Image

Gilgamesh, King of Uruk.

Source: Geohistoria

The Fate of the Afghan Fixers

  

Recent events have disrupted the schedule for this blog. It’s difficult to concentrate on writing with so many disasters unfolding. A couple of posts ago we expressed the fear that efforts to rescue the Afghan interpreters who were embedded with the allied forces would prove to be too little and too late – a prediction that was tragically true for many of them. Here’s one example.

 

Hero Afghan Interpreter Mohammed Nabi Wardak, 30, is sleeping on the streets of Athens and fled his country of Afghanistan since he helped British armed forces in the fight against the Taliban. This simply cannot be right and it’s our duty to help him.

Mohammed served on the front line in Helmand Province between 2008 and 2011. His commanding officers during this time described him as an “excellent interpreter” who risked his life on many occasions. Earlier this year a review in policy meant that over Afghan interpreters had been given the right to stay in the UK to protect from the threat of extremists and as a way to recognise the work they have done for us. Mohammed deserves that too.

Mohammed was threatened during his service with our armed forces and continued to receive threats by the Taliban which have been directed to his family and to him. He was forced to leave the army because of it and leave a second time to look after his sick mother. He has had to leave his wife and family in Afghanistan.

 

The general public has a poor understanding of the role of the military interpreters (often called translators) in Afghanistan. There was much more to it than translating between English and Pashto or Dari, the two main Afghan languages. They were fixers. Fixers is a term that goes back a long way in a pejorative general sense, in fact to 1601 according to Merriam-Webster. Hence: “The one-time fixer for Trump, Cohen…” More recently, however, it has become associated with journalists sent on assignment to countries with which they are only superficially acquainted and whose languages they do not speak. In that role they are invaluable assistants, factotums. They are not only the mouthpiece for their clients, they are also their ears and must report what the other side are saying. They aren’t neutral; their loyalty is to their clients, some of whose lives they saved. And from there it is easy to understand how they became invaluable assistants to the American and allied military. This explains the close relationships that were often formed between the fixers and the soldiers to whom they were assigned and the remorse that the latter feel at leaving their fixers to their fate. If today I were to update my All of Interpreting paper, I would certainly have to add fixer. The closest terms to it are liaison interpreter and escort interpreter.

 

Not all the interpreters were so unlucky. Some did manage to get away in the nick of time. A recent issue of El Confidencial tells the story of Salem Wahdat, who worked for several years for the Spanish troops in Afghanistan and for the Spanish embassy in Kabul. In the latter role he even interpreted for the King of Spain. He was one of the tiny handful of Afghans who had studied Spanish at university. One Saturday morning, in spite of the turmoil in Kabul, he decided to go to the office. When he got there he found that not only had his boss failed to turn up but all the government offices were empty. He took this as a sign that the moment had come for him to disappear too. His mother and his brothers urged him to get away without them because he would certainly be a target for the Taliban. He took the first commercial flight he could find and managed to get on it thanks to his diplomatic passport. He ended up in Turkey with what little money he had managed to withdraw from a bank. His children got out later.

 

Sources

May Bulman. Afghan man who ‘risked his life’ for British army sleeping on streets of Athens after being rejected by UK. Independent, 17 August 2021.

 

Alejandro Requeijo. La historia del traductor afgano que conoció al rey y se salvó por seguir yendo a la oficina (The story of the Afghan translator who met the King and was saved by still going to the office). El Confidencial, 20 August 2021.

 

Brian Harris.  All of Interpreting, A Taxonomic Survey. Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/12072834/All_of_interpreting-a-taxonomic_survey. 1980.

 

Image source: Air Force Magazine

Translatology in Nigeria

 

We in Europe are woefully ignorant about the vast continent that is sub-Saharan Africa. It was with some surprise that I learnt last week that there is a town in Nigeria called Ilorin with a flourishing university; and I was even more surprised to find out that it has an Institute of Translation Arts. The institute is an offshoot of the Department of French, which is understandable if we consider that several countries in West Africa use French as an official language. There’s no other Nigerian translator training institution in my extensive data base of schools and programmes although a Nigerian Association of Translation Studies was formed recently.

The trail through the highways and byways of Google that led me to make the discovery is a personal one.

In the early 1970s, inspired by Eugene Nida’s classic work Toward a Science of Translation,  I coined the term translatology in English. (Its Romance language cognates like French traductologie have a different origin.) The story is told in an article on my academia.edu page (see below). It didn’t catch on. Instead it was eclipsed by another term with roughly the same meaning, translation studies, established by James Holmes. The current figures of hits on Google are very telling: 131,000 for translatology, 2.77 million for translation studies.

So I was delighted to find that the term translatology is used by a distinguished professor and currently head of the department of French at Ilorin, Isaiah Bariki (see photo).. His interests are not only French but also translating African Languages. In a paper this year he noted that translations by the country’s institutions should not be focused on European languages only. He is the first holder of a PhD inTranslation in the University of Ilorin The university’s web site describes him as “an expert in translatology.”.

 

He has a remarkable life story that began in a poor family in the riverine parts of the Niger Delta and presented very challenging and unfavourable conditions for intellectual pursuits. You can read more about it in the Adewumi article referenced below. “With French as my base," he says, "I had a smooth sail to the shores of Translation as a field of study.” 

 

To clarify between Translation and Translatology, Prof. Bariki explains that “translation in its primary sense means the transfer of a message from one language into another. It is an applied Translatology and does not fully take care of all that Translatology stands for. Translatology is an academic interdiscipline rooted in a systematic study of translation, interpretation and localization, while consciously drawing his strength from aspects of linguistics, culturology, philology, neuroscience, history, comparative literature, philosophy, semiology, mathematics, computer science, and a host of other fields – all in a bid to give translation the support it needs.”

 

It couldn’t be better said.

 

Sources

Eugene Nida. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill, 1964. 

Brian Harris. 'Origins and conceptual analysis of the term Traductologie'. Paper to the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association of Translation Studies, 2009. Published Babel 57:1.15-31, 2011.

Ilorin. Wikipedia, 2021.

 

Isaiah Bariki. Translating African names in fiction. iIkala 14(23):43-61, 2009.

 

Agency Report. ‘Things fall Apart’ should be translated into Hausa, other languages – Don. Daily Nigerian, 30 July 2021. https://dailynigerian.com/tag/isaiah-bariki/

 

Kehinde Christopher Adewumi. MosesLe Voyagé: Moses Bariki’s exhibition In honour of his father, Prof. Bariki. New Telegraph, 4 August 2021.  https://www.newtelegraphng.com/tag/prof-bariki or click [HERE].

            

Image source ng.linkedin.com.