Dialogue in and between Different Cultures - International ...

88 Anna Szczepaniak-Kozak
Consequently, conducting a mission of any kind, whether military or peacekeeping,
should go smoothly. So far, Poland has implemented most of the NATO
rules and is a reliable co-operant for other NATO members within the Alliance
itself and outside of NATO scope, e.g. peacekeeping and peace restoring missions
mandated by the United Nations.
A considerable portion of our military regulations are either translations of
the NATO guidelines, which were drawn up before our accession to the Alliance,
or our native written instructions which establish policies and procedures for
cases in which the NATO legislative does not operate or does not exist. Owing to
that, linguistic comparative studies of contemporary NATO and Polish documents
seem unproductive. Up to a point, such an analysis could be conducted to indicate
mistakes or conceptual distortions in Polish translations. To illustrate my point,
there is a popular anecdote in the Polish Army, which says that a civilian
translator who translated a document that regulates the work of civil engineers in
the military incorrectly interpreted the term civil engineers. The NATO document
bound a unit commander to employ at certain posts civil engineers, i.e. specialists
in the art of planning, building and repairing roads and bridges. The Polish
translation of that text was to state that at those posts only civilian engineers
might be hired, which was a clear distortion from the original resulting from the
erroneous interpretation of the adjective civilian. Surely, cases of such misinterpretations
would constitute an interesting topic of the Polish-English contrastive
translation studies. However, such an analysis is beyond the scope of the present
paper.
I should admit that after discovering that contemporary Polish military
regulations are mostly calques, my discursive practice research came to a standstill.
However, during an interview with a Polish captain who is a specialist in
military logistics, I found out that documents which were drawn up during
Poland’s membership of the Warsaw Pact might offer a very interesting corpus to
study. As a result, I decided to compare passages of the NATO regulations
referring to logistics issues with those which discuss the same matters in the
Warsaw Pact documents. The argument which supports the need for a contrastive
analysis of the NATO and the Warsaw Pact logistics texts comes from the fact
that in the view of the negative connotations that accompany Polish military text,
they are doomed to oblivion. Even these days finding a representative sample of
such texts is difficult because many Warsaw Pact manuals and regulations have
already been milled.
I was not able to find an ideal counterpart to the NATO documents within the
Polish corpus. After a thorough research, I decided to compare three Polish texts
and three English ones that discussed similar topics. They are as follows:
− Sample 1 - fragments on loading and unloading of materiel coming from the
Polish logistics manual guidelines for organization and operation of transport
and material handling units (1984), pages 17-24;