Umberto Eco Say almost the same thing. Experiments on translation

1. Conjunction to be written together (in one word): The editor met with the author, to agree on the changes made to the manuscript. It should be distinguished from the combination that would (pronoun and particle), in which the particle could be rearranged to another place in the sentence: That would Can you think of anything else like that?; What else could I come up with?; To no matter what happens, I will not leave him in trouble; I have no idea, to he did in my place.

The following case is also possible: There is no such force that held him in place- here it is permissible to rearrange the particle and, therefore, to write the conjunction word and particle separately: There is no such force that would hold it in place.

Remember: combination through thick and thin written in six words.

2. Unions are also written together (in one word), and both unions are synonymous with the union and; Wed: You too Have you vacationed in the Caucasus? - You Also Have you vacationed in the Caucasus?- AND Have you been on holiday in the Caucasus?

Conjunctions too and should also be distinguished from combinations the same (pronoun with a particle) and the same (adverb with a particle). When combined, the same often stands for the pronoun most: Repeated daily the same. In addition, the combination the same is often followed by the conjunctive word that: Today is the same as yesterday.

The combination is also often followed by an adverb like: We decided to spend the summer the same as last year (the particle can also be omitted: We decided to spend the summer the same as last year).

Often only in a broad context can one discern the presence of a conjunction or combination in a sentence (also - the same, also - the same). Wed:

The others also shouted loudly (‘and the rest shouted loudly’).

The others shouted the same thing loudly (‘they shouted the same thing loudly’).

Teenagers also (‘and teenagers took part in the fight against the fascist occupiers’ - with an intonation pause after the word also).

Teenagers too bravely fought against the fascist occupiers(‘they fought with the same courage’ - with an intonation pause after the word bravely).

Note. The particle is also written in one word: Also my advisor!

3. Conjunctions moreover and moreover have a connecting meaning (‘in addition to this’) and are written together (in one word): The experiment was carried out successfully, and first; The speech is informative and besides interesting in form.

The conjunctions “moreover” and “moreover” should be distinguished from the combinations “at what” and “at that” (pronoun with a preposition). The combination at what is used in interrogative sentences: At what is he here with his claims? The combination at that usually defines the following noun: At that publishing house There is a small printing house.

4. The conjunction is written together (in one word): The climb up the mountain here is steep, but the road is beautiful.

The conjunction, however, should be distinguished from the combination for that (pronoun with a preposition): The workers received a bonus for that construction was completed ahead of schedule.

5. The conjunction so (meaning ‘therefore’) is written together (in one word): So, the lesson is over. It should be distinguished from the combination and so (conjunction and adverb): And so ends every time.

6. Explanatory conjunctions, that is, they are written separately (in two words): We drank as usual that is, a lot (P.); The third day, that is this week, I tell the headman...(Blind).

7. Complex unions because, since, so, in order to, whereas etc. are written separately (in two or three words): We returned from the forest very soon, because it started to rain; Because the bell rang, everyone had to hand over their notebooks to the teacher; I was sick all holidays So it was not possible to go skiing; In order to learn to swim, you must not be afraid of water; We got up early and went fishing, whereas our friends slept all morning.

Dire Quasi la Stessa Cosa

Esperienze di Traduzione

© RCS Libri S.p.A. – Milano Bompiani 2003

© A. Koval, translation into Russian, comments, 2006. Heirs, 2015

© A. Bondarenko, artistic design, layout, 2015

© AST Publishing House LLC, 2015

Publishing house CORPUS ®

Introduction

What does "translate" mean? The first answer, and an encouraging one at that, might be to say the same thing in another language. True, at the same time, firstly, we experience considerable difficulties in trying to establish what it means to “say the same", and we are not clearly aware of this in the course of such operations as paraphrase, definition, clarification, reformulation, not to mention supposed synonymous substitutions. Secondly, holding the text to be translated in front of us, we do not know what it is That. Finally, in some cases even the meaning of the word is questionable say.

We do not intend to emphasize the central position of the translation problem in many philosophical discussions and therefore we will not begin to search for an answer to the question of whether there is a certain Thing in Itself in the Iliad or in the Night Song of the Shepherd Wandering in Asia {♦ 1}* (ta The Thing in Itself which, it would seem, should shine through or shine outside and above any language into which they are translated) - or, on the contrary, it will never be achieved, despite all the efforts to which another language will resort. We are unable to fly so high, and in subsequent pages we will repeatedly descend lower.

