NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION AND TRANSLATION

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ADVISORY BOARD
Jens Allwood {Linguistics, University of Gothenburg)
Morton Benson (Department of Slavic, University of Pennsylvania)
Marilyn Gaddis Rose (CRIT, Binghamton University)
Yves Gambier (Institute of Translation and Interpreting, Turku University)
Daniel Gile (Université Lumière Lyon 2 and CEEI(ISIT), Paris)
Ulrich Heid (Computational Linguistics, University of Stuttgart)
Eva Hung (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
W. John Hutchins (Library, University of East Anglia)
Werner Koller (Department of Germanic, Bergen University)
José Lambert (Catholic University of Louvain)
Willy Martin (Lexicography, Free University of Amsterdam)
Alan Melby (Linguistics, Brigham Young University)
Makoto Nagao (Electrical Engineering, Kyoto University)
Roda Roberts (School of Translation and Interpreting, University of Ottawa)
Juan C. Sager (Linguistics, Terminology, UMIST, Manchester)
María Julia Sainz (Law School, Universidad de la República, Montevideo)
Klaus Schubert (Technical Translation, Fachhochschule Flensburg)
Mary Snell-Hornby (School of Translation & Interpreting, University of Vienna)
Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit (Savonlinna School of Translation Studies, Univ. of Joensuu)
Gideon Toury (M. Bernstein Chair of Translation Theory, Tel Aviv University)
Wolfram Wilss (Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting, University of Saarland)
Judith Woodsworth (FIT Committee for the History of Translation,
Concordia University, Montreal)
Sue Ellen Wright (Applied Linguistics, Kent State University)

Volume 17

Fernando Poyatos (ed.)

Nonverbal Communication and Translation

New perspectives and challenges in literature, interpretation and the media
 NONVERBAL
COMMUNICATION AND
TRANSLATION
NEW PERSPECTIVES AND CHALLENGES
IN LITERATURE, INTERPRETATION
AND THE MEDIA

Edited by

FERNANDO POYATOS
University of New Brunswick

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nonverbal communication and translation : new perspectives and challenges in literature,
interpretation, and the media / edited by Fernando Poyatos.
p. cm. -- (Benjamins translation library, ISSN 0929-7316 ; v. 17)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Translating and interpreting. 2. Nonverbal communication. I. Poyatos, Fernando. II.
Series.
P306.2.N66 1997
418'.02--dc21 97-1033
ISBN 90 272 1618 5 (Eur.) / 1-55619-699-7 (US) (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1997 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA
 To Emilio Lorenzo,
of the University of Madrid
and the Real Academia Española,
forever master and language beacon,
his grateful student of the fifties
and proud friend today
 Contents

Preface xi
Acknowledgments xii
Introduction 1
Fernando Poyatos

Part 1. DISCOURSE AND NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION

Aspects, problems and challenges of nonverbal communication in
literary translation 17
Fernando Poyatos
Discourse features in non-verbal communication: Implications for the
translator 49
Basil Hatim

Part 2. CULTURES IN TRANSLATION

The identification of gestural images in Chinese literary expressions 69
Yau Shun-chiu
Some aspects of Japanese cultural ethos embedded in nonverbal
communicative behavior 83
Rie Hasada
viii CONTENTS

Part 3. NARRATIVE LITERATURE

Alice abroad: Dealing with descriptions and transcriptions of
paralanguage in literary translation 107
Christiane Nord
The translation of gestures in the English and German versions of
Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi 131
Pierangela Diadori
Punctuation in Hans Christian Andersen's stories and in their
translations into English 151
Kirsten Malmkjær
Matching verbal and nonverbal communication in a Holocaust memoir
and its translation 163
Yishai Tobin

Part 4. THEATER
"Is this a dagger which I see before me?": The non-verbal language
of drama 187
Mary Snell-Hornby
Verbal and non-verbal constituents in theatrical texts and implications
for translators 203
Said El-Shiyab

Part 5. POETRY
"Whose morsel of lips will you bite?": Some reflections on the role of
prosody and genre as non-verbal elements in the translation of
poetry 217
Seán Golden

Part 6. INTERPRETATION
The reality of multichannel verbal-nonverbal communication in
simultaneous and consecutive interpretation 249
Fernando Poyatos
 CONTENTS ix

Kinesics and the simultaneous interpreter: The advantages of listening

with one's eyes and speaking with one's body 283
Sergio Viaggio
From Babel to Brussels: Conference interpreting and the art of the
impossible 295
Edna Weale

Part 7.THE AUDIOVISUAL CHANNELS FOR TRANSLATION:

FILM AND TELEVISION DUBBING
Translating non-verbal information in dubbing 315
Frederic Chaume Varela
Dubbing and the nonverbal dimension of translation 327
Patrick Zabalbeascoa
List of contributors 343
Name index 349
Subject index 357
 Preface

Having contributed for many years to the advance of the very interdisciplinary
field of Nonverbal Communication Studies, a book on the translation of literature
and media language and on live interpretation was being felt as overdue in my
own work.
This is, therefore, the first volume of its kind. As such, it should not only
open many new perspectives in the various areas it presents, but also incite
others to further this kind of study in both scope and depth.
The theoretical and methodological ideas and models it contains should
merit the interest not only of students of literature, professional translators and
translatologists, interpreters, and those engaged in film and television dubbing,
but also of literary readers, film and theatergoers, linguists and psycholinguists,
semioticians, communicologists, and crosscultural anthropologists.

Fernando Poyatos
Fredericton, May 1996
 Acknowledgments

To all those who through the years have spurred me to further my work in the
areas here represented by applying it to their own research.
To the colleagues and students of many universities who give me the
opportunity to share my ideas with them, for their very stimulating response.
To John Benjamins' editor Bertie Kaal, who invited me to do this volume;
and to my co-authors, who made it possible, for their knowledge and generosity.
To my University of New Brunswick, my God-given scholar's haven, for
its continued support of thirty years.
 Introduction

Fernando Poyatos
University of New Brunswick

Whether explicitly described, graphically represented or implicitly present

between words and between lines, nonverbal communication — well beyond its
more obvious manifestations — has always been part of the literary texts of
every genre; in fact, beyond the expectations and intentions of the writers
themselves. But nonverbal modes of communication permeate also films,
television and, in any other real-life encounters, those personal interactions
between two or more participants which must be mediated by an interpreter.
To put together, at this point in time, a first volume dealing exclusively with
nonverbal communication in the various kinds of translation requires perhaps that
a clear definition of nonverbal communication (leaving aside any futile disagree­
ments over the very term 'nonverbal') be offered at the very onset. The only
definition I have regarded as realistic during more than twenty-five years of work
in this field, with an indispensable inter- and multidisciplinary approach, has
been: The emissions of signs by all the nonlexical, artifactual and environmental
sensible sign systems contained in a culture, whether individually or in mutual
co-structuration, and whether or not those emissions constitute behavior or
generate personal interaction. Considering, therefore, the unavoidably integrating
nature of such definition, one must readily admit that a volume like this one was
much needed.
Of the elements included in nonverbal communication, some are always
present in any form of literature, film and personal interaction. In the realm of
literature, interest in nonverbal communication — aside from sporadic references
to nonverbal aspects, such as gestures, time, the cultures depicted, etc. — has
been growing, mostly since the mid-70s, with an article on the novel in
Semiotica by Poyatos (1977, reprinted as a 'seminal article' [1981] and in a book
2 FERNANDO POYATOS

