FALEVI 2 YEAR

Teacher: Mr. Aquino

Student: Roberto Gimnez
Subject: Academic Writing
Essay: Translation and Interpreting
We can say that translation is the communication of the meaning of a source/language
text by means of an equivalent target/language text, this is for me, the most short and
precise definition for translation. We can also say that translation is a way to make
certain group of people to understand the text/document in their own language. Anyway,
between al the definitions we find in text books, web pages, e-books, they all have one
thing in common, to make the source text be understandable to the target audience.
Hermeneutics is the art of interpreting. Although it began as a legal and theological
methodology governing the application of civil law, canon law, and the interpretation of
Scripture, it developed into a general theory of human understanding through the work
of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida. Hermeneutics proved to be much bigger than
theology or legal theory. The comprehension of any written text requires hermeneutics;
reading a literary text is as much a hermeneutic act as interpreting law or Scripture.
Skopos theory focuses on translation as an activity with an aim or purpose, and on the
intended audience of the translation. It forces us to see translation as a project, involving
many factors, rather than as work on just one text, also address ethical issues in social
terms (explanation, loyalty). However it has some weaknesses like: The concept of
purpose (or Skopos, or Zweck) is an idealism, The theory is unfalsifiable, The theory
does not address equivalence as an underlying default norm. You may ask yourself:

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how can a translator profit from this theory? Well, its quite simple, by applying the
Skopos TT, their translations will be more acceptable by all sectors of the population,
not just for one sector.
Accuracy it does matter when youre translating a text, because if you misinterpreted a
text, youll lose all credibility and that isnt good for your line of work. However if you
apply the skopos theory, it will be more reliable than a text translated in a literal form;
but, still a text translated literally can be understand by a very small group of people, a
very well educated group of people, but the problem is that there arent too many well
educated people. To avoid this inconvenient we must target our audience, we must do a
translation specifically for a sector of the population; it can be farmers, workers, etc., in
other words, every day common people. Each sector has to understand the same
message than the other sectors, if that is the case, then we have done an amazing job.
The skopos theory has very strong points like the factors that made a good translation as
accurate as possible, also is very aware of the importance of the role played the by the
commissioner/client. To translate means to produce a target text in a target setting for a
target purpose and target addressees in target circumstances. In skopos theory, the status
of the source text is lower than it is in equivalence-based theories of translation. The
source is an "offer of information", which the translator turns into an "offer of
information" for the target audience.
Skopos theory, like other functional approaches, has also contributed to a more
differentiated conceptualization of the agents involved in the translation process. Instead
of simply having a sender and a receiver, we have learned to distinguish between writer,
client, translator, publisher, recipient and addressee and so on. In this sense, skopos
theory has helped to shift the discipline towards a more sociological approach.

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Translation and interpreting, they both came along, mostly because translating is kind of
interpreting, but in text format, also interpreting is a form of translation without the text,
and is far older. Undoubtedly interpreting antedates writing, because translation became
official after the appearance of written literature.
On a certain level, translation is impossible. What is said in a particular language is said
in a distinct form of life, a historical context of meaning. The only way to understand a
text is to read it in its original language; the only way to read a language is to be
familiar with its form of life. Nonetheless, as Walter Benjamin put it, we must translate.
Translation is not a simple substitution of language, but a hermeneutic exercise of
interpreting how a meaning can be transposed into a historical-linguistic horizon
different from the one in which it originated. What emerges in the target language is not
identical to the original, nor wholly different; it is a new expression of the meaning, an
effect of its history.
Notwithstanding being used in an informal sense as interchangeable, interpreting and
translation are not the same, interpreting takes a message from a source language and
change that message into a different target language (ex: English into Spanish), the
interpreter will take in a complex concept from one language, and use or choose the
most appropriate word in order to render the message in the most accurate way possible.
There is always a risk for the translators to spill over the words, to use too many terms
in order to shape the text according to the target audience, it say is a risk because it can
be useful, but also it can be very bad, for example: if you are going to translate for an
Spanish audience from an English text, of course you will have to use more words in
order to shape the text for the Spanish audience, but if you have to translate in the

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opposite way (Spanish to English), you will have to use less words in your translation in
order to shape the text for your audience.
On legal translations, the comprehension it seems to show at least three different levels:
(1) what the term or legal expression can mean with the documents abstraction in
which are contained (the different means in the dictionary), (2) what the term or
expression means in that document in particular and (3) the legal projection of the
content from that document regarding the effectiveness.
With the advance in technology, some believe that the translator job is becoming to an
end, with all the translation programs out there in the web available, it might be true, but
nowadays we are far from that, because no matter how advanced they are (the apps)
always there has to be an human approval, an human correction, because the machine is
not capable of reasoning (yet), so in order to adapt the translation for the targeted
audience, you have to hire the services of an translator or interpreter, whatever the
situation might be.
Nowadays, the translators works more with large companies around the world,
translating important documents for them, this doesnt mean that they only work with
companies, of course they also work with common people, but the interpreters works
with all kinds of people every day, in courts, with tourists, always in front of an
audience, not all the time, but most of the time they do.
A translator may translate parts of the original text provided, indicating, what he is
doing. But, a translator should not take the role of and moderator and purposely delete
or change passages only to please someones interest.
Fidelity (or faithfulness) and transparency, dual ideals in translation, are often at odds. A
17th-century French critic coined the phrase "les bellesinfidles" to suggest that

