1.
Native Language Competence and Foreign Language Interference in Interpreter
Training. Unpublished MA Thesis. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, 2000.
The aim of the thesis was to inspect some
issues of native language competence and foreign language interference among
interpreting trainees and their trainers. To achieve this end, an experiment
was conducted during which interpreters of varied training and professional
experience were asked to perform a sight-translation task from English, their
first foreign language, into Polish, native to all of them.
The
results of the experiment have suggested existence of a vast number of
phenomena, of which some seem to be inherent to the translation process itself
and its internal, mental mechanisms, regardless of the professional experience,
whereas other can be viewed as dependent on such factors as professional
experience and language competence.
Instances
of interference of various kinds, most notably of lexical interference, seem to
belong to the first group of the phenomena: their distribution was relatively
equal among the subjects, regardless of the amount of their interpreting
practice. Therefore, it has been suggested that foreign language interference
plays an important role in the process of oral translation. The reason for this
claim is that at least some part of the processing performed by the
interpreters before the actual interpreting started was conducted in the source
language. On many occasions, the SL text was ‘pre-processed’ mentally by
interpreters, and this pre-processing was conducted in the input language.
Synonyms of lexemes with which the interpreters were not fully familiar were
sought, and whole phrases were re-analysed and reformulated. A side effect of
this process were instances of what for the purposes of this study was named ‘cryptic interference’.
In
view of the above, it has also been claimed that the language of interpreting
input is not inhibited as far as production is concerned, or rather, that it is
active to the extent of being able to inhibit certain monitoring processes
conducted in the output language. A confirmation of this claim may be a
phenomenon whose internal mechanism is rather similar to that of cryptic
interference: the message, before being interpreted, is filtered also in the
target language. Sometimes, however, most likely when the interpreter
instinctively concentrates on one particular element of his or her utterance,
other erroneous elements of an interpreting pass unnoticed and make their way
to the message produced.
Another
issue of a large significance seems to be the fact that interpreting students –
and sometimes also their trainers - often lack certain language skills in their
native language. This can be ascribed to the fact that in the course of
interpreter training at the home institution of all of the subjects the
emphasis is often on interpreting into the foreign language. Thus, certain
native language skills are inhibited, or ‘underdeveloped’, which often results
in imperfect translations into the interpreters’ native language.
In
order to alleviate some of the above mentioned problems, it has been proposed
that more emphasis should be put on the issues connected with the development and perfection
of native language skills in the interpreter training curricula.
Such exercises might include study of the styles and registers in all of the
working languages of the interpreters in question, contrastive analyses of
texts, text types and functions (or activities that could be broadly described
as contrastive textology). It has also been suggested that contrastive analyses
of languages conducted for the purposes of foreign language acquisition can be
beneficial for future interpreters as they can sensitise the latter ones,
especially those who are not ‘stable bilinguals’ and acquired their working
language(s) as foreign language(s), to potential interpreting problem areas.
Finally, perfection of general native language skills, such as study of texts
of different text functions and registers, public speaking and preparation of
spoken presentations, and perfection of native language pronunciation are what,
it is felt, should become an obligatory element of interpreter training.
Considering the
limited scope of this study, all of the issues mentioned are presented in a
relatively tentative manner and require further research. Also the proposals as
to the makeup of interpreter training curricula are merely theoretical and
their efficacy remains to be verified.
2. Interfacing
Contrastive Analysis with Corpus-based Translation Studies: Towards a Research
Paradigm. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Adam Mickiewicz University,
Poznań, 2004.
