Abstracts
Abstract
The authors have conducted a study aiming at determining the unit of translation (UT), a subject of debate for more than forty years. The article consists of a review of relevant literature, a redefinition of the UT, an examination of sampled translated texts, excerpts and sentences of over 23,000 pages, including the Bible and Soul Mountain, translated from the Nobel Prize-winning novel of the Chinese author, Gao Xingjian, and an international survey. The contrastive analysis of these ST and TT materials shows that translations are done sentence by sentence within context and thus identifies the sentence in context as the UT. This identification is further confirmed by an international survey of 66 professional translators and translation editors. By verifying the UT, this study indicates that for a UT-related theory to be testable, the translation theorist should no longer ignore or sideline the sentence from its context.
Mots-Clés/Keywords:
- unit of translation/translation unit (UT),
- sentence in context,
- translation quality assessment (TQA),
- translation studies,
- translatology
Résumé
Les auteurs ont mené une étude visant à caractériser l’unité de traduction (UT), un sujet de débat depuis plus de quarante ans. L’article présente un état de la question, une redéfinition de l’UT, une analyse d’un échantillon de textes, de passages et de phrases traduits extraits d’un corpus de plus de 23 000 pages, y compris la Bible et Soul Mountain, traduit du roman de Gao Xingjian, lauréat chinois du prix Nobel de littérature, et, enfin, les résultas d’une enquête internationale. La comparaison de textes de départ (ST pour source text) et des textes traduits (TT) montre que les traductions sont effectuées phrase par phrase, en contexte, ce qui fait de la phrase en contexte l’unité de traduction. Ce constat est confirmé par une enquête internationale de 66 traducteurs et réviseurs professionels de traductions. La vérification de la nature de l’UT réalisée dans la présente étude indique que pour qu’une théorie faisant référence à l’UT soit testable, les théoriciens de la traduction ne peuvent plus isoler la phrase de son contexte.
Appendices
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