求 罗曼雅各布森的《论翻译的语言学理论》

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热心网友 时间：2023-06-25 17:11

Roman Jakobson On linguistic Aspects of Translation
According to Bertrand Russell, “no one can understand the word‘cheese’ unless he has a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese.”1 If, however,we follow Russell’s fundamental precept and place our “emphasis upon the linguistic aspects oftraditional philosophical problems,” then we are obliged to state that no onecan understand the word “cheese” unless he has an acquaintance with the meaningassigned to this word in the lexical code of English. Any representative of acheese-less culinary culture will understand the English word “cheese” if he isaware that in this language it means “food made of pressed curds and ifhe has at least a linguistic acquaintance with “curds.” We never consumedambrosia ornectar andhave only a linguistic acquaintance with the words “ambrosia,” “nectar,” and“gods” - the name of their mythical users; nonetheless, we understand thesewords and know in what contexts each of them may be used.
The meaning of the words “cheese,” “apple,” “nectar,”“acquaintance,” “but,” “mere,” and of any word or phrase whatsoever isdefinitely a linguistic - or to be more precise and less narrow - a semioticfact. Against those who assign meaning (signatum) not to the sign, but to the thing itself, the simplest andtruest argument would be that nobody has ever smelled or tasted the meaning of“cheese” or of “apple.” There is no signatum without signum. The meaning of theword “cheese” cannot be inferred from a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheddaror with camembert without the assistance of the verbal code. An array oflinguistic signs is needed to introce an unfamiliar word. Mere pointing willnot teach us whether “cheese” is the name of the given specimen or ofany box of camembert, or of camembert in general or of any cheese, any milkproct, any food, any refreshment点心, or perhaps any box irrespective of contents. Finally, does aword simply name the thing in question, or does it imply a meaning such asoffering, sale, prohibition, or malediction? (Pointing actually may meanmalediction in some cultures, particularly in Africa, it is an ominous gesture.)
For us, both as linguistsand as ordinary word-users, the meaning of any linguistic sign is itstranslation into some further, alternative sign, especially a sign “in which itis more fully developed” as Peirce, the deepest inquirer into the essence ofsigns, insistently stated.2 The term “bachelor” may be converted into a more explicitdesignation, “unmarried man,” whenever higher explicitness is required. Wedistinguish three ways of interpreting a verbal sign: it may be translated intoother signs of the same language, into another language, or into another,nonverbal system of symbols. These three kinds of translation are to bedifferently labeled:
1
Intralingual translation or rewordingis an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the samelanguage.
2
Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretationof verbal signs by means of some other language.
3
Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretationof verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.
The intralingual translation of a word uses either another, moreor less synonymous, word or resorts to a circumlocution. Yetsynonymy, as a rule, is not complete equivalence: for example, “every celibate is abachelor, but not every bachelor is a celibate.” A word or an idiomaticphrase-word, briefly a code-unit of the highest level, may be fully interpretedonly by means of an equivalent combination of code-units, i.e., a messagereferring to this code-unit: “every bachelor is an unmarried man, and everyunmarried man is a bachelor,” or “every celibate is bound not to marry, andeveryone who is bound not to marry is a celibate.” Likewise, on the level ofinterlingual translation, there is ordinarily no full equivalence betweencode-units, while messages may serve as adequate interpretations of aliencode-units or messages. The English word “cheese” cannot be completelyidentified with its standard Russian heteronym“сыр,” because cottage cheese is a cheese but not a сыр.Russians say: принеси сыру и творогу “bring cheese and [sic] cottage cheese.”In standard Russian, the food made of pressed curds is called сыр only ifferment is used. Most frequently, however, translation from one language intoanother substitutes messages in one language not for separate code-units butfor entire messages in same other language. Such a translation is a reportedspeech; the translator recodes and transmits a message received from anothersource. Thus translation involves two equivalent messages in two differentcodes.
Equivalence in difference is the cardinal problemof language and the pivotal concern of linguistics. Like any receiver of verbal messages,the linguist acts as their interpreter. No linguistic specimen may beinterpreted by the science of language without a translation of its signs intoother signs of the same system or into signs of another system. Any comparisonof two languages implies an examination of their mutual translatability;widespread practice of interlingual communication, particularly translatingactivities, must be kept under constant scrutiny by linguistic science. It is difficult to overestimate theurgent need for and the theoretical and practical significance of differentialbilingual dictionaries with careful comparative definition of all thecorresponding units in their intention and extension. Likewise differentialbilingual grammars should define what unifies and what differentiates the twolanguages in their selection and delimitation of grammatical concepts.
Both the practice and the theory of translation abound withintricacies, and from time to time attempts are made to sever theGordian knot by proclaiming the dogma of untranslatability. “Mr. Everyman, the natural logician,”vividly imagined by B. L. Whorf, is supposed to have arrived at the followingbit of reasoning: “Facts are unlike to speakers whose language backgroundprovides for unlike formulation of them.”3 In the first years of the Russian revolution there were fanaticvisionaries who argued in Soviet periodicals for a radical revision oftraditional language and particularly for the weeding out of such misleadingexpressions as “sunrise” or “sunset.” Yet we still use this Ptolemaic imagerywithout implying a rejection of Copernican doctrine, and we can easily transform our customary talk aboutthe rising and setting sun into a picture of the earth’s rotation simplybecause any sign is translatable into a sign in which it appears to us morefully developed and precise.
A faculty of speaking a given language implies a faculty oftalking about this language. Such a “metalinguistic” operation permits revisionand redefinition of the vocabulary used. The complementarity of both levels -object-language and metalanguage - was brought out by Niels Bohr: allwell-defined experimental evidence must be expressed in ordinary language, “inwhich the practical use of every word stands in complementary relation toattempts of its strict definition.”4 All cognitive experience and its classificationis conveyable in any existing language. Whenever there is deficiency,terminology may be qualified and amplified by loan-words or loan-translations,neologisms or semantic shifts, and finally, by circumlocutions. Thusin the newborn literary language of the Northeast Siberian Chukchees, “screw”is rendered as “rotating nail,” “steel” as “hard iron,” “tin” as “thin iron,”“chalk” as “writing soap,” “watch” as “hammering heart.” Even seeminglycontradictory circumlocutions, like “electrical horse-ear” (электрическаяконка), the first Russian name of the horseless street ear, or “flyingsteamship” (jena paragot), the Koryak term for the airplane, simply designatethe electrical analogue of the horse-ear and the flying analogue of the steamerand do not impede communication, just as there is no semantic “noise” anddisturbance in the double oxymoron - “cold beef-and-pork hot dog.”