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GUEST EDITORIAL
Language Practice — one profession, multiple applications
Abstract
The metaphor of the growth of a tree demonstrates the growth of language practice. The growth started as a seedling (translation studies) in the late 1950s in a plantation of already fully-grown trees (linguistics) and fought its way to the sunlight in the following 50 years. It is now a fully-grown tree. What will happen in the future to this tree depends on the kind of growth. There will be a lot of branching. Some branches will be dead ends. Others will cause tremendous growth. This growth will be determined by the scholars in translation studies and the language practitioners in the profession. It may overtake the other trees to become a giant of the forest.
In the time span between the 1950s and the 1970s translation studies formed an integral part of applied and general linguistics. In 1972 James Holmes (1988 [1972]: 67–80 provided the first framework for this discipline. From the 1980s onwards notable scholars of translation studies made use of frameworks and methodologies borrowed from other disciplines such as psychology, the theory of communication, literary theory, anthropology, philosophy and, more recently, cultural studies (Bassnett & Lefevere 1990). During this time translation studies is justifiably regarded as a multidisciplinary science (Snell-Hornby, 1995: 7–35). However, translation studies emerged over the past 30 years as a new international and interdisciplinary academic field. The distinctive methodologies and theoretical frameworks derived from other disciplines were constantly adapted and re-evaluated in order to serve the needs of translation studies as an integral and autonomous discipline. The dawn of a new millennium saw the emergence of translation studies as a new discipline carried out by an international network of scholarly communities engaged in scholarly debate across conceptual and disciplinary divisions (Venuti, 2000: 1).
During 2006 the South African Translators' Institute celebrated its 50th anniversary by hosting seminars across the country. This volume consists of some reworked papers presented at these seminars and conferences and it is an attempt to showcase tendencies in language practice in South Africa. The article by Anne-Marie Beukes provides an overview of the ideological discourse and processes that helped shape the translation profession and the activities of translators in twentieth-century South Africa. The role that translators and organised translation activities played in legitimising and institutionalising the Afrikaans language as a tool for building a collective political consciousness is investigated against the backdrop of the grand narrative of Afrikaner nationalism. An account is also given of the modes of governmentality embodied by the South African Translators' Association. In tracing the history of South African higher education institutions, Herculine Olivier and Annelie Lotriet focus on the effect that language has had in the planning and implementation of their language policies. Specific focus is on the University of the Free State and how it approaches challenges in the teaching and learning environment where a multilingual demographic asks for innovative solutions in order to transform successfully. One solution could be that of simultaneous classroom interpreting. Jacobus Marais and Jacobus Naudé investigate a particular register of language, namely the language of popular religious literature, as an instance of language for special purposes (LSP). The analysis therefore aims to describe the features unique to the language of popular religious texts against the background of descriptive translation studies and, more particularly, corpus-based translation studies. The article by Susan Lombaard and Jacobus Naudé aim to prove that biblical texts in South African Sign Language (SASL) are more accessible than written or printed biblical texts for deaf-born South African people who use sign language as their first language. Results from the study also indicate how a signed Bible should look. From the study the conclusion can also be made that the Deaf Community of South Africa has the need for a Bible in SASL. The trends emerging in the natural language processing (NLP) of African languages spoken in South Africa are explored by Sonja Bosch in order to determine whether research in and development of such NLP is keeping abreast of international developments. This is done by investigating the past, present and future of NLP of African languages, especially bearing in mind the multidisciplinary nature of the field and the role of the linguist. Pockets of expertise that developed at various institutions over the past 20 years are discussed and the importance of cooperation in the field, across disciplines, is illustrated in this paper. In this regard the implementation of the concept of the Basic Language Resource Kit (BLARK) is recommended. Koliswa Moropo investigates term formation processes by analysing the English-Xhosa parallel corpus of technical texts with Paraconc: a case study of term formation processes. Ester Ramani, Tebogo Kekana, Mamphao Modiba and Michael Joseph show how terminology can be developed for discipline-specific purposes through pedagogic processes. The absence of specialist terms can be compensated for by the efforts of teachers and learners to create terminology by using the well documented practices of translators, such as transference, transliteration and omission. They provide several examples from the domains of materials development, classroom interaction and assessment to uphold their view that acquisition planning can drive corpus planning. Cobus Snyman, Leandra Ehlers and Jacobus Naudé describe the development of the EtsaTrans translation system prototype and its integration into the Parnassus meeting administration system. Although discourses about translation have broadened steadily in the last decades, the process will gain momentum in the twenty-first century as translation studies include increasing numbers of scholars from all over the world. Translation theory is developing perspectives on translation that transcend Eurocentric views and dominant contemporary Western translation practices so as to include the views and practices of all peoples (that is, augmenting Western Translation Theory by blending it with non-Western ideas about translation). A key to this development will be greater understanding of the superordinate categories within which translation may be situated cross-culturally. One question posed is that of the borders of translation. The starting point can be dated back to the publication of Roman Jakobson's article ‘On linguistic aspects of translation' in 1959. This article is modified by Gideon Toury (1986), Umberto Eco (2001) and Susan Petrilli (2003). The general progression has been from the focus on natural language to the entire human culture to even the entire biosphere. Translation is an inherent part of semiosis or sign activity, and therefore translation can be said to be present in any sign process in any living system.
