AKADEMIA
HUMANISTYCZNO–EKONOMICZNA
W ŁODZI
WYDZIAŁ: HUMANISTYCZNY
Przyjmuję pracę jako magisterską (II stopnia)
(w wersji papierowej i elektronicznej)
podpis promotora..............................................................
data ....................................................................................................
dr Wiesławy Ferlackiej
Table of contents
Table of contents 2
List of tables 4
Introduction 5
Chapter 1: Theory of translation 6
1.1. What is translation? 6
1.2. Translator’s arsenal 7
1.3. Vinay and Darbelnet’s translation procedures 8
1.4. Ivir’s procedures for the translation of culture-bound items 9
1.5. Newmark’s procedures 10
1.6. Standardized and ‘free’ translation 12
1.7. The role of the translator 13
Chapter 2: Legal translation 15
2.1. Law and legal language as a specialized one 15
2.2. Specificity of law and legal translations 16
2.3. Legal vocabulary and its specificity 18
2.4. Basic terminological problems 18
2.5. Difficulties in Polish-English legal translations 19
2.6. Appropriate paragraphing, style and register of translated legal text 19
Chapter 3: Comparison of three commercial English translations of ‘Kodeks Spółek Handlowych” 21
Conclusion 25
References 26
Abstract in Polish 28
OŚWIADCZENIE 29
List of tables
Table 1. The title 22
Table 2. Art. 11. §2. 22
Table 3. Art. 18. §3. 23
Table 4. Art. 157. §1. 23
Introduction
The intension of this work is to present different aspects of translators’ work. This subject was taken up to gain and develop general knowledge about translation and especially the translation of legal texts. The aim of this thesis is to provide a piece of advice to the readers, that already are or want to become professional legal translators.
The text that is analysed in this thesis is “Kodeks Spółek Handlowych” - a Polish legal document translated into English by three different publishers. In this work these translations are compared and the special focus is put on the most problematic mistranslations found. The texts are compared and the most suitable is chosen or, if none is adequate, the most appropriate translation is proposed by the author.
This M.A. thesis consists of three parts. Chapter one introduces the reader into the subject of translation. The definition of it is stated and some of the strategies and procedures are listed.
Chapter two discusses the question of the legal language as the specialized one. The focus is put to the specialised legal vocabulary and the obstacles that an interpreter may come across while doing his or her work.
Due to the differences between the Polish law (based on continental law) and the Anglo-Saxon law (based on the common law and individual legal acts) this thesis finds the key trap-like, ambiguous lexico‑grammatical items that will be highlighted and particularly described in the analytical part enclosed in chapter three.
Chapter 1: Theory of translation
The intention of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the basic definition of translation. A text may be translated in many different ways according to the cultural aspects of source and target language cultures. Descriptions of translation techniques and procedures are embedded herein. These will be used in the third, analytical chapter of this thesis.
The difference between ‘standardized’ and ‘free’ translation (Korzeniowska, Kuhiwczak 2008: 97) is taken into consideration to give a closer look at the matter on how the formal and informal documents should be translated.
The professional translator, while transforming the text from one language into another, should also be aware of his role as a linguist, artist, intermediary and rewriter (Korzeniowska, Kuhiwczak 2008: 115) to adequately transform the text to make it more coherent for the target reader. The above is characterized in this chapter as well.
1.1. What is translation?
Before the definition of translation is given, one should focus on what translation is not. Definitely it is not rewriting one word from one (so called ‘source’) language to another (‘target’) language. If it were so, the role of translators would have already been taken by computers a long time ago (Belczyk 2004: 7). Words happen to be ambiguous as they refer to some specific context. The same word may have different functions in different cultures and may not have the exact equivalent in the target language (Belczyk 2004: 7). Translation must not be taken into consideration on the level of sentences, either, because in different languages they obey different grammar rules.
The essence of translation is certainly in transforming of ‘what the author had in mind while writing the text’ and is focused on meaning rather than form (Belczyk 2004: 7).
Probably the most adequate definition of translation was stated by Peter Newmark (1982: 7) who claimed that “the translation is a craft consisting in the attempt to replace a written message and/or statement in one language by the same message and/or statement in another language”.
1.2. Translator’s arsenal
To translate is to give the sense of a text in the most faithful way in different language. To achieve this task the translator’s duty is to choose among many translation strategies with their sub-categories - procedures. Translation strategies are defined as “a potentially conscious procedure for the solution of a problem which an individual is faced with when translating a text segment from one language into another” (Lörscher 1991, in Kwieciński 2001: 115). Some of these, from the “translator’s arsenal” (Belczyk 2004: 11-27) are described below:
(1) ‘Linking’ is combining many short sentences into one longer.
(2) ‘Dividing’ relies on parting long sentences (sometimes made of complex grammatical structures) into shorter with the use of a comma or a semicolon.
(3) ‘Generalizing’ is used when an ambiguity of a phrase may be generalized by choosing one particular meaning of it, however, one should be careful to choose the adequate meaning that would follow the point stated by the author. The best way to avoid the ambiguities is to form the sentence in a way that leaves the interpretation to the reader.
(4) ‘Word shifting’ is used according to the different grammatical rules in different languages where the word order as well as the syntax differ, it is common rule that the process of translation goes together with shifting the words within the sentence.
(5) ‘Replacing’ is applied when the translated sentence does not fit the whole text stylistically due to e.g. word repetition. A good translator will in such a case re-edit the text and express the same idea in different words.
(6) ‘Erasing’ and ‘simplifying’ are used when the translator does not want the translation to look ridiculous. In such a case one should erase some things that are obvious for the target reader, i.e. if a text explains that Polish parliament is called “Sejm” or an American states that one meter equals 100 centimetres, which is evident for the Polish reader, putting such sentence into the text is aimless.
(7) ‘Adding’ and ‘complementing’ can be operated to achieve more precision it is consider worthy to add some words either for clearness, stylistic matters or grammatical rules. It is sometimes good to add something for better narration or while translating troublesome plural forms.
(8) ‘Change of grammatical form’ is used due to different grammars of languages. The translator needs to replace some collocations or syntax with more understandable and acceptable in the target language. Such a change may include a change of tense, number (singular or plural), (double) negatives or voice (active or passive).
(9) ‘Repetitions’ are usually replaced. However, repetitions are sometimes acceptable in one language but not in another. The simplest solution of avoiding it is the use synonyms, a pronoun or the change in the sentence so that the repetitions are avoided.
The above are the most basic strategies of transforming the text from one language to another. These were described by the polish author Arkadiusz Belczyk (2004) that has a great experience in translation. His book is a practical guide that introduces the beginning translator into the subject of translation.
However, due to the fact that this thesis is devoted to give advice to the professional translators it needs to focus not only on the basic translation methods but also on the...
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