Metaphorical images in the mirror: How Romanian literary translators see themselves and their translations

1 Introduction. Study background

For almost half a century now, Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) observation that metaphors are pervasive in our attempt to conceptualize and understand what we are less familiar with in terms of what we know better has been fueling the debate over metaphors in various fields of knowledge and research. Of these, linguistics and the language-related fields have remained the areas in which the metaphor topic has been discussed most often and at large, from a variety of perspectives.

As I have shown in previous works (Pungă 2016, 2022), though cognitive theories of metaphor seem to have gained the most extensive ground (quite relevantly, among others, through Kövecses’ books and articles (2000, 2005, 2010)), they are certainly not the only ones suggested. The points of view on metaphor have ranged from considering it a purely ornamental device, a figure of speech employed to obtain rhetorical effects (in the Greek and Roman Antiquity) to a number of other perspectives: Max Black’s (1962, 1979) interaction view, suggesting that metaphor works to transfer attributes from one entity to another at the level of concepts rather than of words and phrases; Ortony’s (1979a,b) formulaic approach to metaphor, stating that it is the result of the imbalance between how poignant the shared feature(s) is (are) in the source and, respectively, the target domain; Levin’s (1977) understanding of metaphor as being born from a process of semantic deviation from the standard features of a certain entity; Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) pragmatic view that metaphor occurs when there is a clash between the propositional meaning of an utterance and the meaning its producer actually intends for it; Glucksberg and Keysar’s (1990) categorization view or class-inclusion model, indicating that metaphor is the consequence of including an entity in a category to which it does not normally belong and that is best represented by another entity; Fauconnier and Turner’s (1995) blending theory, putting forth the idea that the source and the target domains input features to a shared space from which (some of) these features are then redistributed to the entity that is metaphorized, etc.

In this article, the perspective on metaphor adopted is the standard cognitive one, coupled with one of its specific developments – Kövecses’ (2000, 82) main meaning focus, which he defines as follows:

Each source is associated with a particular meaning focus (or foci) that is (or are) mapped onto the target. This meaning focus (or foci) is (are) constituted by the central knowledge that pertains to a particular entity or event within a speech community. The target inherits the main meaning focus (or foci) of the source.

In other words, it is a certain feature of the source (domain), or certain meaning component that is selected to be mapped onto the target that is conceptualized. The other features, or meaning components, are left aside or, if they are resorted to in the mapping process, they play a secondary role in it.

This particular perspective is taken on the metaphors suggested by 15 Romanian translators of literary texts. The present analysis is a follow-up of a previous study (Pungă 2022) in which I looked at metaphors of translation and the translator found mainly in Translation Studies works, in a collection of quotes gathered by French scholar Delisle (2017) and in online materials focusing on translation and translators. Only for very few of these metaphors, was it clear that they represented the points of view of translators themselves.

The main purpose of the analysis in this article remains largely the same as in my earlier work: to focus on how the relationship between the source and the target text and, respectively, the relationship between the translator and the author of the original are reflected by the metaphors taken into consideration and, in close connection to this, to shed light on the status of the translator and his/her work, as it is perceived by the translators themselves. Additionally, a conclusion will also be drawn concerning the similarity (in broad lines, within the limits of my own readings in the field of/about translation) or lack thereof between what the translators questioned believe of themselves as professionals and their work and how others perceive their role and the importance of translated literature. Finally, the validity of my previous (Pungă 2022) opinion that Venuti’s (2019) hermeneutic perspective on the translation process is the most appropriate to embrace, to the detriment of the very strict source vs target language and culture orientation, will be checked against the conceptualizations put forth by the metaphors analyzed here.

2 Study design

3 Translator = author? What is (the role of) a literary translator?

Of the 15 translators, two-thirds consider that their role is as important as that of the source text author’s, while one-third see their role as secondary to that of the writer whose text they translate. The conceptual metaphors they suggest to capture their perspectives on this role mirror these two points of view.

