SEMINAR 2

TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION. CHOSING THE BEST TRANSLATOR.

Common Tasks
Task 1
Pre-watching task
Match the following words from Box A to their synonyms and definitions from Box B
Extraneous Start
Sophisticated Additional, unrelated
Poised Complex
Profanity Balanced
commence Swearing, foul language, four-letter words

Task 2. Watch the video. Answer the questions; give its summary, comment on the ideas.
1. What are the rules for the consecutive interpreting?
2. Why can’t you interrupt the speaker?
3. Can you make additions or omissions, changes?
4. What is meant by “use the formal you”?
5. What information is recommended to be note-taken?
6. Is it possible to make any extraneous noises?
7. What is mentioned about double interpretation?
8. Is it important to maintain the register of the speaker, to speak loudly, clearly and
confidently?
9. Do you agree with the recommendation “in case you don’t know the word, make you best
educated guess”?
10. How should you interpret idiomatic expressions?
11. Should you interpret “filter words”?
12. Is it important to remember the source language you interpret from?
13. When is it important to remember the gender of the participants?
14. What is meant by “remember the story, terms”, “Interpret all profanity”, “no
conversions”?
15. Why is it recommended to wait for 2 seconds until you commence interpreting? Can you
ask for a repetition? What is meant by “Spanglish”?
16. Why is it important to concentrate 100 percent, visualize the message, sound self-assured
and poised?

Task 3
Team Tasks
Study the following literature Douglas Robinson “Becoming a Translator. An Introduction
to the Theory and Practice of Translation” P.1-33
Discuss the following:
1 The ethics of translation has often been thought to consist of the translator assuming an entirely
external perspective on his or her work, thinking about it purely from the user's point of view:
thinking, for example, that accuracy is the only possible goal of translation; that the translator
has no right to a personal opinion or interpretation; that the finished product, the translated text,
is the only thing that matters. What other ethical considerations are important? Is it possible to
allow translators their full humanity — their opinions, interpretations, likes and dislikes,
enthusiasms and boredoms — while still insisting on ethical professional behavior that meets
users' expectations?
2 Translators are usually, and understandably, hostile toward machine translation systems, which
promise clients enormous increases in speed at a fraction of the cost of human translation.
Translators typically point to the low quality or reliability of machine-translated texts, but in
some technical fields, where style is not a high priority, the use of constrained source languages
(specially written so as to be unambiguous for machine parsing) makes reliability possible along
with speed and low cost. How should translators meet this challenge? Translate faster and charge
less? Retrain to become pre- and post-editors of machine translation texts? Learn to translate
literature?
Exercises:
1. List the stereotyped character traits of your country, your region, your group (gender,
class, race, education level, etc.). Next list user-oriented ideals for the translator — the personal
characteristics that would make a translator "good" or "reliable" in the eyes of a non-translating
employer or client. Now compare the lists, paying special attention to the mismatches — the
character traits that would make people like you "unqualified" for the translation field — and
discuss the transformations that would be required in either the people who want to be translators
or in society's thinking about translation to make you a good translator.
2. Dramatize a scene in the conference room of a large international corporation that needs a
text translated into the executives' native language by a certain date. What are the parameters of
the discussion? What are the main issues? What are the pressures and the worries? Try to
perceive translation as much as possible from this "external" point of view.
3 Work in small groups to list as many different types of translation user (including the same
user in different use situations) as you can. Then identify the type of text reliability that each
would be likely to favor — what each would want a "good" translation to do, or be like.
4 Break up into groups of three, in each group a source-language user, a target-language user,
and a translator. Take a translation use-situation from this chapter and try to negotiate (a) who is
going to commission and pay for the translation, the source or target user or both (who stands to
benefit most from it? which user has economic power over the other?) and (b) how much money
is available to pay the translator (will the translator, who is a professional, do it for that money?).