CONCLUSIONS AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

The author has so far discussed, in the Introduction, some basic concepts and theories concerning the task of translation; in Chapter 1, some basic similarities and dissimilarities of the three languages involved; and in Chapter 2, in detail, sO'me major problems in translating Latin into German and English, namely, the problems of the artic1e, of case, of gender and number, of word-order, and of tense and aspect. In the light of such discussions and analyses, we may come to the fo11owing conclusions, some of which may be applied to the practícal task of translating the three languages into one another and/or to the practical need of teaching or learning them:

1) Genera11y speaking, linguistic transfer between Latin and German is much greater than that between Latin and English, or between German and English, though previous knowledge of any of the three languages appears to be helpful to the learning of any other.

This means, for any Chinese learner of Latin, previous knowledge of a structurally clos~.

language like German will be of great help (the author's oWn experience also confirms this),30 because there is a tremendous amout of positive transfer from German to Latin and reversely; difficulty lies only in those areas where the two languages are structurally very different. Grammatical inferences may often be made between Latin and German by anyone who knows one or the other. This happens especially in the areas of case of nouns and tense

-

534

一-從對比分析論說了文、種文與英文間一些翻譯問題

of verbs; in some other areas, such as gender and word-order, transfer from one to the other is less reliable or downright negative.

2) Cases of linguistic transfer among the three languages at the lexical level, as one may find in the translation illustrations, are many and self-evident, since there are so many loan words from Latin in German and English. What the student or translator must take heed to, however, are the "false friends" or pseudo-equivalents between them, especially between German and English (as G. bald

‘

soon' vs. E. bald).

3) Since syntactic transfer between each two of the three languages is more negative than positive, the syntax or word-order of each of the languages must be acquired as a separate system. In this area, inferences can scarcely be made; if one does, errors will often result. For Chinese speakers, the syntax of English among the three languages sounds most

“reasonable" 的 them; that of German looks rather bizarre and tongue-twisting; and that of Latin is just utterly imaginable and monstrous. Great efforts, therefore, should be made at this level一 -not to convert the language learner's existing system(s) into the new system(s), but to develop in him new ones.

4) Great care must be taken not to impose unnecessary, hypothetiιor historical grammatical categories on any of the languages whose structure, at that point, happens to be simpler. Never te11 the student, for example, that the word John in John, come on!

“

should be vocative," or that me in give me a book

“

is actually different" from the same word in someone loves me. It won't help, but hinder. This has been practiced by many language teachers in the past and occasionally by some in our time who know Latin or, at least, who have read grammar books based on Latin.

5) It seems that the article system of every language that has one is hard to acquire, especially for non-native learners of the language. Latin, as it has no article at all, seems to have no such troubles in itself. When it comes to be translated into some other languages that have articles and when, in the translations, articles in the target language have to be supplied, the translator's guide depends on the one hand upon the contextual hints in the original text and, on the other hand, on usage and idiom regarding the use of articles in the target,language. With German, while the use of the definite article seems to be sub-stantially more often than that in English, some id

師大學報 第卅一期

syntactico-semantic compönen~s， s~yirtg that zum Beispiel ‘for example~ means actually

“

for the example," am Tisch is actually

“

at the table," and the like. Such^, explanation may have a ilégative, rather than posl1:ive, effèct 'on fhe teaching-learning ,prqcess.

6) With the problem of case, sihce C1iinese, being ideographic iÌ1 writing, has no mo t:-phological indicatlon of surface case at all and Ehgli油， ah 'analytic language like Chinese, has now only littIe, it wi1l be very difficult for the Chinese student with 'previous second-/

foreign-language experience only Qf English to acquire and internalize the highly com-plicated case systems of German and Latin. In this area, no inference' can be madé from hi~

native länguage, and only litt1e fÌ'om his fitst foreign language, English. In real classroom situations, an explanation of the general meänings and flinctions 'of the cäses in each system (see 2'.2) and thé interrelations between the systems (as shownin (32))' máy be, but not necessarily, of help tò' t'hé Chinese student、withprevious knowledge of'Englishbeginning to learn German and/or Latin. For the adult learnér, German and Latin may seem to pe_Jan-guàges that require a lot of work of the mind (reasoriiiig) aíid an' excellent memory (呵，

membering)一一the grammatical genders of nouns, the cases gômg with speCific verbs' and prepositions the conjugation of véi"bs, the unfami1iar word-order, the formation of plurals,31 etc., toge~her with all the^‘inflectional endings that go with廿lesèand other gram-matical notions. All these ànd other complexities seem to crowd, all at once,into the mind of the aduIt learner if ever he is to pròduce'a .grammatiëally correct sentence in German or Latin. “It drains the mind," so to speak. Small childrëh^, 'bèforé the critical age for language, whose minds ar'e like blaÍlk sheets, acquire the linguisticsystem they encounter' withoüt much difficulty no matter how simple"or~

c<

::>mplex the system is (see Chiang' 1 985c).3.,2

Latin, às a dèad, classical language fhat no longer has a locus existendi in the minds of native speakers certàinW does nòt lend itself to any kind of'audiolingual method, and' the

eff~ctiveness in using a 'púrely audio-lingual methodology for teaching German to non-native learners remains uricertain and controversial. 33 In this view ,an eclectic :tñethodology that combines the favorable tenets in' both the audio-lihgual.and cognitive methodologies is bound to show up 1n tlle real DFS ^I (Deutsch tils

F.陀mdsprache ‘German

as æforeign lan-guage') classroom.³⁴

一

'536 一

從對比分析論扭了文、德文與英文問一些翻譯問題

NOTES

1. The other two daughter 1anguages, Oscan 叫ld Umbria泊， have rio known descendantS.

2. Latih .remains to be one of the two classica1 1anguag~s (Latin and Greçk) that are learned, as a 1anguage requirement, not only in the universities and col.leges, but in the' middle schools. It is included in the matriculation examination of Matura for high school graduates, and required for many programs of study at college and graduate levels, iricluding all the humanities, law, medicine, etc.