The former is illustrated by the following imagery:

1) the translator is the reader’s guide through an unfamiliar culture

I, as a literary translator, try to be s/he who invites the foreign reader on a journey, next to me, in the Romanian culture, with its polyphony and musicality.

The journey metaphor is perhaps one of the conceptual metaphors that circulates most widely with reference to a variety of target domains, in, for example, political discourse (e.g., Cibulskiene 2012, Dávid and Furkó 2015, Moragas-Fernándes 2018); medical discourse (e.g., Tay 2011, Hommerberg et al. 2020); marketing and business discourse (Liang 2021, Wang 2020) or environmental discourse (Milne et al. 2006, Skinnenmoen 2009). Translation Studies are no exception, as I have exemplified in my 2022 article on metaphors of translation and the translator, so the conceptualization of the translator as a guide and, respectively, of the translation process as a journey is no novelty.

To support the point of view that the role of the translator is of no lesser importance than that of the author of the source text, that she/he is the key character that can lead the readers’ way through the labyrinth of an unknown language and culture, the journey metaphor is accompanied by additional explanations in my corpus:

I consider that my role is very important and difficult at the same time. I have to be able to get the real sense of the words, to read between the lines and to see into the writer’s soul without having ever met him/her.

To translate is an art in itself which takes dedication on my side. Therefore, my translations are the product of the interpretation of the original, an attempt to solve the conflict between the sense and the word, the sense and the style, between creativity and fidelity.

This last explanation brings to the fore exactly what Venuti (2019, ix–x) insisted on: that it is about time that translation theorists abandoned the dichotomy source-text vs target-text orientation of the translation process, the perception that translation presupposes the mechanical substitution of a text in one culture and language by a text in another culture and language, in favor of insisting on the fact that any translation is a hermeneutic act that results into a new text, adapted to the cognitive, linguistic and cultural needs of the target audience. Only if one looks at translation in this way, one can realize that the role of the translator and that of the author are similar and similarly important.

2) the translator is a bridge/mediator between cultures and languages

3) the translator is (simultaneously) a de(con)structor and a builder

4) the translator is an adoptive/surrogate parent of the target text

5) the translator is a haruspex

The conceptualizations in 2) to 5) are grouped together as they were offered in one single answer and they all support the ‘translator = author’ point of view. The full answer is this:

The translator is, undoubtedly, a bridge between two cultures and, on the other hand, between two languages/linguistic systems, a person who brings these two together, a mediator. Due to his/her mission to “trans-pose,” to “move” a certain text, produced in a given context (a given culture, a given linguistic code, etc) in another, culturally and linguistically-determined context, s/he will act simultaneously as a de(con)structor and a builder (a builder who, however, resorts to hybrid materials, some of which belong to the author and some to himself/herself). The translator, as the presumptive author of one of the multitude of “imperfect copies” of the original, may be regarded, on the other hand, like a surrogate parent or, rather, like an adoptive parent of the original whom s/he “accommodates” and introduces to the target culture. And, finally, another perspective, which is not entirely apart from the equivocal image that the translator is sometimes associated with: for some, the translator looks like a dubious, restless haruspex who desperately (and often with frustration) searches through the entrails of languages, be they source or target languages, correctly intuiting their limits and even experiencing them herself/himself.

The bridge metaphor is, like the journey one, quite often resorted to as a conceptual metaphor, especially in domains where intercultural communication rests at their core (e.g., teaching – Skrefsrud 2020; literary criticism – Strack 2005; public policy-making – Hubbard 2022). Translation, as heavily relying on transfer between languages and cultures, is evidently a foreseeable target domain for the bridge building conceptualization (the builder metaphor, closely associated with the bridge imagery, may be reasonably expected to be used as frequently as the latter), so that it is often employed in both the professional and non-professional discourse about it (examples were provided by Pungă (2022) as well). In my data, it was suggested two more times, in:

The translator is a bridge that connects two linguistic shores.

and

I consider that the translator is, metaphorically speaking, a bridge between cultures, and therefore an intercultural mediator whose role is not only to linguistically communicate the author’s words, perceptions and intentions, but also to interpret them in order to render them in the translated text in such a way as to compensate, through his/her translation options, for the differences between the message sender’s culture and the message receiver’s one.