From another angle there is a broadening of the concept of translation. The realisation in the 1980s that translations can never be produced in a vacuum, divorced from time and culture, and the desire to explain the time-related and culture-bound criteria at play, resulted in a shift away from a normative and prescriptive methodology (compare Hermans, 1985). The move from translation as text to translation as culture and politics, has been termed by Mary Snell-Hornby (1990: 79–86) as ‘the cultural turn'. Bassnett and Lefevere (1990: 11) consider this to be a metaphor for the cultural move beyond language in order to emphasise the interaction between translation and culture, as well as the way in which culture impacts on and constrains translation, and subsequently to stress the much broader issues of context, history and convention. This approach is inclusive of studies on changing standards in translation over a certain space of time; the demands made to the publishing industry in pursuit of specific ideologies; feminist writing and translation; translation as appropriation; translation and colonisation; and translation as rewriting, including film rewrites (Munday 2001: 127). It should also be noted that discussions in poststructuralist and postcolonial fields have increasingly concentrated on agency — that is, the role of the language practitioner in transforming society; for example, interpreters as utilised in classroom interpreting in South Africa. The cultural turn in translation studies has become the ‘power turn', according to Tymoczko and Gentzler(2002: xvi). Tymoczko (2005) indicates that the following activities will unseat current pretheoretical assumptions about translation in the next decade:
• Exploration of the nature of plurilingual and pluricultural life will unseat the presupposition that translators mediate between two linguistic and cultural groups.
• Integration of knowledge about oral cultures into translation studies will unseat the presupposition that translation involves written texts.
• Openness to a greater diversity of text types will unseat the presupposition that primary text types that translators work with have been defined and categorised.
• Attention to processes of translation in other cultures will unseat the presupposition that an individual translator decodes a given message to be translated and recodes the same message in a second language. Where Western theory and practice has focused on the individual as the agent of translation (treating the translator as a sort of ‘black box' of linguistic transformation), translation processes in other cultural contexts present alternate possibilities. In oral societies, for example, the audience is always a ‘participatory' audience; thus ‘a text'
• Recognition of all types of translators: beyond professionalism. Translators are generally educated in their art, have professional standing and often learn their craft in a formal way connected with schooling or training that instructs the translator in language competence, standards of textuality, norms of transposition, and so forth.
• Knowledge of the history of cultural movements and cultural interface. Currently translation is entering a completely new phase and assuming radically new forms because of cultural movements and diasporas associated with globalisation and because of the hybridity of the ensuing cultural configurations.
• Expansion of the object of study: redefining translation and the relationship between text and translation. What most translation scholars would like to believe is that the stage of defining translation is essentially over. However, the task of defining translation is not complete and it will continue to be a central trajectory of translation research in the decades to come.
Another immense development is the transition associated with current developments in information technologies and the media, ranging from new mass media to the Internet, from CAT systems to translation imperatives associated with globalisation (Tymoczko, 2005). Usage of language technology (for example, computer-assisted translation programmes) will dominate the profession and to stay competitive every language practitioner will need to utilise this technology.
The new conditions have increasingly begun to shift the nature of the agent of translation away from the individualistic model that has dominated Western conceptualisations of the translator. When translation projects involve multiple languages, translation must become a decentered process conducted by teams of people linked electronically through technological systems, rather than by single individuals or even groups of individuals coordinating their efforts from a single place (Tymoczko, 2005).
