Материал: Fordítás-vizsga

Inroduction to Translation Studies Answered Exam Questions English II/3

Fordításelmélet alapjai vizsga

Fontos rovidítések:

@ACbefore common era ACcommon era

DTS-descriptive translation studies

SL-source language

ST-source text

TL-target language

TT-target text

1. Translation definition (27oldalt!!!!! olvassak utána)

It is a process or activity of translating words from one language into words from another. And during this process, we are able to collect information or data.

The purpose of the translation is to convey the original meaning of the message, taking into account the cultural and regional differences between the both parties.

In the beggining translations were made mostly for pleasure by writes, poest and inviduals with the taste for literature or science. But in the second half of the 20th century the passion of translating become a profession on its own. Universities, collages and other educational facilities started teaching it, this created new requirements for theory formulation.

On linguistic aspects of translation

•Rewording - an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language

•Translation properan interpretation of verbal by means of some other language

•Transmutationan interpretation of verbal signs by means of sings of non-verbal signs systems

Translation is a mental activity in which a meaning of given linguistic discourse is rendered from one language to another. It is the act of transferring the linguistic entities from one language in to their equivalents in to another language. Translation is an act through which the content of a text is transferred from the source language in to the target language (Foster, 1958). The language to be translated is called the source language (SL), whereas the language to be translated into or arrived at is called the target language (TL). The translator needs to have good knowledge of both the source and the target language, in addition to a high linguistic sensitivity

as he should transmit the writer's intention, original thoughts and opinions in the translated version as precisely and faithfully as possible

2. Significance of translating/interpreting

Definition of interpreting

Interpreting is a service that happens at the moment. The only resource of an interpreter is experience, good memory and quick reflexes.

Interpreters work on projects that include live translation: Conferences and meetings, live TV. Different between translation and interpreting

The key differences between interpretation and translation are found in each service's medium and skill set: interpreters translate spoken language orally, while translators translate the written word. Both require deep cultural and linguistic understanding, expert knowledge of subject matter, and the ability to communicate clearly.

Significance of translating / interpreting

Translation is a tool for different nationalities to get to know each others culture and to communicate between them.

Our history developed by passing on the information from generation to generation, with the help of translations this information exchange extended to a nation to nation level.

With the translation of litreature the cultural exchange of the bordering nations made them alike. Finally the power of translating and interpreting made international realations so strong that we are able to maintain things like the Europen Union.

3. Translation in teaching of foreign languages (117 oldalt scanelt könyv!!)

A translation is by definition text-bound, and confined to the two skills of reading and writing. Translation is a difficult skill which must be done well in order to be productive and rewarding. You need a lot of motivation, a very good knowledge of the language and the culture around it. Translating can hurt more than help sometimes because a bad translation can lose its meaning and can make you even beileve things that the original text was against.

And that is the cause of the need for good translations in teaching foreign languages expecially.

4. Basic translation theories

We need to know three main theories:

•Transformation Approach

•Denotative Approach

•CommunicationApproach Transfomation Approach

The transformational theories consist of many varieties which may have different names but they all have one common feature: the process of translation is regarded as transformation. According to the transformational approach translation is viewed as the transformation of objects and structures of the Source Language into those of the Target Language.

In the transformational approach we shall distinguish three levels of substitutions:

• -morphological equivalents;

•- lexical equivalents ;

•-syntactical equivalents. In the process of translation:

•at the morphological level all morphemes (both word-building and wordchanging) of the TL are substituted for those of the SL.E.g. smallest (has two morphemes –small is a word building morpheme and –est is a word changing morpheme. In the process of translation we substitute these morphemes by their equivalents in the TL;

•at the lexical level words and word combinations of the SL are substituted by the

words of the TL;

• At the syntactic level syntactic structures of the SL are substituted by those of the TL.

Denotative Approach

According to the denotative approach the process of translation is not just substitution but consists of the mental operations:

•-translator reads( hears) the text in the SL;

•-translator finds a notion and concept that correspond to this message;

•- translator formulates a message in the TL relevant to the above notion and concept. If we use this approach during translation and are not taken into account similar words in another language, as opposed to the transformational approach the relationship between the source word and the target word is occasionali rather than regular.

Communication Approach

When communicating we inform others about something we know The communicational theory of translation was suggested by O.Kade

Communication may be defined as an act of sending and receiving some information which is called a message.

Information sent may be of any kind: gestures, words, pictures, but we shall limit ourselves to verbal communication only.

That is in order to formulate a message we use our system of interrelated data which we call a thesaurus.

We shall distinguish between two kinds of thesauruses: language thesaurus and subject thesaurus.

Language thesaurus is a system of our knowledge about the language which we use to formulate a message, whereas a subject thesaurus is a system of our knowledge about the content of the message.

The translator should have two language thesauruses ( the TL and the SL) because he should decode the source message and encode the target one.

5. Translation ranking

With each routine translation, it is noticeable that there are different rankings for the translation One rank of translation consists of rather simple substitutions whereas another involves relatively sophisticated and not just purely linguistic analysis.

Several experiments have been carried out to develop the translation theory(J.Firth, Y.Retsker, J.Catford, V.Komissarov):

•among those one of the most popular in the former Soviet Union was the “theory of translation equivalence level (TEL)” developed by V.Komissarov.

•according to this theory the translation process fluctuates passing from formal interlanguage transformations to the domain of conceptual interrelations.

•according to Catford a certain set of translation tools characteristic of a certain level constitutes a rank of translation and a translation performed using that or another set of tools is called rank bound.

All of these theories try to explain the exact practical process of translation but this has failed to this day.

Transformational approach

Quite convincingly any language there are certain regular syntactic, morphological, and wordbuilding structures which may be successfully matched with their analogies in another language during translation.

It forms the basis of machine translation design – almost any machine translation system uses the principle of matching forms of the languages involved in translation.

The difference is only in the forms that are matched and the rules of matching. Denotative approach