[1983]), with earlier versions in Spanish [Poyatos 1972, 1976a]), another one on
theater (Poyatos 1982) and many live discussions by him at conferences and as
lectures. In a later volume that resulted from an international symposium he
organized (Poyatos 1988), the term 'literary anthropology' was established as an
area for the diachronic or synchronic study of the historical and documentary
elements in literary works that constitute nonverbal communication within a
culture (that is, not only its paralanguage, kinesics and proxemics, but its many
other activities and nonacitivities). In his latest interdisciplinary volume (Poyatos
1992a), six papers treated of various nonverbal aspects in the Greek and Roman
classics (Holoka 1992; Lateiner 1992a; Newbold 1992), with references to other
writings by themselves (Lateiner 1987, 1992b; Newbold 1981, 1982, 1986,
1990), including a discussion of certain translation problems (Vermeer 1992) and
the relationship between literature and the arts (Golder 1992), in addition to one
on paralanguage in literature (Poyatos 1992b). Without attempting to be
exhaustive at all, other authors could be cited who dealt with different nonverbal
aspects of literature: Kuepper (1970), on Kafka; Wyndeatt (1979) and Benson
(1980), on Chaucer; Bevington (1984), on Shakespeare's gestures; Portch (1985),
on the novel; Fell (1986), on Maugham's novels; Marmot Raim (1986), on
Maupassant; Øyslebø (1987), on Jonas Lie; Levenston (1989), on Shaw's stage
directions; Romera (1989, 1991, 1994), on Columbus' Diary, and on literature
in general; Arnould (1990), on laughter and tears in the Greek and Roman
classics from Homer to Plato; Oancia (M.A. thesis, 1990), on Pérez Galdós's
novels; Poyatos himself became increasingly interested in identifying the
different aspects of the literary work which, for the most part, still awaited
greater attention, thus attempting to establish certain models and open various
new perspectives (Poyatos 1993, 1994, 1995a, 1995b), using also as a channel
the new Encyclopedia of Semiotics edited by Bouissac (Poyatos 1996a, 1996b,
In press). The less obvious aspects of nonverbal communication in literary
translation, however, as well as in the challenging experience of live interpreta­
tion, seem to have been traditionally neglected.
The present volume, therefore, represents the first joint effort (which
certainly should be followed by similar and more ambitious endeavors) by those
interested in the various literary genres, specialists in visual translation as film
and television dubbing, and those who professionally practice and teach these
areas. In addition, it discloses the challenges of live interpretation, a field which,
as Viaggio complains in his contribution, still seems to lack a formal treatment
of nonverbal communication even on the part of its professional practitioners. On
 INTRODUCTION 3

the other hand, although any single volume seems to lack something or other, it
is hoped that the readers will appreciate the pioneering effort of the present one,
which John Benjamin editor Bertie Kaal kindly invited me to edit during the
1993 International Congress of Applied Linguistics.

1. The contributions to the volume

Part 1: Discourse and nonverbal communication

FERNANDO POYATOS' first contribution to the volume draws, with various addi­
tions and refinements, from his interdisciplinary work of many years on
nonverbal communication, dealing specifically with the explicit and implicit
presence, functions and analysis of nonverbal elements in the novel. While
earlier he would cover almost only paralanguage and kinesics, he later opened
his eyes to a much wider range of new perspectives, in both narrative literature
and the theater. Without ignoring the physical and circumstantial elements of the
book itself, read by a native or foreign reader, he offers insightful thoughts
regarding the role and problems of the physiology of vision itself, and then
punctuation, in the reading experience. To this follows a discussion of the
explicit and implicit presence and functions of paralanguage and kinesics in the
narrative text as well as of the eloquent 'quasiparalinguistic' audible kinesics and
the sounds of the characters' artifactual and natural environment, considering the
translation problems generated between languages with very different sound-
evoking capability. This discussion is illustrated with well over one hundred
literary examples from more than sixty literary works.
BASIL HATIM, who refers to nonverbal communication as 'graphically
representational language', focusses on the 'vividly descriptive sense of the
graphic in various fictional and nonfictional texts and on translation between
English and Arabic. He recognizes the unquestionable and rich role of para­
language and kinesics in communicating graphically 'vitality and added thrust',
thus constituting an important socio-textual and crosscultural aspect of translation
and furthermore their relevance crossculturally. Opening his discussion with
Poyatos' idea of selection and encoding channel reduction and channel
amplification, Hatim (with examples from Pygmalion) concentrates then on the
latter stage of the text, specifically on the verbalization of paralanguage and
kinesics and, the greatest problem, the culturally unexplained references to either
system, for which the translator's intervention seems so inevitable (e.g. British
'social inferiority', 'intimate camaraderie'), and then on the 'scene and frame'
4 FERNANDO POYATOS

theory proposed by Vermeer (1992). Hatim recognizes in this volume what can
be called popular fiction ('action-packed' for men, 'heart-warming' for women),
analyzing the role, for the graphic representation, of its core vocabulary. As for
ńon-fiction, he refers to news report and its use of core and non-core vocabulary
for description of nonverbal features
Part 2: Cultures in translation
YAU SHUN-CHIU, a sensitive poet himself and the author of another intriguing
and illuminating contribution on Chinese writing characters to a former volume
by Poyatos (Yau 1992), offers an excellent complement to Hasada's article on
Japanese culture (and certainly to Golden's analysis of Chinese literature) and a
much needed reference about Chinese kinesics (which he recognizes as more
limited than, for instance, in Latin cultures), for which there is very little
information, no books and no names to refer to most gestures. While usually
explicit descriptions of gestures in idiomatic expressions do not pose many
problems, Yau discusses, with excellent examples, the less explicit ones, or
descriptions which do not disclose the function of the gestures in question, which
would easily dissociate it from its context in the text and even more in
translation. These would become stumbling blocks for the serious translators (the
others would not even acknowledge such obvious problems). Yau shows us also
a number of most interesting old gestures still present among today's Chinese
people, and others that have disappeared in that society and cannot be recon­
structed (nor safely described by a translator). The second part of Yau's article
presents more Chinese gestures (some appearing in ancient literary works) in a
fascinating present-day crosscultural perspective, and translators will find very
specific and unsuspected implications in its sections on the concept of 'right' and
'left' spatial locations in Chinese culture, 'yes' and 'no' in conversation (similar
to Japan), and the peculiar notion of time of traditional Chinese speakers in the
'spatial' location in references to past and future (reflected in literature).
RIE HASADA'S contribution constitutes an exemplary illustration of the
interdisciplinarity of nonverbal communication studies. Combining the field of
literary translation with what can be aptly termed 'ethnocommunication', she
offers us a fascinating account of Japanese interactive nonverbal communication,
so often and typically puzzling and frustrating for westerners, and a glimpse of
the many misinterpretations to which readers can be exposed in literary
translations. She calls our attention to the risks involved in literal translation of
what, she says, are true 'culturemes' (Poyatos 1976b), in this case culture-
specific displays and functions of nonverbal behaviors such as smiling, crying,
 INTRODUCTION 5