A major future growth area will be research about the translation of materials that coordinate text and image. Such materials have increasingly become the norm in many areas of life: the media (including film, television and the Internet), advertising, business, and so forth (Tymoczko, 2005). This is a research trend that has already begun and will accelerate over the next decades from a marginalised area of translation pertaining to areas such as film dubbing or subtitling and certain features of translating for the stage to an increasingly paradigmatic endeavour — and research must follow suit.
What is immediately obvious is that research in translation studies will become increasingly interdisciplinary during the coming decades. Translation research will move away from linguistic approaches as narrowly conceived and even from the circumscribed cultural studies approaches currently in use. The growing edges of translation research will go beyond current approaches based on humanistic research to embrace thoroughly diverse branches of the social sciences and natural sciences, particularly the biological sciences and technical aspects of cognitive science. What follows is that research in translation studies will increasingly require scholars with broader training than is currently customary in the field. Not only is there the necessity to encourage students to become proficient in the social and natural sciences, as well as linguistic and textual subjects, but current teachers and scholars in translation studies must become more conversant with research in other fields so as to be able to transcend the current limitations of research in translation studies and remain at the cutting edge (Tymoczko, 2005).
The necessity of teaching students how to make translation choices will become central to teaching methods as teachers move away from prescriptive approaches, teaching students the broadest possible outlook on translation types and practices, as well as flexibility in translation techniques, as befits practitioners of a field with a cluster concept at its core (Tymoczko, 2005). It is clear that teachers can only harm their students if they persist in limiting students' understanding of translation through a rigid pedagogy. Instead, teachers should be clear about the limitations of their premises about and frameworks for translation, if only so that students will be prepared for a future that will inevitably entail changes in translation canons, translation strategies, and translation technologies as the definition of translation is increasingly elaborated. Skills other than traditional translation skills, for example document design and text editing skills, must be incorporated in language practice learning programmes. Translation of materials that coordinate text and image will be in demand. Such materials have increasingly become the norm in many areas of life: the media (including film, television and the Internet), modes of disseminating information, advertising, business, and so forth. A move from individual language practitioners to teamwork is necessary — specialists must form teams: translation will become a decentered process conducted by teams of people rather than by single individuals or even groups of individuals coordinating their efforts from a single place. Academics and professionals will need each other and they will have to incorporate the knowledge and experience of each other.
Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2007, 25(2): iii–vi
In the time span between the 1950s and the 1970s translation studies formed an integral part of applied and general linguistics. In 1972 James Holmes (1988 [1972]: 67–80 provided the first framework for this discipline. From the 1980s onwards notable scholars of translation studies made use of frameworks and methodologies borrowed from other disciplines such as psychology, the theory of communication, literary theory, anthropology, philosophy and, more recently, cultural studies (Bassnett & Lefevere 1990). During this time translation studies is justifiably regarded as a multidisciplinary science (Snell-Hornby, 1995: 7–35). However, translation studies emerged over the past 30 years as a new international and interdisciplinary academic field. The distinctive methodologies and theoretical frameworks derived from other disciplines were constantly adapted and re-evaluated in order to serve the needs of translation studies as an integral and autonomous discipline. The dawn of a new millennium saw the emergence of translation studies as a new discipline carried out by an international network of scholarly communities engaged in scholarly debate across conceptual and disciplinary divisions (Venuti, 2000: 1).
