are not confined to one speech community. In principle, the terms should be translated; institutional translation is cultural (so in principle, the terms are transferred, plus or minus) unless concerned with international organizations.
The profession of translator is co-extensive with the rise of technology, and staff translators in industry (not in international organizations) are usually called technical translators, although institutional and commercial terms are ‘umbrella’ components in all technical translation.
Technical translation is primarily distinguished from other forms of translation by terminology, although terminology usually only makes up a out 5-10% of a text. Its characteristics, its characteristics, its grammatical features merge with other varieties of language. Its characteristic format is the technical report, but it also includes instructions, manuals, notices, publicity, which put more emphasis on forms of address and use of the second person.
Technical style (p151)
Unless its non-technical language is jazzed up and popularized, it is usually free from emotive language, connotations, sound-effects and original metaphor, if it is well written…Part of a good technical translator’s job often consists in rephrasing poor written language and converting metaphors to sense.
Terms (p152)
The central difficulty in technical translation is usually the new terminology. I think the best approach to an opaquely technical text is to underline what appear to be its key terms when you first read it and then look them up (even if you think you think you know them-my memory is full of words I half know or do not know) in the micro of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the relevant Penguim.
Even then, the main problem is likely to be that of some technical neologisms in the source language which are relatively context-free, and appear only once. If they are context-bound, you are more likely to understand them by gradually eliminating the less likely versions.
Concept –words are notorious for their different meanings in various technologies…Other terms have various senses when variously collocated.
Varieties of technical style (p153)
Paepcke (1975) has in fact usefully distinguished four varieties of technical language: (1) scientific; (2) workshop level; (3) everyday usage level; (4) publicity/sales. However, a scale like this one is likely to be valid only for one or two terms in a few fields. Based on medical vocabulary, I suggest the following levels: (1) Academic. This includes transferred Latin and Greek words associated with academic papers; (2) Professional. Formal terms used by experts. (3) Popular. Layman vocabulary, which may include familiar alternative terms.
However, these are general categories to which it is often arbitrary to assign one or another term. In some areas, the nomenclature is clouded by additional obsolete, obsolescent or regional terms.
Technical and Descriptive terms (p153)
A further problem is the distinction between technical and descriptive terms. The original SL writer may use a descriptive term for a technical object for three reasons: (1) the object is new, and has not yet got a name;
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(2) the descriptive term is being used as familiar alternative, to avoid repetition; (3) the descriptive term is being used to make a contrast with another one.
Normally, you should translate technical and descriptive terms by their counterparts and, in particular, resist the temptation of translation a descriptive by a technical term for the purpose of showing off your knowledge, thereby sacrificing the linguistic force of the SL descriptive term. However, if the SL descriptive term is being used either because of the SL writer’s ignorance or negligence, or because the appropriate technical term does not exist in the SL, and in particular if an object strange to the SL but not to the TL culture is being referred to, then you are justified in translating a descriptive by a technical term.
(p154) Professional technical translators have a tendency to make a mystique out of their craft by rejecting any descriptive term where a TL technical term exists; a technical term is always more precise than a descriptive term.
Whilst the technical term may be a translator’s find and will help to acclimatize the professional reader, it is I think mistaken to invariably prefer it, bearing in mind that the descriptive term in the SL text may serve other communicative purposes. In cases where the piece is technical and there is clear evidence that the descriptive, the more general and generic term is probably only being used because the narrower technical term is rare or lacking in the SL, the use of the technical term in the TL text is certainly preferable.
Conversely, where an SL technical term has no known TL equivalent, a descriptive term should be used.
Beginning technical translation (p154)
When I say of the terms that the function os as important as the description, and always easier to grasp , I am in fact bringing you back to the application of the laws and principles. When you translate a text, you have to be able to stand back and understand roughly what is happening in real life, not just, or as well as, convincing yourself that the sentence you have just translated makes sense linguistically… even though much scientific and technological language and terminology can be translated ‘literally’ and in newer subjects contains an increasing number of internationalisms and fewer false friends, you have to check the present validity in the register and dialect of the terms you use. But here again, there are priorities. Technical terms that appear on the periphery of a text, say relatively context-free in a list or a foot note, are not as important as those that are central; their nomenclature can be checked without detailed reference to their function or the description. In a word, to translate a text you do not have to be an expert in its technology or its topic; but you have to understand that text and temporarily know the vocabulary it uses.
