Adaptability In The Choice-Making Process Of Translation

In the history of translation studies, many approaches have been taken to the inquiry of the semiotic, linguistic, social, cultural and psychological elements involved in translation and have produced quite a lot of significant insights. But few of them could provide us with a systematic and unified framework to take into account all these factors. This paper thus takes a pragmatic perspective on the investigation of how these factors individually or collectively work in translation, claiming that translation is a dynamic choice-making process involving certain degrees of salience with the aim of achieving adaptability in terms of linguistic reality and contextual correlates.The paper begins with a brief review of the pragmatically oriented translation studies in the past, which reminds us of the problems and deficiencies in applying the findings in pragmatics to the study of translation. These problems and deficiencies are found to arise from the fundamental distinction between European continental and Anglo-American traditions of pragmatics, with the latter more readily as the starting point for a pragmatic perspective of translation studies. The distinction is mainly seen in the definition of pragmatics, intentionality, and objects of pragmatic investigation. Based on this analysis, we suggest that Vershueren's European continental perspective view ofpragmatics is a better approach that we can take to the study of translation as it takes into account all the factors involved in language use, whether linguistic, contextual, socio-cultuTal, cognitive or psychological. It highlights context, but simply adds it as a parameter in the study of language use. It has the specific topic of investigating the meaningful functioning of language in actual use.Borrowing and making some adjustments of Vershueren's theory for our purpose, we have proposed an adaptability framework of translation. In this framework translation is viewed as a dynamic choice-making process involving certain degrees of salience with the aim of achieving adaptability in terms of linguistic reality and contextual correlates. Adaptability is made available and possible by variability and negotiability of language. In the choice-making process of translation, adaptability is achieved in four aspects, linguistic adaptability, contextual adaptability, dynamics and salience.Translation is a choice-making process. Choice-making occurs in the whole process of translation and at all levels of language structure. First there are the choices of what to translate, that is the source language (SL for short) text, and how to translate, namely the translation strategies and techniques. And then there are the choices of codes and styles, speech sounds, words, sentences, and ways of organizing the text. With variability and negotiability accounting for the possibility of choice-making, adaptability is the ultimate aim and result of choice-making. In the paper, the notion adaptability is also defined for translation as distinct from another more frequently used term adaptation. Researchers regard adaptation as target-text oriented, and it is thus distortion, falsification and censorship, or even pseudotranslation. Therefore we "adapt" this term into adaptability both to refer to the property of language and choices to make, and to denote the interadaptation between source language and target language (TL for short) sides as adjustment and adaptation to both sides is the real fact of translation.Four aspects of adaptability are specified in the paper, linguistic adaptability, contextual adaptability, dynamics and salience. This first two explain what adaptability is to be achieved for, and the last two account for how it is achieved. Through the discussion of linguistic adaptability, we find that choice-making in translation occurs at all the levels of language as well as the text-building principles. Translation is a bilingual communication, whose success depends very much on the interadaptability between the two languages. Contextual adaptability tells us how adaptability is to be achieved in thecommunicative and linguistic context. Communicative context includes social, mental and physical worlds. The most important aspect of social relationship concerned with translation is that between the SL author, translator and the TL reader, with the translator as the intermediate role between the other two. The translator's choices have to be adaptable not only to the mental states of the SL author and TL readers, but also to the socio-historic settings, customs, beliefs, kinship systems, social organizations as well as other cultural aspects on both SL and TL sides. What's more, the translator's mental state is also crucial as it is concerned with his intentions in translation. Adaptability is to be achieved in physical world in the sense that different physical surroundings may produce different associations on the same image expressed in different languages. Linguistic context is the context formed by the text itself, in which cohesion and coherence are crucial to make the text meaningful as a whole. Intertextuality explains adaptability in translation in the sense of text interdependence.Dynamics explains how adaptability is achieved in the choice-making process. Linguistic choices in translation are not static, but developing over time following the changes in cultural contexts. Adaptability is achieved dynamically as meaning interpretation and generation are also dynamic. Impact of translation upon SL text and cultures as well as TL cultures is another proof of dynamic property of translation. There is a cognitive and psychological mechanism involved in the choice-making process of translation. This accounts for the fact that the translator is conscious to make some choices rather than others. However, not only different translators but also the same translator in translating different texts is not equally conscious as a result of a wide range of affecting forces in work, such as the translator's beliefs, familiarity with the SL text and background information, patronage as well as target readers' expectations among others. Different degrees of salience are reflected in the translator's choice of what to translate and how to translate, i.e. the strategies and techniques used for different reasons.Based on the analysis of the four aspects of adaptability, this paper attempts to prove that translation is a dynamic choice-making process in which the translator has the aim of achieving adaptability in linguistic structures and contextual correlates with certain degrees of salience involved. This adaptability framework of translation provides us with a unified theoretic basis for the explanation of some common issues in translation studies, such as equivalence, principles of translation, and choice of translation strategies. The...