Concepts of Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity - Essay Example

 This paper introduces the theoretical background to the concepts of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, explaining where these terms come from, and what they mean in contemporary linguistics studies. After this a number of challenges are identified which face a translator who aims to take account of these two concepts in his or her work. Several concrete examples are presented from English and other languages to illustrate both small scale and large scale adjustments which have been made by translators in order to convey the implicatures of their chosen sources. Finally, conclusions are drawn regarding the effectiveness and limitations of these adjustments which translators can make when aiming to achieve the best possible results. At its most basic level the word “intertextuality” implies the existence of two or more texts which stand in some kind of relationship with each other. The word “text” is used with a broad sense in linguistics, taking in all sorts of output which can be written or spoken. The term “interdiscursivity” takes this one step further and takes into account both the intentions of the writer or speaker, the contribution that the reader or listener makes, the impact of the text on its own, and the whole context and situation surrounding the discourse. Many of the greatest authors of world literature including Shakespeare rework older stories using devices like quotation and allusion. The plays “Romeo and Juliet”, “Hamlet” and “MacBeth” for example, are all based on historical figures and at a basic level they allude to people and events. In other ways also, these monumental works of literature rest on a long tradition of similar texts, which means that the whole concept of writing a play, or in later centuries, a novel, or in the contemporary world, a web-based blog, for example, is based on all the previous examples of this kind of writing. We refer to this as “genre” and most of the time both writers and readers, or listeners, adhere to the rules of the genre without even realising that they are there. When people came to a play in Shakespeare’s time they expected to see costumes and lights, have some jokes and some serious sections. They expect a plot, with suitable breaks, and a storyline from beginning to end. These were automatic assumptions which underpinned theatrical performances and although Shakespeare and others stretched the genre and created innovations, they worked within this unspoken framework. The concepts of “intertextuality” and “interdiscursivity” rely on this previous history both of the writer, and of the reader, and also of the created text, and all of these factors can interact with each other in conscious or unconscious ways, creating a network of connections across time and space which can change the meaning of the text. Some literary genres such as parody, satire and pastiche take an earlier text and use many of its features to create a new text which has decidedly different meanings than the source text. The American cartoon series, “The Simpsons” for example, makes a running joke out of making allusions to famous people, books, films and stories.. The starting point for discussions in modern translation studies is usually the post-structuralist theories of language proposed by Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva (Allen, 2000). The implications of these theories are very far-reaching. The post-structuralist view accepts that there is an author who writes the text but it does not accept that the author controls everything that is put into the text. The text exists as an entity in itself, and the language it uses contains an almost infinite number of references and allusions to other texts which came before it and which will come after it. Allen notes: “The meaning of the author’s words, Barthes suggests, does not originate from the author’s own unique consciousness but from their place within linguistic cultural systems. (Allen, 2000:14) Meaning, it seems, is something which belongs not just to a person, or a text, but to whole cultures, and to the “systems” or conventions for language construction that are produced in those cultures. If this is true, then it implies that the role of the translator is not simply to grasp what the intention of the author was in the source text and replicate this in the target text. That is certainly part of the translator’s role, but in fact much more is demanded. An appreciation of the context in which the text was written is needed, along with access to the huge amount of background connections which exist in the language itself, and in the various traditions and genres which have developed over the centuries. Hatim and Mason explain this more fully: “We may safely discard the notion that intertextuality is some static property of texts, which in translating amounts to item-by-item replacement of a reference in the source text by one in the target text. On the contrary, intertextuality is best viewed in terms of semiotic systems of significance.” (Hatim and Mason, 1990: 123) The analogy which Hatim and Mason use for this is a chain or a thread which binds whole areas of experience and creates continuity across time and space. If a translator is to begin to deal with these huge areas of meaning then it is clear that he or she must have access to cultural as well as linguistic information when translating. This can be done either by long familiarity with both source and text languages in situ, along with wide reading of both literatures, or by collaboration between two or more speakers from different language origins. If cultural information is