The Role of Grammatical Transformations While Translating

3. Preserving the meaning structure of the source text

     This aspect is vital in terms of preserving the unique author’s style because sometimes the text is the result or a product of some specific author’s technique of writing. For example, Ernest Hemingway was an adept of simple plain style of narration and it would be a translation defect if his literary style was very grandiloquent and pompous in the target language. That’s why the translator must keep in mind the notion of the text structure. “Structure” means “the arrangement of and relations between the parts of something complex”. Any discourse is a complex structure of meaning which is realized at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and complete texts in a particular sociocultural environment. The relationships between all the levels produce the ultimate effect of gestalt, which is an organized whole perceived as more than the sum of its parts. The ultimate challenge for any translator is to preserve as much of its complex meaning structure in the translation as possible. Sometimes while comparing the source text with the target text, a researcher can see that sometimes the whole passages are omitted. The reasons for such omission can be various but the most common one is that the translator didn’t succeed in finding linguistic means to reflect peculiar sociocultural aspect of the passage. These are usually jokes on politics, specific professional humor typical of a country etc. It is clear that after translation this joke can lose its specific colouring in the target language, but nevertheless it gives a valuable piece of information highlighting the idea to the reader.

     In this respect some ways of making translation decisions can be suggested. At the sentence level, the most common transformations every translator makes are:

• Omission
• Addition
• Transposition
• Change of grammatical forms
• Loss compensation
• Concretization
• Generalization
• Antonymic translation
• Meaning extension
• Metonymic translation
• Sentence integration
• Sentence fragmentation.

   The most relevant means of translation among the above listed are omission, addition, transposition, sentence integration and sentence fragmentation that are directly connected with the grammatical means of translation. All the rest means can be counted to the stylistic means of translation. The suggested method of investigation is comparing the source text of Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” with the target translation made by E.Kalashnikova and pointing out cases of employing grammatical transformations.

   1.4. Author’s Style and Its Significance for Translation

   It is impossible to omit various text peculiarities of extra linguistic importance while translating any text or a literary work. The thesis is based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. It is very important to take into consideration author’s individual literary techniques when a translator chooses any kind of transformation, because any author has his own individual vision of how to create the text and how the reader should interpret it. Ernest Hemingway is among such writers who consider grammatical pattern of the sentence as a part of his artistic design. That is the reason why a translator should get to know the rules which Hemingway intended to imply in his works and the aims he tried to persuade. Otherwise a translator will mislead the reader and fail to preserve the unique style of the author.

   Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 — July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and a journalist. He was a part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, as well as the veterans of World War One later known as "the Lost Generation". Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, in contrast to the style of his literary rival William Faulkner. It had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoic men who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered canonical in American literature. Ernest Hemingway’s literary style is well known and close to linguistic minimalism. But his understatement, scarce speech patterns are only surface impression but in reality every expression is meaningful which should be traced between lines. Hemingway was very resentful against attempts to find any underlying meaning in his works as if something that should be understood was not clear. Nevertheless accentuated detailed description involves numerous symbols. The English writer Syril Conolly wrote about Hemingway’s prose structure: “This style implies that a body tells more than mind does; it is vital to describe such emotions as love, fear, joy of fight, despair and sexual lust but it is extremely poor to imply intellectual ideas”.

   In terms of aesthetics Hemingway had an obsession of being objective. According to his concept of literary oeuvre, prose should be perceived on the physical level and it is necessary to expel any signs of intellectual consideration and fantasies.  Detailed and very exact description of events must be the guide line and the reader should feel it clearly, not only imagine forms and notions but also inosculate with objects and notions the author suggests.

   Hemingway creates such a vivid and effective unity of his creative manner with very scarce means, he is extremely taciturn. In this respect, his style has nothing to do with detailed and grandiloquent literary tradition typical of such American writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville who could be considered as Hemingway’s forerunners in some aspects.

