Henno Rajandi’s Theory of Language and His Practice of Translation

Abstract

The focus of the article is on the translating style of Henno Rajandi (1928– 1998), a translator who has been an embodiment of a masterful translator for the past fifty years. Rajandi, an academic linguist and also a short-time lecturer of Western literatures at the University of Tartu, was well equipped to conceptualize his practices. He has left us with statements about the perceived social significance of translation, and with his general theory of language together with suggestions about its use in communication. Hypothesizing that the theory should bear on his practice of translation, I interpret Rajandi’s translation of Pride and Prejudice in the light of his linguistic theory. For Rajandi language is a network of paradigmatically related elements of meaning–form correspondences selected depending on their syntagmatic value. For the addresser all the elements of the system are formal and the meaning is given, for the addressee the elements are all meaningful and the form is given. He compares an element to a coin stamped by different matrices and dependent on the different neurocognitive environments of the speaker and the listener. As his conceptualisation emphasizes the relative nature of communication, his translation has to be acknowledged as a first person performance.