LECTURE 9. DIFFERENT TYPES OF TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETING

Plan

1. Comprehension in Translation

2. Translation and Comprehension of Specialized Texts

2.1. The Importance of Terminology Knowledge

3. Legal and Court Interpreting

4. Other Types of Interpreting

It is now well-established among interpreters/translator’s instructors and theoreticians on the one hand and practitioners on the other, that translation involves at least some degree of non-trivial comprehension of the Source language Text, that is, comprehension goes beyond the simple recognition of words and linguistic structures. This idea is probably as old as translation itself. The main reason for the requirement of comprehension in translation/interpretation lies in the fact that languages are not isomorphic, since they are not modeled on exactly the same lexical and structural patterns, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the words and structures of any two languages. Even the layperson knows about gross differences such as words existing in one language and not having “exact equivalents” in another, or elements and rules of grammar that obviously from one language to the next: declensions, verb tenses, articles and other function words. What the layperson often fails to perceive are more subtle differences that relate to stylistics or pragmatics: the use of particular type of word or structure may mean one thing in one language and something else in another and may not be socially in yet another. For instance, when expressing personal opinions, the Japanese generally attenuate (express) them by using various linguistic constructions implying interrogation or uncertainty. When expressing the opinion that “A” is “B” a Japanese speaker is likely to say smth like “I wonder whether “A” is “B” “ rather than making an assertion. In Japanese it reflects cultural courtesy whereas in Western languages it often reflects true uncertainty. To a Japanese speaker an unattenuated (positive-assured) sentences expressing a personal opinion, perfectly acceptable in a Western language, may seem very abrupt, to the point of being rude in many circumstances. This means that “transcoding” or “word for word” translation even if it is linguistically possible, may result in a Target text that is clumsy, erroneous or even nonsensical.

The extent of the potential damage caused by translation without comprehension became very obvious with the first machine translation experiments in the 1950’s. Readers can find examples of amusing translations in many accounts of the early days when “automatic translation” through lexical and syntactic substitutions was thought possible. One such example often quoted is the automatic translation of the English sentence:” The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. Into a Russian statement about the wine (or vodka) that was good and miaso that was rotten (bad). Human translators can avoid such gross errors but are nevertheless frequently at a loss when translating or interpreting statements which are lexically or grammatically ambiguous (have many meanings). For example, in data processing text it is often difficult to discriminate between the function and the name of the product. In the field of data processing “Network manager” could be the name of the product, not to be translated, or an executive position that can and should be reexpressed in the Target language using the appropriate terminology. Also in computer science “User Models” might mean “Models for the User” or “Models made up by the User” and may require different translation in each case, depending on the Target Language. Comprehension is also necessary when linguistic rules in the Target Language require the Translator to express explicitly information which is not given in the Source Language text.