Translating technical (LSP) texts into the official South African languages: A corpus-based investigation of translators’ strategies

Abstract

Translating technical texts into the South African Bantu languages, and to a lesser extent into Afrikaans, is an activity fraught with problems, the biggest one being the lack of terminology in these languages. In this article-undertaken within the framework of Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS), and more specifically within the subfield of Applied CTS-we focus on technical translation in the official South African languages, with specific reference to the manner in which (professional) translators deal with the issue of terminology. To this end, and growing out of an earlier pilot study (Gauton et al. 2003), a multilingual corpus of ten sets of parallel texts in all eleven official South African languages was compiled and studied. Taking our cue from the general perception that the translation of terms by means of loanwords and/or transliterations is a dominant strategy, particularly in the South African Bantu languages, these strategies form the focus of the first phase of our investigation. This is followed by a comparative analysis of the translation strategies used by African language translators in finding suitable translation equivalents for English terms foreign to the African languages, using the term'formation strategies' as identified by Mtintsilana and Morris (1988) and'translation strategies' as explicated by Baker (1992) as a basis. For comparative purposes, 20 sample terms were selected from the parallel corpora. The translation strategies utilised in the translation of these terms were then identified and statistically compared. The study concludes with suggestions to African language translators of technical texts in dealing with the problem of non-equivalence encountered in this type of translation work.