1. FACOLTÀ DI STUDI UMANISTICI Lingue e culture per la mediazione linguistica Traduzione
LESSON 1
Prof.ssa Olga Denti
a.a

2. What is translation?
What words come to your mind when talking about translation?

3. INTRODUCTION TO KEY ISSUES IN TRANSLATION
PART 1
INTRODUCTION TO KEY ISSUES IN TRANSLATION

4. Communication Sender message Receiver Codification decodification
feedback

6. Language and culture
Culture: a series of practices Meaning making: identity, belonging Meaning: context, usage and historical circumstances Language: a shared code Concepts: organized, arranged, classified into a conceptual system

7. Key concepts Translation:
MULTILINGUAL
Translation:
INTERDISCIPLINARY
involving Languages, Linguistics, Communication Studies, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, thus Sociolinguistics Textlinguistics DA Speech act theory Ethnography

8. Some definitions Translation: a. the subject field, b. the product,
c. a process-oriented approach linking formal and functional aspects of communication
Cross-cultural communication: learning a new language v requiring a translator (w.) or interpreter (o.)
Translation: the development of intercultural communication skills, cross-cultural awareness & understanding between peoples
Monitoring effectiveness

9. Therefore,
Successful cross-cultural communication: structures, functions and socio-cultural aspects
Process of translation:
original written text (the Source Text, henceforth ST) in the original verbal language (Source language, henceforth SL)
a written text (Target Text, henceforth TT) in a different verbal language (Target Language, henceforth TL)

10. In particular,
Meaning making: from the text level to the surface level
language elements relate to context of text, situation and culture:
1. The ST is assessed against its cultural and social context
2. Its communicative function is recognized
3. Its structure is evaluated (from wider textual elements to grammar & lexis)

11. The process of translation:
Syntactic component: formality
Semantic component: content
Pragmatic component: purpose
Intended meaning of the ST writer’s message:
semantic v pragmatic (context-free/context-bound)
(Ulrich 1992: 8)

12. Translation involves Comparing 2 diverse languages
Understanding their socially-conditioned aspects
Clarifying their functions in a particular context
Our main aim: translation skills, being able to translate different text types and discourses “to a satisfactory degree of communicative equivalence and competence” (Ulrich 1992: 9)

13. The quality of translation:
Text type
Socio-cultural context (client, market or translator)
Quality standard
Key Skills needed: linguistic & cognitive, training/practice, connected (reading & writing, text & stylistic analysis), working knowledge of the topic

14. Jakobson’s categories
Intralingual translation (or rewording)
Interlingual translation (or translation proper)
Intersemiotic translation (or transmutation)
(Jakobson 1959/2000: 114 in Munday 2001: 5)

15. The Origin of Translation studies
James S. Holmes (1972, 1988) – a cluster of issues concerning translating and translation
Mary Snell-Hornby (1988) & Mona Baker (1997) – a ‘new’ independent discipline

16. SOME NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF TRANSLATION
PART 2
SOME NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF TRANSLATION

17. Conflicting guidelines for the translator (Ulrich 1992: 15)

18. Keys issues over the centuries
Word v Sense (unit, focus, ST & TT relation)
Literal v Free
Faithful v Free
Form v Content
Pedagogic translation v Imitation
Formal v Dynamic
Semantic v Communicative
Degrees of Faithfulness
Word-for-word
Imitation

19. The origin
CICERO (literal v free translation) & HORACE (faithfulness to the sentence) (1st century BCE – )
ST JEROME & MARTIN LUTHER (4th century CE – Middle Ages) – not word-for-word T but a readable & intelligible vernacular version of the Bible (TL)
DOLET (1540) – guidelines for the translator (sense/content, SL/TL knowledge, meaning faithfulness, plain speech, style)
Latin -> French, religious -> literary/poetic texts
DRYDEN (17TH c.) – metaphrase, paraphrase, imitation + morel duty of translator: TL orientation

20. DENHAM (1656) v FRASE TYTLER (early 1900s): idea, style/manner, ease
DENHAM (1656) v FRASE TYTLER (early 1900s): idea, style/manner, ease. Loyalty to truth & beauty
Romanticism (18th c.) & creative power: GOETHE – Literary translation: plain prose, parodistic, symbiosis/fusion
Victorian England & national pride (guide the TL reader)
From the late 18th century to mid-1900, a grammar-translation method mechanic/ repeated study of grammatical rules and structures)

21. Direct method or communicative approach to English lg teaching (replicate authentic lg learning conditions)
ARNOLD (1914) – direct, simple & noble style; aesthetics over accuracy
In the 1960s, in the USA: the translation workshop concept, comparative literature & contrastive analysis approaches
SL content & form (SL-oriented approach) v TL reader by adapting the ST form to TL conventions (TL-oriented approach)

22. NIDA (1960s) – shift to the message receiver + + formal v dynamic equivalence (text in context + pragmatic effect)
Same period: NEWMARK’s categories of semantic (contextual meaning) & communicative translation (effect) + KOLLER’s analysis of equivalence
No one single way to translate + no one single methodology
VINAY & DARBELNET’s taxonomy of the linguistic changes occurring in translation
CATFORD’s linguistic model and LEUVEN-ZWART’s 1980s translation shift approach

23. REISS & VERMEER’s text-type and skopos theory (1970s-1980s) + NORD’s text-linguistic approach
HOUSE’s register analysis + the development of discourse-oriented approaches (1990s): BAKER & HATIM & MASON – Halliday’s linguistic approach – translation as a communication w/in a socio-cultural context
EVEN-ZOHAR, TOURY & the Manipulation School – systems theories & target-oriented ‘descriptive’ translation studies
LEFEVERE’s (1980s-1990s) – cultural studies, gender studies & translation & postcolonial translation theories

24. BERMAN & VENUTI – the foreign element in translation and the ‘invisibility of the translator (Munday 2001: 16); naturalizing as the main method to translate
STEINER’s ‘hermeneutic motion’, POUND’s use of archaisms, BENJAMIN’s ‘pure language’, DERRIDA & the deconstruction movement
SNELL-HORNBY’s integrated approach

25. Munday 2001: 10

26. Munday 2001: 13

27. Future trends MT (machine translation) v HT
Text linguistics, DA, AI, Computational linguistics -> analysis of the SL texts and their synthesis in the TL
MAT (computerized dictionaries, text-related glossaries, concordance)