Expertise

Ideal bilingual competence.

LECTURE 7

Translating: Modeling the process.

Main points:

1. The translator: knowledge and skills.

2. Ideal bilingual competence.

3. Expertise.

4. Communicative competence.

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1. The translator: knowledge and skills.

In any sense it is true, that “any old fool can learn a language... but it takes an intelligent person to become a translator (Newmark, 1969, 85). It is important to investigate what this “intelligence” might consist of.

...the professional (technical) translator has access to five distinct kinds of knowledge: target language (TL) knowledge; text-type knowledge; source language (SL) knowledge; subject area (real-world) knowledge; and contrastive knowledge(Johnson and Whitelock, 1987, 137). Add to this the decoding skills of reading and encoding skills of writing and we have a plausible initial listing of the areas which need to be included in any specification of the translator’s competence. Obligatory is an integration between the linguistic knowledge of the two languages specific and general knowledge of the domain and of the world via comparative and contrastive linguistic knowledge.

One approach would be to focus on the competence of the ”ideal translator” or “ideal bilingual”. We would be following exactly Chomsky’s view of the goals of linguistic theory and his proposals for the specification of the competence of the “ideal speaker-hearer” and would, therefore, be led to a definition of translation theory such as: translation theory is primarily concerned with an ideal bilingual reader-writer, who knows both languages perfectly and is unaffected by such theoretically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention or interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying this knowledge in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965, 3). This would lead us to adopt a deductive rather than an inductive approach to the discovery of translator competence, his search of the knowledge by means of which the product is created.

An alternative to the ”ideal translator” model would be to adopt a less abstract approach and describe translation competence in terms of generalization based on inferences drawn from the observation of translator performance.

We might now...study... the crafts of the human translator as an expert system. Since translators are experts studying the process of translation from this point of view (Nirenburg, S.,1987, 10.)

Expert systems are used to give advice to users. From the applied perspective, the expert system provides a means of harnessing the enormous potential of information

technology not only as an aid to more efficient translating but also for the investigation of the translation process.

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