Papers by Aneta Aleksandra Dutton
Translation_as_a_sociolinguistic_activity
A full understanding of the nature of human communication requires not only an appreciation of th... more A full understanding of the nature of human communication requires not only an appreciation of the concept of language but also its relationship to the surrounding world. If we consider the differences among people, due to such factors as age, gender, social class, family background, life experiences and the enormous complexity of human relations, understanding each other seems to be rather a difficult task. If we then include the component of various cultural identities, communication across cultures should be all but impossible. And yet, more often than not, we do understand each other. It is widely accepted that knowing a language involves more than knowledge of its grammatical structures. In this paper we will look into all those necessary factors, which enable us to communicate successfully. The paper is organised as follows: we shall take the notion of learning a foreign language as a departure point and differentiate it from the process of acquiring a first language. Next, we will briefly overview the concept of linguistic competence. We will then introduce the idea of performance concentrating on appropriate language use from the pragmatics perspective paying particular attention to the theory of register and following from it ‘context of situation’.
Language and cross-cultural communication
Language Contact and Language Conflict, 1994
... The fact that even gestures can be culture-specific is illustrated by the following examples ... more ... The fact that even gestures can be culture-specific is illustrated by the following examples recorded by Omondi. ... For example, a husband who receives a call intended for his wife might simp-ly say" Jane, this is for you!" even though the caller is known to him. ...
This paper consists both of the translation of a medical research article from English into Polis... more This paper consists both of the translation of a medical research article from English into Polish and the critical commentary. Published in Thyroid Research in 2016, the article explores the development of a predictive model for malignancy in thyroid nodules. The anticipated translational challenges lie in the source text’s specialised medical terminology, tight texture and complex syntactical structures. The overall strategy for translating the text into Polish is determined by the hypothetical brief, indicating the target audience and the text’s functional goal. As a departure point, the commentary presents prevalent Translation Studies theories, followed by discussion of the source text’s intra and extratextual features in the light of possible translation challenges. Owing to different conventions of text production between cultures, the translator is bound to manage pragmatic divergences between the source and the target context to recreate textuality in all its dimensions. Thus, the commentary further explores the lexical, phraseological, grammatical, textual and pragmatic challenges associated with translating a medical research article for a linguistically and culturally different readership. Subsequently, the procedures applied to overcome these problems are critically evaluated as a part of the translator’s decision-making process. The commentary also assesses translation technology tools as an aid in enhancing the translator’s productivity as well as the reliability of the resources employed in the rendering process.
For a long time, Machine Translation (MT) has been relatively peripheral to the translation indus... more For a long time, Machine Translation (MT) has been relatively peripheral to the translation industry. However, a renewed surge of interest in MT has recently occurred both in practice and research, posing a number of issues in human-computer interaction.
This paper discusses various aspects associated with the use of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) to translate medical content from English (EN) into Polish (PL). It is organised into two parts, the first chapter presents an overview of SMT and compares Human Translation (HT) with MT. The second chapter evaluates selected MT aspects, i.e. post-editing MT (PEMT) and the MT training process. The observations are supported by screenshots and error analyses carried out on a range of texts. As a concluding remark, the advantages of the MT are reiterated and the need for further research into PEMT is emphasised.
Since the cultural turn in Translation Studies (TS) in the late 80s, translation can no longer be... more Since the cultural turn in Translation Studies (TS) in the late 80s, translation can no longer be perceived as purely linguistic activity. Growing diversification within the translation industry and academic research on the nature of translation has highlighted the fact that translation is always embedded in a cultural context.
Within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fowler, 1991; Schäffner, 2003; Fairclough, 1989) and using the model of translator’s mediation (Hatim & Mason, 1997), this paper aims to expose translation as never ‘innocent’, but always determined by a wide spectrum of social and cultural factors, which often result in refractions and ‘manipulating original texts’ (Lefevere, 1992: 16). By identifying translational shifts in three translations from English into Polish, this essay will investigate ‘the translation of ideology’ (Hatim & Mason, 1997: 146), i.e. the means and the extent to which socio-cultural context influences the transfer of meaning and ‘the ideology of translating’ (ibid.), i.e. the extent to which the environment affects the decision-making of individual translators.
Since translation is seen as “an act of communication permanently dealing with at least two langu... more Since translation is seen as “an act of communication permanently dealing with at least two languages along with a broad network of elements including cultural, historical, political and ideological differences” (Hatim and Mason, 1997:2), the translator is bound not to only transfer lexical units from one language to another, but to manage the pragmatic divergences between both source and target contexts in order to recreate the textuality.
