Experiences in translation by Umberto Eco

Author:Umberto Eco [Eco, Umberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Translatio

The term translatio first appeared in the sense of ‘change,’ even of address, ‘transport,’ banking operation, botanical graft, and metaphor. Only in Seneca does it appear as a turning from one language into another. Likewise traducere meant ‘to lead beyond.’ The passage from transporting something from one place to another to translating from one language to another seems to be the result of an error by Leonardo Bruni, who had interpreted Aulus Gellius (Noctes i, 18) incorrectly: ‘Vocabulum graecum vetus traductum in linguam romanam,’ where this means that the Greek word had been transported or transplanted into Latin. In any event, tradurre in its modern sense was common currency in the fifteenth century, and it supplanted (in Italian and French, at least) translatare (English, on the contrary, transported — in the ancient sense of traducere — the Latin translatare into its lexicon, thus coining to translate; see Folena 1991).18

Many dictionaries give, among the several meanings of ‘to translate,’ also the action of transforming data or instructions from one form or from one given alphabet into another form or alphabet, without loss of information. Such information will certainly include references to systems of transcription like the Morse code, to signalling systems using small naval flags, and even to the so-called genetic code. But it is clear that, on a linguistic level, the model of transcription could at most be applied to phrase books for tourists that establish, in a rather perfunctory way, that dog = chien and that coffee = café, without even realizing that, in the last case, equivalence holds for the drink but not for the place where the drink is served, which is coffeehouse or cafeteria in English, café in French, and caffé in Italian. It is clear that in the processes of translation proper there are margins of decision according to the context. These are, however, absent in transcription processes, in which there is no freedom of choice.

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