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?

Comparing the original with these types of translation the following peculiarities can be discovered: a) there is by far no one to one correspondence between all the lexical items (or expressions) and the syntactic structures; b) it cannot be claimed that the linguistic structures of the translations are derived by means of certain syntactic (or any other) transformations from the structures of the SLT; c) the aim of the communication and the situation are the same in the original and also in the traslated texts; d) all those general notions and ideas by means of which the situation is described in the original, viz. part of the original text mentioned sooner as 'description of the situation', can be easily discovered in the translation as well. This can be proved by the fact that the original piece of text can easily be altered semantically into a traslated piece of text in which the same relationship between the basic lexical items will be retained. Thus, for instance, in (4) - both in the original and the translation - the basic relationship in the situation is causal. In the original we have: 'I could puke every time I hear it', if I = A; could puke = B; every time = C; I hear it = D; then because of D, A is always forced to perform B. And in the translation: 'Felfordul a gyomrom, ha hallom', if 'Ha hallom' = D; 'felfordul' = F; 'a gyomrom' = E. F is always forced to perform E because of D. The notion of cause (D) is the same in both cases, although its characteristic features are different. A graphic representation will yield the following formula: (1) D A (C) B (2) D F (C) E The same way (method) to describe a situation presupposes one situation (not two different ones), and the identification of the situation which is to be described in its turn will demand the same aim of communication. In other words, if in the first two equivalence types the translator preserved part of the content which tells us "what the reasons were for giving the original piece of information", or rather "what the essential information is in it", then in the third type "the original form of the information", i.e. "the object of the communication in the situation" has also been preserved. 135