missing then the translator will fail to spot intertextuality when it occurs, and consequently will not be able to consider levels beyond the immediate surface level when translating. The more ambitious the text to be translated is, in terms of intertextuality, the more difficult it will be for a single translator to understand, let alone reproduce the implicatures it contains. Using teams of translators from each culture is, then, the most obvious strategy to adopt when facing the challenges of intertextuality, since one person can rarely reach the level of knowledge required to mediate effectively and two or more translators can debate areas of difference. It is common in professional translation contexts to use at least one native speaker of the source language and one native speaker in the target language, followed by a contribution from an experienced editor who need not necessarily understand the source language, to ensure that all critical meanings are translated accurately, and that the resulting text reads well in the target languages. Often there are conflicts between these demands, and compromises have to be reached and in those cases the team can discuss the relative merits of different factors when deciding which version to use in the final translated text. In another useful introductory study, Bell lists the “seven defining characteristics of text” and the very last of these is: “What other texts does this one resemble (intertextuality)” (Bell, 1991:163-4) Bell, too, stresses the “crucial role played by knowledge of previous texts in ‘making sense’ of newly encountered texts” (Bell, 1991:174) This phrase “making sense” is deliberately ambiguous, since it refers not only to the reader’s ability to decode the meanings that have been put there by the author, and those that are inherent in the text because of its attachment to chains of meaning, but also to those meanings which the reader brings to the text and adds to what is already there. This brings us to another important area of modern linguistics theory, namely that of “Critical Discourse Analysis” and the second of our two terms, interdiscursivity. One of the major contributions of the technique of Critical Discourse Analysis is that it enables us to explore further the social nature of language and in particular the part played by the reader or listener in any kind of written or spoken communication. As Fairclough explains: “The concept of interdiscursivity is modelled upon and closely related to intertextuality (Kristeva 1980) and like intertextuality it highlights a historical view as transforming the past – existing conventions or prior texts – into the present” (Fairclough, 1995: 134). The two terms intertextuality and interdiscursivity have become more or less interchangeable. The former focuses on the linguistic content and chains of meaning in the language, while the latter concentrates more on the social aspects of language and the way that the reader or listener brings his or her own context and experiences to any text or discourse, and thus changes the meaning. This contribution is not limited to lexical items and connotations, but to ideas about the genre or form of communication and many things which are unconscious and “taken as read” by the receiver. Fairclough’s terminology of text meaning “the written or spoken language used in a discursive event” and interdiscursivity meaning “the constitution of a text from diverse discourses and genres” (Fairclough, 1995: 135) has been widely accepted. Much of this is extremely relevant to the activity of translating. Any translation activity is of necessity intertextual and interdiscursive because the translator seeks to bring a text from one source culture and context into another. If, as we have seen above, both source text and target text are in turn linked to a whole chain of explicit and implicit linkages in their respective cultures, then it seems a very daunting task indeed to bridge the main area of difference (language) and also maintain these other connections of discourse and genre. A final important consideration in this field is that of ideology (Fairclough, 2000; Joseph, 2006; Al-Taher, 2008). In this kind of text, such a sermon or political treatise, there are often very clear intentions which appeal to the subconscious and shared assumptions in the culture of author and reader and a translator must take care to ensure as far as possible that these are replicated in the target text. It is evident, however, that a complete transmission of everything a text implies can never be fully achieved, and the title of this paper acknowledges this by suggesting that a translator should attempt to provide similar implicatures and not exactly the same implicatures. The more different the source text culture and the target text culture are, the more likely it is that their implicatures will diverge, and the more difficult the choices are that face the translator. Every translation will both add and detract from the source text, but in most cases the job of the translator is to keep the additions and omissions to a minimum and remain as faithful as possible to the original source. Some exceptions to this rule do exist, however, for example in translation of poetry when a translator might take an approach which is in itself creative, and deliberately different from the source text in order to achieve artistic merit in its own right in the source text language.. This paper concentrates on the role of the translator in trying to mediate between an almost infinite set of possible meanings which may or may not have been intended by the author and which may or may not be picked up by the reader. Hatim and Mason (1990) cite a