Translating Texts

An Introductory Coursebook on Translation and Text Formation

Brian Baer, Christopher Mellinger, Brian James Baer, Christopher D. Mellinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351847384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Clear and accessible, this textbook provides a step-by-step guide to textual analysis for beginning translators and translation students. Covering a variety of text types, including business letters, recipes, and museum guides in six languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish), this book presents authentic, research-based materials to support translation among any of these languages.

Translating Texts will provide beginning translators with greater text awareness, a critical skill for professional translators. Including discussions of the key theoretical texts underlying this text-centred approach to translation and sample rubrics for (self) assessment, this coursebook also provides easy instructions for creating additional corpora for other text types and in other languages.

Ideal for both language-neutral and language-specific classroom settings, this is an essential text for undergraduate and graduate-level programs in modern languages and translation.

Additional resources are available on the Routledge Translation Studies Portal: http://routledgetranslationstudiesportal.com

1 Introduction

Translating texts

One of the unique features of this coursebook is that, while it can certainly be used in the kind of professional translation program that gave birth to it, it is also designed to be used in the new contexts of translation pedagogy that have emerged over the past 10 years, specifically in departments of foreign languages, comparative literature, and world literature. At the same time, it seeks to address the new modalities of translation pedagogy that have arisen within professional education programs, including online instruction, typically asynchronous, as well as non-language-specific models. Within traditional contexts of professional translator education, this textbook could be used in an introductory course on translation or in a course on text formation, common in European translation programs. As for the new contexts of translation pedagogy, this textbook could be used in a stand-alone course on translation practice or integrated into a second-language composition course. In terms of the new modalities of translation pedagogy mentioned above, this textbook could easily be used in non-language-specific courses given the fact that it contains material in six languages and includes instructions for how to add on additional material in other languages, as needed.

Another distinguishing feature of this textbook is that it is research-based in a number of ways. First, it addresses what empirical studies have shown us about novice-level behaviors – and, increasingly, about novice-level conceptions of translation, and of language. It does so by developing the textual awareness necessary to guide the translator’s decision-making with the goal of fostering in novice translators the kind of top-down processing that characterizes the expert. Moreover, that textual awareness, or the sensitivity to what Gayatri Spivak refers to as “the protocols of the text” (2005: 107), is no less relevant to building translation proficiency as it is to building writing proficiency in another language.

This coursebook is also research-based in its use of corpora, defined by Federico Zanettin as a “collection of electronic texts assembled according to explicit design criteria” (2002: 11) – the design criteria in our case being genre-specific texts created over the last 10 years so as to ensure they document current conventions. These corpora allow for the systematic investigation of text types or genres as a whole and are useful for identifying the macro-level features of specific texts. Rather than relying solely on bilingual dictionaries, student-translators can use corpora to provide a more holistic understanding of how texts are made. At the same time, text-type- or genre-specific corpora are an effective way to instill in language learners a keener understanding of register and rhetoric while also challenging a structuralist understanding of language as a fixed and discrete code. They also offer a convenient vehicle for introducing digital humanities into the curriculum. For these reasons, a number of scholars have, over the past 20 years, advocated for the use of corpora in both translation (Bowker and Pearson 2002; Olohan 2004; Zanettin, Bernardini, and Stewart 2000) and foreign language courses (Hidalgo, Quereda, and Santana 2007; Sinclair 2004; Vyatkina and Boulton 2017). Moreover, those calls now have the support of a growing body of empirical research on the development, use, and integration of corpora in the translation classroom (e.g., Biel 2017; Laursen and Pellón 2014; Rodríguez-Inés 2014).

Therefore, with the primary purpose of developing the text awareness that we know to be crucial in supporting translators’ decision-making, this textbook provides stylistic and rhetorical analysis of a series of pragmatic genres, including recipes, instruction manuals, museum guides, patient information, news reports, and business letters in six languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The analysis is based on a series of corpora created for this purpose. Moreover, instructions for building corpora of this kind are provided in Appendix B so that students or teachers may develop their own for other text types and languages. However, a textbook such as this one – addressing both translation proficiency and second-language proficiency – would not have been possible even 15 or 20 years ago when certain beliefs regarding the relationship between translation and second-language acquisition remained firmly entrenched, namely, that translation activities necessarily interfered with second-language acquisition and that translation training should occur only after a certain level of language proficiency was achieved. And so, before describing the organization of this textbook and how to use it in the various contexts referred to above, let us first sketch out the factors that have made a textbook such as this one possible.

Why now?

In 2007 the Modern Language Association, the largest organization of language teachers in the U.S., issued a report titled “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World,” which urged departments of foreign languages to re-imagine the goals of foreign language instruction. The authors encouraged foreign language departments to reorient themselves away from the unrealistic goal of “replicat[ing] the competence of an educated native speaker, a goal that postadolescent learners rarely reach,” toward “the idea of translingual and transcultural competence, [which] places value on the ability to operate between languages” (MLA 2007). These authors also strongly encouraged language departments to offer courses on translation to diversify course offerings and better connect language proficiency with employment opportunities – with translation and interpreting being among the fastest-growing sectors in the global economy.