During 2006 the South African Translators' Institute celebrated its 50th anniversary by hosting seminars across the country. This volume consists of some reworked papers presented at these seminars and conferences and it is an attempt to showcase tendencies in language practice in South Africa. The article by Anne-Marie Beukes provides an overview of the ideological discourse and processes that helped shape the translation profession and the activities of translators in twentieth-century South Africa. The role that translators and organised translation activities played in legitimising and institutionalising the Afrikaans language as a tool for building a collective political consciousness is investigated against the backdrop of the grand narrative of Afrikaner nationalism. An account is also given of the modes of governmentality embodied by the South African Translators' Association. In tracing the history of South African higher education institutions, Herculine Olivier and Annelie Lotriet focus on the effect that language has had in the planning and implementation of their language policies. Specific focus is on the University of the Free State and how it approaches challenges in the teaching and learning environment where a multilingual demographic asks for innovative solutions in order to transform successfully. One solution could be that of simultaneous classroom interpreting. Jacobus Marais and Jacobus Naudé investigate a particular register of language, namely the language of popular religious literature, as an instance of language for special purposes (LSP). The analysis therefore aims to describe the features unique to the language of popular religious texts against the background of descriptive translation studies and, more particularly, corpus-based translation studies. The article by Susan Lombaard and Jacobus Naudé aim to prove that biblical texts in South African Sign Language (SASL) are more accessible than written or printed biblical texts for deaf-born South African people who use sign language as their first language. Results from the study also indicate how a signed Bible should look. From the study the conclusion can also be made that the Deaf Community of South Africa has the need for a Bible in SASL. The trends emerging in the natural language processing (NLP) of African languages spoken in South Africa are explored by Sonja Bosch in order to determine whether research in and development of such NLP is keeping abreast of international developments. This is done by investigating the past, present and future of NLP of African languages, especially bearing in mind the multidisciplinary nature of the field and the role of the linguist. Pockets of expertise that developed at various institutions over the past 20 years are discussed and the importance of cooperation in the field, across disciplines, is illustrated in this paper. In this regard the implementation of the concept of the Basic Language Resource Kit (BLARK) is recommended. Koliswa Moropo investigates term formation processes by analysing the English-Xhosa parallel corpus of technical texts with Paraconc: a case study of term formation processes. Ester Ramani, Tebogo Kekana, Mamphao Modiba and Michael Joseph show how terminology can be developed for discipline-specific purposes through pedagogic processes. The absence of specialist terms can be compensated for by the efforts of teachers and learners to create terminology by using the well documented practices of translators, such as transference, transliteration and omission. They provide several examples from the domains of materials development, classroom interaction and assessment to uphold their view that acquisition planning can drive corpus planning. Cobus Snyman, Leandra Ehlers and Jacobus Naudé describe the development of the EtsaTrans translation system prototype and its integration into the Parnassus meeting administration system. Although discourses about translation have broadened steadily in the last decades, the process will gain momentum in the twenty-first century as translation studies include increasing numbers of scholars from all over the world. Translation theory is developing perspectives on translation that transcend Eurocentric views and dominant contemporary Western translation practices so as to include the views and practices of all peoples (that is, augmenting Western Translation Theory by blending it with non-Western ideas about translation). A key to this development will be greater understanding of the superordinate categories within which translation may be situated cross-culturally. One question posed is that of the borders of translation. The starting point can be dated back to the publication of Roman Jakobson's article ‘On linguistic aspects of translation' in 1959. This article is modified by Gideon Toury (1986), Umberto Eco (2001) and Susan Petrilli (2003). The general progression has been from the focus on natural language to the entire human culture to even the entire biosphere. Translation is an inherent part of semiosis or sign activity, and therefore translation can be said to be present in any sign process in any living system.
From another angle there is a broadening of the concept of translation. The realisation in the 1980s that translations can never be produced in a vacuum, divorced from time and culture, and the desire to explain the time-related and culture-bound criteria at play, resulted in a shift away from a normative and prescriptive methodology (compare Hermans, 1985). The move from translation as text to translation as culture and politics, has been termed by Mary Snell-Hornby (1990: 79–86) as ‘the cultural turn'. Bassnett and Lefevere (1990: 11) consider this to be a metaphor for the cultural move beyond language in order to emphasise the interaction between translation and culture, as well as the way in which culture impacts on and constrains translation, and subsequently to stress the much broader issues of context, history and convention. This approach is inclusive of studies on changing standards in translation over a certain space of time; the demands made to the publishing industry in pursuit of specific ideologies; feminist writing and translation; translation as appropriation; translation and colonisation; and translation as rewriting, including film rewrites (Munday 2001: 127). It should also be noted that discussions in poststructuralist and postcolonial fields have increasingly concentrated on agency — that is, the role of the language practitioner in transforming society; for example, interpreters as utilised in classroom interpreting in South Africa. The cultural turn in translation studies has become the ‘power turn', according to Tymoczko and Gentzler(2002: xvi). Tymoczko (2005) indicates that the following activities will unseat current pretheoretical assumptions about translation in the next decade:
• Exploration of the nature of plurilingual and pluricultural life will unseat the presupposition that translators mediate between two linguistic and cultural groups.
