Word as a unit of translation

What Is to Be Considered as A Unit of Translation?

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Being one of the fundamental concepts always argued about in the realm of translation,
the unit of translation (UT) has been given various definitions by different
theorists. Shuttleworth and Cowie (1997) define it as: «a term used
to refer to the linguistic level at which ST is recodified in TL»
(p. 192). In other words, it’s an element with which the translator decides
to work while translating the ST. Barkhudarov (1993) defines a UT as «the
smallest unit of SL which has an equivalent in TL» (as cited in Shuttleworth
and Cowie, 1997, p. 192). He recommends that this unit of translation,
no matter how long, can itself «have a complex structure» (as
cited in Shuttleworth and Cowie, 1997, p. 192) although its parts separately
cannot be translated and replaced by any equivalent in the TL. Phonemes,
morphemes, words, phrases, sentences and entire texts are probable units
of translation for him. What determines the appropriate UT, according
to him, is the wording at a given point in ST.

When a translator commences his work, i.e. translation, in accordance with the
type of ST he’s working on, he decides about the basic segments in ST
to be translated into TT. These segments range from a whole text, as in
poetry, to a single phoneme.

The argument about the length of a UT also dates back to the conflict between
free vs. literal translation. Literal translation is much focused on individual
words, or even sometimes morphemes. Therefore in literal translation UTs
are as short as words. On the contrary, a free translation «aims
at capturing the sense of a longer stretch of language» (Hatim and
Munday, 2004, p. 17).It always chooses the sentence. Of course by the
arising of text linguistics, the concentration of free translation has
moved from the sentence to the whole text. Once a translator decides to
work on larger segments than is necessary to convey the meaning of ST,
this is free translation which is at work. In the same way, while translating
smaller segments than is needed, literal translation is under discussion.
In Koller terms (1979/1992), translating from a SL which is not that much
related to TL and will usually result in choosing larger units, while
closeness of SL and TL involves smaller UTs.

Vinay and Darbelnet (1985/95) totally draw on the concept of word as a basis
for UT. Of course they do not believe in non-existence of words, especially
in written languages. For them, a translator doesn’t need dictated criteria
about a UT since what he does during the translation process is all done
semantically. So sentencing a formal segment as a basic UT is not desired
at all. Consequently, what should be identified and distinguished as a
unit for a translator, who’s translating thoughts and concepts, is a unit
of thought. Vinay and Darbelnet consider three following terms as being
equivalent: «unit of thought», «lexicological unit»
and «unit of translation». What they suggest as a definition
for UT is» «the smallest segment of the utterance whose signs
are linked in such a way that they should not be translated literally»(as
cited in Hatim and Munday, 2004, p. 138). Lexicological units of Vinay
and Darbelnet contain «lexical elements grouped together to from
a single element of thought» (as cited in Hatim and Munday, 2004,
p. 138).

Several types of UT are recognized by them as: 1- functional units, 2-semantic
units, 3- dialectic units and 4- prosodic units. The last three types
are, according to them, counted as UT but the functional units are almost
too long to include just one UT.

Three other different categories arise while looking at the relationship between
units of translation and words inside a text:

1 — Simple units: Vinay and Darbelnet correspond this type to
a single word. It’s the simplest, as they state, and at the same time
the most widely used unit. In this case, number of units equals number
of words. Replacement of words will not lead to a change in the sentence
structure.

2 — Diluted units: These units contain several words which in
turn shape a lexical unit, since they pursue a single idea.

3 — Fractional units: «A fraction of a word» is what
this type of UTs are consisted of.

For Newmark (1988), «sentence is a natural unit of translation» (p
.65). He then considers some other sub-units of translation in the sentence,
the first of which is the morpheme. Unless placed in special cases, Newmark
states, morphemes shouldn’t be considered seriously. Clause, group, collocation
and words including idioms and compounds are grammatical and lexical sub-units
of translation proposed by him. For sure Newmark’s proposed category partly
relies on a scale formerly established by Michael Halliday in 1985. The
following scale is the one according to which Hallidays performs a systematic
analysis of English:

Morpheme

Word

Group

Clause

Sentence

Newmark considers no priority for each of the lexical or grammatical units, since
wherever they exist, he believes, enough importance should be paid toward
them.