Here, too, it is pretty clear that acting as a ‘bridge’ presupposes, on the part of the translator, that she/he interprets the original text, she/he filters it through the target language and culture so as to provide the target readers with a dynamically equivalent translated text. Advanced skills are needed to offer them a readable, appropriate, and relevant piece of translated literature. For one of the respondents, working to this end is comparable to working as a tailor:

6) the translator is a tailor:

I could say a translator resembles a tailor who works on a pattern, sticks to the pattern of the original coat, but cuts into the fabric of his/her own culture and, if needed, easily adapts that pattern.

Both the bridge builder and the tailor conceptualization of the translator support the ‘translator = author’ point of view. Without the hard and often innovative work of a translator, without his/her ‘mastering a world of solid linguistic and literary knowledge, his/her well-grounded world culture, the sense of words’ rhythm, nuances, chromatics and flowing’, as one of the respondents put it, a literary text written in a foreign language remains isolated, it can never cross the borders (and limits) of its own language and culture. In another respondent’s opinion, the mediated transfer task that a translator takes on is that of an ambassador (which, if one thinks that an ambassador’s main duty is to cleverly and elegantly represent the interests of his country in a foreign place, certainly pleads for looking the translator’s role up):

7) ‘The translator is a cultural ambassador.’

The suggestion that the translator is the author’s voice in another language may be considered to follow the same line of thinking:

The translator is the voice of the author in another language, who renders the culture of a text in the paradigm of a different culture.

The translator as a surrogate/adoptive parent of the ‘child’ target text has also been encountered in the Translation Studies field, as I have illustrated elsewhere (Pungă 2022). However, the translator as a child himself/herself has also been suggested by one of the translators involved in the present study:

8) the translator is a child that solves a linguistic Rubik:

The translator is, in a playful approach, a child who solves a linguistic Rubik.

What may leap to the eye as more innovative is the conceptualization of the translator as a haruspex, an ancient Roman priest who was believed to be able to foretell the future by inspecting the entrails of animals sacrificed to the gods.

By zooming in on specific aspects/features of their respective source domains, all conceptualizations in examples 2) to 8) visibly support the perception of the translator as a knowledgeable, skillful, powerful, and sometimes playful mediator between cultures, at times, endowed with abilities that go beyond what all mortals share. It thus becomes obvious that, seen as illustrated, translators are definitely not inferior to the authors of the source texts. I dare suggest that it may be sensible to read between the lines that they are equipped with additional qualities and capabilities that are not required of authors and, therefore, that they may be regarded as actually superior to the writers of the texts they translate (however, as mentioned, none of the translators who filled in the questionnaire on which this analysis is based suggested this).

The metaphorical imagery that may be interpreted as suggesting an inferior position of the translator as compared to the author has been much less often present among the answers I collected. Only two of the conceptual associations provided for the translator’s role fall in this category:

9) ‘the translator is a shadow’.

and

10) the translator is a ventriloquist:

The translator is some sort of a ventriloquist who has to utter words without anybody noticing that s/he is uttering them.

In both 9) and 10), the translator is conceptualized as almost invisible, however, not in Venuti’s (1995) way, as a professional who is so skillful in doing his/her job that the translation feels like an original itself, but rather as secondary to the author, working in silence, out of the limelight.

However, of the two conceptualizations in 9) and 10), the association of the translator with the author’s shadow may, if the appropriate selection of the source domain features is operated in the mapping process, yield positive implications for how the translator is perceived: as Gopinathan (2006) observes, the shadow is organically linked to the object that casts it, but it may change its shape according to the light angle; similarly, seen as the author’s shadow, the translator may always be secondary to the original, but she/he may as well take different positions in interpreting the source, which requires, as already suggested, advanced linguistic and cultural skills and knowledge, wit and creativity.