eye movements, and eye contact. In fact, hours before writing these lines, I had
occasion to see precisely those behaviors in Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 film Tokyo
Stories', smiling and eye contact being part of my own memories of Japan. By
doing this, the author provides also an excellent complement to Viaggio's and
Weales's papers, as she suggests the risks of live interpretation, when those
behaviors occur and, therefore, the interpreter must take care to (a) properly
translate any verbal reference to those nonverbal behaviors mentioned by Hasada,
and (b) even interpret those behaviors verbally when the speakers display them
themselves, thus meeting the interpreter's responsibility to carry out a correct
cultural rendering of activities and attitudes essential to the encounter.
Part 3: Narrative literature
CHRISTIANE NORD, drawing from her extensive work, deals with descriptions and
transcriptions of paralinguistic behaviors, based on Alice in Wonderland's original
text and its French, German and Spanish translations. After identifying the
characters' nonverbal behaviors and certain culture-bound verbal expressions —
linking on this point with Hasada's paper — she focusses on 'paralinguistic
behavioremes', distinguishing various aspects of speech found in her model
(tone, voice qualities, temporal features, the paralinguistic and kinesic manner of
speech, certain onomatopoeic utterances, and 'zero representations of para-
language', that is, when only the verb 'to say' is used, without specifying how).
She notes that a literary text is not so much the behavior itself as the way it is
described and (explicitly or implicitly) interpreted by the author, narrator and/or
the characters themselves, and calls our attention to the paralanguage used in the
narrator's own comments, a lively stylistic device (not rare in children's
literature), which in turn suggests the style of a potential story reader or teller.
Nord suggests a functional approach whereby translators may opt for either
descriptions or transcriptions of those behaviors, depending on their specific
(sometimes culture-bound) communicative functions and subfunctions (referen­
tial, expressive, appellative, and phatic), which readers must interpret. Nord
concludes that this functional approach is much more truthful than the " 'true' or
'faithful' reproduction of any verbal or paraverbal surface features of the original
text". One should consider, of course, whatever the authors themselves might
have to say regarding what they would probably see as translators' liberties in
detriment of their 'carefully constructed literary text', thus establishing the
confrontation of two crafts with conflicting views and solutions.
PIERANGELA DIADORI, drawing from her continuing work on Italian kinesics
(e.g. Diadori 1990), analyzes the different ways in which the German and
6 FERNANDO POYATOS

English translators deal with the gestures in Manzoni's famous Italian historical
novel I Promessi Sposi, some still common in the western world, while others are
no longer or rarely used, or simply absent in German and English societies.
Diadori explains, with a profusion of examples, how some translators dispense
with some details in their more general descriptions, or, for instance, add verbal
expressions to facilitate their readers' interpretation. It seems that the German
translators are more faithful ("probably also due to its illustrations"), while the
English often insert those metatextual elements. Another important metatextual
element (in fact, what we could call 'accelerating' channel) is the insertion of
illustrations, which may faithfully agree with the verbal description, add details
not present in the text, or even introduce a gesture which is not in the text.
KIRSTEN MALMKJAER, taking Andersen's stories as a clear illustration,
endeavors to heighten the translators' awareness of the extreme, but often
unrecognized, importance of punctuation when rendering the source text into the
target language. His method isolates a particular function of punctuation, namely
the signalling of nuances of semantic significance, suggesting that this function
is not widely recognized. Andersen's punctuation is generally considered to be
idiosyncratic, and Malmkjær suggests that his punctuation supports its lexico-
grammar, showing that the normalization of punctuation in translation accords
with, and amplifies, lexicogrammatical selections which alter the focus of the
source text.
YISHAI TOBIN presents a theoretical and methodological approach based on
his semiotic concept of language and a text as a system of systems used for
communication, which he applies to Zivia Lubetkin's In Days of Destruction and
Revolt, a first-hand, intimately personal autobiographical memoir of the Warsaw
Ghetto and its Zionist pioneering youth movement. He states that he is using
Poyatos' idea of the basic triple structure Language-Paralanguage-Kinesics to see
whether, and how, these systems match in the original text and in its translation,
and relates actions, states, or events to modern Hebrew' system of verb tenses,
seeing that in Lubetkin's text it constitutes a means to determining her own
perception of that environment. Studying the linguistic, extralinguistic and
paralinguistic systems, he shows how the non-random distribution of the
linguistic system specifically reflects the extralinguistic reality of the scenes, thus
"strengthening the common extralinguistic identity between the encoder and her
audience [...] creating and reinforcing a common communicative bond between
them". Tobin discusses also the interaction between the linguistic, extralinguistic
and paralinguistic systems, rightly concluding that they function together and that,
therefore, it would be unrealistic to study them separately, as is done much too often.
 INTRODUCTION 7

Part 4: Theater
MARY SNELL-HORNBY, a well-known authority in the field of translation,
discusses the relationship between verbal and non-verbal language in a stage
performance and, using a number of examples from plays by Shakespeare,
Bernhard and Stoppard, investigates the means by which visions, sounds and
actions are created by the dramatic score of the text. In the world of theatrical
illusion, the nonverbal element is more immediate and basic than the verbal. The
theatrical sign is discussed in its relevance as icon, index and symbol, and the
verbal stage text is seen in its relationship to non-verbal means of communication
(paralinguistic, kinesic and proxemic), a sensory stimulus which only realizes its
full potential within the framework of the stage production. The logical
conclusion is that the translator should be integrated into the production team so
that the text can be adapted to suit the needs of the production concerned.
SAID EL-SHIYAB'S initial warnings concerning the translation of plays (e.g.
that "failure to produce their visual and non-visual effects in the target language
would yield unacceptable results", that sometimes "it is hard for the translator
to apprehend the precise import of such words", and that "the translator's job is
[...] to translate sense, spirit, style, and manner of the original") establish very
logical links with the other papers on literary translation, (in particular Golden's
on poetry, since it is also written to be read aloud). Furthermore, El Shiyab
discusses the different linguistic, social and cultural elements that often defy
accurate translation, as he illustrates with examples from Macbeth and Hamlet,
mainly, and references to Paradise Lost, showing how some Arabic translations
failed (e.g. at times unintentionally or intentionally considering Arabic morals
and tradition, or disregarding Shakespeare's metaphors) to express specific
aspects present in the original lines. Other problems arise too, including acting
style, the inevitable failure to preserve the original sound of the lines, special
meanings of words in the playwright's time, the playwright's hints on the play's
setting, etc.

