Justifying the deverbalization approach in the interpreting and translation classroomWord格式.docx

1、RsumPour convaincre les tudiants de lintrt de la dverbalisation, il importe de les sensibiliser au pralable au fait quen traduisant, ils accomplissent une tche communicationnelle au service dun client et dun auteur. Sur cette base de loyaut professionnelle, ils comprennent lintt de la correction de

2、certaines erreurs et maladresses techniques. En interprtation, lexistence de celles-ci apparat rapidement aux yeux des lves-interprtes du fait de leurs propres difficults. En traduction, lexprimentation pdagogique aide montrer que la variabilit est une partie intrinsque de la production du discours,

3、 que lauteur dun texte nen est pas ncessairement le matre absolu, et quil peut souhaiter le modifier sil en a la possibilit. Cette exprimentation, ainsi que les explications thoriques, qui nexcluent pas les aspects spcifiques par langues et par paires de langues, ont un effet sensibilisateur, mais u

4、n suivi concret dans la pratique est indispensable.Keywords: Deverbalization, classroom experimenting, speech-production variability, fidelity, language-specificityI. IntroductionIn a recent book on translation research and didactics, Hatim （2001） rightly puts the “literal vs. free” issue at the cen

5、ter of debates on translation throughout history. In the translator training schools environment, the literature of the past 30 years seems to reflect a consensus, at least on translation of informational texts （as opposed to literary texts）, in favor of a meaning and intention-oriented translation

6、strategy, as opposed to a strategy based on formal equivalence: it is felt that translation suffers when it is constructed on linguistic correspondences, and serves its purpose better when the form of the source text is used to understand it and is then honorably discharged while the reformulation p

7、rocess proceeds on the basis of an autonomous mental representation of its meaning （informational, emotional, social, intentional, etc.）. As pointed out by Pchhacker （1994:22）, more than 40 years ago, Wirl （1958:23） talked about the translator operating mostly on the basis of the content （“sense”） o

8、f the source text stripped of its linguistic form （“vom Wortlaut schon gelst, also entsprachlicht”）. Two decades later, Seleskovitch and Lederer of ESIT, Paris, made this “deverbalization” principle the foundation of their “theory of sense” （“thorie du sens”）. In the literature, there is some uncert

9、ainty as to the status of this concept: is it supposed to be total or partial （Laplace 2002:197, Setton 2003）, descriptive or prescriptive? My feeling, somewhat different from Karla Djean Le Fals （2002:146）, is that the “theory of sense” is only challenged by its critics as a descriptive theory in t

10、he usual scientific sense of the word, but that it is widely supported as a prescriptive paradigm, that is, a desirable approach to translation. This paper discusses strategies for justifying such an approach to students in the classroom.II. Translator-role postulatesLike many other authors and Tran

11、slation instructors （“Translation” with a capital T will be used to refer to both translation and interpreting; similarly, “Translators” will refer to translators and interpreters, and “Texts” will refer to texts and speeches）, I believe that prescriptive statements about Translation strategies are

12、most convincing if they are based on a clear idea about the communicative role of Translation, that is, if it is made clear to students that in the world of professional Translation, most often, and nearly always when translating non-literary texts, Translators are expected to serve not texts, but p

13、eople, with particular intentions and interests.Explanations can be “theoretical”, for instance using the “skopos theory” （see for example Reiss and Vermeer 1984, Schffner 1998）. In an academic environment, much can be said in favor of some abstract thinking and theorizing. However, in the context o

14、f short, more professionally oriented programs, a straightforward, down-to-earth approach is probably more efficient: when students are told about the real-life circumstances that lead to a Translation assignment, it becomes clearer to them that they are asked to Translate primarily in order to help

15、 users operate a machine, to help a researcher present and explain his/her theory or findings to fellow-researchers, to help a CEO present and defend his business strategy to directors and shareholders, to help a company sell its products, etc. It also becomes clearer to them that the Translation co

