Furthermore, technical manuals may be instructive or directive (Hoffmann 1998: 568) and in German they should have different text titles, if the text producer is authorised to issue directives to the reader (Schmitt 1998: 209).Ĭross-cultural research has concentrated so far on a few linguistic areas only, providing however a series of interesting results. Gläser 1990: 241-242), even though the difference could perhaps be defined better as industrial vs. Thus, most studies propose a distinction between more and less specialised texts, in German normally described as fachintern and fachextern (e.g. As form and style depend on a series of factors like the category of the product or the reader’s and writer’s relative levels of technical knowledge, the text type as a whole appears not to be very homogeneous (Ciliberti 1992: 50-52). Saile 1982), but may also contain passages without procedural or operative functions. Studies stress the fact that texts should be used together with the respective product (e.g. Grosse & Mentrup 1982 Serra Borneto 1992a further references in Nickl 2001) or on readability problems (e.g. Technical manuals belong to the most frequently translated texts and are a valid example of covert translation, but linguistic research has long focussed mostly on their specific pragmatic features (e.g. Specific studies of cultural differences are still lacking for most text classes and language combinations, and thus translators find little hard data on which to base their decisions. respecting both the receiver’s needs and the conventions of the relative text type. Even the supporters of functional approaches like Skopos theory (who often consider technical translation to be a subcategory of technical writing) usually emphasise that translation should be not only adressatenorientiert but also textsortengerecht (Schmitt 1998), i.e. This tendency is expressed in Werner Koller’s (2004) concept of textnormative Äquivalenz and in Juliane House’s influential pragmatic model (1981 1997) by the so-called cultural filter which should be adopted, if a covert translation strategy is chosen. Similarly, the need to respect the text type conventions of the target culture is considered to be one of the principal factors in translation quality. Nowadays the concept of cultural adaptation in the translation of non-fiction texts is widely accepted. Technical manual, cultural difference, style, register, Italian, German, technical translation, distant communication.
The paper includes a series of examples, comparing adequate and inadequate translation solutions. The quality of the German translations in our corpus appears at times to be compromised by cases of intercultural interference which could be avoided, if translators were trained better. The specific stylistic and pragmatic features of the source texts may cause difficulties to translators, if they fail to take into account the different text-type-bound conventions in source and target culture. Distance between writer and reader is underlined by certain linguistic markers and bureaucratic expressions. Italian texts are found to be distinguished by a ‘high’, somewhat ‘scientific’ register which in turn is characterised by markedly explicit formulations. This paper presents a corpus-based study, the aim of which is to define translation-relevant, culture-bound features of Italian technical manuals and their impact on translation decisions. This litany of images, repeating over and over with slight variations, is what transports the audience into the world of the workers, the process of time passing leads to empathy, and only then the multiple layers and connections to us appear.Home > Issue11 > Hempel article Intercultural interferences in technical translation: a glance at Italian and German technical manuals Karl Gerhard Hempel, Università del Salento (Lecce, Italy) ABSTRACT
A group of men haul loads of plantains from shore, onto a ship and up the stairs. On the second, a flurry of activity endlessly takes place. A massive stone cross behind a clear blue sky stands impassive on one screen. Sisyphus / Síifo is a video installation that consists of two large projection screens standing side by side. Abstract: Title: Sisyphus Video: Ariadna Capasso Sound: Damián Keller Duration: 6’00” and 16’00” Year: 2003-4 Media: Two video projections & surround sound.