   Hemingway, as a writer who started his career with journalism, aspired to freeze and write down the expressive and laconic vernacular language of streets. He anticipated the English writer Syril Conolly’s adage expressed in 1938:  “Language of our days is journalistic language, and the secret of journalism is to write as people speak in reality”. Hemingway’s principal technique was to stick to reality and everyday life. When Hemingway was a reporter and a correspondent, he tried to follow the same models as those of literary works implying his inspiration and fantasy into the facts depicted. He was interested in man’s actions, character’s type and atmosphere. That’s why he implied impressionism manner in his literary works which makes a possibility to catch vivid atmosphere the most important principle. Hemingway tried to convey feelings and emotions which are experienced in the course of events, distorting or even omitting information of higher importance. He took a well-known rule of journalism very personally:         “ Don’t let the reality spoil good news”. He considered a report as a minor genre of a novelist. [16]

   Hemingway wrote articles for two magazines of Oak Park: The trapeze and Tabula. His first experiments of his literary technique involved imitating Jack London’s style and articles in which he patterned himself on Ring Lardner who was a symbol of the entire epoch of the American journalism. Sarcastic, masterly and intentionally vulgar style of Lardner with interrupted phrases was perfect for sport reviews and comments. It is Lardner’s style that Hemingway adopted as a model.

   As a result, that he was inclined to such masters of picturesque description as Jack London and Mark Twain was initially combined with his inclination to the newspaper style of writing that was aggressive and straightforward. Besides, he had been reading much the writers who were considered a model of aestheticism – Henry James, William Butler Yeats. These two literary sources formed the creative individuality of Hemingway although they might seem rather controversial ranging between vulgarity and aestheticism.

   Like a lot of his contemporaries, Hemingway strived to create such kind of prose which would put an end to the baroque style typical of the 19^th century. His developing skill of a journalist allowed him to deny grandiloquence and focus on everyday life what resulted in peculiar realism of his literary works emphasizing correspondence with reality as the major principle.

   Just after Hemingway got a job at Kansas City Star, he was given a brochure with 10 stylistic requirements pointed out. The editors intended to make all the authors follow common style and set up a single standard of text published where objectivity and laconic language were primary. In brief the requirements were as follows:

• Make up brief, simple and clear phrases;
• Avoid Passive Voice if Active Voice is possible;
• Avoid two words if one is enough;
• Employ descriptive, straightforward and functional language;
• Use verbs which convey more detailed description of an action:
• Avoid adjectives except the cases when they convey exact notion;
• Expel all the grandiloquent adorning;
• Tend to narrate positively describing what really exists but not what could exist. [16]

     Speaking about the career of a writer, Hemingway’s contacts with other authors who visited Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound’s society appeared of more importance though they belonged to the previous generation. For example, Sherwood Anderson whom Hemingway had met before his travel to Paris became his first literary critic. Hemingway was fascinated while reading Anderson’s collection of stories titled “Winesburg, Ohio” (1919) where Anderson implied colloquial language with scarce expressive means. It was Anderson who prompted Hemingway the idea of that it would be impossible to consider the work completed without rereading it several times.

     The English writer of the older generation Ford Madox Ford shared his technique flash-back with Hemingway (retrospective, or a leap into the past). This narrative technique consists in that the actions in the present tell about events in the past. This experience became fundamental for the writer because he lacked the way to convey discontinuity of life events.

      It is worth noticing that while reading Hemingway’s works the reader often comes across foreign speech piercing through the entire text as the original as the translated one because translators leave those phrases intact. Many Hemingway’s heroes speak English though English is not their native language; it is supposed that they speak other languages. The author overcomes this difficulty so that native language of a character is easily recognized by its syntactical structure and certain semantic connotations. Hemingway embeds English into expressive structure of the other languages in such a way that one always is able to recognize the English language of a foreigner from that of a native speaker. For example, the Spanish people who speak English in such novels as “Fiesta” and “For Whom The Bell Tolls” or the Italians in “Farewell to Arms!”.  This peculiarity is lost in the translated texts because only native speakers of English are able to appreciate it.           Hemingway persuades the same purpose when he introduces a lot of foreign words into his texts, mostly Spanish and Italian, thus creating mixed jargon. [16]

     Hemingway opted for telegraphic style instead of prolixity. That telegraphic style allowed the author to lighten the character, a subject or an action with bright and brief phrases which are more effective than any additions and explanations. Brief and quick as lightning phrases join one another in a syncopated rhythm, thus, embodying the syntax with scarce means as its principal element. Due to simplicity and abundant repetitions, one can perceive it like ingenuous and awkward prose which is absolutely different from what is generally considered to be fine literature. But what is true is that this style is carefully thought over and very well disciplined.

     Few adjectives are one of the characteristic features of Hemingway’s style. The author posed the noun on the top of all the naming means because the noun always conveys the essence of a phenomenon.

     He believed that nouns implied the notions and qualities which adjectives described. The reader was free to imagine some others if reader’s personal experience told to do it. Hemingway used adjectives which described only colour, shape, etc.

