Quantifying a successful translation: A cognitive frame analysis of (un)translatability
Ingie Zakaria
Ain Shams University , EgyptAbstract
Assessing the success of a translated text is one of the controversial topics often discussed in the field of translation studies. The definition of a so-called successful translation is itself controversial. Therefore, for the purpose of this study, the success of a given translation may be defined as transmitting a similar, though rarely identical, semantic frame reference in the Target Language (TL) as was intended by the Source Language (SL) and may be quantified by comparing alternate translations and choosing the one with the highest number of equivalent frame references. One of the factors which could be considered detrimental to the production of a successful translation, as defined above, is the (un)translatability of cultural terms. Cultural terms, defined here as expressions referring to concepts or entities that are unique to a certain culture, are believed to be untranslatable. This paper uses Arabic visual frames referencing the Egyptian garment ǧal-labiy-ya (or ǧilbāb) as an example and argues that (un)translatability can be quantified using semantic frames based on the assumption that all SL terms have multiple frame references, some of which, mostly the ones indicating denotative meaning, have parallels in the TL while some others, mostly the ones indicating connotative meaning, do not. The degree of (un)translatability may, therefore, be quantifiable by observing which TL terms possess a higher rate of similar frame references in SL, which aids in the evaluation of translated texts in terms of relative equivalence and the degree to which the Target Text (TT) audience receives similar information to that received by the Source Text (ST) audience.
Keywords:
Frame Semantics, Cognitive Semantics and Translation, VISUAL Frames, Translating Cultural ElementsReferences
Alkhamissi, K. (2011). Taxi. Cairo: Dār ash-shurūq.
Ibrahim, S. (2003). Ḏāt. Cairo: Dār al-Mustaqbal al-ʕarabī.
Taher, B. (1996). Xaltī ṣafiy-ya wad-dīr. Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl.
Alkhamissi, K. (2011). Taxi. (J. Wright, Trans.). Doha: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing.
Ibrahim, S. (2001). Zaat. (A. Calderbank, Trans.). Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.
Taher, B. (1996). Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery. (B. Romaine, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Abdul-Baquee, S., & Atwell, ES. (2009). Knowledge representation of the Quran through frame semantics: a corpus-based approach. In Proceedings of the Fifth Corpus Linguistics Conference. The Fifth Corpus Linguistics Conference, 20-23 July 2009, University of Liverpool, UK.
Abdul Rahman, M.S. (2003). Islam: Questions and Answer, vol. 10. London: MSA Publication Limited.
Al-Fauzan, S. F. (2003). Rulings Pertaining to Muslim Women. Riyadh: Maktaba Dar-us-Salam.
Ameli, S., & Merali, A. (2004). British Muslims’ Expectations of Government, Volume 2. London: Islamic Human Rights Commission.
Boas, H. C. (2002). Bilingual FrameNet dictionaries for machine translation. In M. González Rodríguez & C. Paz Suárez Araujo (Eds.), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Vol. 4 (pp. 1364–1371). Las Palmas, Spain.
Boas, H. C. (2003). A constructional approach to resultatives. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Boas, H. C. (2005). From theory to practice: Frame semantics and the design of FrameNet. In S. Langer & D. Schnorbusch (Eds.), Semantik im Lexikon (pp. 129–160). Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Boas, H. C. (2013). Frame Semantics and Translation. In Ana Rojo and Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistics and Translation. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Burchardt, A., Erk, K., Frank, A., Kowalski, A., Pado, S., & Pinkal, M. (2009). FrameNet for the semantic analysis of German: Annotation, representation, and automation. In Hans Boas (Ed.), Multilingual FrameNet. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Emon, A., Ellis, M., & Glahn, B. (Eds.) (2012). Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fillmore, C. J., & Atkins, B. T. S. (2000). Describing polysemy: The case of ‘crawl’. In Y. Ravin & C. Leacock (Eds.), Polysemy (pp. 91–110). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gärdenfors, P. (1999). Some Tenets of Cognitive Semantics. In J. Allwood & P. Gärdenfors (Eds.) Cognitive Semantics: Meaning and Cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Merali, A. (2006). Hijab, Meaning, Identity, Otherization and Politics: British Muslim Women. London: Islamic Human Rights Commission.
O’Hagan, K. (2006). Identifying Emotional and Psychological Abuse: A Guide for Childcare Professionals. Berkshire: Open University Press.
Ohara, K., Fujii, S., Ohoro, T., Suzuki, R., Saito, H., & Ishizaki, S. (2004). The Japanese FrameNet Project: An Introduction. LREC 2004: The Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Lisbon, Portugal. May, 2004.
Petruck, M. R. L., & Boas, H. C. (2003). All in a day’s week. In E. Hajicova, A. Kotesovcova & J. Mirovsky (Eds.), Proceedings of CIL 17. Prague: Matfyzpress.
Renard, J. (2012). The Handy Religion Answer Book. Detroit: Visible Ink Press.
Rojo, A. M. (2002a). Applying frame semantics to translation: A practical example. Meta: Translators’ Journal 4.3, 312-50.
Rojo, A. M. (2002b). Frame semantics and the translation of humor. Babel 48(1), 34-77(44).
Samiuddin, A., & Khanam, R. (2002). Iraq, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, vol. 3. Chicago: Northwestern University.
Subirats, C., & Petruck, M. (2003). Surprise: Spanish FrameNet. International Congress of Linguists. Workshop on Frame Semantics, Prague (Czech Republic), July 2003.
Vega de, M. (1984). Introducción a la Psicología Cognitiva. Madrid: Alianza.
