What it is
Adaptation exchanges a situation described in the source for a different situation that the target culture recognizes, on the ground that the source situation has no counterpart there. The referent changes. What survives is the role the referent played: the same social gesture, the same institutional function, the same everyday familiarity.
Vinay and Darbelnet placed adaptation last among their seven procedures and called it the extreme limit of translation, to be used where the source situation is unknown in the receiving culture. Their position was polemical as much as descriptive: they argued that a refusal to adapt is a principal reason why translations come out grammatically impeccable and still read as foreign. The same operation recurs under other names. Newmark treats it as the cultural equivalent, an approximate rendering of a source cultural word by a target cultural word. Baker calls it cultural substitution and attaches the condition that governs it in practice, namely that its availability depends on the latitude the commissioner grants and on the purpose the translation is to serve. Franco Aixelá files the same move as naturalization, one of his substitution strategies. Molina and Hurtado Albir retain the original label.
The boundary against established equivalent is worth holding. An established equivalent is retrieved: the target language has already settled the rendering, and the translator is recognizing a fact about usage. An adaptation is decided, and the judgement is defensible by argument rather than by citation.
When it applies
- The source names an object, institution, festival, game or measure that has no counterpart in the target culture, and the text uses it only for its everyday familiarity.
- The source gesture or formula carries a social value that the literal act would misreport, or would report as odd rather than as ordinary.
- The commission is persuasive, promotional or instructional, so effect on the reader outranks documentary fidelity.
- The item is incidental to the argument, so the reader loses nothing by not knowing which culture it came from.
Examples
EN>FR
- Source: He kissed his daughter on the mouth.
- Target: Il serra tendrement sa fille dans ses bras.
- Comment: Vinay and Darbelnet's own illustration. The gesture is unremarkable in one culture and reads as improper in the other, so a faithful rendering of the act misreports the relationship it was describing. The affection is preserved; the kiss is not.
DE>EN
- Source: Abitur
- Target: A-levels
- Comment: Two distinct institutions occupying the same position in two school systems. The substitution reads naturally in a curriculum vitae or a company profile. It is inadmissible in a certified transcript, where the reader is entitled to know which qualification was actually awarded, and where the loan with a short description is the only defensible route.
TR>EN
- Source: Ellerine sağlık.
- Target: That was delicious.
- Comment: The Turkish formula thanks a cook by wishing health on the hands that did the work, and English has no formula for the occasion. Rendering the hands produces a sentence no English speaker utters; adapting to the compliment English does pay preserves what the utterance performs.
Watch out for
Adaptation is the technique most often applied one step too early. Before substituting, establish that the target culture genuinely lacks the item rather than merely lacking a convenient word for it, because the second case is served by description, a functional equivalent or a loan with a gloss, all of which leave the source referent standing.
- An adaptation is irreversible for the reader. Nothing in the target text signals that a substitution happened, so the reader cannot recover the source referent or notice that a culture has been swapped.
- Consistency binds. Once a school system, a legal system or a currency has been adapted, every later reference must follow, and a text that adapts in one paragraph and conserves in the next reads as careless.
- In certified, legal and academic work the technique is generally not available. Institutional names, qualifications, court titles and statutory instruments identify a specific source-system object, and substituting the nearest target object asserts an equivalence the document does not claim.
References
- Vinay, J.-P. & Darbelnet, J. (1958). Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais: méthode de traduction. Paris: Didier. English translation by J. C. Sager & M.-J. Hamel (1995), Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation, Benjamins Translation Library 11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 39–40.
- Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall, p. 83.
- Baker, M. (1992). In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge, Ch. 2.
- Franco Aixelá, J. (1996). "Culture-specific Items in Translation." In R. Álvarez & M. C.-Á. Vidal (eds), Translation, Power, Subversion. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 52–78.
- Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.