ABSTRACT
Seealso: MACHINE·AIDED TRANSLATION; MACHINE TRANSLATION, APPUCA TIONS; MACHINE TRANSLATION, lllSTORY.
Further reading Arnold et al. 1994; Hutchins and Somers 1 992; Nirenburg et al. forthcoming.
Metaphor of translation Translation is most commonly thought of as a practical activity that involves turning one language into another. It is also the scene of a striking metaphorics. For example, translators and theorists have invoked metaphors of fidel ity, servility, bastardization or usurpation to figure the relationship between texts (see GENDER METAPHORICS IN TRANSLATION). Sometimes the translated text itself is viewed as a metaphor for the foreign text, as when Gre gory Rabassa argues that 'a word is nothing but a metaphor for an object or . . . for another word' , and that translation is 'a form of adapta tion, making the new metaphor fit the original metaphor' ( 1989: 1 -2). For Rabassa, transla tion is the piecing together of metaphors, in order to construct another entity which is also a metaphor: metaphor as a metaphor for transla tion. Awareness of the metaphors through which practitioners and theorists figure the pragmatics of translation must however be distinguished from the current widespread use of translation as a metaphor to discuss relations between objects other than languages. Thus, to give an actual and pertinent example, there is sometimes talk of 'translating one culture into tenns intelligible to another' . The difficulty with this statement, as with Rabassa's mimetic model, is that it remains an oversimplification: it demands a more theoretically rigorous analy sis of the relations involved.
