Towards recipient-oriented translation

Sakhnevich S. V.

Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor
Moscow State University for the Humanities
named after M.A. Sholokhov
E-mail: crash68@yandex.ru

 

Increased attention to recipient-oriented translation and the growing number of domestic and international studies in this area are driven by a number of factors. The height of the marketing campaign era [29, 27], the growing sociocultural fragmentation of the population, the spread of culture from one segment of society to another, and the transmission of experience from the older to the younger generation force recipients of translations to perceive the same information differently [16, 200].

The struggle of nations for dominance in the world and the struggle of classes for power, the struggle against sexism, racism and nationalism, religious intolerance and totalitarianism, the struggle of various minorities for their rights encourage the acquisition and organization of new knowledge about how recipients of translation see their world [33, 137].

Although the first attempts to orient translation toward its recipient were undertaken as early as the time of Cicero, they need to be continued and strengthened precisely now [6, 400], when the noesis of translation recipients regarding how they wish to see their translation may differ radically from the noesis of the translator. For example, the noesis of the "literacy-oriented translation recipients" segment can be defined as "the translator's successful rendering of the translation's form for ease of perception: stylistic, grammatical, and syntactic" [28, 10].

As a result of insufficient theoretical development of the recipient-oriented translation system and its special practical significance, the article highlights the following for the survival of translators in the conditions of modern competition contradictions between:

(1) what the translator offers and what the recipient of the translation wants;

(2) the need for highly qualified translators with a broad recipient-oriented profile and the corresponding level of their training;

(3) between the need to meet the needs of a wide variety of translation recipients and the lack of an adequate and comprehensive recipient-oriented theory of translation that can help the translator meet these needs.

 

These contradictions predetermined problem Articles: How can we align, and ideally, make identical, what the recipient of a translation requires and how the translator wants to translate? This is a complex problem that needs to be broken down into three relatively independent aspects:

1. What is the knowledge system on the basis of which recipient-oriented translation skills are formed?
2. How to develop skills, translation and otherwise, to translate in a recipient-oriented manner?
3. What are the content and structure of the ability to translate in a recipient-oriented manner?

Object The article became a translation process that revolves around (1) a multi-segment system of needs of the recipients of the translation and (2) the judgments and views of the translator.

Item Articles: methods aimed at satisfying the various needs of translation recipients.

The goal The purpose of the article is to analyze existing methods of recipient-oriented translation, generalize the results in this area and develop scientific foundations for describing translation from the point of view of satisfying the needs of the recipient of the translation.

As material The article utilized a wide variety of sources of diverse nature—historical, linguistic, psycholinguistic, marketing, and economic—which were subjected to a comparative analysis, allowing for the identification of a special unit of description—the parameter of satisfying the needs of the recipient of the translation, which is understood as the method of providing the recipient with an understandable translation, for example, studying the needs of the recipients of the translation, creating a client base, segmenting and differentiating the recipients of the translation, and others.

 

Hypothesis: translation aimed at satisfying the needs of the recipients of the translation will not only serve as the basis for qualitative changes in the work of translators and translation organizations, but can also, in fact, prevent a threat to the existence of the translator or translation company itself.

Tasks:

1. To study the methods of recipient-oriented translation that have taken place both in the history of foreign and domestic translation.
2. To explore and inventory theories that can be applied to further develop a recipient-oriented theory of translation.
3. To justify the need for peaceful coexistence of various theories of translation in the modern period.
4. To study the technical components of recipient-oriented translation: the variability of translation receptors, their segmentation and differentiation.

The "fighters for their rights" segment see translation as the achievement of ethno-national political goals [34, 17] and the spread of the spirit of the revolutionary era [2, 300]. The "disabled" segment see translation as caring for people with disabilities [34, 19], and the "believers" segment see translation as respect for the feelings of believers [36, 117]. The "those who want to improve culture" segment see translation as a source of knowledge about good manners [11, 39], and the "supporters of globalization" segment [12] see translation as a buffer against conflicts, often contributing to reconciliation during the introduction of modern Western rationality into the life and way of life of the peoples of the world [25, 370]. If translators are not familiar with the noesis of those for whom they translate, a situation of cultural dissonance may arise in the context of the need for a continuous revaluation of values at all stages of the history of society's development [7, 35]. Therefore, when recipients look at translations made in the past through the eyes of modernity and are not satisfied with the classical examples of their predecessors, then translators translate again and again, introducing an ideological interpretation and aesthetic understanding of the recipients of the translation [5, 364].

