Translation Theory |
71 articles in this category (not counting subcategories) |
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Tradurre la letteratura
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Problematiche relative alla traduzione di testi letterari in prosa e testi poetici
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NAIVE TRANSLATION EQUIVALENT
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The author claims that most adults produce sentences in a foreign language, either in speaking it or translating into it, by tacit translation of corresponding words of their native language. Also, unless they are linguistically sophisticated, most people tend to translate native-language texts into another language as if each word in their language had one meaning or function. The author has found out, both by observation and research, that an average translator tends to render a word from her/his native language into a foreign one by translating its most frequent meaning, even though the particular word does not correspond to the most frequent translation equivalent in a particular context. For instance, there is no doubt that the most frequent French equivalent of the English preposition for is pour. Theefore, if asked to translate the phrase jump for joy into French, a linguistically naïve native speaker of English will most likely produce *sauter pour joie rather than the proper sauter de joie, because to her/him for simply “means” ‘pour’. By using pour, the most frequent French translation of for, in a context in which it cannot be used, the English-speaking translator has produced a wrong translation, which the author calls NAÏVE TRANSLATION EQUIVALENT.
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Why translation is art as well as science
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This article provides a theoretical framework for understanding the artistic, if also scientific, nature of the act of translating an initial set of concepts into the expression of a second language.
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Machine Translation of Poetry
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Machine translation of poetry seems to be very possible now and it is a real option for minority languages. Richard Richens points out that “if a Georgian speaker wishes to appreciate the imagery of Welsh poetry, machine translation might be well prove to be the ideal approach” (Madsen, 2009). It is true that the output of machine translation often sounds gibberish and incoherent but this should not hinder or stop research in the field. Google’s attempts to generate and translate poems might be rewarded within the next five or ten years, just like the attempts of those computer programmers who designed the first chess programs that beat a human player in 1950s. What needs to be kept in mind, however, is that the translation of poetry is a creative art that requires from a translator to follow certain rules as well incurs subjective involvement when comparing the translated text with its original. Although many computer programs are now well-suited for the translation of simple iambic lines with one- or two-syllable words, the machines still have a long way to go in order to simulate human understanding and intuition. Translating Russian poetry, for example, where rhyme and meter are dominant elements, computer programs are always pulling between form and content, and as a result, often have to compromise semantic accuracy, word choice and order, lexical levels, etc. Of course, only the human translator can be a true mediator between the author and the reader in expressing emotions of poems; however, machine is not necessarily required to produce an exact copy of the original. It can produce a “fake” of the original: a fake poem lacks any criminality provided that it stays as close to the source text as possible and has a similar emotional impact on the target reader.
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Bilingualism and Translation: Cognitive Constraints on Comprehension of Specialized Texts
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Bilingualism can only be seen as an initial stage in translator’s profession. Although multilingual speakers do often have necessary expertise in specific domains, the cognitive challenges they face are due to the lack of academic knowledge of the languages, absence of cultural competences, differences in mental dictionary, and specificity of cognitive and psychological processes in their brains versus those of trained translators’. Also, translation requires continual practice and discipline. Unfortunately, not all bilinguals inherently possess these qualities; however, not all clients understand this.
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