Can Translation Be Taught?
Lucía I. Llorente and Mary Fitzhugh Parra, US
Lucía I. Llorente holds a Ph.D. in Romance Linguistics from the University of Washington (Seattle, USA). She is currently Associate Professor of Spanish at Berry College (Rome, GA, USA). Her research interests are Spanish Applied Linguistics and foreign language methodology. She is the author of two books and several articles on these areas.
E-mail: lllorente@berry.edu
Mary Fitzhugh Parra holds an MA in Spanish Literature from Georgia State University (Atlanta, USA), and is a certified Spanish/English translator by the Translation and Certificate Program at the same institution. She has been a language instructor (both English and Spanish) and currently is an instructor in the Translation Program at Georgia State. This work has fostered her research interest on translation pedagogy and methodology. E-mail: mparra@gsu.edu
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Introduction
Translation as a skill
Introducing areas of transfer competence in an undergraduate course
Dictionary training
Selection of the texts
Subject competence
Cultural knowledge
Some theoretical notions
Conclusions
References
Translation is a dirty word. For decades the old “grammar-translation” method was the only way language was taught, to the detriment of the oral/aural skills. With the advent of new methodologies, the “direct method,” “the audiolingual method,” and the “communicative method,” translation has fallen so far out of favor that students are, generally speaking, no longer exposed to it in their language classes. While large universities may offer different tracks within a Spanish major, international business combined with the language --for example, or programs dedicated to translation/interpretation-- our smaller colleges, with fewer students and fewer professors, concentrate on the study of literature, offering a degree that essentially points the student in the direction of the teaching profession. In fact, when a prospective language major comes to us to inquire about the professional opportunities that a language degree might offer, the answer is “teaching.” Translation/interpreting is the second possibility that comes to mind, and it is a viable profession for our students. Not only is it viable, but it is a profession that is gaining importance and stature in today’s world. Why, then, is it so seldom taught?
In 1972, Kirstein, writing about the audiolingual approach and monolingual instruction, pointed out that our aim as language teachers is to create “coordinate bilinguals” (73) ; the “intention is to build up the students’ knowledge of the foreign language without making open reference to their native language” (75). Now, in the 21st century, our monolingual, communicative instruction has the same aim: we want our students to start out thinking in their new language. While both supporting and applauding the great strides language instruction has made since the days of strict grammar-translation teaching, our current method of teaching foreign language, isolated from the students’ mother tongue, has a consequence: our students, our “coordinate bilinguals,” do not know how to bridge the gap between the two languages. That is, they lack the skill of translation and are, in fact, unaware that it is a skill. Translation is not easy; it requires deep knowledge of both the foreign language and the mother tongue, as well as knowledge of subject and culture, as we will see below. Becoming a good translator takes more than the four years that an undergraduate degree stipulates. However, in this paper we would like to put forth the idea that an introductory translation course is viable, and of great practical value, at the undergraduate level. As Kirstein (1972) points out:
If the ultimate goal of foreign language instruction is to produce versatile coordinate bilinguals (i.e., versatile with regards to the various media, roles, formality levels, and domains) who are “purists” while speaking each of their two languages, and consequently, do not allow the vocabulary and constructions of one language to creep into the other, then some -and maybe extensive- training in translation seems necessary to enable the bilingual to bridge the inevitable instances of short circuit between his linguistic systems without producing audible signs of interference (78).
An undergraduate course in translation would not only afford our students beginning training in the area, but also the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the two linguistic systems and to learn to bridge the gap between them.
Students start with an erroneous idea of what translation is because it is widely assumed by the general public that the ability to translate and interpret comes with knowledge of a second language; in other words being bilingual automatically confers the title of translator/interpreter. The misconception that follows such an erroneous assumption is that a student of language will also automatically be able to produce an acceptable, accurate translation of any given text. An important part of teaching translation at any level, but especially at the undergraduate level, would therefore constitute opening the students’ eyes to what is really involved in the act of translating. It is not simply knowing two languages well. As stated by Gerding-Salas (2000), “neither knowing languages nor being efficiently bilingual is enough to become a translator” (6).
