A metapattern for translation: the transforming competence

Problem: teaching translation. Students must follow a vast list of concepts and parameters. