Translation is a cluster concept (Tymoczko 2005) that is constituted by various cultural practices with complex overlapping similarities. This includes what is sometimes referred to as ‘translation proper’, i.e. ‘transferring’ a (mostly) written source text from one language to a target text in another language. Interpreting, i.e. the ‘transfer’ of (mostly) spoken language is part of the cluster concept, just as well as localization – of software, video games and the like – or sur-/subtitling, transcreating etc. In the following, the terms translation and translate shall include all these practices.
On a side note: It is exactly this understanding of translation as a cluster of cultural practices which opens up the possibility of studying not just the linguistic differences between two texts, but the whole range of patterns of practices and power concerning translation, including, but not limited to such questions as what is translated and who commissions translations, what conscious and subconscious translation strategies are being taught and applied, how censorship and translation interact, etc. etc. This wiki page introduces key concepts and issues that inform the pragmatics of translating a specific text.
Functionalism and translation strategies
Functionalist theories of translation (see, e.g.,Vermeer 1989) have highlighted that translation is a purposeful activity, i.e. it is text production with a goal and an audience, with a precursor, the source text, which may require different levels of adaptation to the target culture. Nord (1989) introduces the spectrum between documentary and instrumental translation: The former is meant to highlight the original make-up of the source text with interlinear glosses being an extreme form, the latter aims at producing a text which is meant to act as a target culture text and should not be discernible from original texts. All in all, a functionalist approach to translation offers us a wide array of translation strategies, keeping in mind that, following Nord, we should remain loyal to both the creators of the source text as well as the intended audience of the target text.
Applied to the purpose of translating science, you might ask yourself, for instance, how to go about the subtitling of a video which introduces a scientific topic. While, of course, you will want to get the terminology and the science right, do think about what the idea of the source text is: Is it purely informatory or does the video at hand also aim to entertain? Assuming it does, what is your goal in translation: Do you mostly care about the science or do you want to entertain as well? What you probably will not want is a ‘close’ translation in a structural sense, i.e. trying to mimic the syntactic or lexical structures of the source text – unless you are aiming, e.g., at documenting which linguistic strategies can be used in a certain language for edutainment videos. Another example is that of the translation of Bron Taylor’s book “Dark green religion” into German, where the author explicitly encouraged the translator Kocku von Stuckrad to add comments explaining how historical US-related circumstances compare to those in Germany, making the text more accessible to a German audience (von Stuckrad in Taylor 2020: 303).
Technical translation and cultural influences
A common misconception is that terminology (or language on the whole) in the natural and engineering sciences is near-‘objective’ in a sense that it fosters a ‘simple’ one-to-one transfer between languages. However, cultural influences abound also in technical language, influencing terminology, phraseology, style, text structures, argumentation patterns etc. Cultural influence here does not solely refer to the larger setting of regional, national, areal or global cultures, but also to cultures of specific scientific fields and subfields (i.e., shared assumptions, traditions, practices, etc.). Even within a language, creating, e.g., something like a common terminology may be quite an undertaking especially in younger fields of research (see, e.g., Avizienis et al. 2004 for the field of dependable and fault tolerant computing). Between languages, even slightest differences in conceptualizations and uses can pose a challenge. On top of this, influence of larger cultural contexts is omnipresent not just in the humanities or social sciences, with the discussion about the English master/slave terminology in computing and electrical engineering as a very prominent and illustrative example (Charboneau 2020). As pointed out above, these differences may extend to other linguistic levels such as phraseology, argumentation patterns or text structures, in some cases giving rise to strategies of translation which are often subsumed under adaptation, i.e. making deep(er) changes to the make-up of a (stretch of) text in order to make it more target culture adequate and fitting to the purpose, which can be quite in line with Nord’s principle of loyalty. Whichever strategy you choose, be aware of these cultural factors even in technical language.