If the advanced knowledge of two languages is not enough to produce a translator, then what--what third element--is missing? Consider this answer provided by Kaiser-Cook (1994):
The knowledge required for the process of translation is conventionally broken down into linguistic knowledge or competence, subject knowledge and that elusive creature, translatorial competence (137).
Neubert (1994) also observes three kinds of competence: language competence, subject competence, and transfer competence (412). Wakabayashi (2002) expounds on these three skills; she divides what others term linguistic competence into target language competence and source language competence, and adds contrastive differences along with transfer competence, which she defines as “the skill that distinguishes translators from people who are merely bilingual “ (1). Along with subject competence, Wakabayashi includes textual competence or the ability to recognize and translate a range of genres and text types, as well as familiarity with their different conventions and requirements, terminological competence which means not only familiarity with key terms in various fields but basic skills in terminology retrieval, verification and management, and quality control competence, or the ability to recognize what constitutes a good or bad translation (2). This very complete outline is born of experience in teaching Japanese/English translation in a Masters of Arts program which, as such, includes professional competence and theory, as well as competencies that the program itself may not provide directly, but which a good translator should acquire: technological competence, cultural competence and general world knowledge (4).
It is clear, whether examining the three basic competencies, or Wakabayashi’s excellent expanded version, that translation is not simply the sum of the knowledge of two languages, but a skill that depends on that knowledge, on subject competence, and on a number of other competencies or factors. Offering a course introducing our students to the concept of transfer competence, or translatorial competence, will give them a chance to develop that skill; not doing so is to limit their knowledge and possibilities.
In a master’s degree program, or a program aimed at turning out professional translators, students are expected to have already attained an advanced level in the two languages involved. At the undergraduate level, however, most students are still learning their second language. As they begin their study of translation, the instructor should therefore use an eclectic approach which would be applicable to both areas (Azizinezhad 2006:4). It is important to keep in mind that learning to deal with translatorial problems, such as those presented by figurative language, culture-specific terminology or texts of a technological nature, is not the same as learning the language itself, although they go hand in hand. In an undergraduate translation course, we would, then, be concentrating on the two major areas of transfer competence and linguistic competence.
One of the first steps toward transfer competence is to help the beginning translation student overcome the obstacle of their word-for-word concept of translation, or what Ryan (1960) terms “word translation psychology” (263). A beginning student unfamiliar with the phrase “pay attention” will invariably write “pagar atención,” and may even look up the word “pay,” choose the first translation (s)he sees (or the only translation, as (s)he may not yet have an adequate dictionary) without regard to later entries which would indicate that the correct translation is “prestar atención.” The reverse would also be true, producing “lend attention” in English. As Kaiser-Cook (1994) observes: “Novices tend to view problems at their explicit, face value (in translation at the word level, for example)” (136). Training to overcome this type of very basic translation problem and the students’ incorrect word-for-word solution involves making students aware that words occur within a context, that they may form phrases, set or idiomatic expressions, sayings or proverbs, where their context determines their appropriate translation. Students must have adequate dictionaries, both bilingual and monolingual, and receive training in their use. This topic is developed in the next section.
Training in dictionary use may take the form of asking the students to examine the entries in a good bilingual dictionary. In the case of “pay attention”, the example mentioned above, students would be asked to look up the word “pay”, note the number and variety of entries, identify the abbreviations, and select the entry that is most appropriate for the phrase they are trying to translate.
Correct dictionary use can also help students with idiomatic expressions. These combinations of two or more words, whose special meaning cannot generally be guessed from the isolated meanings of the individual words, are particularly challenging for students. They need training in how to deal with them as a whole, and practice in trying to find the key word in the expression. Examples of this kind of expressions would be “you are pulling my leg”, or “me estás tomando el pelo”, where students would identify “pelo” and “leg” as key words.
Good use of the dictionary may also enable students to produce better translations on the syntactic level. Asking students to translate short, simple sentences to practice certain points may include a key word to help them produce the correct translation. The examples included in (1) below contain expressions that exist in both English and Spanish. In some of them, however, the word order is curiously reversed (Mott 1996:177-178). This poses no problem for bilinguals, but students of Spanish who are still working on their linguistic competence may very well translate word-for-word, producing a sentence whose unnatural word order sounds odd. Students would be asked to look up the highlighted key words before writing their translations for the following sentences:
(1) Short sentences
- My family had an accident on the way home but they arrived safe and sound.