Part 5: Poetry
SEAN GOLDEN'S contribution challenges existing hypotheses on poetry as a genre
and on translation of poetry as poetry. He shows how two things differ greatly
across cultures: the literary pragmatics of poetry and its semiotic role in the
ideology of a culture, and the formal elements that configure the genre of poetry,
among which there are a number of nonverbal aspects. Golden analyzes some
audible, visual and special aspects of the formal elements of poetry in order to
question some of the assumptions that are taken for granted when discussing the
8 FERNANDO POYATOS

subject of translating poetry as poetry. In his author's statement, Golden says:

"Should it be translated as poetry? And by poets? These are two cpmmonplace
considerations in the theory of translation of poetry." Thus, he introduces some
complementary considerations that "query the validity of these two questions",
questioning what theoreticians understand 'poetry' to be, in formal and generic
terms, as opposed to what poets may think or have thought poetry to be, and
whether or not the concept of 'genre' itself, and the formal elements associated
with poetry as a genre, such as prosody or meter, are not much more culture-
bound that theoreticians have yet admitted.
Part 6: Interpretation
FERNANDO POYATOS' second contribution (a necessary background for the next
four in the volume) presupposes the reading of the ample notes on paralanguage,
kinesics and other sounds contained in his first. Enlarging upon his lectures at
the Heidelberg and Germersheim translation schools, he offers a number of
perspectives for the study and practice of consecutive and simultaneous
interpretation which could be the basis for a textbook on the subject. First, he
identifies all the verbal and nonverbal components of the interpretation situation
in two blocks: audible (language, paralanguage and audible kinesics and silences)
and visual (mainly kinesics, but without ignoring other possible somatic signs.
Although oral communication fails at the point of ineffability, it can actually be
completed thanks to nonverbal expressiveness and the perfect mutual cohesive-
ness of the basic audiovisual structure of speech language-paralanguage-kinesics.
Besides identifying the specific encoding and decoding problems typical of
interlinguistic-intercultural interactions involving interpretation, Poyatos outlines
three of his models for the systematic observation and research of interaction and
its personal and cultural styles: the 'nonverbal categories', the structure of
conversation, and the reality of 'reduced interaction' (in which one or more
participants are physically limited by blindness, deafness, lack of limbs, etc.).
SERGIO VIAGGIO, a well-known interpreter with a long experience in a
difficult field, and the next author, Edna Weale, complement each other
perfectly. Viaggio endeavors to explain the need of the simultaneous interpreter-
in-the-booth to see both speaker and audience, since isolating their audible
expression is, as Viaggio puts it, an outright 'amputation' of what Poyatos has
studied as the basic triple structure language-paralanguage-kinesics of interactive
discourse. For all purposes, that limitation renders the interpreter blind with
respect to the true audiovisual nature of interactive speech and the dialogic
nature of the audience's feedback. And yet, as Viaggio says, many interpreters
 INTRODUCTION 9

neglect this basic fact, concentrating on the 'micro level' of their communicative
situation, rather than weighing all the components of its 'macro level', including
the lexical functions of kinesics; although it is a fact that an audience prefers
"intelligibility and essentials over completeness". As for the visibility of the
listener's feedback, Viaggio confirms this basic need; consequently, he confirms
as well the invisible interpreters s natural audio-visual production of speech
during interpretation, as well as their awareness of their own nonverbal
inaccuracies. Thus, Viaggio's contribution is perhaps the first systematic attempt
at explaining the reason why good visibility of all participants in the act of
communication is essential for the simultaneous interpreter, emphasizing also the
importance of the speaker's and the audience's kinesics as comprehension aids,
as well as that of the interpreter's own kinesics for processing and delivery.
EDNA WEALE, another high-level professional interpreter, presents an
enlightening discussion of many of the problems caused by nonverbal commu­
nication and, in the process, succeeds in demonstrating how interpretation can be
turned into an art, based entirely on her long personal experience. Besides adding
much valuable information to Viaggio's discussion on the speaker's amputation
of his/her audiovisual speech, she discusses (a) paralinguistic problems, including
the possible incongruence between the sex of speaker and interpreter, which
naturally affects the proper conveyance and interpretation of sex-specific
paralinguistic behaviors; (b) the time delay between the speaker's delivery and
its translation; (c) the problems involved in interpretating read speeches; (d) the
artificial culture created within a conference venue, (e) what Weale calls the
"joyful chaos" of conference misunderstandings, which she illustrates with some
memorable anecdotes, centered on humor, anger, pride and honor, and
appearance; and (f) some parallels between interpretation and music, poetry,
filming and theater.

Part 7: Film and television

FREDERIC CHAUME VARELA'S discussion analyzes different instances of the
interplay between nonverbal and verbal communication in audiovisual translation,
showing the extent of flexibility the translator has in order to solve the textual,
pragmatic and semiotic constraints originated by such interplay, and proving the
advisability of compensation and recreation. He begins this study of dubbing by
pointing out the traditional neglect of nonverbal information, besides having been
"taken for granted", as translators "are commonly used to simple modes of
discourse"; not so simple, one might add, as this volume abundantly demon­
strates. Thus, Chaume's discussion, which includes television commercials,
10 FERNANDO POYATOS

cartoons and films, constitutes a brief but very useful manual for those who must
design and translate an audiovisual source product, offering quite a few
suggestions for dealing with specific problems encountered in audiovisual texts
that contain paralanguage, kinesics, proxemics, cultural signs, etc. Readers will
find this contribution most appropriate at a time when particularly TV commer­
cials, mostly through multinationals, travel the world over, carrying with them
the verbal and nonverbal translation problems Chaume deals with here.
PATRICK ZABALBEASCOA, finally, complements Chaume's discussion,
showing how the translation of audiovisual texts forces one to rethink some of
the recurrent issues in the translation field, particularly the division into
intralingual, interlingual (regarded as translation proper) and intersemiotic
translation. New forms of text production like hypertexts, multimedia, films and
television certainly put such division into a new perspective. Zabalbeascoa argues
that those three types do not have such clear-cut borders and that it may be more
useful to think of translation as a matter of degree, where many verbal and
nonverbal factors come into play, some being more important or more restrictive
in one type and not so much in another. This approach requires a common
denominator or definition for all translation phenomena and a set of parameters
by which to study and evaluate translations, besides identifying the exact force
of each factor for each translation type. Zabalbeascoa describes some of the
specific features of audiovisual translation and accounts for them within his
general mode of translation, which hinges on the notion of variability within the
priorities and restrictions involved in that task.