Briefly speaking, Newmark (1988) labels paragraphs and texts as higher UTs, while
sentences, groups, clauses and words as lower UTs. He contends that «the
mass of translation uses a text as a unit only when there are apparently
insuperable problems at the level of the collocations, clause or sentence
level» (p. 64). Recent emphasis on communicative competence and language
is what Newmark counts as a factor which had made the text as unit renowned. 
In his terms, most of the translation is done at the smaller units, i.e.
word and clause.

Trying to delve more into the details and providing a clearer elaboration on
the concept of UT, Newmark (1988) states that in informative and authoritative
texts, the focus is on the word, in informative texts on the collocation
and the group and in vocative texts on the sentence and the text, as a
unit.

He concludes in this way: «all lengths of language can, at different moments
and also simultaneously, be used as units of translation in the course
of the translation activity… to me the unit of translation is a sliding
scale, responding according to other varying factors, and (still) ultimately
a little unsatisfactory» (pp. 66-67).

References

Shuttleworth, M. & M.
Cowie. (1997). Dictionary of translation studies. Manchester: St.
Jerome.

Barkhudarov, L. (1993). The
problem of the unit of translation. In P. Zelateva (Ed), Translation
as social action: Russian and Bulgarian perspectives (pp. 39-46).
London and New York: Routledge.

Hatim, B. & Munday, J.
(2004). Translation: An advanced resource book. New York: Routledge

Vinay, J. P & Darbelnet,
J. (1958/ 1995). A methodology for translation. In L. Venuti (Ed.), The
translation studies reader (pp. 84-93). London: Routledge.

Newmark, P. (1988). A textbook
of translation. Singapore: Prentice hall international (UK) ltd

Halliday, M. A. K. (1985/1994).
An introduction to functional grammar. London, Melbourne and Auckland:
Edward Arnold.

Koller, W. (1979/1992). EinfÜhrang
in die Übersetzungswissenschaft. Heidelberg: Quelle and Meyer.

Published — February 2010

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Since the formal description of any language is based on distinguishing a system of interrelated language units, it is possible to assume that the process of translation may be viewed on the basis of distinguishing certain units (units of translation). There are different approaches to distinguishing units of translation.

APPROACH # 1

The unit of translation is the smallest unit of the SL text, functioning in the process of translation more or less independently. The units of translation may be different for different languages and different kinds of translation. There are 2 kinds of translation: written and oral.

In written translation the unit of translation is usually represented by a sentence or sometimes 2 consecutive sentences – if one of them is structurally or semantically incomplete. These sentences usually contain all the information necessary to recreate the structure of a corresponding sentence in the TL. The sentence – is a speech unit which contains a more or less complete thought and that is why it may function more or less independently in the process of translation.

ex. After all they all have day jobs. Not so Seed. – Зрештою, у них у всіх є робота, окрім Сіда. (the 2^nd sentence is incomplete)

Your presence at the meeting is not necessa ry. N or is it desirable. – Ваша присутність на зустрічі є необов’язковою і навіть небажаною.

In oral translation, especially synchronized translation, the unit of translation is usually represented by a sense group (a group of words, which expresses the main idea) or a sentence, especially if elements important for understanding are located at the end of the sentence.

ex. Mediators from 3 west African ECOWAS nations planned today to visit rebels in Ivory Coast as France flew in 70 more soldiers to assist the Ivorian government. – Сьогодні посередники від 3 африканських країн-членів ЕКОВАС планували зустрітися з повстанцями в Кот-д’Івуарі. В той час як Франція відрядила до країни ще 70 військових на допомогу івуарійському урядові.

(This sentence represents 2 units of translation, since it consists of 2 sence groups. The 1st unit of tr. is…, the 2nd — …)

APPROACH # 2 (= LEVELS OF TRANSLATION)

The unit of translation is the smallest SL unit which is translated as a whole. It means that in the TLT it is impossible to discover TL units reproducing the meaning of the constituents, which make up the SL unit.

ex. pretty woman – красунечка (не можна віднайти безпосереднього відбиття лексичних одиниць)

help yourself – пригощайтеся (translated as a whole)

Each unit of translation belongs to a certain language level. So, every translation is performed at a definite language level.

