These few comments provide us with two basic ways of approaching the relation between distribution and localization. On the one hand, localization is partly knowable through the analysis of the "before" and "after" of the texts involved. On the other, to know why and how any particular localization was carried out, we should look at the material and human movements concerned. We could ask what came from where and for what reason, and where, why and to whom the localization is to go. Two complementary approaches are thus available from the outset: one is textual (localization as representation), the other is extra-textual (localization as response).
A linguist would tend to interrogate localization from the first of these perspectives, making vast use of science but in fact basing observations on no more than localized texts as representations. The second approach can sometimes subvert the conclusions thus reached.
Here, for instance, is a text visibly localized because the English translation critic Peter Newmark has enabled us to compare it with a French source:
(1) Car la France n'est pas seule! Elle n'est pas seule! Elle n'est pas seule!
(2) For remember this, France does not stand alone, she is not isolated.
Newmark (1977:169), with hopefully feigned horror, has pointed out that (2) is a paraphrase of (1). He also insists that this kind of translation (if indeed it is a translation) should not be allowed in the case of citations from what he calls
"authoritative" texts. Presumably we should have something as literalist as:
(3) For France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone!
There can apparently be no legitimate reason for presenting the paratactic and perhaps hysterical French negatives of (1) as if they were stable hypotactic English logic as in (2). However, we can properly consider the example as an act of localization, independently of our personal ideas about good and bad translations. A sympathetic analysis might have tried to find speech norms that allow the French an exclamatory voice not so readily available in English, thus justifying (2) in terms of shifting registers or dynamic equivalence. A trans-formational approach might then suggest that the repeated negatives were derived from obsessive suppression of the idea that France was in fact isolated, in that case justifying (2) as a more successful repression. Could it then be that the parataxis of (1) had to be transformed into the hypotaxis of (2), coordination into subordination, spoken into written? Could the transformation have some justification after all?
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