Jiří Levý a didaktika překladu

Abstract

Although Jiři Levy, the most renowned Czech translation scholar, is not directly associated with translation pedagogy, many of the concepts that he left behind are still relevant for translator training as well as foreign language teaching. The present paper first explores the comprehension stage of Levy’s model of translation process which he broke down in a commendably detailed manner in order to help future translators realize how many aspects and layers of the source text they have to understand and analyse before beginning with the actual translation. Examples of errors made by translator trainees as well as professionals are discussed to explain that insufficient comprehension of the surface (i.e. purely linguistic) level is a rather frequent occurrence which very often affects deeper levels of content (such as the author’s attitude) and text coherence. At the same time, the objective is to explain how comprehension errors can be used in the translation classroom to develop research skills, including the use of language corpora. The latter half of the paper is a discussion of Levy’s thoughts on translation procedures and the behavioural tendencies of literary translators. Levy himself suggested only a limited number of procedures to be taken by literary translators to transfer names and culture-bound terms but definitely left his mark by being probably the first scholar to explain in a systematic way the tendencies exhibited by translators whereby translations tend to be more general, neutral, logical and explicit than their source texts. Taken together, Levy’s procedures as well as tendencies have been presented by Anthony Pym as one of many viable typologies of translation solutions, which might prove to be a key to getting language teachers and learners to think of translation as a communicative activity, thereby contributing to initiating the much-missed collaboration between Translation Studies and the teaching of foreign languages.