LOTMAN AND TRANSLATABILITY

1. LOTMAN AND TRANSLATABILITY

2. An important contribution to translation studies and to the definition of the concept of "translatability" from a semiotic point of view comes from Lotman, founder of the Tartu School of Semiotics. During the '40s, the young Lotman enrolls in the University and - interrupted by his participation as a soldier in World War II - earns a human sciences degree with honors.

3. The fates deemed Lotman to begin his university career in Tartu, the second most important town in Estonia. In the 1960s, Lotman is particularly interested in the methods of analyzing poetic texts and in the research on the ideological models of culture. In 1960, he gives his first course in structural poetics and, in 1962, publishes his Lectures on Structural Poetics. Lotman died in 1993. The Semiotics professorship is now held by Peeter Torop, one of the most famous researchers, among other fields, in the application of semiotics to translation studies. In Lotman's writings there is something very interesting for translation studies. To understand what Torop says about translatability, we do best to begin from the general Lotmanian view of culture:

4. The Lotmanian view of culture is strictly related to translatability and translation studies • For the biological survival of an individual, the satisfaction of some natural needs is enough, the life of any group whatsoever is not possible without a culture. All man's needs can be divided into two groups: • The needs that must be immediately satisfied and cannot (or can • hardly) be accumulated. • The needs that can be satisfied by accumulated store form a different • group. They are the objective basis for the acquisition, by the • organism, of extra-genetic information.

5. In the nature/culture dialectics, Lotman attributes to man, among all the other living beings, the only possibility of belonging to both systems:Man, in his struggle for life, is, therefore, inserted in two processes: • In one he intervenes as a consumer of material values, of things. • In the other he is, instead an accumulator of information. Both are necessary for existence. If for man, as a biological creature, the first is enough, social life implies both. In Lotman's opinion, there are not only the culture space and the nature space in the semiotic world; there is a non-culture space as well, "that sphere functionally belonging to Culture, but not fulfilling its rules" . When Lotman says "Culture", he refers to the whole of the cultures constituting man's world and, within each of them, he isolates a "language set", so that every member of any given culture is "a sort of polyglot".

6. The Lotmanian view of culture is strictly related to translatability and translation studies : “ Culture is a gathering of historically formed semiotic systems (languages) The translation of the same texts into other semiotic systems, the assimilation of different texts, the moving of the boundaries between texts belonging to culture and those beyond its boundaries are the mechanisms through which it is possible to culturally incorporate reality. Translating a given section of reality into one of the languages of culture, transforming it into a text, i.e. into an information codified in a given way, introducing this information into collective memory: this is the everyday cultural activity sphere. Only what has been translated into a sign system can become part of memory. The intellectual history of humankind can be considered as a struggle for memory. ”

7. Lotman imagines the whole of reciprocally interacting texts and languages as a system, and calls this system "semiosphere". One of the main qualities of this system is its delimitedness. The semiosphere is confined by the space which surrounds it; it can be extrasemiotic (a space where signification processes do not occur, like a natural space) or heterosemiotic (i.e. belonging to another semiotic system, for example, a musical text versus a pictorial text). The semiotic border is the sum of the bilingual translation "filters" passing through which the text is translated into another language (or other languages) that are outside a given semiosphere.

8. The difference between systems is no longer the problem for the excellence of translators. On the contrary, the presence of this difference is necessary to the life of the cultural world. Translation loss is no longer viewed as a cumbersome burden the managing of which is a problem to translators. The fact that it is never possible to translate everything guarantees the preservation of differences and the preservation of cultural life.

9. Torop and translatability The only element emerging clearly from all quoted essays is maybe that the "translation" notion is indefinite. There are many views on the language/culture, language/thought relations. • In Torop's opinion, as there cannot be a single approach to translatability, it is possible to isolate three distinct aspects: • Translatability as a cultural-linguistic and poetic aspect of the text. • Translatability of the perceptive or conceptual unit of the text: Here the text is thought of in the form of a fragment, not as a whole. • Translatability as pre-definability of the reception of a text in a given culture; in this case, the relation is emphasized between a given text and a given culture, and the potential interactions are analyzed.

10. Torop isolates five translatability parameters, each matching a different translation strategy. CULTURE TRANSLATABILITY • Translatability parametersTranslation strategies • Language:nationalization (naturalization), trans-nationalization, • denationalization • Time:archaization, historization, modernization, neutralization • Space:localization, visualization, naturalization, exotization, • neutralization • Text:preservation/non-preservation of the structure (element and • level hierarchy), preservation/non-preservation of cohesion • Work:readers version, intratextual clarification, interlinear • commentaries, special commentaries at the end, general • systematic commentaries, metatextual compensation • Socio-political manipulation:purification of the texts, text orientation

11. The language parameter consists of: Grammatical categories: in some cases two languages are different because of the presence/absence of some grammatical category. Translatability problems are linked to the absence, for example, of the article in some languages. In this case, when translating from one such language into a language with definite and indefinite articles, each name implies a difficult choice: For example, when you have to translate the Russian word roza, you can choose among three possibilities: "rose", "a rose", and "the rose". The same goes for the presence/absence of declinations, prepositions, verbal tenses and so on.

