Defining Translation and Culture

Defining Translation and Culture

Cultural Context Language Translation

Culture and translation sounds like completely different thing for many people. When translating something, people just need to transfer a word of sentence to different language. Culture sounds like something bigger associated with human being. In fact, translation has very strong association with the language aspect while language becomes part of the culture. It means that language will include much bigger things associated with the culture of human who is using the language. That is why it is crucial for making sure that people do not forget about the cultural aspect when they try to translate something. For this purpose, people need to be able to define translation and culture.

Translation

Translation surely is much bigger thing than just delivering sentence in one language to another language. There is meaning which should be delivered to the readers so the translation process should be done carefully including by considering the cultural aspects. There are some different definitions of translation which can be found according to the scholars. It can be the textual material replacement on one language by the textual material in another that is equal. There is also definition that translating will include reproducing in the different language the closest original language message natural equivalent. It must be bigger than just delivering word from one language to another language. In this circumstance, translators must deal with the alien culture which should be understood well or else the message will be delivered in strange way. That is why people cannot separate culture and translation at all to get the best result.

Culture

Of course it means that people have to understand further about the definition of culture. There are two manifestations of culture after all. First of all, the vocabulary items reference or concept is specific for given culture. Reference or concept is pretty general but there is specific expression to the culture of source language. That is why, it is better for translators to be careful when they translate expression or word which is culturally bound. They also have to consider about the procedures of translation. As translators, there are several competencies which should be owned. They must have excellent knowledge not only about the target language but also the source language from the vocabulary to the pronunciation. However, they also need the sociolinguistic competence. This knowledge will provide them with very great help for understanding the text with the right context. In fact, translators should increase their knowledge about culture and translation.

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Translating Word Problems: How to Solve Word Problems

Translating Word Problems: How to Solve Word Problems

Language Literal Translation

Do you need help to solve your translating word problems? Then, you’ve read the right article. This article will help you to become the person who is good at solving every problem in translating word. Being a person like that is quite same with being a detective. You have to be able to choose clues that can help you solve the case and to be a good investigator. To solve translating word problems, you need to have good ability in solving math equations.

Simple example to start

This is a very simple example to begin with: The length of Sunny Side School field is 40 feet more than the wide. Elaborate the length of the field in terms of its width.

After looking the example, now you should follow these following steps.

The steps to solve translating word problems

1. Read the problem carefully

This is the first simple step to solve the word problem. This is the step that needs your reading comprehension skills. Read the question again and again until you are fully understood.

2. Identify the important information

Based on the example, you need to take a note about the field that is 40 feet longer than the wide.

3. Identify the missing information

Based on the example above, you need to find the length of the field.

4. Analyze the word problem

For the word problem, you need the right equation that can express the length of the field.

5. Organize the clues

Now, you have to give meaningful and clear variable name for each piece of information you have and you don’t have. So, we will give the variable name for the length of the field as “L” and the width of the field as “W”.

6. Search the word problem

You need to know some words that are related to mathematical operation. Those words are including:

· Addition: increased by, total, more than, sum, combined, plus, in all, together/altogether.

· Multiplication: times, product, of, multiplied by.

· Subtraction: less/fewer than, minus, decreased by, less, difference.

· Division: out of, a, per, percent, quotient of, ratio of.

· Equal: are, were, is, was, yields, gives.

7. Translate the English term into Mathematical term

The last step, from the example, there are important words to be highlighted. The first one is “more than” means (=) and “is” as (=) with the variable names before (W and L) that indicates the width and the length.

Now, finally you can solve the translating word problems based on the example above. The algebraic expression is L=W+40. Following these steps will make you good at solving any word problems in no time!

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Translation Matters - Using Translated Products

Translation Matters - Using Translated Products

Language Project Translation Issue

If your company translates corporate material into other languages, including your native tongue, you may have experienced something like one of the following scenarios:

Scenario #1: The translation is good and you can easily understand the important information your company wanted to convey to you. Your Corporate Communications Department is 'on-the-ball', that is to say, they know what they are doing. They probably hired out the effort to a company specializing in translating important material. They, in turn, know what they are doing when it comes to selecting highly skilled language translators. And they know the importance of editing.

