Juliane House: -
Text and Context in Translation listen
This lecture deals with a fundamental issue of translation: The
relationship between a text and its cognitive and material
environment, its context, and how this relationship influences the
process and the nature of translation.
While research on texts as units larger than sentences has had a
rich tradition in translation studies, the notion of context has
received much less attention. It is therefore necessary to attempt
to “rethink context” for translation.
As a first step, Juliane will briefly examine what has been said
about “context” in different disciplines. The currently
fashionable view of context as something dynamic, emergent, and
fluid is rejected in favour of the more traditional one seems more
appropriate for written texts and for translation. In receiving
and producing text, translators habitually unite text and context
in acts of interpretation taking account of the situatedness of
text reception and production. Translators thus manage to overcome
the separation of text and context by uniting (in their minds)
time and place, words and things, languages and cultures – all
this, however, at a particular point in time.
In a second step she will present her own theory of translation as
an act of re-contextualisation. Two basic types of translation –
overt and covert translation - are suggested as indicators of very
different re-contextualisation strategies. Covert translation,
unlike overt tran slation, critically involves the application of
a “cultural filter” with which translators take account of the
new context (and the new addressees). She will provide several
examples of cultural filtering in different genres and stress the
necessity to base acts of reframing and otherwise changing
originals on results of contrastive pragmatic research.
Finally Juliane will touch on a recent important development in
translation: The influence of global English on
recontextualisation processes.
About Juliane House
Juliane House is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Hamburg
University and co-director of the German Science Foundation’s
Research Centre on Multilingualism, where she co-ordinates the
Multilingual Communication Group as well as two projects on
translation and interpreting. Her research interests include
translation theory, contrastive pragmatics, discourse analysis,
English as a lingua franca and intercultural communication. She
has written and edited many articles and books, among them A Model
for Translation Quality Assessment, Translation Quality
Assessment: A Model Revisited, Interlingual and Intercultural
Communication, Cross-Cultural Pragmatics,, Misunderstanding in
Social Life, Multilingual Communication, Translation and the
Construction of Identity.
Michael Kemmann: -
Medical Device Localisation listen
Manufacturers of medical devices, diagnostic instruments, etc.,
act in heavily regulated environments. Often, some of the
regulatory requirements they are facing are language-related. With
utmost product safety as the core concern of manufacturers, users
and health authorities alike, the safety of use can in many cases
only be guaranteed by providing users (whether they are patients,
laboratory staff or surgeons) with instructions in their
respective languages. This creates a large demand for translation
and localisation; however, with respect to the high risk
manufacturers are running if errors in their user documentation
lead to misuse of a device and potential harm to a patient, the
special requirements to quality control in the localisation
workflow are obvious.
The first part of the session will start with an overview of the
constituents of the regulatory environment relevant to the
language business, and will look at their consequences for the
(European) markets. The second part will look at workflows,
Quality Assurance models and some more of the "nuts and
bolts" aspects typical to medical localisation.
About Michael Kemmann
Michael was born in 1967 in Aachen, Germany and studied German and
English literature at the universities of Würzburg, Aachen and
Bonn. He received an M.A. (major: Newer German Literature) from
Bonn university in 1995 and from 1995-1997 was Editor / Senior
Editor at Translingua in Bonn.
From 1997-1999 he worked as an independent
translator, localiser and consultant, working (partly on site) for
several large software, telecommunication and financial
corporations. In 1999 he became Managing Director of Transline
Localization and after an MBO in 2003, and the subsequent renaming
of the company, he is now the Managing Director and owner of ADAPT
Localization Services, Bonn.
Anthony Pym: - Risk
Management in Localisation Processes listen
Risk management in localisation processes
This seminar will present the basic concepts of risk
management and consider some of the ways in which they can be
applied to the twin processes of internationalisation and
localisation.
Special attention will be paid to notions of error. We know that
errors always occur; we have to live with them; but how can we
assess the relative risks involved? Several classical errors will
be discussed, although participants are invited to present (or
confess) their own.
The second half of the seminar will focus on the problem of
defining goals. For the project manager, a clear definition of the
goals is the first step toward identifying and assessing risks.
For workers like translators, revisers or engineers, however, many
risks cannot be assessed because the goals are never made
explicit.
Some final questions will be asked about the long-term risks of
localisation itself as a communication process. Does the industry
exist simply to sell more things faster and for more profit? What
might be the goals of localisation with respect to the future
strength and diversity of our languages and cultures? What are the
risks if we fail to meet those goals? Tentative answers to these
questions will be drawn from Bourdieu’s analysis of economic and
symbolic capital.
The seminar thus aims to be both useful and, hopefully, upsetting.
About Anthony Pym
Anthony Pym is the director postgraduate programs
in translation at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.
He is also 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), and The Moving Text:
Localization, Distribution, and Translation (2004). Editor of
L'Internationalité littéraire (1988), Mites australians (1990)
and the series Translation Theories Explained and Translation
Practices Explained (St Jerome); co-editor of Les formations en
traduction et interprétation. Essai de recensement mondial
(1995).
|