Corpus linguistics, though a relatively new approach in the
field of linguistic enquiry, is now a widely recognised and used methodology
with well-developed theoretical and methodological foundations. Corpus-based
Translation Studies (CTS) is a daughter discipline of corpus linguistics in the
field of Translation Studies (TS), which can be seen both as a new approach to
studying translation and translation-related linguistic phenomena, and as a new
a research paradigm in the field of TS that, although probably already past its
nascent stage, is still developing both its theoretical foundations and
research methods and tools. The cross-linguistic character of translational
analyses of language is the factor that makes CTS a special case in the area of
corpus linguistics, since its bi- (or, potentially, pluri-) linguistic bias
changes the whole research perspective into one involving a comparison of
linguistic phenomena across languages. For this reason, CTS seems to be closely
related, in terms of its theoretical foundations and methodologies, and to a large
extent also goals, with Contrastive Analysis (CA).
The present
dissertation seeks to explore this relationship, and to put forward a viable research framework spanning
TS, CA and CTS – or to suggest some ways of interfacing translation
and corpus research via contrastive methodologies, and, on those bases, produce
a research paradigm availing the corpus translation researcher of a means of
studying translation phenomena through corpora.
Chapter 1 presents an
overview of corpus linguistics, along with its main theoretical foundations,
including the relationship with the science of language at large, and its main
methodological and research trends. It also presents the major problems connected
with corpus-linguistic research, such as the differences between “rationalism”
and “empiricism” in language studies, and, more specifically, the problem of
corpus representativeness and authenticity. Its last section overviews the main
applications of corpora in linguistic research, as well as some corpus software
and annotation issues.
Chapter 2 focuses on
corpora in translational research. It starts with a short historical overview
of corpus-based research in Translation Studies before the advent of electronic
corpora, and later discusses the development and theoretical foundations of
present-day corpus translational research. Further, it discusses the problem of
corpus representativeness and corpus structure from the perspective of
cross-linguistic studies, and in particular studies of translation.
The subsequent
section describes the relationship between Descriptive Translation Studies
(DTS), the main theoretical foundation of the corpus “branch” of TS, and Corpus-based
Translation Studies, and proceeds to discuss the research findings and
applications of the latter. Finally, it inspects its relationship with
Contrastive Analysis, and discusses corpus terminology and typology in CTS. It
concludes with the observation that there are some significant similarities
between CA and corpus cross-linguistic studies, and suggests that in the case
of the latter - thus also studies of translation - CA may serve as a
theoretical and methodological foundation for many analyses. The CA used for
CTS purposes, however, must meet certain “translational” requirements.
It is suggested that
due to certain methodological problems with cross-linguistic corpus studies,
and thus also studies of translation, CTS may be an insufficient basis for at
least some translational studies. On the other hand, there are some striking
similarities between cross-linguistic corpus analyses and Contrastive Analysis,
and these similarities could potentially be exploited towards building a
combined, corpus-contrastive research paradigm for translational studies.
However, considering the translational character of CTS, it seems that a
prerequisite in constructing such a paradigm is to find or formulate a
“translational” CA, i.e. one that would account for the specific character and
requirements of the activity of translation.
Consequently, Chapter
3 presents the origins, theoretical foundations and applications of Contrastive
Analysis, as well as some of the main research trends within CA. It also inspects
the relationship of the former with Translation Studies, analyses the
applications of CA in TS, and presents an overview of the main trends in TS
that resorted to CA, and also more generally Contrastive Linguistics. On this
basis, it is suggested that the type of CA that most fulfils the requirements
of a “translational” CA is Contrastive Functional Analysis, a research
methodology developed by Andrew Chesterman (1998), as one that is based on
meaning, and thus accounting for, broadly speaking, the pragmatic (functional)
aspects of linguistic messages. Similarly to translation, where the para-, or
explicitly non-linguistic context significantly influences the task of the
translator, and hence the result of his or her work, CFA, too, to a large
extent focuses on the para- and non-linguistic aspects of meaning, and sees the
external reality as a significant determinant of contrastive linguistic
studies.
