Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

In Italy

Italian academic and translation teacher Gabriella Mauriello in Italy maintains that translation teaching has a tendency to adopt a practical approach:
you take a text and deal with whatever translation problems arise from this particular text, in whatever order they come. (Mauriello 1992: 64)
Mauriello also states that “there is plenty of good literature on the theory of translation, but very little on the practice of translation and how to teach it” (Ibid: 63). Students in her view should learn a “savoir faire” in addition to a “savoir”; in other words, “they should be told the ways, (i.e. the road map) to follow” to achieve a good translation (Ibid).
In Mauriello’s school of translation, the teaching follows a linguistic progression and is largely based on the textlinguistic approach. The whole

text is taken as the translation unit, but the emphasis is placed on different linguistic aspects along the period of instruction in the following manner:

x First year: syntactic structures
x Second year: semantic aspects
x Third year: style, language for special purposes, and terminology.
The texts are selected from authentic materials, provided that they reflect this progression and that they represent the different text types: expository, argumentative and instructional.
Concerning the translation process and its relation to translation teaching, Mauriello draws attention to the fact that this process involves two phases, a passive phase and an active phase, in addition to a phase in between, a “no-man’s land” where teachers can intervene to help students acquire some translation skills (Ibid: 66-67). In the first phase, the student reads the text until it “becomes imprinted on the mind and links up with the previous encyclopedic knowledge of the reader”. While engaged in this activity, he/she will get a feel of “the general rhythm of the text, its overall structure, its register, its level of language and its intended meaning (Ibid: 66). In the second phase, the active phase, the translator draws on the knowledge and insights he or she gathered from the first phase and puts into action his or her productive skills in the target language.
It is the phase in between that is particularly interesting. This is divided into two sub-phases, namely, analysis of the text, and terminology and documentation research. The analysis of the text is further subdivided into two steps: concept analysis and technical analysis. In concept analysis, the translator has to identify the following elements:
x the author’s thesis
x the logical units which indicate the overall structure of the text
x the key concept in the ST
x the author of the text
x the target reader
x the subject matter
x the function of the text
x the text type
Following this analysis, a translation strategy will be adopted. Concerning technical analysis, students are given guidance into how to identify and to solve some technical translation problems.

As for the second sub-phase, that is terminology and documentary research, students use their dictionaries to look up technical and common words without attempting to find the exact word. The latter, according to Mauriello, will fall naturally from the context when the translator gets involved in creating the target text.

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