4 Original text = translated text? What is (the role of) a literary translation?

About 73% of the respondents to my questionnaire said they regarded their translations as important as the source texts, while 27% saw them as less important than the originals.

As I regarded strict adherence to the text to be translated as a potential sign of considering it of very high importance by comparison to its translation, I asked the respondents, as indicated in Section 2, how much liberty they allow themselves when working with a foreign literary work? Sixty percentage answered that they take the freedom to change/adapt the source text as much as they consider necessary in order to obtain a translation that is relevant to the target audience, while 40% declared that they strive to remain as close as possible to the original (the percentages of answers in each category do not perfectly match that of answers to the question concerning the importance of a translation vs that of the original, but it still validates, at least partly, my opinion about the connection between the two).

The conceptualizations suggested to refer to the role of a translation go, at points, hand in hand with those put forth for translators themselves. Thus, if a translator is a bridge builder between languages and cultures,

11) a translated text is a bridge (builder), too:

To read a translated book means to get to know a new culture, translations build valuable spiritual bridges over immense knowledge gaps.

The translated text is a bridge between people and their stories/feelings.

The translated text is a bridge between cultures.

The channel conceptual metaphor for the translated text, closely connected to the bridge conceptualization, has been employed quite often in the Translation Studies discourse (as illustrated in my 2022 study); it was also suggested by one professional who filled in my questionnaire:

12) a translated text is a channel of communication:

A translation is a channel of communication not only with a writer/author, but also with an entire culture to which the translated author and his/her text belong.

The characteristic of providing access to a realm situated beyond a certain point of reference is selected not only in the case of the bridge and channel (of communication) source domains, but also when the translated text is conceptualized as a window (another cognitive metaphor often encountered in discourse about translation – see, for example, Deng 2020), an imagery that occurred repeatedly in my corpus:

13) the translated text is a window:

The translated text is, from the reader’s perspective, a window to another culture, to another world, to another cultural and spiritual experience.

A translated literary text offers windows to other worlds. Like any window, translation facilitates contact, but, inevitably, it also limits it.

A translated text is a window to an author’s world.

The rather innovative conceptual metaphor in 14) is somewhat connected to the three previous associations, as it builds on a characteristic shared by the source and the target domain – that of functioning as a transportation vehicle. Emphasis is placed here on the same connecting, transfer potential of a translated text:

14) the translated text is a merry-go-round:

The translated literary text is a merry-go-round that takes us through a universe created by the author of the source language text.

The conceptual metaphors in examples 11) to 14) suggest a relationship of equal importance between the authors and those who translate their literature. Without translators, the former’s work cannot be transferred, transported, and made accessible to an audience that does not speak the language of their books. It is true, however, that, as one translator pointed out, (if seen as a window), translation may sometimes not be able to offer full access to the original, the reasons for this varying widely from lack of or restricted linguistic resources, to the translator’s rather weak expertise and contextual factors surrounding both the source and the target text.

Just like the translator is the reader’s guide through an unfamiliar culture, the translation itself may serve as a guide into a language and culture the public is unacquainted with. This is clear when the association in 15) is suggested:

15) a translated text is a mile marker

in one respondent’s opinion, the place where roads (and cultures) meet and where indications to take the right route (on the road, in the actual reality and, metaphorically, into the translated text as well) are much needed:

Each translated literary text is a mile marker, a crossroads, an opportunity for at least two worlds (two civilizations, two cultures, two universes of thinking…) to meet.

Once transported into the new language and culture,

16) the translated text is a seed

that may or, on the contrary, may not become a plant to be admired, depending on the translator’s (the gardener’s) skill (this conceptualization is quite close to that of translation as a flower, quoted by Delisle (2017)):

The translated literary text … looks like a seed sawn in the soil of another culture, where it can grow in all its splendor and bear flowers or fruit and, possibly, lead to fertile hybridization or, on the contrary, fall into some sort of nothingness, marked by indifference and failure to be understood.

