Practical Translation Project Design

　Practical Translation Project Design - Translation > Stage 5 > Step 2 > Task 5

　 Analyze Case Five

Read the following excerpts from different rationales and try to find out in what way they can be improved. Please write your answer in the space provided.

A: Bassinet & Lefevere have said that “Translation reflects a certain ideology and poetics and as such manipulates literature to function in a given society in a given way”. Lambert has also said that “The translator’s options can indeed be explained by social recommendations, restrictions, taboos, but sometimes also by laws and prohibitions”. And Wilss has said that “The question of why a textual element fails to take on a cognitive structure opening the way for decision –making is analogous to the question of why some stimuli are attended to and perceived, while others go unnoticed”.

B: “Extending the meaning of a word” is on Page 24 and it says “When translating English into Chinese, we often come across this kind of problems: some words are hard to be translated into proper Chinese words. If we translate them directly from the meanings in the dictionary, we can make the translation uninteresting and even changed. We must base our translation on the original meaning, according to the whole text and choose exact Chinese words to extend the meaning.”

C: What is translation? Often, it is rendering the meaning of a text into another language in the way that the author intended the text. In the process of translating we must bear in the mind that the principle of reproduction of meaning must be given priority, for it is the content of the message that is of prime importance for the purpose of translation, and a good translation focuses on the meaning or content of the source language-cultural. Hence, preserving the information of the cultural blanks of the source language-culture is most important in the process of translation of cultural blanks.

The three samples above fail to observe the academic conventions of providing sources for references. Acknowledging the sources of references not only shows respect to their authors but also ensures the reader the authority and reliability of the references.

References are generally either directly or indirectly quoted. Direct quotations refer to the original words, sentences or texts from others’ works. They need to be put in the double quotation marks and followed by such information as the surname(s) of the author(s), the year of publication of the book and the number of the page from which the quotation is taken. All this information should be put in the brackets right after the quotation unless the surname(s) of the author(s) have already been mentioned in the sentence. Please look at the following direct quotation as an example.

Bassinet & Lefevere (1986: 101) stated that “Translation reflects a certain ideology and poetics and as such manipulates literature to function in a given society in a given way”.

Indirect quotations include the concepts or theories formulated by others but phrased in your own words. Indirect quotations should also be followed by the name(s) of the author (s) and the year of publication of the book. But they may not be followed by the page range. Please read an example of indirect quotation below.

Translation is to represent the meaning in the source text in the comprehensible target language (Nida, 1997).

Based on the above description of direct and indirect quotations, you may now be able to find out how Samples A, B and C can be improved.

The direct quotations in Sample A are all not being given their sources. As a result, the reader may not know from which books they are quoted.

Sample B contains a very long direct quotation. If the direct quotation is longer than three sentences, it is normally put in an indented separate paragraph as in the following example.

Feng Qinghua (冯庆华) explained “extending the meaning of a word” in the following way:

“When translating English into Chinese, we often come across this kind of problems: some words are hard to be translated into proper Chinese words. If we translate them directly from the meanings in the dictionary, we can make the translation uninteresting and even changed. We must base our translation on the original meaning, according to the whole text and choose exact Chinese words to extend the meaning” (1995:24).

Example C is intended to define the nature of translation, yet makes no distinction between what is quoted either directly or indirectly from others and what is the researcher’s own idea. Making references to others’ works without acknowledgment can put the researcher at the risk of being accused of plagiarism, which is considered a very serious offence in the academic field.

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