References

Arnould, Dominique. 1990. Le rire et les larmes dans la littérature grecque d'Homère à
Platon. Paris: Societé d'editions Les Belles Lettres.
Benson, R.G. 1980. Medieval Body Language: A Study in the Use of Gesture in Chaucer's
Poetry. Anglistica 21. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger.
Bevington, David. 1984. Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diadori, P. 1990. Senza parole: 100 gesti degli italiani. Rome: Bonacci.
Fell, Katherine R. 1986. "A Silent Way Unseen: Maugham's Use of Nonverbal Behavior
in Three Novels". Dissertation Abstracts International 47(7), 2593A. Ann Arbor.
 INTRODUCTION 11

Golder, Herbert. 1992. "Visual Meaning in Greek Drama: Sophocles' Ajax and the Art of
Dying". In F. Poyatos (ed.), Advances in Nonverbal Communication: Sociocultural,
Clinical, Esthetic and Literary Perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 323-360.
Holoka, James P. 1992. "Nonverbal Communication and Criticism of the Classics:
Research Opportunities". In F. Poyatos (ed.), Advances in Nonverbal Communication:
Sociocultural, Clinical, Esthetic and Literary Perspectives. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 239-254.
Kuepper, Karl J. 1970. "Gesture and Posture as Elemental Symbolism in Kafka's 'The
Trial'. Mosaic 3(4), 143-152.
Lateiner, Donald. 1987. "Nonverbal Communication in the Histories of Herodotus".
Arethusa 20(1/2), 83-119.
——. 1992a. "Affect Displays in the Epic Poetry of Homer, Vergil, and Ovid". In
F. Poyatos (ed.), Advancements in Nonverbal Communication: Sociocultural, Clinical,
Esthetic and Literary Perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
255-269.
——. 1992b. "Heroic Proxemics: Social Space and Distance in the Odyssey".
Transactions of the American Philological Association 122, 133-163.
Levenston, E.A. 1989. "Shaw's Stage Directions." In H. Scolnikow and P. Holland (eds),
To Read a Play. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marmot Rain, A. 1986. La communication non-verbale chez Maupassant. Paris: Nizet.
Newbold, Ronald. 1981. "Space and Scenery in Quintus of Smyrna, Claudian, and
Nonnus". Ramus 10, 53-68.
——. 1982. "Perception and Sensory Awareness Among Latin Writers in Late
Antiquity". Classica et Mediœvalia 33, 169-190.
——. 1986. "Nonverbal Communication and Parataxis in Late Antiquity". L'Antiquité
Classique 55, 223-244.
——. 1990. "Nonverbal Communication in Tacitus and Ammianus". Ancient Society 21,
189-199.
——. 1992. "Nonverbal Communication in Late Greek Epic: Quintus of Smyrna, and
Nonnus". In F. Poyatos (ed.), Advances in Nonverbal Communication: Sociocultural,
Clinical, Esthetic and Literary Perspectives. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 271-283.
Oancia, María. 1992. "La comunicación no verbal en la narrativa de Galdós". Master's
Thesis. University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canadá.
Øyslebø, Olaf. 1987. "Nonverbal Presentation of Narrative Characters: Two Aspects of the
Visualizing Art of Jonas Lie in The family at Gilje". Livstegn 1(87), 181-192.
Porten, Stephen R. 1985. Literature's Silent Language. New York/Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Poyatos, Fernando. 1972. "Paralenguaje y kinésica del personaje novelesco: nueva
perspectiva en el análisis de la narración". Revista de Occidente 113/114, 148-170.
12 FERNANDO POYATOS

——. 1976a. "Nueva perspectiva de la narración a través de los repertorios extra-

verbales del personaje". In S. Sanz-Villanueva, C. Barbachano (eds), Teoría de la
novela. Madrid: S.G.E.L., 353-383.
——. 1976b. "Analysis of a Culture Through Its Culturemes: Theory and Method". In
A. Rappoport (ed.), The Mutual Interaction of People and Their Built environment,
265-274. The Hague: Mouton.
——. 1977. "Forms and Functions of Nonverbal Communication in the Novel: A New
perspective of the Author-Character-Reader Relationship". Semiotica 21(3/4),
295-337.
——. 1981. "Forms and Functions of Nonverbal Communication in the Novel: A New
perspective of the Author-Character-Reader Relationship". In A. Kendon (ed.),
Nonverbal Interaction, and Gesture. The Hague: Mouton, 107-149.
——. 1982. "Nonverbal Communication in the Theater: The Playwright Actor-Spectator
Relationship". In E. Hess-Lüttich (ed.), Multimedial Communication, IL Tübingen:
Gunter Narr Verlag, 75-94.
——. 1983. New Perspectives in Nonverbal Communication: Studies Cultural Anthropol­
ogy, Social Psychology, Linguistics, Literature and Semiotics. Oxford: Pergamon
Press.
——. 1988. "Literary Anthropology: Toward a New Interdisciplinary Area". In
F. Poyatos (ed.), Literary Anthropology: New Approaches to People, Signs and
Literature. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 3-49.
——. (ed.). 1992a. Advances in Nonverbal Communication: Sociocultural, Critical
Esthetic and Literary Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
——. 1992b. "Paralanguage and Quasiparalinguistic Sounds as a Concern of Literary
Anthropology". In F. Poyatos (ed.), Advances in Nonverbal Communication:
Sociocultural, Clinical, Esthetic and Literary Perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins, 301-319.
——. 1993. "Aspects of Nonverbal Communication in Literature". In J. Holz Mänttäri
and C. Nord (eds), Traducere navem: Festschrift für Katharina Reiss, Studia
Translatologica, ser. A, Vol. 3. Tampere: Tampere University, 137-151.
——. 1994. La comunicación no verbal, volumen III: Nuevas perspectivas en novela y
teatro y en su traducción. Madrid: Istmo.
——. 1995a. "Paralanguage and Extrasomatic and Environmental Sounds in Literary
Translation: Perspectives and Problems". TEXTconTEXT 1995:1, 25-45.
——. 1995b. "Kinesic and Other Visual Signs in Literary Translation: Perspectives and
Problems". TEXTconTEXT 1995:2, 121-144.
——. 1996a (In Press). "Nonverbal Communication in the Novel". In P. Bouissac (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Semiotics. London: Garland.
——. 1996b (In Press). "Nonverbal Communication in the Theater". In P. Bouissac
(ed.), Encyclopedia of Semiotics. London: Garland.
 INTRODUCTION 13

Roberts, R.E. 1982. "Nonverbal Communication in The Great Gatsby". Language and
Literature 7, 107-129.
Romera Castillo, José. 1989. "Rasgos kinésicos en el Diario de Cristóbal Colón". In M.
Criado de Val (ed.), Literatura Hispánica: Reyes Católicos y Descubrimiento.
Barcelona: PPU, 115-124.
——. 1991. "Sistemas verbal y no verbal en literatura". FACE (Special issue) l, 75-91.
——. 1994. "Repertorios extraverbales en la comunicación literaria". Signa 3, 175-208.
Vermeer, Hans J. 1992. "Describing Nonverbal Behavior in the Odyssey: Scenes and
Verbal Frames as Translation Problems". In F. Poyatos (ed.), Advancements in
Nonverbal Communication: Sociocultural, Clinical, Esthetic and Literary Perspectives.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 285-299.
Wyndeatt, B. 1979. "Gesture in Chaucer". M'edieaevalia et Humanística 9, 143-161.
Yau Shun-chiu. 1992. "Six Characters in Search of a Gesture: Chinese Graphs and
Corporal Behavior". In F. Poyatos (ed.), Advances in Nonverbal Communication:
Sociocultural, Clinical, Esthetic and Literary Perspectives, 163-186. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
 Part 1

