What it is
Part and whole substitutes one member of a containment relation for another. The translator names the whole where the source names a part, names a part where the source names the whole, or names a different part of the same whole. The referent is unchanged: the wording simply takes hold of it somewhere else.
Vinay and Darbelnet listed all three moves among the modulation subtypes. The territory overlaps with classical rhetoric, where the same relations are described as synecdoche and, in the looser cases of contiguity, as metonymy. Their interest was not in the figure as such but in the observation that each language has conventional choices about which part it names for a given situation, so that reproducing the source choice yields a target text that is intelligible and recognizably foreign. The observations on the modulation record about fixed and free instances apply here too.
Two boundaries keep the category usable. Trope change concerns figurative expression as such, including whether a figure survives at all, while this technique concerns a viewpoint shift that may be entirely literal in both texts. Generalization and particularization move within a hyponymy hierarchy, where the target item names a kind of the source item; here the relation is meronymy. A wheel is not a kind of car, and moving from one to the other is not a step up or down a taxonomy.
When it applies
- Each language has a conventional body part or body region for the same gesture, posture or reaction, and the conventions do not coincide.
- The source uses institutional metonymy, naming a seat, building or city for the body that sits there, and the target reader would not recognize the reference.
- A fixed expression in the source is built on a part for which the target's own fixed expression selects a different one.
Examples
FR>EN
- Source: Il m'a claqué la porte au nez.
- Target: He slammed the door in my face.
- Comment: One part exchanged for another, and the standard illustration of that move. Both languages describe the same event with a body part; French selects the nose and English the face. The literal rendering is understandable and would be read as a description of an unusually close encounter.
DE>EN
- Source: Das Auto steht vor der Tür.
- Target: The car is outside.
- Comment: German names the door and means the frontage of the building. English names no part at all and takes the whole exterior. "In front of the door" narrows the statement to a spot the German does not specify, which is the quiet way this technique introduces precision that is not there.
NL>EN
- Source: Den Haag heeft anders beslist.
- Target: The government has decided otherwise.
- Comment: Institutional metonymy, and the case that calls for the most caution. The Dutch convention is transparent to a Dutch reader; the English rendering names the body outright. Where the source used the place name to keep the actor slightly indeterminate, resolving it is a substantive change and not a stylistic one.
Watch out for
The failure mode is a change of scope. In descriptions of goods, premises, equipment and damage, the difference between a component and the assembly that contains it is the difference between two claims, and a target text that names the wrong one is wrong in a way no monolingual reviser will catch.
- In technical, insurance and inventory text, keep the source's level of containment. Naming the whole where the source named a part enlarges what is asserted, and naming a part where the source named the whole restricts it.
- Where the target language shares the source convention, retain it. A shift applied without a target-side motive is an unjustified change, and the reviser is entitled to ask what it was for.
- Institutional metonymy sometimes carries deliberate vagueness about who acted. Resolving it supplies an actor, which belongs with the cautions on attributing agency rather than with viewpoint.
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. 30–39.