Pragmatic and cultural

Description

Replace a term with an account of what it looks like or what it does. Also called Descriptive equivalent.

Reference/All techniques

Optional Phrase Newmark (1988, descriptive equivalent) Molina & Hurtado Albir (2002)

What it is

Description substitutes for a source term a short account of the thing the term names: its form, its material, its occasion of use, or the job it does. The term itself disappears from the target text and is replaced by the information a reader would need in order to picture it.

Newmark introduced it as the descriptive equivalent and set it beside the functional equivalent, which is the parallel move on the other axis. His samurai illustration separates the two cleanly. The description is that the samurai were the Japanese aristocracy of the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries; the function is that they officered and governed the country. Neither statement is the other, and Newmark's point is that a translator should know which of the two a given sentence requires, since supplying both is often impossible within it. Molina and Hurtado Albir keep the technique under the name description and illustrate it with an Italian cake name rendered as an account of the cake, which shows the same operation applied to a material rather than an institutional item.

Description shades into paraphrase and into amplification, and the distinction is one of scope rather than of kind. Paraphrase reformulates a stretch of text without a term being at issue. Amplification is the general label for content the target gains that the source did not state, and a description is one of the ways that gain is delivered. Description is the narrower category, and the more useful one, because it names what the added material is.

When it applies

  • The source term names a concrete object, dish, garment, festival or artefact that the target reader cannot be assumed to have seen.
  • A loan alone would leave the sentence uninformative, and a footnote would be out of proportion or unavailable in the format.
  • The item appears once, so establishing a loan and reusing it gains nothing.
  • What matters in context is what the thing is or looks like, rather than what institutional role it plays.

Examples

IT>EN

  • Source: panettone
  • Target: the tall domed sweet bread eaten in Italy at Christmas
  • Comment: Molina and Hurtado Albir's illustration. The loan is now reasonably current in English and could stand alone in a food text; in a general text the description does the work that the loan only does for readers who already know the referent.

DE>EN

  • Source: Schultüte
  • Target: the cone of sweets and small presents given to a child on the first day of school
  • Comment: The object is unfamiliar and the custom is the point of the sentence in which it usually appears. A functional rendering such as "a first-day gift" is accurate and leaves the reader unable to picture anything, which is precisely the case Newmark distinguishes.

TR>EN

  • Source: kına gecesi
  • Target: the henna night held for the bride on the eve of the wedding
  • Comment: Description covers form and occasion together. Note what it does not do: it makes no claim that the event corresponds to anything in the target culture, which is why description is the safe choice where adaptation to a target-culture ceremony would be false.

Watch out for

A description is longer than the term it replaces, and length is the constraint that governs the technique. Repeating a six-word description at every occurrence distorts the texture of the text and shifts the emphasis onto an item the source mentioned in passing. The standard remedy is to describe once, at first mention, and let the loan or a short form carry the later occurrences.

  • A description states facts. Anything in it that the source did not assert is the translator's own contribution, and it must be verifiable rather than merely plausible.
  • Descriptions date. Customs, administrative structures and product ranges change, and a description fixed in a text is not revisable as a glossary entry is.
  • In certified and binding work a description added inside the running text reads as if the source contained it. Where the convention requires it, mark the addition as the translator's, or place it in a note.

References

  • Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall, p. 83.
  • Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.

Structural triggers

This technique is not always a choice. The parameters below are the structural differences between languages that call for it, the first group compulsorily and the second as a strong tendency.

Invited by

Compounding and word formation

Terminological situations that call for this

The entries below describe states of a concept or of its designation in which this technique is the operation that answers them. They are reasons of evidence and of conceptual fit rather than of grammar.

Ranking the options when no equivalent existsOnomasiology and semasiologyPrimary and secondary term formationSystem-bound concepts and incongruityPrinciples for forming and judging termsWriting terminological definitions

Fixed units this technique approximates

For the entries below the target community has no fixed counterpart, or has one that does different work. This technique produces the substitute, and the entry says what the substitute should keep visible.

Attestation and certification formulaeReference and amendment formulaeHeadings, rubrics and form labels

Related entries

Functional equivalent Componential analysis Paraphrase Amplification

Translation that can be checked

Every Translyta delivery comes with a quality report and a terminology report, so the decisions described here are visible to your reviser instead of buried in the text.

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