Tuesday, January 06, 2004

What I want to emphasise is that many concepts circulating in translation studies (such as adequacy, equivalence, faithfulness) can also be considered from the point of view of negotiation. Negotiation is a process by virtue of which, in order to get something, each party renounces something else, and at the end everybody feels satisfied since one cannot have everything.

For example, there is no exact way to translate the Latin word "Mus" into English. In Latin "Mus" covers the same semantic space covered by "mouse" and "rat" in English - as well as in French, where there is "souris" and "rat", in Spanish ("ratón" and "rata") or in German ("maus" and "ratte"). But in Italian, even though the difference between a "topo" or, more unusually a "sorcio", and "ratto" is recorded in dictionaries, in everyday language one can use "topo" even for a big rat - perhaps stretching it to "topone" or "topaccio" - but "ratto" is used only in technical texts. So what happens when we find the word "topo" in an Italian translation of a French text? Does it translate back as "rat" or "souris"?