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The Words or the Sense

The oldest argument in translation theory is between the words and the sense, and it was had independently wherever a canon crossed a language. It is the field’s first conflict, fidelity against freedom, in its plainest form, and every later position takes a stand on it.

The founding opposition is Cicero’s. Explaining in De optimo genere oratorum how he had rendered two Greek orators into Latin, he wrote that he had translated not as an interpreter but as an orator, keeping the force and flavour of the passages rather than counting out the words. Jerome, defending his own practice in a letter to Pammachius (395), made the formula that stuck: not word for word but sense for sense, with the exception of Holy Scripture, where even the word order holds a mystery. The exception matters as much as the rule. Sacred text, law and philosophy have kept pulling translation towards the letter, while oratory, poetry and the market for readable books have pulled it towards the sense, and the two-thousand-year argument between them is the field’s oldest and still its most practical.

In China the translation of Buddhist scripture ran for centuries, and its two great figures took opposite roads: Kumārajīva (344–413) rendered the sutras into a fluent Chinese that put the sense before the letter and has never been displaced in use, while Xuanzang (602–664), returning from India with the texts, translated more literally and laid down the five kinds of untranslatables, terms to be transliterated rather than translated: mantras, words with many senses, things that do not exist in China, terms long established in transliteration, and words whose foreignness carries their weight. In Abbasid Baghdad the Greek medical and philosophical corpus passed into Syriac and Arabic under Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (808–873), who collated manuscripts to establish a text before rendering its sense rather than its words, and whose method became the standard of the translation movement.

The English neoclassical line then gave the opposition its three-part form. Dryden, in the preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), reduced all translation to three heads: metaphrase, word by word and line by line; paraphrase, translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view but the words are not so strictly followed as the sense; and imitation, where the translator takes only hints from the original and runs division on the ground-work as he pleases. He chose the middle road. Alexander Fraser Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791) turned the choice into laws: a translation should give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original, keep its style and manner, and have all the ease of original composition. A century later, and possibly with Tytler in view, Yan Fu prefaced his translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1898) with the three difficulties of translation, faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance (xin, da, ya), which Chinese translation theory has argued over since as its own standard.