Theorizing

"Translators are theorizing all the time. Once they have identified a translation problem, they usually have to decide between several possible solutions. Let's say you have to translate the English term ‘Tory,’ employed to designate the Conservative Party. According to the situation, you might consider things like using the English term and inserting information to explain it, or adding a footnote, or just giving a word-tor-word equivalent of Conservative Party‘ or naming the corresponding part of the political spectrum in the target culture, or just leaving out the problematic name altogether. All those options could be legitimate, given the appropriate text, purpose, and client. Formulating them (generating possible translations) and then choosing between them (selecting a definitive translation) can be a difficult and complex operation. Yet translators are doing precisely that all the time, in split seconds. Whenever they do it, whenever they decide to opt for one rendition rather than others, they bring into play a series of ideas about what translation is and how it should be carried out. They are theorizing.

The word ‘theory’ probably comes from the Greek thea, view + -horan, to see—to theorize is to look at a view (the word theater has the same origins). A theory sets the scene where the generation and selection process takes place. Translators are thus not only constantly theorizing. but they are doing it in various kinds of conceptual scenes.

This private, internal theorizing becomes public when translators discuss what they do.

They occasionally theorize out loud when talking with other translators or with clients, and sometimes with students or instructors. This out-loud theorizing might involve no more than a tew shared terms for the things we are dealing with. For example, here I shall refer to the ‘Still text‘ as the one we translate from, and to the ‘target text‘ as the translation produced. By extension, we can talk about the ‘start language’ and the ‘target language,‘ or the ‘start culture‘ and the ‘target culture.‘ ‘Translating’ would then be a set of processes leading from one side to the other.

Do these words mean that I am already using a theory? Such interrelated names-for things do tend to form models of translation, and those models are never neutral..."

Source

Anthony Pym. Exploring Translation Theories