A Functional Approach To Translation Studies

This bestselling text is a comprehensive overview of functionalist approaches to translation in English. Christiane Nord, one of the leading figures in translation studies, explains the complexities of theories and terms in simple language with numerous examples. Covering how the theories developed, illustrations of the main ideas, and specific applications to translator training, literary translation, interpreting and ethics, Translating as a Purposeful Activity concludes with a concise review of both criticisms and perspectives for the future. Now with a Foreword by Georges Bastin and a new chapter covering the recent developments and elaborations of the theory, this is an essential text for students of translation studies and for translator training.

This bestselling text is a comprehensive overview of functionalist approaches to translation in English. Christiane Nord, one of the leading figures in translation studies, explains the complexities of theories and terms, in simple language with numerous examples. Now with a foreword by Georges Bastin and a substantial new chapter covering the recent developments and elaborations of the theory, Translating as a Purposeful Activity is an essential text for students of translation studies and translator training.

German-language approaches to translation have been revolutionized by the theory of action (Handlungstheorie) and the related theory of translation's goal or purpose (Skopstheorie). Both these approaches are functionalist: they seek to liberate translators from servitude to the source text, seeing translation as a new communicative act that must be purposeful with respect to the translator's client and readership. As one of the leading figures in this field, Christiane Nord gives the first full survey of functionalist approaches in English. She explains the complexities of the theories and their terms, using simple language with numerous examples. The book includes an overview of how the theories developed, illustrations of the main ideas, and specific applications to translator training, literary translation, interpreting and ethics. The survey concludes with a concise review of the criticisms that have been made of the theories, together with perspectives for the future development of functionalist approaches.

This volume contains a generous selection of articles on translation by Professor José Lambert (K.U. Leuven). It traces the intellectual itinerary of their author, who started out as a French and Comparative Literature scholar some four decades ago trying to get a better grip on the problem of inter-literary contacts, and who soon became a key figure in the emergent discipline of Translation Studies, where he is widely known as an indefatigable promoter of descriptively oriented research. This collection shows how José Lambert has never stopped asking new questions about the crucial but often hidden role of language and translation in the world of today. It includes some of the author’s classic papers as well as a few lesser known ones that deserve wider circulation. The editors’ introduction and the bibliography complete this thought-provoking survey of the career of one of the most creative researchers in the field.

Text Analysis in Translation has become a classic in Translation Studies. Based on a functional approach to translation and endebted to pragmatic text linguistics, it suggests a model for translation-oriented source-text analysis applicable to all text types and genres independent of the language and culture pairs involved. Part 1 of the study presents the theoretical framework on which the model is based, and surveys the various concepts of translation theory and text linguistics. Part 2 describes the role and scope of source-text analysis in the translation process and explains why the model is relevant to translation. Part 3 presents a detailed study of the extratextual and intratextual factors and their interaction in the text, using numerous examples from all areas of professional translation. Part 4 discusses the applications of the model to translator training, placing particular emphasis on the selection of material for translation classes, grading the difficulty of translation tasks, and translation quality assessment. The book concludes with the practical analysis of a number of texts and their translations, taking into account various text types and several languages (German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch).

This book offers a comprehensive account of Systemic Functional Translation Studies (SFTS) - a research area that applies Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to study translation, and to relate researches by scholars in the community of both SFL and translation studies. The important trends as well as contributions in SFTS will be summarised. Various topics in SFTS will be covered in the six chapters of this book, including the basic issues and concepts in SFTS; the relationship between SFTS, the cognate functional approaches, translation studies and translation practice; SFTS and different modes of meaning; registerial variation and SFTS; technologies and SFTS as well as a future outlook on SFTS. The objectives of this book include to provide a comprehensive introduction to SFTS; to relate SFTS to translation studies; to summarise the important contributions and limitations of SFTS; and to offer directions for future researches in SFTS, reflecting on what is currently missing from the SFL theory.

This volume contains a generous selection of articles on translation by Professor José Lambert (K.U. Leuven). It traces the intellectual itinerary of their author, who started out as a French and Comparative Literature scholar some four decades ago trying to get a better grip on the problem of inter-literary contacts, and who soon became a key figure in the emergent discipline of Translation Studies, where he is widely known as an indefatigable promoter of descriptively oriented research. This collection shows how José Lambert has never stopped asking new questions about the crucial but often hidden role of language and translation in the world of today. It includes some of the author's classic papers as well as a few lesser known ones that deserve wider circulation. The editors' introduction and the bibliography complete this thought-provoking survey of the career of one of the most creative researchers in the field.

This book begins by investigating, through the use of think-aloud protocols, the mental processes of students when they translate. The creative and successful processes observed can be used directly for teaching purposes, while the unsuccessful ones can serve to find out where remedial training is needed. The book then goes on to discuss methods for improving a translator's competence. The strategies offered are based on the pragmatic and semantic analysis of texts from a functional point of view, and they include such practical matters as the use of dictionaries and the evaluation of translations and error analysis. The book is intended for teachers in translator-training institutions, but it can also be used by students for self-training.

This book introduces the latest advances in Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS), a thriving subfield of Translation Studies which forms an important part of both translator training and empirical translation research. Largely empirical and exploratory, a distinctive feature of CBTS is the development and exploration of quantitative linguistic data in search of useful patterns of variation and change in translation. With the introduction of textual statistics to Translation Studies, CBTS has geared towards a new research direction that is more systematic in the identification of translation patterns; and more explanatory of any linguistic variations identified in translations. The book traces the advances from the advent of language corpora in translation studies, to the new textual dimensions and shift towards a probability-variation model. Such advances made in CBTS have enabled in-depth analyses of translation by establishing useful links between a translation and the social and cultural context in which the translation is produced, circulated and consumed.