Scenario #2: The translation is okay, but after you've read it, you have an uncertain feeling as to whether or not you got the full scope of what the original document communicated (in the original language). It's like when you eat a meal and there isn't quite enough to fill you. You get sort of a half-full feeling. Or we could liken it to the feeling you get when you have just swallowed a bad part of an apricot.

Scenario #3: The translation is just awful. It ranges in quality from the unintelligible to being something a 6th grader might be capable of performing.

You might ask how this happens. It usually happens when an inexperienced Corporate Communications Leader decides to cut out the "unnecessary" costs of hiring either a Professional Translator directly or more appropriately hiring a Multi-Lingual Translation Company to oversee the entire process, including quality checking.

What they have done in this case, is simply use one of their employees to perform the translation. While the employee may know their mother tongue fairly well, they may still be struggling with the new tongue. They might understand spoken English, for example, but still struggle with written English. Further complicating matters are all the technical issues involved in rendering a good translation that the non-translator is probably not aware of and you can see how a poor translation could result. The bottom line is that being bilingual does not a translator make. If the native speaker of the foreign language was not trained and has no experience in translation, he will not produce good translations.

The potential silver lining resulting from the last scenario, is that it usually only takes a little feedback from the folks in the target language group to divorce the Communications Leader from ever trying that in the future. The problem is that oft' times that feedback never comes and is not sought after. In other words, the feedback loop remains unclosed.

You could hire a Professional Translator to "Back Translate" a paragraph of the document into the Source Language and provide it to the Communications Leader to show just how awful is the work of the non-professional. That might be one way to close the loop and ensure a more rigorous process going forward.

Surely Corporate Leadership would do something about ensuring quality translation for the welfare of the company and its stakeholders. It seems unconscionable to do otherwise.

By: Thomas Mayhew

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Translation Theory: The ideal translation should be..

Translation Theory: The ideal translation should be..

Equivalence Language Theory Translation Translation Theory Receptor

What is translation?

Translation consists of transferring the meaning of the source language text into the receptor language text.
Catford (1965: 20) Translation is the replacement of textual material in one language by equivalent textual material in another language.

Acording to Nida and Taber

Translating consists of reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style (Nida and Taber, 1982)
Translation is the general term referring to the transfer of thoughts and ideas from one language (source) to another (target), whether the languages are in written or oral form; whether the languages have established orthographies or do not have such standardization or whether one or both languages is based on signs, as with sign languages of the deaf (Brislin, 1976)

Translation is a process of finding a TL equivalent for an SL utterance. (Pinhuhuck, 1977:38)

Translation is a craft consisting in the attempt to replace a written message and/or statement in one language by the same message and/or statement in another language. (Newmark, 1981:7)

(McGuire, 1980:2) Translation involves the rendering of a source language (SL) text into the target language (TL) so as to ensure that (1) the surface meaning of the two will be approximately similar and (2) the structure of the SL will be preserved as closely as possible, but not so closely that the TL structure will be seriously distorted.

Translation is a transfer process which aims at the transformation of a written SL text into an optimally equivalent TL text, and which requires the syntactic, the systematic and the pragmatic understanding and analytical processing of the SL (Wilss and Noss, 1982).
Good theory is based on information gained from practice. Good practice is based on carefully worked-out theory. The two are interdependent. (Larson l991, p. 1)
The ideal translation will be accurate as to meaning and natural as to the receptor language forms used. An intended audience who is unfamiliar with the source text will readily understand it. The success of a translation is measured by how closely it measures up to these ideals.

The ideal translation should be…

Accurate: reproducing as exactly as possible the meaning of the source text.
Natural: using natural forms of the receptor language in a way that is appropriate to the kind of text being translated.
Communicative: expressing all aspects of the meaning in a way that is readily understandable to the intended audience.
Translation is a process based on the theory that it is possible to abstract the meaning of a text from its forms and reproduce that meaning with the very different forms of a second language.

Translation, then, consists of studying the lexicon, grammatical structure, communication situation, and cultural context of the source language text, analyzing it in order to determine its meaning, and then reconstructing this same meaning using the lexicon and grammatical structure which are appropriate in the receptor language and its cultural context. (Larson l998, p. 3)

Read also Translation study 

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