By Katharina Reiss
Translated by Errol F. Rhodes
St. Jerome Publishing and the American Bible Society 2000

http://www.translationdirectory.com/article20.htm

The Virgin Birth and Virgin Mary are, pardon the pun, pregnant with social symbolic significance in most, if not all, parts of the world. Whether you believe in them or not, they are solid social constructs, rehearsed endlessly in art, humour, everyday life, and language. And yet their birth is due to a relatively simple mistake in translation. The Old Testament talks about almah 'young woman,' not bethulah 'virgin.' However, the scholars in the 3^rd century BC translated the Hebrew almah as parthenos in Greek. Thus the 'young woman' in Hebrew metamorphosed into a 'virgin' in Greek—and she has remained a virgin ever since in translations across the world. The notion of 'virgin birth' was born, thanks to a mistranslation.

Mistranslation is plentiful, painful and powerful, whether it shapes our way of seeing the world through the Bible or the bibles of our times—films. In an American cult movie, "You'll get the pink slip for Christmas" is translated as "You'll get red underpants in Santa Claus' stocking." It must be a joke, I hear you say. No, I'm afraid, it is not. The 'pink slip' (a notice of dismissal, American slang) has metamorphosed into 'red underpants' in a famous action movie seen by millions and millions of people. Thanks to the translator's error, they envisage the hero in a pair of red underpants, not as getting fired by Christmas.

…..Both examples above illustrate relatively simple nonetheless fundamental mistakes in translation. Objective mistakes. But a mistake is a mistake only when you become aware of it. Otherwise mistakes become part and parcel of our ongoing discursified thinking—of our language and thus symbolic cultural system. As the virgin birth has, and no doubt the red underpants will.

It is this—objective, verifiable translation criticism that Katharina Reiss' Translation Criticism focuses on….Reiss structures her multifarious categories and criteria into two main parts: The Potential of Translation Criticism and The Limitations of Translation Criticism….The book provides many useful categories and criteria to structure thinking about But the issues Reiss focuses on are undoubtedly vital. In translation criticism you are looking for talent in writing, sensitivity to language, internal consistency, semantic, structural and dynamic equivalence, creative recreation of the cultural allusions, the spirit of the original, precision in and mastery of style and grammar, idiomatic usage, fidelity to the intent of the original author and the text type—just to mention a few fundamental aspects of the incredibly complex and complicated process.

As Reiss points out, translation is a hermeneutic process, which is subjectively conditioned—and so is translation criticism. Translation is, in the final analysis, an interpretation, an appreciation of the source text. The translator infers from the text—she reads into it. Such a subjective hermeneutic process ultimately stands or falls not simply on the bicultural, professional linguistic knowledge, expertise and experience of the translator. These are naturally necessary but not sufficient to produce an acceptable translation. Since the translator filters the source text through herself during the hermeneutic process of the translation, the translator's personality, mind-set and attitudes are all vital players in the game and can subvert the translation in many ways.

Thus the vulnerability of the source text to the translator cannot be underestimated. Hence the choice of the translator and translation criticism impact directly on the metamorphosis of the source into the target text, the young maiden into virgin Mary, and the dismissal slip into red underpants.

Ref.: B. L. Whorf, J.B. Carroll (eds.) Language, Thought and Reality (1956)

This article was originally published at Translation Journal (http://accurapid.com/journal).

處女聖母和紅內褲—

翻譯者須擔起塑造人們世界觀的責任

「童女懷孕」和「童女馬利亞」在世界大多數地區都包含著社會象徵意義。不管你相不相信這些故事，它們都是具體的社會建構，並且不斷在藝術、幽默、日常生活和語言中覆誦。然而這兩個概念卻出自一個頗為簡單的翻譯錯誤：希伯來文的舊約中」almah」是年輕女子的意思，不是處女，然而西元前第三世紀的學者在把舊約翻譯成希臘文時卻誤譯成「處女」。結果希伯來文中的年輕女人就變成了希臘文中的童女，而且在全球各文化的翻譯中繼續被理解為童女。這樣說來，所謂童女懷孕其實只是一個翻譯的誤譯。

不管是透過聖經或是透過當代的聖經──電影──來看世界，這類的誤譯其實非常多、非常痛苦、也非常有力。當代一部美國小眾電影「你的聖誕禮物是遣散通知」(You'll get the pink slip for Christmas) 被翻譯成「紅內褲是你的聖誕禮物」(You'll get red underpants in Santa Claus' stocking)，使得成千上萬的人想像劇中英雄穿著紅內褲的奇景，而不是聖誕節時被遣散。由此可見，翻譯影響人們對世界的看法不容小覷，差之毫釐，失之千里。

….上述兩個例子示範了翻譯中相當簡單但是很根本的錯誤，而且是「客觀的錯誤」。然而覺悟到的錯誤才是錯誤，很多錯誤則在我們當下的語言象徵系統中逐漸沈澱成論述思考的根本內容。

Katharina Reiss的《翻譯評論》一書就針對了這種客觀的、可證實的翻譯批評….Reiss不但處理翻譯批評的潛在可能，也展現了其侷限…..本書提供了很多有用的範疇和判準來建構翻譯批評的重要議題。翻譯需要寫作天分，語言敏感，內在一致，語意、結構上的動態平衡，文化典故的創造性重現，體現原文的精神，精確掌握風格及語法，瞭解慣用成語，忠實呈現原作者和文字的目的用意。

Reiss指出：「翻譯是一個詮譯的過程，是受主觀限制的，翻譯批評也是如此。追根究底，翻譯就是一種解釋，一種對於原文的鑑賞。翻譯者必須融入其中，再根據文字來推斷作者想傳達的意念。這種主觀解釋的成敗，並不僅僅建基於翻譯者必須具有跨文化的專業語言學知識、專長、和經驗，這些都自然是必要的條件，然而卻不足以生產優質的翻譯。既然原文在詮釋的過程中必須通過翻譯者的篩選解讀，那麼翻譯者的人格特質、心理狀態以及處世態度都會形成重要的影響因素，而且可能在很多方面顛覆原文的翻譯。」

由此可見，我們不能低估原文在遭遇翻譯者時的脆弱。因此，如何選擇翻譯者與翻譯批評，都會直接衝擊到原文轉化成譯文的過程，也就是少女變成童女馬利亞或者遣散單變成紅內褲的過程。

92102035 王鈺婷

92102034 張華容