On The Translatability Of Sentences

The possibility of translation is no longer a new topic in field of philosophy,linguistics and translatology.With the application of modern linguistic theories and the renewal of philosophy,arguments on the incommensurability of languages and inaccessibility of sense are broadly accepted.The belief that “translation is impossible” has then become increasingly vocal since the 1960 s and 1970 s.However,there are researchers who are not agree.Roman Jakobson may be the most representative one.He takes the translation of the word cheese as an example.According to him,this word can be translated by the notion of “food made of pressed curds” in a language whose culture doesn't know this substance.What he shows here is that ? All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language.?(1959 : p.234-235).Actually,such a vision of language supposes by default that it is possible to transpose all meaning and content between any languages.In fact,it is true that there is an abundance of empirical research,describing how translation constantly surmounts differences,and thus justifies the feasibility of this exercise.Nevertheless,these works which only illustrate examples of translatable fails to demonstrate translatability.In fact,very few studies deal directly with the translatability and the approximate but acceptable transposition between languages.Then,it is clear that the “contradiction” between untranslatability and translatable is no more than superficial.They belong respectively to metaphysical and practical discussion.Besides,most of the existing studies on the possibility of translation focus on “words” and “texts”,but not sentences.However,sentence is one of the subjects of translation studies which cannot be neglected.If translation becomes itself a kind of discourse that differs from others,it is not only due to lexical particularities but also to syntactic ones.However,in most cases the translatability of sentence is considered as a “pseudo-proposition”,because even if modern linguistics has managed to overturn the idea that “language is a nomenclature”,the lack of equivalence between languages in terms of the sentence seems to be previously recognized.The sentence,connecting viwords and texts,is the first unit of discourse,allowing the expansion of the latter into longer sequences.Through the sentence,the linguistic signs come into contact with the world and acquire their meaning and referent.But more often is that a sentence with particular referent gives rise to different meaning according to different speakers.Moreover,the fact that the same concept or event is organized in different languages by different sentence structures reveals the subjacent cultural disparities.But,do all these sources of untranslatable imply the untranslatability of the sentence? Here reveals a real paradox of translation: linguistics strives to demonstrate untranslatability by non-equivalence between languages,whereas the untranslatability of the sentence briefly mentioned never constitutes the “preliminary objection” of translation.So,in order to make comments on the untranslatability of sentence,it is necessary to define first the notion of untranslatability in its general sense.In this context,this dissertation seeks to bridge an academic gap while revisiting the concept of translatability.To that end,as do most linguistic research,we first consider the act of translation as a language act,which claims specific principles and laws of its own.Direct responses to the question of translatability can thus be initiated in two directions: the first,in the exploration of linguistic principles securing crosslinguistic transfer;the second,in the discovery of objective regularities among translation solutions.Afterwards,we propose to adopt the linguistic approach to carry out analyses which parallel the original text and the translated one,and which dig the regularities implanted in the products manifested in it.As to the translatability of the sentence,we rely on a real corpus of translation for quantitative and qualitative studies to pinpoint internal rules that lead to general linguistic mechanism and its manifestation.This research framework based on utterance and on discourse remains applicable to the research on the translatability of any language and linguistic unit.To testify to the feasibility of this framework,and more importantly to show the specific performance and characteristic of the translatability of the sentence,we have chosen the translation of relative clauses from French to Chinese as a case in point for detailed analysis.Picking the relative clauses is because this frequently used structure of second predication is semantically and syntactically complex,which can give rise to a whole serial of possible translations.The translation from French to Chinese is because the typological difference of these two languages allows different distributions between the antecedent(the head noun)and the proposition,which provides an ideal field to observe the constraint factors in translation.Through our research,we figure out that the principles governing the translatability of the sentence manifest on one hand in a linguistic mechanism of presuppositions,in which each actual sentence refers to an underlying conceptual expression,which in turn corresponds to a variety of superficial realizations.Naturally,when a sentence is translated into another language,it will be represented by a number of expressions.On the other hand,if,by chance,two languages have each a formal structure responding to the same information structure,the translation of sentences would become more “direct” and simpler.In addition,while our qualitative research find that the number of the corresponding structures is limited and the occurrence of each of them exhibits regularities that are statistically significant,our qualitative studies detect a series of linguistic elements that restrains the use of “simpler” structures.Meanwhile,these intervening factors manifest their own regularities with differing intensities,belonging to a hierarchy.In view of this,the inscription of studies on translatability in the search for principles and laws is not only confirmed by its rationality in theory,but also by its applicability in practice.It allows the unification of the epistemology and the methodology on the question and thus the reconciliation between untranslatability on the metaphysical level and translatable in practice.Such a research approach deserves further exploration and extension.