A Typology of Translation
“Translate this passage.” You are doubtless familiar with this instruction. But lurking behind that simple imperative — “translate” — is a sea of possibilities. Are you being asked for a literal translation? A free translation? An elegant, idiomatic translation? And what do these terms even mean: how literal must literal be; and how free, free? The answers to these questions are, it will come as no surprise, complicated. Indeed, translation has emerged as a rich area of scholarly inquiry in its own right. Here, I supply here a simplified typology of the different types of translation that we may undertake this semester. For each, I offer an example based on a friendly proverb quoted by the ancient scholar Porphyrio in his commentary on a poem by Horace (Odes 2.17.5):
dicunt amicitiam animam unam esse et duo corpora.
| “English” | They talk friendship soul one to be and two bodies.
Translate “word by word” with no attempt to create a grammatically correct or even sensible English sentence. You “English” when you write a translation above each word in a Latin sentence. “Englishing” reveals that you recognize the vocabulary of the source. |
| Metaphrase
“a speaking across” |
They say that friendship is one soul and two bodies.
Attempts to provide as much formal equivalence between source and translation as possible by “word by word and line by line” translation. This is what is usually meant by “literal” or “close” translation. A metaphase translation is rendered in intelligible English but the style may well be crabbed, strained, or unusual because you are preserving as much of the original’s form—its words, phrasing, and syntax—as possible. Proper metaphrasing can reveal that you understand the grammar of the source. |
| Idiomatic | Friendship, they say, is one soul in two bodies.
Attempts to render the Message while carrying over as much of the source’s phrasing and structure as possible to create a translation that reads naturally in the target language. A reader of a good idiomatic translation would not know they were were reading a translation but if that fact became known it would be easy to discover the source. As the English poet Dryden observes, “When [words] appear… literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since… what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author’s words: ’tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense.” |
| Double | Translate the source twice: first by metaphrasing and idiomatically. |
| Paraphrase
“a saying in other words” |
True friends share a single heart.
Attempts to convey the essential thought and meaning of the source but with different words and constructions. A paraphrase might be much shorter or longer than the source. |
| Free | 👫=1❤️ or Friends. Two hearts that beat as one.
Attempts to reproduce the function of source the provoke a similar (emotional, intellectual, aesthetic) response by the reader but with formal elements unaligned with the original. |
Why Translate?
“Translation is the art of revelation. It makes the unknown known”
—William Barnstone
Translation can be a valuable method for refining and conveying your understanding of a passage. Because translation is born from intensive reading and careful consideration of all pieces of information in a passage, the process of creating a translation can help you move towards a more accurate and more complete understanding of a passage. In general I do not favor translation as an initial interpretive strategy. Better to cultivate a thorough understanding of the Latin as Latin (which, I believe, has to happen before one ever tries to translate it).
Indeed, translation has always played an important role in the educational practice of the ancient Romans and their cultural heirs:
”The dominant role of imitative exercises in Roman paideia—metaphrase, paraphrase, and translation—shaped the practices of reading and composition among the Romans, who were conditioned from their earliest experience with literature to recognize and appreciate subtle differences among variations on a theme, and who were keenly “attuned to reading and listening for how texts quoted, manipulated, and reworked older ones.” Early school activities in translation consisted of rote metaphrasing, in which students would copy a source text word by word down the page and then translate each word alongside the original. But practice in translation was not limited to the schoolroom and the tiro, as the rhetorical turn in elite education further cultivated aesthetic and intellectual interest in imitative variation among an audience conditioned by years of practice with suasoriae and controversiae to find value in the clever manipulation of similar themes. Writing in 380 ce, Jerome reflects on the “old custom among men of letters of translating Greek books into Latin as an intellectual exercise, and, what is more difficult, of translating fine poetry into Latin” (Praef. Chron. 1). Centuries before, Pliny, in a letter to the elderly Fuscus Salinator, recommends bidirectional translation — “from Greek into Latin or from Latin in Greek” — as the best method for honing one’s literary faculties during retirement (Epist. 7.9.2). Translation, which was recognized as the heuristic mechanism par excellence for deepening one’s understand of a text, thus stood at the boundary between grammar and rhetoric, where the line between pedagogical exercise, commentary, and imitative artwork became blurred.”
