s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

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Katarzyna Jaworska-Biskup
nally, external interference embraces incongruent terms – the terms that are
used in a different context in SL and TL. The example of this last category also
provided by Dierżanowska (1990: 96) can be a word nekrolog that is wrongly
translated as “obituary” instead of “death notice”, “funeral notice” or “in memorial”.
To continue, internal interference encompasses morphological or semantic
similarities between words, such as “near” and “nearly”, “direct” and “directly”,
“hard” and “hardly”.
In the light of the above, a translator always makes a decision as to what
equivalent to choose in order to best convey the message. As Jiří Levý ascertains
(2001), in an attempt to find the best lexical item a translator makes
a number of choices being at the same time limited by such factors as style,
context, connotative extension of meaning, all of which Levý describes as “selective
instructions”, subjective or objective and linguistic material-bound:
“translating is a decision process: a series of a certain number of consecutive
situations – moves, as in a game – situations imposing on the translator the necessity
of choosing among a certain (and very often exactly definable) number
of alternatives” (Levý 2001: 148). The inappropriate choice of the translator
may result in the so-called “otherness” or “strangeness” (obcość) – a term
coined by Roman Lewicki (2000). In other words, a translated text is somehow
linguistically (the choice of inappropriate equivalents) or culturally (different
interpretation of the facts described in the translated text by a source and a target
reader) distant. Otherness can also take the denotative and connotative form,
the first being the case when the SL term refers to a different denotate in TL,
and the second when the SL term conjures up different connotations than the TL
term.
Today, legal translation is perceived not as a mere process of transcoding
but as a process of communication on a text level (Šarcevic 2000: 12–14).
There exist three primary levels of difficulty when translating a given source
text into its target text, namely the textual, the morpho-syntactic and the lexical
level, the last of which seems to trigger most difficulties (Taylor 2006: 30 referring
to Scarpa 2001). Thus, in plainest terms, bearing the rarely clear-cut semantic
borderlines between words in mind, lexical total equivalence is always
hard to achieve. One of the most prevailing dilemmas making a translator lose
sleep is whether a text should be more “foreign” or “domestic”, in other words
embedded in mother or foreign culture. Taylor (2006: 40) proposes the “Translator’s
Creativity Cline” that reflects what strategies a translator should adopt
when dealing with a particular text type. Taylor divides texts into four categories
ranging from highly creative texts (basically scientific texts that have some
literary value such as newspaper articles) to fairly non-creative texts (technical
texts, such as instructions, manuals, medical abstract, rules and regulations that
require maximum of standardization and can be fully assisted by technological