RESEARCH ISSUES IN TRANSLATION STUDIES

Rabia Abid
Roll# Eng-16032
Translation Studies
Government College Women University Sialkot
 RESEARCH ISSUES IN TRANSLATION STUDIES
In the past half century or so, there has been a growing recognition that translation and
translating can be serious intellectual pursuits. There has also been a growing dissatisfaction
with traditional accounts of translation, such as “replacement of textual material” (Catford
1965: 20) or “a problem in cryptography” (Weaver, 1955). A few decades are a short time in
the development of intellectual discourse and translation studies (TS) still lacks a sound and
unifying theoretical basis. Naturally, translation scholars are debating such questions as: How
will I conduct my research? Which phenomena will count as relevant observations? How will
I interpret my findings and for which purpose? These are less methodological issues than
epistemological ones. Why would TS need a sound theoretical basis? Because these questions
depend existentially on agreed theoretical conventions (Popper, 2002). Why should this basis
be also unifying? Because investigation is always open to inter–subjective scrutiny. The rules
of intellectual inquiry are set within a community. Ironically, TS is traversed by lots of theories:
linguistics (general linguistics, discourse analysis, relevance theory, corpus linguistics), game
theory, comparative literature, cultural studies, cognitive sciences, and memetics—just to cite
the main currents.

Qualitative research is based on subjective reports, explanations and interpretations. In TS, we

need qualitative methods, but we cannot make do with only specific, private findings that
cannot be generalized. According to Gile, “our perception of both ‘reality’ around us and other
people’s statements is distorted and limited by our sensory and cognitive limitations”. Thus,
the question is: how can we push back these limitations and follow the norms of the so-called
scientific method, according to the aspiration of objectivity? In other words, how can we, using
qualitative methods, move from the individual, subjective level, represented in individual
reports and interpretations, to a level of, if not objectivity, then at least subject-independency
or inter-subjectivity? Especially regarding the fundamental scientific problem that data have to
be gathered and interpreted by an observer, we also have to ask the question: how can bias
from observers’ effects, i.e. his/her interests, prejudices and attitudes, be minimized or
avoided?

Additional questions arise due to the complexity of the field “translation”. In many projects,
the connected whole has to be taken into consideration, because the experimental conditions
are complex situations with subjects and their multifarious individual backgrounds. How can
we take such complex situations with many variables into consideration without renouncing
the possibility of obtaining results that can be comprehended and perhaps replicated by other
scholars? Answers can be found in interdisciplinarity, and especially in intermethodology.
Translation in itself is an interdiscipline (Snell-Hornby, 1986), in the sense that the complex
phenomenon consists of inseparably connected aspects from different disciplines like
linguistics, culture, communication and terminology. In TS, these disciplines are always
relevant and thus an inherent part of the research issue translation. But interdisciplinarity can
also be understood differently, i.e. as an attempt to adopt methods and ideas from other
disciplines bearing some resemblance to the multifaceted TS. Disciplines
like psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences and health care share our questions as to
research methods, because they also deal with complex issues involving individuals’ attitudes,
behavior and reports. This kind of interdisciplinarity means that research issues, apart from and
in addition to the usually “inseparable disciplines”, can be investigated from different angles,
using knowledge, methods, tools and techniques from different paradigms and disciplines,
which at first glance might seem to have little in common with translation.

Qualitative methods are used in many disciplines in social sciences, psychology, human
sciences and also in natural sciences. Especially in approaches close to empirical research, such
as phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, psychology of perception and
consciousness studies, great efforts have been made to accommodate qualitative research to
some “scientific” norms; a balancing act between the special purpose and conditions of
qualitative research on the one hand, and the requirements of natural sciences as to exactness,
reliability, validity and credibility on the other hand. These empirical approaches from other
disciplines provide us with useful discussions, attitudes, techniques and procedures. Most
important for TS are: precise and transparent description, reflective attitude, communication
techniques, coding procedures and combinations and triangulations of methods and data.

