What does Babbitt's Law mean?

Meaning is the essence and life of translation. No matter successful translation or interpretation, it is inseparable from the transmission of meaning, or the quality of meaning transmission is the key to the success or failure of oral translation. The two schools of meaning to be discussed in this paper are the interpretation theory which is widely known in the field of interpretation and Bakhudarov's theory which is regarded as the representative of linguistic school. Danica Ceries Covic, a famous French translator and translation theorist, and his colleagues and students formally established the theory of interpretive meaning in 1980s, which is also called communicative interpretive theory. Its research object is no longer the language level, but the phenomenon of meaning transmission in anatomical interpretation. After observing and studying the practice of interpretation, the school of hermeneutics put forward the translation procedure of "understanding-leaving the shell of the source language-expressing", emphasizing that translation is a communicative act and the translator's task is to convey information. It is a major feature of interpretive theory to regard translation as a communicative act rather than a communicative result. In their view, "language is just a macro symbol without any communicative significance before it is combined with the translator's cognition" [5](p 190). The theory put forward by Barkhudarov of the Soviet Union in 1970s is closely related to the latest achievements in the development of world linguistics at that time. It has the advantages of both linguistic school and literary school. Pasteur is a representative figure who introduced semiotic theory into translation studies. In his book Language and Translation, he defined translation as: translation is the process of changing the speech product of one language into the speech product of another language while keeping the content or meaning unchanged (1985: 5). He also made a supplementary explanation of "keeping the content unchanged". He believes that keeping the content unchanged is only relative, and it is inevitable that there will be losses in interlingual conversion and transmission, which cannot be completely equivalent to the original text. Due to the existence of various meanings, translation must determine the order of meaning transmission and choose between the meaning that should be emphasized and the meaning that can be sacrificed. In this book, the author mainly discusses semantic transmission and translation transformation in translation from the level of words. Although these two schools of theory come from interpretation and translation studies respectively, they have many similarities in their views on meaning transmission. This paper intends to compare and analyze the similarities and differences between them in the concept of meaning, and give concrete examples to illustrate that Pasteur's theory of meaning is more operable in interpretation activities. 2. Comparison between Pasteur's theory and hermeneutic theory 2. The semiotics of the three semantic systems of1Pasteur's theory studies the relationship between form (symbol) and content (meaning). According to the principle of modern semiotics, Pasteur summed up three types of meaning: the signified meaning, pragmatic meaning and internal meaning of language. The signified meaning refers to the relationship between symbols and signified things (such as objects, attributes, processes, etc.). )[3](p 149)。 The signified meaning is mainly the scope of semantic research. Babbitt thinks that in different language systems, there are few cases where the meanings of words correspond completely, and he focuses on the cases of partial correspondence and non-correspondence. In other words, most of the signified meanings can only be similar in interlingual conversion. Pragmatic meaning refers to the relationship between a symbol and the person who uses it, mainly refers to the subjective attitude of the user attached to the symbol, including emotional color, rhetorical effect, tone strength and tone harmony [3](p 149). Obviously, pragmatic meaning is the research object of pragmatics. Babbitt's understanding of pragmatic meaning goes far beyond the linguistic symbols themselves, but he should study the supralinguistic factors in speech such as the object, environment and participants in speech acts. Pragmatic meaning often cannot find an absolute equivalent in the target language. The intrinsic meaning of language refers to the relationship between symbols in the same symbol system, such as the rhythm of poetry and various rhetorical devices such as homophonic and pun [3](p 150). In different article genres, three kinds of meanings play different roles: science and technology, law, and the signified meaning is particularly prominent; Advertising or poetry pays more attention to pragmatic meaning; If some rhetorical devices such as rhyme and pun are widely used in poetry, the inherent meaning of language will be very strong. Therefore, according to the genre of the article, Babbitt thinks that priority should be given to conveying the semantic system that plays a major role. At the same time, he also pointed out that in the general genre, the signified meaning is reserved the most, followed by pragmatic meaning, and then the internal meaning of language. Pasteur did not observe it as a law, but summarized the main manifestations of the meaning system for us. This is of great inspiration to translators, especially interpreters, because the characteristics of interpretation itself (please refer to the third part of this paper) determine that it is impossible to convey three or more meanings at the same time. 2.2 Interpretation of Meaning in Interpretation Theory 1) Interpretation theory holds that the meaning of speech should refer to "the whole meaning of a text" in interpretation activities, and Babbitt also holds that "the equivalence of the meaning of the source text and the target text is not at the level of each word, or even at the level of each sentence, but at the level of the whole text" [1](p9). 