Channels, Fall 2020

Page 28 Beale • Equivalence in Translation leaving coal behind. The second three texts were linguistic research papers: the first on the topic of text classifications (appropriately enough), the second on the state of training for up-and-coming translators in Europe, and the third on the translation of metaphors in documents of the International Monetary Fund. In this first round, I made every effort to construct a faithful translation, that is, one which is grammatically acceptable in the TL that holds closely to the structure and wording of the ST and avoids idiomatic rewording in the TL (Hervey et al., 2006). Before translating each text, I read the ST in its entirety to gain an understanding of the author’s work and intention. The lin guistic papers were not chosen with any special intention. However, the news articles were chosen for their differing styles. The China text is a basic text with little in the way of implied pragmatic meaning. The Davos text contains heavy use of the German Subjunctive I, which requires transformations to achieve a natural reading in English. Finally, the opinion piece was chosen as a text which has more idiomatic and pragmatically charged material, requiring special knowledge of the context in which the author is writing. In the second phase, I revised the translations I created in the first round, trying to achieve a more balanced or idiomatic style that would sound natural to TT readers and communicate the same informational and effectual content that would be conveyed to the ST audience, thereby achieving an equivalent effect (Hervey et al., 2006). To do this, I modified the TT while working directly off the ST to avoid any significant changes of meaning or style. I tried to capture the sense of the ST author’s work by taking into consideration the factors which were discussed in the literature review. One source which I feel worthy of mention is the dictionary website Reverso, which shows instances of the word searched for in context, as well as how it has been translated in other works. In the third phase, I conducted a two-part evaluation of my translations. The first was a comparison of the ST and modified TT (TTm) through the lens of a modified form of House’s 1997 Translation Quality Assessment (TQ A) model, looking for loss of content or stylistic grammatical changes that occurred in the translation process. After looking for said changes, I compiled the results into a spreadsheet to determine in which translations various changes took place. The second part of the evaluation consisted of two external review processes. The first was conducted by the resident German professor at Cedarville University, Dr. Annis Shaver, to check for any major technical errors in meaning or sense. The second involved th e use of “naïve” readers, those who have no direct knowledge of the project. They read each text and gave their feedback as to whether anything seemed unnatural or unusual about the texts. The news articles were given to twenty-seven local business students, with nine reading each of the three translations. Each student was asked what news source the article had come from and if the writer was a native speaker of English. If they thought the writer was not native, they were asked what gave them such an impression. The results of these component analyses were then compiled to provide an overall picture as to the successfulness of achieving equivalence. As a final note of transparency, I acknowledge that I have little in the way of education in the field of translation. On the one hand, this fact allows for a certain degree of unbiased analysis in following the facts where they may lead me. On the other hand, it means that the