Suppose in an English novel a certain character says: it's raining cats and dogs. The bad translator will be the one who, thinking that he is saying the same thing, translates it literally: “it rains like dogs and cats” ( piove cani e gatti). This should be translated “it’s pouring like buckets” ( piove and cantinelle or piove sauté Dio la manda). But what if this is a fantasy novel, and it was written by an adherent of the so-called “Fortian” sciences {♦ 2}, and it talks about how does it really rain on cats and dogs? Then you need to translate literally. Agree. What if this character goes to Dr. Freud to tell him that he has an inexplicable manic fear of cats and dogs, which he thinks are especially dangerous when it rains? Again, it will be necessary to translate literally, but a certain shade of meaning will be lost: after all, this Cat Man is also concerned with idiomatic expressions.

And if in an Italian novel the character who says that it rains with cats and dogs is a student at the Berlitz school {♦ 3}, unable to resist the temptation to decorate their speech with tortured Anglicisms? If translated literally, an ignorant Italian reader would not understand that this character uses anglicism. And if then this Italian novel needs to be translated into English, then how to convey this habit of equipping your speech with Anglicisms? Is it really necessary to change the nationality of the hero and make him an Englishman, spouting Italianisms left and right, or a London worker unsuccessfully demonstrating his Oxford pronunciation? This would be an impermissible liberty. What if the phrase it's raining cats and dogs spoken in English by a character in a French novel? How to translate it into English? See how difficult it is to say what it is That, which must be conveyed through text, and how difficult it is to convey it.

This is the point of the following chapters: to try to understand how, even knowing that the same never said, you can say almost the same. With this approach, the problem is no longer so much the concept of the same himself and not so much in concept Togo the same thing, how much in the concept of this almost. How stretchable is it almost? It all depends on the point of view: Earth is almost the same as Mars, since both of these planets revolve around the Sun and they are both spherical. But the Earth may be almost the same as any other planet orbiting in some other solar system; it is almost the same as the Sun itself, as far as celestial bodies are concerned; it is almost the same as a fortune teller's crystal ball, like a ball or an orange. To establish the limits of flexibility, stretchability of this almost, known criteria are required, which are negotiated in advance. To say almost the same thing is a procedure that, as we will see below, goes under the sign negotiations

* * *

I probably first began to theoretically engage with translation problems in 1983, explaining how I translated Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style {♦ 4}. In the future, it seems, I did not pay much attention to this until the nineties, when a number of my speeches took place on various occasions at various conferences; In addition, as will be seen later, I once presented part of my experience as an author translated into other languages. The problem of translation could not be avoided in my study “In Search of a Perfect Language” ( Eco 1993b); I have referred to careful analysis of translations in one translation of Joyce (Eco 1996) and also in my own translation of Gerard de Nerval's Sylvia. {♦ 5} (Eco 1999b)

However, in 1997–1999. At the University of Bologna, two year-long seminars were held, where doctoral work on semiotics was discussed. The seminars were devoted to the topic of intersemiotic translation, that is, all those cases when translation is carried out not from one natural language to another, but from one semiotic system to another, different from it: when, for example, a novel is “translated” into a film, an epic poem - into comics or paint a picture on the theme of a poem. During the discussions, I found that I disagreed with some doctoral students and colleagues on the issue of the relationship between translation “in the proper sense of the word” and translation, called “intersemiotic”. The subject of the dispute can be understood from the pages of this book; in the same way, you can understand what incentives and motivations I received, including (and even especially) from those with whom I disagreed. My responses at that time, as well as those of other participants, appeared in two special issues of the magazine VS 82 (1999) and VS 85–87 (2000).

Meanwhile, in the fall of 1998, the University of Toronto invited me to attend a lecture series in honor of Professor Emilio Goggio, during which I began to reconsider my thoughts on this issue. The results of these reports were then published in the volume “Experiments on Translation” ( Eco 2001).

Finally, in 2002, I gave eight Weidenfeld Lectures at Oxford, all on the same topic, where I eventually developed the concept of translation as negotiation.

This book reproduces essays written on the above occasions, with many new arguments and examples, since I am no longer bound by the required time of individual reports or presentations at a particular conference. However, despite these significant additions and the different organization of the material, I have tried to maintain the conversational tone in which my previous texts were maintained.

* * *

The conversational tone was and is explained by the fact that in the following pages, where various aspects of translation theory undoubtedly come into play, I always proceed from concrete experience. We can say it differently: the experience may be remembered in connection with some theoretical problems that are dealt with today in translation studies, but these theoretical problems always arise thanks to experience, mostly personal.

Texts on translation studies often did not satisfy me precisely because in them the wealth of theoretical reasoning was not clothed in reliable armor of examples. Of course, this is not true of all books or essays on the subject, and I think, for example, of the wealth of examples collected in George Steiner's After Babylon. (Steiner 1975). But in many other cases I had the suspicion that the translation theorist himself had never translated and therefore was talking about something in which he had no direct experience.