The phoneme level

The phoneme – is a speech sound, the smallest 1-facet language unit, it has a form but has no meaning. This unit of translation is mainly relevant to the translation of proper names, geographical names, internationalisms, units of specific national lexicon and neologisms.

Bush – Буш (а не Кущ), гривня – hryvnia, dollar – долар,

computer – комп’ютер, вареники – varenyky

The morpheme level

The morpheme – is the smallest indivisible 2-facet language unit (has both form and meaning). It is the smallest sense unit.

superprofit – надприбуток, cloudless – безхмарний

The word level

The word – is the basic 2-facet language unit. The word is the smallest independent sense unit. Words are divisible (for morphemes).

blackboard – дошка (- if translated at a word level, if translated as чорна дошка – it is a morpheme level)

strawberry – полуниця, dog – собака

The word-combination level

The word-combination – is the largest 2-facet lexical unit comprising more that 1 word.

first night – прем’єра

to come up roses – чудово виходити

The sentence level

The sentence – a 2-facet speech unit which conveys a more or less complete thought.The sentence may express a statement,a command or a question.

Every dark cloud has a silver lining. – Немає лиха без добра.

A cat may look at a king. – Дивитися не заборонено.

Будь здоров! – Bless you!

The text level

The text – is the largest 2-facet language unit, consisting of sentences bound by the same idea. This unit of translation may function in poetry.

The unit of translation

Using systematic approaches to examine the unit of translation, the term “Translation Unit” must be identified. The term refers to ‘the linguistic level at which ST is recodified in TL.’ (Shuttleworth and Cowie 1997:192). In other words, the element used by the translator when working on the ST. It may be the individual word, group, clause, sentence or even the whole text.

SYSTEMATIC APPROACHES TO THE TRANSLATION UNIT

In first discussing the word as a possible unit of translation, Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1995) draw on Saussure’s key concepts of the linguistic sign, defined by the signifier and signified:
The famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure invented the linguistic term sign that unifies signifier (sound-image or word) and signified (concept). Importantly, Saussure emphasizes that the sign is by nature arbitrary and can only derive meaning from contrast with other signs in the same system (language). Thus, the signifier tree recalls the real-world signified plant with a trunk; it can be contrasted with signifiers such as bush, a different kind of plant. But the selection of tree for this designation is arbitrary and only occurs in the English-language system.
Vinay and Darbelnet reject the word as a unit of translation since translators focus on the semantic field rather than on the formal properties of the individual signifier. For them, the unit is ‘the smallest segment of the utterance whose signs are linked in such a way that they should not be translated individually’ (Vinay and Darbelnet, 1958/1995:21). This is what they call the lexicological unit and the unit of thought.

THE LEXICOLOGICAL UNIT

The lexicological units described by Vinay and Darbelnet contain ‘lexical elements grouped together to form a single element of thought’.
Illustrative examples are going to be provided, to show the non-correspondence at word level between Arabic and English.
‘In fact, even basic vocabulary is coloured by contexts, as ‘pragmaticians’ will tell you so that a simple term like ‘food’ can become غذاء (or أغذية in the UN parlance, cf. Food and Agriculture Organization ( منظمة الأغذية والزراعة or طعام . A voracious eater آكل / طاعم / نهم / شره is one who devours يزدرد / يلتهم large quantities of food (ravenous, gluttonous ?) And the choice of the translated term will depend on the context, which is naturally determined by culture.
Examine the differences between English and Arabic use of the concept of vision:

ينظر فى الأمر ‘to look into the matter’

يتطلع إلى مثل أعلى ‘to look up to an ideal’

يتأمل لوحة فنية ‘to look at a painting’

يبحث عن حل ‘to look for a solution’
(Enani,The Science of Translation)

This reflects what the unit of translation is in these translation equivalents and the illustrative examples.

THE UNIT OF THOUGHT

Using the back-translation as necessary in order to figuer out what units of translation a translator might use when translating a source text as a potential equivalent is absent in most dictionaries. This shows that it is the specific context which determines the translation of a given unit.

A translator needs to consider the whole structure in order to translate an individual word. Thus, the phrase as a whole is a unit of thought and needs to be treated as such in the process of translation. Translation units, therefore,will vary according to the linguistic structure involved.

