The Analysts of A Text (Peter Newmark)

The Analysts of a Text

You begin the job by reading the original for two purposes: first, to understand what it
is about; second, to analyse it from a 'translator's* point of view, which is not the same
as a linguist's or a literary critic's. You have to determine its intention and the way it is
written for the purpose of selecting a suitable translation method and identifying
particular and recurrent problems, Understanding the text requires both general and close reading.

General reading to get the gist; here you may have to read encyclopaedias, textbooks, or specialist papers to understand the subject and the concepts, always bearing in mind that for the translator the function precedes the description - the important thing about the neutrino in context is not that it is a stable elementary particle-preserving the law of
conservation of mass and energy, but that now the neutrino has been found to have
mass, the Universe is calculated to be twice as large as previously thought, lChair',
chaise* Stuhl, Sessel7 sedia, silla? siul - they all present somewhat different images,
lax bundles of shapes that differ in each culture, united primarily by a similar function,
an object for a person to sit on plus a few essential formal features, such as a board
with a back and four legs. A knife is for cutting with, but the blade and the handle are
important too - they distinguish the knife from the scissors.
Close reading is required, in any challenging text, of the words both out of and
in context. In principle, everything has to be looked up that does not make good sense
in its context; common words like serpent (F), to ensure they are not being used
musically or figuratively (sly, deceitful, unscupulous) or technically (EEC currency) or
colloquially; neologisms - you will likely find many if you are translating a recent
publication (for 'non-equivalent1 words, see p. 117); acronyms, to find their TL
equivalents, which may be non-existent (you should not invent them, even if you note
that the SL author has invented them); figures and measures, convening to TL or
Systime International (SI) units where appropriate; names of people and places, almost
all words beginning with capital letters -'encyclopaedia* words are as important as
'dictionary1 words, the distinction being fuzzy- (Words like 'always*, 'never', *ali\
'must1 have no place in talk about translation - there are 'always' exceptions.) You can compare the translating activity to an iceberg: the tip is the translation - what is visible, what is written on the page - the iceberg, the activity, is all the work you do, often ten times as much again, much of which you do not even use.

 

(Peter Newmark :1988, A Book Of Translation)