Giuseppe Francescato once made the following remark (I am paraphrasing from memory): in order to study the phenomenon of bilingualism, and therefore to collect enough experience on the formation of dual linguistic competence, you need hour after hour, day after day, to observe the behavior of a child who has to experience dual linguistic motivation.

Such experience can only be acquired by: (1) linguists, (2) who have a spouse of a different nationality and/or live abroad, (3) who have children, and (4) who are able to regularly monitor their children from the very first moments of their linguistic behavior . It is not always possible to meet all these requirements, and that is why research on bilingualism has developed slowly.

I ask the following question: perhaps, in order to develop a theory of translation, it is necessary not only to consider many examples of translation, but also to carry out at least one of the following three experiences: checking translations made by others, translating yourself, and being translated ( or, better yet, be translated by collaborating with your own translator)?

Here one might note that it is not at all necessary to be a poet in order to develop a sensible theory of poetry, and one can evaluate a text written in a foreign language, even knowing this language mainly passively. However, this objection is true only to a certain extent. In fact, even someone who has never written poetry has experience of his own language and could at least once in his life try (and can always try) to write an eleven-syllable, find a rhyme, metaphorically depict this or that object or event. And anyone who has only passive knowledge of a foreign language has at least experienced how difficult it is to build coherent phrases in it. It also seems to me that an art critic who does not know how to draw is able (and for this very reason) to note the difficulties hidden in any kind of visual image; Likewise, a music critic with a weak voice can understand from direct experience what skill is required in order to masterfully hit a high note.

Therefore, I believe this: in order to engage in theoretical reflection on the translation process, it is not useful to have its active or passive experience. On the other hand, when no translation theory yet existed, i.e. from St. Jerome {♦ 6} until the 20th century, the only interesting observations on this topic were made precisely by those who translated themselves, and it is well known what hermeneutical difficulties St. Augustine experienced, intending to talk about correct translations, but having at the same time poor knowledge of foreign languages (he did not speak Hebrew). knew everything, but knew Greek very poorly).

I will add that in my life I have had to verify many translations made by other people, both during my long publishing experience and as the leader of a series of scientific essays; that I translated two books that required considerable effort - Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau and Sylvia by Gerard de Nerval - devoting many years to both; and, as a writer of scientific and artistic works, I worked closely with my translators. I not only supervised the translations (at least into those languages that I know to some extent, and that is why I will often quote the translations of William Weaver, Burkhart Kroeber, Jean-Noel Schifano, Elena Lozano and others), but also In the course of my work, I had long conversations with translators, so I discovered: if the translator or translator is savvy, they can explain the problems that arise in their language, even to the author who does not know it, and even in these cases the author can act as a collaborator, offering his decisions or indicating what liberties they can take in their text in order to get around the obstacle (this often happened to me with Elena Kostyukovich, translator into Russian, with Imre Barna, translating into Hungarian, with Jond Bouquet and Patti Krone, translating into Dutch, with Masaki Fujimura and Tadahiko Wada translating into Japanese).

That is why I decided to talk about translation, starting from specific problems, which for the most part relate to my own writings, and limit myself to mentioning theoretical solutions only on the basis of this experience in corpore vili * .

By making this decision, I expose myself to a double danger: first, of being narcissistic, and second, of believing that my interpretation my books prevailed over their interpretation by other readers, including in primis** – my translators. But I myself debated this principle in books such as “The Role of the Reader” {♦ 7} and “Limits of Interpretation.” The first danger is inevitable - but, in fact, I behave like those carriers of diseases dangerous to society who agree to openly tell people both about their current condition and about the treatment measures they are taking in order to benefit others. As to the second danger, I hope that it will be seen in the following pages that I have always pointed out to my translators the critical places in my texts that are likely to give rise to ambiguities, advising them to pay attention to them and without attempting to influence their interpretation. On other occasions I answered their direct requests when they asked me which of the various decisions I would make if I had to write in their language; and in these cases my decision took on the force of law, since ultimately my name was on the cover of the book.

On the other hand, in my experience as an author translating into other languages, I constantly felt the conflict between the need for the translation to be “true” to what I had written, and the exciting discovery of how my text could (and sometimes had) to be transformed, clothed in the words of another language. And, although sometimes I realized that translation was impossible (of course, such cases were always resolved in one way or another), even more often I noticed possibilities: that is, I noticed how, when in contact with another language, the text showed interpretation potentials that were not known myself, and how sometimes a translation could improve the original (I say “improve” precisely in relation to intention, which the text itself suddenly manifested, regardless of the original intention that I had as an empirical author).