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translations, like women, can be either faithful or beautiful, but not both. Transparency
is the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to
have originally been written in that language, and conforms to its grammar, syntax and
idiom.
In order to be a competent translator and interpreter, you have to fulfill some
requirements such as: a very good knowledge of the language, written and spoken, an
excellent command of the language into which they are translating, familiarity with the
subject matter of the text being translated, a profound understanding of the etymological
and idiomatic correlates between the two languages and a finely tuned sense of when to
metaphrase ("translate literally") and when to paraphrase, so as to assure true rather than
spurious equivalents between the source- and target-language texts.
In our digital age, electronic formats concern not just our texts, but also our
communications with clients and other translators. Thanks to the Internet, professionals
from all over the world can be in regular contact by email or various forms of instant
messaging. Work can be sent and received electronically, across national and cultural
borders. This has several consequences. First, in theory, you can work for clients
anywhere in the world. The market for translations need not be your city or your
country. A source text received at 5 pm in Tarragona can be sent to a translator in New
Zealand, who will return the translation before 9 am the following morning, Tarragona
time. Time zones can thus be used creatively, and work can thus come from companies
that are very far away. All you have to do is list your name, language combinations and
areas of specialization on one of the many web sites that aim to put translators and
clients in touch with each other. One would expect this process to lead to a situation
where the fees paid for translations will become virtually the same all over the world, in
keeping with theories of a global market. This, however, is very far from happening.

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Translation is still a service that depends on a high degree of trust between the translator
and the client. Little constant high-paid work will come from unseen clients; the fees
paid in different countries still vary widely; the best contacts are probably still the ones
made face-to-face and by word of mouth.
A second consequence of electronic communications is the increased security risk.
Translators quite often work on material that is not in the public domain, and this is
indeed one of the reasons why relations of trust are so important. When sending and
receiving files, you will have to learn various forms of zipping, secure FTP, or other
company-specific forms of encoding, with all their corresponding passwords.
A third consequence is that electronic communications make it relatively easy to
distribute very large translation jobs between various intermediaries. The client may
want to market their product in 15 European languages. They hire a marketing company,
which hires a language-service provider, which hires a series of brokers for each
language, who give the work to a series of translation companies, who pass the texts on
to translators, often freelancers. In this kind of system, the client may be paying as much
as four times what the actual translators are receiving per translated page. But each link
in the chain is revising, coordinating and producing the various translation products,
adding value as they go. This means the text the translator produces is commonly not
the same text as the one actually used, and there can thus be little question of copyright
over the translators work.
It also means that translators are sometimes very far removed from the end client and
the overall context of the texts they work on. Translators in projects like software
localization quite often see no more than lists of phrases, along with glossaries that are
to be respected. The resulting work can be quite isolating and dehumanizing.

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Electronic communications have also been used to enhance communication between

translators, especially through Internet forums for professional translators. These are
usually classified by topics and/or language pairs. Some may be open, in others
participation is restricted to registered members. The traffic (number of emails) in each
group varies from a few emails a month to hundreds a day. In these forums translators
are very willing to exchange advice, give tips, and generally discuss their work. Simply
by reading the posted messages, students and novice translators can learn about
translation and see the kind of support that professionals give each other. Discussion
lists for professionals usually have their own communication guidelines, and so new
participants see a specific way of interacting among professionals. For example, when
asking about terminology, professional translators usually send a short message in
which they give the term, some context, suggested translations and the consulted
sources. This model gives valuable hints about terminology mining and teamwork
skills. Or again, by reading messages about a specific computer tool, novice translators
often discover that the program is in constant evolution and has functions they would
have otherwise overlooked. These forums thus build a valuable bridge between students
and the professional world. They also put paid to the stereotype of the professional
translator somehow isolated behind a wall of dusty dictionaries.
The world of business knows that the economy is global; the world of academia has
been slower to recognize the global unification of research through communication
technology. A university can no longer remain content within its national boundaries; it
must become a center for inter-national collaboration. We only understand the other by
entering their horizon. We only enter the horizon of the other by acknowledging its
otherness. We must meet. We must interpret. The contemporary university must become

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a center for inter-cultural and intra-cultural dialogue if it is to remain relevant in the

twenty first century.
In this on growing business, we must be prepared mentally, physically and spiritually, in
order to face the ethical dilemmas that we will have along the way, however, if we are
prepared, it should be easier to surpass those barriers, of course it will not be easy, but
when it comes, we will be prepared.

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Sources

J.M. Cohen, "Translation", Encyclopedia Americana, 1986, vol. 27, p. 12.

FreLa notion de fidlitentraduction, (The Idea of Fidelity in Translation), Paris,

Didier rudition, 1990, p. 231.

Christopher Kasparek, "Prus' Pharaoh and Curtin's Translation," The Polish

Review, vol. XXXI, nos. 23 (1986), p. 135.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/text
Handouts of my 1st year 2014,
- Hermeneutics,
- legal translations,
- The Need for Inter-Linguistic Collaboration,
- The Need for Inter-National Collaboration,
- Skopos theory.
http://isg.urv.es/library/papers/BiauPym_Technology.pdf
http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/online/translation/BiauPym_TechnologyAndTranslation.pdf