     Hemingway tried to express the reality that everyone could see as much as possible basing on the distinctive character of every situation and searching for the unique method of reflecting the moment and the emotion that this moment bears. The thing is that Hemingway attempted to catch a certain feeling for a reader to perceive with the help of sophisticated technique but he never tried to point what feeling it should be like. In other words, life teaches us to write as well as literature teaches us to live.

     Hemingway always tried to evade sublimity, which estranges the author and the subject he writes about and it becomes more abstract. Hemingway aspired to reach the opposite that was to be as close as possible to the matter of description. According to Candido Perez Galliego, Hemingway’s literary style can be defined by 5 principles:

• to prefer what is concealed to what is evident;
• to prefer what is insignificant to what seems grandiose;
• to prefer something momentary to the eternal things;
• to prefer spontaneous to intellectual meaning that it is necessary to escape grandiloquence.

   As for the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, the protagonist of Robert Jordan is an American writer who joined the military actions not only for the sake of ideology but also for the sake of moral dogmas. His struggle is aimed at his own liberation. Hi is sure that human solidarity is vital as every person is not an island and the entire humankind feels death or salvation of anyone. That is why he believes that everyone does what he can do. Probably, you are unable to do anything for yourself but you can do something for the other. Besides, the fact that he loves a young Spanish woman Maria who witnessed disasters of the war symbolizes the moral unity against the background of his impending death. Hemingway disappointed Spanish republicans exiled from the country with such a passionate and thoughtful approach to the idea. The republicans expected him to write more bellicose novel. But nevertheless, the reader liked the novel in spite of the fact that this novel marked the beginning of Hemingway’s literary crisis. His unique fresh style that had been considered earlier as a kind of experiment was adopted and imitated by other American novelists and become a common literary technique of any second-rate author. So, Hemingway had nothing to amaze the public. He could not surpass his own expectations and excel his imitators. 

   So, peculiarities of the author’s literary techniques used in the analyzed novel give ground to consider the following. It is important not only to transform the text in accordance with translation techniques and rules, difference between the source and target languages but also rendering the impression which the author wanted to render for the reader in spite of his or her native language.

The next chapter involves examples of grammatical transformations based on the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and each example will be commented on concerning transformations employed, reasons for transformations chosen and how the translator keeps the author’s style. [16]

Chapter 2

2.1. Lexical Transformations

     The matter of lexical transformations is considered in linguistics concerning translation of scientific and social and political texts because new word formations are typical of the above texts (for instance, neologisms of various kind). However, little attention is paid to the features of lexical transformations in terms of literary translation. Mostly, the matter of lexical transformations concerns stylistic norms of the language because lexical transformations are connected mostly with such translation techniques as 1) generalization; 2) omission; 3) concretization; 4) antonymic translation; 5) meaning extension or sense development 6) loss compensation.  

      Generalization is used when something in the target language is usually expressed using concepts with broader meaning or when the preserving the original concepts with narrower meaning would result in an awkward translation.

     The original text contains the Middle English pronoun thee. The translator usually faces a challenge in such cases because there should be a choice between the archaic word with certain stylistic colouring and certain stylistic generalization, almost neutralization. In this particular case the translator opted for stylistic generalization and her choice might be explained by the historical context. The Russians had certain idea of Spanish guerillas of that time. If the translator kept the archaic form in the translation, it would sound at least awkward and provoke a smile of the Russian reader. Nevertheless, here the author’s gesture interferes again because Hemingway assigned such awkward phrases to foreigners who spoke English in his works. Thus, English readers could exactly distinguish this inappropriate use of the word thee. But at the same time, if we know the plot of the novel, we should note that the character, who pronounced How do they call thee?, respected very much Robert Jordan, the person who this phrase was addressed to. Therefore, we may suggest that such enigmatic usage of the pronoun thee might have double sense. The translation was effected at the word level.

      Omission is used when the clause is redundant, from the point of the target language, and would make the target sentence sound unnatural if it were to be translated. There are cases when certain words are just omitted without compensation and mentioning with the help of some lexical units.

      Concretization is used when something in the target language is usually expressed using concepts with narrower meaning or when preserving the original concepts with broader meaning would result in awkward translation.

  Sometimes concretization causes not only choice of more exact word for translation but also transposition in the sentence and change of syntactical structure of the sentence.

     Sometimes a translator adapts rather general word combinations to the context and translates them with more precise meaning than they were implied in the source text. Due to this translator’s decision, the target text becomes clearer and reflects the contextual background better.