- My father works night and day.
- My grandparents still have a black and white television.
The third sentence would also require the use of the preposition “en” in Spanish and the phrase would follow the noun.
The same “keyword technique” is used for helping students come up with the correct version of sayings and proverbs like the ones listed in (2) and (3) below. Students must learn, however, to identify that key word themselves. The Oxford Spanish Dictionary gives the first noun as the keyword:
(2)
- It is raining cats and dogs.
- Kill two birds with the same stone.
If there is no noun, the first verb, adjective, or adverb will determine where to find the expression:
(3)
- Live and learn
- Better safe than sorry
Good dictionary skills are essential in translation; very often, however, we take for granted that students already have them. We defend the need to devote time to develop them, because dictionary skills, in our opinion, are a component of the general linguistic skills, as we have defended elsewhere. In the next section, we address the topic of selected texts.
Carefully selected texts can help students with both transfer competence and linguistic competence if attention is given to the translation problem and/or the linguistic point which the text includes. For example, we know that one of the big differences between English and Spanish is not only the placement of adjectives, but the frequent use that English makes of sequences of nouns in which one of them is used as an adjective. Consider the examples listed in (4):
(4)
garden flower
flower garden
child model
model child
Students may have a hard time identifying the role that each word plays; and because they have difficulties in doing so, the translation of these sequences is not an easy matter.
A related instance in which English and Spanish differ is the habit that English makes of hyphenating words in order to describe a noun. Magazines such as “Marie Claire” or “Cosmopolitan”, popular among female students, offer plenty of examples of this kind, some of which are listed in (5):
(5)
care-free personality
down-to-earth counselor
leopard-print suit
slim-fitting jeans
hip-hiding skirt
low-waisted trousers
Whereas translating these isolated instances is certainly illustrative of the problem (or rather, the difference between the languages), a longer selection is more likely to engage the students, defying them to find the best strategy to solve the translation at hand. The fragments from Caramelo (the novel by Sandra Cisneros) that appear below are an example of such a selection.
(6) Fragments from Caramelo
Though their apartment itself is little, the furniture is big. Iron kitchen chairs with high backs like thrones. Bedroom sets that poke out beyond the door frames and keep the doors from shutting completely. A thick wedge of clothes on hangers behind every door. (...) Wall-to-wall shag carpeting covered with plastic floor runners and area rugs. A marble coffee table like a coffin lid. Speckled Venetian blown-glass knickknacks –a rooster, a tropical fish, a swan-. Onyx ashtrays. My favorite is a gold swag lamp of the Three Graces laced with strings of real water like a fountain. Even our Carmen Miranda lamp with the night-light, maraca hiss, and rotating stand can’t compete (…) (12)
This is clearly a challenging text, since most of the nouns that appear in it are modified in some way. When converting the fragment into Spanish, students would have to use an array of techniques including pondering the position of adjectives, the use of relative clauses, rearrangement of the order of the elements in a given phrase, etc.
The following authentic text found in a local newspaper illustrates another point:
(7) “So, You Want to Quit”
A habit is hard to break and from what I understand, smoking is one of the hardest. If you are ready to give it a try, here are some suggestions. At the end of this article you will find the number for a “Quit Line,” so read on.
It really doesn´t matter what you are trying to do, a plan of action always helps. Listed below is a seven step action plan that might help you quit smoking.
- Get ready to quit by choosing a target date. Mark the date on the calendar and tell others close to you that you are quitting that day. Get their support and plan how you will reward yourself each week you stay smoke-free. You may want to quit on a weekend when you have less stress.
- Survive Day One. Have specific plans for how you will get through the first day. Throw out the ashtrays, the matches and lighters and all the other things that you need to smoke. Then have plans that are enjoyable to distract you so you will be less likely to smoke. Go to a movie or where smoking is not allowed.
- Figure out what makes you smoke. It may be coffee in the morning, sitting in front of the TV, or driving to work (…) (Times-Courier 8B).