12. Realia: these are words existing only in one given culture, like spaghetti in Italian, balalaika in Russian, hutzpah in Yiddish, Knödel in German, and so on. The translator can choose to simply transcribe (or transliterate when the alphabets are different) the word, or to translate it: By associations we mean words with peculiar connotations not always understandable or easy to render in another language: for example, trade marks that give an idea of luxury or deprivation, colors indicating mourning, love, jealousy, etc. World image: The degree of explicitness of a language, can be a problem. Translating from a figurative language into a more explicit culture, often a text is obtained that is perceived as hermetic while, on the contrary, translating from a more explicit language into a more figurative culture, often results in a text that is perceived as redundant. The discourse aspect is linked to the awareness of the specific translation problems related to scientific and technical jargons.

13. TIME PARAMETER concerns the period connected to the prototext culture, the author's historical time, and the historical time in which the narrated events are set. SPACE PARAMETER: Social space consists in the preservation/suppression of sociolects. Since social differences are different in various cultures, dialects, slang, argot can sometimes be rendered with dialects of the receiving culture, but the result is never completely satisfactory and, in some cases, the translation loss is very conspicuous. PSYCHOLOGICAL SPACE: Concerns both the reader and the translator. It is important for the reader to perceive the inner unity of the text, attainable using both lexical coherence and imagery in the text. In some cases, as far as the translator is concerned, it is important to reconstruct the concrete scene of the imaginary world described by the prototext.

14. STRATEGIES: • Localization: Commented translation, with insertion of the translator's interventions. • Visualization: Graphical representation of situations, adaptation to places familiar to the receiving reader • Exotization: Preservation of specific characteristics of an exotic culture. • Neutralization: Generalization of local peculiarities, standardization.

15. Torop and translatability - part three The text parameter takes a look at poetic and literary technique. The first aspect taken into account is that concerning the genre codes. When some expressions reflect a typical formulation of a given literary genre (for example, "Once upon a time" recalls to the mind the beginning of a fairy tale) in a text, it is important for the translator to grasp the signal and, if possible, to reconstruct it. The translatability problems concern, above all, those literary genres that are absent from the metatext culture.

16. Chronotopes: The translator must distinguish the problems related to the: • Plot chronotope: Narration or narrator language • Psychological chronotope: Concerns to the expressive aura of characters. • Metaphysical chronotope: Regarding the peculiar author's lexicon. The main translatability problems are related to complex linguistic or poetic structures, to peculiar narrative modes of the characters, as in many Leskov's tales

17. In the tale quoted below, the inner narrator orally tells a story to people around him. There are many overlapping narration layers. We have a spoken speech in writing, as we can note from the repetitions ("but") and verbal tense incongruences. Please note that the oral speech is not only in quotes, but also in the inner narrator's voice: But Lukà didn't have even a minute to talk, he doesn't answer grandpa, but quickly pushes the icon out to the Englishman through the peephole. But he pushes it back as fast as he has taken it."But how come" he says "there's no seal?"Lukà says:"What do you mean, no seal?""But there's no seal"

18. Expressive aura of the character: The perceptive coherence with which a character is described. This implies a descriptive coherence first by the author, then by the translator too. Otherwise, the metatext reader will not be able to individuate the character with the same clearness of the prototext reader. Torop rightly observes that the expressive aura of a character sometimes begins with the name of the character, when it is meaningful: Dostoevskij's idiot is called Myshkin, deriving from the name mýshka, "little mouse".

19. Translatability problems arise from the peculiar lexical use by an author. There can be favorite words, images, particular world views. There are lexical peculiarities linked to literary currents, which must be recognizable. • The system of expressive means has to do with the rhythm of the text, the repetition of elements, motives, metaphors, and connotations. Even in this case, it is fundamental for the translator to be able to manage a like system of intratextual links.

20. The work parameter has to do with the creation of the metatext as a book, as a published volume, sometimes with critical apparatuses, notes, afterword, chronologies, etc. This parameter influences the perception of the work by the audience. The translation text in itself, as interpretation of the prototext, can aim at reinforcing the idea the audience already has of that work or, on the contrary, try and create a new one, elicit a different reaction in the reader. • The presence of a metatext (extratextual apparatus) is, in some cases, necessary. In the editions of classical works for the mass audience, the absence of a commentary is a real belittling of the reader. • The socio-political determinacy parameter concerns the forms of censure and ideological manipulation of a translation.