Discourse and Nonverbal Communication

 Aspects, problems and challenges of
nonverbal communication in literary translation

Fernando Poyatos
University of New Brunswick

To Umberto Eco and Thomas A, Sebeok

1. Introduction

My interest in different areas of communication for almost thirty years — mainly

within linguistics, phonetics, anthropology, psychology, semiotics, and literature
— led me always to seek out, in an interdisciplinary fashion, certain important
dimensions that had been traditionally ignored or neglected. In the area of
literature, after an earlier article which seems to have encouraged much research,
in which I dealt with paralanguage and kinesics in narrative literature and theater,
I began to cover other aspects of nonverbal communication while simultaneously
studying the verbal and nonverbal aspects of discourse and written language.1 In
so doing, part of a natural development was to ponder certain deeper levels of
translation and consider not only the problems posed by language, paralanguage
and kinesics, but the presence of a host of other nonverbal elements in both the
source and the target literary texts. This led me to deeper levels of the reading
experience, which in turn called my attention to what is truly the transmitting
channel of narrative literature, that is, the book itself, and then the sensory ways
in which readers perceive it, mostly in the fascinating experience of reading,
bringing to life a whole array of personal and environmental elements. This
means, not only the speaking face and body and total appearance of the
characters, which include their explicit or implicit between-the-lines paralanguage
and. kinesics, but the eloquent quasiparalinguistic sounds of people and
environment, and their silences and stillness, all knitted together and first
funnelled into just a visual medium, the printed page, to be later multisensorially
18 FERNANDO POYATOS

amplified by the reader through a sort of sign countermetamorphosis. But any of

those nonverbal systems undergo profound changes through translations, and
translators need to become extremely sensitive to all that happens or does not
happen as they translate a text, for it is well known that translation is not only
a interlinguistic exercise, but an intercultural one as well. And yet there are still
aspects of it that continue to be neglected by the majority. This is an attempt to
systematically and progressively summarize those nonverbal aspects of literature
before and after translation.

2. The physical and circumstantial conditioning elements of the reading

experience

In order to analyze what happens to an original narrative text when it is

translated into another language for readers of a different culture (and a different
time in the case of works of the past), one should consider three major
conditioning factors of the reading experience which continue to be neglected,
namely, the book itself, the reader, and their environment, which I succinctly
identify here only in an attempt to encourage their serious study.
The book is the sensorially perceived material vehicle and channel of the
reading activity, that is: the physical peculiarities of a particular edition by a
particular publisher, such as age, the color of the paper used — or its coloration
by age — as well as its specific printing style. As random examples, I preferred,
as an adolescent, to feel and read 'in my hands' my small 1895 Maucci
(Barcelona) edition of Chateaubriand's Atala, with relief black drawings and gold
letters on hard red covers, as I do now my 1935 J. Ferenci et Fils' paperback of
Mauriac's 1927 Thérèse Desqueyroux, charmingly illustrated with wood
engravings by a L.-J. Soulas, to any present-day edition. All these period features
seem to identify me with those readers, allowing me to experience the book itself
they way they did. Except that, inevitably, I need to intellectually enter that
temporal and spatial locus, while they were in it, and were part of it. But the
intellectual and esthetic values of different editions, particularly the original or
almost original ones, remains unquestionable.
The specific environment, whose characteristics may condition differently,
whether consciously or unconsciously, the reception of that narration, such as
poor lighting, low temperature, great comfort, the presence of nature that might
seem to blend with the fictional world or strike certain chords in the reader. As
a young man, I used to enjoy reading by candlelight my Spanish translations
 PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION 19

(often in turn-of-the-century editions) of romantic novels, which certainly helped

me to identify better with last century's readers.
The specific personal circumstances, such as medical state (which later
might trigger even negative associations with that particular novel, as I have
experienced myself), anxiety, happiness, gloom, any of which, again, might
coincide or clash with the characters' own circumstances. In addition, our reading
may take place in very contrasting environments, perhaps rather close to or quite
far removed from that in the story (e.g. reading The Red Badge of Courage or
The Great Gatsby in a battlefield, in bed with a fever, or comfortably seated by
a fireplace). All this seems to suggest the need for translators — or writers, for
that matter — to work in close association with those who give shape to the
book.

3. The physiological basis of text perception and interpretation:

Vision and the reading act

A printed narrative text is, first of all, something we perceive through our eyes,
and then 'intellectualize' in a process conditioned by a series of factors, mainly
personal (e.g. socioeducational status), cultural (e.g. specific interpretation of
certain interactive silences, possibly indicated but not explained), and situational
(e.g. one's mood or emotional state). Therefore, basic also to any discussion of
that text seems to be the acknowledgement of how exactly our reading takes
place, the 'act of reading', as we might appropriately call it; that is, how we
perceive the writer's verbal and nonverbal representation of the characters, their
circumstances and their surrounding physical world (which in turn contains many
other elements implicitly). This representation is visually rendered on the space
of each page by typesetter and printer, those intermediaries who are as a rule
totally detached from the readers' complex and subtle experience of reading the
text which they are setting and printing, and yet are instrumentally responsible
for that intimate activity of ours.
If we think of speech as the basic triple audiovisual structure language-para-
language-kinesics, which the writer is forced to reduce to a verbal-nonverbal
visual depiction, we immediately see that that very spatial and visual medium,
the page, varies with each different edition according to the spatial location of
elements on each line and on each page. It is, in other words, quite alienated
from the reality of the living, organized, psychosomatic activity that it purports
to evoke and represent. Besides the physical characteristics of the book itself,
20 FERNANDO POYATOS

referred to above, there are still some fundamental conditioning elements to

consider which may substantially vary between source text and the translated
text, namely: (a) The spatial location of written speech and of the writer's own
comments on it, specifically paralanguage and kinesics, as well as of any other
somatic activities (e.g. blushing, blanching, sweating), and references to any
personal and environmental circumstances; and (b) the way in which punctuation
affects their perception and interpretation by the readers.
The physiology of vision plays a most important part in the perception and
functional appreciation of what is going on on any particular page, in turn
determined by its specific location on that page; in fact, a qualifying word or
words specifying how something is said or moved, or the motivating emotion
involved, or a punctuation symbol indicating an attitude (e.g. the very exclama­
tion mark I am going to write here could be placed, in a given edition, even on
the next page! But even within the same page, our perception of those qualifying
features depends entirely on our macular vision (operating 12° to 15° in the
horizontal plane and only 3° in the vertical plane), and on our peripheral vision
(up to through-the-corner-of-one's-eye 90° coverage horizontally on each side,
that is, 180°, and about 150° vertically); thus, certain features of the text are
often well outside the perceptual-interpretative range of macular vision (e.g. a
distant [!] or [?], as discussed below).
Often, when the description of the features of verbal or nonverbal activities
require a few words or more than a few words in the text, their specific effect
as qualifiers is totally lacking until the reader's eyes reach the end of that
description after having read what the character said already; that is, first he
knows 'what he said', and then, once it has been said, he learns 'how he said it'
(e.g. '-said with sarcasm'. '-said with elation').
See that steamer out there? [...]/ 'Yes,' said Suzanne with a little gasp. She inhaled her
breath as she pronounced this, word, which gave it an airy breathlessness which had a
touch of demure pathos in it (Dreiser G, III, VII)