To some young scholars, the obligation to include bibliographical references in their

publications is basically a nuisance, especially when they feel they have a contribution to make
in the form of new ideas or new data. Such an attitude actually reflects poor scholarship:
research is essentially a systematic and rigorous exploration of reality, and reality includes
previously published studies. Citations reflect not only those data and ideas found in the
literature, but also the degree of thoroughness of the citing author. Lists of references with
spelling mistakes, missing information (year of publication, page numbers, place of
publication, etc.) and/or violations of typographical conventions (italics, spaces, punctuation,
etc.) are indicators of sloppy scholarship. In terms of substance, references in which important
(relevant) studies are missing are indicators of less than thorough scholarship – or of
insufficient knowledge of the field, or of allegiances, alliances etc. as mentioned above.

Another challenge for researchers, who cannot attend to all relevant aspects of the phenomenon
under investigation in any single study, is that have to rely on replications and attempt to attend
to the parameters and parameter values which they believe are the most relevant; “most
relevant” in this case means most likely to have a non-negligible effect on the dependent
variable studied. But how they know which are the most relevant parameters and parameter
values? Relevant parameters are those that have been previously shown to affect the dependent
variable. A resource for the selection of relevant parameters to attend to is theory. The selection
of relevant parameters on the basis of a theory will be biased towards those factors which the
theory considers most important, at the risk of neglecting other factors and thus designing
studies which will not be generalizable – and sometimes not even valid

In the process of specialised translation, terms can in some cases clearly and without any
problem be distinguished from words, whereas in others this is not so obvious, especially in
cases where terms turn out to behave like words as in such disciplines like psychology,
sociology, art & art criticism, leisure & tourism, etc. Marcel (2005) raised a number of research
issues in this respect including the following:

 What is it that triggers the translator’s decision to translate the item in question as a term
or as a word: is it, for example, the item’s morphology or etymology, the item’s meaning
description and/or context hints as given in (specialised) dictionaries, indicators in the
item’s context, the item’s behaviour in the source text regarded in terms of intertextuality,
the explicitness and clarity of the subject area in question, the translator’s experience, etc?
 Can these triggers be used as guiding or discovery procedures?
 What can the translator do and what aids does he have at his disposal to make the
appropriate decision: is this only term extraction tools or is there more?
 What is the use of the pre-translation macro-textual and micro-textual analysis?
 Are all these issues issues at all in the presence of translation memories and term banks?
 How can corpus linguistics help?
 Do the above research issues regarding term recognition also play a role in interpreting and
if so, is this role the same as in translation; if not, what makes up the difference?
 In what way do theory and practice co-operate to help the translator / interpreter?
 Is it possible to generalise the findings of this type of research into rules and where will
these rules be accommodated best: in theory or in practice?

Probabilistic laws lie somewhere between determinism, where a phenomenon is certain, and
total uncertainty, where one has no idea as to whether the phenomenon will materialize and
how. Probabilistic laws attempt to quantify uncertainty. Uncertainty in empirical observation
of phenomena may be due to the probabilistic nature of a phenomenon, environmental reasons,
or due to the limitations or weaknesses in the detection and measurement of the phenomenon
by man. In many cases, researchers investigate the existence of a trend, not its quantitative
contours. For instance, in TS, the explicitation hypothesis assumes the existence of a tendency,
not how strong it is or to what extent a TT will be more explicit than the ST. In such a case,
researchers are interested not in quantitative variation, but in its occurrence as such. If such
occurrence is irregular, this does not necessarily mean that the law is not true, or that it is
probabilistic in nature. When irregularities occur, the natural procedure in research is to try to
find what causes this irregularity, starting with the removal of environmental factors which
may interfere, for instance through experimental research.
References
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Gile, Daniel, Helle V. Dam, Friedel Dubslaff, Bodil Martinsen & Anne Schjoldager (eds).
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Gile, Daniel & Gyde Hansen. “The editorial process through the looking glass”. In Claims,
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Linguistics. London: Oxford University Press. 1965

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