Situational models of translation

Situational (or referential, denotational) model of translation (see the works by J. Catford, V.G. Gak) was developed under the influence of linguistic views of major British scholars (J. Firth, A.K. Halliday, etc) who argued that every human language possesses its own systems of meaning understood as a matrix of relations into which this or that unit enters. It follows from this that such systems differ from language to language and account for the specific features of particular languages. In view of this, translation should not be understood as a mere transfer of meanings as different languages often use different sets of semantic components to describe the same or similar situations. In other words in keeping with the situational model of translation various semantic shifts (deletion or addition of some semantic components, their replacements) may take place as a result of paraphrasing, hence semantic equivalence of a SLT and a TLT is established not on the basis of respective sets of semantic components, but on the basis of identity of the situation described in the two languages. It must be stressed that a situation is understood as objects of reality and relations between them described in an utterance, but not as a speech context in which an act of communication takes place. According to V.G. Gak, there are five kinds of semantic changes in the ways of naming an object including synonymic substitutions, antonymic translation, semantic processes of expansion or narrowing, as well as the process of transfer. Such changes may involve interlevel re-distribution of semantic components, reduction in the number of semantic components, their repetition, as well as vector substitutions. This model is reliable when comparing similar ways of describing the same situation despite various other differences:

1) the difference in word-building resources of SL and TL, e.g. It is convenient for a money-losing factory to blame suppliers for its own fault. – Плохо работающему производству удобно винить смежников.

2) The difference in ways of describing a given situation in the two languages, e.g. It would really make the whole evening – Это будет настоящим гвоздем программы ( C.П. Романова, А.Л. Коралова).

3) The difference between lexico-semantic systems of SL and TL in verbalizing notions of different degrees of abstractedness, e.g. English has no generic term for the Russian любитель, but only a number of particular words, cf. coffee drinkers, cinema goers, nature lover, dog fancier.

4) Peculiarities of expressive resources and stylistic devices of SL and TL, e.g. It won’t be skin off my nose. – Плевать мне с высокой горы.

From the above review of some of the linguistic models of translation it is clear that they are interdependent, and as they each concentrate on some aspect of translation process they should be considered as complementary in the study of the complex nature of translation.

In the last few decades there was a shift in scholarly interest in translation to the pragmatic aspect of translation which gave birth to a number of pragmatic models of translation. The traditional approach to translation as a mere linguistic transcoding of a text from ‘one language to another’ was given up for the sake of integrating translation into a wider network of social interactions.

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