Transliteration involves distribution without the visible replacement of language strings. Since it leads to the exact quantitative equality between input and output, we might call the result "absolute equivalence". Or is it simple identity?
In fact, in such cases can we really talk about values or a properly translational work process at all?
Here we might consider Borges' short story about Pierre Menard, the fictional Modernist figure who set out to translate Don Quijote. The would-be translator studied all the details of Cervantes'life, began to eat and speak like Cervantes, and finally translated the novel into its original seventeenth-century Spanish, in exactly the same words as the original.The result of the translation was thus exact quantitative equivalence.
Borges’story makes the quite obvious point that distribution changes value. Cervantes' Quijote had an oppositional value in relation to medieval romance; Menard's point of departure already had an oppositional value in the context of Modernist ideas about authorship. So was Pierre Menard's output really a translation? Two points need to be made.
First, Menard worked enormously to achieve this quantitative exactitude; he invested effort in order to write like Cervantes. And since there is a narrative frame recounting this work, the subjective investment can scarcely be invisible.
The Modernist text should indeed be regarded as a replacement of natural-language strings. It is a translation.
Second, the point of maximum ideological conflict lies in Borges' title "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote", suggesting that the translator actually became the author. This sets up a problem for anyone aware that Cervantes is supposed to be the author of that text. Since a translator cannot be an author, Menard cannot be Cervantes. The contradiction thus churns in the space of the proper name, where there is certainly no quantitative equivalence. Borges breaks the rules not because the output has the same form as the input, but because he wants us to recognize two distanced authors for the one text. Translational discourse, such as we know it, will not allow this to be done. The result must be irony, and little more.
Note, also, that some proposed cases of absolute equivalence are in fact unwitting transformations. The eighteenth-century island Otaheite, for instance, meant "This is Tahiti". According to Garcilaso Inca de la Vega (1963:11), the name of the country Peru comes from Berú, the name of the first native to be interrogated by Spanish conquistadores, or from Pelú, meaning "river", which is where the native was at the time. In the case of Tahiti, a certain authorship has since been restored to the native islanders. In the case of Peru, the translation has perhaps become an improper proper name. In both cases the supposedly absolute equivalents were impositions of mistaken authority.
The quantitative identity associated with transliterated names should be treated with considerable suspicion. It should not be regarded as an automatic index of untranslatability, as was believed by Mounin (1976). Nor is the identity a sign of universal comprehension, as proposed by Lotman and Uspenkij (1977). Proper names are untranslatable simply because they do not have to be translated. Exact quantitative equality should thus be analyzed as a special kind of translation. This is minimally because an apparently untranslated term in an otherwise translated text must be received as a term that has at least been processed translationally. Hence, of course, the use of loan words (the fiestas and tapas found in English texts on Spain), which has long been regarded as a legitimate translation solution. Absolute equivalence is thereby established between a manifest text and a virtual text, both of which look exactly the same and occupy exactly the same position.
Unfortunately, the main problem with absolute equivalence is that it is often unacceptable equivalence, unless much language learning is to be done. Alternatives are necessary.
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