The German commentary is explicitly longer than any source, since it proposes then discounts the translation Die Bewegung. Yet the French commentary, in declaring the source text to be untranslatable and then immediately translating it, merely imitates the German procedure in an implicit way, arriving at similar doubt about the equivalence of choix d'avancer. In both cases, double presentation breeds doubt. Much the same procedure underlies the

Newsweek version, where the presentation of the distributed text and the bracketing of the translation (The Happening) could be read as saying, "There is no equivalent for this term, but it means something like...". The English-language approach thus involves essentially the same strategy as the German and French rejections of simple equivalence. The differences between these examples are not so much in their procedures as in the quantities of interceding text used to convey doubt about equivalence. As localizations, they are peculiar because they use length in order to talk about translations.

Quantity speaks

What consequences do these mediating quantities have for the perception of the term La Movida? If we can apply the above principles of asymmetric value, we would expect the longer texts to accord the Spanish term more value than does the immediately substitutive rendition (The Happening). And this would seem to be what happens. The relative quantitative equivalence of the Newsweek translation (the shortest rendition) even suggests that the Spanish term has no originality beyond its function as a touch of local color. "La Movida" is made to look like a much belated Spanish version of something from the American 1960s, when Happenings were a part of hippie culture. The Spanish term has become a bad translation in itself, ironically reversing the principle of asymmetric equivalence. Happily, a later Newsweek article redressed the injury, using textual expansion to give "La Movida" rather greater value:

“[.….] in the years after 1975, Spain celebrated La Movida, a sense of explosive artistic, cultural and political excitement." (Newsweek, European Edition,“Spain’s Weary Generation", October 30, 1989)

In 1985, as Spain was deciding to enter NATo, Newsweek was not particularly interested in translating anything more than a superficial Spanish culture based on American precedents. In 1989, however, during national elections following Spain's presidency of what was then the European Community, the same magazine saw fit to accord Spanish culture a recent history of its own, with correspondingly lengthened explanations.

These examples suggest a correlative of the general principle of asymmetry, this time applicable to all localization: The more the output quantity exceeds the input, even beyond approximate quantitative equivalence, the greater the value accorded to the input. However, unlike the general principle of asymmetric value, here it does matter how much more output there is than input. Here the logic of asymmetry goes beyond the leeway of relative equivalence.

责任编辑：admin