Words from Well-known Translators
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Publish Date：2018-05-11
Words from Well-known Translators
Any form of translational action, including therefore translation itself, may be conceived as an action. Any action has an aim, a purpose.
--Hans Vermeer (Selected Readings of Contemporary Western Translation Theories, 2009; p.83)
Skopos theory was first put forward by the German linguist Hans J. Vermeer in his paper “Framework for a General Translation Theory” in 1978. The Greek word “skopos” means intention, goal, purpose or function. Vermeer holds that this theory provides an insight into the nature of translation as a purposeful activity, hence applicable to every translation project.
In the development of functionalist approaches to translation, Vermeer’s skopos theory has played a major role. Vermeer, who had been trained as an interpreter by Kantharina Reiss, the famous translation scholar, was dissatisfied with the linguistic-oriented translation theory, because in his view translating is “not merely and not even primarily a linguistic process”, but a type of human action, an intentional, purposeful behavior that takes place in a given situation.
Vermeer formulated three rules guiding the translator’s translation decision: the skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. Of the three rules, the skopos rule is the top-ranking one, which must be given priority over any other rules in translating when there is a conflict among them.
1. The Skopos rule (the TT is determined by its skopos) stipulates that translation is not determined by the source text, or its effects on the source text recipient, or the function assigned to it by the author, but by the prospective function or purpose of the translated text as determined by the translation initiator.
2. The coherence rule (the TT must be internally coherent) means that the translated text must be sufficiently coherent to allow the intended addressees to comprehend it, given their assumed background knowledge and situational circumstances.
3. The fidelity rule (the TT must be coherent with the ST) refers to intertextual coherence, implying some kind of relationship between translatum (i.e. translated text) and source text.
Skopos theory was further developed as the foundation for a general theory of translation in Reins and Vermeer’s co-authored book Groundwork for a General Theory of Translation (1984). Basic concepts of Vermeer’s theory are extensively explained in English in Chapter Three of Nord’s book Translating as a Purposeful Activity (1997).
Vermeer’s skopos theory makes a great contribution to translation studies. It moves translation theory beyond the static linguistic typologies of translation. Translation is no longer considered as a merely linguistic process, but a purposeful action. And the translator is no longer a mechanical copier from source language to target language, but an expert in translational action, who should be responsible both for carrying out the commissioned translation task and for ensuring the result of the translation process. It allows the possibility of the same text being translated in different ways according to the purpose of the target text.
But the theory has its limitations. Nord and Schäffner discuss some of the criticisms that have been made of skopos theory by other scholars. These include the following:
1. What purports to be a ‘general’ theory is in fact only valid for non-literary texts. Literary texts are considered either to have no specific purpose and/or to be far more complex stylistically.
2. Reiss’s text type approach and Vermeer’s skopos theory consider different functional phenomena and cannot be lumped together.
3. Skopos theory does not pay sufficient attention to the linguistic nature of the ST nor to the reproduction of microlevel features in the TT. Even if the skopos is adequately fulfilled, it may be inadequate at the stylistic or semantic levels of individual segments.
References:
1. Munday, Jeremy, Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications, New York: Routledge, 2008;
2. Ma Huijuan & Miao Ju (ed.), Selected Readings of Contemporary Western Translation Theories, Peking : Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2009.