Didactics of Translation: Text in Context

Table: 5

The number of students not answering the MCQ pre-test is 7 (19.4%).

2. 
   The students’ feedback:
   

Only 6 students (16.6%) attempted to justify their answers, while the rest, 30 students (83.3%), provided no justification.

3. 
   Interpretation of the results:
   

The number of students choosing the correct answer for the MCQ pre- test is far greater than the number of those who produced wrong answers. One possible explanation for this result could be the nature of this kind of test which, to a certain extent, assists the testees by narrowing down the range of possible options. Nevertheless, 25% of the testees still showed problems in interpreting sentences 2 and 4 in the MCQ pre-test.

4. 
   Evaluation of the testees’ translations:
   

Concerning the translation of the MCQs, to take just sentence 1 and the written sign in 4, 25% of the testees incorrectly translated sentence 1 “will you marry me?” as*ϲϨϨϴΟϭΰΘΘγ Ϟϫ instead of ˮ ϲϨϣ Ν΍ϭΰϟ΍ ϦϴϠΒϘΗ΃ Again, in this example, the testees translated the words in the sentence and failed to translate its functional meaning, which is making a request. Similarly, 25
% of the testees translated the written sign “No smoking” as ϦϴΧΪΘϠϟ ϻ instead of ϦϴΧΪΘϟ΍ ωϮϨϤϣ, thus failing to correlate this utterance with its normally associated situation. The utterance was apparently interpreted by the testees as a campaign slogan and translated accordingly. The back translation of ϦϴΧΪΘϠϟ ϻ would in fact be: “Say no to smoking”.

Controlled free response:

‘The cow and the frogs’ text, a story for children, did not pose any translation problems for students. During the interview, the students largely attributed their unproblematic translations and the ease with which they rendered this text to the simplicity of the ST vocabulary and structure. However, they were not aware of other important factors which went into the making of this text.
The Lecture on Register
The students were given a lecture on register (see Appendix D) along the lines discussed in great detail in the relevant chapters of this work. The lecture included the following salient points:
x The register membership of the text.
x The pragmatics of the communicative act or how language is used to convey various intentions.
x The semiotics of culture which Hatim (2000: 13) defines as “the way language use relies on a system of signs which signifies knowledge and beliefs essential for members of a community to operate in an acceptable manner.” This system of signs is referred
to as textual practices and covers the following: genre, discourse and text types.

2.