CHAPTER 4: EQUIVALENTS IN TRANSLATION AND STRATEGIES TO DEAL
4.1. Equivalents and non- equivalents at word level
Baker (1992) follows a hierarchy of discussion on translation equivalence, the first level of which is equivalence at word level. She first mentions different types of word meaning, differences in choosing certain meanings amongst different languages, and then suitable solutions in the case that there is no word in the target language (TL) to express the same meaning as the source language (SL) word are suggested.
Semantically defined, word meaning is constituted from the meanings of its grammatical and lexical elements. For example, the word “redoes” has its lexical
meaning of “doing again” and grammatical meaning of “verb used for third person singular subject”. However, in the scope of this study, the researcher will content herself with lexical meaning only.
According to Baker (1992:12), lexical meaning of a word “may be thought of as the specific value it has in a particular linguistic system” and the “personality” it acquires through usage within that system. Meaning can be classified in different ways, but according to Cruse (1998), there are four main types of meaning in words and utterances: propositional meaning, expressive meaning, presupposed meaning, and evoked meaning.
Propositional meaning is defined as the relation between that meaning and what it refers to or describes in a real or imaginary world; it provides the ground on which a judgment for an utterance is true or false. For example, the propositional meaning of book” is a set of printed or electronic papers that is informative or expressive and serves the needs of information. In this regard, an “inaccurate”
translation is often due to the problematic propositional meaning.
On the contrary, expressive meaning cannot receive either true or false judgment. The reason for this is because it is related to speaker’s feelings or beliefs rather than to what words and utterances refer to (Baker, 1992). An illustration for this is the two words “tired” and “exhausted”, with the latter expressing being extremely tired and sweated. Obviously, the two words are similar in its propositional meaning “tiredness”, but different in its expressive meaning. Interestingly, these two words are both English and to some extent synonymic to each other, and the naturally coming both English and to some extent synonymic to each other, and the naturally coming question is how about the case between words from different languages. The same case does occur, actually. For instance, even though sharing the same propositional meaning- being well-known, “famous” in English differs from
“fameux” in French in that the former is neutral in English while the latter potentially evaluative and derogatory (une femme fameuse means “a woman of ill repute”
(Baker, 1992). The mention of this meaning remains noted to any translators.
The third group of meaning is presupposed meaning. It comes from the restrictions on a preceding or following word or lexical unit. Two subtypes of restrictions are selectional restrictions and collocational restrictions. For example, for selectional restrictions, the pre-restriction expected for the word “studious” is a human subject restriction, the pre-restriction expected for the word “studious” is a human subject while that for the “geometrical” is inanimate. The happening of violation of these restrictions is in the case of figurative meaning (metaphor or personalization). For collocational restrictions, for the meaning “trà đặc", English people will prefer the word “dense” to precede tea, instead of saying “heavy tea”.
The fourth, evoked meaning, derives from dialect and register variation.
Dialect is a variety of language which has “currency within a specific community or group of speakers”. For example, geographically, there are British English and American English, like, temporally, there are verily and really.
Register is a variety of language that is supposed by language users to be appropriate to a specific situation. Let’s see the following example:
In a discourse between a mother and her son, it is unusual for her to state something like “I wonder if you could...”; the favored one would be otherwise very different. However, the above sample statement will be accepted in such cases as patient-doctor and speaker-audience discourses.
4.1.2. Non-equivalence at word level
Among many approaches introduced above, Mona Baker was the most outstanding theorist dramatically focusing on equivalence at word level since, as being claimed by her, word is the basic unit to be considered in meaning of translation text. Her analysis on word level is particularly clear, easy to comprehend.
It is undeniable that Mona Baker’s theory on non-equivalence at word level is universally supported by a great number of famous linguistic scholars and researchers. Firstly, Haliday (1985) strongly stresses the importance of seeking for equivalence at word level by the famous saying “meanings are realized through words, and without a theory of wordings, there is no way of making explicit one’s interpretation of the meaning of the text” (p.17). Additionally, in the book To Mean
or Not to Mean, the theorist Monia Bayar (2007) also appreciates the significance of word level equivalence by affirming that equivalence “designates an area of correspondence ranging around the word” (p.163). She even involves the roles of lower units such as the phoneme or the morpheme.
Roger. T. Bell (1991) is another notable researcher to mention equivalence at word level. She also figures out that there is no word equivalence among languages since even in the same language there is no absolute synonym between words.
Newmark (1991) agrees “it is impossible to expect perfect translation equivalence between SL word and its TL correspondent” (p.100). He emphasizes that between the two words that are deemed to be correspondents, one always covers more ground in meaning than the other, leading to the problem of non-equivalence at word level.
In addition, Catford (1996) is another famous researcher who stresses on the equivalence at word level. He started with categorized translation regarding three perspectives: the extent of translation (full translation versus partial translation); the grammatical rank at which the translation equivalence is established (rank bound translation vs. unbounded translation); the levels of language involved in translation (total translation vs. restricted translation). Carford notes that in rank-bound translation an equivalent is sought in the TL for each word, or for each morpheme encountered in the ST.
It is noteworthy that Vanessa Leonardi (2000) introduces Baker’s theory as
“an extremely interesting discussion of the notion of equivalence” (p. 7). As appraised in Leonardi’s paper, Baker has provided “a more detailed list of conditions upon which the concept of equivalence can be defined”. The author particularly compliments levels of Baker’s approach as “putting together the linguistic and the communicative approach” and agrees that in a bottom-up approach to translation, equivalence at word level is the first element to be taken into consideration by the translator.
Particularly, in his study, namely Translation Equivalence and Different Theories, Ghadi (n.d.) strongly focuses on Mona Baker non equivalence at word level and take it as the basic theory before addressing the word non-equivalence between
English and Persian. In his writing, non- equivalence at word level of Baker is thoroughly introduced and analyzed relative to other approaches as a way to confirm the validity and soundness of the theory.
Last but not least, Magdalena, P. M. (2005) accommodates the readers with a considerably comprehensive analysis on Baker’s theory on non-equivalence at word level before attempting to address specific problematic words and expressions between English and Polish. The paper strongly corroborates Baker’s theory by working on every problems and strategies of non- equivalence at word level and rationally provides the pros and cons of each. All in all, the pertinence of Baker’s theory has been critically recognized. As a brief introduction, the following table will present common problems of non-equivalence at word level as specified by Mona Baker.
Non - Equivalence At Word Level
1 Culture - specific concepts 7 Differences in physical or interpersonal perspective 2 The source language concept is not
lexicalized in the target language
8 Differences in expressive meaning
3 The source language word is semantically complex
9 Differences in from
4 The source and target language make different distinctions in meaning
10 Differences in frequency and purpose of using specific forms 5 The target language lacks a
superordinate term
11 The use of loan words in the source text
6 The target language lacks a specific term (hyponym)
Table 4.1: Baker’s taxonomy of non-equivalence at word level (1992)