Loss and Gain in

Translation vis-à-vis
Translatability
A.Loss and Gain in Translation
B. Translatability
A. Loss and Gain in Translation

Loss is the disappearance of certain features

in the target language text which are present
in the source language text.
Gain is a concept that focuses on the
enrichment or clarification of the source
language text.
“Every translation entails a loss by comparison
with the original”, states by Wolf Harranth, a
well-known translator of books for children and
young people.

There is always the possibility of

miscommunication in the act of
communication with translation. Certain
elements can be added or left out.
When a text or communication in one code is
translated into another, it is indispensable that
something is gained while some elements are
lost which results to miscommunication.
Therefore, it is impossible to achieve complete
equivalence.
Robert Frost’s famous definition of poetry is
notable: “Poetry is what gets lost in
translation”. The basis of Frost’s statement is
the concept of the creative originality of the
poet who creates a work where the meaning
lurks somewhere beneath the surface of
words.
 So far as the translation of literary text is
concerned gain and loss are different in
contrary to the other genre of texts.
 The gain and loss in the literary texts do much
to the figurative usage of the two encoded
and decoded languages involved in the
process of translation.
 The issue of ‘gain’ crops out when an
overenthusiastic translator inadvertently over-
translate the concerned text at hand.
The issue of loss and gain owes genesis to the
cultural dissimilarity and divergent linguistic
structures between two linguistic communities.
The more the structures are divergent, the more
the translation becomes error-prone. As a result,
it is indispensable to observe and incorporate
the divergent patterns between a pair of
languages so that the accuracy could be
enhanced and translated more correctly.
The problem of loss and gain is again due to
the cultural dissimilarity between two linguistic
groups.
 It is said that the language of Eskimos has
more than one hundred words to describe
‘snow’. These subtle distinctions they make
between various types of snow cannot be
brought out in a single Hindi word. The reverse
is also applicable.
 As discussed in Muzaffar (2016), English is a
European language while Urdu belongs to
the Indo-Aryan group of languages.
 There are many incongruent features
related to morphology, syntax, semantics,
and discourse.
 Urdu has an enriched morphology and
allows scrambling as syntactic process.
 English has a weak morphology and fixed
word-order.
One of translators’ main problems is finding
the equivalence of culture-specific items as
they contain cultural information which
needs special considerations since they are
related to cultural knowledge and cultural
background. The meaning of cultural
dependent words is difficult to transfer into
another language, particularly when the
worlds are linked to cultural domains (Nida,
2015)
B. Translatability
Sometimes, it is not cultural differences that
pose hurdles for translation activity. It could
be a grammatical construction that
becomes the problem. These gaps in
translation often have (unintentional) hilarious
results.
Two types of Untranslatability
- J.C. Catford

A. Linguistic Untranslatability – occurs when

there are no grammatical or syntactic
equivalence in the target language.
B. Cultural Differences – pave the way for
cultural untranslatability.
Two types of Problems
- Anton Popovic

1. A situation in which the linguistic elements of

the original cannot be replaced adequately in
structural, linear, functional or semantic terms in
consequence of a lack of denotation or
connotation.
2. Where the relation of expressing the meaning
i.e. the relation between the creative subject
and its linguistic expression in the original does
not find an adequate linguistic expression in the
translation.
Georges Mounin, a French linguist felt that
dwelling on the problems of untranslatability will
not yield positive results.

Problems in translation also occur because of

fundamental differences between two
language systems that differ in their very basic
sense.
Mounin believed that communication through
translation is possible if you try to understand it in
context.

Translation involves “the consideration of a

language in its entirety, together with its most
subjective messages, through an examination
of common situations and a multiplication of
contacts that need clarifying” (Bassnett 36).
Translation would imply comprehensive
consideration of both source and target
languages, and an evaluation of how the SL
text can best be reproduced in the TL.

It also proves that some form of

communication is not impossible either. When
we come to the problem of translatability and
a fine hair splitting that go with it, we have to
pose and remember a few basic facts.