• Integration of knowledge about oral cultures into translation studies will unseat the presupposition that translation involves written texts.
• Openness to a greater diversity of text types will unseat the presupposition that primary text types that translators work with have been defined and categorised.
• Attention to processes of translation in other cultures will unseat the presupposition that an individual translator decodes a given message to be translated and recodes the same message in a second language. Where Western theory and practice has focused on the individual as the agent of translation (treating the translator as a sort of ‘black box' of linguistic transformation), translation processes in other cultural contexts present alternate possibilities. In oral societies, for example, the audience is always a ‘participatory' audience; thus ‘a text'
• Recognition of all types of translators: beyond professionalism. Translators are generally educated in their art, have professional standing and often learn their craft in a formal way connected with schooling or training that instructs the translator in language competence, standards of textuality, norms of transposition, and so forth.
• Knowledge of the history of cultural movements and cultural interface. Currently translation is entering a completely new phase and assuming radically new forms because of cultural movements and diasporas associated with globalisation and because of the hybridity of the ensuing cultural configurations.
• Expansion of the object of study: redefining translation and the relationship between text and translation. What most translation scholars would like to believe is that the stage of defining translation is essentially over. However, the task of defining translation is not complete and it will continue to be a central trajectory of translation research in the decades to come.
Another immense development is the transition associated with current developments in information technologies and the media, ranging from new mass media to the Internet, from CAT systems to translation imperatives associated with globalisation (Tymoczko, 2005). Usage of language technology (for example, computer-assisted translation programmes) will dominate the profession and to stay competitive every language practitioner will need to utilise this technology.
The new conditions have increasingly begun to shift the nature of the agent of translation away from the individualistic model that has dominated Western conceptualisations of the translator. When translation projects involve multiple languages, translation must become a decentered process conducted by teams of people linked electronically through technological systems, rather than by single individuals or even groups of individuals coordinating their efforts from a single place (Tymoczko, 2005).
A major future growth area will be research about the translation of materials that coordinate text and image. Such materials have increasingly become the norm in many areas of life: the media (including film, television and the Internet), advertising, business, and so forth (Tymoczko, 2005). This is a research trend that has already begun and will accelerate over the next decades from a marginalised area of translation pertaining to areas such as film dubbing or subtitling and certain features of translating for the stage to an increasingly paradigmatic endeavour — and research must follow suit.
What is immediately obvious is that research in translation studies will become increasingly interdisciplinary during the coming decades. Translation research will move away from linguistic approaches as narrowly conceived and even from the circumscribed cultural studies approaches currently in use. The growing edges of translation research will go beyond current approaches based on humanistic research to embrace thoroughly diverse branches of the social sciences and natural sciences, particularly the biological sciences and technical aspects of cognitive science. What follows is that research in translation studies will increasingly require scholars with broader training than is currently customary in the field. Not only is there the necessity to encourage students to become proficient in the social and natural sciences, as well as linguistic and textual subjects, but current teachers and scholars in translation studies must become more conversant with research in other fields so as to be able to transcend the current limitations of research in translation studies and remain at the cutting edge (Tymoczko, 2005).
The necessity of teaching students how to make translation choices will become central to teaching methods as teachers move away from prescriptive approaches, teaching students the broadest possible outlook on translation types and practices, as well as flexibility in translation techniques, as befits practitioners of a field with a cluster concept at its core (Tymoczko, 2005). It is clear that teachers can only harm their students if they persist in limiting students' understanding of translation through a rigid pedagogy. Instead, teachers should be clear about the limitations of their premises about and frameworks for translation, if only so that students will be prepared for a future that will inevitably entail changes in translation canons, translation strategies, and translation technologies as the definition of translation is increasingly elaborated. Skills other than traditional translation skills, for example document design and text editing skills, must be incorporated in language practice learning programmes. Translation of materials that coordinate text and image will be in demand. Such materials have increasingly become the norm in many areas of life: the media (including film, television and the Internet), modes of disseminating information, advertising, business, and so forth. A move from individual language practitioners to teamwork is necessary — specialists must form teams: translation will become a decentered process conducted by teams of people rather than by single individuals or even groups of individuals coordinating their efforts from a single place. Academics and professionals will need each other and they will have to incorporate the knowledge and experience of each other.
Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2007, 25(2): iii–vi
