Learning how to translate: a language-contact situation with a difference
Periklis Daltas · Aristotle University of Thessaloniki · 2019
The typical translation produced by a trainee translator is the result of a certain amount of mixture and simplification. Such processes are, of course, common in many a language-contact situation, but the student translator partly adapts them to fit the peculiarities of her own endeavor, i.e. (mainly) the fact that (a) she does not provide her own response to the original text but reproduces it in different code, (b) her understanding of the source language (SL) may be partial and/or the target language (TL) means at her disposal necessary for the translation of such a text may be inadequate, and (c) she cannot ignore what she does not understand but must deal with everything. As a result, knowledge of TL affects interpretation of (bits of) SL text, and the (visual) presence of SL vocabulary and syntactic frames disrupts the production of TL "equivalents". Furthermore, the budding translator, like the general reader, often relies on guessing to achieve a correct reading of the original text. Guessing capitalizes both on the redundancy ties between prototypically organized semantic feature configurations of co-occurring vocabulary items and on knowledge of the world. Redundancy, however, is not an inexhaustible resource. If too many words in the surface string are represented by semantic feature sets that are too patchy and/or connection with the extralinguistic reality is insufficiently established, redundancy cannot take the pressure and collapses. This results in inadequate interpetations of SL texts and/or incomprehensible TL equivalent texts.