In " 'You're a liar!', he yelled, banging the table with his fist. 'You're a liar,
you're a liar!' "(Lawrence SL I, I), we at least perceive the pounding on the table
immediately after the first "You're a liar!", but not in:
Mr. Pyser took his pipe from his mouth, and looked at Hetty in mild surprise for some
moments [...] / 'Why, what's put that idea into your head, my wench?' he said at last,
after he had given one conservative puff (Eliot AB, XXXI)

However, we prefer to become aware of the nonverbal qualifiers before and not
after the words, as in:
 PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION 21

Scully [the hotel's proprietor] banged his hand impressively on the footboard of the bed.
'Why, man, we're goin' to have a line of ilictric street-cars in this town next spring'
(Crane BH, I)

Even more in these two longer examples, where verbal and nonverbal expres­
sions are presented in their actual sequence throughout:
fue tanto [don Quixote's annoyance] que, con voz atropellada y tartamuda lengua,
lanzando vivo fuego por los ojos, dijo: — ¡Oh, bellaco, villano, malmirado, descompuesto,
ignorante, infacundo, deslenguado, atrevido, murmurador y maldiciente! [...] ¡Vete, no
parezcas delante de mí, so pena de mi ira! Y diciendo esto, enarcó las cejas, hinchó los
carrillos, miró a todas partes, y dio con el pie derecho una gran patada en el suelo, señales
todas de la ira que encerraba en sus entrañas (Cervantes DQ, 1, XLVI)

And all at once Lucy began to laugh again, uncontrollably. She covered her face with
her hands, her whole body shook, as though she were passionately weeping. 'It's too
good', she gasped, dropping her hands and leaning back in her chair. Her face still
worked with laughter; there were tears on her cheeks (Huxley PCP, XI)

Obviously, if the accompanying or qualifying behaviors are identified in a short

space, synchronization can be quite accurate, as in '"Haw! haw! haw!' roared
Legget, slapping his knees" (Grey LT, XIII), where that roaring is better
synchronized than the simultaneous slapping.

4. The role of punctuation symbols

As for punctuation itself,2 we must recognize also the correlation between our
visual perception of written words and their simultaneous or almost simultaneous
features evoked by punctuation symbols, for instance: When Spanish [¡], is
associated to the words that follow, immediately modifying them a posteriori
(but with continuity) as they get farther away from it; and the perception and
anticipation a priori when those paralinguistic symbols follow the words, for
instance, [...], or, again in Spanish, the [¡] or [¿] of the following sentence; that
is, as an intellectual (but basically physiological) operation through macular
vision and even peripheral vision. Translators, therefore, must be extremely
conscious of the extent to which they should be aware of the presence and
location of the punctuation symbols they are translating, as they should
constantly help the more sensitive readers not just to 'hear' but to 'see' the
persons in the story. Both translators and translatologists should realize that the
various aspects and problems of punctuation fall squarely within nonverbal
communication studies, for it is precisely nonverbal elements that people have
22 FERNANDO POYATOS

strived to represent by means of punctuation, thus acknowledging its use as an

essential part of the audible-visual nature of speech. Naturally, ùnderstanding
speech as including kinesics (gestures of face, eyes and hands, manners and
postures), for if punctuation represents a conscious effort to symbolize speech to
better evoke its semantic changes and avoid ambiguity, it also evokes, and
mostly quite unconsciously, the kinesic movements (of face, hands, eyes) and
positions (postures), as happens, for instance, with [!], [!!!] or [?!], something,
however, that escapes so many readers and even writers as they use those
symbols.
Trying to address, within the limits of this article, some specific translation
problems in connection with punctuation, it will suffice to mention at this time
the problem which translators create when rendering Spanish [!——!] as
[ — — ! ] , and, on the other hand, how they improve that appreciation when
having to change a single [——!] into a more logical [ ¡ — — ! ] . Such a
nonsegmental continuous feature cannot be detected on time in English, unless
it qualifies a short segment, as in " 'Loves me!' breathed Helen softly" (Grey LT,
IX). But the reader's macular vision cannot see the distant end of, for instance,
a long phrase uttered with a higher voice loudness, an end which might even be
on the next line (unless it happens to appear 'conveniently' below its beginning),
that [——!] being totally ineffectual until almost the end, whenfinallyour eye
catches it. But that feature has not been evoked in our mind when it truly should
have been, unless the writer tells us, as in the second example:
And so Hester, I drew thee into my heart, for its innermost chamber, and sought to warm
thee by the warmth which thy presence made there! (Hawthorne SL, IV)

As for the similar inefficacy of, for instance, English [——?] as compared to
Spanish [ ¿ — — ? ] , I will just offer a few examples showing (but, naturally,
conditioned in turn by how it appears in this volume) how the readers of English
can be totally unaware of how those written words are meant to be uttered until
they come to the very last one of them, that is, whether it is going to be an
interrogation or not:3
You remember a certain famous occasion when I was more drunk than — than usual?
(Dickens TTC, XXI)

Je suppose que le compagnon auquel vous faites allusion n'est pas Alfred Meurant?
(Simenon MA, II)
you aren't going to give up playing just when the luck's running your way? (Waugh HD, VI)
— ¿Tú te quedas con lo mío después del favor que te hice? (Berenguer MJL, 64)
 PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION 23

5. The speaking face and body of the character and its perception in the
written text and its translation

Having said above that speech is a triple audiovisual structure made up basically
of words, paralanguage and kinesics, it must be specified now that its basic
instrument of transmission is the face, complemented by hand movements and
in general by the movements and still positions of the rest of the body. It is
essentially a facial anatomy of static signs or features that speaks to us in an
interaction, which we consciously or unconsciously see, consistently made
dynamic and lending specific characteristics to words and word-like utterances
(sighs, clicks, 'Uh-hu'), which are in turn accompanied by, and semantically
related to, gestures, manners and postures of equally specific personal and
cultural characteristics.4
Thus, when translators translate the words spoken by the characters, as well
as the authors's words that describe how those voices sound and what those
speaking faces look like as they speak, they ought to bear in mind the acoustic
similarities and differences between the words in the original text and those in
their target language, for the more sensitive readers will utter them to themselves
and therefore hear and see those faces. Therefore, if the narrator introduces
initially the characters' facial features, and their general style of visual behavior,
the reader will be able to imagine them more consistenly each time new
paralinguistic or kinesic features are described. And what is even more important,
that initial physical portrait, as with subsequent descriptions, will allow us to see
and hear the characters even when we are not given any paralinguistic and
kinesic descriptions. The writer, therefore, will exercise his or her ability, once
that initial presentation has been done, to maintain kinesic and paralinguistic
repertoires that correspond precisely to those characters:
The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled
into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top
one upward, when they closed together after a word (Hardy TD, II)

He [Sir Rupert Irons] had a heavily hard body, was square in the head, face, jaws and
shoulders [...] his neck was ridged with muscles acquired from a life-long habit of
stiffening his jaw and pushing it forward during all business conversations (MacLennan
TS, I, XI)
24 FERNANDO POYATOS

6. Explicit presence of paralanguage in the text: Verbal description and

visual transcription

For this comprehensive discussion of paralanguage5 in literature, the various

categories and how they can be either verbally described or evoked, or ortho-
graphically transcribed, can be summarized covering only some of the voice
features, in an attempt to incite students and practitioners of translation to ponder
some obvious problems, particularly two: the rendering of the source language's
echoic words to the target language in verbal descriptions, and the spelling
difficulties of true transcriptions, both shown in the examples that follow and
deserving special study.

