Lecture 2. Ways, models and types of translation / 2 hours/
PLAN
1. Ways of STT.
2. Text segmentation.]
3. Problems of genre and style in translation.
1. Ways of translation.
A translator first of all should determine the way of the target text translation, i. e. «a measure of informative order of the text being translated». And the first stage a translator should determine the fact in which way the original text should be presented: in full scale or partially. In dependence on communicative task at this stage he (she) should choose full or shortened way of translation (the last version is sometimes called an abstract translation).
The scientific-technical text is not exclusion out of this rule. As a result of reduction one gets such documents as thesis, synopsis, abstracts, summaries, digests etc. Generally, a shortened way of translation is performed by one of a fundamental ways of translation: selective or functional translation.
Selective translation as a way of shortened translation is a way of choosing, from a translator’s point of view, key lexical items of the original text and their full translation. All the other components of the original text are flung off as secondary ones in view of the result achievement. Such translation probably is based on the exactness of key items selection – a translator should see if some important parts of the original information would not disappear in the course of translation. That is why this way is characterized by certain subjectivity.
Functional translation as a way of shortened rendering of the original text in the other language means the arrangement of the text as a product of translation based on the lexical items of the text being translated, Functional transformation may be based on lexical-and-semantic, grammar and stylistic transformations of the original text with the aim of simplifying it.
(In this connection it is worth mentioning the sociolinguistic experiment carried out two years ago in the group of students of ecology and biotechnology of NULES (2nd study year). First they were reading the original text taken from Internet, then they were divided into two groups: the first one had to do the selective translation, while the second one – the functional translation. As the results of the experiment show, the second subgroup demonstrated better progress (11% higher than the first one). They reproduced more facts, their speech contained more special terms and lexical items, and they were closer to the source text).
So far we have been considering shortened ways of translation. In contrast to it, full translation is aimed at the detailed arrangement of all the components of the original text (in L1) in the translation lexical items (L2). The most widespread kinds of full translation are the following: 1) literal or word-by-word translation; 2) semantic translation; 3) communicative translation.
The literal translation is a complete reproduction of the text in L1 into the text in L2. Generally, literal translation is seldom used for communicative purposes; and functions in the field of scientific language, for example, for linguistic analysis. It gives the possibility to render the very syntactic features of the original source text.
E.g.: In the year 2000 world population was about 6 billion people. (У 2000 р. населення світу становило близько 6 млрд. людей).
Semantic way of translation is characterized by the fullest possible rendering of contextual meaning of the original text elements in the items of L2. The process of semantic translation makes up two strategies’ natural interaction: on the one hand, orientation at way of expression adopted in L2, and, on the other hand, strategy of preserving the characteristics of the original form of expression. The first strategy refers to the generally adopted lexical-grammar elements of the original text such as standard syntactic structures, punctuation, sentence length, conjunctions, special terms and idioms etc. The second structure seems proper while translating non-standard author’s expressions, original stylistic techniques, non-typical vocabulary etc.
Semantic translation is used mainly in case of scientific, academic editions, assigned for limited society of specialists or for documents existing in a single copy – the so-called authentic translation. It is used for translating scientific publications, technical manuals and instructions, legal documents – in those fields where the high information precision is needed. Generally, semantic approach demands full and exact translation, as the target text is unique and valuable.
Communicative approach means option of such way of original information rendering which results in text in L2 with the influence on a recipient which corresponds to L1. The main object in such way of translation is not as much language unit of the target text as its intentional and emotive-esthetic value. We may consider this way as literary of art translation. It is hardly suitable for scientific-technical style, as a translator has the right to the original text creative revise, and that is why his final product will be undoubtedly marked by subjectivism.