* * *

This book, based on personal experience and born from two series of lectures, I I don’t pass it off as a book on translation theory(and it lacks appropriate systematicity) for the simple reason that it leaves innumerable problems of translation studies open. I am not talking about relations with the Greek and Latin classics simply because I have never translated Homer and have not had the opportunity to pass judgment on one or another Homeric translation for a series of classical authors. I speak about the so-called intersemiotic translation only occasionally, since I have never made a film based on a novel or staged a ballet based on a poem. I do not deal with postcolonial tactics and strategies for adapting a particular Eastern text to the perception of other cultures, since I could neither follow the translations of my texts into Arabic, Persian, Korean or Chinese, nor discuss these translations. I have never had to translate texts written by a woman (and not because out of habit I only translate men: in my entire life I have translated only two of them), and I don’t know what problems I would have to face. In relations with some of my translators (into Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, Croatian, Greek), I encountered such a willingness on their part to apply to my text that I did not encounter any will to “feminist” translation.

I devoted several paragraphs to the word “fidelity”, since the author, who monitors his translators, always proceeds from the implied requirement fidelity. I understand that this word may seem outdated in view of the statements of some critics who claim that in translation only the result realized in the text and the language of arrival counts - especially at a certain historical moment, when an attempt is made to update a text created in other eras. But the concept of fidelity is associated with the conviction that translation is a form of interpretation and, even based on the perception and culture of the reader, it should always strive to reproduce the intention - I will not say “author”, but text intent: what a text says or implies based on the language in which it is expressed and the cultural context in which it appears.

Suppose in some American text one character says to another: you are just pulling my leg. The translator should not convey this literally: “you are only pulling my leg” or “yes, you are leading me by the leg”; "You're trying to trick me" would be correct (mi stai prendendo in giro) or, even better, “you’re leading me by the nose” (mi stai prendendo per il naso). A literal translation will result in a phrase so unusual in Italian that we will be forced to assume that the character (and with him the author) are inventing some kind of daring rhetorical figure - and this is not so, since the character is using what is in his language is a stable expression. On the contrary, if you replace “leg” with “nose”, the Italian reader will find himself in the same situation in which the author of the text would like to place the English reader. So, here is an example of how apparent infidelity (the text is not translated literally) turns out to be an act of fidelity in the end. Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translators, spoke about this in almost the same words: when translating, you need non verbum e verbo sed sensum exprimere de sensu* – although we will see that this statement can also lead to many ambiguities.

So, to translate means to understand the internal system of a language and the structure of a given text in this language and to build a textual system that in a certain sense can have a similar impact on the reader - both in terms of semantic and syntactic, and in terms of stylistic, metric, sound-symbolic - as well as the emotional impact that the source text was striving for 1 .

Hello! In all your answers to questions about discrepancies in the rules of Russian spelling and punctuation of 1956 and 2006, you say that new words appear, the spelling of which was not taken into account in the earlier edition, and one cannot but agree with this, but the discrepancies in the “Rules” are available not only in the "Spelling" section, but also in the "Punctuation" section too. For example, the new edition says that definitions are not isolated if they come after negative, indefinite, demonstrative, attributive pronouns and form a single semantic group with them, but in the 1956 edition not a word is said at all about the relationship of these pronouns with definitions. So, please answer this question: when checking the Total Dictation, what will you consider correct - the attributive phrase highlighted with commas after such a pronoun or not? Don't you think that a “single semantic group” is a somewhat vague concept? One of your dictators will pause in one place and the writers will decide that this is a single semantic group, and the other will pause in another place and everyone who listens to him will feel that the attributive phrase has a clarifying meaning. and separate it with commas. The same thing, by the way, can be said about the “circumstantial connotation” of the attributive phrase. So what are your evaluation criteria?


	Question No. 274338

Good afternoon
I am completely confused with the conjugation, and I am surprised that no questions about this arose at school or institute. And now I can’t figure it out with my son (6th grade).
According to the rule from the textbook, the verb LIVE should belong to the 2nd conjugation (all verbs are in it, except shave, lay), but it is clearly 1st conjugation!
He also beats himself, pours, howls, and so on.
It looks like the rule is greatly truncated and it is not clear how to determine conjugations then.
I advise my son to now conjugate the plural verb THEY LIVE and at the end determine that this is 1 conjugation.
I found a more complete rule on Wikipedia, and all these verbs are listed there - and it turns out that there are not 11 exception verbs at all, but much more - it is simply impossible to learn them. So why are children forced to learn a truncated rule that does not stand up to criticism? And how do you come across the verb LIVE, SLEEP (according to rule 1, according to life 2), SOUND, SHAKE, etc. - What should a child do on a test, how to determine the conjugation?
And horror also arises with differently conjugated verbs - where is the list of them, except to run and want. Poor children - a complete mess in their heads! Please tell me how to organize this mess?