Translation as a Profession (Benjamins Translation Library)

What the (near) future (most probably) holds 365Accepting these principles does not necessarily imply giving in to the ‘philistines’and reducing things to the ‘sheer efficiency’ principle. Quite the opposite. Itmeans getting rid of a whole raft of constraints. The principles listed above canin fact also be seen as the premises of a radically different evolution, highlightingthe translator’s writing (creative) skills. As a matter of fact, given the right circumstances(i.e. when the financial stakes are high enough) the translator should befirst and foremost a highly skilled writer or designer who uses the material to betranslated as a source of information to be reorganised and reformulated to providethe most effective response possible, with different and often complex levelsof communication. This means translation sometimes calls for complicated andtricky content management skills together with rather elaborate writing (editorial)skills, even when the source material is very technical and stereotyped and,some might say, especially in such cases.In this perspective, which is poles apart from the trend towards more standardised,monotonous styles of communication, the translator will be responsiblefor any necessary cultural adaptations (deleting any items or references whichmay become meaningless in the target culture and adding or modifying any itemswhich may be needed to inform or enlighten the reader or end-user or simplyto make it possible for him to ‘understand’ the message), any typological adaptations(by using the organisational and phraseological models that the targetgroupexpectstofindinaparticulardocumentandcontext),andanynecessarychanges in discourse and connotation. In doing this, the translator will be on‘home ground’, where machine translation cannot compete. He will communicatemore efficiently and therefore increase the added value of the translation bothfor the work provider (whom he will serve better) and for the end-user (whom hewill serve more efficiently).And whatever happens, the one who pulls through will be the one whoknows from the inside the languages and the cultures involved, who is familiarwith the domain or field of experience to which the source materials refer, whois familiar with all the translation techniques and strategies and knows whatthe basic challenges facing the translation industry are, who is familiar with allthe tools needed to manage various kinds of materials (communication mediaand channels are now changing so rapidly that handling the material itself willsoon be a specific competence, as is already the case with some knowledgeengineering applications) and who can deliver the quality and productivity gainsthat everyone is dreaming of: i.e. the translator-cum-writer-cum-quasi IT expertcum-innovativegenius (with terminology, phraseology and project managementskills thrown in). In other words, the multilingual, multimedia communicationengineering expert.At the same time, the shifts in professional translation practices, which areboth geared towards, and prompted by, the trend towards greater industrialisation