hierarchical list, based on Halliday as a possible unified framework for the analysis of intertextual reference. It starts with the smaller units, and consists of three “levels” : Level one : word phrase clause clause sequence Level two: text discourse genre Level three: typology of intertextual signs (Hatim and Mason, 1990: 132). Rather than continue with an examination of the theories behind intertextuality and interdiscursivity we shall move now to two major example, with various smaller details, which illustrate how these two concepts affect the work of translation. First, we will look at the way the intertextuality of the Christian Bible has been exploited through the ages, illustrating where challenges arise for translators, and what adjustments have been made to meet those challenges. This topic encapsulates some of the more traditional approaches to intertextuality as it was apparent in a predominant and uniform world view. Christianity is based on a sacred text which is accorded a special canonical status and even regarded as the true word of the divinity. This creates a fairly fixed framework for investigation of intertextuality. Secondly we shall look at the example of a contemporary film which originated in Turkey and was translated for UK audiences. This is a more modern example, showing a very post-modern fragmentation of cultures and an open-ended reference to many different possible world views, and it illustrates some of the contemporary debates around intertextuality. The origins of the Bible are Hebrew for the Old Testament, and Greek with some Aramaic for the New Testament, all within a Jewish cultural context. There is an extensive network of forwards and backwards intertextuality in the diverse texts that made up the canon of the Bible, and this was commonly referred to by Christian scholars and generations of preachers as “prophecy” and “fulfilment”. These terms rely upon the basic premise that the World was created by God, and the Biblical texts were inspired by this creator God and constitute a revelation to mankind which needs to be interpreted by preachers and teachers for Christian believers. The Christian Church in the West quickly identified the Latin Vulgate of Jerome as the standard translation for use across the many languages and cultures where it had power and influence. Using ancient Greek and Latin rhetorical theories as a basis, the intertextuality of the Bible was captured and interpreted using four categories known as “the four senses of scripture” which were 1. the literal sense 2. the allegorical sense 3. the moral sense 4. the anagogical sense (how the text points to life after death and salvation) (De Lubac, 1959) These early insights into what we would call “intertextuality” aimed to categorise and pin down possible linkages across time and across texts, with a particular focus on using these texts for inspiration and religious guidance. Over the centuries connotations were built around this shared heritage. The word “bread”, for example, in Western cultures is connected with teaching (as in the example of the feeding of the five thousand), and with death (as in the example of holy communion where bread is broken to symbolise the body of Christ). This is part of a long chain of references to bread/body/feeding which extends from the manna which fell from heaven to feed the Israelites in their Old Testament wanderings, to the “give us this day our daily bread” prayer which signifies not only physical nourishment i.e. food but also spiritual nourishment i.e. teaching from the word of God. The ritual of Holy Communion also links the breaking of bread with the body of Christ, who in turn is “the Word made flesh” etc. There is a tight system of intertextual referencing going on here. The shape of the bread might be different in Greece, Italy, France Germany and England, but the concept translates fairly well. In a Far Eastern culture which has rice as a staple food, the translator faces a problem not only of finding a suitable word for the literal meaning, but also a carrier for all of the linked concepts. If an equivalent word does not exist, then the translator has to choose between retaining the foreign word (with or without explanations or footnotes) such as bread, substituting a more familiar word from the target language, even though it carries different connotations – for example an Asian version of the Lord’s prayer could be “give us this day our daily rice” finding a compromise which conveys some but not all of the meaning of the source text – for example an Asian version might say “give us this day our daily food” completely reformulating the phrase so that the untranslatable item is avoided. All of these strategies can be effective, and if care is taken to maintain consistency of approach throughout the whole text, a new set of allusions and references can be built up in the target language. The two examples cited above, that of “rice” and “food” as translations for the New Testament item “bread” will convey different portions of the possible meanings and connotations. “Rice” is closer to the target language culture, and will carry more local connotations, including some which do not fit with the Biblical context, while “food” is weaker, conveying general rather than specific allusions. These same issues can be seen again in a modern context by looking at the film “Hamam” (1997) which is a Turkish/Italian/Spanish collaboration directed by Ferzan Özpetek. This was produced in both Turkish and Italian and then subtitled for an English speaking audience. The title of the film in English was “Steam: The Turkish Bath” and the plot revolves around a young Italian man who travels to Istanbul to investigate