Metaglossia: The Translation World

There is currently a growing interest in Russia and Eastern Europe as a distinct 'translation zone' of complex historical and social contexts, transcultural and translingual mediations and formative processes.

Inversas (I)

Por Alicia Martorell

La traducción es un oficio reciente en la forma en que lo conocemos. Hace cincuenta años, un traductor era cualquier persona capaz, gracias a sus habilidades lingüísticas, de poner en conocimiento de otros lo que por el idioma en el que estaba redactado quedaba fuera de su alcance.

Dada la penuria de este tipo de mediadores, y la necesidad de entendernos con los que no hablaban como nosotros, en realidad cualquier intento se daba por bueno, porque la alternativa para la mayoría consistía en vivir encerrados dentro de su propio idioma.

En cierta forma, la traducción sigue siendo en algunos casos una mediación de emergencia y no es malo que así sea, pero parece que ya hay un consenso sobre la necesidad de adquirir algunas destrezas complementarias para ejercer esta profesión y, muy especialmente, sobre el hecho de que cualquier intento no es bueno, es decir, sobre la exigencia de un nivel mínimo para que una traducción se considere «profesional». Ya no basta con «entenderse», afortunadamente, cada vez es mayor la exigencia de traducciones de una calidad estándar, difícil de definir en abstracto pero relativamente fácil de cotejar con situaciones concretas, al menos en los casos más extremos.

Sin embargo, esta evolución, que parece el nivel básico de la dignidad profesional de un traductor consciente, no ha llegado a todos los estratos de la profesión.

Uno de los aspectos con más resistencia a asumir la traducción como profesión, con todo lo que conlleva, es el que atañe a las traducciones llamadas «inversas».

Para entender este concepto, debemos retroceder al estadio anterior, cuando las personas que hablaban idiomas tenían una condición casi mágica de mediadores que les permitía actuar en cualquier situación y circunstancia.

STATUTORY interpretation is not, on its face, sexy. But Antonin Scalia, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Bryan Garner, a lexicographer and editor of Black’s Law Dictionary, try their best. Their "Reading Law", published in June, is a guide for lawyers and judges on how to read a text. The book is not only a love letter to textualism, Mr Scalia’s preferred theory of interpretation. It is also a sharp brief against those who would seek to indiscriminately inject arguments of public policy and personal politics into their analysis of a static text. The result is engaging; the theoretical aspects of statutory interpretation are still unsexy, of course, but here they are highly readable.

For lawyers, the term “statutory interpretation” connotes occasional necessary evil: the deliberate, sometimes unscrupulous, massaging of the text of a law to serve a client. (Messrs Scalia and Garner acknowledge this: “That is [lawyers’] job: to inject doubt when it is in their clients’ interest.”) For judges, interpreting a statute is stickier. The result of their analysis, a judicial opinion, is permanent. In contrast, lawyers’ impassioned arguments, even if they are recorded, do not serve any future legal purpose. And lawyers are forgiven for drawing bizarre interpretive arguments from the ether to serve their cause. Judges are not so easily relieved. Strict, dispassionate adherence to the plain meaning of the text could produce results anathema to the judge’s own political views. For tenured judges insulated from popular reproach, there is a temptation to look away from the text to support a particular outcome. Messrs Scalia and Garner want to end this temptation.

Charles Fillmore (1977) developed a linguistic theory that he referred to as scenes and frames semantics. This concept seems a bit abstract at first, but I think is very helpful to translators and to anyone writing.

What is meant by it is "a prototypical, experience-based (and thus culturally-determined) word meaning, but the meaning is not static... it is influenced by the communicative situation, and the context, and indeed, it is even created by them". (Kußmaul, "Verstehen und Übersetzen").

"Charles Fillmore describes them with the metaphor of the scene and the frame. The scenes are concepts and images in our minds, and in communication with language, are limited by frames, i.e. the linguistic form. So the scene is the image, and the frame is the word.

Benichov et al (2012) evaluated 53 adults (ages 19 to 89 years, mean age 56 years) with regard to age, hearing acuity (based on high-frequency, pure tone average), a composite score of cognitive function (created from tests of episodic memory, working memory and speed of processing) and verbal ability (based on WAIS and WTAR) with regard to the use of linguistic context on word recognition.
They report that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required for correct word recognition is inversely related to the probability of the same word occurring in the sentence context. After exploring the effects of aging, hearing acuity and cognitive ability with regard to spoken word recognition, they note age and cognitive ability contribute significant variance across all contextual conditions tested, while hearing acuity ceased to be a significant contributor to recognition thresholds in the high context conditions. Specifically, even with a moderate hearing loss, linguistic content provides a powerful effect with regard to improving recognition , and linguistic context may "virtually override differences among listeners" with regard to hearing acuity. Their regression analysis indicates cognitive ability is a significant predictor of word recognition—even after statistically controlling for hearing acuity.

Google ha anunciado una nueva opción para su traductor Google Translate que permitirá a los usuario acceder a una frase en la que se muestra una traducción en su contexto.

L'outil de traduction automatique de Google propose désormais de remettre les mots et groupes de mots à traduire dans leur contexte.

Google Translate (Google Traduction) propose désormais d'observer les mots dans leur habitat naturel, en y ajoutant des exemples de phrases dans l'outil de...

Nouvelle fonctionnalité pour Google Traduction qui propose des exemples de phrases pour remettre une traduction dans son contexte.

The significance of social situations is commonly context-embedded. Although the role of context has been extensively studied in basic sensory processing or simple stimulus-response settings, its relevance for social cognition is unknown. We propose the social context network model (SCNM), a fronto-insular-temporal network responsible for processing social contextual effects. The SCNM may 1) update the context and use it to make predictions, 2) coordinate internal and external milieus, and 3) consolidate context-target associative learning. We suggest the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) as a specific disorder in which the reported deficits in social cognition (e.g., facial recognition, empathy, decision-making, figurative language, theory of mind) can be described as context impairments due to deficits in the SCNM. Disruption of orbitofrontal-amygdala circuit, as well as the frontal, temporal, and insular atrophy in bVFTD, suggests a relationship between context-sensitive social cognition and SCNM. In considering context as an intrinsic part of social cognition, we highlight the need for a situated cognition approach in social cognition research as opposed to an abstract, universal, and decontextualized approach. The assessment of context-dependent social cognition paradigms, the SCNM, and their possible application to neuropsychiatric disorders may provide new insight into bvFTD and other related frontal disorders.

You might be asking yourself, "But aren't all translations  in context ?" Actually, no.

When I talk to people about vague language, they often ask me what is the difference between vague language and ambiguity. I just thought of a handy example. Consider the difference between “...