Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

Preliminaries and global findings

The area of translation teaching as a sub-branch of applied translation studies is both exciting and challenging. The challenge is due to the daunting task that confronts the translation trainer in his/her endeavour to introduce the translation trainee to a delicate terrain, where sensitivity to details, awareness of the multi-disciplinary character of the translation activity and self-awareness of the mental processes involved in comprehending and decision-making, are pre-requisites for a successful rendering of a foreign language text.
The excitement and pleasure derive from the ability of the translation trainer to bring to the surface a whole range of frequently barely perceptible relations between culture, society and the psychological domain of language, and from the opportunity to be able to share this pleasure with the trainees in class.
This research set out to do three main things. The first objective is to test the claim that discourse analysis (more particularly the contrastive discourse analysis of Hatim & Mason (1990) (1997) and the text analysis model of House (1997) could help students adopt an efficient translation strategy. Secondly, the goal is to try to contribute to the process of “professionalization” of translation teaching. Thirdly, the research is intended to see if a translation training using the insights of the discourse models above along with the psycholinguistic models of comprehension can have some beneficial effects on the students’ competence and performance.
Concerning the first aim, one can say that the insights of these models allow students to understand the source text more deeply. Thanks to the guidelines put forward in these models, the students are able to extract, for the purpose of their translating activity, most needed information regarding form, content, origin, authorship and purpose. They, thus, are better able to embark on translating the source text and are more aware of the specific tasks they have to perform to achieve a successful translation.

Moreover, these models do sensitize students to the importance of taking into account a hitherto neglected aspect of texts, namely, their macro- structure. In other words, the models have assisted the students in relating the words on the page to higher semiotic structures (text type, genre and discourse), and in pointing out the differences that may occur at this level between the source text and the target text. Consequently, the models have been a great help to the students in avoiding the pitfalls of unjustified literal translation.

With regard to the second aim of this research, i.e. contributing to the process of professionalization of translation teaching and not merely relying on intuition and non-systematic approaches, one could maintain that this research has to a great extent, achieved its goal with respect to the following points:

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  Helping the students rationalize their comprehension and translation processes through the use of lecturing, discussions, post- tests and interviews.
  
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  Giving translation trainers arguments to use in favour of or against certain translation decisions. These arguments are based on a context-sensitive contrastive discourse model, on the principles of translation quality assessment and on psycholinguistic models of comprehension (top-down vs. bottom-up processes, Boekart’s model about the comprehension process and the empirical results derived from TAPS concerning controlled and uncontrolled translation processes).
  
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  Making students aware of what is expected of them and of their roles as “autonomous intercultural and interlingual mediators” (Kiraly 1995: 113).
  
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  Implementing a curriculum design that is systematic (informed by textlinguistic findings and insights) and that is graded (moving in a meaningful way from the least to the most complex).
  

As far as the third aim is concerned, and in spite of the constraints of time and the requirements of the experiment, one can say that the kind of translation training used in the experiment did have some beneficial effects on the students’ translation competence and on their performance especially in the areas of text types, genre and discourse. Training in register, however, did not lead to any substantial improvement in translation performance although it did have a significant influence on their source text processing of a few texts.
The effect of the translation teaching was evaluated by using:

1. 
   the students’ performance in the pre-tests and post-tests
   
2. 
   their feedback after the post-tests (interviews)
   
3. 
   their impressions and reactions to the kind of translation teaching used in the experiment
   
4. 
   a comparison of the performance of two different groups of students: those who attended the course regularly and those who never did.
   

2.