Signata (Dec 2016)
Language of Translation and Interculturality for a Corpus-based Translation Pedagogy
Abstract
With the purpose of devising a variety of translation-based activities aimed at developing students’ inter-linguistic and intercultural competences, we have compiled an aligned parallel corpus of study with ten contemporary Brazilian novels and their translations into English. This paper intends to develop a methodology for translation investigation and teaching by combining three approaches for discovering regularities in linguistic and translational behaviour alike. The departure point of this investigation is provided by Baker’s (1996, 2000, 2004) proposal to study the linguistic patterns of translational language which are manifestations of explicitation, simplification and normalisation. For cultural markers, the investigation draws on works on cultural domains (Nida 1945; Aubert 2006) in order to investigate various aspects of material, social, ecological or ideological culture. In order to discover the regularities in the foreign language, we draw on a student-centred teaching approach (Johns 1991a, 1991b; Laviosa 2008, 2010). The paper then reports on a case study of professionally-oriented corpus-based translation pedagogy underlain by the three procedures adopted. The study uses the WordSmith Tools programme to permit rapid access to surface features of whole texts. In addition, the British National Corpus (BNC) is used to compare the linguistic patterns characterising translational English with the patterns of original English. In this way, the corpus-based analysis can help learners investigate the respective expectations, experience and knowledge of the linguistic communities involved. In the process of identifying equivalents between source and target texts, learners acquire information about the way in which both discourse and cultural markers are laid down in the two languages. Also, they can use corpus evidence to translate new texts (Zanettin 1998). By looking for cultural makers, collocational patterns and their equivalents, learners are also able to examine similarities and differences across languages and cultures as well as search for vocabulary and phraseology, thus engaging in a meaning creation activity and developing translator skills.
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