@Linguist_CIOL
JUNE/JULY The Linguist 19
multiple and varied (e.g. versions of Shakespeare) start
to seem more central, and instances where translation
is more regulated (e.g. of a law or scientific document)
look more like special cases. This helps us to see
more clearly why particular constraints on translation
operate in particular contexts. For example, in the case
of scientific and legal translation, special controls on
meaning are in place to enable those technical varieties
of language to function, as required in their distinctive
professional milieux.
Prismatic Jane Eyre
On a prismatic view, translations of a novel – or of any
text – are not copies that necessarily fail to be as good
as their source. Rather, they are new realisations of the
meaning-making potential embodied in the source
text, made with different materials from the global
landscape of language variety. This means that, even
if you can read 'the original', it is also interesting to
smatic translation tell us about translation and its
ooks to multiple versions of Jane Eyre to find out
A PRISM
choices: not only being right or wrong, elegant or
awkward, expected or surprising, but doing something
to change and shape the medium of language that
everyone encounters and uses.
You also get a better understanding of why those
choices are subject to different kinds of regulation in
different circumstances. If you take your norm for
translation to be a formalised kind of prose text – say a
business report – transferred from one standard language
into another standard language, then more fluid kinds of
translation, perhaps of jokes or poems into dialects or
unusual idioms, will look like departures from the norm.
They may even seem to be (as is sometimes said of
versions of poems) not really 'translations' at all.
But if you adopt a prismatic view, where the norm is
plurality and your starting point is that any translation
could be and probably will be done differently – in
different idioms, registers, dialects, languages, times and
places – then instances where translation is obviously
DEPICTING JANE
Book illustration by
F H Townsend entitled
'Young Jane argues
with her guardian
Mrs Reed of Gateshead'
