translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

* WORKING PROTOCOL
Difficulties encountered Solutions adopted
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Seminar B
Objectives: to raise students’ awareness on the main lexical,
morphological and syntactic problematic areas encountered in translation,
translating an IT text type (e.g. help menu), translating back into English a
text that had been initially translated from English in Romanian by a peer
and comparing the two texts, discussion based on the protocols on the kind
of strategies a person should use in translating, as well as about the
particular features of technical translations.
Seminar description: a class discussion is organized based on the
translated texts and the protocols, debating on the modalities of solving
the problems encountered and the kind of solutions adopted (such as
dictionary, inference from the context, asking the teacher, failure to
translate etc.).
A range of tasks folows in order to sensitize the learners on the
following frequent translation problems: semantic confusion, word order
in English, IT terminology translation into Romanian – terms that are taken
over as such, terms that are partially translated, terms that are fully
translatable and so on.
Finally, the texts initially translated by certain students are
distributed to other learners who get the task of translating them back into
English. A group then conclude the seminar on translation and translating
connected topics.
The most frequent notes in the working protocols referred to:
inference from context – 45 %, dictionary work – 26%, asking the
peers/teacher – 28%). These results were confirmed by the students’ diaries
where in some cases students mentioned and even partially repeated their
notes from the working protocols.
Diary comments were generally positive, but there were also several
cases in which, although students had been explained that the protocol
would be used by the teacher in order to learn more about their difficulties
in translating, they resented having to waste time or break the logical flow of
their activity in order to write down notes in the protocol.
These remarks come very much in line with those reported by Krings
(1986), who lists among the indicators of problem areas: the subjects’
explicit statement of problems; the use of reference books; the underlining
of source-language text passages; the semantic analysis of source-language
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