NATURAL TRANSLATION

However, there are all kinds of insidious resistances to literal translation. You may feel it is not translation, it is mechanical, it is automatic, it is humdrum, it is not clever. You have been told at school not to practise it. It does not enrich your knowledge either of the source or of the target language. It is too easy. We have to resist these arguments. Apart from translationese (i.e. inaccurate translation) the only valid argument against what I might find an acceptable literal translation of an ordinary language unit is that you find it unnatural. Take I'heure est venue or les maisons basses: if you insist you would not normally say 'the hour has come', only

'the time has come'; not 'the low houses', only 'the squat or low-lying houses', I would suspect you were deluding yourself, but I believe that, except for an expres- sive text, you should write in a manner natural to yourself, a manner that expresses your own sense of good style. This is yet another of the tensions within translation. In fact, by repeating several times to yourself a slightly 'unnatural' unit of language, or by saying it in a soft tone of voice, you can sometimes make it sound more natural, and convince yourself it is a good translation. If it still remains unnatural to you, you should avoid it. In this sense, the argument in favour of a translation having the impress of a translator's own way of writing has precedence over the principle of literal translation.

Note that it is sometimes advisable to retreat from literal translation when

faced with SL general words for which there are no 'satisfactory' one-to-one TL equivalents even though one is over-translating. Thus Darstellungen is more common and concrete than 'representations', and, in the context, 'drawings',

'pictures' or 'diagrams' may be quite suitable.

A further point. One can say that, in the human view, all objects are symbols

and all words are either representations or symbols of objects. In this sense, literal translation can go either way. Commonly, atropinique can mean, literally, 'made of

atropin' or 'atropin-like'; brulure, a 'burn' or 'a burn-like sensation'. Less commonly, Die Apfelsinne fdllt mir ein may literally mean 'The orange' (previously mentioned) or 'The idea of the orange occurs to me'.