In Russia, due to the fact that either illiterate representatives of the local population and immigrants do not speak literary Russian, or the vector of child care continues to change its direction, the noesis of some translation recipients is becoming increasingly specific [9, 32]. Therefore, the translation terms with which we designate segments of reality must be as precise as necessary for the understanding of this segment by the recipients of the translation. The need for such specificity leads to the idea of using nomenclature as a tool that most fully meets the needs of disparate segments of translation recipients [15, 30]. The implementation of system analysis and the maintenance of marketing databases helps recipient-oriented translators use the accumulated knowledge about the various noesis of segments of translation recipients and thus optimize the translation process [28, 10]. This relationship between recipient-oriented translation and the process of cognition about the various noesis of translation segments is reflected, in one way or another, in the emergence of new translation firms. These firms are not translation firms in the full sense of the word, since the actual translation of textual data is only a component of the overall production process of language management, in which, in addition to linguists, specialists from other fields participate. This issue was also addressed at the American Translators Association (ATA) Conference, held in 1997 [35,15].

In the works of M. Gasparov, I. Levoy, Yu. Naida, K. Rice, G. Vermeer and a number of other scholars, the theoretical positions formulated by M. Luther [27, 9] are developed, but the analysis of existing recipient-oriented theories shows that the foundations for describing the noesis of translation recipients as a system have not yet become complete, which leads to a random composition of the grammar and vocabulary used in translation, the inclusion of information that is incomprehensible to the receptor and grammatical figures that are incomprehensible to the recipient. A lot of attention has been paid to the process of translation and the product of translation and the translator: we have witnessed the emergence of many theoretical works on translation as a process or product; on what a translator does when he or she translates; on how equivalence is achieved, and on what skills a translator must have in order to translate correctly [21, 494]. All communicators are translators because all communicators as recipients, whether listeners or readers, monolinguals or bilinguals, face the same problem: they receive signals in written or spoken form, encoded using a communication system that does not coincide with their own. The process of translation is also communication, with the only difference being that in translation, the translator is a bilingual intermediary agent between monolingual participants in the communication process from different language communities, and in the process of bilingual mediation between monolingual participants in the communication process from different language communities, little is done to convey information to the recipient in its entirety [24, 9]. However, not enough has been said about who the one for whom the translation is being performed is, that is, the recipient of the translation. What is translation for the recipient of the translation? Who is the translator for the recipient of the translation? What is a correct translation in the understanding of the recipient of the translation? How does the translation recipient perceive themselves? What types of translation recipients are there? Do we currently have a complete answer to who the translation recipient is? The answers to these questions remain incomplete and are often not included in the psycholinguistic model of translation. Meanwhile, the "translation recipient" represents a set of needs that may not be directly related to translation, since each recipient segment can only be satisfied in a unique way [29, 67].

When a translator satisfies the needs of the translation recipient, the translator acts in the best possible way, because the behavior of the translation recipient is rational. It is the decisions of the translation recipient about the need to solve their problems through translation that generate the demand for translation [10, 27]. When a translation recipient requests a translation, they strive to maximize their needs related to the translation and achieve the highest level of utility when using the translation [19, 104-105]. The level of utility is directly related to the characteristics of the translation, among which the ease of use of the translation plays the most important role [31, 42].

The recipient of the translation is not subject to external influence. Let's say the translations of a respected translator are always considered correct, and therefore the translator is considered prestigious by many. But a recipient of the translation who doesn't have a very good knowledge of literary Russian will rarely, under the influence of general opinion, buy a translation that is literary correct but incomprehensible to them, and then, wasting time and money, order another translation in a less-than-literate but understandable language [13, 365].

Therefore, it is precisely now, in the era of the marketing campaign, when the needs of all recipients come first, that we must fully and completely address the importance of the recipient of a translation. But does anything—for example, the status of translation as an art form—prevent us from raising this question and subsequently understanding it? No! Now that translation has become a means of livelihood for many people, nothing prevents us from analyzing the recipient of a translation.

Receptor-oriented translation served various translation receptors. It not only made the original understandable to a diverse mass of readers, but also satisfied the needs for developing oratory, elucidating persuasiveness, affirming the values of the native language, preserving existing traditions and classical models, competing in various interpretations of the same words, prophesying, and unraveling unsystematic linguistic chaos [22, 31].

There were various methods of receptor-orientation of translation. Already in the middle of the 16th century, additions were used, through which elegance of style was achieved; omissions, through which the meaning of a foreign-language work was reproduced; conveying the meaning in one's own words, through which texts were explained; replacing some realities with others, through which the archaism of the translation was achieved, satisfying the expectations of recipients who wanted to hear strange ancient sounds; the actual writing of one's own poems, completely unlike the originals, free reworking of the translation, its adaptation, through which the development of judgments was achieved, addressed to a selected segment of the recipients of the translation, the extreme point of which were Kurochin's translations from Beranger and the realism of the 19th century [4, 108-109].

In the 20th century, the theory of dynamic equivalence emerged, specifying for whom exactly a translation is correct and prescribing the need to evoke a reaction from the recipient of the translation and influence them in various ways, including by adapting vocabulary and grammar to the recipient of the translation and explaining cultural realities with the help of references and notes [30, 23]. For example, farcical translations are considered correct if, with the help of the most catchy titles possible, they attracted the broadest sections of the population to reading and attending performances in their native language [30, 25].

