Abstract:

Translation process is usually interpreted as a three-stage activity: understanding – translating – assessing the translation [1]. Practical teaching, however, revealed that understanding the contents of the text and its message does not necessarily lead to the ultimate result. It seems that understanding per se without explicit explanation what regularities govern the translator’s choice is not enough, as teaching a translator implies that we are not working towards an intuitive decision. Students are expecting some practical algorithm which will establish strong and well-grounded correlation between the original text and its translated version.

And here we need to elaborate some algorithm, some cognitive translation frame which can be applied at the first teaching stage. The authors suggest a step-by-step algorithm that can be practiced when training would-be translators.

The algorithm starts with analyzing the culture-specific content, such as realia relating to cultural or historic relics, or – which is less discernible without training – the differences in the linguistic map of the world. For instance, translating Russian rhetoric sentence into English the translator has to keep in mind that the niche allocated to this question in English is very narrow as compared to that of the Russian rhetoric construction. It explains why Russian rhetoric questions in many cases are transformed into affirmative sentences: Какие только меры мы не принимали!- We took all possible measures.

If we take structurally different languages, such as inflexional Russian and analytical English languages, we have to take into account structural differences, which tell on the translator’s choice. The languages may have similar structures and seemingly coinciding words and constructions though their functions and stylistic relevance may significantly differ. Therefore, grammatical and culture aspects play a significant role in teaching translation (see, for example, [1]).

The next step was to analyze the words, then sometimes proceed to the morphology and, if needed, turn to phonetic level.
So, when training professional translator we start with pre-translation analysis and only after that proceed to translation per se.

References:
[1] Grammaticheskie aspekty perevoda. Uchebnoe posobie. Sulejmanova O.A. , Beklemesheva N.N. , Kardanova K.S., Lyagushkina N.V., Yaremenko V.I., Moskva, "Izdatel'skij centr Akademiya", 2010, 240 s.
[2] V. Komissarov (2002) Sovremennoe perevodovedenie, Moskva, «R. Valent», 408 s.

Keywords:

Pre-translation analysis, grammatical aspects of teaching, culture and translation.