Lexicography, Terminology, and Translation: Text-based Studies in Honour of Ingrid Meyer

Chapter 15. The Contextual Turn in Learning to Translate1

215 FROM TURN TO TURN Over the past decades, it has been possible to discern a number of “turns” in translation studies. These turns have manifested changes in focus areas of translation research. The turns have usually been defined as ten-year periods that have conveniently coincided with the actual decades in the Christian calendar. So far, we have seen the heydays of linguistic, cultural, and historical turns, and we have talked about translators’ visibility as a potential turn. The emphasis is now shiing to issues of social relevance and quality in translation. Maybe we can even claim that we are now about to enter yet another turn in translation studies. The important thing to keep in mind is that these different turns are by no means discrete or exclusive shis of emphasis. The main impacts of all of them are still felt and remain relevant. It is even likely that some turns will be revitalized in the future when we feel the need to focus on them again. In fact, all these research areas show how multifaceted the translation process is in reality and how the various aspects of multilingual communication can be highlighted in the study of translation. In that framework, it is actually surprising how li
le a
ention the translating aspect of translation has received in translation studies. Naturally, there are a number of very useful language-specific “how to”-style instruction books and other practical guides for students of translation, but not a great deal has been wri
en with translating in CHAPTER 15 THE CONTEXTUAL TURN IN LEARNING TO TRANSLATE1 KRISTA VARANTOLA 216 Krista Varantola focus. Studies on the use of corpora in translation are notable exceptions (e.g., Laviosa 1998; Bernardini and Zane
in 2000; Bowker and Pearson 2002; Zane
in, Bernardini, and Stewart 2003; Olohan 2004). In my opinion, however, the time is now ripe for yet another emphasis, which I would like to call a “contextual turn in translating.” Whywouldwewanttofocusonsuchapracticalaspectoftranslation? My main argument is that the recent major developments in the tools of translation, such as dictionaries and corpora, merit this emphasis on the practical aspects of translation. Their effect on the actual translating process is fundamental and deserves a much more systematic treatment than is the case today. In this way, the benefits of the new technologies also become familiar in the training and practice of translation. This new interest area became visible at a recent CULT symposium (Corpus Use and Learning to Translate, Barcelona, 2004) where a number of talks concentrated on the benefits of extractable corpus information for translation. Good examples of such research foci are the Internet as a corpus, comparable corpora, as well as information on contextual equivalence and semantic prosody in corpus data. What seems to have been largely overlooked in the context of translating, however, is the potential of modern dictionaries. THE HAPPY THREESOME In this article, my starting point is the competent human translator and his or her information needs. The question is how modern linguistic tools, such as dictionaries and corpora, can help the translator during translation. By competent, I mean somebody who knows how to make decisions about translation strategies, how to translate, and which aspects to take into account and balance in the process. In the actual performance, however, our competent translator needs help in the decision-making process: consultations with other human experts, help from dictionaries and glossaries, information from parallel and comparable texts, et cetera. The need for this external help is particularly marked if the translation task is tricky, a special domain text, a translation into the translator’s second language (L2), a very special text genre, or any other challenging task. My claim is that, owing to developments in language technology and electronic processing of linguistic data, the translators’ problemsolving techniques have changed dramatically over the past decade or The Contextual Turn in Learning to Translate 217 so. Electronic dictionaries, general and specialized corpora, corpora and corpus analysis tools, and the Internet have all contributed to making the translators’lives easier: these tools have lessened translators’anxiety levels, made translators less frustrated and more confident about their decisions. To summarize, the new tools and resources have made it easier for translators to match competence with equally high-level performance (Varantola 2003, 59). A MEETING PLACE I will concentrate on the major changes that have taken...