Is Redundancy Translatable?

What is redundancy?

For a communication system, or any system for that matter to be effective, it must have a degree of superfluity. For example, a military communication system has several networks. If in war one network is destroyed, communication is maintained by resorting to other networks within the system. Moreover, the communication system in a modern office may consist of a multi-line telephone, a fax, internal and external mail services, online computer communication links such as the internet or electronic mail, to name the main ones. Such a system contains redundant components. For this system to remain effective at all times, these components are essential. Similarly, a human communication system, such as language, must contain redundancy in order to ensure the message is communicated without distortion or fail.

In communication theory, Fiske (1990) defines redundancy as: "... that which is predictable or conventional in a message... Redundancy is the result of high predictability..."(Fiske, 1990: 10) More recently, Fiske (1994) has defined redundancy as:

"...predictability structured into a message or text, in order to facilitate accurate decoding or to strengthen social bonds— or both." (in O’Sullivan et al, 1994:259-261)

Cherry (1978) on the other hand, views redundancy as "a property of languages, codes, and sign systems which arise from a superfluity of rules." This superfluity facilitates communication despite the factors of uncertainty that work against communication. Cherry maintains that human languages have developed a surplus of rules to maintain communication in the event of certain rules being broken. He argues that the rules of grammar and syntax are not inviolable. However, the more rules we break, the lower are our chances of successful communication. As such, language is designed in such a way that the various rules duplicate and supplement one another to ensure that communication is not hampered, interrupted or completely halted. "...We can break some of the rules, but we cannot break them all if we wish to remain within the social community..." (Cherry, 1978: 19)

Campbell (1982) cites the following examples from Professor William Lasher of such violation of rules and reduction of redundancy in the "Black English" of the United States that do not reach the point of breaking down communication.

We was at the ball game last night.
Mary had five card.

In The Grammatical Man, Campbell (1982) maintains that in order to reduce the unexpectedness or surprise effect of the information being sent, to make it more predictable, almost all forms of communication produce additional messages to convey the information intended by the sender. He argues that: "A message conveys no information unless some prior uncertainty exists in the mind of the receiver about what the message will contain. And the greater the uncertainty, the larger the amount of information conveyed when that uncertainty is resolved." (Campbell, 1982: 68)

In this sense, Campbell asserts the relationship between information, probability and predictability. He argues that a written message would be nonsense if it were completely unpredictable. For a message to be comprehensible, it must conform to rules of spelling, syntax and grammar. These rules are a form of redundancy which make certain parts of a message more probable than others and consequently more predictable. Campbell maintains that words might be easily deleted from a message (in English prose, for example) without compromising the integrity of the information it conveyed. Moreover, Campbell remarks that redundancy enables systems to become complex. Such complexity is important because failure is an inherent property of systems. If they are not complex, their failure is fatal or irrecoverable. That is why Campbell quotes von Neumann as saying that failure must not be thought of "as an aberration, but as an essential, independent part of the logic of complex systems." In this sense, redundancy, Campbell asserts, is what keeps a system running in spite of malfunction. It follows that all complex systems contain redundancy. A human body is a complex system that has redundant features — a pair of almost every vital organ: eyes, ears, nostrils, lungs, kidneys, and so on. A modern airplane also has a pair of almost every system — two hydraulic systems, two electric systems, two communication systems — as well as backups.

For Carroll (1964) redundancy is "the property of texts that allows us to predict missing symbols from the context. High-redundancy texts tend to be repetitive and to contain relatively little information per symbol. A text with zero redundancy would be one in which no symbol is predictable from any other, and thus there would be a maximum amount of informativeness per symbol." (1964:56) It follows that in some respect redundancy is contextual. If information is out of context, it will produce a message with low redundancy. This is clearly illustrated in Carroll’s example of a list of words selected at random from the dictionary. The list "would constitute a text with low redundancy." (56)

In their communication model, Turk and Kirkman (1989) highlight an important aspect of redundancy in communication which other models seem to overlook. They identify four points at which data is transferred from one medium to another. At each point, information, facts or ideas are lost. Information is potentially lost: first, when the message is transferred from facts to language; second, when it is transferred from language to written words; third, when it is transferred from written words to language in another mind; and fourth, when it is transferred out of that language into stored information. (13)

Berlo argues that redundancy in communication cannot be looked on as undesirable and that the question is not whether a message is redundant or not, but whether the redundancy is useful in increasing the effect of the message on the receiver.

Sommerhoff (1990) contends that a low redundancy is not always desirable in a message because the greater the redundancy the less will be the effect of any incidental error in the message on the information it conveys. (1990: 312)

Levels of redundancy

Cherry (1978) identifies two levels of redundancy, syntactic and semantic. "Syntactic redundancy implies additions to a text; something more is said or written than is strictly necessary to convey the message. Any individual has an enormous storehouse of his language statistics, habits and conventions, at both syntactic and semantic levels. He stores rules of spelling, word orders, grammar, idioms, clichés; again he stores typical vocabularies and phraseology which are used for specific subject matters, and he can predict to some extent from his knowledge of topics or of the writer’s point of view...We cannot say what elements may be stripped off a given text before the message fails to conveyed to a given recipient." Such inability makes the translation decision problem more difficult to resolve.

