The Unit of Translation: statistics Speak

• Autores: Harry J. Huang, Canzhong Wu
• Localización: Meta: Journal des traducteurs = translators' journal, ISSN 0026-0452, Vol. 54, Nº. 1, 2009, págs. 110-130
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • The authors have conducted a study aiming at determining the unit of translation (UT), a subject of debate for more than forty years. The article consists of a review of relevant literature, a redefinition of the UT, an examination of sampled translated texts, excerpts and sentences of over 23,000 pages, including the Bible and Soul Mountain, translated from the Nobel Prize-winning novel of the Chinese author, Gao Xingjian, and an international survey. The contrastive analysis of these ST and TT materials shows that translations are done sentence by sentence within context and thus identifies the sentence in context as the UT. This identification is further confirmed by an international survey of 66 professional translators and translation editors. By verifying the UT, this study indicates that for a UT-related theory to be testable, the translation theorist should no longer ignore or sideline the sentence from its context.

    
    
    Plan de l'article
    
    1. Objective of the study
    1.1. Definitions of the unit of translation
    1.2. Definition of UT adapted
    1.3. Methodology
    1.3.1. Non-primary data
    1.3.2. Selection method
    1.4. Primary data
    2. Analysis of Translation Samples
    2.1. Types of translation analyzed
    2.2. Analysis of non-literary translation samples
    2.2.1. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
    2.2.2. The Holy Bible
    2.2.3. The Koran
    2.2.4. The Lun Yu [Analects, 499 sayings]
    2.2.5. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (CCRF) in English and French
    2.2.6. Patent Law of the People's Republic of China (in Chinese and English) (PLPRC)
    2.3. Academic translations - a summary
    2.4. Analysis of literary translation excluding poetry
    2.4.1. Soul Mountain
    2.4.2. Journey to the West
    2.4.3. Pu Songling's Liao Zhai Zhi Yi
    2.4.4. Utopia
    2.4.5. Ma Ke Bai (Zhong Ying Dui Zhao) (Macbeth in English and Chinese)
    2.4.6. La Conteuse (The Story Girl)
    2.4.7. "Of Studies"
    2.5. Poetry translation
    2.5.1. Poetry translations by professional translators
    2.5.2. Self-translated free verse
    2.5.3. Bilingual author's free verse (for comparison)
    3. The unit of translation confirmed
    3.1. ST-TT converting patterns
    3.2. The universal features of the UT
    3.3. The UT used by professional translators
    3.3.1. How translators translate
    3.3.2. Percentage of translation rendered sentence by sentence
    3.3.3. How translation is evaluated and edited
    4. Conclusion
    4.1. Implication of this study for translatology
    4.2. Implication for future research