(Un)Folding the Meaning: Translation Competence and Translation Strategies Compared

Abstract

In the framework of a wider longitudinal empirical study on translation competence (TC) and its development, this paper investigates the attitudes of novice vs. professional translators towards the strategies of foreignization and domestication (Venuti 2008). Moving from the consideration that “expansion, [is] an unfolding of what, in the original, is ‘folded’” (Berman 2004:290), the study analyses the number and type of expansions and reductions in a parallel corpus of multiple translations of the same source texts produced by translators at different stages in the development of their TC. The working hypothesis is that the strategies of foreignization and domestication might be to some extent related to the translator’s supposed level of competence. This paper describes the trends observed in the corpus as concerns expansions and reductions from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective and outlines some provisional results suggesting a tendency towards expansion and domestication in professional translators. (At the time of writing this article, the whole study had not been completed. The final results of this and other analyses on the same corpus are now available in C. Quinci (2015), Translators in the Making: An Empirical Longitudinal Study on Translation Competence and its Development, Ph.D. Thesis, Università degli Studi di Trieste. From April 2016 on, the thesis will be available for download at http://hdl.handle.net/10077/10986.)