In communication the effective meaning of any message is what gets through to the receptor.
Eugene Nida – Towards a Science of Translation
We live in a world that loves to classify and categorise. People are either politically left-wing or right-wing. We are either sporty or intellectual, introvert or extravert, gifted or not gifted, neurodiverse or neurotypical. We love categories and most of all we love binary categories. Translation is much the same
Often, people want to categorise translation into two types. Perhaps we have free translation vs literal translation. Perhaps we have dynamic equivalence vs formal equivalence. Perhaps we have foreignization vs domestication. Those categories are all tempting but none of them actually work very well.
The Problem with Binaries
The easiest way to explain why binaries are unhelpful in translation and interpreting is simply to give an example. What is the best French translation of the word “window”?
The answer is: it depends.
A house window would be “une fenêtre”. But a shop window is “une vitrine”. A car window is “une vitre”. A window at a kiosk is “un guichet” and a window of time could be “un créneau”, “une occasion” or something else entirely. This is before we come to all the options that involve not using a word for “window” at all.
The best translation of “window” depends on what we know about the window or what we want to say about the window, not whether we want a “free” or “literal” version.
We could go even further and ask about how we deal with entire phrases. Translating something as simple as “what is your name?” or “what do you do for a living?” usually means finding whichever phrase is used to gain the same information in the other language.
Translators and interpreters are almost never choosing between two and only two versions. They are trying to work out what will work for this audience, to achieve the aim of the translation.
What does this mean?
This all means that we need to think of translation and interpreting as being more about people than they are about language. They are not simply an exercise in looking words up in a dictionary or even in memorising phrases.
Translation and interpreting are about people trying to communicate for a specific purpose. If we realise that, we can start thinking more clearly about how to make translation and interpreting more effective. And we do all that without the categories we so often see.