Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

NOTES

Chapter I

1. 
   While, for some, teaching translation academically should aim at training future translators for the job market, for others, it is just an additional language activity which helps students in their text comprehension and composition. However, there are those, such as Defeng Li (2001: 351), who argue that both goals should be aimed at, and that one therefore has to strike a balance between language training and translation training.
   
2. 
   For Kiraly (1995: 16), it is essential for translation trainers to be aware of the constituents and nature of translation competence for efficient teaching. He also points to the distinction between translation competence and translator competence; i.e. the more general types of native and foreign language communication that the translator shares with bilinguals, and the translation skills that are specific to professional translation and which most bilinguals do not usually develop naturally. For Wilss (1982: 58), the constituents of translation competence are: a receptive competence, a reproductive competence and a super competence (how to translate a SL text into a TL text). The third constituent is, according to Wilss, intertextual and not interlingual. For Neubert (1995: 412), translational competence consists of language competence, subject competence and transfer competence.
   
3. 
   Gabriella Mauriello (1992: 64) describes most eloquently this non-systematic approach to translation teaching: “you take a text and deal with whatever translation problems arise from this particular text, in whatever order they come”. Röhl (1983: 4) also argues that “translators are being trained despite the absence of a systematically developed and tested translation didactics.”