Insights Into Specialized Translation
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Linguistic Insights 46 Insights into Specialized Translation Bearbeitet von Susan Sarcevic, Maurizio Gotti 1. Auflage 2006. Taschenbuch. 396 S. Paperback ISBN 978 3 03911 186 2 Format (B x L): 15 x 22 cm Gewicht: 550 g schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei Die Online-Fachbuchhandlung beck-shop.de ist spezialisiert auf Fachbücher, insbesondere Recht, Steuern und Wirtschaft. Im Sortiment finden Sie alle Medien (Bücher, Zeitschriften, CDs, eBooks, etc.) aller Verlage. Ergänzt wird das Programm durch Services wie Neuerscheinungsdienst oder Zusammenstellungen von Büchern zu Sonderpreisen. Der Shop führt mehr als 8 Millionen Produkte. MAURIZIO GOTTI /SUSAN ŠARýEVIû Introduction 1. Specialized translation It is a paradox of the age of globalization that the demand for translation has grown despite the spread and dominance of English. This is especially true of specialized translation. Broadly speaking, specialized translation (Fachübersetzen, traduction spécialisée, traduzione specializzata) covers the specialist subject fields falling under non-literary translation, the best known of which include science and technology, economics, marketing, law, politics, medicine and mass media, most of which are dealt with in this volume as well as lesser researched areas such as maritime navigation, archaeology, geography and nutrigenomics. When Translation Studies emerged as a discipline back in the early seventies (Holmes 1972), scholars were concerned mainly with literary translation, whereas the ‘other’ areas of ‘technical’ translation were regarded as part of Applied Linguistics and snubbed as an ‘inferior’ form of mechanical translation (Snell-Hornby 1996). With the emergence of LSP theory, the broader term ‘LSP translation’ (Somers 1996; Schäffner 2004) became popular and is still widely used today. In particular, the advent of the computer and the age of globalization have had a significant impact on the development of technical (Hann 1992; Wright / Wright 1993), scientific (Wright / Wright 1993), legal (Gémar 1995a, 1995b; Sandrini 1999, Šarþeviü 2000) and industrial (Sager 1994) translation. Today ‘LSP translation’ has matured into specialized translation (Thelen 2004; Desblache 2001; Stolze 1999), thus shifting the emphasis to the transfer of specialist knowledge (Hoffmann 1993; Mayer 2003) by a translator who ideally has “the knowledge, the competence and the recognised status of an expert” (Snell-Hornby 1992: 10). Thus the final stage of 10 Maurizio Gotti / Susan Šarþeviü competence is “expertise itself, where intuition takes over, an intuition that is trusted because it is constantly tested and refined” (Schäffner 2004: 679). The worldwide market for specialized translation and software web localization services has grown at a fast pace (Esselink 2000) so that technical and business translation far exceeds the translation of literary texts, both in volume and financial worth (Venuti 1995). Advances in technology have drastically altered the workplace and working methods of profession translators, including terminology research (Picht 1993, 2006; Somers 1996; Wright / Budin 1997; Wright / Wright 1997; Cabré 1999) and translation processing (Newton 1992; Sager 1994). The responsibility for translation is often entrusted to project-managers with large organizations equipped with translation memory systems and machine-assisted translation, which are far from reliable but have established themselves as essential tools in our time and expense motivated world. Translation is increasingly becoming a team project and professional translators are engaged for the revision process. Corpus-linguistic studies (Baker 1995, 1996, 1999; Laviosa 1997, 1998) have proven valuable for researching not only general but also specialized translation. The data obtained from processing various corpora – monolingual, comparable, parallel unidirectional and parallel bidirectional (Aston 1999) – sheds light on possible interpretations of the source text and indicates effective translation strategies based on text type and purpose. Scholars are also using corpus-processing tools to carry out research projects for the purpose of quality assessment (House 1997, 2001). Today creativity plays a role in areas of specialized translation where cultural transfer is important and pragmatic and rhetoric parameters come into play (Kalverkämper 2004; Kovtyk / Wendt 2002). In this respect, the strict linguistic approach has been replaced by a more cognitive approach in which the translator generates special-purpose text types as an active participant in intercultural communication (Lee-Jahnke 2005; Vandaele / Lubin 2005). The teaching of translation also presents new challenges to ensure that future translators acquire multidisciplinary skills (Snell- Hornby 1992; Snell-Hornby / Pöchhacker / Kaindl 1994; Bowker et al. 1998). In addition to traditional subjects such as the history of Introduction 11 Translation Studies, theory of translation and translation techniques, courses on specialized translation are being offered on a variety of specialist text types, terminology, translation processing, the use of corpora and computer-assisted translation. The debate on how to incorporate e-learning into translator training is also gaining attention (Pym 2004) in response to the increasing demand for localization competence of translators (Wright 2004). 