Re: Translation

Rosa Graciela Montes (rmontes who-is-at cca.pue.udlap.mx)
Fri, 19 Apr 1996 16:40:38 -0600 (CST)

This is a comment to a post by Ken Goodman about translation of "real
discourse" examples (as opposed to examples constructed by the analyst)

One of the best book translations I have seen is that of Charles
Hockett's "Course of Modern Linguistics" into Spanish by Jorge Luis
Suarez and Emma Gregores. As Hockett writes in the preface to the Spanish
version of the book "it is not only a translation but an adaptation ...
where applicable, examples based on English and the Germanic languages
have been replaced by examples based on Spanish and the Romance
languages ...". For example, a chapter which discusses the phoneme and
which in the English version has a long list of contrasting minimal pairs
for English sounds was replaced in the Spanish version by contrasting
pairs for Spanish; the historical chapter in the English version
discusses the evolution of English from Proto-Germanic and in the Spanish
version, the evolution of Spanish from Proto-Romance. It's a wonderful
"translation" and especially taking into account the intended audience
(since the book was an introductory textbook for students beginning work
on descriptive linguistics) it's very clear and facilitates the task for
the student.

In contrast there's another translation of another introductory
linguistics book which somewhere says something like: " In my previous
sentence you can see three different uses of the suffix {-ing}" and then
goes on to talk about these three different uses based on the "previous
sentence". But since in the translation the sentence is in Spanish, there
are no uses of {-ing} at all, and the whole paragraph is totally
incomprehensible for someone who doesn't speak English in the first place.

With respect to translation of data: I work on Spanish discourse. What
I've done in some papers and articles submitted in English was to provide
both a literal morph by morph translation and a "gloss" . The literal
translation remains faithful to the Spanish construction. The "gloss"
while trying to remain as close as possible to the original adapts the
example to make it clear to an English reader. The aim is to provide an
illustration of the phenomenon being discussed. Of course I include a
warning in a footnote that these glosses are just illustrative and that
theoretical claims are and should be based only on the original data.

Rosa

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Dra. Rosa Graciela Montes
Coordinadora
Ciencias del Lenguaje
ICSyH - UAP

Maximino Avila Camacho
72001 Puebla, Pue.
MEXICO

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