Background knowledge as a prerequisite for quality translation

A s has been mentioned above advanced language skills are only the beginning in the translation profession. Subject knowledge, background knowledge, social and cultural competence within two linguistic communities, professional skills and ethics round off the profile of a professional translator. In this lecture, a special emphasis will be laid on background knowledge as a prerequisite for quality translation. Business practice and communication have chosen as subject area since many Applied Linguistics graduates from Lviv Polytechnic work as office managers for various companies and businesses in Lviv and Ukraine.

Language proficiency in English only is not sufficient for appropriate international professional content comprehension if one’s knowledge of the world based on prior experience and cultural knowledge is limited. The theoretical concepts of schema, precedent text, vertical context, and language-cultural personality have been employed.

The globalization process has had a strong impact on the conceptual and pragmatic needs of business practice in countries with transition economies. Ukraine is no exception. Ways of bringing an international and, thus, intercultural perspective into business education and practice are central to an updated Ukrainian interdisciplinary business and translation training strategy. An appropriate professional content, which is predominately culturally constituted, may be found in international periodicals (The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Economist and Business Week). Ukrainian graduate students and business people may have difficulty understanding the cognitive structure of the text and thus processing appropriately the text information. What may hinder adequate comprehension is an insufficient level of an individual’s background knowledge which includes one’s set of concepts and expectations based on prior experience and cultural knowledge. Comprehension involves an interactive process between the reader and the text, i.e. processing semantic and logical relations rather then processing words of the message. The target audience of the above internationally recognized business editions is supposed to have an extensive cultural and intercultural background knowledge. Omaggio Hadley claims that in foreign language acquisition at least three types of background knowledge are activated: 1)linguistic information, or one’s knowledge of the target language code; 2)knowledge of the world, including one’s store of concepts and expectations; 3)knowledge of discourse structure or understanding of how various kinds or types of discourse are generally organized (1993:13).

The role played by background knowledge in language comprehension is explained and formulated in a theoretical model known as Schema Theory (Carrell P.L.and J.Eisterhold). One of the basic points of this theory is that any given text does not carry meaning in and of itself. Rather, it provides direction for listeners or readers so that they can construct meaning from their own cognitive structure (previously acquired background knowledge). The previously acquired knowledge structures accessed in the comprehension process are called schemata. Schema is defined as an abstract representation of a generic concept for an object, event, or situation, e.g. house, home. Cultural differences of Ukrainian and American discourse patterns may also alter the abstract representation for a given concept (apartment –suite, driver – chauffeur, joke – anecdote, etc). A typical cross-cultural mistake is made when Ukrainian and Russian speakers of English misinterpret the noun anecdote: Much attention is paid to illustration of precedent texts in parodies and anecdotes meaning jokes. Ukrainians and Russians, when speaking English, use nouns joke and anecdote interchangeably and fail to interpret faithfully the phrase used in Business Communication training sessions: If you want to keep your audience’s attention start with a joke or an anecdote.

Experts in the field argue that comprehension is not a matter of simply processing the words of the message but involves fitting the meaning of the message to the schema that one has in mind. Any one individual’s interpretation of a message will be heavily influenced by his/her personal history, interests, preconceived ideas, and cultural background, Communication is viewed as a process involving the encoding and decoding of messages. One of the postulates of the theory of communication is its ambiguous character, i,e, the message sent is not necessarily received. The risk of misunderstanding, and consequently, misperception, misinterpretation, and communicative failure dramatically increases in an international setting when the sender and the receiver of the message are from different cultures. Besides, our effectiveness of communicators depends on the qualitative parameters of our language, speech and communicative personality.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14