Introducing Specialised Translation
This introductory chapter defines the object of specialised translation, i.e. Languages for Special Purposes or ‘LSPs’, focusing both on the formal differences of LSPs resulting from the different specialised domains, and on the pragmatic variation of LSP
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Translation is an ancient craft but a relatively young discipline. Since the 1960s, when some linguists began to give a theoretical basis to the activity of translating, the institutionalisation of translation as an academic discipline was carried out under the auspices of linguistics, a discipline that, as Neubert (1998: 15) recalls, was itself hailed as “a science pilote”. Until the 1980s translation was therefore considered as a branch of applied linguistics, whose absolute and indisputed paradigm was that of contrastive linguistics, i.e. the study of cross-language correspondences between language pairs. In keeping with this, early linguistic theories of translation were more focused on the formal traits of language than on the features that characterise them today, which are the relations between language patterns, the translators using them and the social/cultural context in which they were used (cf. Baker 2000: 31–32). Crucially, however, by the early 1970s translation was also taking its first steps as an autonomous discipline. The traditional starting point for this process is set in the paper “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies”, delivered in Amsterdam in 1972 at the Third International Conference of Applied Linguistics by James Holmes, who coined the name ‘Translation Studies’
© The Author(s) 2020 F. Scarpa, Research and Professional Practice in Specialised Translation, Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51967-2_1
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to highlight the interdisciplinary and humanistic nature of translation (Holmes 1988 [1972]). In the early 1980s, the concepts of ‘textual domains’ and ‘similar communicative situations’ of the source text and target text (from now onwards, ST and TT respectively) were introduced in translation via the text-linguistic paradigm and within a more general ‘pragmatic turn’1 of linguistics (Snell-Hornby 2006: 35–40). These two concepts proved to be particularly useful in specialised translation because they provided the basis for ‘comparable’ texts, called back then ‘parallel texts’, which are texts similar in topic and text type that were produced independently of each other by the source language and target language (from now onwards, SL and TL respectively) and are a crucial source of information for specialised translators. In the same decade, a new paradigm of translation also began to emerge, which moved beyond a purely linguistic approach and was both process-oriented and interdisciplinary. Despite being still viewed as a fundamentally linguistic activity, translation began to be seen, on the one hand, as having its focus on the process of translating (hence the so-called ‘translation process research’ or TPR) rather than on the translation product (i.e. the translated text) and, on the other, encompassing components from other neighbouring disciplines as well as the various specialised domains of the texts to be translated. In the wake of this paradigm shift, Translation Studies also began to be viewed as a discipl
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