Pages in topic:   < [1 2]
Off topic: Skopos theory
Thread poster: Marianna Chatzigianni
mughwI
mughwI
United States
Local time: 05:56
English to Spanish
+ ...
I pity the fool... Dec 1, 2017

Mario Chavez wrote:

By the way, Wikipedia is at it again: running out of money and begging its users to pony up 3 dollars or more to keep it running. I wish Twitter had the same trouble, so we can all be freed from the caustic gossip that seems to be infiltrating our democracies. Ah, yes, and we'd be rid of Mr. T as well.



No way! Not Mr. T.! He's like, a true American icon.

He can dance, too, apparently. Who knew?


 
Mario Chavez (X)
Mario Chavez (X)  Identity Verified
Local time: 05:56
English to Spanish
+ ...
The bias that confirms the bias theory Dec 1, 2017

Daniel Frisano wrote:

Mario Chavez wrote:

I'm sure someone in academia put together an easy primer for theory-allergic translators.



And we all know how things work in academia, don't we? It's probably the most biased of all biased sources you can imagine.


No, I don't think we all know how things work in academia, unless we have had ample inside experience. Being a student and having been saddled with poorly trained professors doesn't count because it's already a biased argument.


 
Daniel Frisano
Daniel Frisano  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 10:56
Member (2008)
English to Italian
+ ...
My personal conclusion Dec 1, 2017

To answer the original question (how useful is this theory), my answer is "it looks highly dangerous, partly because it could be used to justify sloopy, biased or arbitrary translation, and it doesn't seem to bring any kind of benefits".

Then again, I am sure that Copernicus' theory was regarded as highly dangerous too at the time, so I guess you never know. It could be the next scientific revolution.


 
Kay Denney
Kay Denney  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 10:56
French to English
Common sense is plenty Dec 2, 2017

Daniel Frisano wrote:

To answer the original question (how useful is this theory), my answer is "it looks highly dangerous, partly because it could be used to justify sloopy, biased or arbitrary translation, and it doesn't seem to bring any kind of benefits".

Then again, I am sure that Copernicus' theory was regarded as highly dangerous too at the time, so I guess you never know. It could be the next scientific revolution.




My personal take is that this and all other theory is of no consequence whatsoever. I vaguely learned about skopos in the theory class I had to take to get my Master in translation, but it didn't help me as a translator one iota. I had already been translating, applying "mere" common sense, for fifteen years at that point.

And it seems that common sense was plenty, and I had been doing it right all along, in that I was dispensed from all classes on actual translation in my language pair, on the strength of my previous professional experience. (I was doing the Master course as a way of validating my professional experience. On principle, the translation school refused to fully validate anyone's experience, we were all made to do at least a few classes, because otherwise the diploma would be "cheapened". But they didn't find anything to criticise in the translations I submitted as proof of my capabilities, and only made me do the theory class.)

Of course common sense is not something that's taught in academia, or if it is, it's dressed up in a lot of longwinded academicspeak to the point of being practically unrecognisable. The weird questions students asked in that class were perhaps proof that common sense is actually not at all common, even exceedingly rare.


 
Mario Chavez (X)
Mario Chavez (X)  Identity Verified
Local time: 05:56
English to Spanish
+ ...
Back to brass tacks Dec 2, 2017

In spite of my questions to the original poster, who nicely asked opinions about skopos theory based on our practice, I need to add the following:

1) When I was in college as an undergrad student, I studied semesters of phonetics, English grammar, Spanish grammar, English language, Law and other things. We practiced translations in class based on a dubious text categorization: journalistic, technical, literary, etc. We learned about Ferdinand de Saussure and other important figures
... See more
In spite of my questions to the original poster, who nicely asked opinions about skopos theory based on our practice, I need to add the following:

1) When I was in college as an undergrad student, I studied semesters of phonetics, English grammar, Spanish grammar, English language, Law and other things. We practiced translations in class based on a dubious text categorization: journalistic, technical, literary, etc. We learned about Ferdinand de Saussure and other important figures in Linguistics, but I am straining to remember anything about translation theories.

