Lesson 3: Mistranslations and misinterpretations

Before I assess it for you, how do you assess a translation that you do?

  Here is an excerpt from the translation Journal: http://translationjournal.net/January-2016/the-language-of-tourism-translating-terms-in-tourist-texts.html

 

The question of quality assessment is rather ambiguous. To the best of our knowledge, there are no universal generally accepted criteria to assess the quality of translation. Much depends on the type of the text, genre, source text and target language conventions. Functionalist theory (Reiss, Vermeer, Nord) considers a target reader as the driving force for the translation decision-making process and a commissioner as the decision-coordinating factor.

1. Mistranslations;
2. Misinterpretations;

Mistranslations are considered to be grave mistakes, leading to the breakdown in communication (Kelly, 1997), misinterpretations are regarded here as being relatively easy mistakes, leading to the lessening of communicative effect, and nontranslations are context-dependent and can be either grave or easy.

The first type, mistranslations of tourism terms can result in considerable breakdown in communication. Based on the results of our investigation we can assume that these mistakes occur because of either conceptual problems or lack of linguistic competence.
The second type, misinterpretations lessen the communicative effect of the source term. The reasons for their occurrence are two-fold as well – either conceptual deficiency or lack of knowledge.

Alright, we will work on that as we continue, but for now we need to practice a bit

Go to the ‘visit Paris website’ and do some examples

Extra: Translating names

How do we translate names?

In English we always keep the original name of a person

Name of a place is controversial because there are often changes: Seville and Sevilla, Oporto and Porto, as a standard rule you change to the English language

Bad translations:

Where to sleep in italy? There is only an embarrassment

of choice. in addition to more than thirty thousand

hotels located in every part of the country, there are an

additional thirty five thousand addresses of campsites,

country farmhouses, bed and breakfasts, youth hostels,

private accommodation and so forth.

No personal pronouns

Oddity of language