HOW TO TRAIN TRANSLATORS IN A WORLD OF CHANGE Anthony Pym

Who are we? ATA certified translators? Who teach more than they translate? Who translate more than they teach? Who want to become teachers? Who want a few suggestions about how to teach?

CARTE du jour Starter: A case for enlightened ignorance Main course: À choisir: How to make Translation Studies respond to students’ questions Lessons as discovery procedures Afters: The multilingual translation class Cost-cutting and short-changing Renegotiating the pact with the translation profession

What do we know? Is post-editing SMT more efficient than translating from scratch? Is pre-editing SMT more effective than post-editing? Should always apply your client’s TM 100% matches? Should you translate fast then revise slowly, or vice versa? Should you revise a translation with or without looking at the start text? Should you translate into L2? Can you translate 30% faster without losing quality? Are translators able to negotiate directly with text-using clients?

Getting it right? Brazilian Portuguese Catalan Dutch French German Greek Icelandic Italian Japanese Russian Spanish … 25 000 translators!

Getting it right?

Getting it right?

Getting it right? No L2 translation? Direct contact with translator? One translator per client?

Getting it right?

Getting it right?

Getting it right? Why is Durban so sure she is right? Why are we so sure professionals are our aim? (400 subjects represent 333 000 professionals?

Enlightened ignorance The professional as expert? Training as a master-apprentice relationship? Or a process of discovery? Using simple empiricism?

What students want to know

Questions about professions Money-related matters Entering the translation market Desirable skills and how to keep them updated Daily routines of translators and their relationship to clients

Questions about research How can theory help practice? What theories need to be learned? How valid a science is Translation Studies? What is the future of Translation Studies? How is research carried out?

Questions about how to... How can translation quality be measured? What should be done with a start text that has mistakes? How can we translate humor, dialects, idioms, and culture-specific items? How can we find a balance between the start and target texts? What happens in the brain of a translator or interpreter?

Questions about technologies Will machines replace translators? Which translation tools are most useful for translators? What new forms of translation will new technologies encourage?

Basic empiricism Admit you don’t know. Formulate the problem as a proposition that can be tested (a hypothesis). Test it. Report the results to the people that they can best serve. Change the hypothesis following the test. Go to step 1 again.

Basic theorization Pretend you know. Formulate your knowledge in terms and models. Organize evidence in terms of your theory. Argue against other theories. (And thus construct and legitimize a decision-making authority)

A model to test ST = TT1, TT2, TT3… TTn Select just one TT, quickly and with justified (ethical) confidence.

Testing the model Piss off, you bastards! ¡Largaos, asquerosas! ¡La leche con las moscas! ¿Por qué no se largarán de una puñetera vez? ¡Largo, cerdas!

A model to test The basic translation unit is the sentence (in written translation and interpreting).

A test of the hypothesis

An ethics to test Non-ethical question: What does this mean? Ethical question: What do you mean? (from Arnaud Laygues)

A man testing the ethics

A woman testing the ethics

© Intercultural Studies Group Testing norms Welcome to Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Canada’s most acclaimed large-vocabulary continuous-speech dictation system. With Dragon NaturallySpeaking you can compose e-mail messages, create reports, draft letters, edit proposals, create reports, and more, all by speaking to your computer instead of typing. © Intercultural Studies Group

© Intercultural Studies Group Testing norms Welcome to Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Canada’s most acclaimed large-vocabulary continuous-speech dictation system. With Dragon NaturallySpeaking you can compose e-mail messages, create reports, draft letters, edit proposals, create reports, and more, all by speaking to your computer instead of typing. © Intercultural Studies Group

© Intercultural Studies Group Testing norms © Intercultural Studies Group

© Intercultural Studies Group Testing skopos theory Hypothesis: If the one text is translated with different instructions, different translations will result. Test: Half the class translates for Purpose A, the other half for Purpose B. Text: Sir James Watts used his economic wealth to become a gentleman, although this was not without contradictions. When he entered Parliament he fought for equality, but he sent his son John to Eton. His son would become accustomed to the ways of the upper social class. However, when Sir James died in 1898, his widow could not afford to send John to Eton any more. © Intercultural Studies Group

© Intercultural Studies Group Testing skopos theory Hypothesis: If the one text is translated with different instructions, different translations will result. Test: Half the class translates for Purpose A, the other half for Purpose B. Text: Sir James Watts used his economic wealth to become a gentleman, although this was not without contradictions. When he entered Parliament he fought for equality, but he sent his son John to Eton. His son would become accustomed to the ways of the upper social class. However, when Sir James died in 1898, his widow could not afford to send John to Eton any more. © Intercultural Studies Group

© Intercultural Studies Group Testing skopos theory 1 = Eton / Eton 2 = Eton / THAT school or similar 3 = Eton SCHOOL / Eton 4 = PRESTIGIOUS school Eton / Eton 5 = a prestigious school LIKE Eton 6 = a prestigious school / Ivy league school © Intercultural Studies Group

© Intercultural Studies Group Testing skopos theory © Intercultural Studies Group

Testing localization Working in groups of three or four, select a multinational company or agency (e.g. the World Bank, Ikea) and see how its website is localized. Can you make clear distinctions between what is translated and what is localized? Does the company adopt a general approach of standardization or adaptation? Now choose a national or local website of a company in the same field. How does it use localization and/or translation? Write up your answer in about half a page. . 

Testing localization

Testing localization

Testing localization

Testing technology Working in groups of 4 or 5, as far as possible, invent two longish English-language utterances (one or two sentences) where one is context-dependent and the other is context independent.  Then have both these sentences translated into one language, then back into English, then into another language, and then back to English. The sentence pairs (both sentences traveling together in each case) must make this trip using three different technologies: 1. Voice only (no writing allowed, no computers) 2. Pen-and-paper only (folded over each time, as described below) 3) Google Translate. 

Testing technology Hypothesis 1: The more powerful the technology, the more stable the messages. Hypothesis 2: The context-independent sentences will be more stable than the context-dependent messages, under all conditions. Working in groups, please write a short report of what happened, and why you think it happened. 

Playing telephone

What the professor knows