Handout 2   193     

http://www.geocities.com/elmbsm193/fitzgerald4whole

XIX.(First Edition)

And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean--
   Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!

XX. ( Fifth Edition)

And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean--
   Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!

http://www.geocities.com/elmbsm193/fitzgerald4whole

 

The Invisible in Translation: The Role of Text Structure

by Abdolmehdi Riazi, Ph.D.
Associate professor, Department of Foreign Languages & Linguistics
Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

http://www.geocities.com/elmbsm193/fitzgerald5translation

Yarmohammadi (1995) studied the rhetorical organization of Khayam's Robaiyat (quatrains) and compared it with its English translation by Fitzgerald. His study revealed that the macro-structure of all Khayam's Robaiyat included three components, namely, "description," "recommendation," and "reasoning" which can be used as a criterion to distinguish between the real Khayam's Robaiyat and those erroneously attributed to him. Based on his analysis, Yarmohammadi came to the conclusion that the reason for Fitzgerald's successful translation of Khayam's Robaiyat is that he was able to reconstruct the same macro-structures in English and then apply appropriate sentence structures and lexis. The following is an example of one of the Khayam's quatrains as translated by Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald:

And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean—
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!

 

Literal:

The grass that grows by every stream
Like angelic smiles faintly gleam
Step gently, cause it not to scream
For it has grown from a lover's dream.

Conclusion

As Hatim and Mason (1997) state, a translator typically operates on the verbal record of an act of communication between source language speaker/writer and hearers/readers and seeks to relay perceived meaning values to a group of target language receiver(s) as an separate act of communication. However, according to Hatim and Mason (1990), we know little about what patterns there are and how equivalence could be achieved between them. One thing of which we can be confident, nevertheless, is that the patterns are always employed in the service of an overriding rhetorical purpose. This is an aspect of texture which is of crucial importance to the translator. The structure of the source text becomes an important guide to decisions regarding what should or should not appear in the derived text. The point that the present paper tried to make is the benefit translators may derive from text analysis in translation by determining the micro- and macro-indices of the texts to support them in their difficult task.

Text analysis is, thus, becoming a promising tool in performing more reliable translations. There are numerous studies done on text analysis, which can have interesting messages for translators. For example, the kind of structure frequently reported for argumentative genres include "introduction, explanation of the case under discussion, outline of the argument, proof, refutation and conclusion" (Hatch 1992: 185). As a final word, we may say that in translation we should first try to reconstruct the macro-structure and rhetorical structure of the source text in the target language and then look for the appropriate words and structures; this is a procedure that skillful translators perform in the process of translation consciously or unconsciously.

وإن توافِ العشب عندَ الغدير

وقَد كسَا الأرض بساطاً نضير

فامشِ الهوينا فوقهُ . إنه

غذّتهُ أوصالُ حبيبٌ طرير