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Translation audience, philosophy, and approach

Many professional translators learn by translating, and often eschew translation theory in favor of a hands-on approach. Their research is practical and centers around the terminology and concepts of various industries. Even many college translation programs favor practical studies over theory.

One pervading philosophy or another, however, often comes to underpin and inform a translator’s approach, and this philosophy is built upon the relationship the translator has with his or her audience and the type of equivalence sought between the source and target.

Inspired by a three-way discussion among this blog, The Gits Blog, and the transubstantiation blog, I’m now hoping to clarify the philosophies of various groups of translators.

Beginning with an area I know something about, legal translators have what I would call a somewhat adversarial relationship with their clients. What I mean is that despite an attorney’s wish for a different wording, a translator must render a translation that reflects the original as accurately as possible, without editorial input from his client. This is not to say the translator must work entirely independently from the client — an attorney knows her case far better than the translator and background information is always helpful — but to best serve the attorney, the translator must be more faithful to the words on the page than to the client.

I would venture to say that the goal of the technical or medical translator is not that different from the legal translator but I invite them to voice their opposition. Advertising translators, on the contrary, would appear to best serve their clients by giving them what they want despite what the original document says, and here again, please contradict me.

Having studied literary theory, I assert that just as the original author does not write for an audience, but rather to express himself, the final reader of the translation is less important than fidelity to the author’s unique voice as distinguished from other speakers of his language. Thus a literary translator must strive to find a voice in the target language that is just as unique as the author’s rather than rely on the most conventional idiom.

Besides audience, equivalence between the source and target languages plays a role on how the translator translates, too, and for this I’m referring to an informative post on the transubstantiation blog. I would venture to say that, outside of literary translation, most translators would seek either referential equivalence, which “is established when the words in the source language refer to the same objects in the world as the words in the target language,” or contextual equivalence, which “is established when words in both languages are used in the same or similar contexts.”

Because countries have different legal systems that develop culturally over long periods, there are comparable contexts between languages but direct terminological equivalents are often missing. Legal translators thus find themselves comparing the contexts of the source and target legal systems and reaching for best equivalent, often inserting a translator’s note to alert the reader.

Because scientific language is not so culturally dependent, I would imagine that referential equivalence prevails. Advertising, on the other hand, is so culturally biased that in many cases source language should be re-written in the target language rather than translated. To refer once again to the transubstantiation post linked above, I would venture to guess that most advertising translators remain in the realm of connotative equivalence, which “is established when the words in both languages and texts trigger the same associations and connotations,” and pragmatic equivalence, which “refers to words in both languages having the same effect on the readers in both languages.”

Literary translators seem to have the broadest range, as they rely not only on the four types of equivalence mentioned, but formal equivalence and textual equivalence too.

I invite translators from all fields to give some thought to your philosophy. Or if you translate for more than one industry, how is your approach affected?