THE UNIT OF TRANSLATION AS A PRELUDE TO ANALYSIS

Division of ST and TT into the units of translation is of particular importance in Vinay and Darbelnet’s work as a prelude to analysis of changes in translation.As an illustration of how this division works, and how it might illuminate the process of translation, look at the following example.

Example

A poster located by the underground ticket office at Heathrow airport, London:

Travelling from Heathrow?
There are easy to follow instructions on the larger self-service touch screen ticket machines.

A translator approaching this short text will most probably break it down into the title (Travelling from Heathrow?) and the instructions in the second sentence. While that sentence will be taken as a whole, it might also in turn be sub-divided more or less as follows:

There are/
[easy to follow/instructions]/
[on the/larger/self-service/touch screen/ticket machines]

Here, the slashes (/) indicate small word groups with a distinct semantic meaning that might be considered separately, while the brackets ([. . .]) enclose larger units that a practised translator is likely to translate as a whole.

The actual Arabic TT on the poster indicates how this operates in real life:

للسفر من مطار هيثرو
هناك أجهزة آلية لصرف التذاكر مزودة بشاشات كبيرة تعمل باللمس وتقدم لك تعليمات واضحة عليك اتباعها

In practice, the translation unit will typically tend to be not individual words but small groups of language building up into the sentence, what the famous translation theorist Eugene Nida (1964:268) calls ‘meaningful mouthfuls of language’.
According to Newmark (1988), ‘literal’ and ‘free’ translation are linked to different translation units, ‘literal’ being very much centered on faithfulness to the individual word, while ‘free’ translation aims at capturing the sense of a longer stretch of language.

References:

Basil Hatim and Jeremy Munday (2004). Translation, An advanced resource book . Routledge.

Enani, M.The Science of Translation :(an introduction, with reference to Arabic-English and English-Arabic translation).

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the linguistic meaning of the term. For the C programming term, see translation unit (programming).

In the field of translation, a translation unit is a segment of a text which the translator treats as a single cognitive unit for the purposes of establishing an equivalence. It may be a single word, a phrase, one or more sentences, or even a larger unit.

When a translator segments a text into translation units, the larger these units are, the better chance there is of obtaining an idiomatic translation. This is true not only of human translation, but also where human translators use computer-assisted translation, such as translation memories, and when translations are performed by machine translation systems.

Perceptions on the concept of unit[edit]

Vinay and Darbelnet took to Saussure’s original concepts of the linguistic sign when beginning to discuss the idea of a single word as a translation unit.^[1] According to Saussure, the sign is naturally arbitrary, so it can only derive meaning from contrast in other signs in that same system.

However, Russian scholar Leonid Barkhudarov^[2] stated that, limiting it to poetry, for instance, a translation unit can take the form of a complete text. This seems to relate to his conception that a translation unit is the smallest unit in the source language with an equivalent in the target one, and when its parts are taken individually, they become untranslatable; these parts can be as small as phonemes or morphemes, or as large as entire texts.

Susan Bassnett widened Barkhudarov’s poetry perception to include prose, adding that in this type of translation text is the prime unit, including the idea that sentence-by-sentence translation could cause loss of important structural features.

Swiss linguist Werner Koller connected Barkhudarov’s idea of unit sizing to the difference between the two languages involved, by stating that the more different or unrelated these languages were, the larger the unit would be.^[3]

One final perception on the idea of unit came from linguist Eugene Nida. To him, translation units have a tendency to be small groups of language building up into sentences, thus forming what he called meaningful mouthfuls of language.

Points of view towards translation units[edit]

Process-oriented POV[edit]

According to this point of view, a translation unit is a stretch of text on which attention is focused to be represented as a whole in the target language. In this point of view we can consider the concept of the think-aloud protocol, supported by German linguist Wolfgang Lörscher: isolating units using self-reports by translating subjects. It also relates to how experienced the translator in question is: language learners take a word as a translation unit, whereas experienced translators isolate and translate units of meaning in the form of phrases, clauses or sentences.

Product-oriented POV[edit]

Here, the target-text unit can be mapped into an equivalent source-text unit. A case study on this matter was reported by Gideon Toury, in which 27 English-Hebrew student-produced translations were mapped onto a source text. Those students that were less experienced had larger numbers of small units at word and morpheme level in their translations, while one student with translation experience had approximately half of those units, mostly at phrase or clause level.

References[edit]