#mona baker

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Some slashers with very different vibes and things going on! (Artfight)

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Mona Baker’s 5 levels of equivalence

Once again, no fancy theories or sophisticated vocabulary. Let’s get down to business. Mona Baker, the author of “In Other Words,” has explained the concept of “equivalence” in a way that might help us, language learners, understand how our target languages work.  

What’s equivalence in translation?

Simply put, it means "the best translation of a word/phrase/concept." A concept expressed in your native language is expressed by a concept in your target language so, they evoke the same emotions, mental pictures, and adhere to cultural standards. 

Simple example: 

A car – big, small, red, 4 wheels, a windshield, Toyota, etc. 

Samochód – the features I stated above apply to samochód as well. 

They’re equivalents. 

Difficult example: 

Święcenie koszyczka (a Polish thing. We do it for Easter.) = Basket Blessing 

“What the hell is Basket Blessing?” That’s what non-Polish people usually ask me when they learn about our Easter traditions.  

Święcenie koszyczka has special connotations in Poland. It’s a Catholic tradition that people like. There are some preparations for it like decorating boiled eggs, etc. 

Basket Blessing is a literal translation. The target audience is usually confused and doesn’t feel anything while reading this phrase, no sentiment, no mental pictures, nothing. Just a fun fact. It’s not the best equivalent, but you can’t go with anything else because there’s no other way to translate it. You can replace it with a local custom (you’ll get people sentimental), but you’ll change facts. Is it a good choice? I don’t know. It depends on what you want to achieve. 

Fun Fact 

Equivalence is not about word-for-word translation (just like in a dictionary). It’s possible to achieve equivalence, but you need to remember that there are so many people in the world and each of them creates different mental pictures when they hear a word. They feel different emotions, and that alone makes achieving the perfect, the ultimate equivalence impossible. That’s why linguists and translators have been studying equivalence for a while now. They keep working and looking for the answer to “How can we achieve the best equivalence?” 

To the point! 

Mona Baker talks about 5 different levels of equivalence: 

Equivalence at word level and above word level (2 levels) – we’re trying to translate words only or phrases, collocations, idioms, etc.

You might not be able to translate a word because you’re dealing with:

Culture-specific concepts which are expressed through one word only.

There is no such thing/action in your target language/culture.

Your native language is more specific, and the word you want to translate refers to one thing only.  Your target language, on the other hand, refers to many things, and it uses one word for a lot of objects. (skówka na długopis, zakrętka, zatyczka = a cap).

Differences in physical or interpersonal perspective (words such as come/go, take/bring, arrive/depart).

Different connotations (some words are neutral in your native language, but some are very emotive in your target language).

Affixes (prefixes and suffixes). English "–ish" (greenish) is applicable to many words. It’s almost impossible to render it into Polish. 

Some words can be translated (have equivalents), but they’re not used as often as they are in the target culture/language. 

How can I deal with that?

Use more general words, less expressive words.

You can always describe the thing, provide an explanation (translation by illustration).

You can omit that word if it isn’t necessary and won’t cause any problems with understanding.

Paraphrase.

Borrow the word and provide its explanation.

Cultural substitution (instead of święcenie koszyczka use a custom common for your target language’s culture).

Grammatical equivalence – differences in grammatical constructions (they might be difficult to translate as well). Catford’s translation shifts overlap with Mona Baker’s grammatical equivalence. 

Number (plural/singular)

Gender

Person (I, You, He, She, It)

Tense and aspect (perfective and imperfective)

Voice (active/passive)

Textual equivalence – differences in text organization and structuring (word order, cohesion, word choice, paragraphs, etc.)

It’s most visible in languages such as Japanese, where the topic and the subject are two different concepts. 

In Polish, the word order is very flexible unlike in English. The Japanese always finish their sentences with verbs. 

Some languages prefer nominal structures. In Polish, we like to use verbal structures. (jakie anime planuje się stworzyć = upcoming anime releases) 

Pragmatic equivalence – how it is that we understand more than it is actually said.

Implied information – you know, all those little things that tell us that our speaker meant something completely different or meant to insult us in a non-straight-forward manner using culturally specific words and concepts. (Forrest Gump is a good example of such implied information. You need to be familiar with US history and culture to fully enjoy the movie).

So, how this knowledge can help you?

1. It will help you ask better questions in class. 2. Understanding how your native language works will speed up your learning process tremendously. 3. If comparing languages is your favorite language learning method, Catford’s and Mona Baker's translation theries can give an idea where to start and what to notice. 4. If you’re a teacher, it can help you explain some grammatical phenomena. 5. If you help others learn your native language, you’ll be able to explain grammatical issues, or at least give examples. 6. You’ll speed up your translation abilities.  

