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(Un)Folding the Meaning: Translation Competence and Translation Strategies Compared

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Rereading Schleiermacher: Translation, Cognition and Culture

Part of the book series: New Frontiers in Translation Studies ((NFTS))

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Abstract

In the framework of a wider longitudinal empirical study on translation competence (TC) and its development, this paper investigates the attitudes of novice vs. professional translators towards the strategies of foreignization and domestication (Venuti 2008). Moving from the consideration that “expansion, [is] an unfolding of what, in the original, is ‘folded’” (Berman 2004:290), the study analyses the number and type of expansions and reductions in a parallel corpus of multiple translations of the same source texts produced by translators at different stages in the development of their TC. The working hypothesis is that the strategies of foreignization and domestication might be to some extent related to the translator’s supposed level of competence. This paper describes the trends observed in the corpus as concerns expansions and reductions from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective and outlines some provisional results suggesting a tendency towards expansion and domestication in professional translators. (At the time of writing this article, the whole study had not been completed. The final results of this and other analyses on the same corpus are now available in C. Quinci (2015), Translators in the Making: An Empirical Longitudinal Study on Translation Competence and its Development, Ph.D. Thesis, Università degli Studi di Trieste. From April 2016 on, the thesis will be available for download at http://hdl.handle.net/10077/10986.)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the second edition of The Translator’s Invisibility, Venuti (19) explicitly rejects Pym’s parallel, pointing out that “the terms ‘domestication ’ and ‘foreignization ’ do not establish a neat binary opposition that can simply be superimposed on ‘fluent’ or ‘resistant’ discursive strategies, nor can these two sets of terms be reduced to the true binaries that have proliferated in the history of translation commentary, such as ‘literal’ vs. ‘free’ […]. The terms ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ indicated fundamentally ethical attitudes towards a foreign text and culture, ethical effects produced by the choice of a text and by the strategy devised to translate it, whereas terms like ‘fluency ’ and ‘resistancy’ indicate fundamentally discursive features of translation strategies in relation to the reader ’s cognitive processing” (original emphasis).

  2. 2.

    The first TT deals with a rejection letter sent to the University of Oxford (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/19/why-i-sent-oxford-university-rejection-letter), whereas the second one reports on some new EU emissions-reduction targets (“How low can you go”, retrievable at http://www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/Britain_in%20_2011_Environment_tcm8-18630.pdf).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy

    Carla Quinci

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  1. Carla Quinci
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Correspondence to Carla Quinci .

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  1. Faculty of Letters,Department of German Studies, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Grande Lisboa, Portugal

    Teresa Seruya

  2. Faculty of Letters, Department of German Studies, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Grande Lisboa, Portugal

    José Miranda Justo

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Quinci, C. (2016). (Un)Folding the Meaning: Translation Competence and Translation Strategies Compared. In: Seruya, T., Justo, J. (eds) Rereading Schleiermacher: Translation, Cognition and Culture. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47949-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47949-0_8

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