Margaret Rogers

Structuring Information in English: A Specialist Translation Perspective on Sentence Beginnings

Abstract This paper describes an empirical study of information structure (Functional Sentence Perspective) in the English translation of a German special-language text, an investment report. The focus of the study is on sentence beginnings, where German typically locates known information and English locates the grammatical subject, sometimes preceded by certain types of adverbial phrase. A special-language text is chosen, as the more formulaic nature of special languages may restrict choices in translation, thereby providing a challenging test-bed for the claim that translators tend to resolve syntactic/communicative tensions by prioritizing the syntactic requirements of the target language. The aim of the study is three-fold: to establish whether information structure is carried over from source to target language on a sentence-by-sentence basis; to describe the means by which this is achieved where applicable; and to describe what happens where this is not the case. The analysis draws on a framework adapted from Thompson’s (1978) pragmatic-grammatical language typology continuum. The results of the study show that in the case of both sentence-initial thematic arguments of the verb and adverbial adjuncts, a range of restructuring techniques is used to mirror the perspective of source sentences. While these techniques are not always deployed, changes in perspective in translation do not necessarily disrupt the communicative build-up in the target-text sentence.

User Participation in Software Development

In the last 40 years, translation has established itself as a “distinct and autonomous profession”, requiring “specialised knowledge and long and intensive academic preparation” (Newmark 1991:45). Even in the United Kingdom, for example, where industry and commerce often rely on the status of English as a lingua franca, the profession is now consolidating its position.

Translation and information technology: The Translator's Workbench

In the world of the 1990s, linguistic and traditional discipline boundaries are breaking down. Consequently, many companies and organisations are faced with considerable communication problems, including a growing need for translation. It has recently been estimated, for instance, that the number of pages translated in Western Europe in 1986 was 100 million; by 1987 this was said to have increased to 160 million. A number of factors have contributed to this growth in demand. Product cycles are shorter, requiring more frequent updating of documentation; documentation has become more complex, concomitant with the increasing complexity of technology; companies have begun to realise that multilingual markets are generally bigger than monolingual ones; and large companies are themselves often transnational.

The translation of culturally bound metaphors in the genre of popular science articles: A corpus-based case study from Scientific American translated into Arabic

Abstract This paper reports on a study of a particular cultural problem in contemporary English-Arabic translation, namely pedagogical metaphors in popular science writing. Pedagogical metaphors are argued to be crucial to the communicative intent of this genre, namely the dissemination of knowledge about complex scientific phenomena from expert to non-expert. Seen by some scholars as a type of translation in itself, popular science writing presents particular translation challenges for culturally distant languages such as English and Arabic. Whilst traditional studies of metaphors in translation have focused on the un/translatability of linguistic expressions, the present study adopts a conceptual approach emphasizing the contribution made by related sets of metaphorical linguistic expressions to the scientific “story.” Following an account of metaphor types and functions, the paper outlines the construction of a 287,306-word parallel corpus of selected articles from Scientific American and its Arabic equivalent Majallat Al-Oloom (1995–2009). Extending previous monolingual/manual corpus analytical methods, the study reports on a range of intercultural problems and their translation solutions, bearing in mind the pedagogical function of the metaphors analyzed. It is concluded that a range of translation strategies is used to accommodate the cultural expectations and experience of the Arabic readership, indicating that popular science is culturally nuanced. In this sense, translations cannot therefore be seen simply as different language versions of the same material.

Creating Terminology Resources

This section describes a terminology management methodology for creating multilingual terminologies of emerging multidisciplinary domains for use by translators, developed at the University of Surrey. The term “Terminology management” denotes the modern methods of creating, organising, and exploiting terminology resources, i.e. of compiling text corpora on computer systems together with software programs which can be used with WIMPS (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers), (proprietary) database management systems and information retrieval software systems for the formalised elicitation and elaboration of terminology (a collection of terms) of a specialist domain. We have demonstrated how terminology can be identified, organised and disseminated using corpus-based computer-assisted methods drawing on text analysis, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data base systems within the linguistic framework of Language for Special Purposes (LSP).

