Competence in translation: a complex skill, how to study and how to teach it

Translation involves variable tasks that make specific demands on the cognitive system of the translator. What enables translators to cope with these tasks is their translational competence. On closer scrutiny this complex knowledge and skill summarized as competence turns out to be of a tripartite structure. The structure of translational competence includes three kinds of competence: (1) language competence, (2) subject competence, (3) transfer competence. The way these competences are configured into a complex whole singles out translation studies from other kinds of communication research.

To be precise, competence (1) and (2) are shared with other communicators, whereas competence (3) or transfer competence is the distinguishing domain of the translators. Transfer skills integrate language and subject knowledge with the sole aim of satisfying transfer needs. Nevertheless, there would be no grounds for competence (3) without the translator’s thorough grounding in (1) and (2). The crucial question is how these three competences interrelate efficiently, effectively, and adequately to form the admittedly graded translator’s competence that guarantees the achievement of the highly variegated scale of tasks expected from translators in their extremely multifaceted work routines. In other words, translation competence is more than transfer competence, but at the same time language and subject competence amounts to less than transfer competence. Evidently, it is the way these competences supplement or enrich each other that “does the trick”.

But this is not the whole story about translational complexity. The interplay of knowledge and skill components can be observed in two more ways. First, it is a feature of the task to translate any individual text, and, second, it is characteristic of the variety of texts or text types to be translated by any individual translator. Here the competence profiles of the professional and, to a lesser degree, of the translation student show remarkable variations. In the actual translation process we can study how translators subtly develop and negotiate their competence resources so that they can successfully handle their complex tasks.

Thus it becomes clear that translation is much more than a linguistic topic. It is also more than to study languages in contrast. It is of course true that an important part of translation studies deals with the tactics and strategies of converting L1 texts into L2 texts. On the other hand, though, there is no denying that judgements about translation, that is about their adequacy, refer primarily to linguistic and subject adequacy. Yet, “measuring” a translation, contrasting it with a lesser product and ascribing high quality marks to it, or, for that matter, pointing out its weaknesses leading to inadequacy, always needs to have recourse to how successfully the transfer has been effected. A translation should not only be linguistically correct and make sense with regard to any particular subject area. It has to stand in some kind of equivalence relation to the original. But “equivalence” here has nothing of the mathematical or logical identity connotation. It is rather an admittedly misleading concept characterizing the notion of “transfer of something else”, and this something else stands in a value relationship to a certain “subject” or topic expressed in an original (L1) language. Thus equivalence in translation is not an isolated, quasy-objective quality, it is a functional concept that can be attributed to a particular translation situation.

It comes as no surprise then that equivalence is also a complex concept having linguistic, subject (or content), and transfer (or comparative) aspects. The logic of our complex approach makes it unlikely that equivalence is achieved by any single competence. If one speaks, for instance, of linguistic equivalence then this is, strictly speaking, not part of a translational approach. What is actually meant by this is a statement of contrastive linguistics or language typology singling out the linguistic correspondence between the more or less isolated elements of two or more language systems. Of course, we can integrate “linguistic equivalences” into translation studies. But in doing so one has to be carefully aware of the extremely limited value and hence restricted usefulness of this characterization in terms of a translational value judgement. What rightly appears to be linguistically equivalent may very frequently qualify as “translationally” non-equivalent. And this is so because the complex demands on adequacy in translation involve subject factors and transfer conventions that typically run counter to considerations about “surface” linguistic equivalence. Equivalence can never rest entirely on linguistic pillars.

Similarly, translation equivalence cannot be fully achieved within the subject or content realms. It is often said that a translation is about the same as the original. And this sameness of reference, the denotational identity is supposed to be the hallmark of a good translation. But is it? In a very general sense, it is. But in actual fact it is not, when it comes to the detailed meanings negotiated by subject-competent translators in their attempts to cope with the original version and to create translation adequacy. And such adequacy is achieved by translations that are couched in a particular target language and destined for a particular purpose in the target community, which has a particular, historically grown view of the topic involved. Precise and 100% subject equivalence is not a viable proposition. It is often not only hard to achieve, but it may not be a desired aim at all.

For translational equivalence to come about “subject equivalence” must be married with “linguistic equivalence”. And the intermarriage is the work of the translator’s transfer competence. The later is in itself substantially supported by the former, viz. language (L1 as well as L2) knowledge and (often highly specialized) subject expertise. Transfer competence refers to the mental equipment that constitutes the translator’s unique cognitive set or ability of matching language and subject competences. In detail, these are the processes comprised by ongoing search, retrieval, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. Based on practical experience trasfer competence is both actualized and “stored”. It is knowledge in action and as repertoire. It is constantly updated in the translator’s practical work and on many occasions often only indirectly related to a particular translation assignment. Transfer strategies can never be isolated from linguistic and encyclopaedic considerations.

There is an intricate network between all three of them. The mental processes underlying translation and the linguistic implementation leading to the target text occur in anything but a neatly organized linear fashion. The translator’s competence acts upon text segments of varying sizes. In essence this is a graded performance of hierarchically matching so-called units of translation, which may be defined as meaning-cum-form stretches of smaller and larger, simple and composite, systemic and textual structurings. Along with this transfer strategy and in fact in close feedback with it, we can observe the exploitation of the encyclopaedic and linguistic resources of the translator. Most of the minute translation tactics, before they become fully routinized, can be described as complex instances of language, subject and transfer problems that tax the translator’s competence or rather the mediated interplay of the three competence constituents. Any individual text segment identified and focused in the source text is subjected to bottom-up and top-down searching, matching, and recreating on the basis of local as well as global assessments. And these assessments are again monitored by what can be called the tripartite translation competence.

(From Albrecht Neubert “Translation Studies - An Interdiscipline”,

1994. – Pp. 411 – 416).