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Article: AN APPROACH TO THE TRANSLATION OF LITERATURE: RICH POINTS & WHAT THEY REVEAL
Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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Jun 26, 2005

This topic is for discussion of the ProZ.com translation article "AN APPROACH TO THE TRANSLATION OF LITERATURE: RICH POINTS & WHAT THEY REVEAL".
 
USER00230 (X)
USER00230 (X)
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:15
German to English
I agree completely Jan 20, 2006

I agree completely with the following statement at the beginning of this article:

"In other words, translations are frequently begun without a great deal of consideration of the work as a whole, with sentences “translated at face value rather than as component units in a complex overall structure” (ibid:115). With this approach there is a real danger that sight may be lost of how the text as a whole functions...The prime translation unit must ultimately be the entire text - not ... See more
I agree completely with the following statement at the beginning of this article:

"In other words, translations are frequently begun without a great deal of consideration of the work as a whole, with sentences “translated at face value rather than as component units in a complex overall structure” (ibid:115). With this approach there is a real danger that sight may be lost of how the text as a whole functions...The prime translation unit must ultimately be the entire text - not words or sentences or even paragraphs within it..."

This is the fundamental flaw with Trados and other CAT tools, that they are based on the sentence, as if this was somehow the fundamental "unit" of a translation.

Although the article is about literary translation, I believe it applies to more everyday texts as well, though to a lesser extent. ▲ Collapse
 


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Article: AN APPROACH TO THE TRANSLATION OF LITERATURE: RICH POINTS & WHAT THEY REVEAL






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