Rhetoric of translation in non-literary texts

[Susan LaVelle]

Hello, I follow the SEELANGS list and rarely make a comment, but
occasionally a topic prompts me to post. I am currently in a Master's
program in Writing Studies, but I have a BA in Russian and Linguistics.
Right now I am interested in the rhetoric of translation as regards the
choices made specifically within translations of non-literary texts. Much
work has been done on the side of literary texts, but I began to get the
feeling that there may be a sort of chaos that reigns in the field of
non-literary texts, since really for the most part, the monetary and
pragmatic bottom line seems to be what is most important, rather than
securing a translation free of undue political or cultural influences.

Therefore, it seems to me that a lot of rhetorical mischief can and will
happen within such translations, especially with lesser known languages,
because such writing escapes under the radar of the passionate critique of
the SEELANGS-kind. For example, if a medical technology company needs a
manual or a set of diagnostic tests translated into another language,
especially into a lesser-learned language, then the translation will rest on
the work of a small team, perhaps just one person, with very little solid
input given by outside sources. Supposing the translator/translation team
uses one or another dialect or sub-dialect of the language or makes certain
word choices (i.e., rhetorical choices: every choice is some kind of
rhetorical choice) which are seen by some speakers as representing an
oppressive political power, persecuting religion, or unfamiliar tribe. How
will this effect the reception of the translation? As the recent discussions
of "samoliubiv" show amply, each word carries particular feelings to it
which may differ slightly or even massively between contexts or between
dialects of the same language or between sister languages. 

I think that even such non-prose translations, as ordinary as they seem,
need to come under some sort of scrutiny from "rhetorical translationists"
because these days, cost and efficiency is what really "powers" translation
issues going forward, due to economic globalization.

Does anyone know of some research that deals with this (i.e., where the
rhetoric of translation meets non-literary, technical, or scientific texts)
within translation studies? 

If the monetary bottom line, using machine translation, et al, is the way of
the future, it may never seem to matter much in the translation of major
literary icons, like Dostoevsky, Chekov, or Tolstoy, but all the everyday
texts and possibly everything translated into "lesser studied" languages
could suffer from this in some way. 

The other day I conversed with a translation vendor that works with Romance
languages, and his line of thinking was that in the future, a sort of
"survival of the fittest" would take place in translation of texts, so that
the problem I was talking about would go away, because "Google Translate"
will just keep getting better and better, so that any language that did not
have a sufficient basis for "Google Translate" to work from would probably
not need to be translated, because such languages would "drop away" from use
by medical or technical companies and people would use the major languages
that Google has a good data base to work with. (e.g., Google translate uses
a base of already translated texts which it contextualizes in order to
supply the requested translation.)

If anyone knows of any good sources that address this issue, I would love to
hear them, on or off list. 

Thanks! 
Susan LaVelle 
lave0093 at umn.edu

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------