| О Нордовском анализе текста | |
You've been translating for years, you arrive in class armed with examples, experience, communicative methods, didactics and dialectics, and soon your students are floundering in a sea of disparate problems, competences and skills. Some kind of life raft is needed, for both teachers and students. | | |
Christiane Nord's model of translation-oriented text analysis, translated and adapted from her Textanalyse und Übersetzen of 1988, is a very useful raft in such situations. Designed for application to all text types and language pairs, Nord's approach aims to provide "criteria for the classification of texts for translation classes, and some guidelines for assessing the quality of the translation" (2). It has numerous clear examples, some very complete box-and-arrow diagrams, and coffins around the key statements that students tend to underline anyway. It should be of extreme interest to anyone seeking a solid basis for the training of translators. | | |
The book has five sections. Part one outlines a series of theoretical principles relating source-text analysis to German Skopostheorie. Part two describes the role of source text analysis. Part three then runs through the extratextual and intratextual factors involved in the analysis. Part four discusses the didactic applications of the model. Part five applies the model to an analysis of three texts and their translations. The approach is nothing if not systematic. | | |
Nord's adherence to what German knows as Skopostheorie means she ranks target-text purpose (the "skopos") above all other determinants on a translation. For Nord, the skopos is "a more or less explicit description of the prospective target situation" (8). It is thus to be derived from the instructions given by the "initiator," the person for whom the translator is working (not to be confused with authors or readers, although authors and readers may become initiators). The skopos is in a sense the pragmatic content of the initiator's instructions. As such, Nord's use of the term differs from previous usages in Vermeer, for whom the translator fixes the skopos on the basis of the initiator's instructions. Nord does not accord the translator the freedom to decide such things alone. For her, the skopos remains "subject to the initiator's decision and not to the discretion of the translator" (9). Although no reasons are given for this variant on other versions of Skopostheorie, one suspects that the relatively subordinate position of Nord's translator is due to the classroom situation for which she is writing. Perhaps her translator is ultimately a student. | | |
