AKV 5005 Theory of translation

Prof. V. Kalėdaitė

Translation theory and the

non-literary text
 Main textbook
• Munday, Jeremy. 2008. An Introduction to
Translation Studies (e-book). Routledge.

• A short introduction (4:30) at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iffkVwa9l
no
 Other useful videos
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukqmyv50ij
Y ; Capita 2:07
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOlQ9OR2L
0o –TAUS: "The history of translation“ (the
tower of Babel) 3:23;
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrxX_JkIpIA
; Why Translation Is Like Music 4:22
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYQh2XhCt
ic ; Hidden In Translation: an Inaugural Lecture
by Prof Christina Schaffner 50:02; 2009-02-16
 MUNDAY, Jeremy. 2001. Introducing Translation Studies –
Theories and Applications. London and New York: Routledge
 J. Munday is a Professor at the University of Leeds,
Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American
Studies
Research interests:
• Translation studies, including stylistics, discourse and text
analysis in translation;
• systemic functional linguistics (especially evaluation and
appraisal theory);
• ideology in the translation of literary and political works and
speeches, with special reference to Spain and Latin America;
• corpus-based translation studies, including contrastive studies
of lexical patterns and semantic prosody;
• cognitive translation studies;
• the history of literary translators in the twentieth century.
 Chapter 1. Main issues of translation studies

STUDY QUESTIONS, CONCEPTS, TERMINOLOGY

1.1 The concept of translation

1.2 What is Translation Studies?
1.3 A brief history of the discipline
1.4 The Holmes / Toury ‘map’
1.5 Development of Translation Studies since
the 1970s
 A few general distinctions
• Translating v. interpreting
• Source language/text – SL / ST
• Target language/text - TL / TT
• Intralingual v. interlingual v.
intersemiotic translation
 1.2 – 1.3 Translation Studies
• Conferences,
• Books (John Benjamins, Multilingual Matters,
Rodopi, Routledge, St Jerome)
• Journals
• Grammar-translation method vs
communicative language teaching
• Academic investigation of translation:
– USA – translation workshops; comparative
literature
– Contrastive analysis
 “Translation Studies”
– self-perception
• Many people today think that Translation
Studies is mainly:
– Literary theory
– Cultural studies
• And, possibly:
– Communication studies
– Stylistics & Genre analysis
Translation Theory – Perspective from Linguistics
• Linguists perceive it as related to:
–Contrastive linguistics
–Pragmatics
–Discourse Analysis
–Stylistics
• Once dismissed as useless to
Translation Theory – all of these
areas have been re-animated by
corpus linguistics
 Translation Theories
The objectives of this course:
– To give a general outline of translation
theories in this century
– To show how these theories apply to non-
literary texts
– To demonstrate that translation practice can
benefit from theory
“There is nothing more practical than a
good theory”
 Translation theories
• Mostly a Translation Theory is:
–Product-oriented – focuses on the
translation
–Function-oriented – examines the
context and purpose of the translation
–Process-oriented – analyses the
psychology of translation and process
• But usually has elements of all three
 James S.Holmes (1988/2000) “The name
and nature of translation studies”

• Originally, a paper given in 1972 in

the Third International Congress of
Applied Linguistics in Copenhagen.
• It is considered to be “the founding
statement” of a new discipline.
• At the time translation research was
dispersed across older disciplines.
 Partial theories of translation
• Medium restricted – man or machine?
• Area restricted – specific languages/
cultures
• Rank-restricted – word/sentence/text
• Text-type restricted –different genres
• Time-restricted – historical view
• Problem-restricted – specific problems, e.g
equivalence
 Translation Theory - the professional
perspective
• Translator training
• Interpreter training
• Translation aids
• Translation criticism
• Translation quality
• Translation policy
• Professional translation standards
 Ch 1: Technical terms

• Approach (1) A way to deal with sth.

• Framework (1) (structure holding the
parts of sth. together) basic arrangement,
structure, or system
• Hypothesis (1) consists either of a
suggested explanation for a phenomenon
or of a reasoned proposal suggesting a
possible correlation between multiple
phenomena. (You may find another
definition!)
 Ch 1: Technical terms

• Interlingual translation (1) ‘translation

proper’: an interpretation of verbal signs by
means of some other language
(R.Jakobson)
• Metalanguage (1) A language that is used
to talk about another language, the object
language
• Method (1) A way of doing sth; procedure
 Ch 1: Technical terms
• Sign – Signified – Signifier (1) (A form
which stands for something); the
relationship between a concept (the
semantic content), the signified, and
some acoustic noise (vocal expression,
the spoken and written signal) or graphic
form which stands for the concept, namely
the signifier (Saussure)
 Ch 1: Technical terms
• Septuagint (70) (1) A translation into Greek of the
Old Testament made several centuries BC; because
of the ancient tradition that it was completed in 70 (or
72) days by 72 Palestinian Jews for Ptolemy II, King of
Egypt
• Scriptures (1)a) the sacred writings of the Jews,
identical with the Old Testament of the Christians; b)
the Christian Bible, Old and New Testaments (Šventas
Raštas)
• Theory (1) A formulated general principle
explaining the operation of certain phenomena
Look at the Finnish translation of a German poem by Morgenstern (1969). Give all the
reasons you can come up with of why this is considered to be a translation. A useful
hint: in Finnish, the verb kääntää ‘to translate’ also has the literal meaning ‘to turn’ (cf.
Latin fero, tuli, latum, ferre)