Integrative teaching materials

In the following, we shall enumerate some translation coursebooks that success­

fully combine the various approaches.

The above approaches are neatly combined by Hervey and Higgins (1992). They start out from general translation topics (the translation of connotations, cultural

2. Designing translator training courses

words, inscriptions, etc.) and general translation operations (compensation, con­

traction, etc.) and discuss them according to language pairs, always providing illus­

trative texts too. In their book entitled Thinking Translation, they first designed a theoretically well-founded translation skills development coursebook for the English- French language pair (Hervey and Higgins 1992), which was so popular that it was soon followed by the English-German (Hervey, Higgins and Loughridge

1995), and the English-Spanish version (Hervey, Higgins and Haywood 1996).

Another popular translation coursebook series was launched by Beverly Adab (1993). The series published by Multilingual Matters is entitled Annotated Texts for Translation, and its first volume deals with translation from French to English. The book contains three parts: the first part consists of 30 French texts, the second consists of the English translations of these 30 texts, and the third part contains the so-called annotations, i.e. the comments related to translation problems in the following order:

(1) general stylistic introduction (2) sentence structure problems (3) syntactic problems

(4) lexis

(5) rhetorical tools (6) cultural references (7) punctuation.

The 30 texts represent various genres, the explanations are well grounded from the point of view of linguistics, and the introductions provide guidance concern­

ing the theoretical issues of translation. The "reverse" of the first book, based on the problems of translating from English into French, was also soon published (Adab 1996).

Corvina Publishing House in Budapest also started a series with a similar struc­

ture to tackle the translation problems in the English-Hungarian, Hungarian- English, and Hungarian-German language pairs (Bart, Klaudy and Szöllősy 1996, Zalán 1997). The first volume of the series entitled Angol fordítóiskola (English translation school) belongs to the group of text-oriented coursebooks. It contains two main parts: the first part deals with translation from English into Hungarian and the second part with translation from Hungarian into English. Both parts contain nine chapters. The structure of the chapters is the following:

(1) Text to be translated (2) Preparatory tasks

• textual work

• lexical preparation

• multioption translation (3) Suggested translation (4) Comments

(5) Further tasks

• guided translation

• editing

• individual task

In selecting texts the authors attempted to find varied and lifelike texts. Neither literary nor technical and scientific texts were included, as the objective of the book was the development of general translation skills. This idea guided the selec­

tion of texts, which include job advertisements, opening speeches, reports, tourist brochures, contracts, popular science texts, etc.

The texts are not all “perfect” English texts (and the Hungarian texts in the second part are not “faultless”, either), nor is the author invariably a native speak­

er of the source language, in the same way as in real life, where translators often meet texts, which they have to edit first to be able to translate into the target lan­

guage. The “pre-editing” of vaguely and unclearly composed texts is also part of translation competence. In this way, the selection of texts was based on practical considerations.

The authors also made an attempt to grade the texts. As mentioned before, in teaching translation the sequencing of texts according to difficulty level is a demand­

ing task. For translators there are no easy texts. All texts are difficult in one way or another. Different texts are difficult in different ways, and individual translators experience different degrees of difficulty in the same text. In spite of this, authors ranked the nine texts according to difficulty level: the first one is a job advertise­

ment containing merely a list, while the ninth text is an extract from an ironical essay on the philosophy of discourse organisation, from a quality literary journal.

Contributing to the idea of gradation, the comments after the translations gradu­

ally increase in length and complexity.

The commentaries embody the basic principle of the authors’ “translation phi­

losophy”, according to which translators’ solutions are not always unique and un­

repeatable. If it were not so, then translators’ experiences could never be gener­

alised and, of course, transmitted. Thus, in their commentaries, the authors explain, generalise, and, wherever possible identify the kind transfer operation used in the suggested translation. This feature helps the user to follow up identical solutions in the book, which will hopefully enable him/her to replicate them in real life.

Translators often do not dare to perform certain operations because they are afraid of translating too freely. If, however, they know that certain lexical opera­

tions (e.g., expansion, contraction, disintegration, omission and addition, transpo­

sition and compensation, etc.), grammatical operations (e.g., the elevation of nominal structures, the transformation of -ing participles into separate clauses), and discourse-level operations (e.g., the insertion of emphasisers, sign-posting ele­

ments, and discourse markers) are legitimate, and frequent transfer operations, then they will use them with greater confidence.

3. Methodological issues in the teaching