Links to pages: 455, 456, 460. 462, 466, 472
Comments welcome
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii
December 21, 1987
1. That, at best, the conception of translation which I have labeled "locutionary" can be applied in only a limited set of favorable conditions. What I mean by "locutionary" translation is translation in which the object to be translated is a source-language text,(1) and the translation is to consist of a target-language text having the same meaning. I presume that the meaning of a text must be understood as the meaning which would be computed from the meanings of the constituent lexical items and the meaning(s) of the construction(s) in which they appear. Meaning in this sense--what we might refer to as meaning-by-(semantic)-computation or computed meaning--is presumably the only kind of meaning that could be attributed to a text qua text.(2)
2. Where locutionary translation is not possible, the remaining alternative is perlocutionary translation.(3) By perlocutionary translation I mean translation in which what is to be conveyed is an understanding of the motivating purposes of the speaker.(4) I have tried to make the point, esp. in Grace 1987a, that, although in perlocutionary translation there is a source-language text,(5) this text is underdetermined by the speaker's purposes and should not be thought of as defining the translation task by itself.
Thus, I have proposed two bases for translation--the first, likeness of the meanings of linguistic signs ("texts") in the source and target languages and the second, likeness of the purposes satisfied by speech acts. However in addition to these, there is what appears to be a third basis which I have heard suggested: that of saying "what they [i.e., target-language speakers] would say in the same situation". That is, a particular target-language text would be judged to be a suitable translation of a particular source-language text if the former would be appropriate to use in situations which were, for all practical purposes, the same as that in which the latter had been used. In this conception, then, translation would apparently still be based on a relation between text and text, but there would be no concern with the meaning (i.e., meaning-by-computation) of the source-language text.
It seems clear that if such an approach to translation is to play a role in a future theory of translation, the concept of "situation" will have to be clarified. Now, presumably if any speech event occurs at all, it may be said to have occurred within some situation. In fact, presumably everyone is in some situation at all times, whether speaking or not. But the what-they-would-say-in-the-same-situation [henceforth: WTWS] principle of translation requires situations of a particular kind. In fact, the requirements seem to be of three kinds. First, it requires a basis for specifying situations such that two different situations can receive the same specification--i.e., are determined to be "the same situation" for the purposes of the WTWS principle. Second, it requires that the situations which it recognizes must be associated in a predictable way with speech--i.e., they must be situations that will evoke speech, and we must be able to predict (at least within some fairly narrow limits) the speech which they will evoke. Third, a sufficient number of the same situations must be identifiable in both source and target language.
Situations which meet the first two requirements for particular languages (or cultures) can be found. There are in different cultures various identifiable situations which require some verbal response.
A kind of example which I have heard offered in support of the WTWS principle is the following: In some societies of the Pacific and Asia, an appropriate greeting to someone encountered on the road is something for which the best approximation to a locutionary translation might be something like "Where are you going?" However, the WTWS principle might suggest "Hello" or something of the sort as the most appropriate translation. Certainly, one can easily imagine practical circumstances in which the latter translation would be preferable to the locutionary one.
As a further example we might ask what English-speaking people say in the situation where someone has just thanked them for something. And one might answer, that in that situation they say (or are expected to say, or recognize as the correct thing to say, or something of the sort), "You're welcome". (Of course, this is not intended as an exact prediction of what any particular person will actually say on a particular occasion; the point is that one can understand how this kind of reasoning might justifiably be used to support the translation of, say, German "Bitte" in a situation of the specified kind as "You're welcome".)
Unfortunately, however, the same situations would need to be shared between language communities, and often they are not. For example, suppose we are to translate from French into English, and, in a situation where people are just sitting down to eat the French speaker whose words we are to translate says to them, "Bon appétit". From the point of view of the source language we are dealing with a culturally-defined situation in which there is an appropriate verbal response. But when we are asked what English speakers would say in the same situation, the answer seems (as far as I can see) to be that there is no way to predict from the information which has been given what they might say or, indeed, whether or not they would say anything at all. For English speakers the situation as defined is not a culturally-recognized situation, and there is no particular culturally prescribed behavior, or behavior that can be predicted on any other grounds.
What we have seen so far seems to indicate that situations which are recognized in both communities as calling for predictable (within limits) utterances are too rare to be of more than occasional aid to translation. However, what I would like to propose here is that a somewhat more complex view of kinds of situations can partially resolve the problem, at least where suitable shared presuppositions are present.
