Филологические науки / 1. Методика преподавания языка и литературы

Lyubov Zrazhevska

East European University of Economics and Management, Cherkasy, Ukraine

Tailoring the Translation Course to the Situation

As far back as the history of language instruction goes, conscientious teachers have sought new and better ways to facilitate and accelerate language learning.

The study of translation and the training of professional translators is without question an integral part of the explosion of both intercultural relations and the transmitting of scientific and technological knowledge. The need for a new approach to the process of teaching and learning is certainly felt in translator and interpreter training programs.

Translation studies was thought of as a specialized branch of philology, applied linguistics, or comparative literature. Translator training revolved around the semantic transfer of words, phrases and whole texts from one language to another. The chief issue in the history of translation theory since Cicero in the first century before our era has been linguistic segmentation: should the primary segment of translation be the individual word or the phrase, clause, or sentence (producing sense for sense translation)? Even in our day, most of the best-known theorists of translation – J.C.Catford, Kornei Chukovski, Peter Newmark, Ian Mason are linguists who think of translation as primarily or exclusively an operation performed on language.

Translation courses have for generations used basically the same methodology, whether at university level, in secondary schools, or even in private language-teaching institutions. Translation as a technique has long been a part of general language-learning courses, and until the '50s was, indeed, the fundamental method used for teaching a foreign language (the grammar-translation method). With the introduction of the audiolingual method, the use of the native language was either banned from the foreign-language classroom or was highly restricted. Nowadays, however, it's no longer sinful to use the student's native language as a resource in order to facilitate foreign-language acquisition.

While using adapted material in these courses cannot be considered wrong, it is misleading, for the students are then not faced with the actual difficulties of real-life texts but deal with texts in which difficulties are controlled. The progressive ordering of the material can be done according to several kinds of difficulties: syntactic, lexical, terminological and content difficulties, where the overall meaning of the text is obscure, due, perhaps, to lack of background information on the subject. Most texts can be classified into more than one of these categories. In the courses we are discussing, the basic methodology will be to have students translate intensively.

It is, however, for the practical part of a translation course that creativity is needed. This activity should be spliced with a few others to break the monotony of most translation courses. The variety should reside mainly in the diversity of the texts selected for translation.

Classroom translation activities should be based on the students' and teacher's interaction in actually translating a text and discussing alternative means for expressing the author's message. In doing this we are meeting several needs:

• teaching to draw on background information, that is, the knowledge which they already have about the subject matter of the text;

• practicing in guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words will gradually increase students’ skills and confidence;

• generating students' research instincts – i.e., guiding them as to what they must more fully understand in order to produce an adequate translation, where they can research the subject or the terminology, how deep they should go in searching for background information, and who (which kind of professional) can be of help;

• raising their awareness that there is never one sole perfect end-product of translation;

• generating a conscious decision-making attitude when students compare different possibilities for the same text, or part of a text, and are faced with options;

• discussing the text's real and hidden meanings, thus analyzing the semantics of both languages;

• refining students' knowledge of linguistics and cultural intricacies based on the discussion of the text material; clarifying and standardizing translation norms;

• cueing students into frequent and effective use of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauruses;

• selecting appropriate transfer mechanisms for situations where it is necessary to overtranslate or undertranslate.

• allowing students to live out real translation experiences;

An efficient "know-it-all" translation teacher could, indeed, present most of this material to his/her students in lecture form. But as soon as the students are out of the teacher's reach, who can guarantee they will be able to effectively apply the guidelines they have been taught? However, if these aspects have been discussed in the classroom and the students themselves have felt the difficulties and made their own decisions (perhaps with the help of the teacher but not imposed by the teacher) they will be better prepared for a future in professional translation.

The end product of translation is the result of a series of phrases that the translator undergoes consciously or unconsciously and more or less intricately according to different factors: the purpose of the translation, the translator’s intellectual resources and other external influences. But the basic process remains the same: an author has transmitted his message via a certain code to a receptor who is the translator, that is the new author, who will transmit the same message via a different code to other receptors.

References:

1. Allen V.F. Techniques in Teaching Vocabulary. – Oxford University Press, 1983.

2. Brower R.A. On translation. – New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

3. Brower R.A. On translation. – Oxford University Press, 1996.

4. Newmark P. A Textbook of Translation. – New York, 1999.

5. Robinson D. Becoming a Translator. – London and New York: Routledge, 1998.