Transcript Padova Presentation

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto
Línguas Aplicadas
General Translation
PORTUGUESE - ENGLISH
SPRING SEMESTER 2009
Tue. 10.30-12.30 Classroom: 206.A
Wed. 13:30-15:30 Classroom: 211
Teacher:
Elena Zagar Galvão
[email protected]
[email protected]
Webpage: web.letras.up.pt/egalvao
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
A TRANSLATION WORKSHOP
We learn mainly by doing, so we learn to
translate mainly by translating. We also
learn by reading about translation,
analysing other people’s translations,
discussing the problems, difficulties, and
solutions we encounter when we
translate, and by sharing the joys and
frustrations of our activity as future
language mediation experts.
This is why our course is best described as
a TRANSLATION WORKSHOP.
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
We shall become familiar with various
translation approaches and procedures
and focus on different areas such as
context and register, language functions
and text types, as well as source text and
target text objectives and audiences. We
will also deal with specific terminology, as
well as with collocations, false friends,
idioms, and culture-bound terms. Keep in
mind that this is a SKILLS COURSE, where
we start to become acquainted with some
of the multiple tools required of a
translator today.
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
Our class:
a learner-centred environment
This means that:
 The teacher is not the source of all
knowledge, but a facilitator of students’
learning experiences, and a learner along
with the students.
 The students are not passive recipients of
knowledge or know-how but its active
generators, and thus teachers along with
the teacher.
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
People learn best not by listening
passively and memorizing what they hear
but by doing things, actively participating
in a process.
 This hands-on pedagogy lies behind the
practical translation seminar: if you learn
to translate best by translating, then the
best way to teach students how to
translate is to give them texts and have
them translate them into another
language.
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão



Theorizing translation is more important for the
translation student than theories of translation
as static objects to be studied and learned.
Students should become increasingly
comfortable thinking complexly about what they
do, both in order to improve their problemsolving skills and in order to defend their
translational decisions to agencies or clients or
editors who criticize them.
From:
ROBINSON, Douglas. Becoming A Translator. London: Routledge, 1997 (pp. 265 and
275).
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
OBJECTIVES (1)

To practise deverbalisation through a
variety of exercises (note-taking, oral and
written summarising, etc.);

To practise analysing source texts from a
translator’s point of view;
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
OBJECTIVES (2)
To introduce students to the various
strategies used by professional translators to
overcome difficulties at word, sentence and
text level;
 To facilitate genre literacy by practising text
production of specific text types in the
target language;

FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
OBJECTIVES (3)

To familiarise students with the multiple
translation resources available on the
Internet and help students separate the
wheat from the chaff;

To familiarise students with writing
conventions in the target language.
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
Teaching Methods
All the members of our small discourse
community will take an active part in the
joint process of enquiry, asking questions,
giving and taking ideas, opinions, and
reasons for translation choices. Remember
that having an inquisitive mind is the first
step to learning successfully and is a
prerequisite for a life-long learning activity
such as translating.
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
Bibliography




BAKER, Mona. In Other Words: A Coursebook on
Translation. London and New York: Routledge,
1992.
HATIM, Basil and Jeremy MUNDAY.
Translation. An Advanced Resource Book. London
and New York: Routledge, 2004.
NORD, Christiane. Translating as a Purposeful
Activity. Manchester: St.Jerome Publishing, 1997.
ROBINSON, Douglas. Becoming A Translator:
An Accelerated Course. London and New York:
Routledge, 1997.
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
Complementary Bibliography
Students should regularly consult the Translation
Portuguese-English website
(web.letras.up.pt/egalvao) for information about
the course, homework, useful links, etc.
Students should keep an organized record of all
the useful sites they find and share this
information with the rest of the class.
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
Translation Companies
Students will be divided into groups of 3 or 4 and will form their own
Translation Companies. Each company will be responsible for:
•creating their own image (through a webpage and Power Point
presentations);
•deciding on each partner’s specific responsibilities (project
management, translation, revision, overall quality control, etc.);
•managing each translation job in a professional way (from answering
requests for quotation and planning the project to delivering the final
product and invoicing the client);
Feedback will be provided on each job, which will have to be revised
following the comments and suggestions received.
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
Assessment
Translation Company Work: 50%
Final test: 50%
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
Getting to know each other
What I’d like to know about you
 Brief bio
 Why translation?
 What translation?
 What do you expect from this class?
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
What would you like
to know about me?
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
Translating from Portuguese into English
Although the direction of translation has been
traditionally assumed to be into the translator’s
mother tongue, it is by now widely recognized
that translations from languages of limited
diffusion into major languages, such as
English, often have to be carried out by nonnative English translators. Moreover, “English
has long since left the ownership of the native
speakers in England, and has become, as
Henry Widdowson has described it, ‘world
property’” (Snell-Hornby, 2000).
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
Many authors (among whom Cay Dollerup and
Mary Snell-Hornby) have repeatedly pointed out
that English has become the international lingua
franca; that translations into English are very
frequently meant to reach audiences made up
mostly of non-native speakers of this language;
and that, as a consequence, it is rather unrealistic,
if not even arrogant (Stewart, 2000), to insist on
the somewhat old-fashioned notion that translators
should translate only and exclusively into their
mother tongue (a concept which is undergoing
drastic changes in our increasingly globalised
world).
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão
In Portugal, for instance (and although Portuguese is among
the top ten languages in the world in terms of number of
speakers) many years of experience with translation trainees
have demonstrated very clearly that a large number of
employers tend to assume that translation students must be
able to translate from and into the foreign language. For this
reason, the texts chosen for this class (for individual and group
projects as well as for homework) will be selected from areas
which a translator may realistically be confronted with on the
Portuguese market – the Internet, business, tourism,
international conferences, exhibitions, etc. The following is a
list of potential text-types: websites, abstracts; brochures and
catalogues (tourist, commercial, institutional); academic
papers; research projects; conference programmes, etc.
FLUP - Elena Zagar Galvão