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Translator competence and translator training
Understanding the constituents and nature of translation competence is of immediate relevance to translation training since the concept enables us to identify the areas where the intervention of the translation instructor is most needed. A number of translation scholars have addressed this issue and reached several interesting and at times conflicting conclusions. To begin with, House (1980) quoted by Kiraly (1995) maintains that translation competence is a fifth basic foreign language skill in addition to reading, writing, speaking and listening. Wilss (1982), in a more elaborate description of the constituents of translation competence, argues that it is the fusion of SL receptive competence, TL reproductive competence and a super competence consisting in the ability to render a SL text into a TL text. Of special significance here is Wilss’s argument that the ‘super competence’ is intertexual and not interlingual. That is to say, being truly bilingual or fluent in a foreign language is no guarantee that the translation will be a successful one; on top of all this, one has to be conversant with the discourses of the SL and TL (Kiraly 1995: 14).
The constituents of translation competence aside, the true nature of translation competence has remained a controversial subject, dividing the field into two main groups of translation scholars: those who advocate an innate view of translation competence and those who support a non-innate view. The first group (1) believes that the ability to translate emerges the moment the process of second language learning is started. Hence, they claim, there is “no essential difference between the translation behaviour of professional translators, translation trainees and second-language learners” (Ibid: 15). The role of translation training here, it is maintained, consists in intervening “in the natural evolution of translation competence in the increasingly bilingual individual” (Ibid).
As for the second group (2), translation competence involves “the ability to decompose texts according to text types, the ability to identify a hierarchy of the relevancy of features of different types, the ability to transfer fully and efficiently those relevant features, in order of their relevancy, and finally the ability to recompose the text around the transferred features” (Toury 1974: 88). Hence, second language learners cannot translate because, as Hönig (1988 a) maintains, they are firstly unaware of the situational factors necessary in any translation; secondly, they do not know the strategies that are required to carry out a translation; and, finally, they lack frames of reference for evaluating the adequacy or quality of their translation.
For Kiraly (1995: 16), translation pedagogy should focus on translator competence, i.e. on “the specialized skills of the professional translator”, and not on translation competence per se. The term translator competence according to him “allows us to distinguish between 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 normally develop naturally”.
Pym (1992: 281) gives a fuller description of the skills which are specific to the professional translator and which have little to do with linguistic competence. He, thus, states that translation competence may minimally be defined as the union of two skills:
The ability to generate a target-text series of more than one viable term (target text 1, target text 2 ... target text n) for a source text.
The ability to select only one target text from this series, quickly and with justified confidence, and to propose this target text as a replacement of a source text for a specified purpose and reader.
Relating this definition of translational competence to translation pedagogy, Pym maintains that since translating is “a process of generation and selection between alternative texts”, then, “this is presumably what should be taught in the translation class”. However, as he notes with much surprise, “this is not what is usually taught in language class” (Ibid: 281). More specifically, and with regard to translation errors, Pym argues that translational competence enables one “to define a translation error as a manifestation of a defect in any of the factors entering into the above skills” (Ibid). He further adds
Whatever the nature and provenance of translation errors, my working definition of translational competence implies that they should all have the same basic form: they should all involve selection from a potential target- text series of more than one viable term. This is what I want to call the non-binarism of translational errors. A binary error opposes a wrong answer to the right answer; non-binarism requires that the target actually selected be opposed to at least one further text 2 which could also have been selected, and then to possible wrong answers. For binarism, there is only right and wrong; for non-binarism, there are at least two right answers and then the wrong ones. (Ibid: 282)
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