Channels, Fall 2020

Channels • 20 20 • Volume 5 • Number 1 Page 29 translations I produce may not be of the quality expected by professionals. I have chosen German as my language of work, as I have been involved in intensive study of the language for the last six semesters at Cedarville. German is also linguistically related to English, albeit distantly, thus making for a more suitable introduction to translation than my other language specialization, Russian. The genres in which I translated were also chosen for their relatively factual content that would not be heavily laden with hidden pragmatic content, perhaps the one exception being the opinion piece. Findings Translation Quality Assessment The main categories of observations I identified in the course of my evaluation were as follows: SSO (switched sentence order), ignoring cases where such a move was required by the differences in German and English grammar; MMc/w (modified meaning at the clause or word level), whereby a related, more natural variant was chosen in place of a literal or faithful translation; CON (contracting two or more sentences into one); UT (unclear translation due to ambiguity in word choice or phrase structure); PC (possible calque); PO (particle omission); CLT (colloquial or idiomatic translation); MOD (modulation); TRN (transposition); ELLc/e (contractive or expansive ellipsis); COM (compensation); CT (cultural terminology), where a proper noun has differing names in two languages; and ULM (unlisted meaning in dictionary). The types of modifications refer to the manner in which the text was changed, not from what and to what the text was changed. Only the top four categories were listed for each genre and the overall count. Across all six translations, I found 228 modifications from the categories listed above. Before looking more closely at the specific cases of modification, the total number of observations in the business texts (henceforth referred to as BT) far exceeded that of the linguistic texts (henceforth LT) by a margin of 148 to 80. The most widely observed categories across both genres were CLT (32), SSO (31), TRN (25), and ELLe (20). I also counted 11 instances of UT, some of which related to possible content loss, but most of which were connected to a phrase which had no clear, natural-sounding translation. Perhaps even more curious than the number of instances observed between the genre types are the categories of said modifications. The number of SSO was close between the two, with 15 in the BT and 16 in the LT. However, while SSO was the second most observed change in the LT (TRN had the most at 17), it only came in fourth in BA. I observed 22 instances of CLT in BT, half of which were in the opinion piece, compared to only 10 in all LT. I also observed 17 instances of CON, ELLe, and COM in BT. The fourth highest amount in LT was MMw with nine occurrences. The differences in number of occurrences between genres and frequency of modifications within genres point to the necessity of a different set of requirements when translating a text with the goal of achieving an equivalent result, the merits of which will be discussed later. The important fact here is the statistical difference in changes required between BT and LT. For a more nuanced and experienced view at the conveying of content and