Malinowski coined the term ‘context of situation’, which referred to the location of a text in its environment and the need to take into account the “totality of the culture surrounding the act of text production and reception” (Hatim and Mason 1990:37).Ĭultural elements are central to any translation. The cultural elements marked out the patterns and threads in the narrative and, apart from providing insights to the author and an understanding of the undercurrents in the novel, the benefit of this particular kind of analysis is that the overall cultural gap that has to be bridged can be gauged, and some consideration can also be given to the balance of items to be domesticated and foreignised.
The focus of this paper is the reading that involved the identification and isolation of key cultural elements, which were a particular feature of this novel given its temporal-spatial setting (Barcelona 1954). Obviously, in the case of a foreign culture, the translator’s reading will also be a form of interpretation on behalf of the ultimate reader.Īpart from two general readings (in 1997 and prior to commencing this analysis), I made a number of gist readings of the novel Un Calor Tan Cercano by Maruja Torres (Alfaguara Bolsillo 1998), focusing on aspects such as characterisation, narrative and syntax. Moreover, the concept of intertextuality reinforces this perspective on the reader, since every text is in some way a translation and consciously or subconsciously influenced by other texts in the overall system of texts. And if reading is translation, so too is translation a form of critical reading. Like Boase-Beier & Holman (1999), she points to the fact that the traditional sacredness of authorship has shifted in more recent times towards a gradual reinstatement of the reader, as one who translates or decodes a text. Logically, analysis will commence at an early stage of the entire translation process, yet will obviously be cyclical, or ‘looping’ to use Nord’s term.īassnett-McGuire (1991) also discusses the roles of the translator as reader and the reader as translator. The aim will depend on each novel as well as on the patterns detected at the surface level in the initial sequential reading(s), but might focus on semantic, stylistic, cultural, linguistic, textual or pragmatic issues, or a combination of any of these. However, if an aim is established for each reading, not only does one read systematically, one can also read more quickly (gist reading). To 'absorb' a lengthy novel, however, is difficult and potentially tedious. Translators are admonished, before starting to translate a novel, to “read the entire text at least once” (Landers 2001:32), but instinctively one feels that once is simply not enough. Novels, unlike poems and many other texts, tend to be lengthy, and assimilation of overall content, therefore, is more difficult and requires time. One of the reasons why reading may be deficient is quite obvious. To return then to the question of ‘deficiency in reading’, mentioned above, I will now focus specifically on the issue of translating a novel. The prime translation unit must ultimately be the entire text - not words or sentences or even paragraphs within it - and it is devices within the text that are crucial to understanding the overall text structure. Moreover, decisions are made intuitively and therefore cannot be properly explained or justified.
With this approach there is a real danger that sight may be lost of how the text as a whole functions. In other words, translations are frequently begun without a great deal of consideration of the work as a whole, with sentences “translated at face value rather than as component units in a complex overall structure” (ibid:115). The problem is not one of translators failing to create “readable texts", rather their failure “to consider the way in which individual sentences form part of the total structure… first and foremost a deficiency in reading” (Bassnett-McGuire 1991:115-6). In comparing poetry and prose translations, Basnett-McGuire observes that there is a tendency for translators of the latter to “consider content as separable from form” (1991:110).