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» Bilingualism and Translation: Cognitive Constraints on Comprehension of Specialized Texts

By vasylbabiy | Published 01/9/2015 | Translation Theory | Recommendation:

Bilingualism can only be seen as an initial stage in translator’s profession. Although multilingual speakers do often have necessary expertise in specific domains, the cognitive challenges they face are due to the lack of academic knowledge of the languages, absence of cultural competences, differences in mental dictionary, and specificity of cognitive and psychological processes in their brains versus those of trained translators’. Also, translation requires continual practice and discipline. Unfortunately, not all bilinguals inherently possess these qualities; however, not all clients understand this.

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» Machine Translation of Poetry

By vasylbabiy | Published 01/13/2015 | Translation Theory | Recommendation:

Machine translation of poetry seems to be very possible now and it is a real option for minority languages. Richard Richens points out that “if a Georgian speaker wishes to appreciate the imagery of Welsh poetry, machine translation might be well prove to be the ideal approach” (Madsen, 2009). It is true that the output of machine translation often sounds gibberish and incoherent but this should not hinder or stop research in the field. Google’s attempts to generate and translate poems might be rewarded within the next five or ten years, just like the attempts of those computer programmers who designed the first chess programs that beat a human player in 1950s. What needs to be kept in mind, however, is that the translation of poetry is a creative art that requires from a translator to follow certain rules as well incurs subjective involvement when comparing the translated text with its original. Although many computer programs are now well-suited for the translation of simple iambic lines with one- or two-syllable words, the machines still have a long way to go in order to simulate human understanding and intuition. Translating Russian poetry, for example, where rhyme and meter are dominant elements, computer programs are always pulling between form and content, and as a result, often have to compromise semantic accuracy, word choice and order, lexical levels, etc. Of course, only the human translator can be a true mediator between the author and the reader in expressing emotions of poems; however, machine is not necessarily required to produce an exact copy of the original. It can produce a “fake” of the original: a fake poem lacks any criminality provided that it stays as close to the source text as possible and has a similar emotional impact on the target reader.

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