Translation Toolkit

7. Semantic Filter

Literal Meaning and Collocation and Colllocative Clashes were discussed in Section 7.

Non-Literal Meaning refers to connotative meaning, and derives from:

• attitude to the referent or addressee; i.e. warmth, hostility;
• association, which may be social, cultural (but clearly the translator should put his or her personal associations aside), etc.;
• reflected meaning, for example, similarity to another word or phrase; or,
• allusion, that is a single reference or echo of another text (see discussion of intertextual level for more sustained references to other texts).

In the Keats's ode 'To Autumn', discussed earlier, we saw how meaning is reflected from the context in which 'mellow' is used so that its reflected meaning alludes to the colour yellow. Clearly Keats can not have been alluding to Donovan's chart hit 'Mellow Yellow' (1966) in 'To Autumn', even if this were the major association of 'mellow' for many modern readers, and if some of Donovan's audience thought of Keats's 'To Autumn' on hearing the song. What we do not know is whether Keats was alluding to J. Thomas's 'roving mists' or William Wordsworth's 'mellow Autumn charged with bounteous fruit', nor whether or how his readers in 1820 would have responded to these allusions and other echoes.

Non-literal meaning often has a culturally-specific component, and calls for compensation to palliate the effects of its loss:

TT1	(from Sp): Around her body / rose snails of water.
TT2	Soft around her body / curled the water like a snail. (Macpherson & Minnet)
ST	Por el cuerpo le subían / los caracoles del agua.

The context is a lyrical play, Yerma, by Spain's Federico García Lorca, in which a barren women sensuously bathes in a fast-flowing mountain stream as part of a fertility ritual. Macpherson and Minnett's use of 'soft' and 'curled' convey this aspect of the text very well. Their translation of 'caracol' as 'snail', however, introduces unfortunate associative and attitudinal connotations into the TT, which are not present in the ST. In Spanish the noun 'caracol' refers as much to the snail's shell, and its spiralling shape, as to the living creature. This can be found in its use in the Spanish phrase for spiral staircase, 'escalera de caracol', or for shape smoke makes as it drifts in the air, 'subir en caracol'. It is also the noun used for a popular snail-based snack dish, similar to French escargots. In Anglophone culture, however, snails are largely associated with the popular image in children's culture of an animal that carries its house on its back (click here), and more widely as a slimy and unpleasant garden pest (for a combination of the house-carrier, and sliminess click here). The snail image in English introduces rather unpleasant or, at least inappropriate, associations, and so the image as a whole might be better replaced with something which conveys the shape, and the upward climbing movement with which that shape is associated in the source culture:

TT3	Welling up around her body / spirals of water swirled.

This TT rejects the snail metaphor and the introduction of unwanted connotations, and replaces the image with one of the shape of the water's flow as the woman submerges herself in the stream. It compensates somewhat for the loss through its use of alliteration on w-, and assonance in swirl, to link movement with the water, and s-, to link the shape and the image of the moving water.

 

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