Chapter 4 contains
the proposal of the corpus research paradigm for the studies on translation
based on Contrastive Functional Analysis. The basic tenet of the paradigm is
functionalism in translation and Translation Studies, an approach that sees
translation as a goal-driven activity, and the job of the translator as to a
large extent determined by the specific task that he or she is required to do,
which naturally bears on the character of the final product of the activity of
translation. The paradigm also draws on functionalism in language studies, with
a special focus on the Firthian contextual theory of meaning, one of the
fundamentals of corpus linguistics. A central issue connected with the proposed
paradigm is the relationship between tertium comparationis as a sine
qua non of any contrastive analysis, and hence also a corpus contrastive
analysis, translation equivalence seen as a dynamic concept, determined by the
function a translation of a text is meant to perform, and corpus
representativeness which, in the case of corpora of translations and parallel
texts, is determined by the respective communicative functions and situational
contexts of both the former and the latter. The discussion rejects translation
equivalence as the sole tertium comparationis for studies of translation
on the grounds that the language of translation is inherently different from
non-translated language, and thus an analysis based exclusively on this tertium
comparationis would lead to biased, or even falsificationist, results.
Instead it argues in favour of a “dual” tertium comparationis, i.e. one
based on both translation equivalence, or that which holds between a source
text and its translation, as the only way of obtaining semantic “sameness”
between the source and the target text, and pragmatic, or functional,
equivalence, holding between a source text and a parallel text, as the only
means of inspecting the functional, or communicative, “sameness” of source
texts and translations. The result of the theoretical analysis is what may be
called a dynamic research paradigm, which it is possible to adjust to different
conditions and goals of translation (the function it is to perform), and hence
to different objectives of studies and analyses.
An important aspect
of the whole study are the practical applications of the proposed paradigm.
These are explored and described in Chapter 5, presenting the analyses
conducted within the paradigm. The analyses were bi-directional, i.e.
English-Polish and Polish-English, based on two source texts, one for each of
the languages, translated by two groups of seven, composed of professional and
trainee translators, all native speakers of Polish, the translations, “mirror
image” parallel texts, and on reference corpora in each of the target languages
made up of texts parallel with respect to the original text in the source
language. The analyses aimed to account for a whole variety of aspects,
including differences between the source texts and their translations, the
translations and the reference corpora, the professional and the trainee
translations and the translations from the native language into the foreign
language and from the foreign language into the native language.
The analyses were
divided into three general series, i.e. macrolinguistic, lexical analyses,
including analyses of linguistic conventions, and of extended units of meaning
in translation on the basis of selected phrases and their collocates;
macrolinguistic analyses, including analyses of cohesion and cohesion-related
factors, such as phenomena influencing readability, on the basis of selected
conjunctions, as well as grammatical-textual phenomena (relative clauses); and
software-driven analyses, i.e. sentence length and (standardised) type/token
ratio analyses. The results of the analyses revealed significant differences
between translational and non-translational language, some differences between
professional and trainee translations, as well as some differences, albeit less
significant, between translation from the translators’ native language and into
their native language. On the strength of those findings it was possible to
confirm certain assertions concerning translation universals, while refute, or
at least put into question, some others, as well as put forward certain
conclusions concerning the differences between professional and trainee
translation performance.
On this basis it may
be suggested that both theses of the present dissertation, namely that CTS
need, or at least may, be successfully interfaced with CA, and that the type of
CA that best meets the requirements of translational studies is Contrastive
Functional Analysis, have been confirmed.
Finally, it must be
emphasised that the corpora used in the present dissertation were of a
relatively small size, and limited to merely a small section of one specific
language genre. For this reason, while the paradigm itself seems a viable means
for the performance of translation, and probably also contrastive, corpus-based
studies, the results of the analyses performed within the paradigm, and hence
the conclusions based upon them, cannot be seen as more than tentative and
hence open to further research.