Translation method (p155)
When you approach a technical text, you read it first to understand it (underline difficult words) and then to assess its nature (proportion of persuasion to information), its degree of formality, its intention (attitude to its topic), the possible cultural and professional differences between your readership and the original one. Next, you should give your translation the framework of a recognized house-style, either the format of a technical report adopted by your client, or, if you are
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translating an article or a paper, the house-style of the relevant periodical or journal.
The title (p156)
Normally, as a translator, you are entitled to ‘change’ the title of your text. All titles are either descriptive or allusive; in a non-literary text, a descriptive title that succinctly names the subject and states its purpose is appropriate. (Allusive titles are suitable for some imaginative literature and popular journalism, and may have to be changed.)
The advantage of the title of a scientific article is that it normally states the subject, but not always the purpose or intention of the process described…It is usually a recall of the purpose of an operation rather than the minutiae of its stages described in an article which makes it coherent and logical for the reader.
(p157)Misleading adjective plus noun collocations for standardized terms are one of the most common sources of error in technical translation. In non-standardized language, transparent or motivated verb plus object, or subject plus verb collocations, can be equally misleading. But this can lead to professional deformation.
Going through the text (p158)
You should read the article through and underline all words and structures that appear to contain problems. These may include:
(1) Unfamiliar apparently transparent words…
(2) Figures and symbols. These have to be checked for TL equivalence and order—the
innumeracy of some arts graduates can be gathered by the fact that initially they simply copy figures and symbols unthinkingly into their versions.
(3) Semi-empty words which are likely to be reduced to ‘is’ or ‘in’, etc., in the TL version. (4) Verbs which more often than not require a recasting of the TL sentence. (5) ‘Pun words’.
You can then translate sentence by sentence, making grammatical shifts to form natural language.
(p159)in a technical translation you can be as bold and free in recasting grammar (cutting up sentences, transposing clauses, converting verbs to nouns, etc.) as in any other type of informative or vocative text, provided the original is defective. Here particular you, who are a professional writer, should produce a better text than the writer of the original, who is not. However, with the terminology take no risk; play for safety.
As a technical translator, you vary your format in relation to your customer. If he wants a ‘cover-to-cover’ translation, you normally keep the house-style of the original. If you translate for a publication, you adapt its house-style, and you should peruse its back- number to see what this is.
Lexically, the main characteristic of technical language is its actual richness and its potential infinity—there are always unnamed bones and rocks. In many areas of science, Graeco-Latin terms are used for classification purposed, and in translation they serve as internationalisms, and can be used as functional equivalents when a SL term for a natural object (flora, fauna, new minerals are named by an international committee of nomenclature) is missing in the TL, since the referent is not known in the TL environment.
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Conclusion (p160)
Perhaps inevitably a technical translation is so varied in topic and often diverse in register, and so badly written, that it is not easy to make helpful generalizations about it…In fact, bibliographies and diagrams are the first things you should look at.
Technology being an explosion, escalating exponentially, ongoing, this is the field, on the frontier of knowledge, where you have to be most up to date.
Terminology makes up perhaps 5-10% of a text. The rest is ‘language’, usually a natural style of language; and here you normally find an authoritative text aspires to such a style; if it does not, you gently convert it to natural and elegant language—the writer will be grateful to you.
Chapter 15 The Translation of Serious Literature and Authoritative Statements
Introduction (p162)
I can say that normally the translation of serious literature and authoritative statements is the most testing type of translation, because the first, basic articulation of meaning (the word) is as important as the second (the sentence or, in poetry, the line) and the effort to make word, sentence and text cohere requires continuous compromise and readjustment.
Buhler’s expressive function of language, where content and form are on the whole equally and indissolubly important, informs two broad text-categories: serious imaginative literature and authoritative statements of any kind, whether political, scientific, philosophical or legal.
