Translation Watch Quarterly

Modern languages have developed linguistic patterns that are often in consonance with the epistemic knowledge of the world. For the main part, epistemic knowledge is inferred from such linguistic patterns. In some situations however, dissonance occurs between linguistic inference and epistemic inference. When this happens, language compensates by utilizing certain linguistic patterns and rhetorical techniques to realign linguistic and epistemic realities. This paper examines aspects of translation-induced dissonance in linguistic and epistemic inference drawing on examples from news and current affairs Arabic corpus of satellite television. INTRODUCTION odern languages have developed linguistic patterns that are often in consonance with the epistemic knowledge of the world. For the main part, epistemic knowledge is inferred from such linguistic patterns and when dissonance occurs between linguistic and epistemic inferences, language compensates by utilizing certain linguistic patterns and rhetorical techniques to realign linguistic and epistemic realities. For example, the English hypothetical conditional antecedent "If I were you" is a compensatory linguistic technique to achieve concordance between linguistic and epistemic inferences when it is physically impossible for one person to be another person physically. Languages differ in their linguistic representation of epistemic knowledge and when any two languages are juxtaposed, they are bound to produce cognitive dissonance due to the disagreement that ensues between the linguistic forms within the language pair used to express the same epistemic phenomena. Left irreconciled, such infelicities are bound to change the shared experience of a speech community or surreptitiously reconstitute its social and cultural model. This paper examines aspects of translation-induced dissonance in linguistic and epistemic inference drawing on examples from news and current affairs Arabic corpus of satellite television. M TRANSLATION WATCH QUARTERLY Volume 4, Issue 1, June 2008 89 of 134 EPISTEMIC KNOWLEDGE VERSUS LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE Our knowledge of world’s phenomena is often expressed in linguistic-epistemic forms that express these phenomena metaphorically or define them conventionally. As our knowledge of these phenomena changes through discovery and scientific enquiry, a shift in the epistemic definitions of these phenomena occurs causing dissonance with the epistemic forms used to express them linguistically. Other epistemic forms may include pictorial and audiovisual representations of epistemic knowledge. Sherry and Trigg (1996:38) define epistemic forms as models of information. “An epistemic form is a target structure that guides the inquiry process. It shows how knowledge is organized or concepts are classified, as well as illustrating the relationships among the different facts and concepts being learned”. 1 Epistemic forms include charts, maps, process flows, that visually organize information. Figure 2— Pictorial Representation of Epistemic Reality (Picasso, Girl before a Mirror) Translation-induced Metaphoric Shift When epistemic shifts occur, the linguistic patterns in most situations do not concur with the epistemic knowledge. For example, “the sun rises” is a linguistic form that originally described a natural phenomenon as observed by people who understood it that way. While our knowledge of this phenomenon has changed— that is, we now know that the sun does not rise—the epistemic form remains in TRANSLATION WATCH QUARTERLY Volume 4, Issue 1, June 2008 90 of 134 use. To avoid this dissonance between our epistemic knowledge and linguistically represented epistemic form, the form is transferred into a metaphor that invokes a perceptual and cognitive representation consistent with the new epistemic reality, which for all intents and purposes may be in disagreement with its ontic nature. Consequently, metaphors act as re-constitutive epistemic forms that reconcile linguistic and epistemic realities. When such reconciliation occurs, metaphors become dead or dormant metaphors—they lose the idea or phenomenon they initially denoted. A good example of such metaphors is the term “heartburn”, once believed to be related to ailment of the heart, and now known to have nothing to do with the heart. Yet we continue to use the term metaphorically to refer to the burning sensation in the stomach. Heartburn (n) an uneasy burning sensation in the stomach, typically extending toward the esophagus, and sometimes associated with the eructation of an acid fluid. [American Heritage Dictionary] However, readjustment does not happen right away and a metaphoric lag persists until the cognitive epistemic schema is reset. Only then does complete reconciliation take place. This is an important aspect of metaphors because “their meanings (the ground of the metaphor) are captured by terms that are not lexically related to the lexical items in the metaphors” (Hasson and Glucksberg, 2005: 4). This property of metaphors makes them susceptible to epistemic shifts, when subjected