A. Primary Qualities6
a. Verbal description:
'It must be nice to be famous', said the girl softly (Dreiser JG, I)
'No,' he said, with a slow sadness; 'I never saw you looking better' (Howells HNF, V)

b. Paralinguistic transcription:
Fine ol' lady—fi-ii-ne [...] Well, you'll have t'brace up an' be a comfort t' th' ol'
mother (Crane GM, I)

You're a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven't the thousand obstacles a
woman has in front of her (Lawrence WL, IV)

B. Qualifiers1
a. Verbal description:
[Basilio] con voz tremente y ronca [...] con voz doliente y desmayada [...] [pretending to
die] ya los ojos vueltos, el aliento corto y apresurado, murmurando entre los dientes el
nombre de Quiteña (Cervantes DQ, II, XXI)

La voz [Hilda's] era vibrante, desgarrada, con matices aguardentosos, entre provocativa
y fiera, con unos altibajos y unos retintines que estaban pidiendo camorra (Pereda S, V)

he [Gerald] said [...] at last, forcing the words from his lungs, in a voice so soft and
low, it sounded like a dream within her, not spoken in the outer air (Lawrence WL, XIV)

her voice became husky because her throat was bathed in the irrepressible and
continuous crying which her happiness caused her (Doctorow R, VII)

b. Paralinguistic transcription:
MARTA (a snarl of disimissal and contempt) NYYYYAAAAHHHH! (Aibee WAVW, I)
 PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION 25

C. Differentiators8
a. Verbal description:
La Condesa gave a little saw-edged trill of laughter (Porter SF, II, 200)
Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, 'Well, I told you so' (Dickens GE, II)

b. Paralinguistic transcription:
'Ho-ho-ho!' laughed dark Car./ 'Hee-hee-hee!' laughed the tippling bride [...]
'Heu-heu-heu' laughed dark Car's mother (Hardy TD, X)
'Ow-w-w-w!' shrieked Irene. 'Do stop!' (Howells RSL, IV, 58)
Davy Byrne smiledyawnednodded all in one:/—Iiiiiichaaaaaaaach! (Joyce U, 177)
'Whoooee, here we go!'[...] and they gunned up the truck to seventy and passed
everybody on the road [...]' [...] 'Wagh! Whoo!' (Kerouak OR, IV)
'Hyesss,' Hannah said softly, sharply inhaling the first of the word, and trailing the
sibilant to a hair (Agee DF, VIII, XI)
I had my mouth full of tobacco juice. I bent down to her and Phth! says I to her like
that [...] Phth! [...] right into her eye (Joyce PAYM, I)
Arabella [...] hiccuped [...] 'It is—hie—never too late—hie—to mend!' (Hardy JO, VI)

D. Alternants9
a. Verbal description:
Jonathan made no answer to this; but his breath literally hissed through his clenched
teeth (Grey LT, XIX)
he pursed his lips [...] and emitted a sort of sorrowful whistle (Conrad U, XIII)
He stretched out with a murmur of relief and comfort (Crane RBC, XIII)
'A gentleman?' she gasped [...] She broke into a breathless affirmative groan (James TS, V)
b. Paralinguistic transcription:
'Hegh, hegh!' said Mr. Poyser, meaning to check her playfully, 'don't let's have any
crying' (Eliot AB, XXXI)
Mrs. Lapham fell back in her chair, and let her work drop in her lap with that Tckk!'
in which her sex knows how to express utter contempt and despair (Howells RSL, XI)
Ughgh—Ughgh—yuhyuh Ugh wheek yuh yuh Ughgh yuh wheek wheek yuhyuh: wheek
wheek: uh: {angry f rustration and a car not starting) (Agee DF, II)
Aw—I am—aw—your new captain [...]' [...] the look I gave him [...] made him
stammer {hesitation) (Conrad LI, VI)
la chusma le saludó como es usanza cuando una persona principal entra en la galera,
diciendo: '¡Hu, hu,hu!' tres veces (Cervantes DQ, 2, LXIII)
26 FERNANDO POYATOS

7. Implicit presence of paralanguage in the text: Intersystemic co-

structuration, personality, situational context and culture

The more sensitive readers can 'see' and 'hear' things that are not described nor
transcribed and yet are present in the text only 'between the lines' or 'along the
lines'. The translator must be acutely aware of this, since the text he or she is
translating is not a conglomerate of mutually independent elements, but a
structurally and functionally coherent whole; in the case of paralanguage (and the
same must be said of kinesics), we can identify these hidden elements:
a. By the character's kinesic behavior, to which we (not always as foreign
readers) know correspond certain voice features, as long as we are not too
far removed historically:
And Winfield, picking his teeth with a splinter in a very adult manner, said, 'I knowed
it all the time' (Steinbeck GW, XXX)

b. when both the kinesic behavior and its meaning are identified:
A smile coyly bridged the crack in the door./'Shall I bring in the milk?' (Dos Passos
MT, II, I)

c. by the relation proxemics-voice:

Puis elle se leva, s'approcha de l'Allemand pour lui parler à l'oreille, et lui dit: — Dieu
merci! le voilà qui va s'endormir (Balzac CP, 248)

d. by the known familiar correlation of other somatic reactions and

paralanguage, as happens, also culturally, with blushing and tear-shedding:
She [Mary to Walter, a close friend of her deceased husband] threw her arms around him
and kissed him on the cheek [...]/ There now,' he said, blushing deeply and trying to
embrace and to sustain her without touching her too closely. 'There now,' he said again
(Agee DF, X)

e. by the external situational context described, at times a very culture-specific

one, as in:
'Well, you got to eat, Jay. It'll still be chilly for hours' [having got up in the middle of
the night]. She spoke as if in a church or library, because of the sleeping children,
unconsciously, because of the time of night (Agee DF, II)

f. by the character's personality, state of mind or emotional state, equally

differentiated transculturally:
[Hetty, in her cell, before being hanged] 'You won't leave me, Dinah? You'll keep close
to me?' (Eliot AB, XLV)