Theoretical Issues in Specialised Translation
This chapter focuses on the most relevant conceptual issues in specialised translation by using process- and product-oriented theoretical models which are mostly the result of actual translation practice and, more generally, of experimental approaches and
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Specialised translation has long been considered the Cinderella of academic research in translation, as also shown by a general lack of interest in Translation Studies and, even more, in non-literary translation, by research-funding bodies.1 Back in 2001, when the first Italian edition of my volume on specialised translation was published, translation theory was still overwhelmingly concerned with literary and, at best, ‘generalist’ texts (Franco Aixelá 2004), despite the very small volume of literary translations as compared to “the rapidly expanding political, juridical, technological, and commercial translating” (Nida 1997: 9). In English, back then the only recent volumes on non-literary translation were focused on very specific subdomains (Esselink 2000; Gambier and Gottlieb 2001). A glaring example of the lack of interest of specialised translation as an object of study at that time is the first 1998 edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Baker 1998a), containing no entry for ‘Specialised Translation’ (nor indeed ‘Scientific’, ‘Technical’ or ‘Pragmatic’ translation), whilst there were two separate entries for ‘Literary Translation’ (the first subtitled ‘Practices’ and the second ‘Research Issues’), plus two separate entries for ‘Poetry Translation’ and ‘Shakespeare Translation’. On the other hand, the fact that in the © 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_2
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Encyclopedia three different entries were devoted to ‘Terminology’ (subtitled respectively ‘Applications’, ‘Standardization’ and ‘Theory’) could be taken to reflect what Rogers (2015: 3) calls “the early narrow scoping of LSP studies as terminological studies”. The only possible exception to this academic neglect of non-literary translation in those years was legal translation (e.g. Šarčević 1997; Bhatia 1997), which has always had a unique place within specialised translation because in no other specialised domain are the social and cultural contexts of the SL and TL as different as in legal texts, the legal system of a state being its cultural manifestation par excellence. Even when the second Italian edition of my book came out in 2008 and, in its French translation, in 2010, the idea of specialised translation as being less empowering and intriguing—as well as fundamentally more ‘boring’ and ‘easier’—than either literary translation or translation/interpreting as ‘mediation’ in ‘extreme’ work situations such as conflict and war settings, was still there, though with a few notable exceptions. In English, these were mainly practical handbooks and coursebooks on specific subdomains (Hann 2004; Byrne 2006; Montalt Resurrecció and González Davies 2007; Pym 2004b; Diaz Cintas and Remael 2007), and also an edited volume on the broader and more theoretical issues of specialised translation (Gotti and Šarčević 2006). In the last few years, however, ‘non-literary’ transl
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