Specialised Translation: An Orientation

Writing some 15 years ago, the pioneering translation scholar Wolfram Wilss (Wilss 1999: 9) estimated that ‘specialist’ translation accounted for some 80 per cent of the total volume of translation (the other 20 per cent being literary and Bible translation). In a lecture a few years later,1 Geoffrey Kingscott, a leading professional translator, businessman and writer, estimated that over 90 per cent of the world’s translation output was accounted for by ‘technical and commercial translation’. A similar estimate was made by Franco Aixela in the new millennium (2004), in an agenda-setting piece for the launch of JoSTrans. Yet in the scholarly arena, research in ‘non-literary’ translation is said to have lagged behind its literary counterpart (ibid.). So, in addition to investigating when ‘technical and scientific translation came to be a “research field in its own right”’, Franco Aixela estimates that ‘80–90% of the professional demand for translators’ is accounted for by ‘technical translating’, whilst a much lower percentage of publications in Translation Studies2 are concerned with this field (10.2 per cent in the 1990s, rising from 1.4 per cent pre-1950) (2004: 31, 44, 34). The small-scale journal survey reported in Chapter 1 suggests, however, that, some 15 years later, at least in the journals investigated, the balance between research articles concerned with literary or specialised translation may be changing. Nevertheless, that is not to deny that the number of journals devoted to literary issues including literary translation vastly outweighs those dedicated to specialised languages and specialised translation.

Terminology and Text: Closing the Gaps

Whilst it is generally accepted that languages map the world in different ways through the structure of their vocabularies, it is often wrongly assumed — as we have seen in previous chapters — that specialist areas of knowledge are culture-free zones with a universal character, especially in Science and Technology. If that were the case, closing the lexical gaps in specialised translation would be largely reduced to a straightforward coining task to label concepts new to the target culture, with no troubling factors of connotation or nuance, not to mention issues of ideology, politics, or religion. We have already seen (Chapter 4) how such factors can influence the choice of terms, even in science writing. The current chapter goes on to document some of the complex decisions which translators, and to some extent terminologists, actually make and have made for millennia when terminological gaps are identified in the target language.

Borders and Borderlands

The study of literature — or more specifically, literatures — is widely practised and accepted as an academic discipline in schools and universities across the globe. Translation as an academic discipline has a much shorter history and has struggled to gain acceptance in some scholarly circles.1 As Kuhiwczak aptly remarked just a decade or so ago: the ‘activity which has such old and noble origins has only recently been established as an academic field in a conscious way’, concluding that ‘its position is by no means universally acknowledged’ (2003: 112). In making a case for translation, or at least literary translation, to be treated as a ‘serious enterprise, not inherently less important than creative writing or literary criticism’ (2003: 122), Kuhiwczak indirectly draws our attention to the even less established academic status of ‘non-literary’ translation. If literary translation, with its strong associations with prestigious texts of the creative imagination has suffered from what he calls a ‘troubled identity’, how much more so is the identity of non-literary translation ‘troubled’, especially as its binary opposite has itself had its academic problems? Being defined negatively is one thing; being defined negatively in relation to a less than universally accepted academic discipline is another.

Terminology and Specialised Translation: A Historical Perspective

The focus of the present chapter shifts to one of the factors which is often claimed to distinguish specialised from literary translation, namely the use of specialised vocabularies, in other words, terminology. In setting out to redefine the characteristics of literary translation, Woodsworth, for example, argues that for scientific-technical translators, the principal difficulty is terminological compared with the stylistic ‘traps’ of literary translation (1988: 121).

Terminology, Term Banks and Termbases for Translation

Modern-day translators continue to play an essential role in the long tradition of knowledge and information transfer between cultures. Given the rapid growth of specialised knowledge and dissemination of information in our global society, translators need particular support in solving terminological problems, because terms are key to the understanding of many texts. In this article, two types of electronic terminology resource are discussed in the context of translators’ needs: term banks, often the result of projects undertaken in large organizations and now made publicly available through the World Wide Web, and the more recent termbases, compiled using commercially available software by a wide range of users from individuals to companies. Some problems are identified and future developments discussed.