Transformations in translation

This Lecture

• introduces the notion of:

• transformation as a change of the source text *t the syntactic level
during translation,

• discusses:

• the conditions under which regular and occasional transformations take place in English Verbal Complexes;

• Pluralia and Singularia Tantum;

• Gender Forms;

• Sequence of Tenses.

Speaking about translation equivalence we mentioned that there were three basic types of it - syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. The stu­dents might remember that syntactic equivalence meant the structural similarity of the source and target texts. If the syntactic similarity is miss­ing we observe a transformation.

Transformation is any change of the source text at the syntactic level during translation.

On the one hand, even for the languages of different structure gen­eral structural similarity in translation is common enough. Just compare any English text and its translation into Ukrainian and you will see much in common at the syntactic level (e. g. Subject-Predicate-Object se­quences, Attribute-Noun structures, etc.). On the other, total similarity.

It is worth saying that any formal identity of the signs of different lan­guages is out of the question and one may speak only about similarity or differ­ence of certain modeling representation, e. g. of syntactic models. of syntactic structures is a rare (and generally hardly desirable) case, which means that in English-Ukrainian translation we often observe transformations.

One should note, however, that the majority of syntactic transfor­mations in English-Ukrainian translation are occasional, i. e. the transla­tor transforms the source syntactic structures on case-by-case basis, each case being dependent on the context, situation, pragmatic intent and many other factors some of which are unknown and the translator's decisions relevant to the case are often intuitive.

To put it differently, it is impossible to formulate the rules for the overwhelming majority of such occasional transformations and one sim­ply cannot list all occasional transformations that are observed in Eng­lish-Ukrainian translation.

•In English-Ukrainian translation occasional transformations are often the matter of translator's individual choice and, in general, strongly depend on stylistic peculiarities and communication intent of the source text.

Yet, in English-Ukrainian translation there are also cases of regular syntactic transformations, where a translator is expected to observe cer­tain transformation rules more or less strictly.

Regular syntactic (grammatical) transformations are the match­ing rules for the grammars of the two languages involved in transla­tion.

Detailed description of regular English-Ukrainian grammatical (syn­tactic) transformations one can find in any English manual for Ukrainian audience (for example, the matching system of English and Ukrainian Verb Tenses, Noun Numbers and Cases, Adjectives, Pronouns, etc.).

We think that the readers and users of this Manual are generally aware of these matching rules and that it is hardly a goal of a translation manual to duplicate the information of the language manuals for the beginners. Moreover, we consider that the goal of a translation manual is to show (where possible) how and why the matching rules (regular trans­formations) of the grammatical systems of the two languages involved in translation are violated.

However, there are certain unique elements of the English and Ukrainian grammar systems which, because of their uniqueness deserve special attention as translation problems. The most common of those are mentioned below.