Publication details
Die unerträgliche Wichtigkeit eines Kontextes. Die Verdunkelungsmethode zur Förderung des Kontextbewusstseins beim Übersetzen von Labeltexten
| Title in English | The unbearable importance of a context. The obscuration method for promoting context awareness when translating label texts |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Citation | |
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| Description | Minimum texts such as (traffic) signs, short messages, labels, marks, pictograms, and titles are “label texts”. They are suitable objects for mediation or translation training in spite of their specific functions and forms. Translating label texts differs from translations of other texts or coherent text sequences: They are like phrasems, should (in most cases) be translated as such, but to catch their proper meaning it is absolutely essential to know the context they are set in. This study describes a negative-experience-method (called here the “obscuration method”) how to enhance the awareness of importance of the context knowledge at any stage of translat-ing/mediating: The students don´t know the context and have to translate label texts. This inevi-tably irritating process uncovers difficulties that arise when translating generally and answer these Questions: Why is it difficult to translate label texts? What mistakes are the most com-mon? How to enhance proficiency in mediating these texts? The “negative” experience can be transferred to the positive translator´s proficiency. The corpus for the empirical part in this study consists of homework translations of students studying German as a foreign language in Czechia (L1 Czech). |