Consider an example which I have already cited in several places previously: Whorf's example (Carroll 1956: 208) of a Shawnee expression which he translates "I clean it with the ramrod" (where "it" is to be understood as referring to a gun).(6) The example is of interest because by locutionary standards, the Shawnee and English linguistic signs ("texts") cannot have the same meaning; the constituent lexical elements show no apparent similarity of meaning and the constructions are fundamentally dissimilar. And yet, presumably any people that habitually cleans guns with ramrods may reasonably be expected to have some way of saying that they do. That is, one would think that they must have some way to say something which is in some respect equivalent to "I clean it with the ramrod". But what is the nature of the equivalence?
I think the equivalence is one of purpose--in fact, of a single purpose--on the part of the speaker. That purpose is to report a particular activity, and the activity in question is one which has become habitual for some members of both the English and Shawnee speech communities and which has assumed very much the same form in both. The translation of the Shawnee text by the English one, or vice versa, is therefore perlocutionary translation.
We might, therefore, say that the speaker finds him/herself in the situation of wanting to report the activity in question--i.e., of having the purpose of reporting it. We might speak of the situation in which the activity takes place or might take place as the objective situation, and the situation in which the speaker-to-be finds him/herself--i.e., the situation of being aware of the objective situation and having the purpose of reporting it--as the subjective situation. Then, we might for the purposes of WTWS principle interpret "the same situation" as meaning the same subjective situation.
Thus in the example cited (according to what we have been given to understand), Shawnee speakers do (or did) clean guns with the ramrod in the same way that we do (and thus could find themselves in equivalent objective situations), and the Shawnee linguistic expression that Whorf cites is what they would say if they had the purpose of reporting that fact (and were therefore in the equivalent subjective situation).
It is important to point out that the specification of a subjective situation in this sense is not sufficient to permit us to predict with precision what an individual will say. However, that should not be surprising. I tried to make the point in Grace1986 that speakers ordinarily have a number of purposes simultaneously. Thus, our discussion of subjective situations so far has dealt with idealizations, and these idealized situations do not correspond to real situations. In real situations the speaker will generally have multiple motivating purposes. Therefore, the requirements of the real situation which exists for a real speaker will not all be accounted for by our specification of our idealized subjective situation. Or, to put it differently, our idealized subjective situations will underdetermine the actual linguistic sign ("text") to be used by the speaker.
However, let us also remember that the practical application of the WTWS principle in actual translation begins with a speech act in the source language. The translator then infers the speaker's purposes from the speech act and whatever other sources of information are available. If, for example, the speech act takes the form of a request, the translator will presumably infer that the speaker had the purpose of making a request, but additional purposes can probably also be inferred. If the request is made in (in the terms of Brown and Levinson 1978) a bald-on-record form--e.g., if it takes the form of a direct order--the further purposes which are attributed to the speaker will be different from those that would be attributed if the form of the request were, say, indirect. The two forms of request indicate somewhat different sets of purposes on the part of the speaker--i.e., in the terms which we are using here, the speaker is in somewhat different (subjective) situations in the two cases--and applications of the WTWS principle in the two cases should accordingly produce different results (different translations).
The idea that the WTWS principle might be the basis for the best practical translation is an appealing one, but it is not clear just how it works. A key difficulty concerns the concept "situation" in the formulation. It seems clear that if this principle is to play a role in a future theory of translation, the concept of "situation" will have to be clarified.
In its ordinary use the word situation is understood in a very general way--so general that there is always a situation or anything at any time. But if one were to be asked what situation a particular person was in at a particular point in time, how should the question be answered? The fact is that there is no simple answer. An exhaustive description is not possible, indeed it is theoretically impossible.
But an exhaustive description would not be useful in any case, because no two situations would have the same exhaustive descriptions. As a consequence, the situation of a source-language speaker at the time of his/her speech act would have been a unique one, one in which no one else--and of course that includes any target-language speaker--could ever be. Therefore, we would have no basis in experience for saying what target-language speakers would say in that situation. What the WTWS principle presumably means by "situation", then, is a kind of situation.
