Translation

The translation is the fact of interpreting the Sens of a text in a Langue ( source language , or source language ), and of producing a text having a Sens and an equivalents effect on a reader having a Langue and a different Culture ( target language , or target language ).

Up to now, the translation remained a primarily human activity. Attempts were however made to automate and computerize the translation ( Automatic translation), or to use the Ordinateur S like support of the human translation (Traduction computer-assisted).

The goal of the translation is to establish an equivalence between the text of the source language and that of the target language (i.e. to make so that the two texts mean the same thing), while taking account of a certain number of constraints (context, Grammaire, etc), in order to return it comprehensible for people not having knowledge of the source language and not having same the Culture or the same luggage of knowledge.

Translation and interpretation

There exists a difference between translation, which consists in translating ideas expressed with the writing of a Langue towards another, and interpretation, which consists in translating ideas expressed orally or by the use of parts of the body (Langue of the signs) of a language towards another.

Although interpretation seems to be a under-field of the translation if one examines the theory behind the processes of the two trades (studies in translation), the practice shows that these professions require very different aptitudes.

Theories of the translation

The translation process

The translation process consists of three successive phases:

  1. comprehension: assimilation of the direction conveyed by a text, to want to say of an author… ;
  2. deverbalisation: lapse of memory of the words and conservation of the direction; " Operation by which a prone takes Conscience Sens of a Message by losing conscience of the words and the sentences which gave him corps."
  3. réexpression: reformulation of wanting to say in target language.

Types of translations

On the Job market, one distinguishes two types of traduction : pragmatic translation of texts S and the literary translation. The majority of the professional translators translate pragmatic texts.

Pragmatic translation

The pragmatic translation relates to the documents such as the handbooks, layers of Instruction S, notes internal, official reports, financial reportings, and other documents intended for a limited public (that which is directly concerned with the document) and of which the useful lifespan is often limited.

For example, a guide of user for a particular model of refrigerator has utility only for the owner of the refrigerator, and will remain useful as long as this model of refrigerator will exist. In the same way, the software Documentation is generally addressed to a particular software, whose applications relate to a category of user S.

The translation of pragmatic texts often requires Connaissance S specialized in a field or another. Belong to the texts pragmatiques :

  • documents of technical order (Data-processing, electronic, Mechanical, etc)
  • scientific texts (Astronomy, Medicine, Geology, etc)
  • texts of a financial or administrative nature.

The pragmatic translation is a type of translation often " anonym" in which the translator can not be associated with the translated document, just like certain companies do not mention author of user guides of the products. However, in the case of the translation of books with informative contents, the translator will be mentioned in the section of primary responsibility for item bibliographical for the book.

In general, the pragmatic translation is more accessible and brings back wages higher than the literary translation. The latter is carried out above all by love of the Langue and the original text, or by will to make known all subtleties of an admirable text written in foreign language.

Schools of thought

According to the school of thought Cibliste , it is necessary to privilege the exactitude of the remarks to the detriment of stylistics, when that is essential. For " to make pass its message" , the translation will have to sometimes exchange the cultural elements of the original text for equivalent, but better known examples of the readers of the culture of arrival. Most important direction message remains the which the author tries to convey. The translator must initially transmit this message in a way idiomatic and natural for the reader in target language, while remaining faithful to the language, the register and the tone employed by the author of the text in source language.

According to the school of thought Sourcière , the translator with the responsibility to translate while remaining entirely faithful to the shape of the original text. The translator will have to thus reproduce all the elements stylistics of the original, to employ the same tone, to leave all the intact cultural elements and (to the extreme) to even force the target language to take the form dictated by the starting text. The translator waterfinder will initially occupy himself not to betray the vehicle used by the author, and then will try to return the direction of the message well.

(See Critical translation Ci-low.)

Difficulties connected to the fields of speciality

To carry out useful pragmatic translations, it is necessary to control the jargon of the field and to know to employ the good terms; a translation which does not reflect the everyday usage and the evolution of the language of speciality could not interest its readers, as well as one does not write any more as in 1750.

Certain fields (as the Informatique) evolve/move at a vertiginous speed, at the point where the Jargon specialized of the target language (p. e.g. French) is not able to grow rich rather quickly to compensate for the evolution of the source language (p. e.g. English). In this situation, the translator can be confronted with the absence of French equivalent (thus with the creation of a Néologisme); with a quantity of neologisms about equivalent or to the alternative made up of an obscure and well-known term, and of a more precise term, but less employed.

The translation of software (which comprises two distinct phases, the internationalization and the regionalization) is a process which differs from the simple textual translation to various degrees.

Literary translation

This type of translation relates to the Romance , Poème S and other artistic creations of the literary field.

The literary translation requires aptitudes in Stylistique, a good imagination and wide cultural knowledge. It is a question of reproducing the integral effect of the original text at the reader in target language, as far as the direction of the words. The translation must be as pleasant with reading, and causing the same emotions as the original. The large translators, whatever the language, have a very demanding formation, literary and university studies, in their native tongue, language into which they translate (Jean-François Ménard, Laetitia Devaux). They are often themselves writers.

The problem of the double translation

A well-known difficulty of the translators, and which one is aware apart from them little, is the fact that the text for translation is sometimes already a translation, not necessarily faithful, and that it is as far as possible necessary to try to exceed it to go back to the original.