At roughly the same time, researchers began turning their attention to the relationship of translation to second language acquisition, demonstrating that exposure to translation training, once banished from the communicative language classroom, can actually enhance language learning (Laviosa 2014; Malmkjaer 1998; Rocha 2010). And while not all such studies were conclusive in establishing a direct link between translation activities and improvement in second-language acquisition, there are now many studies documenting a positive reaction to translation activities among second-language students (Carreres 2006; Conacher 1996; Hervey, Higgins, and Haywood 1995/2002; Lavault 1985), suggesting a role for translation in increasing motivation and, by extension, persistence. Informed by this growing body of research, Colina and Lafford (2017) have advocated for the inclusion of translation as a “fifth skill” in the language classroom, alongside speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

All this was happening against the backdrop of impressive growth in the sector of the economy often referred to as the language industry. In fact, a 2016 Forbes report listed translation as one of the 20 fastest-growing jobs in the country (Sola 2016), and in 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projected translation and interpreting to grow at a much faster rate than all other professions, at about 18% growth over a 10 year period (BLS 2019). Since then increasing numbers of foreign language departments, as well as departments of comparative literature and world literature, have begun to offer courses in the theory and practice of translation. While this is laudable, many departments are relying on faculty with degrees in foreign languages and literature and with little training or experience in translation or familiarity with translation studies. This textbook is designed to fill that specific but urgent need for research-based teaching materials that can be easily used by instructors with little or no training in Translation Studies, allowing language programs to take the “translational turn” (Backmann-Medick 2009) in a pedagogically-sound way while also providing a unifying structure in translation courses that are non-language-specific.

While the continued growth in the language industry has provided the most obvious justification for introducing translation into foreign language programs – connecting students with career paths – it is not the only one. More and more scholars are making the argument that translation pedagogy is not just for professional translators. The fact that translations are ubiquitous in our lives – whether we are aware of it or not – underscores the need for a more sophisticated understanding of the task of the translator on everyone’s part. Translation literacy is now seen as a key aspect of global literacy (Takeda and Yamada 2019) and, as such, no less relevant than information and digital literacy. Evidence for this growing emphasis on translation literacy can be seen in new academic programs, such as the University of Iowa’s minor in “Translation for Global Literacy” with its gateway course “Translation and the Global Society.” This notion of translation literacy underscores the idea that translation pedagogy is not just for professional translators. As Anthony Pym comments, “Translation scholars may need to break the unspoken pact that they have developed with the translation professions. They should instead adopt a view where everyone can translate, not just professionals, and everyone can be trained to translate better” (Pym 2018: 1; emphasis added).

Toward a research-based translation pedagogy

Another defining feature of this coursebook is that it is research-based in the sense that it was designed to address as directly as possible what we know from empirical research about students’ initial understanding of the task of the translator and the behaviors associated with that understanding. For example, Presas and Martín’s (2014: 273) study of “the implicit theories of translation students” revealed very mechanistic views of the act of translation as exchange, “which do not reflect the complexity of translation phenomena” (Presas and Martín 2014: 273). Moreover, these implicit theories of translation held by students suggest implicit theories of the nature of language, namely that natural languages are more or less equivalent codes and that all languages reflect the “same” reality so that, if one searches long enough and with the help of a big enough bilingual dictionary, a close equivalent for source texts, words and constructions can eventually be found.

These implicit theories of translation, and by extension of language, align well with what we know from a now rather extensive body of research on novice translator behavior, as opposed to that of experts or professionals. For instance, novice translators tend to translate small units (words, phrases) to the detriment of textual cohesion (e.g., Lörscher 1991; Tirkkonen-Condit 1992); they fail to check dictionary meanings against the context (e.g., Lörscher 1991, 1996); they lack a strategic orientation to solving problems (e.g., Göpferich 2010); and they overuse bilingual dictionaries, ignoring other resources, such as parallel texts, background reading, or targeted research (e.g., Krings 1986; Kussmaul 1995). Taken together, these behaviors are said to represent bottom-up processing, as opposed to the behaviors of experts or professionals, which are described as more top-down. In other words, the decision-making of professionals is guided by a keen awareness of the genre conventions of the text they are translating, among other things.¹

In addition to empirical studies of translator behaviors, there exists a rather extensive body of anecdotal evidence suggesting the kind of conceptual support novices need in order to better address “the complexity of translation phenomena” (Presas and Martín 2014: 273). Unsure of what should guide their decision-making, student-translators are often reluctant to alter source-text patterning, resulting in awkward-sounding texts lacking in cohesion, which are typically labeled “translationese.” If novice translations are, as researchers have shown (e.g., Kumpulainen 2018; Malkiel 2009), an effect of “bottom-up” processing, then our pedagogical approaches in introductory courses must be aimed primarily at developing a more complex understanding of translation as decision-making, providing the conceptual tools necessary to guide that decision-making, and thereby supporting the development of top-down processing, which begins and ends with text, hence the title of this textbook.

