Presentation of the second volume of the journal dedicated to translation teaching between theory and profession

Lozano Miralles, Helena

Magris, Marella

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PrefazioneEditorial PrefaceMarella Magris & Helena Lozano MirallesUniversità di TriestePrefazione – Editorial PrefaceThis issue of RITT is the second volume of the proceedings of the session “Trans-lation teaching: bridging theory and the profession”, organized in 2010 by theScuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori of Trieste with-in the conference “Emerging topics in Translation and Interpreting”. In the first volume, particular emphasis was placed on the role that differentlinguistic, cognitive and cultural models can play in order to bring translationtheory and training closer together. This second part is organized around threemain topics: the interactions with the professional world, the impact of newtechnologies and the importance of corpora and terminography in specializedtranslation. In the opening paper, Marco Fiola points out that translation scholars, edu-cators and employers have not yet succeeded in finding a common ground thatwould be beneficial to future translators. After exploring the reasons for thispersisting mutual distrust and focusing in particular on different views oftranslation quality, Fiola suggests that a better understanding of the dynamicmulticompetence and of the social role of translators might contribute to a rap-prochement between academia and industry. The paper by the next two authors, Betül Parlak and Alev Bulut, follows asimilar line of reasoning: it discusses how translation training institutions cancontribute to make the profession more visible and to solve some problemswhich affect the translation market place, such as unfavourable working condi-tions, exploitation of student translators and above all plagiarism. BorrowingVIIsome concepts from the field of sociology and basing their description on theirown experience in Turkey, the authors show how the creation of an “action net-work” comprising academics, professional organizations and students maybring benefits to all parties involved. Also Fiorenza Mileto pleads for more cooperation by showing through herpersonal experience how teaching and professional activity can take advantageof each other. The author, herself a professional, a trainer for companies and auniversity teacher, identifies three main areas as fundamental for the develop-ment of future translators: competences, tools and methodology. She furtherdescribes the implementation of a constructivist teaching model (Project-BasedLearning), which has proven successful in better preparing students for thetranslation market. The importance of academic education in the development of translationalskills is the central idea of the next paper by Mitra Shahabi, Gilda Tataei andMaria Teresa Roberto. The authors postulate that people sharing the same lin-guistic competence reach different performance levels if exposed to differenttypes of translation education. In order to verify this hypothesis, they developeda test measuring performance in 4 main domains: cognition, production, natu-ralness and translation techniques. The results show that, indeed, subjects whohad attended a translation course improved their translation skills and did bet-ter than the control group.The following two papers, by Erik Angelone and Kyriaki Kourouni, bothadvocate for an increased didactic application of technology-based methodolo-gies initially developed for experimental research. Erik Angelone describes theadvantages of this approach within the context of process-oriented training.After an overview of the main existing methodologies, the author focuses onscreen recording and proposes three activities, i.e. the analysis of informationretrieval efficacy, of the immediate post-pause activity and of problem solving atthe textual level, which have been tested with some students and have demon-strated their effectiveness in enhancing problem awareness.  Also Kourouni’spaper revolves around the use of new technological tools in the translationclassroom. The author illustrates the criteria which were considered in a re -search project aimed at analyzing the performance of undergraduate studentsusing different methodologies, i.e. eye tracking, screen recording and keystrokelogging. Her major concern was to identify a tool that would allow both toachieve direct benefits for the students and to ensure experimental validity. The didactic potential of e-learning is explored by Emmanuela Meiwes, whodevelops a cooperative translation activity using the Moodle platform. The prin-ciple behind this project is “co-translation”, a term coined by the author in analo-gy to “co-writing” and designating a collaborative translation carried out by stu-dents in a partially virtual learning community. The author continuouslymonitored the experience and concluded that this kind of activity can sensitizestudents to translation problems and help them to develop various competences. VIIIPrefazione – Editorial PrefaceAmong the technologies already widely used by translators, a special place isoccupied by Translation Memories, which are the subject of the next paper byAdrià Martín-Mor. In his research, the author tries to ascertain whether the useof these CAT tools influences the translated texts, focusing on the aspect of lin-guistic interference. In particular, the paper describes the results of a pilotstudy, which have led to some changes in the methodology and seem to suggestthat the software indeed exerts an influence on the behaviour of translators andon the translated texts.Paola Valli presents her PhD research project which investigates the relationbetween translation problems and language combination analyzing the use of aspecific tool, i.e. a multilingual concordancer, within the framework of transla-tion at EU institutions. After briefly sketching the translation services and theCAT tools available to EU translators, the paper describes the concordancingsoftware, which offers optimal conditions for a large-scale study, and themethodology adopted for a pilot study within the research project. The following two papers both deal with corpora. Tamara Mikoli  Ju ni  illus-trates the usefulness of monolingual and parallel text collections in translationteaching, not just in order to provide solutions to lexical problems, but also toguide the student’s stylistic and syntactic choices. As the author shows throughexamples concerning the phenomenon of nominalization in Slovene and Ital-ian, corpora can help identify areas of divergence between two languages andsuggest possible translation options, also in relation to different text types.Gianluca Pontrandolfo’s paper is a survey of existing specialized corpora oflegal language. Focused on three languages (English, Spanish and Italian) andwith a strong emphasis on the subject area of Criminal Law, the survey isaddressed to both researchers and translators and is conceived as a practicalguide so as to allow rapid consultation. The paper stems from the author’s PhDresearch project, aimed at a qualitative and quantitative analysis of legal phrase-ology, an aspect that has not been studied systematically so far.The last three contributions deal with terminology and terminography, veryimportant “building blocks” in the training of future professional translators.In his paper, Christian Vicente discusses the role of terminology in special-ized translation and specifically tackles some “myths” (such as the biunivocalrelationship between terms and concepts) that are still widespread in transla-tion teaching. Drawing on examples from various domains, the author showshow “real” terminology sometimes departs from idealized principles, andpoints out that future translators should be aware of the problems posed byinstability, inaccuracy etc. in order to ensure translation quality through a“soundly critical attitude” towards terminological issues.Alessandra Lombardi and Costanza Peverati present an ongoing project aim-ing at the development of a multilingual terminological and textual databasefor the field of tourism. Taking as their starting point an analysis of typical inac-curacies that can be found in translations of tourist texts, they stress the impor-IXxtance of providing the translator with rich conceptual/encyclopedic, linguisticand stylistic/textual information. One of the most interesting features of thenew database is the focus on phraseology, which is considered one of the keyaspects for the production of natural-sounding and effective translated texts.In the last paper, Katia Peruzzo describes the preliminary results of her PhDresearch project on the terminology of a specific legal subfield, i.e. the standingof victims in criminal proceedings. The analysis of a corpus of EU texts allowsher to identify the main characteristics of legal terminology employed in amulti-judicial setting, namely conceptual asymmetries leading to variousdegrees of equivalence, polysemy and synonymy. From a terminographic pointof view, the complexity observed in the “real” behaviour of terms calls for newsolutions that could benefit from the integration of ontological methods. The issue is completed by a review and a homage to two scholars who havemade the history of translation: Eugene Nida and Peter Newmark. Marella Magris & Helena Lozano MirallesUniversità di Trieste

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MAGRIS, Marella

LOZANO MIRALLES, HELENA

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