In translating this text from English into Spanish, students practice the formal command form, which gives them additional practice in the correct use of accent marks. Incorrect punctuation makes for incorrect translations, a point that should be emphasized in a translation class. Students (including native speakers of Spanish!) often need extra practice in this area. This text has the advantage of offering that practice.
In language classes, students are often asked to write about their childhood or write about a past experience to elicit the use and practice of the Spanish Imperfect tense. In translating the following lines, students should produce the Imperfect, contrasting it with the past continuous in English and using it for description:
(8)
It was a dark night and I was driving along a lonely back road. The wind was blowing in the trees and it was raining, but I was happy. I was thinking about the girl who was waiting for me…
Should the story continue it would logically elicit the use of the Imperfect versus the Preterite that English-speaking students of Spanish so need to practice.
As we can see, by translating the above texts, students gain practice and insight into contrastive aspects of both languages. It is not easy, however, to find texts so strictly limited to particular points; generally speaking texts will (and should) include a variety of translation challenges, including vocabulary (consider, for example how challenging the fragment from Caramelo was in this regard). This brings us to the third major area identified previously as essential to successful translation: subject competence.
As undergraduates, our students cannot be expected to have a wide range subject competence. The above texts are within the realms of general subject competence and subsequent, more complicated texts should also be carefully selected. General text translations can be followed by the introduction of semi-technical texts which would initiate the students into major areas--legal, medical, financial, technology--of subject competence. Short “seminal” glossaries can be provided with these texts with instructions that the students add to them to form their own personal technical glossaries. The undergraduate translation textbook En otras palabras moves students from general texts to such “technical” texts as the “Miranda Rights” in a palatable manner. While a short course in general translation cannot possibly give any student--whatever his or her linguistic level--the necessary subject competence in specific areas, it can make the student aware of its importance. Today’s translators and interpreters tend to have areas of expertise, and students who are interested in pursuing the profession should be encouraged to think about what field might interest them.
The importance of cultural knowledge, which is essential to transfer competence, is another area to be addressed in teaching translation. Kaiser-Cook (1994) observes:
Translation is … a process of conceptual restructuring within the conventions of the target culture. Cultural knowledge in this broad sense is the very essence of translatorial expertise and it is this that translators base their decisions on. Translatorial expertise is the ability to compare how two languages structure the world and to adapt the conceptual pattern of one language to meet the conceptual and linguistic constraint of another. What people say and how they say it is culturally determined, on the very fundamental cognitive level, which means that conceptual and semantic restructuring is always necessary. This being so, the idea of any sort of literal of ‘word-for-word’ translation becomes untenable. (138)
Politzer (1956) makes another observation illustrating the impossibility of word-for-word renderings of source language into target language. He says:
In many instances words are not used with a clear cut single meaning, but their entire value plays a role in their actual use. Obvious examples for this importance of values within actual speech are, for instance, the pun or intentional ambiguity… Expressions of two different languages may mean the same, but the associations they suggest, the images they invoke are apt to be different. (320)
Take for example the word “bar.” A student in a Spanish university may suggest going to the “bar” to get something to drink. “Bar,” in American English implies imbibing alcohol; as such American universities do not have “bars,” but they do have cafeterias, snack bars, or coffee shops. Although this example may fall under the heading of false cognates, it goes beyond that category; the meanings of the terms are closely related and the associations each word calls to mind are different.
The issue of “cultural intranslatability” mentioned by Gerding-Salas20 illustrates the need for cultural knowledge. Politzer (1956), in turn, brings up the problem of intranslatability when there is an “absence of the referent in the other culture” (321). The “drive-through,” so common in the USA, is an example. A student whose only cultural knowledge is limited to his or her native USA will expect to find a one-or- two-word solution expressing this very (to him or her) familiar concept. (S)he may be surprised to find no such thing. In fact there is no listing for “drive-through” per se in the Oxford Spanish Dictionary (1065) but it does list ”drive-in” which is translated under cinema as “auto-cine” and is indicated as used in Mexico. The other entry gives a ten word translation for “drive in”: “restaurante que sirve a los clientes en el propio automóvil.” The Spanish idea of “comer de pinchos” would illustrate an analogous problem when translating into English.
