scholarly journals Termini in der technischen Übersetzung: Rettungsanker, Tyrannen – oder auch nur Wörter?

Author(s):  
Ulrike Oster

The understanding of ‘term’ in traditional terminology theory reduces the lexical problems of technical translation to a mere substitution of the source-text term by a target-text term. In translation studies however , a number of issues have been highlighted which are not covered by traditional terminology theory, e.g. cultural specificity or the importance of textual and pragmatic considerations. This paper first analyses how the new communication and cognition-oriented approaches to terminology account for these aspects of technical translation. Then it briefly presents results of a language-pair and domain-specific study which allows us to exemplify some of the issues that have been discussed and to reach some specific conclusions for the translator of this linguistic combination.

LETRAS ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Javier Franco Aixelá

Tradicionalmente, la traducción científico-técnica ha contado poco en la reflexión tanto lingüística como traductológica por partir de un lenguaje escasamente creativo. Hasta las últimas décadas del siglo XX los investigadores no comienzan a prestarle verdadera atención. En este trabajo se analizan las aportaciones de los estudios de traducción modernos a esta modalidad de transferencia interlingüística. La traductología se desarrolla a partir de una perspectiva textual y se vuelca sobre la optimización del texto meta, como un instrumento de comunicación semiautónomo que debe encajar en un nuevo sistema de expectativas y convenciones. Se presta atención a dos aspectos de la traducción: la interferencia y la posibilidad de mejora del texto original. Traditionally, scientific and technical translation has been given less importance in linguistic and translatological research because it uses a variety of language which is barely creative. Until the last decades of the 20th century, researchers had not given it real attention. The main contributions made by modern translation studies are analyzed in this paper. Translation studies takes a textual stance and focuses on optimizing the target text, which is understood as a semi-autonomous communication tool that must fit into a new system of expectations and conventions. Two other translation issues are also addressed here: interference and the possibility of improving the source text.


2019 ◽  

The paper, in its first part, outlines the Slovak research into audiovisual translation (AVT) from the 1950s up to the present, paying attention to the most important scholars as well as publications that helped to shape and establish the discipline within Slovak translation studies. It is based on the ongoing bibliographical research and the historical explanation mapping the development of AVT research in Slovakia by I. Tyšš – e.g. his publication Myslenie o audiovizuálnom preklade na Slovensku: 1952 – 2017 (Thinking on Audiovisual Translation in Slovakia: 1952 – 2017, 2018) – as well as on own findings covering the last two years. In more detail, the first part of the paper highlights that it was primarily thanks to a younger generation of translation studies scholars – especially E. Perez (née Janecová), L. Paulínyová (née Kozáková) and J. Želonka – that in 2012 the Slovak research into AVT finally became systematic. The second part of the paper is devoted to the phenomenon of the so-called second-hand translation of originally Russian audiovisual works that may be observed in Slovakia in recent years. The questionable nature of this phenomenon is stressed since the Russian language is not a language of limited diffusion and definitely not remote in relation to the Slovak cultural space. On the example of two documentary films – Под властью мусора (Held Captive by Rubbish, 2013) and Дух в движении (Spirit in Motion, 2015), the author discusses and analyses the problems that occur when translating originally Russian AV works into Slovak through the English language, i.e. the negative shifts resulting from mis-/overinterpretation of the source text, translation by omission, wrong order of dialogues, cultural specifics and incorrect transcription.


2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vahid Medhat ◽  
Hossein Pirnajmuddin ◽  
Pyeaam Abbasi

This article applies the theory of possible worlds to the field of translation studies by examining the narrative worlds of original and translated texts. Specifically, Marie-Laure Ryan’s characterization of possible worlds provides an account of the internal structure of the textual universe and the progression of the plot. Based on this account, one of the stories from Rumi’s Masnavi is compared to Coleman Barks’s English translation. The possible worlds of the characters and the unfolding of the plots in both texts are examined to assess the degree of compatibility between the textual universes of the original and the translated texts and how significant this might be. It also examines how readers reconstruct the narrative worlds projected by the two texts. The analysis reveals some inconsistencies in the way the textual universes of the original and translated texts are furnished and in the way readers reconstruct the narrative worlds of the two texts. The inability of translation to fully render the main character results in some loss in terms of the pungency and pithiness of the original text. It is also shown that the source text presents a richer domain of the virtual in comparison, suggesting a higher degree of tellability in the textual universe of the Masnavi’s narrative.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Gonzálvez-García

Abstract Building on Tabakowska’s (1993, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2013) full-blown defense of a cognitive linguistic approach to literary translation as well as on previous research dealing with the implementations of Construction Grammar(s) for translation studies (Szymańska 2011a, 2011b; Serbina 2015), this paper critically examines the role of iconicity in selected lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnets capitalizing on the passage of Time-Death and their corresponding translations in present-day Spanish and Italian. Specifically, drawing on Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006) and Contrastive Construction Grammar (Boas 2010a; Boas & Gonzálvez-García 2014), I focus on instances of secondary predication with verbs of sensory perception, causative constructions and aspectual constructions iconically connected with the above-mentioned motif and demonstrate that iconicity emerges as a very useful communicative ‘filter’ that can help to minimize any undesirable arbitrariness which may obscure the semantico-pragmatic interpretation of the source text and/or its rendering into the target text.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Faber ◽  
Arianne Reimerink

