Linguist Roman Jakobson delineated three families of what he called translation: intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic. The second, interlingual, is what comes to mind when a layman is asked what translation proper is—a shift of some source text in language A to a target text in language B. Furthermore when you ask said layman what translation does, he or she may say that it is a way of bringing the original meaning into the “new” language, and this is wherein lies the issue. Interlingual translation is an imperfect tool when trying to understand the meaning of a source text due to there being non-equal sets of required information given by a language’s grammatical system, nevertheless it is a perfect tool in illustrating interpretation of meaning.
The first task of proving this is to posit from where meaning is derived, and Umberto Eco in his book Experiences in Translation gives the first crucial step in doing so, he says, “Meaning results when one expression is replaced by another expression from which follow all the illative consequences that follow from the first” (70). Basically Eco is arguing that meaning is attained when a given expression A points to or refers to the all of the same things according to an individual if and only if expression B does so as well, he then goes on explaining how this is ultimately a cyclical argument, but that is not important here.
Given this we would say that the layman was right, when system/language A and system/ language B evoke the same interpretation/understanding then meaning has been achieved, but as Jakobson points out there is a phenomenon which translators are all too familiar with, languages do not necessarily encode for the same information, or in other words, “Languages differ essentially in what the must convey and not in what they may convey” (Jakobson 136)” He gives an example of translating from English into Russian, Russian being a language which encodes for the dual, grammatical gender on nouns, and the telicity (completeness) of past tense verbs, all of which English does not do; or from Russian to English, the later of which requires definiteness (the vs. a/an) and perfectness (did vs. have done) to necessarily be included in all utterances, and this time Russian does none of that. This dilemma of what has to be included causes to problems when translating in a source text, either more information must be included (and thus invented), or information must be omitted for an utterance to sound normal to the reader/listener. Given these misalignments, System B (English) cannot possibly result in the complete same interpretation as System A (Russian) does, which as seen above is what is required for meaning to be correctly discerned.
One could counter this saying that its only a one way street, sure, English does not necessarily encode for the dual, gender, or telicity, but that does not mean that it cannot, in fact itmay (as seen in Jakobson’s quote); but the argument here requires the linguistic concept of markedness. Markedness is essentially an utterance or expression being in the state of standing out or not. Take the phrase, “The dog barked,” this is unmarked, it is the normal way of saying the concept, what about “The canine unit cried out ‘woof’;” arguably it means the same as the first but it sounds much more explicit. If encoded preserving Russian grammar a possible translation could be “The two male dogs finished barking”, which of course is possible but if the the original Russian text was more focused not on these details that it was forced to include due to its own confining grammar but rather stating an unmarked sentence conveying that there was x amount of y-gendered dogs either successfully making noice or not, then the correct meaning would actually contain sense of being an unmarked utterance. This is of course a catch 22, you cannot have your cake and eat it too, the phrase either includes all of the information or is unmarked, and the choice is for the translator to interpret, which is why translation is not a tool in finding meaning but rather in interpreting it.
Bibliography
Eco, Umberto “Experiences in Translation”
Jakobson, Roman “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”