to a translation process that focuses on the lexical items of the metaphor rather than on the terms that are related to the meaning of the metaphor. The following figure illustrates this dynamic nature of metaphors. Figure 3— Smoking Gun Metaphor: the terms that are related to the meaning of the metaphor In this connection, Searle (reported in Johnson, 1987) contends that “every literal utterance ultimately presupposes a nonrepresentational, nonpropositional, preintentional “Background” of capacities, skills, and stances in order to determine its condition of satisfaction. The meaning of any metaphor will be determined only against a preintentional background that cannot be represented propositionally” (Johnson, 1987:72). TRANSLATION WATCH QUARTERLY Volume 4, Issue 1, June 2008 91 of 134 Reinforcing this notion of metaphor, Benzon and Hays (1987) make a distinction between physiognomic and propositional representations as one between a photograph of a scene and a verbal description of the scene. They argue that the filtering or extraction process which underlies metaphor, which in the context of our discussion creates consonance between two types of epistemic representation, “is fundamentally one involving physiognomic representations. The linguistic form of the metaphor is propositional. Hence metaphor is a device for regulating the interaction of propositional and physiognomic representations, that is to say, for recognition” (59), and subsequently for creating or restoring consonance between the epistemic and linguistic realities. This semiotic status of metaphors, according to Hatim and Mason (1990:69), constitutes the crucial factor in deciding how a metaphor should be translated, since metaphoric use of language invariably conveys additional meaning. “Solutions to problems of translating metaphor should, in the first instance, be related to rhetorical function” (Hatim and Mason, 1990:233), and should seek to understand the “writer’s whole world-view” (4). This world view is actually the epistemic reality which is for the main part in congruence with the linguistic reality as expressed by the chosen epistemic form of metaphor and with the epistemic schema. Waking the Dead and Dormant Metaphors The purpose of metaphor, according to Newmark (1988) is twofold: cognitivereferential and aesthetic-pragmatic. “[i]ts referential purpose is to describe a mental process or state, a concept, a person, an object, a quality or an action more comprehensively and concisely than is possible in literal or physical language; its pragmatic purpose, which is simultaneous, is to appeal to the senses, to interest, to clarify ‘graphically’, to please, to delight, to surprise” (Newmark, 1988:104). However, beyond their textual considerations, one of the functions of metaphors, according to Kövecses (2000:17), is that they “can actually “create,” or constitute social, cultural, and psychological realities for us”. Kövecses contends that conceptual metaphors do not simply reflect cultural models; they are in fact constitutive of cultural models. It can be argued however, that metaphors do both. “For a child, for example, hearing the metaphors constructs the model; for an adult, hearing and using the metaphor reflects and constitutes the model for others”. Based on this constitutive view of metaphor, culturally bound metaphors that seek to align these realities are particularly problematic in translation. For instance, take the verb (create) in English and its metaphoric sense of “make, invent”, as in “create a peaceful environment”, “create web pages”, “create an illusion”, etc. The Arabic counterpart for the verb “create”, (���) (khalaqa), which means (1) “to create or cause to come into being from nothing”, (2) “fabricate; fake”, and (3) “to assess or evaluate” [old usage], is usually an attribute of God in sense (1). In translating English expressions comprising the word “create” into Arabic, dissonance between the epistemic knowledge and TRANSLATION WATCH QUARTERLY Volume 4, Issue 1, June 2008 92 of 134 linguistic form occurs, which is increasingly left irreconciled in daily usage of both the colloquial and standard forms, causing cognitive dissonance in alert minds when encountered, gradually changing the frequency, currency and foregrounding of the primary and secondary meanings of the verb and eventually causing metaphoric shift. Another example of this kind of dissonance is the Arabic translation of the word (astronomical) in the sense of “extremely large; exceedingly great; enormous”, as (�����) (falakiyyah) in the sense of “pertaining to astronomy”, a rendition no less moronic and retarded than the Arabic rendition of (create) which has been obstinately circulated and repeated by Arabic media producers and news editors. In this example, the concrete sense of the word (falakiyyah) is reversed, producing faulty metaphors. Faulty metaphors resulting in metaphoric shifts cause cultural and linguistic changes and mismatches of shared experience among members of the same speech community. When this happens, the likelihood of communication breakdown or misunderstanding increases.