1. ‘Kultura współczesnego języka polskiego w kształceniu tłumaczy’
[Native contemporary (Polish) language in translator and interpreter training],
in: Lingua Legis
11. Tepis: Warszawa 2003 (3-11).
Problemy związane ze szkoleniem
tłumaczy stały się na przestrzeni ostatnich kilku lat przedmiotem szczególnej
uwagi. Wiąże się to z większym otwarciem Polski na świat, rosnącą liczbą
kontaktów zagranicznych - handlowych, politycznych i społecznych - polskich
obywateli. Wzrasta tym samym zapotrzebowanie na usługi tłumaczeniowe różnego
rodzaju; niestety, często wykonywania takich usług podejmują się osoby nie
tylko nie mające odpowiedniego wykształcenia czy kwalifikacji, lecz także i
umiejętności sprawnego posługiwania się współczesną polszczyzną. Również i
tłumacze-profesjonaliści zaniedbują często najważniejsze narzędzie swej pracy –
język. Tłumacz, jak każdy rzemieślnik, zobowiązany jest przecież do
doskonalenia swego warsztatu oraz narzędzi, którymi się posługuje.
Samokształcenie związane z innymi aspektami doskonalenia warsztatu, jak choćby
w zakresie technologii komputerowych i informacyjnych, choć niewątpliwie
niezbędne dla współczesnego tłumacza, nie może przesłaniać potrzeby dbałości o
kulturę języka. Niniejszy artykuł jest próbą zwrócenia uwagi na problemy
związane z potrzebą świadomej „pielęgnacji” języka ojczystego w kształceniu
tłumaczy.
2. ‘The phenomenon of cryptic interference: some remarks concerning
the process of translation on the basis of an empirical study of sight
translation’, in: SAP 39. Adam Mickiewicz University: Poznań
2003 (263-277).
This paper seeks to explore the nature of certain types of
interaction between the source and the target language in the process of
translation basing on the notion of language interference in the sense of any
violation of the target language form or norm under the influence of the source
language form or norm. It is suggested that apart from ‘overt’ manifestations
of interference, that can be easily traced back to the source language, there
also exists another type of interference, or ‘cryptic’ interference. Its
mechanism consists in switching between the source and the target language,
which affects the mental processing and results in producing instances of
interference which can be traced back to the source language, however, not to
the source language phrases, formulations, and lexical items found in the
actual source language text; these phenomena are due to the process of
re-analysis (or reformulation) of the source language message occurring before
the actual translation is performed.
3. ‘Contrastive Functional Analysis as a starting point for CTS: methodological
considerations for analysing small translational corpora’, in: Language Matters 35(1). University of South Africa: Pretoria 2004 (102-118).
The aim of this article is to show the benefits of working with
relatively small but carefully designed corpora of texts specifically selected
for the purposes of a given study, and also to put forward a research paradigm
for Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS) based on contrastive linguistics.
The theoretical framework is Contrastive Functional Analysis (CFA), a
methodology based on meaning and looking at the ways in which meaning is
expressed in a pair of languages (Chesterman 1998). For the purposes of the
present article and, more generally, translation studies and CTS, a distinction
is also made between translation-mediated texts and original (parallel) texts,
as well as between professional and trainee translations. The article also
advocates what may be called an eclectic approach to corpus studies: an
initial, contrastive analysis is conducted on relatively small corpora of texts
(cf. e.g. Malmkjær 1998) and larger corpora are used at a later stage of
the analysis to verify statistically the findings of the initial study and thus
to objectify the final results.
4.
‘Analysing and teaching translation through corpora: lexical convention and
lexical use’, in: PSiCL 41. Adam Mickiewicz University:
Poznań (forthcoming).
The popularity of corpus methodologies in numerous areas of
linguistic research is matched by their widespread use in other, related
fields. In Translation Studies, it resulted in the development of a new methodology
for inspecting translational-linguistic issues, i.e. Corpus-based Translation
Studies. This paper seeks to suggest some benefits of using research data
obtained from corpora for the teaching of translation. First, it gives an
overview of the main corpus research trends in translation and their
applications in translation teaching to date. Subsequently, on the basis of
corpus findings obtained from an analysis of small, Polish-English and
English-Polish corpora of translations performed by professional translators
and translation trainees and their comparison with corpora of parallel texts in
English and Polish, respectively, it suggests some other, potential uses of
corpora in translation didactics.