Lingua e traduzione inglese: ESP - English for specific purposes and specisalised translation

Specialised Translation

Specialised translation covers the specialist subjects' fields falling under non-literary translation which include science and technology, business, law, politics, medicine, mass media. What is fundamental is the familiarity with subject-based texts so the familiarity with the topic I am talking about.

When we talk about target text types, we refer to functional approaches to translation: translation was firstly associated with a language practice, culture was not involved though it was a simple language transfer, mostly a language-based practise. This changed and in the '80s translators and scholars talked about cultural term in translation: culture is essential in translation. In '90s some scholars decided to create the functionalism, a functional approach to translation where the translation commission is very important, it implies the commissioner that asks for the translation of the text and you, as a client, have to fulfil the context and respect what the commissioner.

The scholars spoke about the functionally adequate target text so adequacy is the most important feature and it is linked to the skopostheorie which tells us that translation is successfully only if it succeeds in having a certain intended effect on a given intended audience.

When we translate specialised text types we have to understand if the function can be reproduced and understood by the target context, by the new public.

Translation can be defined as the process or the product of transforming a written text from one language to another which generally requires a significant degree of resemblance or correspondence with respect to the source text. It means that translation implies that what we have to do is understand the degrees of resemblance which implies distance or closeness, if the source text and the target text are close or distant.

The degree of resemblance between two texts in two different languages can be conceptualised with a dividing line containing:

Interlinear translation, which is represented by linguistic glosses and which is mainly a word-for-word translation- Literal translation- Free translation for example poetry where the level of creation is fundamental due to rhythm, rhymes, puns- Adaptation, which is typical of theatre, screen A text type should be classified according to its genre: The macro-genre is a text type for specific purpose which has its own sub-genres. Text types or genres can be categorised through different viewpoints: - From a sociolinguistic perspective: concerning peoples, races, individuals speaking varieties of the same language; gender, age, social class (levels of formality of the language, colloquialism, technicality) so diastratic and diatopic variations - From the translation and interpreting perspectives according to the subject area, literary, technical, legal, commercial etc. for example a recipe - From a language function perspective, if a text is dominated by a conative function or aestheticforexample. "They call me jeeg robot": the target language is very informal, cruel, there's the roman dialect and accent. Subtitles can't reproduce everything is said by actors, in subtitling we definitely lose something. Translation strategies are some strategies proposed by Malone that the translator should use in his works. They are: equation and substitution; divergence and convergence; amplification and reduction; diffusion and condensation; reordering. The first one is the equation. The most obvious form of equation is the loan word: a lot of words are loaned and that's why Italians play football and British eat lasagne and generally a word is loaned when in the language there's not the referent for an object. But words are loaned even if the term for something already exists: British supermarkets sell rucola even if the English for rucola is rocket. Another form of equation is the calque in which a term is adapted to the phono-morphological system of

1. alanguage: for example, the Italian verbs dribblare and crossare are calques of the English verbs to dribble and to cross.
2. But equation refers also to the default position where a term should be translated by its clear one-to-one equivalent. But one of the most well-known traps associated with the word-for-word equation are the false friends where the meanings of similar terms don't match across languages simpatico/sympathetic; cold/caldo
3. Substitution: we use the substitution when we can't translate a word or a phrase literally. For example, the Saxon's genitive in Italian is translated with the prepositional phrase "Mike's book" "il libro di Mike"
4. Divergence: is the strategy of choosing a suitable term from a potential range of alternatives. For the Italian adverb "sempre" there are many alternatives in English such as always or still and we chose one of them according to the context
5. Convergence: is the opposite of divergence so

We can take into consideration the Italian personal pronouns "tu, lei, voi, loro" that in English all converge into the personal pronoun "you".

Amplification: requires that the translator add some elements to the source text and it is used in order to clarify some topics and for comprehension when the source language takes for granted certain components which may be cultural or linguistic or both: "Swansea is the birthplace of Dylan Thomas". If we want to translate it in Italian we have to say "Swansea è la città natale di Dylan Thomas famoso scrittore e poeta inglese" because Italians generally don't know who Dylan Thomas is.

Reduction: consists of omitting elements in a target text because they are redundant or even misleading. The Italian "carta geografica" is merely a map in English and the English "three-toed sloth" in the Italian "bradipo".

Diffusion: is concerned with the phenomena of linguistically slackening source text.

expressions for the target text version. For example the Italian “Magari!” can be translated into “if only I could”, “would that it were”,“I wish that were the case”.

Condensation: in which the target text expression is more linguistically economic. For example the Italian “abuon Prezzo” is translated into “cheap” but the English phrasal verbs such as “to make up” or “to make up for” are translated into the Italians “inventare” and “compensare”

Reordering is the last strategy and the translator must pay attention to the reordering because it isn’t always necessary. For example, “high pressure” can be translated as “alta pressione” or “pressione alta” but alta pressione is part of the semantic field of meteorology while pressione alta is the high blood pressure and it is used in medicine.

Newmark mentioned the difference between

1. Word-for-word translation: in which the SL word order is preserved and the words are translated by their most common meanings.
2. Literal translation: in which the SL grammatical constructions are converted to their nearest TL equivalents.
3. Faithful translation: through which the translator reproduces the contextual meaning of the original within the constraints of the TL grammatical structures.
4. Semantic translation: which aims at rendering the contextual meaning of the ST.
5. Adaptation: a free translation where the SL culture is converted to the TL culture and the text is rewritten.
6. Free translation: which produces the TL text without the style, form or content of the original.
7. Idiomatic translation: which reproduces the message of the original but changes nuances of meaning opting for colloquialism and idioms where these are not present in the original.

1. Communicative translation which attempts to render the exact contextual meaning of the original in such a way that both content and language are acceptable and comprehensible to the readers.
2. The procedures are:
1. Transference: the process of transferring an SL word to a TL text.