Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)
Péter Ortutay: How to evaluate translation?
2.0. Equivalence is considered to be one of the crucial (if not the most important) questions in translation theory. The problem is, however, that most of the scholars are looking at it as a notion which is natural and self evident, and consequently they try to prescribe (and not to describe) it as an obligatory category, which must always be present in any translation. For instance: " The original text (SLT) and its message has a certain core which must be embedded unchanged into the translation (TLT)" (Dániel, 1983:13; the emphasis is mine - P.O.). Even professor Roger T. Bell is unable to avoid the traps of prescriptivism in his endeavour to define equivalence: "In essence ... the problem (of achieving equivalence in translation - P.O.) is to relate (a) sociological variables ... with (b) linguistic features which combine to create text which is realized in and as interaction" (Bell, 1991:9). I am not going to encumber the attention of the reader with further definitions because they could be quoted almost endlessly, and still we would not get any closer to the solution of the problem. Instead I will make an attempt to demonstrate with an analysis that, even if the factors making up equivalence are extremely versatile, the sherely lingustic phenomena which determine the semantic possibilities and limits of utterances in different languages can easily be observed and described. At the same time I should like to emphasize that below I will always be trying to abstain from making judgements about the appropriateness of the given translation; no attempt will be made to assess its quality either. The analysis is going to be purely of a descriptive character and is aimed at examining and understanding the degrees of the greatest possible and the smallest necessary similarity, viz. equivalence. 2.1. First let us take an example in which contextual similarity between the original and the translation is the smallest in terms of the results of a comparison of any other translation with its original, which results reveal a greater closeness (between the two texts) than that we are having in the following examples (the quoted texts are all taken from the following two editions respectively: J. D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye , Penguin Books, 1985; J. D. Salinger: Zabhegyező. Fordította Gyepes Judit. Árkádia, Budapest, 1983. The figures after the quotations indicate the page number where the given quotation can be found). 131
