COMPARING THE TRANSLATION WITH THE ORIGINALThirdly, you consider how the translator has solved the particular problems of the SL text. You do not take the points successively; you group them selectively under general heads: the title; the structure, including the paragraphing and sentence connectives; shifts; metaphors; cultural words; translationese; proper names; neologisms; 'untranslatable' words; ambiguity; level of language; and, where relevant, meta-language, puns, sound-effect. This third section of your critique should consist of a discussion of trans for instance, did the translator within the context prefer 'less intensely' to 'less acutely' or 'with less intensity' for vivre avec mains d'acuite? Why did he prefer 'uncharted territory' to 'terra ignota' for terra ignota? (Latin tags more familar to French than to English educated readers?) Why was 'drastic statement' preferred to 'severe judgment' for jugement severe? (It can be justified on the ground that French has no obvious one-to-one translations for 'drastic' or 'statement', and therefore the translator was merely exploiting French lexical gaps; further, jugement has a wider semantic range than 'judgment', which would be rather heavy in this context.) This third section is the heart of the critique; normally it has to be selective since, in principle, any passage that diverges from literal translation in grammar, lexis or 'marked' word order (as well as any deliberate sound-effect) constitutes a problem, offers choices, requires you to justify your preferred solution. Why was Un historien contemporain ecrivait, ily a quelques annees, que... changed to 'Some years ago it was remarked by a contemporary historian that...' instead of 'A contemporary historian stated, a few years ago, that...'? Clearly 'Some years ago' is a more natural, less marked, word order when placed at the head of the sentence rather than in parenthesis, but there seems no good reason for passivising the sentence and replacing ecrivait with 'remarked'.
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