2. Contents of the book This volume contains a number of chapters written by established authors on topics dealing with recent orientations in the field, as well as chapters based on selected contributions presented at the 15th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes, held at the University of Bergamo (Italy) from 29 August to 2 September 2005 on the theme ‘New Trends in Specialized Discourse’. Various issues are addressed reflecting the immense changes in the field: translation strategy, the teaching of specialist translators, intercultural and multicultural transfer, quality assessment, translation revision and textual and terminological issues in bilingual and multilingual settings, including international organizations and the European Union. In an attempt to achieve a balance between theory and practice, some chapters analyze linguistic and textual features of special-purpose texts and their function in specialized communication, while others show how specialized translation has changed as a result of globalization and advances in technology. The sixteen chapters are divided into three sections: 1) theoretical and methodological issues, 2) quality and cultural issues and 3) textual and terminological issues. 2.1. Theoretical and methodological issues The first two chapters of Section One serve as an introduction to specialized translation in general. The first is written in English and 12 Maurizio Gotti / Susan Šarþeviü the second in German; however, both propose a similar hierarchy of LSP text types on an ascending cline or descending axis in the order of the degree of their complexity and language specialization. The whole spectrum of special-purpose texts is covered, ranging from technical manuals and instructions for specialists at one end to popular science texts and articles in educated journals for laymen at the other. Translation strategy can be determined by properly positioning the source text or parts thereof on the proposed cline or axis. The remaining three chapters deal with different aspects of legal translation in national, international and supranational settings. CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR commences his overview of specialized translation methodologies by emphasizing the importance of comparative linguistics with special reference to the lexicogrammar and focus on the lexis itself. Despite the need for translators to recognize lexis and process syntax, he reassures us that LSP scholars “have not lost sight of the pragmatic and rhetorical features that translation theory had initially reserved for the ‘higher’ planes of literature and philosophy”. On his cline, the top position is reserved for highly creative texts with frequent culture-based references and low intertextual influence. Translators of such texts are encouraged to produce a ‘new text’ in terms of pragmalinguistic choices, style and rhetorical strategies. According to Taylor, whether we like it or not, the future of specialized translation lies at the other end of the cline: Controlled languages are being developed so that technical texts with conventionalized structures can be mechanically reproduced by translation memory systems and other technical tools with a minimum of editing required. Examples illustrating techniques in specialized translation are cited from a case study of the English translation of Imago Italiae, a detailed history of Italian cartography. HANNELORE LEE-JAHNKE’s main concern is the teaching of specialist translators and facilitating learning by making students aware of the cognitive and mental processes of specialized translation. From her own experience, the acquisition of translation competence can be enhanced by incorporating the vertical axis of complexity and the horizontal axis of specialization into translator teaching for the purpose of analyzing, processing and generating special-purpose texts. The main factors to be taken into account on the vertical axis include the frequency of technical terms (usually coupled with an adverse Introduction 13 number of cultural specifics), the receiver’s knowledge of the subject- matter, as well as the sender’s knowledge of the subject matter and the purpose of the translation.