There is yet another instance of conceptualization, in my corpus, a fresher image than that above, in which emphasis seems to be placed on the quality of a translation as being that which influences the way this text is received in the target culture, by the target readers. Reference to it is made via conceptualizing the translator himself/herself (so the metaphors in 17) could as well have been discussed in the previous section) as below:

17) the translator is a piece in a chess game:

By analogy, the translator is not just a pawn, s/he may be the queen. No matter how good and famous the author of the text may be, a reader may remember a book with great pleasure or unwanted disappointment. In other words, the literary translator may be a “due to” or a “because”. We would rather forget the latter variant.

It follows from 17) that, if the translator is a chess piece, the translation process may be regarded as the chess game, and

18) the translated text is the chess board

where the player’s (the translator’s) moves (choices) dictate the success of the game (the translation endeavor).

The conceptualization in quotes 15) to 18), too, supports the view that the role of a well-translated text is regarded as crucial in the life of literature beyond its own language and culture, in guiding the readers through a fictional universe that would otherwise remain either unknown or obscure.

If a chess game requires preparation, a careful thinking of every move, translation may not always be that closely calculated. Apart from solid knowledge of the working languages and cultures and attentive weighing of every translation choice, the translation process may sometimes call for improvisation, just like in a musical jam session. The association of translation with the same musical piece being played with different instruments is, like some of the other metaphors discussed so far in this article, no novelty (examples were quoted by Pungă 2022 as well). It is present among the conceptual metaphors discussed here too:

19) the translated text is music (played with different instruments):

The translated text is a musical theme played again with a new instrument, sometimes a jam session.

This final conceptual metaphor may be ambiguous in terms of whether one should understand from it that a translated text has an inferior status to that of the original text or not. The same tune played with different instruments may be a success in itself, or it may be a pathetic failure, depending, again, on how skillful the artist is. Similarly, a translation, as innovative as it may be, can be equally appealing as the original or much less so. It all rests in the translator’s power to make it one or the other.

5 Conclusion

The results of my small-scale analysis in this article show that the metaphors for the translator and the translated text are, often, those found in the general discourse about translation, both in the Translation Studies academic field and in non-professional contexts (conceptualizations drawing on the bridge, the journey, the window, or music as their source domain are often resorted to not only in the translation-related debate but also in other fields). However, novel metaphors have also been suggested: e.g., the translator as a haruspex or a child who plays with a Rubik’s cube, the translated text as a merry-go-round, or a chess board.

By the kind of conceptual metaphors they provide, the professional literary translators involved in the study presented here demonstrate that they tend to believe that their role in making literature written in a foreign language available to their home audience is as important as that of the writer in producing his/her original work. Quite naturally, the metaphorical associations they suggest to clarify their perception of the role and status of their translations, as compared to those of the source texts, also indicate that they see no major differences between these two.

What may be striking is that, though some of them admitted to placing themselves and their work at a lower, less significant level than the authors of the original writings and their literary works, the conceptual metaphors they included in their answers prove this standpoint in very few cases (e.g., the translator as a ventriloquist), some of which may even be ambiguous (e.g., the translator as a shadow and the translated text as the same tune played with different instruments).

The now very old source-orientation vs target-orientation dichotomy in the translation process echoes in at least some of the metaphors analyzed. Nevertheless, the idea that translation is and should remain an interpretive act surfaces more powerfully, as I indicated. Thus, the conceptual metaphors I have taken into consideration plead in favor of rather abandoning the strict disjunction mentioned and embracing Venuti’s (2019) hermeneutic perspective instead. If his way of looking at the translation process is supported, perhaps the author–translator and source text–target text relationships will themselves be assessed from a non-contrastive perspective, which, in its turn, may be beneficial to acknowledging the undeniable importance translators and translation play in the circulation of texts, literary or otherwise, in the world.