The traditional example is consisted the Gospels, which pay to us in Greek remarks made obviously in araméen; as the originals seem lost, if they ever existed, it results from it from the quarrels of scholars, essentially interminable. Another example is consisted the Latin texts of the Middle Ages where clerks endeavoured to transpose in the language of Cicéron of realities whose Cicéron did not have the least idea, going until making of a “archbishop” a “archiflamen”.

Nowadays however the phenomenon developed and arises in various forms.

There is initially the use conscious of a language-bridge; if it is necessary to translate into modern Greek an Estonian text, one will be able to have evil to unearth a translator knowing at the same time the two languages and the covered subject. It is of a translation, generally in English, whose the translator will leave. The inaccuracy of this language can present problems, like points out it Claude Piron with this sentence whose it had had to control the French translation: He could not approved with the amendments to the draft resolution proposed by the delegation off India. the first translator could not know if proposed referred to amendments or with resolution and it had chosen the bad solution. Claude Piron, who had under the eyes the unit of the report/ratio, could rectify

But the problem is often that, English passing for international language, understood everywhere, one will instinctively have recourse to him of thinking by there facilitating the things. The person in charge of a Spanish company wants to write with a French company; simplest would be that it threw the broad outlines in its language as well as possible, that a secretary formatted the text and that it read again it before sending, having thus expressed its opinion. The recipient would give the letter to a Spanish translator into French and would receive in return the version nearest to the original. In practice the Spanish person in charge will judge more polished to ask a presumedly bilingual secretary to write in the language of His Gracious Majesty, and the secretary will thus write it in what she will believe being of English. It is possible that the correspondent, not including/understanding anything with nonsense that one sends to him, that is to say all the same constrained to address to a translator, undoubtedly lending to him superhuman capacities, and the unhappy one will have to give itself much more evil to translate which if it had had directly under the eyes the Spanish text.

A similar frame of mind will play when an international company has of a German text and its translation in English and that it has need maintaining for a French version. It is almost automatically that one will send to a translator the english language version which will be likely to pose infinitely more problems to him than the original, original which one practically never thinks of joining.

Criticisms of the translation

To obtain a " translation; intelligente" , sensitive, it is advisable to forget not the knowledge acquired at the school or the University but the standards of the correctors. One wanted that a Latin version felt Latin, and it was thus necessary to write “a bronze sword”, another estimated that in a successful version one was not to be able to guess the source language and it advised “a bronze sword”; one realizes thereafter that one and the other were at the same time reason and wrong and that their only defect was to present their requirement like an absolute truth.

Marc Bloch raised the question while writing in Apologie for the History  :

“It would be annoying, acknowledge it, to see the historians encumbering their remarks of foreign terms, to imitate these authors of rustic novels which, through patoiser, slip with a jargon where the fields would not be recognized better than the city. While renonçant with any test of equivalence, it is often with reality even as one would make wrong. a use which goes up, I believe, at the eighteenth century, wants that serf in French, or of the words of close direction in the other Western languages, are employed to indicate the chriépostnoï old Russia tsarist. A more unfortunate bringing together could be imagined with difficulty. Over there, a mode of fastener to the glèbe, transformed little by little into a true slavery; on our premises, a form of personal dependence which, in spite of its rigor, was very far from treating the man like a thing deprived of straight: alleged Russian serfdom did not have about anything commun run with our medieval serfdom. However, to say “chriépostnoï simply” would hardly advance us. Because there existed in Romania, in Hungary, in Poland and into Eastern Germany, of the types of country subjection narrowly related to that which is established in Russia. Will it be necessary, very with turn, speech Rumanian, Hungarian, Polish, German or Russian? Once more, the essence would escape, which is to restore the major connections of the facts, by expressing them by a right nomenclature.”

That shows all the difference between the school translation and the adult translation. The professors get along at least on this principle: “If a sentence is ambiguous, the translation also owes the being”; undoubtedly do they want that the pupil benefits from the occasion to show his virtuosity, but which translator, seeing in front of him the words “ his secretary” will not seek to know, even apart from the text that one subjects to him, if it is of “ his secretary” or about “ his secretary”? To translate cost often to choose.

We arrive then at the second criticism, less easy to argue, which is based on the Italian sentence with the particularly vigorous formulation:

Traduttore… Traditore!

This criticism supports that any translation amounts too much betraying the author, its text, the spirit of this one, its style… because them choice to be made of any share. What to sacrifice, the brevity or clearness, so in the text the formula is short and effective, but impossible to translate into if few words with this precise direction? In this second critic one could understand there that encourages us to read in the text . But if such is the implied council, it appears obvious that it is impossible to follow in the facts.

Translation of the computer programs

See the article Regionalization of software .

See too

Internal bonds

External bonds

  • Many dictionaries in line
  • bilingual Dictionaries on line and to download
  • Small guide of the purchaser of translations published by the French company of the Translators
  • International Conference of Academic institutes of translators and interpreters
  • Association of the Literary Translators of France
  • Meta, re-examined traductology
  • the Community of translators in line

Software on line

  • Software of translation Systran
  • Reverso
  • German Webtranslate
  • German Leo
  • multilingual WorldLingo
  • Translated

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