Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto
Línguas e Literaturas Modernas
INTRODUCTION TO
TRANSLATION STUDIES
Power Point 11
28 November 2007
Work in pairs and decide:
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Who wrote the message?
For whom?
Where?
When?
Why?
This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
William Carlos Williams, "This is Just to Say" from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams,
Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan. Copyright © 1938, 1944, 1945 by New
Directions Publishing Corporation. Used by permission of the publishers.
http://www.favoritepoem.org/poems/williams/
The same text as poem:
different choices
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Different context (author, audience,
situation)
Different purpose/function
Different reading/interpretation
Different TT objectives (skopoi)
• Poem is to be translated for publication in a
collection of poems by modernist writers;
• Poem is to be translated for a lecture on W.C.
Williams (given in Portuguese to an audience
who is not familar with the English language)
and distributed as handout to serve as a
window onto the original
Ao sermos apresentados ao “mesmo”
fragmento, agora rotulado de poema, o
que antes era prosaico passa a ser
poético.
Como
leitores
do
poema,
membros de uma comunidade cultural
para a qual o texto se enquadra dentro
das convenções literárias estabelecidas,
aceitamos
o
desafio
implícito
de
interpretá-lo poeticamente e passamos a
procurar um sentido coerente para ele.
Passamos a pensar, por exemplo, nas
possíveis implicações da oposição entre o
acto de comer as ameixas e as relações
sociais que esse ato viola. Oposição essa
que não se resolve pacificamente:
ao mesmo tempo em que o poema, pela
sua própria razão de ser, reconhece a
prioridade das regras, através do pedido
de perdão, afirma também que a
experiência sensual imediata é importante
(principalmente
pelas
suas
últimas
palavras “so sweet and so cold”) e que as
relações pessoais (a relação entre o I e o
you) devem antecipar um espaço para tal
experiência.
Enquanto que a tradução do texto/bilhete
não nos trouxe maiores dificuldades, a
tradução do texto/poema nos obrigaria a
tomar várias decisões nada fáceis.
Rosemary Arrojo, Oficina de Tradução
1970s and 1980s: Germany
Functionalist and communicative
approaches to translation
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Katharina Reiss – Möglichkeiten und
Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik, 1971
Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiss –
Grundlegungen einer allgemeiner
Translationstheorie, 1984
Justa Holz-Mänttäri - Translatorisches
Handeln: Theorie und Methode, 1984
Major shift in TS
Douglas Robinson, BAT, p. 192
Thesis: Translation involves far
more than finding target-language
equivalents for source-language
words or phrases; it also involves
dealing with clients, agencies,
employers; networking, researching,
use of technology; and generally an
awareness of the role translation
plays in society and society plays in
translation.
Douglas Robinson, BAT, p. 192
Until the late 1970s, with the rise of
polysystems theory, the mid-1980s
with the rise of skopos/Handlung
theory, and the late 1980s and early
1990s, with the rise of postcolonial
theory, virtually no one thought of
translation as essentially a social
activity.
Focus in this lesson
and next lesson
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Functional translation theory
Handlung (action) translation
theory
Skopostheorie
Katharina Reiss, Hans Vermeer,
Holz-Mänttäri
We will now work together at producing
the next slides in this Power Point
presentation.
Search the web and your books and note
the most important apects of the above
authors’ work. Make notes and remember
to be prepared to give your contribution to
this collaborative learning task.