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WORDS AND CONTEXT

Many translators say you should never translate words, you translate sentences or ideas or messages. I think they are deceiving themselves. The SL text consists of words, that is all that is there, on the page. Finally all you have is words to translate, and you have to account for each of them somewhere in your TL text, sometimes by deliberately not translating them (e.g. sometimes words like schon and dejo), or by compensating for them, because if translated cold you inevitably over-translate them, e.g., Ich bin schon lange fertig- L T have been ready for ages'; 1000francs, c'est dejd mat-* 1000 francs, that’s not bad at all 1 .

I am not suggesting you translate isolated words. You translate words that are more or less linguistically, referentially, culturally and subjectively influenced in their meaning, words conditioned by a certain linguistic, referential, cultural and personal context. The linguistic context may be limited to a collocation (90% of the time, it is no more than that): un hiveT blanc - 'a vthitz winter' (blanc has many other meanings); or it may be as large as a sentence in the case of an extended metaphor or a proverb. And occasionally, a word may be linguistically conditioned by its use beyond the sentence, when it is a concept-word variously repeated or modified or contrasted in other sentences or paragraphs, or again where it is used as a stylistic marker or leitmotif throughout the text.

Secondly, the referential context. This relates to the topic of the text. Often only the topic will nail the meaning of a thousand technical words such as defilement ('scrolling'), stockage (’storage’), reckercher ('search'), fusionner (’merge 1 ), appel (’calling*), which happen to be related to electronic data processing. However, the number of such words even in an ’opaquely’ technical text, i.e., one that is comprehensible only to the relevant expert, does not usually exceed 5-10%.

Thirdly, there is the cultural context, words related to ways of thinking and behaving within a particular language community, and words which may be cultural (e.g., kuffiak, an Arabic head-dress) or universal (e.g., ’tea’) denoting a specific material culrural object.

Lastly, there is the individual context, the idiolect of the writer, the fact that we all use some words and collocations in a way peculiar to ourselves.

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Translation Unit --------------- Context

Steps in Translation

Text in Translation

Translation Procedures

Shifting in Translation

V-Flat Translation Theory

Two-Pole Theory (F&D)