Die Übersetzung eines Werbetexts im Rahmen der fachsprachlichen Ausbildung von Übersetzer(inne)n

Abstract

This article – „The translation of an advertisement as part of the special language instruction of would-be translators of Chinese” – is based on experience gathered in teaching both German student translators at Humboldt University, Berlin, and Chinese participants in a translator’s crash-course at Peking branch of the Goethe Institute. The two groups were not, at first, accustomed to consider a text as a whole entity; instead, they almost automatically broke it up into words and phrases and sentences. In translation, however, we are faced with texts in well-defined contexts and with well-defined purposes. They are characterized both by their linguistic and non-linguistic features. Translatological text linguistics, therefore, makes a point of considering the purpose of a translation, the social and cultural conventions involved, etc. In effect, the scope of linguistic analysis is broadened, since sociological and speech act considerations, to mention just two disciplines, are brought into play. In this way, due attention is paid to the fact that language users make a choice of the linguistic means employed in accordance with the purpose of their communication. The factors influencing the functional structure of a given text may differ between any two languages, a fact that has to be duly considered when a text is to be adequately translated, i.e. when the target-language text is meant to fulfil the same function as the source-language text. This presented quite a difficult problem for students at first. One way to handle this difficulty is demonstrated in this article, which describes how a group of Chinese students analyzed a German text, an advertisement translated from the Chinese, and finally replaced it by a new and, hopefully, improved version of their own. German students would certainly face different problems in various respects, but the methodological approach would be the same.