问答题

The Difficulty of Translation

Since translating is a skill which requires considerable practice, most people assume that it can be taught, and to some extent this is true. But it is also true that really exceptional translators are born, not made. Potential translators must have a high level of aptitude for the creative use of language, or they are not likely to be outstanding in their profession. Perhaps the greatest benefit from instruction in translating is to become aware of one"s own limitations, something which a translator of Steinbeck"s of Mice and Men into Chinese should have learned. Then he would not have translated English mule-skinner into a Chinese phrase meaning "a person who skins the hide of a mule".
For many people the need for human translation seems paradoxical in this age of computers. Some modern computers can be loaded with dictionaries and grammars, why not let computers do the work? Computers can perform certain very simple interlingual tasks, providing there is sufficient pre-editing and post-editing. But neither advertising brochures nor lyric poetry can ever been reduced to the kind of logic required of computer programs. Computer printouts of translations can often be understood, if the persons involved already know what the text is supposed to say. But the results of machine translating are usually in an unnatural form of language and sometimes just plain weird. Furthermore, real improvements will not come from merely doctoring the program or adding rules. The human brain is not only digital and analogic, but it also has a built-in system of values which gives it a componentially incalculable advantage over machines. Human translators will always be necessary for any text that is stylistically appealing and semantically complex—which includes most of what is worth communicating in another language.
The most difficult texts to translate are not, however, highly literary productions, but rather those texts which say nothing, the type of language often used by politicians and delegates to international forums. In fact, a group of professional translators at the United Nations headquarters in New York City have insisted that the most difficult text to translate is one in which the speaker or writer has attempted to say nothing. The next most difficult type of text is one filled with irony and sarcasm, since in a written text the paralinguistic clues to the meaning are usually much more difficult to detect than when someone is speaking. And perhaps the third most difficult type of text is a book or article on translating in which the illustrative examples rarely match.
Some people imagine that the greatest problem in translating is to find the right words and constructions in the receptor or target language. On the contrary, the most difficult task for the translator is to understand thoroughly the designative and associative meanings of the text to be translated. This involves not only knowing the meanings of the words and the syntactic relations, but also being sensitive to all the nuances of the stylist device. As one struggling translator summed up his problem, "if I really understood what the text means, I could easily translate it."