2) Interpretation theory holds that the meaning information involved in interpretation can be divided into two categories, the first category is "explicit information" and the second category is "implicit information". "Explicit information" generally refers to the obvious relationship between the symbol and the object it refers to, and the understanding of the source language in the context is at the lowest level. "Implicit information" includes subtle connotations and various meanings, mainly including: a. Emotional information; B. cultural information of words; C paralinguistic information, such as extra-linguistic information such as tone and intonation peculiar to interpretation [2]. Obviously, the explicit information mentioned by the hermeneutics school is equivalent to the signified meaning of Pasteur, while the implicit information is equivalent to the pragmatic meaning and internal meaning of Pasteur. 3) Bao Shigang, the main founder of the school of interpretation, 1998, in the article "Semantic Issues in Interpretation Procedures", also thinks that interpretation, like translation, contains almost all the meaningful information in or outside the language that can be involved in translation activities, and that it is impossible for translators to translate all the words in the source language due to the limitation of the amount of information that needs to be processed extemporaneously in interpretation. Bao Gang's point of view is quite close to Pasteur's theory, or as one of the representatives of China's hermeneutic school, he organically combined Pasteur's theory with hermeneutic theory. The rationality of Pasteur's theory has also been further confirmed. 4) Albee, a hermeneutic researcher, puts forward that meaning is a kind of synthesis: "The unit of meaning is a kind of synthesis under the joint action of style, connotation, information and other factors". According to "different types of translated texts, some factors may play different roles, for example, the factors of style and connotation will dominate poetry, while the information factor plays an important role in scientific articles" [4]. According to Pasteur's classification, the style, connotation or information factors in the meaning unit mentioned by Albee can be divided into different types of meanings: the information factors in scientific articles are Pasteur's signified meaning, while the style and connotation factors in poems are consistent with pragmatic meaning. He believes that the main factors will be different with the change of text types, but they are similar to Papi's meaning transmission, but Albee did not specify the order of these factors. Papi not only emphasized that the translator's subjective choice should conform to the characteristics of text meaning expression, but also pointed out the order of meaning preservation. However, it can be seen that both of them decide what meaning to retain to the greatest extent on the premise of serving communicative purposes. To sum up, the similarities and differences between the two schools of theory can be summarized as follows: A. The two schools of theory have very similar views on the definition and classification of meaning, the limitations of meaning transmission, the overall understanding of meaning and the main expressions of different genres. B. Interpretation theory does not discuss the order of meaning transmission in detail, while Pasteur theory holds that, generally speaking, the signified meaning is reserved the most, followed by pragmatic meaning, and then the internal meaning of language, and this order will also be influenced by speech genre. From this point of view, the author thinks that Pasteur's theory is better, and if we can combine the theory of interpretation with the meaning view of Pasteur's theory, it will be more operable for the interpreter. 3. Case Analysis The following will illustrate the rationality of Babbitt's theory of meaning transfer by taking the interpretation materials of the newly established Chinese and foreign press conference as an example. The formality of interpreting Chinese and foreign press conferences in the State Council is between diplomacy and foreign affairs translation. Most of the topics involved are serious political topics with high policy sensitivity. Generally speaking, the language used in this kind of communication is more formal, and its style is between written language and spoken language. It is a kind of spoken language with accurate and easy words and concise grammar, which is different from ordinary spoken language. Its interpretation requires accurate meaning, appropriate words, consistent tone and color with the speaker, that is, accurate communication of discourse content and its implied policy stance. The following examples are all selected from Premier Zhu's speeches at Chinese and foreign press conferences and their corresponding interpretation texts. I hope it helps you.