The competence required to use language seems to involve some kind of understanding of kinds of situation as they relate to speech. People are often able to give an explication of what someone "meant" by something s/he said--the explication being in fact a partial description of the speaker's subjective situation. And surely it is the kind of understanding which underlies such explication that is being invoked when people appeal to the WTWS principle in proposing a translation ("what they would say in this situation is ___").
It also seems appropriate here to mention another context in which this understanding is revealed. Some years ago, I thought it quite remarkable to discover that I (and I understood, most other people) when asked to judge whether some problematic string was "grammatical"(!) in English, sought an answer to the question by trying to imagine a situation in which it could be used.
The question is: How do we do this? I'm not sure, but it seems to me that the method includes a mixture of trial and error, on the one hand, and some analysis to determine the characteristics which the appropriate situation might have, on the other.
It seems that a theory of translation according to the WTWS principle would have to include something like a theory of situations. What this theory of situations would need to do is permit us to specify the situation of the source-language speaker/writer in such a way that (among other things) it would be possible to imagine speakers of the target language finding themselves in a situation with the same specifications.
Of course, the situations that we are ultimately concerned here are subjective situations, since it is the subjective situations which are directly related to speech. But how can we compare the subjective situations of two people? We cannot observe them directly, we can only compare them on the basis of the behavior they produce--in the cases which interest us, speech behavior. But if the speech behavior is different, as it must be if they are speaking different languages, how can we use it as evidence of likeness of subjective situations? The answer I am attempting to develop here is based on the hypothesis that subjective situations in an idealized form can, at least in many cases, be traced to objective situations. And the hope is that it may then prove possible to develop criteria--objective criteria--by which some objective situations can be said to be equivalent to one another. If equivalent objective situations can be experienced by members of different speech communities, we will have a basis for the hypothesis that they can experience subjective situations which are also equivalent.
It is probably simpler to begin by thinking in terms of idealized subjective situations in which the speaker has a single motivating purpose, such as that of reporting, inquiring about, or making a request regarding an objective situation (actual or potential). This would presumably make the mapping of subjective situations onto objective situations simpler.
This approach might be productive if equivalent objective situations can be found often enough in enough different linguistic communities. And it seems that conditions which should be favorable to the occurrence of such equivalent situations are frequently found. We have already discussed the practice of cleaning guns with ramrods, which seems to be shared by English and Shawnee speakers. And there are very many elements--institutions, complexes, traits--of culture which are widely shared. Many such elements, of both material and non-material culture, involve processes or actions in which something can go wrong, or at certain junctures of which information must be obtained, decisions must be made, new courses of action initiated, etc.
The automobile provides an example. In operating a car, there are various familiar things that can go wrong. It won't start, it runs out of gasoline, it has a flat tire. Various actions must or may be performed at appropriate junctures--starting it, shifting gears, making turns, swerving to avoid obstacles, slamming on brakes, stepping on the gas, turning on the lights, turning on the windshield wiper, getting gasoline. Familiarity with such culture elements results in assumptions about what exists in the world and how it works (this is part of what linguists often refer to as "knowledge of the world"). It seems that where such cultural assumptions are shared by the source-language and target-language communities, equivalent objective situations are likely to be definable in the two--objective situations to which the purposes of speakers' subjective situations can be related.
As the example of the automobile illustrates, a simple element of material culture may provide a quite large repertoire of situations which are likely to be recognizable to anyone in any community who is familiar with their operation. These objective situations all seem to lead in a natural way to(idealized) subjective situations (e.g., having the purpose of reporting that the car won't start, of asking a passenger to roll up the window) which speakers of other languages who share the same cultural assumptions should find easy to recognize.
(Of course, as I tried to indicate in Grace 1987c, most translation--at least, professional translation--today probably occurs between what I called there, "languages of universal translation", and its subject matter concerns the affairs of "modern culture" shared by both speech communities.)
Could the WTWS principle ever be applicable to translating something said by a speaker of one language to a speaker of another if what was said did not derive from a cultural background common to the two? That is, is it possible to talk about their being in the same situation if the conceptualization of that situation does not derive from shared culture? My feeling is that to some limited extent there can be situations which are like for different people where the likeness is not due to culture, but that we should exercise extreme caution about attributing any single situation which we might define to mankind at large.