a Turkish “hamam” which he has inherited. He has a relationship with a young Turkish man, and then is killed, whereupon his Italian wife comes to Istanbul and restores the hamam in his memory. For viewers who are familiar with Turkey and the culture of communal bathing the word hamam needs no translation. For northern European cultures, however, the word is not known and so it is logical that the translator would use a descriptive phrase “The Turkish Bath”. This is where the problems begin. First of all Turkey is a long way from the UK, for example, and it has connotations of luxury (as in the sweet “Turkish Delight”) and a literary/historical connection with harems, opium and decadence for a prudish British public. Byron’s “Don Juan”, a scurrilous tale in partly ironic and partly amusing verse, provides a literary context, hedonistic tourism provides a contemporary cultural one. The translator’s choice to name the film “Steam: The Turkish Bath”, exaggerates this aspect of the film, and suggests that there are erotic and possibly even pornographic overtones to be expected. In everyday usage a “steamy” novel or film is of low artistic value but generally popular as titillating entertainment. No doubt this is an excellent marketing strategy for the film, but it is questionable how faithful it is to the film’s original emphasis. The translator’s choice to render the single word “hamam” with the single word “steam” followed by a descriptive phrase “The Turkish Bath” brings a whole new dimension of intertextuality to the British context, and this has changed the meaning of the film fundamentally. The examples shown so far focus on individual words and their linkage to other texts where the same or similar words are used. These examples illustrate the bottom level of Hatim and Mason’s “hierarchy” of intertextuality (1990, p 132) which builds up from the word, phrase, and clause level, and ultimately leading to the levels of “text, discourse and genre”. The higher one goes up this hierarchy, the broader the perspective becomes, and the more opportunity there is for wide-ranging intertextual and iterdiscursive linkages to appear. Looking now at these higher levels of the hierarchy of intertextuality in connection with the film “Hamam” , we can see that here also, translation into a West European rather than an East European cultural context has brought a whole new dimension of intertextuality into focus. A perceptive essay by Diken and Laustsen notes that the overriding “genre” of the film is a presentation, albeit ironically, of colonialist travel writing, following in the tradition of Montesquieu’s “Persian letters” (Diken and Laustsen, 2003: 4). They discuss how the genre is presented in a modernist way : “It is hence Francesco, the European hero, who saves the primitive and backward Oriental subjects from themselves…” (Diken and Laustsen, 2003: 3) They also liken the tale to a Greek tragedy where Marta and Francesco both play the role of heroes who are destined to go to Istanbul (page 9) and while Francesco meets his noble death, Marta plays the role of Antigone (p.13) and completes the story, assuming the role of the woman who started it all off by buying the harem in the first place. In this analysis the function of the title is to highlight the location, and the theme of the “mystical orient” in contrast to the boring, materialistic world of Italian urban people like Francesco and Marta. For an Italian audience, therefore, classical references fix the film in a long tradition of East/West and fantasy/reality comparisons with strong colonialist undercurrents. The film also echoes very well ancient Greek and Roman classical traditions of communal bath houses and casual homosexual relationships, a culture which in modern Italy is regarded as child-like and heathen, awaiting the sanitizing influence of Christianity. This, in turn, connects with Turkey’s recent ambitions to join the European mainstream by entering more fully into the European Union, a development about which Italy is, to say the least, ambivalent because of the fundamentally Roman Catholic nature of Italian society and the largely Islamic nature of Turkish society. These are “high brow” references which helped to give the film cult status as an art film in Italy. The reception of the film in the UK, however, was very different. The emphasis of the title and the advertising for the film in English found resonance with the gay community and this was helped by an extremely vibrant musical score by the group “Transcendence” which was widely played on the club circuit. The word “hamam” is now known primarily because of its connection with the music CD rather than from the film itself. Once again the exotic Orient is part of the meaning which British audiences read in the film, but the emphasis is on gender rather than culture, and it conjures up images of holidays and sexual excesses, which the British indulge in every year all around the Mediterranean. Leppihalm (1997) would describe this kind of encounter as a “Culture Bump”, in other words an occasion where mainstream British culture meets with another culture and experiences a jolt, not as great as a culture shock, but nevertheless a feeling of being taken aback, and not quite comfortable with what they are seeing. This gave the film, and even more so the music, in the UK cult status of a very different kind. The sexual and particularly homosexual implicatures of the film have blossomed in this alternative scene in a way that would have hardly been possible in Turkey or even in Italy. This example shows how intertextuality can work forwards, as well as backwards, in time, and how it ecompasses not just individual words and