This textbook is designed specifically to address these behaviors and to inculcate more top-down processing by re-focusing student attention onto the text as the primary unit of translation. To that end, it offers corpus-based analysis of various text types, moving from the smallest units of translation (words and phrases), which is where students typically begin, and spiraling up to ever-higher levels of text, ending with a discussion of such “global” or supra-sentential textual features as cohesion and discourse organization. This spiraling up is meant to leave students with an awareness of the text as text before beginning the actual translation, which increases the likelihood they will exhibit greater top-down processing.

What is a text?

By text, we are referring to “units of language larger than a single sentence, typically comprised of several written sentences or spoken utterances grouped together in a particular sequence,” one that is “non-random” (Shreve 2018: 165). That is, the sentences that comprise a text “have been brought together deliberately for communicative purposes by a text producer in order to carry out a ‘definable communicative function’” (Crystal 2008) (Shreve 2018: 165); or, as Halliday and Webster (2014: 183) put it, texts are “coherent and interconnected pieces of language, as distinct from unorganized strings of sentences.” The definition of individual texts, however, almost invariably bleeds into the notion of text types or genres insofar as the creation of a text is governed by conventions:

The properties of the grouping [of texts] can vary according to the communicative setting in which it is used; variation in these properties can be used to classify texts into different text types for instance, an endeavor called text typology pursued both in text linguistics and translation.

(Shreve 2018: 165)

While this text-based approach to translation is commonly associated with scholars working at the University of Leipzig in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Otto Kade and Albrecht Neubert, their insights are shared by scholars from many cultures and historical periods. The Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, offered a concept similar to text types with his notion of speech genres. According to Bakhtin (1986: 64), speech genres are produced when “a particular function (scientific, technical, commentarial, business, everyday) and the particular conditions of speech communication specific for each sphere give rise to particular genres, that is, certain relatively stable thematic, compositional, and stylistic types of utterances.” For Bakhtin, speech genres were a natural outgrowth of his dissatisfaction with Saussure’s “too rigid a conception of code” (Holquist 1986: xxi), as represented by his idea of langue. As Bakhtin points out, this code is an abstraction, which no individual speaker can know in its entirety, except, perhaps, “the Biblical Adam, dealing only with virgin and still unnamed objects, giving them names for the first time” (1986: 93). As Bakhtin argues, speakers typically interact not directly with the abstract language system but rather with socio-culture “genres” or text types, which grow and evolve in specific socio-cultural contexts. “When we select words in the process of constructing an utterance,” Bakhtin explains,

we by no means always take them from the system of language in their neutral, dictionary form. We usually take them from other utterances, and mainly from utterances that are kindred to ours in genre, that is, in theme, composition, or style. Consequently, we choose words according to their generic specifications.

(1986: 87)

Bakhtin then suggests the pedagogical implications of a text-based understanding of language when he writes: “Words are strung together only in the first stage of the study of a foreign language, and then only when the methodological guidance is poor” (Bakhtin 1986: 86). Translation pedagogy that is not text-based would be, by analogy, akin to bad foreign language instruction that allows novice learners to pluck individual words directly from the abstracted code through the use of a dictionary and string them together in a way that typically reflects L1 patterning and often leads to the production of “texts” that are not only awkward but incomprehensible. The novice translator’s overreliance on bilingual dictionaries produces a similar effect.

Gayatri Spivak (2005: 94), too, lends theoretical support to a text-based approach to translation when she writes:

Grasping the writer’s presuppositions as they inform his or her use of language, as they develop into a kind of singular code, is what Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who has taught me a great deal, calls entering the protocols of a text – not the general laws of the language, but the laws specific to this text. And this is why it is my sense that translation is the most intimate act of reading.

Like Bakhtin, Spivak contrasts Saussure’s abstract langue to the “singular” code of a text, which can only be deciphered by entering the protocols of that specific text or text type. This ability to enter the protocols of a text – to realize that words acquire a specific valence within a text – is in fact a key aha moment in the development of translator proficiency. Growing awareness of textual protocols will lead students to become dissatisfied with bilingual dictionaries alone and so move on to consult other, more context-dependent resources, such as thesauri, corpora, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributions
• Editor and contributor biographies
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Translating texts
• TEXT TYPES: SAMPLES WITH TEXT ANALYSIS
• Appendix A: Sample grading rubric
• Appendix B: How to build a corpus
• References
• Index