Alfred Nobel University Journal of Philology (Dec 2024)
COMPONENT CONSISTENCY AS ONE OF THE ASPECTS OF GERMAN-UKRAINIAN SPECIALIZED TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSURANCE
Abstract
This empirical-theoretical inquiry aims to identify, describe, and propose solutions to address incon- sistent reproduction of derived terms containing recurring components in German-Ukrainian legal trans- lation. The study is grounded in translation-oriented terminology and seeks to establish new criteria for translation quality assessment. The manifold objectives encompass: 1) undertaking a scientific investiga- tion to demonstrate the problematical nature of intratextual term consistency in translation; 2) scrutinizing potential impacts of prospective translation regulating instruments on providing terminology consistency; 3) adducing extensive illustrations of adherence to the intratextual term component consistency principle while translating German legal texts into Ukrainian. The research proposes four heuristic hypotheses: 1) Term component inconsistency in translation sig- nificantly reduces translation quality, potentially leading to partial information loss or distortion, which af- fects the translation dominant. 2) Maintaining consistency in how term components are translated is cru- cial for ensuring high-quality specialized translations, especially in fields like legal translation. 3) Implicitly formulated quality requirements for specialized translation can induce strategic terminological-discursive errors, regardless of the translator’s professional experience or status, which can be attributed to trans- lator’s unconscious decisions. 4) Specialized lexicographic reference works, while functioning as translation regulating instruments, exhibit both general and component inconsistencies. Therefore, they can only serve as aids for exercising the translator’s term selection and decision-making competence. The comprehensively formulated methodology encompasses a blind translator experiment incorpo- rating three participants of disparate professional experience and status (two Ukrainian translation agen- cies and one translation studies master’s student), meticulous comparative intralingual and interlingual analysis of source and target texts, induction/deduction approach to identify recurrent translational phe- nomena, morphosemantic analysis to determine the internal semantic structure of legal terms, derivation analysis to explicate term-formation processes, and contrastive lexicographic analysis to assess the poten- tial of existing terminological records to ensure the term component consistency. The methodology pro- posed in the article allowed to examine invariant properties of the object (legal terms in both languages) under study from various translation-oriented terminology perspectives. An in-depth approach to consideration of intratextual terminology heterogeneity, which contradicts the re- quirements of current international standards for translation quality assurance, has led to the distinction of term component consistency and term component inconsistency in translation. It is established that recurring strate- gic terminological- discursive mistakes at the text level of multiple translations result from translation instructors/ scholars not sufficiently attending to the problematic issue. The overlooked translation quality criterion has led even experienced and well-regarded experiment participants to inadvertently make unconscious mistakes. Concurrently, the contrastive analysis of German-Ukrainian specialized dictionaries evinced their lim- itations in ensuring component consistency, spotlighting the indispensability of the translator’s role in up- holding this benchmark. The proposed glossary with verified equivalents for the terminological field of Ger- man “Unterhalt” demonstrates the potential for consistent translation of derived terms into Ukrainian. The extensive empirical evidence and elucidation of a novel translation studies method (viz., blind translator experiment) along with newly discovered concepts (inter alia term selection competence) ren- der this inquiry a worthwhile contribution toward enhancing German-Ukrainian legal translation quality. Ultimately, this is a commendable study advancing the field of translation-oriented terminology and con- tributing to the harmonization of German-Ukrainian terminological capital. Future research prospects in- clude developing and describing a microstrategy to ensure intratextual term component consistency and investigating the influences of explicit translation regulating instruments on specialized translation quality.
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