3. “Literature" here' takes the broadèt sen:se to 'refer to all forms of written. information preserved.

4. According to Index Translationum, published .by UNESCO up. to 1970, Gèrman has been the first lahguage (the second is Russian) 一into，which all kindsof .information and 1iterature ofthe world have beèn translated (see Newmark 1981.:3).

5. As far as the personal experience of the author goes, English is not as international, at least可 in Europe, as it .is supposed to be. The Germans and the Frencfr, for exampl~ ，

seldom speak English to foreigners even if they can.

6. In many languages a distinction is .made between the species term for human beings in general and sex-specific term for a male person. In Chinese, jen is the generic-individual term, jen-lei is the generk-collective, and. nan.jen Ìs the sex-specifk In Englisll, rñan serves for both. When the. generic meaning is stressed, human beings, humαns， or mankind may be the substitutes. The same distinction is held between Mensch and Mannin German, homo and vir in Latin, and hito and otoko in Japanese, the former being generic and the latter sex-specific. Very often, however, the distinction may

n.o

t be 'so clear. Ger. Mann, for example, niay' take on the generic .reference of

‘

buman being', the sex-specific of

‘

male person', and the meaning of

‘

husband'. And French, fOf'one, does not seem to emphasize such a distinctiòn in the .lexicon: both may be expressed by homme.

7. It is these

“

translation equivalents" that are the immediate concern of the translator.

It is clear frol1). the context here that translation equivalents may be, buf not neces-sari1y are, semantic equivalents. For in a case where no exact semantic equivalent exists, translation equivalents between two languages are sti1l possible.

8. There have beên different translations of this well-known Chinese

“

trigram" for translation. Rona1d A.. Knox、 puts itas

“

accuracy, intelligibi1ity, and readabi1ity'

1師大學報 第卅一期

Chao Juen Ren translates it as “fidelity, f1uency, and elegance"; and some other translations. The author, ac∞rding to .the. 申iew he holds, finds it desirable to translate it as “faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance."

9. A T~latiYely 0徊，if ^Q..ot totqlly 9utdated c1assificatory term for.language.

10. For some synthetic languages^,‘especially the “agglutinative" an.d. t'pQlysyl)thetic"

languages .such as Hungarian and Eskimo., where c1asses^, of form♀ cO p1.e together in un-. interrupted successions: to form word-sentences, i

t.

is difficult to say what a “word" is

Latin lends itself., to some extent恤， to. the same situatiQn: whi1e, fon il!stan~e， a “word"

like laudabor means, and should .be t:t:anslat~d into; E.ngljsh 'I'Jl b~ PLajseçl', it is hard to say whether it is^, one ^,single ^'Word or, .a.combin<Jiion o.f,.two or1 more.

11. The same happens with some other topic languages like Chinese.

12. In German terminology, a Wortstock ‘word也tock (J)' qiffers from a, 字的mm ‘ st，em'lin th^C!-t it does not take the final, linking yowel of the stem (th~ Stam1114uslaut). For example, the stem of the Latin nOl，lllβqmmae ‘f1a.mes' i~βα?1lm辭， but, the “~ord­

stock" is flamm-.

13. Here

“

name-form" is used with a broader reference than Ger., Nennform, literally

‘name-form' but actually referring. only to infinitives Qf verbs.

'14. This statement .was made by D^1:. 、[ikto1: Böhm, the^, author's. Latin :Ínstructor in \-;ienna, in a c1assroom lecture.

15. This is actually the practice of some German dictionaries.

;r

he l,lstlal^,practive is to label those words'.of.dual function as~"adj:" ， or. to indiçate.t}1eir .adverbial fUI).ction by an. additional sýmbol.

16.. This Latin -text and .all the others -that follo.w are .taken from Liber Latinus; A, 1.

Teil (Österreichischer

Bundesver1aιWien，

1982), the standat:d, textbook of Latin for Austrain high schools (Gymnasiums).' All the German and Engli~h translations. of the Latin .texts are bý the author. .himself.

.1 7, According to a che一ckwithnative .American speakers, at^, mea{s, isnot èolloquial;.a much more colloquial expression would be having a meal.

,'18. The same ∞ ntrast of meaning:is seenJn.Englishgo to . (the) çhurch:, at (the) table, and the like.

19. If, for example，扭曲 the tt:anslation .trigram “你旬，旬， ya" ( ‘信達雅)， were, t.o. mean

‘f1uency' alone and this principle of .ta^, were .to b~ striGt1y .followed .in all kinds of translation, how then,. co^,uld o.ne work .out a. fl.ue,nt^, translatiçm, say, o( ^C!- tong,ue.

twisting' nov~l 1ike' Joyce~.s Ulysses. 0 1: Wang Wen-hsin~s ,'lJle Family αtastrophe ( 家變)'1 --， 53 日一

在文檔中 Some Translation Problems Between Latin, German, and English:A Contrastive Analysis and Pedagogical Implications (頁 40-45)