However to speculate a bit, it would seem that there must be some common assumptions which result from natural phenomena. For example, it seems reasonable to suppose that speakers of all languages spoken on this planet would be familiar with the subjective situation of wanting to tell someone that it is raining. And, therefore, it seems reasonable to speculate that an English speech act which has the linguistic sign, "It's raining"(appropriately uttered), as its vehicle, could be translated into any other language by means of the WTWS principle. And it would seem that there must be other such situations occasioned by the nature of the terrestrial environment which would also provide the basis of WTWS-principle translation. Therefore, one would expect them to be valid for any human language spoken on earth.
One would imagine that it might also be possible to define some universally-recognizable situations which are due to the nature of the human animal--situations associated with eating, drinking, and other bodily functions, for example. These should result in subjective situations shared by all humans (in this case even by humans who had left the earth for some exotic environment).
It is hard to make even a very rough estimate of how numerous such universally-recognizable non-cultural situations might be. The experience most relevant to the question is probably the attempt to design the optimal test-list for lexicostatistics. People at one time even conceived of it as consisting of "non-cultural" vocabulary, although it was later agreed that no vocabulary could be non-cultural. At any rate, that experience suggests that there are not many concepts that are universally shared, or at least universally lexicalized.
In any case, all of this discussion of non-cultural universals--universal either to the terrestrial environment or to the species--is nothing but thought experimentation based on a priori reasoning. Nevertheless, whether sharing of situations is due to common elements of culture, to common environment, or to common natural functions, it is clearly not due to any inherent property of language. It has nothing to tell us about the nature of language.
It has sometimes been suggested that we can think of a linguistic sign (i.e., a "text") when actually used in a particular situation as having a meaning within the context of that particular situation which is in some respects different from (probably more narrowly defined than) its meaning as analyzed in isolation. I think it is important to emphasize that this notion of the meaning-of-the-linguistic-sign-when-used-in-a-particular-situation is quite different from what we have been discussing here. I presume that "meaning" in this conception is to be thought of as having the same structure as the meaning of any other linguistic sign ("text")--that is, it is a slightly adapted meaning-by-computation. There is no reason whatsoever, as far as I can see, to imagine that a speaker's motivating purposes have, either singly or as a group, any such structure.
Nevertheless, I think that we do often use the word "meaning" for WTWS. I can offer what appears to be an instance of this from my own writing. In Grace 1981: 48, I wrote, "Sometimes an expression can be translated literally from one language to another but the resulting translation has the wrong meaning."(emphasis added--to be translated literally would mean, of course, that the meanings of the constituent lexical items were alike, and that the constructions--and therefore, presumably their meanings--were also alike).
Then (Grace 1981: 49), I cited these examples (taken from Vinay and Darbelnet 1958): "French Comment est (la maison)?--literally "How is (the house)?"--is to be understood as something like 'What is (the house) like?' "Again, French Soyez sûr que...--literally "Be sure that..."--is to be understood as something like 'You can rest assured that...,' while English Be sure that...must be translated with something like 'Assurez-vous que...'"
Surely in these examples, if any of the French expressions agree in meaning, in the sense of computed meaning, with any of the English ones, the agreements must be between those which are literal translations of each other. And yet using these agreements would produce translations of the sort that I described as having "the wrong meaning".
It would seem that if we want to use the same word, "meaning", to represent concepts as different as the computed meaning of a linguistic sign, on the one hand, and the purposes of a speaker, on the other, and if, at the same time we want to avoid confusing ourselves, we will have to exercise an awful lot of caution. If we follow the teachings of semantics and take computed meaning to be meaning-in-the-true-sense, then we might be wise to avoid the term when talking about anything else. If so, perhaps I should amend my 1981 statement to read, "Sometimes an expression can be translated literally from one language to another but the resulting translation is still not suitable to use for the same purposes" or something like that.
However, there does seem to be considerable precedent for applying the term "meaning" to WTWS. Translators and interpreters, seem rarely (except in the case of what I--Grace 1987a--called "formulated linguistic expressions") to find equivalences of meaning-by-semantic-computation appropriate. Yet they, bilinguals generally, and the public at large all seem to think of translation as a matter of likeness of meaning. One almost wonders if it would not be easier to reserve the term "meaning" for WTWS and to suggest that semantics seek a different term for its object of study.
This discussion is obviously of a very preliminary sort. It attempts to begin the process of isolating one factor--equivalence between situations--in (one kind of) perlocutionary translation. It scarcely seems necessary to emphasize that virtually everything said here must be regarded as extremely tentative.