16、mmissioner is generally not the speaker or the author of the text but an intermediary, whose primary interests may be to serve the interests of the speaker or author or their organizations, but may just as often be purely commercial.The default parameters I define in the classroom after discussion o

17、f other cases posit a Translation done at the request of a Translation commissioner （the “Client”） with the purpose of conveying to target-language readers or listeners the authors or speakers message, both in terms of the information that s/he intends them to receive and in terms of the effect（s） t

18、hat s/he is trying to achieve. Thus, the Translators professional loyalty is due both to the Client, by virtue of the professional relationship they enter into, and to the author or speaker, whom the Translator represents, most often in a transparent way, at least in written, non-literary translatio

19、n: readers may have the knowledge that they are reading a translation, but not the constant awareness of the fact, and feel that they are reading the authors text, not the translators. In the most frequent case, the Clients aims are not incompatible with the author/speakers, which means that the Tra

20、nslator is free to devote his/her efforts to serve the authors/speakers interests （different situations, where the Translator serves not the author, but a third party, also occur - see Gile 1995）.Once professional loyalty is seen as serving the author of a message, whose text or speech is the verbal

21、 object designed to serve his/her intention to produce certain effects on readers/listeners, and under the default assumption that the authors interests do not clash with the Clients, it becomes easy to identify certain cases where the Translator can justifiably depart from the source Text. In parti

22、cular, when it contains a mistake which can reasonably be assumed to result from a technical problem （such as a typo） or from the authors insufficient mastery of the source-text language, it is easy to defend the idea that the Translator does his/her work best if s/he corrects it in the target Text.

23、 Similarly, if a Text is ambiguous and there is no reason to believe this is due to the authors intention to be vague, students can be persuaded that they will serve such an authors intentions and interests best by removing the ambiguity.Over the past ten years or so, I have been collecting authenti

24、c Texts with errors and ambiguous passages for classroom demonstrations. Such Texts can be found in the course of ones Translation work （for interpreting, speeches may be recorded, both in the conference room - with the relevant persons permission, or from radio and TV broadcasts）. Instructors not c

25、urrently engaged in professional translation can look for suitable examples in scientific papers, which are often written by non native speakers, and in particular in abstracts. In the translation classroom, in order to save time, the whole text is presented to students, but they are asked to transl

26、ate only short passages which are particularly problematic, so as to raise their awareness of such problems in “official” printed material, which many of them tend to consider error-free （“It has been published, so it must be good”）.One particular striking example was found on the internet recently,

27、 in the biography of a personality: （ accessed on October 14, 2000）, where the following two sentences were found:“He is quality of knowledge is a Mujjahid Murakkih Juristic Scholars able to outweigh between the four Islamic Schools of thought: Hanafi, Maliki, Shaffiie and Hanbali.”.“He is the found

28、er of Hizb ut-Tahrir Uk branch and the founder of Al-Muhajiroun world-wild.”It was obvious for the students that if they were asked to translate this Web-page into French for the purpose of serving the interests of its authors, they had to make sense out of it and correct it.III. Justifying a deverb

29、alization approach in interpreting classesOnce Translation is understood as a communication service as set out in Section II above, justifying deverbalization in the interpreting classroom is relatively easy, because students realize within a very short time how complex and difficult speech producti

30、on can be and how often infelicities and even errors occur in spontaneous speech. Not only do they observe them in other speakers, but they painfully experience them in their own speech production. The deterioration of linguistic output quality in students speaking their native language during exerc

31、ises in consecutive interpreting was one of the phenomena I found most striking when I was a first year interpreting student myself; it later became the focus of an empirical study in which I used it as an indicator of the relative difficulty of consecutive and simultaneous interpreting （Gile 1987）. Once interpreting students are aware of these difficulties, they can extrapolate on the basis of their own experience and understand in a very concrete, personal way, reinforced with many field observations, how stress, or the influence of a foreign language in the immedia