2) I began learning and reading about translation theories after I started working full time as an independent translator. Curious that I am, I wanted to see what the fuss was all about or why I should care to know this or that theory. I kept reading, agreeing and disagreeing in my mind.

3) As a practicing translator with 26 years of experience under my belt (but it doesn't show, I'm quite slender, ha!), I've formed my own theories of translation and applied my own principles under different circumstances. Over the years, however, I realized that the skopos theory (which I like to call “theory of purposes” or “theory of objectives”) is the most suitable one for the kind of translations I do for my clientele. Mind you, I have worked for American corporations (software, medical devices, oncology research center) as a translator and I have noticed that, intentionally or not, I have applied some of the skopos theory principles and recommendations in practice.

In other words, I don't need to hypothesize in my mind what skopos theory might do for me as I have been applying it in the majority of my projects: have a brief (those are the client's instructions), determine the purpose of the text (who's the audience? is it informational, for marketing, for sales, for technicians, for in-house use?). Every translation has to have a purpose; most technical translations are eminently utilitarian and commercial in nature, so that reveals something about their purpose. However, a translated text's purpose is not a static feature as it may be modified throughout the process.

Like it or not, we all need a theory of practice to do our translations. It doesn't have to be called a name. It all depends on your client, the type of text (is it just words or does it have video, audio, graphics?), who are going to use the translation, etc. It could be John's theory of translation, or The Misha's Grand Theory of Commonsensical Translation. It's very easy to dismiss a concept or theory when you think you got the gist of it by reading a single description online, without as much as reflecting on it, just eager to answer an online question. You might not like looking at translation theories, talk about Translation Studies or even consider having an opinion on a given theory, but that doesn't help whoever is sincerely asking about it. Besides, such a blasé approach to answering questions about topics you couldn't care less reveals more about how you approach unknown subjects and what opinion-forming process you follow.
Collapse


Iwona Budzynska MCIL
 
Michele Fauble
Michele Fauble  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 02:56
Member (2006)
Norwegian to English
+ ...
Translation theories Dec 2, 2017

Mario Chavez wrote:

Like it or not, we all need a theory of practice to do our translations. It doesn't have to be called a name.


All translators are guided by a theory of translation, formal or informal, explicit or implicit, informed by formal studies and/or arrived at from the practice of translation.

As someone once said, "There's nothing so practical as a good theory".


 
Mario Chavez (X)
Mario Chavez (X)  Identity Verified
Local time: 05:56
English to Spanish
+ ...
Speaking of common sense Dec 2, 2017

Texte Style wrote:

Daniel Frisano wrote:

To answer the original question (how useful is this theory), my answer is "it looks highly dangerous, partly because it could be used to justify sloopy, biased or arbitrary translation, and it doesn't seem to bring any kind of benefits".

Then again, I am sure that Copernicus' theory was regarded as highly dangerous too at the time, so I guess you never know. It could be the next scientific revolution.




My personal take is that this and all other theory is of no consequence whatsoever. I vaguely learned about skopos in the theory class I had to take to get my Master in translation, but it didn't help me as a translator one iota. I had already been translating, applying "mere" common sense, for fifteen years at that point.

And it seems that common sense was plenty, and I had been doing it right all along, in that I was dispensed from all classes on actual translation in my language pair, on the strength of my previous professional experience. (I was doing the Master course as a way of validating my professional experience. On principle, the translation school refused to fully validate anyone's experience, we were all made to do at least a few classes, because otherwise the diploma would be "cheapened". But they didn't find anything to criticise in the translations I submitted as proof of my capabilities, and only made me do the theory class.)

Of course common sense is not something that's taught in academia, or if it is, it's dressed up in a lot of longwinded academicspeak to the point of being practically unrecognisable. The weird questions students asked in that class were perhaps proof that common sense is actually not at all common, even exceedingly rare.



We'd like to think that, being adults and careful individuals, we have plenty of common sense. This may be true, no argument here. However, some of us tend to think that our understanding of common sense is universally shared across cultures, languages, peoples and nations. Let me illustrate with an example.

