Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English-language Translation Bc. Michaela Chlebdová Translation Quality in Non-literary Translation into the Second Language Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. et Ing., Jiří Rambousek, Ph. D. 2018 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. et Ing. Jiří Rambousek, Ph.D., for his kind help and valuable advice. I would also like to express my gratitude to all the translators and reviewers who have willingly participated in my experiment for their precious time and involvement. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 2. Theoretical Background ............................................................................................ 4 2.1 Directionality in Translation ................................................................................... 4 2.2 The Literary vs. Non-literary Translation ............................................................... 9 2.3 Translation Quality Assessment ....................................................................... 10 3. Methodology............................................................................................................ 13 3.1 Research Design, Materials, and Subjects ............................................................ 15 3.1.1 Subjects Participating in the Study ................................................................. 18 3.1.1.1 Translators ................................................................................................ 18 3.1.1.2 Reviewers ................................................................................................. 22 3.1.1.3 End-users .................................................................................................. 22 3.1.2 Selection of the Source Texts ......................................................................... 23 3.1.2.1 Text No. 1 ................................................................................................. 24 3.1.2.2 Text No. 2.............................................................................................. 24 3.1.2.3 Text No. 3 ................................................................................................. 25 3.1.2.4 Text No. 4 ................................................................................................. 26 3.1.3 Questionnaire Survey ..................................................................................... 26 3.2 Assessment of the Quality of the Target Texts ..................................................... 27 3.2.1 Categorisation of Errors ................................................................................. 28 3.2.1.1 Editorial Interventions Omitted from the Analysis .................................. 32 4. Results and Discussion ............................................................................................ 35 4.1 Error Count and Representation of Errors ............................................................ 35 4.2 Qualitative Error Counts and Representations of Error Categories ...................... 40 4.2.1 Substantial and Less Serious Shifts in Meaning............................................. 44 4.2.2 Counts and Representation of Qualitative Errors by Translators ................... 49 4.3 Quantitative Errors in L1 and L2 translations ....................................................... 52 4.4 End-user Assessment ............................................................................................ 53 4.5 Discussion and Suggestions .................................................................................. 55 5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 60 6. Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 63 7. Résumé .................................................................................................................... 70 7.1 English................................................................................................................... 70 7.2 Czech ..................................................................................................................... 71 8. Appendixes .............................................................................................................. 72 Appendix A: Source Texts .............................................................................................. 72 Appendix B: Target Texts with Corrected Errors ........................................................... 75 Appendix C: Examples of Tables with Categorised Errors by Individual Texts ............ 76 Appendix D: Questionnaire for L2 Translators .............................................................. 93 1. Introduction Although in the distant past directionality of translation was not an issue and many translations were carried out into non-mother tongues, Latin and Greek in particular, this view radically changed in the sixteenth century, when translation into the second language began to be regarded as of inferior quality and therefore undesirable. This opinion was carried over in the field of Translation Studies until the 1990s when some scholars set out to challenge it. Since then, the opinion on translations into non-mother tongue has been gradually changing. The claim against translations carried out into one’s second language has been that the language used by non-native speakers lacks the nativelike selection and fluency (Pawley and Syder 1983: 191) and that they are of inferior quality. For many years this axiom held true without any evidence obtained by means of a research. These days, it is widely acknowledged that translation into the second language (L2 translation) is a reality in many settings around the world (e.g. Pavlović N., Pokorn), in the cultures that use a “language of limited diffusion” in particular, and the issues of the directionality of translation have focused the attention of Translation Studies. The research conducted by Pokorn, for instance, aimed to determine whether the target audience is able to tell the directionality of translation of a set of literary texts. However, such texts usually provide the readers with much more clues regarding the direction of the translation than only the idiomaticity of the language. The readers might decide based on some signs of foreignization, for example. Yet it is the idiomaticity what translations into the second language are supposed to lack and why translators were (and sometimes still are) discouraged from translating into the second language. Therefore, non- literary texts seem to be more suitable to test this ability of the target audience 1 since many of them, e.g. some purely technical texts would not show such clues for the target audience (although this cannot be held as a general rule, of course). Furthermore, the issues of quality of translation into the second language have remained unresearched. Still, it would be beneficial to know potential differences in the quality of L1 and L2 translation, in the case when the second language is English in particular, since L2 translations can hardly be avoided in the translation practice. As the Pavlović claims, “even translators whose mother tongue is one of the ‘major’ languages are more and more frequently required to work out of their first language into English, the dominant language of the globalised world” (Pavlović 2007). This thesis sets out to explore the potential differences in the quality of translation of non-literary texts carried out by native and non-native speakers of the target language and to test whether the target audience of these translations is able to recognise the direction of translation. The basic assumption related to the research is that the knowledge of the differences in the quality of L1 and L2 translations can help translators who carry out translations into the non-mother tongue to concentrate on some specific aspects the related to the quality of L2 translations and thus improve the quality of their work. The main aim of the thesis is to examine potential differences in the quality of translations of technical and general non-literary texts from Czech into English performed by English native speakers (L1 translations) and by Czech translators translating into English as into their second language (L2 translations). Based on the findings, the study further seeks to identify the variance in the representation of the specific types of errors in the translations and to identify the types of errors which prevailingly occur in the L2 translations and could be related to the 2 direction of translation. Finally, it is going to examine a potential link between the directionality of the translation and the opinion of potential end-users on the quality of the respective translation. This aspect is also closely related to the ability of the target audience to distinguish texts translated by native speakers of the given language from texts translated by non-native speakers of the language, namely of English in the case of this study. Therefore, this ability of the target audience is also going to be tested.