Abstract:

Languages reflect social, political, cultural and other changes in a society in the context of globalization. As argued by Cook (2010) apart from being a useful skill in itself, translation in a globalized world is all around us. Translation assignments in classes for students majoring in translation studies help them to relate new knowledge to existing knowledge, promotes noticing and language awareness, and focuses on the differences and similarities between languages and cultures. The research investigates how translation strategies, namely omission, may be helpful for students in developing their linguistic and cultural skills in translation practice classes. Translation strategy omission has been chosen non-accidentally: omission as a translation strategy is not considered to be very common and, traditionally, it does not attract lecturers’ attention. It is, however, applied for a number of reasons: to ensure linguistic accuracy; to make the text stylistically appropriate; to provide essential information (if it is required); to observe text-type and genre-related editorial norms; to avoid cultural taboos; to translate texts to target readers in consideration of age, education, gender, social class (Dimitriu, 2004). However, omission can also be identified as “unconditional surrender” (Landers, 2001:95) and, thus, the translation strategy of omission itself may be identified as an admission of failure to translate. The aim of the paper is to analyse omission in translation as an applicable method in translator training. The results of the analysis demonstrate that translation assignments analysing omission are useful as a teaching/learning method because of its twofold nature: it helps to analyse issues in translation as well as increases multicultural awareness that is significantly important in translation studies.

Keywords:

University education, translation studies, translation strategy, omission, news media texts.