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Decided to flesh out that character doodle a few days ago, here’s mona baker!

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Review: In Other Words – A Coursebook On Translation – by Mona Baker

This Mona Baker book is a core text on my Translation (MA) at Cardiff University. We use the text to accompany the Translation Methods Course. The early chapter of equivalence at word level and how to translate non equivalence is particularly interesting, useful and a strong section of the well-written precise coursebook. On occasion there is perhaps an abundance of examples although Baker covers…

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Speak English: Homogenisation of the Message and the Mona Baker Lecture at UCL

I admit that this lecture was more a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than a revelation, so I was one satisfied student. As a postgraduate student you get ‘repeater guilt’ when you stick to certain familiar theories, but come on, I may be well-versed in narratology (exploring how all human experience is communicated and mediated through narratives, and the implications of this) but translation studies is my new thing and I needed to confirm what I surmised it meant. I certainly didn’t realise that Mona Baker’s translation studies would define my own blurry ideas regarding the moral and ethical choices the literary translator makes in making a text multiply.  

It seems a minor idea but the fact that a text has been translated makes one believe that it must be important. In Dr. Baker’s lecture she showed examples of how a certain news website almost blinds its readers with its displays of translations. Instead of realising that its news articles have been carefully selected for a pro-American bias, you instead see the wealth of languages that the articles have been translated from, and even have the chance of viewing the original articles in their original languages to assess how good the translations are. By showing one truth (that the translations are good translations) you forget the political truth of the texts as a whole (only being about instances of anti-American feeling to promote xenophobia in America). Dr. Baker also told of how the CNN news network intentionally or unintentionally mistranslated the phrase ‘nuclear technologies’ as ‘nuclear weapons’ in a story from the Middle East, triggering a complete misunderstanding of a government’s intentions and making its image far worse in America in an irretrievable way. If CNN say they made a mistake, you will give them the benefit of the doubt. Their ‘on brand’ narratives are respected, even if their messages can be wrong.

I have always known that there is no good or bad writing, quality is subjective (completely ignoring in this instance the constant ‘it needs to be publishable and expect a great readership’ argument, even if it’s important in practical discussions on translation publishing) and if you’re not going to please everyone, why worry about it.  Well, do worry about it: wonder why it is large groups reject your style, genre, subject-material, characterization, or all of the above. Certainly the decision of whether something is ‘worthwhile’ to translate does not, I believe, need to take into account whether a text is a ‘classic’ or even a novelty, well-written or an enjoyable read. It’s about fairness and difference. It’s about the uncanny, the unconventional, the foreign. It’s political. These are ideas I’d written about across two years while studying embodiment theory. Here was narratology, the exploration of the homogenization and mediation of personal experience, cropping up again: instead of it being the discourse surrounding physical and mental illness, pregnancy and the body, it is texts about, and created from, foreign cultures and minorities.

So, why does Tracey Emin’s text get dismissed in such a patronising sweep? The art world is far from being a utopian democracy where the lay and the scholar are united through the interpretation of images: there is still a right way and a wrong way to talk about art and to communicate through it, even if people can understand where you’re coming from. You will be judged. Why are only a third of translated books taken from languages that are not English? It is because we have little respect, trust or interest in messages that do not follow the authority of English grammar or are from the elite world Anglo-American lich-rich-er. This is the language of the The Times, the BBC, the hero, the anti-hero, at times censored for our sensibilities. We don’t want to know about post-colonial experience with its jumbled dialects, so what if you’re a foreign language writer who wrote even the first draft of your story in English because how else would anyone care about it, or see an umlaut in a place name in a story set in Germany. We don’t, as my lecturer said on television sign-language, want to see ‘that pantomime in the corner’ of the television screen.  We don’t want to read the illiterate scrawl of trauma. We get it, you have a graduate reading level, but Emin does not want to write a triumph-over-tragedy narrative about her experiences in the rhetoric of reported speech, because her life isn’t a series of bite size this-happened-but-I’m-fine-now stories for you to consume, like the news with its perceived beginning, its plot and its decided ending. We like our messages like all the other official and sanctioned messages of the past. This is why people hate poetry; it battles to make communication more complicated and make the reader revel in not being sure of what’s being said. In the Western world, you must have a silent right to write, you must write clearly about the familiar and the allowed, and you must write proply.

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© Jen Calleja