In this paper we will firstly present a translation from English into Polish of the political commentary text 'Plutonomy and the Precariat: On the History of the U.S. Economy in Decline' by Noam Chomsky, and then closely examine translation issues encountered during the rendering process.
As a departure point we will conduct a pre-translation analysis to evaluate how far intra and extratextual factors may affect the transfer of the communicative situation into a new cultural reality. The analysis draws on the ideas and work of a number of scholars, such as Nord (1991), Hatim and Mason (1990), Halliday (1978) and Schäffner (1997).
The purpose of the pre-translation analysis is to establish translation strategy, which would lend itself to the overall rhetorical purpose of the text, according to the brief. The translation challenges encountered during the rendering process will be examined within the framework proposed by Baker (2011), i.e. at word, above word, grammatical, textual and pragmatic levels. A variety of translation procedures will be employed accordingly in order to overcome the issue of non-equivalence.
The integrative approach to culture and language is one of the most postulated views in modern li... more The integrative approach to culture and language is one of the most postulated views in modern linguistics. It emphasises that linguistic practice is always embedded in the wider cultural context. Indeed, if we consider how different world views are contained in the semantic and pragmatic systems of various languages, the macro-context of acts of communication starts to play a significant role. The reason behind this is that operating a language involves an awareness of all the associations, which the expressions give a rise to, which, in turn are shaped by the cultural reality. Embracing culture in translation thus means not only working on the translatability of the text but also decoding all culture specific items (CSI) 'that are key to social organization, cultural practices, and dispositions constituting the habitus as a culture, and are central to the question of personal and social identities, as well as to social cohesion' (Tymoczko, 2007: 242).
A full understanding of the nature of human communication requires not only an appreciation of th... more A full understanding of the nature of human communication requires not only an appreciation of the concept of language but also its relationship to the surrounding world. If we consider the differences among people, due to such factors as age, gender, social class, family background, life experiences and the enormous complexity of human relations, understanding each other seems to be rather a difficult task. If we then include the component of various cultural identities, communication across cultures should be all but impossible. And yet, more often than not, we do understand each other. It is widely accepted that knowing a language involves more than knowledge of its grammatical structures. In this paper we will look into all those necessary factors, which enable us to communicate successfully.
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Papers by Aneta Aleksandra Dutton
This paper discusses various aspects associated with the use of Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) to translate medical content from English (EN) into Polish (PL). It is organised into two parts, the first chapter presents an overview of SMT and compares Human Translation (HT) with MT. The second chapter evaluates selected MT aspects, i.e. post-editing MT (PEMT) and the MT training process. The observations are supported by screenshots and error analyses carried out on a range of texts. As a concluding remark, the advantages of the MT are reiterated and the need for further research into PEMT is emphasised.
Within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fowler, 1991; Schäffner, 2003; Fairclough, 1989) and using the model of translator’s mediation (Hatim & Mason, 1997), this paper aims to expose translation as never ‘innocent’, but always determined by a wide spectrum of social and cultural factors, which often result in refractions and ‘manipulating original texts’ (Lefevere, 1992: 16). By identifying translational shifts in three translations from English into Polish, this essay will investigate ‘the translation of ideology’ (Hatim & Mason, 1997: 146), i.e. the means and the extent to which socio-cultural context influences the transfer of meaning and ‘the ideology of translating’ (ibid.), i.e. the extent to which the environment affects the decision-making of individual translators.
In this paper we will firstly present a translation from English into Polish of the political commentary text 'Plutonomy and the Precariat: On the History of the U.S. Economy in Decline' by Noam Chomsky, and then closely examine translation issues encountered during the rendering process.
As a departure point we will conduct a pre-translation analysis to evaluate how far intra and extratextual factors may affect the transfer of the communicative situation into a new cultural reality. The analysis draws on the ideas and work of a number of scholars, such as Nord (1991), Hatim and Mason (1990), Halliday (1978) and Schäffner (1997).
The purpose of the pre-translation analysis is to establish translation strategy, which would lend itself to the overall rhetorical purpose of the text, according to the brief. The translation challenges encountered during the rendering process will be examined within the framework proposed by Baker (2011), i.e. at word, above word, grammatical, textual and pragmatic levels. A variety of translation procedures will be employed accordingly in order to overcome the issue of non-equivalence.