Channels, Fall 2020

Page 36 Beale • Equivalence in Translation Appendix A: Translations (English) Linguistic Text A: FIRST LINGUISTICALLY ORIENTED APPROACHES In the 50’s and 60’s, research in the area of machine/automatic translation was given ever greater concentration, and contributed to the consideration of translation as predominantly or even exclusively a phenomenon of linguistics, as the compilation of a translation theory that structured the language in such a way that the text could be analyzed by a computer in the SL (source language) and synthesized in the TL (target language) was essential for the implementation of a mechanical translation theory. (citation). However, it was determined that it was not technical problems that needed to be dealt with, but linguistic. The efforts to convey text- and text-type specific principles of the text configuration increased and set themselves up as a task to convey and order factors, and to establish correlations between the text function and constitution, in order to derive translation methods. R. W. Jumpelt was one of the first to observe translation from a linguistic perspective and as a field of linguistics, and occupied himself only with texts from the areas of technology and science, similarly to Kade and Jäger some time later. His theory builds on the premise that the text type determines all criteria. He suggests six text genres: aesthetic, religious, pragmatic, ethnographic, linguistic, and psychological. With him, the grammatical-stylistic and lexical problems are dealt with. which appear as a result of the differing lexis and style of non- literary texts. Jumpelt spoke of “linguistic -stylistic adequacy” and meant thereby the grammatical correctness and adherence to the linguistic - stylistic usage norms of the respective text. However, he must admit that a scientific analysis of a text on lexical, morphological, and syntactic levels is not always enough, and therefore in the case of a text in the areas of science and technology, the content is given attention above all else, thereby the further linguistic functions are assigned a secondary role. The focus of his research is primarily the quantifiable requirements and linguistic aspects, so that the principles of translation can be described. If in the past the attention was given to literary texts, the scope is now limited to scientific texts as a result of increasing demand concerning science, quantifiability, and ease of formalization. The goal, as much as possible, is the elimination of all factors that determine the translation and are considered subjective. Albrecht Neubert deals with the problem of translatability and views the solution of the problem of the “optimal translation” as a first step that translation studies must make. It’s about the adequate translation which can no longer be recognized as such, it’s about the setting laws which secure the reformulation of the SL text into the TL text. Neubert speaks of a pragmatically adequate translation which is “simultaneously the most correct.” In 1983, he considered a text as “well - formed” if it m atches the norms of the parallel TL text genre. In Neubert, one comes across four types of SL texts, classified by degrees of translatability: 1) texts not specifically directed at the SL, transferable to the TL (i.e.,