phrases, but the whole concept of the film and its significance as a work of art. Where before, in the Middle Ages, there was one dominant world view, i.e. Christianity, which dictated the framework in which literature was read, in the late twentieth century Christianity is just one of many cultures, and this expands the reach of references in cross-cultural texts exponentially. If one looks at the film from a Turkish point of view, all of these implicatures are quite clear in the film and there are also positive expressions of Istanbul’s history as a cosmopolitan city of the world, tolerant of great diversity and centre for many different religious and cultural groups. The Turkish film is, however, an interplay of these themes, full of hope and exuberance, holding these tensions together and not limiting the references to the purely political or purely sexual. Complexity of this sort is a feature of Eastern culture, and this is hinted at in the film as one sees the intricate tiles and mosaics and the narrow, interlocking streets of the bustling capital city. These elements are local and normal in the film, not exotic, and the journeys are depicted from the Eastern and not the Western perspective. The point of this example is to illustrate how intertextuality and interdiscursivity can work through the translator’s choices from the level of single word, right up to the coming together of two very different literary and cultural traditions. What results in each case of translation is a re-telling of the story and a new understanding of some, but not all, of the original film’s implicatures. This is probably the best that can be achieved by translators within the constraints of film production as an industry and it is a source of never-ending delight to see the creativity and innovation that results from their efforts. In conclusion, then, we have seen that at the level of individual words translators must work hard to convey interdiscursivity and intertextuality, and especially so if the source and text language are distant in time or in space from each other. An overarching world view, such as a religion, for example, or a political ideology, can help in the process by establishing conventions, ground rules, and common patterns over time that people easily recognise, and can build into criss-crossing patterns of meaning. Where the two cultures and languages are very different, however, and there is little common unconscious or automatic intertextuality, then different tactics like omission of unfamiliar words, replacement with more familiar words, or addition of explanations can go some way to making up the deficit. In the larger scale level of a meeting of two or three whole cultures, in the case of “Hamam”, for example these single word difficulties for the translator can be compounded by entirely different, or even opposite cultural histories and world views. An understanding of intertextuality and interdiscursivity in this case has revealed not only what has been lost in terms of nuances of meaning in the English version of the film, but what has been gained via the addition of new layers and new interpretations which bring to the fore elements of the original which were less fully expressed in the original Turkish and largely Muslim context. This example has shown how both sides of the translation equation can work together to forge separate, but related, creative works, each of which explores a slightly different range of potential reference. Reference List Allen, G. (2000) Intertextuality: New Critical Idiom. London and New York: Routledge. Al-Taher, M. A. (2008) Intertextual Expressions in Political Articles. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Salford. Available at: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/2196/ Bell, R. (1991) Translation and Translating, London: Longman. Diken, B. and Laustsen, C. B. (2003) Postal Economics of the Orient. Online paper published by the University of Lancaster. Available at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/diken-laustsen-postal-economies.pdf Fairclough, N. (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (2000) New Labour, New Language, London and New York: Routledge. Fawcett, P. (1997) Translation and Language, Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Fowler, R. (1991) Language in the News, London: Routledge. Gee, J. (1999) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. London And New York: Routledge. Hamam (1997) Dir. F. Özpetek. Perf. A. Gassman, F. D’Aloja and Mehmet Günsur. Film. Hatim, B. & Mason, I. (1990) Discourse and the Translator, London: Longman.  Hatim, B. & Mason, I. (1997) The Translator as Communicator, London: Routledge. Joseph. J. (2006) Language and Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kristeva, J. (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, (translated by T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L. Roudiez), Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Leppihalme, R. (1997) Culture Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. De Lubac, H. (1959, in French) (1988 in English) Medieval Exegesis: the Four Senses of Scripture, Translated by M. Sebanc, Edinburgh and Michigan: Eerdmans. Meinhof, U. and Smith, J.(eds) (2000) Intertextuality and the Media: from Genre to Everyday Life, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Newmark, P. (1981) Approaches to Translation, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Plett, H. (ed.) (1991) Intertextuality, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. (1995) Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Worton, M. and Still J. (1990) Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Read More