Say you drive a car to work in Paris. It's January 10, you park your car in the company's parking lot...you turn the engine off before going inside, right? That would be common sense. No one in your neighborhood, not even across Paris, or even France, would think that leaving the car running while you're at work is a common sense decision. However, not everybody who drives a vehicle in other parts of the world does the same thing. People in Yakutsk, for instance, leave their cars running all day while at work. Quote:

“Still, local people habitually leave the engines running if they have to stop off for half an hour, and some leave them on all day while at work to stop them conking out and to make driving bearably warm. The overworked exhausts add to the fog that clings to the city.” Source: https://ind.pn/2iAGWvH

So, for drivers in extremely cold cities, leaving the car running for 30 to 60 minutes, even for hours, is common sense.

We aren't born with common sense, it's an acquired knowledge.


 
Heinrich Pesch
Heinrich Pesch  Identity Verified
Finland
Local time: 11:56
Member (2003)
Finnish to German
+ ...
It should be useful, but the world thinks different Dec 3, 2017

I based my master thesis on the skopos theory. Lets take an example.

A Finnish article about sauna should be translated into English. The author of the article as well as the target audience (the Finnish readers) know everything about sauna since their baby age, so the text will only deal with things beyond this experience. For an English reader the article, if translated 1:1 truthfully (like a technical document) will leave quite a lot in the dark.
So if the initiators of th
... See more
I based my master thesis on the skopos theory. Lets take an example.

A Finnish article about sauna should be translated into English. The author of the article as well as the target audience (the Finnish readers) know everything about sauna since their baby age, so the text will only deal with things beyond this experience. For an English reader the article, if translated 1:1 truthfully (like a technical document) will leave quite a lot in the dark.
So if the initiators of the translation knows skopos theory, they will understand that the translator should do more than just translate the words. They would search for a translator who knows Finnish culture intimately and is able to make the text useful for the foreign English speaking reader. The translator would know how it feels when a foreigner meets the real Finnish sauna in Finland.
But in reality the initiator of the translation does not care and will hire the one with the best rate. That's where skopos theory goes to the dustbin.
Collapse


 
Mario Chavez (X)
Mario Chavez (X)  Identity Verified
Local time: 05:56
English to Spanish
+ ...
Thinking differently Dec 3, 2017

Heinrich Pesch wrote:

I based my master thesis on the skopos theory. Lets take an example.

A Finnish article about sauna should be translated into English. The author of the article as well as the target audience (the Finnish readers) know everything about sauna since their baby age, so the text will only deal with things beyond this experience. For an English reader the article, if translated 1:1 truthfully (like a technical document) will leave quite a lot in the dark.
So if the initiators of the translation knows skopos theory, they will understand that the translator should do more than just translate the words. They would search for a translator who knows Finnish culture intimately and is able to make the text useful for the foreign English speaking reader. The translator would know how it feels when a foreigner meets the real Finnish sauna in Finland.
But in reality the initiator of the translation does not care and will hire the one with the best rate. That's where skopos theory goes to the dustbin.


An interesting example, but it is still one example, not enough to extrapolate into “the world thinks differently.”

Translation Studies theoreticians and academics use theories to describe the best they can what's going on in the real world. Do they get it wrong sometimes? Of course! That's why there are different theoretical approaches. As Roger Bell once wrote: a theory is a model, an abstract. To me, a theory is a model that helps me to look at a process (translational, scientific, psychological, etc.) and analyze how the process works in my situation in real life. Theories are not prescriptive, but descriptive. Failing to see that side of theoretical models is one reason, I believe, why there is so much animosity among some translators to even look at them in the first place.


 
Pages in topic:   < [1 2]


To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator:


You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request »

Skopos theory







Wordfast Pro
Translation Memory Software for Any Platform

Exclusive discount for ProZ.com users! Save over 13% when purchasing Wordfast Pro through ProZ.com. Wordfast is the world's #1 provider of platform-independent Translation Memory software. Consistently ranked the most user-friendly and highest value

Buy now! »
CafeTran Espresso
You've never met a CAT tool this clever!

Translate faster & easier, using a sophisticated CAT tool built by a translator / developer. Accept jobs from clients who use Trados, MemoQ, Wordfast & major CAT tools. Download and start using CafeTran Espresso -- for free

Buy now! »