Pragmatic and cultural

Paraphrase

Render the sense of the larger unit when its parts have no counterparts. Also called Free rendering or explanatory rendering.

Reference/All techniques

Optional Clause Sentence Newmark (1988) Baker (1992) Chesterman (1997, S8)

What it is

Paraphrase abandons the individual words of a stretch of source text and renders what the stretch as a whole is doing. The unit of translation moves up: instead of finding counterparts for the lexemes and assembling them, the translator states the pragmatic sense of the clause or sentence in whatever target wording carries it. Individual source items may end up with nothing corresponding to them, which is a property of the technique rather than a defect of the rendering.

Chesterman files it as S8 among the semantic strategies and defines it in precisely those terms: a loose, free rendering at clause or sentence level in which semantic components at word level may be disregarded in favour of the pragmatic sense of the higher unit. He notes that it is typical of idiom translation, and that is where Baker locates it too. In her account it is by far the most common way of dealing with an idiom for which the target language offers no match of comparable meaning and form. What is lost is idiomaticity, not meaning. Baker separates paraphrase using a related word, where the target has the same concept expressed with a different form or frequency, from paraphrase using unrelated words, where the sense is unpacked with material that shares nothing with the source item.

The boundaries on either side are worth holding. If the target language has a fixed expression covering the same situation, the translator retrieves it and the technique is established equivalent. Description replaces a term with an account of its form or function and is a lexical operation, whereas paraphrase works on a clause or a sentence. Newmark distinguishes legitimate paraphrase, applied where a passage is poorly written or carries implications of importance, from the free paraphrase that simply departs from the text, and Delisle treats excessive unjustified paraphrase as a translation error rather than as a technique.

When it applies

  • An idiom, proverb or fixed expression has no target counterpart at a usable register.
  • The source clause is culturally or institutionally dense, so that a word-by-word rendering would be grammatical and unreadable.
  • The source itself is defective or elliptical, and the sense has to be reconstructed for the target to say anything at all.
  • The target text type demands ordinary language where the source used figurative or ceremonial language.

Examples

NL>EN

  • Source: Dat is niet mijn pakkie-an.
  • Target: That is not my responsibility.
  • Comment: Baker's paraphrase using unrelated words. English has informal alternatives, but each shifts the register or the speaker's attitude, so the plain statement is preferred. Idiomaticity is lost and the meaning is intact, which is the trade Baker describes.

TR>EN

  • Source: Eli kulağında.
  • Target: It is about to happen.
  • Comment: No English idiom occupies the same everyday slot, and reproducing the image would leave the reader reconstructing a figure that does not exist for them. The source is register-neutral, so an English idiom of marked informality would be a poorer choice than the plain paraphrase.

DE>EN

  • Source: Da liegt der Hund begraben.
  • Target: That is where the real problem lies.
  • Comment: The boundary case. English has a fixed expression close in sense, but it sits at a literary register the German commonplace does not occupy. Had the registers matched, the technique would have been established equivalent.

Watch out for

Paraphrase is permissive by construction, which makes it the easiest technique to overuse. The question a reviser asks is not whether the target is accurate but whether anything in the source authorized this much latitude.

  • Do not paraphrase what is merely difficult. Density and technicality are properties the source reader also faced, and smoothing them is a decision about the text rather than a rendering of it.
  • Watch the drift into explicitation. A paraphrase resolving an ambiguity the source left open has settled a question on the author's behalf.
  • In binding text the technique is largely unavailable. Operative provisions, definitions and performative formulae are drafted and read at word level, and a paraphrase there substitutes the translator's understanding of a clause for the clause itself.

References

  • Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall, p. 90.
  • Baker, M. (1992). In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge, Ch. 3.
  • Delisle, J. (1993). La traduction raisonnée: manuel d'initiation à la traduction professionnelle de l'anglais vers le français. Ottawa: Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa.
  • Chesterman, A. (2016). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory, revised edition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Ch. 4. First edition 1997.

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 existsWriting 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.

Definitional formulaeFrames with variable slotsLexical bundles and recurrent sequencesRoutine formulaeStandard clauses and boilerplate

Related entries

Description Explicitation Established equivalent Reduction

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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