Translation Research Projects 2 Edited by Anthony Pym and Alexander Perekrestenko Intercultural Studies Group Universitat Rovira i Virgili Translation Research Projects 2 Edited by Anthony Pym and Alexander Perekrestenko Tarragona, 2009 Title: Translation Research Projects 2 Editors: Anthony Pym, Alexander Perekrestenko © for texts, individual authors 2009 © for compilation, Intercultural Studies Group 2009 Publisher: Intercultural Studies Group. URV. Av. Catalunya 35. 43002 Tarragona, Spain. http://isg.urv.es/ Printer: Gràfiques del Matarranya ISBN-13: 978-84-613-1619-9 (paper) 978-84-613-1620-5 (web) Texts available at: http://isg.urv.es/publicity/isg/publications/trp_2_2009/index.htm La publicación de esta obra ha sido posible gracias a ayudas de: - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Madrid, como parte del proyecto Nuevas tecnologías para la profesionalización de traductores (PHB2007-0021-TA) - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Madrid, ayudas a la movilidad de profesorado, programa de doctorado Translation and Intercultural Studies (Mención de Calidad) (MCD2003-00844) - Generalitat de Catalunya (AGAUR), com part de l’ajut al congrés New research in translation and interpreting Studies (2007ARCS100006). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Front cover: Translation technology class led by Ignacio García, Tarragona 2008 (photograph by Anthony Pym) Printed in Spain Contents Presentation .................................................................................................... 1 Part 1: Mapping the Future of Research on Translation and Interpreting Andrew Chesterman, Everything I wish I had known about the philosophy of science ........................................................................................................ 5 Christina Schaeffner, Research Training: How specific does it need to be? .9 Yves Gambier, Challenges in research on audiovisual translation ............. 17 Ignacio García, Research on translation tools ............................................. 27 Daniel Gile, Research for training, research for society in Translation Studies .......................................................................................................... 35 Franz Pöchhacker, Broader, better, further: Developing Interpreting Studies .......................................................................................................... 41 John Milton, Translation Studies and Adaptation Studies ........................... 51 Gideon Toury, Target and Translation Studies. Half-baked observations towards a sociological account .................................................................... 59 Michaela Wolf, The implications of a sociological turn. Methodological and disciplinary questions ............................................................................ 73 Part 2. New Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies Diane Howard, What was so hard about that? Test errors and source- passage challenges ....................................................................................... 83 Kristian T. H. Jensen & Nataša Pavlović, Eye tracking translation directionality ................................................................................................ 93 Renata Kamenicka, The as-if game and literary translation ..................... 111 Szu-Wen Cindy Kung, Translation agents and networks, with reference to the translation of contemporary Taiwanese novels .................................... 123 Ondřej Vimr, “...here, in this world, I am utterly useless and redundant.” Roles of Translators in Scandinavian-Czech Literary Translation 1890- 1950 ............................................................................................................ 139 Myriam Suchet, Translating literary heterolingualism: Hijo de hombre’s French variations ....................................................................................... 151 Rosanna Rion, Translation for dubbing into Spanish and Catalan: criteria and traditions ............................................................................................. 165 Costanza Peverati, Professionally oriented translation teaching in a modern-language faculty. An exploratory case-study ................................ 173 Index ........................................................................................................... 191 0 Presentation This volume brings together texts from two activities: position papers from the seminar “The Future of Research on Translation and Interpreting” held in Tarragona in December 2008, and selected presentations from the graduate conference “New Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies” held in Tarragona in October 2007. The two parts speak to each other as two sides of the process of training researchers. The voices in the first part belong to professors teaching or supervising research in our international doctoral program in Translation and Intercultural Studies. Those in the second part are doctoral students or young graduates, presenting research projects that are underway or have recently been completed. Both kinds of voice should ideally be paying some attention to the other. The professorial part of the dialogue comes from a seminar that asked the following questions about research in Translation Studies (which we take to include Interpreting Studies): 1. What specific problems need to be addressed by research? 2. What specific methodologies are needed? 3. How should we be training researchers to focus on those problems and to use those methodologies? The various answers concern both how we should be training research- ers (particularly in contributions by Daniel Gile and Andrew Chesterman), and what areas are opening up for future research projects (most of the other papers in that first part). A few more fundamental questions about where we have come from, and thus where we might be headed, are raised in Gideon Toury’s survey of the first twenty years of the Translation Studies journal Target, which has long been the most prestigious place of publication for European Translation Studies. The papers in the second part have far more to do with the hard realities of actually doing research at the present time. The points of non- correspondence with the professorial desiderata are numerous; the ties with traditional approaches and local needs are more obvious. Our hope in publishing these two sets of papers is that the different perspectives might enter into exchange, ideally beyond the level of plati- tudes. The seminar on “The Future of Research on Translation and Interpret- ing” was held in response to numerous doubts about the nature and direction of our own doctoral program: endemic topics, poor research designs, limited awareness of where the results of research might go, high levels of non- completed projects, attacks of non-scientificity from petty empiricists on the 2 Presentation one hand, and a willful dissolution of the translation concept from autodidact intellectuals on the other. The questions, I believe, were timely. May they eventually lead to a few answers. Anthony Pym Tarragona, February 2009 Aknowledgements The editors would like to extend sincere thanks to Serafima Khalzanova and Esther Torres Simón for their hard work on this volume. Part 1 Mapping the Future of Research on Translation and Interpreting 3 Everything I wish I had known about the philosophy of science... ANDREW CHESTERMAN University of Helsinki, Finland When I started my own PhD back in the 1980s, I already knew a lot about my actual subject (a contrastive linguistic analysis of the semantics and expression of definiteness in English and Finnish), but I was methodologi- cally and philosophically naive. At our first meeting, the head of my department at Reading University, the distinguished linguist Frank Palmer, gave me a small piece of paper on which he had written his official supervisory advice. This is what it said: – Be brief. A thesis of 60,000 words can be quite satisfactory. 100,000 words is usually too long. – Do not deal at length with matters that are familiar. – Keep the introductory sections short. – Do not make extensive use of quotations. In particular, do not use quotations as authority for your views. – Restrict references to those that are relevant. – Restrict your discussion to the “facts”, i.e. do not include statements of an emotive kind and be careful not to assume what you have to prove. – If you have a great deal of research material, do not include it in the thesis (but make sure it is available for inspection). – If your thesis is on an interdisciplinary subject, be very careful to check the appropriateness and correctness of your material, theory etc., from the point of view of the other disciplines. That was it. It was certainly good advice. But now, looking back, there was a gap: I was largely unaware of the philosophy of science, and thus not well informed about many things that I would now consider as fundamental for any doctoral researcher. Fortunately however, I was saved by Karl Popper. I had come across a small book by Bryan Magee, called simply Popper, in the Fontana Modern Masters series (1973). It opened huge windows for me, and I quickly became completely hooked. I read a lot more about Popper and by him, and deliberately structured my thesis along Popperian lines, starting with a problem, with an initial hypothesis—the traditional