Trainee translators' and professional translators' source text comprehension and reproduction

Abstract

This chapter aims to reaffirm the need to give more prominence to text-linguistic analysis for comprehension and reproduction in translator training programs of both source texts and target texts. At the interface between foreign language teaching and translator training is the issue of training students to analyze L2 source texts (i.e., English) whereby they learn to identify the semantic-pragmatic relations that underlie varied grammatical constructions, such as fronted participial clauses, parenthetical modificational elements positioned between the head noun and the rest of the sentence, appositive elements, and certain idiomatic phrases. The semantic-pragmatic relations that underlie the aforementioned grammatical constructions could be theme/rheme relations, statement-comment, problem-solution, etc. This chapter reports the results of a comparative study of a sample of undergraduate Arabic-speaking trainee translators’ renditions and a sample of professional translators’ renditions of a source text such as a nonfinite clause at the beginning of a sentence “Depending on where you stand,” or an idiomatic verbal phrase positioned between the head noun and the predicate as “strikes a budget deal” or an appositive element such as the “Presidency of the EU” as in “the British, as holders of the EU Presidency” (see Appendix A: Source Text titled: European Union Summit). Furthermore, it examines the processes the two groups use to identify or not identify the source text segments as problems and the solutions they offer. The study consisted of two phases: (1) a translation of the text from English into Arabic by 18 undergraduate trainee translators and by 18 professional translators and (2) a questionnaire that examined both groups’ identification or lack of identification of six source text segments as problems and the solutions to those problems. The first phase is a product-oriented approach to translation performance while the second phase is process-oriented (cf., Gile qtd. in Kelly 13). The analysis of the translations produced by the two groups, the undergraduate trainee translators and the professional translators, shows that the latter outperformed the trainees in translating the source text segments. However, both groups failed identically at the task of identifying the problematic source text segments and providing solutions. In using dictionaries, both groups disregarded the situational context of the problem segments. The findings of this study point to one pressing issue in translation teaching - the need to upgrade the level of trainee translators’ and the professional translators’ textual competence in L2 reading comprehension.