A student faced with a similar lexical problem must know both the cultural concept of the term involved and how best to convey that concept in the target language. Different cultural environments impose limitations on translation and “underline the intimate and inevitable tie between culture and language study” (Politzer 1956:321). The world of advertisement is full of examples in which cultural knowledge proves to be essential when doing a proper translation; there is even an award, the “Chevy Nova”, which is given in honor of GM’s fiasco in trying to market this car in Central and South America. “No va,” or ‘it doesn’t go’ in Spanish, is not a car that many of us would choose to buy. Some comical examples of translations that have been candidates for this award are the following. The Dairy Association’s huge success with the campaign “Got Milk?” encouraged them to expand it to Mexico. They soon found out that the Spanish translation of the slogan read “Are you lactating?” Another instance is the case of the Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux, which used the following in an American ad campaign: “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.” Also, when Parker Pen marketed a ball-point pen in Mexico, its advertisements were supposed to read “It will not leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” But what they actually wrote was “It will not leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.” Finally, an even more illuminating faux pas is the case of Gerber; when this company started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the US, with the smiling baby on the label; later, they learned that in Africa companies routinely put pictures on the labels of what is inside, since many people cannot read. These examples, among others, were listed at one point in www.refresher.com/!translations.html, a page which is not available at the present moment (06/07/2009).
This last gaffe, while non-linguistic, highlights the importance of adapting cross cultural communication for the audience to whom it is intended. Verbal or non-verbal, these funny and embarrassing cases certainly make a point. As language--and translation--teachers, it is up to us to make it clear, as Politzer (1956) so aptly notes “that the study of language is more than the juggling of new symbols, that it introduces the student to new facts or a least a completely new way of looking at already familiar facts” (322). Language cannot be divorced from its culture. What better way to bring this home to students than by introducing them to the challenges of translation?
Our undergraduate translation course is centered around examples, exercises, and texts which give students practical experience of huge instructional value. We would, however, defend the idea of introducing some very basic theory through short reading assignments such as Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet’s (2000:85-92) well-known outline of seven procedures used in translation: borrowing, calque, literal translation, transposition, modulation, equivalence, and adaptation. To experienced translators (and many have not studied theory) these procedures come naturally, but for beginning translation students, their very existence can be an eye-opener. Understanding technical procedures and reading examples of them can do much to free students from the vise of word-for-word translation. The English/Spanish Manual de traducción gives examples for each of the seven procedures cited above along with three additional techniques of a more semantic nature: expansion, reduction and compensation (López Guix 1977:235-297). Under reduction López Guix gives “shiny boot-polish black” translated as “negro charol” (292). This neatly solves the problem presented by the adjective “shiny” combined with the hyphenated double noun “boot-polish” by reducing the three words to one word which perfectly expresses the original concept. Knowing these techniques and recognizing them as principles of transfer competence can help students make decisions when faced with translation problems, and in the professional world, help translators explain their choices when dealing with clients, as Wakabayashi suggests (2002:3)!
To sum up, we have examined translation as a skill which does not depend solely on the knowledge of two languages, but on transfer competence and other related competencies, and considered how to introduce translatorial skills at the undergraduate level through dictionary training, and the selection of phrases, sentences, and structure-targeted texts which underscore translation problems. We have pointed out the importance of subject competence and cultural knowledge and included a brief look at theoretical notions that could benefit our students.
Is translation, then, a dirty word? And more importantly, can it be taught at the undergraduate level? If students are introduced to transfer competence and steered away from the novice’s idea that word-for-word rendering of texts in the target language constitutes translation, if they are trained in good use of the dictionary and learn to handle the linguistic differences of their language pair, then translation is not a dirty word, and “yes”, it can be taught. We are not, after all, attempting to produce “instant” professional translators but potential students of translation. We defend the idea that an undergraduate course in translation opens up a challenging world for our students. Once they gain awareness of the importance of subject expertise and of firm knowledge and understanding of the cultures of the language pair in question, once they have been introduced to basic sound principles of translation and have gained insight into them through practice that also improves their language skills in each language--mother tongue and second language-- it will then be up to the individual student to decide whether to pursue translation studies, to perfect his or her linguistic and cultural knowledge, to gain both general knowledge and expertise in a specific or technical area, in short, to continue on the translation path toward becoming a translator.
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