Up to this point I have argued as if translation were a process taking place between tongues, that is, between two different linguistic systems. It is not so, otherwise the paramount example of translation would be a bilingual dictionary. On the contrary, students taking an exam in a foreign language are not expected to produce a dictionary. They are requested to use (or to know by heart) a dictionary in order correctly to translate a text.
We must come back to the structure of a natural language. The diagram on page 22 suggested that form, substance and continuum were all elements of the structure of a language, and they were put in that diagram in order to show how they are mutually related.
In fact the study of a linguistic system starts when a given language has already segmented the continuum of all possible sounds into a form of expression, and the same happens with the content. In this sense the study of a language as a system is concerned only with forms: content form and expression form.
Substance is not a system phenomenon. It appears only when, by exploiting the possibilities provided by a given linguistic system, one physically produces a text or, if you prefer, a discourse. The substance of an expression is produced, materially, only when a communication process begins, that is, when sounds are emitted according to the rules of a given language.
Translation is a phenomenon which does not concerrn the relationships between two languages or linguistic systems – except in the rare cases in which one asks native speakers or interpreters how they would translate a given term in their own language, and we have seen what we risk by asking a native of Quine or the programmer of Babelfish. Rather, translation is a process that takes place between two texts produced at a given historical moment in a given cultural milieu.
One can adequately translate the Italian word nipote into English only when it occurs within an expressed text, referring to a given possible world or state of affairs. Otherwise one cannot make any reasonable decision.
Thus in a text, which is a produced substance, we have a Linear Text Manifestation – like the words I uttered at Oxford or these you are reading on this page – and the Sense or the multiple Senses of that given text: not the multiple meanings of the word nipote but the sense that this word acquires in a given context.
When I start interpreting a Linear Text Manifestation, I rely on the whole of my linguistic knowledge, and a more complex process occurs when I try to elicit the sense of what is said. As a first approach I try to understand the literal sense of the single sentences (if they are not ambiguous, hence requiring the help of a wider context), and to see them as referring to a given possible world.
If I read that Snow White is eating an apple I know that a female individual is biting, chewing and swallowing a fruit, and I can make some hypotheses about the possible world where this scene occurs: is it a world like the one we live in, where an apple a day keeps the doctor away, or a fairy-tale universe where to eat an apple means to become the victim of a spell? If I choose the second possibility, then I have to resort to encyclopaedic competences, among which there are intertextual scripts, explaining that in fairy tales things usually happen in a certain fashion. Naturally I am obliged to explore the Linear Manifestation further in order to know something more about Snow White, as well as about the place and the time in which the events occur.
At every step of my reading I ask myself what the topic is of a sentence, of a paragraph or of a whole chapter, and I must isolate isotopies, that is, homogeneous sense levels.
At this point I would be able to reconstruct a story from the plot, the story being the chronological sequence of events that can be turned upside down or at least ‘edited’ by the plot. I can tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, starting from the end, with the girl who, after having being rescued by the hunter, remembers what happened in the early morning when she met the wolf for the first time, and step by step reconstructs her vicissitudes.
By the way, notice that such a distinction also holds for non-fictional texts. I hated John, so I killed him and Since I hated John I killed him are two Linear Manifestations that convey the same story with two different plots. Moreover, story and plot also hold for non-narrative texts. Take a poem like ‘A Silvia’ by Leopardi. There is a story: there was a young woman, the poet secretly loved her, she died, and the poet remembers her in the flower of her youth, as well as his lost illusions. But this story is seen through a plot: the poet shows up when his illusions are definitively lost, and the young woman appears as a gentle ghost in the midst of his desperate remembrances. In translating ‘A Silvia’ one should respect not only the story but also the plot; otherwise one would concoct not a translation of this delicate poem but rather a clumsy summary.
Because I try to reconstruct the story from the plot, as my reading goes on, I will transform large textual chunks (or series of sentences and paragraphs) into micro-propositions that recapitulate them – at the middle of my reading of Snow White I can synthesise what I learned as ‘Snow White is a beautiful young princess who arouses the jealousy of her stepmother who wants her to be killed in the woods’, but at a further stage of the tale I can sum up the whole story by a macro-proposition as ‘A persecuted beautiful young princess is received and welcomed by seven dwarves.’ This embedding from micro- to macro-propositions will be my way to isolate the ‘deep’ story of the whole tale, and even its moral meaning (if any), while at the same time deciding which events can be considered as essential and which ones marginal or parenthetic.
Then I can try to detect the psychological features of the characters, and their position in what Greimas calls actantial structures,6 in the sense that many different characters can play the role of the Opponent or the Helper, and a given character can seem at the beginning to be the Helper and then become the Opponent (such a strategy is for instance typical of detective stories, where a character seems to collaborate with the detective until, in the last chapter, he/she is revealed as the culprit, that is, the detective’s arch-foe).
It would be possible to discover other textual levels that I can focus on during my reading. There is no fixed chronological progression (neither top-to-bottom nor bottom-up), in so far as at the very moment I try to detect the topic of a sentence, I can also try hypotheses about the great moral or ideological structures of the whole text – and once again detective stories are a useful touchstone because they usually show how a text can deceive its readers, persuading them to make wrong inferences about the general sense of certain events and to venture wrong guesses.
Any interpretative bet on the different levels of sense, and on their importance for the global interpretation of a text, is obviously fundamental for any reader, but it is essential for a translator. Another crucial point, however, is that a plurality of levels can also be found in the Linear Manifestation.
There are many substances in the Linear Manifestation. This is evident for many non-verbal systems: take for example a movie, where images certainly count for a lot, but one must also take into account rhythm, editing, sound (words or noises, and music), and even graphic elements – not only when there are subtitles, but also when the movie shows written expression, such as the title of a book or an advertisement that is visible in the background. In a painting we ought to consider not only the iconic elements but also colours and chiaroscuro relationships, not to mention an iconological lexicon allowing one to recognise a Christ, a Virgin, a Saint or a King.
In a verbal text, obviously the linguistic substance is the most evident one, but it is not always the most relevant. The expression Would you like to close the door? can express courtesy, love, rage, sadism or shyness, according to the tone in which it is uttered, but these feelings would be equally communicated if the expression were please pass the butter. All these are phenomena that linguistics considers as suprasegmental or tonemic, and which do not have directly to do with the laws of a linguistic system (one can express rage by uttering either please pass the butter or prego, passami il burro). If I say (and I apologise for offering you such a bad example of poetry) Please pass the butter – that is what I utter, I am making stylistical phenomena, metrical elements and rhyme pertinent. Metric is so independent from the linguistic system that the hendecasyllabic structure can be embodied by expression in different languages, and the problem for translators of poetry is to find something in their own language that can be considered equivalent to a rhyme in the source language.
To cite Leopardi’s ‘A Silvia’ once again, any effort to translate its first strophe would be inadequate
