How is translation related to linguistics studies?

Lingua 5B wrote:


Linguistics as a science is a broad field.

Linguistic skills or disciplines are all interrelated and mutually integrated, hence translation (also a linguistic discipline) can't be discussed or viewed totally separately in isolation, like you are implying. In translation, you will be using various linguistic skills simultaneously.

Lingua 5B wrote:
hence translation (also a linguistic discipline) can't be discussed or viewed totally separately in isolation.

Vitals wrote:

Hi there,

I remember writing a certain paper on Translation during a course of Applied Linguistics during my MA years. Maybe this could be the "way" for you, too?

All the best,
VS

[Edited at 2011-05-24 20:14 GMT]

Phil Hand wrote:

Hi, Jyuan.

I did linguistics at university, and I'm now doing an MA in translation studies, so I've got some experience in both fields. They are very different kinds of disciplines, with different approaches, assumptions and skill sets.

Linguistics is very concerned with being a science: it measures things numerically, builds models and theories, and aims for objectivity. In areas like phonetics and phonology, there are some great models, and we've achieved some good insights into speech sounds. In grammar and semantics, not so much - human language is hard, so it's slow work, and people have only been doing linguistics as a science for about 100 years.

Translation studies is even younger than linguistics as an academic discipline. It grew out of the practice of translation, and is much more concerned with researching real translation situations than with setting up models. There's a lot of judgment involved, and not so much time spent trying to remain perfectly objective. Translation studies definitely a social science, while linguistics tries to work as much like a hard science as possible.

If you're interested in doing something translation-related, then I would say translation studies is the field you want to be looking at. You can find a lot of the basic texts online on Chinese websites: try Bassnett (Translation Studies) and Venuti (Translation Studies Reader) as introductions. You can also have a look at some of the journals (Babel, Meta, JoSTrans, Target, The Translator) to see what other people are writing about. But the nice thing about translation studies as a field is that it's very open. You don't have to have a very thorough theoretical background to work in it - experience is enough, if you have something interesting to say.

And you really should: Chinese English is horribly understudied (or rather, there are a lot of people studying it in China, but most of them aren't very good), but it's clearly going to be the biggest language pair in the translation world for a long time. We need more people working out how to do it right, and writing about it.

jyuan_us wrote:

So, to me, so far, translation study is not even a sub-type of linguistics.

[Edited at 2011-05-25 06:34 GMT]

Lingua 5B wrote:



What does it belong to then? It concerns words, syntactic functionality, writing, semantics, vocabulary, grammar and many other linguistic skills, so how can it not be a sub-type of linguistics?

[Edited at 2011-05-25 08:22 GMT]

Lingua 5B wrote:



What does it belong to then? It concerns words, syntactic functionality, writing, semantics, vocabulary, grammar and many other linguistic skills, so how can it not be a sub-type of linguistics?

[Edited at 2011-05-25 08:22 GMT]

jyuan_us wrote:



You will find that linguistics is quite different to what most people would understand it. It is a social science defined and elaborated in here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics.

We as translators use the words linguist or linguisitic all the time but these words in the science of linguisitics tend to mean very differently than we think. And a topic in translation is not neccessarily a topic in linguistics. The reason is that a translation study could contribute to the theory and practice of translation but not neccessarily to the science of linguisitics at all. For example, if you study how a best-seller has been translated into another language, it is definately a good topic for the science of translation (if it is a science), but such a research could have no value at all to the science of linguistics.

I have a lot of misconceptions and find it hard to relate translation to linguistics. Hence the topic.

[Edited at 2011-05-25 04:27 GMT]

[Edited at 2011-05-25 04:31 GMT]