I believe that the kinds of shared culture elements appearing in the examples here are somewhat different from those I have had in mind previously when talking about the likelihood that shared ways of talking about particular cultural institutions will accompany the shared institutions themselves(e.g., Grace 1987b: 105). The Shawnee and English ways of talking about guns (or at least about cleaning them) seem to have little or nothing in common, and I suspect that would be true for many languages as far as the examples cited here (concerning the operation of cars, etc.) are concerned.
Where a way of talking about something is shared exactly enough by two languages, locutionary translation between the two will be possible as long as the subject matter is confined to that which the way of talking is designed for. My present speculation is that the way of talking is more likely to accompany the institution in the measure that the institution is dependent upon, or otherwise involves, some kind of theory, or more generally, in the measure that it exists just by virtue of its verbal representation (as law codes, scientific theories, etc.). But this is also very tentative.
1. Actually, the object to be translated might better be characterized as the artifact of language use, whether written or oral. In order to avoid the implication that it must be written, I prefer to speak of a (sentence-level) linguistic sign. Back up
2. The most fundamental objection to the idea that translation in this conception is generally possible is that we have no way of determining whether or not two texts have the same meaning. Even supposing that we have some means (say an authoritative bilingual dictionary) for determining that the respective lexical items of the two texts are alike in meaning, we are still left without criteria for determining whether or not the source-language and target-language constructions have the same meaning. In what terms can we, in fact, talk about the meanings of constructions?
(The only work that I can recall which seemed to have been written with the problem of the meanings of constructions in mind was Weinreich 1963, although the matter receives some mention in Katz and Fodor 1963. Unfortunately, Weinreich seems not to have pursued the question any further. At present, there seems to be an assumption that the same syntactic structures in different languages--i.e., the same according to the particular syntactic theory being employed--have the same meanings. But I think there are problems with that assumption, too, as I tried to show in Grace 1981: 49.) Back up
3. I use the terms "locutionary" and "perlocutionary" for these kinds of translation because I think of locutionary translation as attempting to establish equivalence between locutionary acts and perlocutionary translation as attempting to establish equivalence between perlocutionary acts in the sense of Austin 1965. Back up
4. Just what kind of understanding is required is somewhat dependent upon whose purposes the translator is working for; there is no single perspective from which the satisfactoriness of a perlocutionary translation can be judged. Back up
5. Or at least there is a text in the type of cases that I have in mind here. I intend elsewhere to discuss some types of cases which are said to involve translation but in which there is no source-language text. Back up
6. Recall that the Shawnee expression consisted of morphemes glossed, respectively, as "I", "dry space", "interior of hole", "by motion of tool, instrument", and "cause to another". Back up
Austin, J. L. 1965. How to do things with words. New York: Oxford University Press. Back up
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1978. Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In Esther N. Goody (ed.). Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 56- 89. Back up
Carroll, John B. (ed.). 1956. Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Back up
Grace, George W. 1981. An essay on language. Columbia SC: Hornbeam Press. Back up
Grace, George W. 1986. Perlocutionary translation. Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3, Number 26. Printout. Back up. Also internet World Wide Web page (Click Here).
Grace, George W. 1987a. The translation of casual speech. Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3, Number 28. Printout. Back up. Also internet World Wide Web page (Click Here).
Grace, George W. 1987b. The linguistic construction of reality. London: Croom Helm. Back up
Grace, George W. 1987c. Why translation works (to the extent that it does). Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3, Number 30. Printout. Back up. Also internet World Wide Web page (Click Here).
Katz, Jerrold J., and Jerry A. Fodor. 1963. The structure of a semantic theory. Language 39: 170-210. Back up
Vinay, Jean-Paul, and J. Darbelnet. 1958. Stylistique comparée du Français et de l'Anglais: Méthode de traduction. Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, SA. Back up
Weinreich, Uriel. 1963. On the semantic structure of language. In Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.). Universals of Language. Cambridge MA: The M.I.T. Press, pp. 114-71. Back up
| Home Page | The Ethnolinguistic Notes | The Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 1 and 2 | Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3 | The Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 4 | Reflections: Language Evolution |
| Reflections: Knowledge of Language | Personal Page | The Human Predicament | Why Write Unpublishable Things? | Modest Proposals | Odds and Ends | Pictures |
Last updated 20 April 1996