Abstract Legal language and its translation are considerably more complex than scientific and technical translation because the legal object is a text that performs an action. For this reason it is not only necessary to consider the legal terminology but also the structure of the text itself as well as the verbs used and their performative act. In this paper, we explore how the analysis of terminological meaning in legal texts can be addressed from the perspective of Frame-Based Terminology (FBT), a cognitive approach to domain-specific language, which directly links specialized knowledge representation to cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics. In a case study on international agreements in the context of environmental law, we analyze the argument structure of verbs as well as the conceptual categories of their semantic arguments providing insights into the semantic profile of this text type. The representation of the verb class and its semantic arguments can be considered a type of interlingua that could be used as a basis for translation.


Tekstualia ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (36) ◽  
pp. 47-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Crickmar

The discourse of translation has always seemed to lean towards the negative. Over the years translation scholars have discussed refractions and deformities in translation, as well as losses that need to be compensated for and infi delities committed by unwary representatives of this treacherous craft. Regardless of the specifi c subject of research, there usually is some sense of implied failure on the part of the target text. The situation becomes even more complex, when the source text itself exhibits a failure of some kind, as is the case with Dorota Masłowska’s debut novel. The young Polish author in question intentionally breaks the rules of her native language and challenges Polish literary conventions, thus causing a translational dilemma. The article poses the question, whether the translator should carry the said failure into the target text or should (s)he ‘correct’ it and, as a result, conventionalize (domesticate) the translation. In other words, is the translator always bound to fail… to fail?


Author(s):  
Norbert Bachleitner

AbstractThe English translation of Aichinger’s novel appeared in 1963, that is at a time when her writing did not yet seem appropriate for a wider public. The American translator Cornelia Schaeffer therefore adapted the novel by ›clarifying‹ opaque phrases and ›normalizing‹ unusual expressions or by simply omitting them. She tries to provide her readers with a more or less realistic story of children trying to escape from Nazi terror. Furthermore, she does not adequately render leitmotifs such as Aichinger’s variations of the word »nachweisen « referring to the notorious (Arier-)Nachweis. Sometimes it is clear that deviations from the meaning of the source text are due to the lack of the translator’s command of German. Most interesting for comparative translation studies are passages that are open to interpretation in the German version, e.g. Ellen’s striving for the »Allererste«.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 22-35
Author(s):  
Jonė Grigaliūnienė

This paper aims to consider the impact corpora have made on language studies and to touch upon the interface between corpora use and translator training/practice. A small-scale survey conducted among the translation trainers/professionals and translation students, with the aim of finding out whether professional translators and students are aware of the existence of corpora and to what extent they use them in their work, revealed that both the trainers and the students are well aware of corpora, but they still prefer translation memory technology to using corpora when translating. They have also pointed out that they would be interested in a service which quickly provided domain-and-language specific corpora tailored to their needs and a tool for extracting terminology from a domain specific corpus. The paper presents a tool which is now widely available for academic institutions in Europe and which gives a chance to quickly and easily compile a specific corpus, extract keywords, provides concordances and gives a useful word sketch that could be of great help when translating. The paper concludes that corpora have yet to make an impact on translation studies and that this will depend on raising awareness of the usefulness of corpora for translation training and practice and the availability of corpora tools that could meet translator needs.


2021 ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
Тетяна Ляшенко

In the paper, we off er the translatological defi nition of the concept of culture, relevant for literary translation as a culturological phenomenon. We believe that the given defi nition combines the main aspects of its interpretation in culturology, socio-cultural anthropology, and intercultural communication. Such an approach allows outlining cultural background knowledge of the translator, which is necessary, on the one hand, for understanding of the text and, on the other, for the adequate translation of cultural information. The article analyses various theories of the understanding of culture and the tradition of its research in the translation studies, particularly in German translatology. The combination of interpretive, linguistic and translational turns in the cultural sciences is identifi ed as a perspective for translation studies. The attention focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of common interpretations. The paper considers the issues of meaningful and spatial defi nition of the concept of culture. The study characterizes the understanding of culture in the process of intercultural communication and the role of literary translation in it as well as clarifi es the peculiarities of the refl ection of culture in the literary text. The elements of culture that constitute translation problems are both extralinguistic concepts, i.e. phenomena and events that take place in a particular linguocultural community (the culture described by language), and “culturally conditioned” units of language as markers of a particular culture (the culture in language). In this research, we exemplify the possible ways of solving the problem of identifi cation and translation of cultural information in literary translation. It is important to complete a systematic description of culture in literary texts to enable its identifi cation at the macro- and microstructural levels. The article points out the need to consider the issue of identifi cation and translation of cultural information not only at the stage of implementation of the message in the language of translation, but also at the stages of decoding the source text and its recoding. The prospects for further research are outlined, which consist in the operationalization of the concept of culture at the empirical level, a systematic description of cultural manifestations in the source text, and a systematic approach to the reproduction of cultural information in the translated text. Key words: culture, translation studies, intercultural communication, literary translation, literary text.


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