Channels, Fall 2020

Channels • 20 20 • Volume 5 • Number 1 Page 27 Survey In addition to the above conversation, I sent out a survey to several current translators to answer questions related to translation and equivalence. I received a survey back from one correspondent, henceforth to be referred to as Jan, who provided me with valuable insights from his time working as a translator. Jan has worked on the translation of biblical narrative, hortatory, and apocalyptic literature for over 30 years from English into several languages of Papua New Guinea and has most recently started work as a consultant on an Austroasiatic language of SE Asia. He has not personally heard of Reiss’ text -type theory of translation, instead working with Mildred Larson’s Meaning Based translation theory. In discussing equivalence, Jan noted the difficulties in translation of biblical literature as being not only linguistic and cultural, but also chronical. He has subseq uently defined equivalence in terms of “reproducing as closely as possible what the original author meant, which includes what the original hearer heard,” while also stating that the genre type should also be faithfully replicated, i.e., poetry sounds like poetry, narrative sounds like narrative, and sarcasm is understood as such. Jan also defined equivalence in terms of communication theory, whereby the speaker encodes meaning and the hearer decodes meaning. For Jan, equivalence in translation is not measured on a purely linguistic scale (i.e. free vs. formal), but more so on the level of meaning. As to the relation between equivalence and the translation purpose, Jan asserts the necessity to keep the two in balance, with the purpose informing the equivalence function. In his words, “I judge the equivalence of meaning by how well it fulfills the purpose.” Methods I conducted six translations of my own to put the above-mentioned facets of achieving equivalence into practice, as part of my goal in this research is to bring practice and theory closer together. However, this plan required deviating from more traditional methods of study such as demographic surveys or SLA studies, and therefore, I decided I would conduct this research as a case study. I chose Casanave’s (2010) definition of a case study as the theoretical framework of my research. Casanave’s definition of a case study as a tradition rather than a method is particularly important in this research, as my method of investigation, conducting my own translations followed by analysis of the results, does not seem to follow traditional methods of translation research. The focus of the case study approach on a closed context to enhance the understanding of a singular subject suits my analysis of Reiss’ text -type theory and equivalence well (Casanave, 2010). The project was conducted in three main phases following the completion of the literature review and the surveys. In the first phase, I conducted six translations from German to English, with all falling under what Reiss would classify as informational texts, while Jumpelt would place them in separate categories of “pragmatic” and linguistic literature. The first three texts were pulled from the German news website DW on the topics of China’s economic difficult ies, the Davos Summit in 2020, and Germany and the process of