The pedagogical value of translation solution types

Abstract

Typologies of translation solutions have been used in translator training since at least the 1950s. Despite numerous criticisms, some of the oldest versions are still held to have pedagogical value as the toolboxes of the trade. Here we report on class activities in which two classical typologies – Vinay and Darbelnet and Loh – were learned, applied, and critically evaluated by four classes of final-year Masters students translating into a variety of European and Asian languages. It is found that students working with European languages prefer Vinay and Darbelnet, while students working with Chinese prefer Loh. The students' evaluations of the solution types nevertheless reveal surprising lacunas in both, and evince the need for some careful redefinitions. The pedagogical value of the solution types thus lies not in their capacity to describe actual translation processes, since there is a strong linguistic relativity involved, but in the way that their imperfect metalanguages allow students to reflect critically not only on their own practice but also on the difficulties of theorization.

Keywords:

• teaching translation
• translating style
• translation theory
• cultural diversity

Acknowledgements

The authors express their extreme gratitude for the help received from Maggie Ting Ting Hui at the City University of Hong Kong, who located a copy of Loh (1958) and guided us through its examples.

Notes on contributors

Anthony Pym is director of postgraduate programs in translation, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain. He is President of the European Society for Translation Studies and a fellow of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. He is the author of Translation and Text Transfer (1992), Epistemological Problems in Translation and its Teaching (1993), Pour une éthique du traducteur (1997), Method in Translation History (1998), Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History (2000), The Moving Text: Localization, Distribution, and Translation (2004), and Exploring Translation Theories (2010). He is Editor of L'Internationalité littéraire (1988), Mites australians (1990), and the series Translation Theories Explained and Translation Practices Explained (St Jerome); and co-editor of Les formations en traduction et interprétation. Essai de recensement mondial (1995), Sociocultural Approaches to Translating and Interpreting (2006), and Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies (2008).

Esther Torres-Simón is research coordinator of the Intercultural Studies Group at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. She specialized in Asian Translation Studies. She completed her PhD on English-language translations from Korean published after the Korean War.

Notes

1. The breakdown into classes was as follows: 10 in 2009, 15 in 2011, 19 in 2012 and 14 in 2013. Of these, 34 worked with Chinese, 10 with Korean or Japanese, nine with Romance languages, three with Russian, and two with German.

2. The names for the solution types and the sample problems were the work of Mike Holt, a professional translator who taught in the Masters in Translation Technologies at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona in the early 2000s.

3. This was actually a text previously used in an experiment by Fabio Alves (2005).

4. The use of newspaper articles was not a matter of sheer expediency, as it may be for some translation instructors. The texts were all designed to test other variables (see Pym, 2009), and the most important criterion was that they be equally new and relatively accessible to students of all the languages in the class. Further, since Monterey trains translators and interpreters for various departments in various governments, current affairs is one of the fields in which the students are expected to be well versed.

5. The three Russian students and two German students, who all found the solutions difficult, are not included in the table because the sample is too small for percentages to be significant.