In the following sections we will briefly describe
the main concepts at work
within the descriptive paradigm. In the next chapter we will look at the larger concepts
of norms and laws.
5.4.1 Translation shifts and their analysis
The most obvious way to apply structuralism to translation is to see the source and
target texts as sets of structures. We can compare the texts and see where the structures
are different, we then have specific structures (the differences)
that somehow belong to
the field of translation. That idea is as simple to understand as it is difficult to apply.
The structural differences between translations and their sources can be
described as “
translation shifts
,” a term found in many different theories. For
Catford
,
shifts are “departures from formal correspondence” (1965: 73), which sounds clear
enough. If formal correspondence is what we find between “Friday the 13
th
” and
“viernes y 13,” then any other rendition will be a “shift” of some kind. The range of
possible shifts might thus include all the things that Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) found
translations doing, or indeed anything detected by anyone within
the equivalence
paradigm. A shift might come from the translator’s decision to render function rather
than form, or to translate a semantic value on a different linguistic level, or to create the
correspondence at a different place in the text (using a strategy of compensation), or
indeed to select different genre conventions. Much research can be carried out in this
way:
compare the texts, collect the differences, then try to organize the various kinds of
shifts.
There are at least two ways of approaching this task: bottom-up analysis starts from
the smaller units (usually terms, phrases or sentences) and works up to the larger ones
(text, context, genre, culture); top-down analysis goes the other way,
starting with the
larger systemic factors (especially constructs such as the position of translations within
the sociocultural system) and working down to the smaller ones (especially categories
like translation strategies). In principle, it should make no difference which end you
start at:
all roads lead to Rome, and there are always dialectics of loops and jumps
between levels. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the difference between bottom-up and top-
down has a lot to do with the role of theory in description.
5.4.1.1 Bottom-up shift analysis
The range and complexity of bottom-up analysis is
most completely seen in the
comparative model developed by
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