The needs of an older translation recipient may be represented by complex grammatical constructions, outdated jargon, bookish vocabulary and somewhat outdated vocabulary [14, 88].

The needs of translation recipients represented by women, especially professional women, may be represented by more politically correct vocabulary, based on impersonal sentences that avoid being too direct. The needs of translation recipients represented by family people may be represented by the use of documentation for household appliances, exercise equipment, health-promoting products, or beauty products [3, 181]. People who belong to the same social class are roughly similar in their translation aspirations, such as students from prestigious universities who dream of working for multinational companies, immigrants and illiterate locals, businesspeople, and other representatives of the sociolinguistic segments of translation recipients. What translation recipients feel and value about themselves—for example, the need for all people to attain full rights or the need to make the Bible text more simplified and understandable for believers—influences the translation recipients' desires [27, 9]. The translator should "forget" their knowledge and experience and equate themselves with the translation recipient. Thus, the translator begins to experience the same "flow of sensations" as the translation recipient, having first reduced their own sensations and co-constituted themselves with the translation recipient [8, 63].

As society transitions to the era of marketing campaigns [29, 64], the effectiveness of translation depends on how quickly these changes resonate in the field of translation. The opinions of translation recipients in the activities of various translation organizations have become a significant force determining the translation process of a company or individual translator. The existing gap between theory and practice in the field of recipient-oriented translation, manifested in the absence of a unified theory amid the ever-increasing demand for recipient-oriented translation, leads to a decline in translation quality overall. Therefore, the creation of a scientific foundation for recipient-oriented translation is necessary both in theoretical terms and for the optimization of the practical translation process.

In recent decades, the position of translation in the world has undergone a qualitative transformation: the magnitude of society's translation activity has become a force on a planetary scale, comparable to global material and energetic processes. Humanity has already created an artificial habitat for translators that is tens and hundreds of times more productive than the natural environment [37, 23-25]. The interaction between translator and recipient of translation, as a result of the rapid growth of services worldwide, has reached extreme, critical forms and dimensions, despite the global crisis [20, 41]. The question of the extent to which these services satisfy the recipient of translation has become acute, and if a translator wants to survive, or perhaps even prosper, they must be prepared to meet these highly diverse needs.

Translation studies has responded to translation controversies with a significant stream of research devoted to understanding the relationship between translator and recipient of translation and to finding practical ways to achieve agreement between them [18, 87]. However, ever-increasing evidence of the worsening translation situation allows us to conclude that something essential is being overlooked, without which resolving these problems becomes impossible.

The most difficult problems in themselves – economic, social, political and other – turned out to be interconnected with the problem of «quality of translation for the recipient», the evolution of translation, the increase in illiteracy and the study of new databases [1, 54]. The need for a special view of the problem has generated interest in research based on aggregated translation models of the highest level, describing translation processes not only at the linguistic, sociolinguistic or psycholinguistic level, but also at the recipient-oriented level [23, 64]. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the study of translation problems at different levels requires a systematic approach and the use of interdisciplinary analysis methods [26, 7]. Currently, this point of view is becoming increasingly widespread with the emergence of a large number of works, including domestic ones, whose goal is to study the reactions of growing human activity to translation. It is necessary to create a broad program of interdisciplinary general linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic efforts to transition, firstly, to a fundamentally new methodology for making translation decisions based on their serious conceptual elaboration, using an appropriate analytical tool, such as, for example, an analysis of the needs of the translation recipients, and, secondly, to the introduction of a recipient-oriented approach into the entire translation process, especially at the stages of semantic representation, pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic types of synthesis [23, 63]. At the same time, it is important to avoid illusions and not allow one to slip into one's favorite translation method.

The process of translation—analysis, semantic representation, and synthesis—revealed the need to integrate knowledge at the intersection of linguistic, psychological, and social sciences. The question arose of creating a whole complex of disciplines, based on which recipient-oriented translation could become a new, comprehensive science, analogous to the teachings of phenomenologists or positivists [17, 46].

The social and professional qualifications of translators trained by modern universities, as specialists prepared to make strategic decisions in this field, do not meet the demands of the times, the demands of the marketing campaign era, dictated by the degree of development of the translation crisis. One of the reasons for this situation lies not only in the lack of sufficiently developed organizational foundations for the training of recipient-oriented translators, but also in the absence of theoretical research aimed at developing organizational and didactic foundations for the widespread use of new technologies of recipient-oriented translation as the primary means of satisfying the needs of translation recipients [32, 17].

In general, failing to consider the needs of translation recipients when translating effectively means ignoring the social factors that have occurred and continue to occur in our society, of which translation itself is an integral part. This is doubly important because society continues to change, and therefore, the needs of translation recipients, to which the translator must respond appropriately, continue to evolve.