Consider the following example of stripping off redundant elements of text.

1. Help him stand on his own two feet.
   
2. Help him stand on his own feet.*
   
3. Help him stand on his two feet.*
   
4. Help him stand on his feet.*
   
5. Help him stand (up).
   

The following is another example of semantic redundancy.

1. Make sure the application form is signed.
   
2. Make sure the application is signed.
   
3. Make sure the form is signed.
   

Whether we like it or not, the fact remains that the majority of translators (those who effect change, not the elite or the trained) rely on the form and structure of the source text (i.e. the formal constraint). The more uncertainty there is about the information in a text, the closer the translator’s adherence to the formal component of text.

Semantic vs syntactic redundancy

It is interesting to note that in translation between certain languages such as English and Arabic, semantic redundancy is transformed into syntactic redundancy where the redundant semantic elements in one language become syntactic.

Help him stand on his own two feet.
sa’idhu lilwuqufi ‘ala qadamayhi.

The word qadamay(hi) [(his)two feet] is the dual form of qadam [foot].

Additionally, the syntactic limitations of the English sentence "Help him stand on his own two feet." impose semantic constraints on the translation. This is so because the imperative verb help is gender- and number-free in English while in Arabic it is gender- and number-sensitive. A translation into Arabic of the imperative verb form forces the translator to make a decision whether to render it as:

1. Sa’idhu lilwuqufi ‘ala qadamayhi.
   Help him {second person singular, masculine}
   

2. Sa’idihi lilwuqufi ‘ala qadamayhi.
   Help him {second person singular, feminine}
   

3. Sa’idahu lilwuqufi ‘ala qadamayhi.
   Help him {second person dual, masculine/feminine}
   

4. Sa’iduhu lilwuqufi ‘ala qadamayhi.
   Help him {second person plural, masculine}
   

5. Sa’idnahu lilwuqufi ‘ala qadamayhi.
   Help him {second person plural, feminine}
   

These Arabic sentences have a built in syntactico-semantic redundancy, where the grammatical morphemes indicate gender and number. In translating any of these sentences into English, the syntactico-semantic redundancy is stripped off to a gender-and number-neutral form. Conversely, translating the English imperative into Arabic forces the translator to make decisions about gender and number. The English and Arabic imperatives impose constraints on translation and on the translation decision-making process.

To continue with the same language pair, Arabic also employs a form of semantic redundancy known as hendiadys. Hendiadys is the use of two or more words with an overlapping meaning to complete the overall meaning. In Arabic hendiadys is confined to two overlapping words that go hand in hand. Examples of hendiadys in Arabic are:

al-qada’u wa al-qadar
fate and destiny

al-jahu wa as-sultan
status and power

at-tarbiyah wa at-ta’lim
education and teaching

These word pairs complement each other. Strictly speaking, either word within the pair is redundant and can easily be omitted. But since the communicative value of their constituents is not always equal, it is not always immediately apparent which constituent is primary and which one is secondary , and which one can be dropped. In translating these pairs, however, the redundant element must be dropped, otherwise an awkward translation is produced. This imposes a constraint on the translator who has to decide the primary word.

Another aspect of redundancy in language has to do with tense, the form of the verb that denotes time. Many languages have two categories of time: past and not past. However, in expressing time-action relationship in tense, certain languages divide the temporality of action into various categories of tense. English speakers, for example, conceive of time as present, past and future. Within each tense there are subcategories denoting time-action relationship: simple present, present continuous, perfect present, continuous perfect present, simple past, continuous past, perfect past, continuous perfect past, simple future, continuous future, perfect future, and continuous perfect future. Certain languages do not have this distinction in tense. Arabic for example, has three tense categories: past, present and future although progressive forms are expressed in a variety of ways. The future is realized in present verb form or with the utilization of the auxiliary article sawfa ( or its shortened version sa).

Conceptual redundancy

Another feature of cross-cultural, cross-lingual redundancy is manifest in the system of concepts and how certain concepts are expressed in a concept-term relationship. Certain languages break down a concept into subconcepts. For example, English differentiates between engine and motor, while Arabic does not have such distinction (the word muharrik is usually used for both). In some cases, the translator can get away with the use of one term to refer to both or either concept. However, in certain translational (or transtextual) situations, this is not possible, and the distinction needs to be made. This places a constraint on the translation process. What this really means is that redundancy of concepts can at times be translated, but not always.

The following table compares the English and Arabic systems of concepts of family members (partial listing).

Concept Schema	Arabic	Arabic Supplemental	English	English Supplemental
Father	abb		father
Mother	umm		mother
Grandfather	jadd	jadduhu li-abih or jadduhu abu abih jadduh li-ummeh or jadduh abu ummeh	grandfather	paternal grandfather maternal grandfather
Grandmother	jaddah	jaddatuhu li-abih or jaddatuhu ummu abih jaddatuhu li-ummeh or jaddatuhu ummu ummeh	grandmother	paternal grandmother maternal grandmother
Uncle	amm		uncle	paternal uncle
	khal		uncle	maternal uncle
Aunt	ammah		aunt	paternal aunt
	khalah		aunt	maternal aunt