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| Post Graduate Diploma in Translation Studies |
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| UNIT 411.4: MODELS OF TRANSLATION |
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| 411.4.5 : DEVELOPMENTALLY SENSITIVE MODELS |
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| 1. |
These third wave models represent in part a response to the second wave or pragmatically based models just discussed. They have not yet received book-length treatment, but are presented only in articles. Debates surrounding them have not yet taken place. So we will cover such thinking only very briefly. |
| 2. |
The background to developmentally sensitive thinking about translation may be described like this. The pragmatists, over reacting against the fundamentalist and foundationist excesses of first wave thinking, have tended to see the translation traffic for a given language couple A/B as something to be negotiated and evaluated on strictly bilateral basis between those two cultures, and thus only with reference to the history of the A / B intercultural trade. Such pessimism about the possibility of consensus or of universal validation casts doubt on the legitimacy of the modernization or development process itself, in theory, But in practice, even the pragmatists like the semantically based first wave, have been committed to translation as a means for the Westernization of the planet, and have not incorporated in their thinking any alternative to the Western images of possible global futures, or any other way of thinking about languages and meanings. |
| 3. |
Developmentally sensitive thinkers about translation-who may be called globalists for brevity or reference-are, on the contrary, theoretically optimistic about the possibility of the emergence of a genuinely global enlightenment out of the struggle today among various ideas about the future and practices reflecting these ideas. But in practice, globalists are skeptical about the validity of Western practices, including their pragmatically based theories of translation. Thus, globalist writing about translation theory proposes alternative models of semantics and pragmatics as providing a better theoretical perspective for translation studies than what is current in the West. One such author, K.V. Tirumalesh, writing in an issue(vol.1 no.2, 1989) of the Delhi-based International Journal of Translation which carries several globalist papers, suggests that the general traffic of translation is slowly creating new general literature. He views it as a Literature Three which belongs neither the first language (the SL) nor to the second(the TL). But his view is consistent with a strong globalism which would read literature three as a global interspace. Literature three becomes a truly public communication area, its voices will be able to sponsor the non-private, non-bilateral generality of an emerging global semantics. As this practical possibility grows in power in power and visibility, so will theories, which reflect its new balance of forces. |
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| 411.4.6 : MACHINE TRANSLATION</td>
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| 1. |
The extremely large volume of technical, industrial, scientific and common translation that has been needed since the Second World War far exceeds the limits of what human translators can deliver within the relevant deadlines. This urgent need has coincided with the rise of computer technology to bring about the development of translations systems. Some ambitious systems aim for Machine Translation (MT) proper. Others offer machine-aided translation (depending on the emphasis, either human-assisted MT or machine-assisted human translation). Some systems assemble and periodically update multilingual terminology databanks for the relevant disciplines, as adjuncts to mechanical or human translation. All such systems are loosely included in the MT enterprise. |
| 2. |
Issues in MT debates appear in a specific form because of the technological context. But the forces shaping the human translation endeavour are also relevant here. On the one hand, MT has had a semantically based, foundationist point of departure, coupled with the pragmatically based assumption that serious sentence level semantics could generally be avoided in the actual work. But on the other hand the rise of many centers of MT activity, especially outside the Western linguistic sphere, encourages developmentally sensitive or pluralistic global perspectives to emerge in the long run. Hence, many points made in the earlier sections of this unit apply to MT as well. |
| 3. |
MT systems face three important choice points. With respect to the interface between the SL and the TL, the system must decide whether to adopt a direct strategy of attack (tackling each SL expression by immediately matching it with a TL expression synthesis. If the indirect strategy is chosen, the system must then choose between the method of transfer, which operates through an intermediate language in terms of which operates on one word at a time and later cleans up the output if necessary, or for global processing, which considers larger syntactic units like phrases and sentences and offers relatively high quality renderings that do not need to be cleaned up later. O these three issues, contemporary systems have stopped worrying about two. All current systems are indirect rather than direct and opt for processing of global rather than local scope. Only the transfer method vs. Interlingua method question is still a matter of choice. |
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