The two categories have obvious differences: (a) authoritative statements are more openly addressed to a readership than is literature; (b) literature is allegorical in some degree; authoritative statements are often literal and denotative and figurative only in exceptional passages, as in broad popular appeals…Further, the element of self-expression in authoritative statements is only incidental but the translator has to pay the same respect to bizarreries of idiolect as in fantastic literature.
(p163)A further generalization for the translator: literature broadly runs along a four-point scale from lyrical poetry through the short story and the novel to drama.
Poetry (p163)
Poetry is the most personal and concentrated of the four forms, no redundancy, no phatic language, where, as a unit, the word has greater importance than in any other type of text. And again, if the word is the first unit of meaning, the second is not the sentence or the proposition, but usually the line, thereby again demonstrating a unique double concentration of units.
The integrity of both the lexical units and the lines has to be preserved within a context of: (a) corresponding punctuation, which essentially reproduces the tone of the original; and (b) accurate translation of metaphor.
(p164)Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling, in particular, and however concrete the language, each represents something else- a feeling, a behavior, a view of life as well as itself. Original metaphors the translator has to reproduce scrupulously, even if they are likely to cause cultural shock.
The translator can boldly transfer the image of any metaphor where it is known in the TL culture.
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In such poems there is a case for creating a culturally equivalent TL metaphor, or converting the SL metaphor to sense or, where there is space, adding sense to the metaphor; but if the translator regards the metaphor as important, it is his duty to carry it across to launch it on the target language and its culture.
Whilst I think that all images have universal, cultural and personal sources, the translator of poetry cannot make any concession to the reader such as transferring the foreign culture to a native equivalent.
(p165) The transition from Chinese to English culture is made easier because all the images mentioned are not unfamiliar to an English reader.
A translator can hardly achieve even a parallel effect in poetry—the two languages, since all their resources are being used here as in no other literary or non-literary medium, are, at their widest, poles apart. Syntax, lexis, sound, culture, but not image, clash with each other.
Now I think that in most examples of poetry translation, the translator first decides to choose a TL poetic form as close as possible to that of the SL. Although the rhyming scheme is part of the form, its precise order may have to be dropped. Secondly, he will reproduce the figurative meaning, the concrete images of the poem. Lastly, the setting, the thought-words, often the various techniques of sound-effect which produce the individual impact…Emotionally, different sounds create different meanings, based not on the sounds of nature, nor on the seductive noises in the streams and the forests, but on the common sounds of the human throat…The fact is that, however good as a translation, its meaning will differ in many ways from the original—it will, in Borrow’s phrase, be a mere echo of the original, not through Gogol’s glass pane—and it will have its own independent strength. A successfully translated poem is always another poem.
(p166)whether a translator gives priority to content or manner, and, within manner, what aspect—metre, rhyme, sound, structure—is to have priority, must depend not only on the values of the particular poem, but also on the translator’s theory of poetry. Therefore, no general theory of poetic translation is possible and all a translation theorist can do is to draw attention to the variety of possibilities and point to successful practice, unless he rashly wants to incorporate his theory of translation in to his own theory of poetry. Deliberately or intuitively, the translator has to decide whether the expressive or the aesthetic function of language in a poem or in one place in a poem is more important.
The short story/novel
(p170)From a translator’s point of view, the short story is, of literary forms, the second most difficult, but here he is released from the obvious constraints of poetry—metre and rhyme—whilst the varieties of sound-effect are likely to play a minor role. Further, since the line is no longer a unit of meaning, he an spread himself a little—his version is likely to be somewhat longer than the original though, always, the shorter the better. He can supply cultural glosses within the text—not, as in poetry or drama, delete or banish them to some note or glossary.
(p171)Since formal and thematic concentration and unity may distinguish the short story from the novel, the translator has to be careful to preserve certain cohesive effects.
…two types of key-words I propose to define: leitmotifs are peculiar to a short story, characterizing a character or a situation. When they are repeated, they should be appropriately
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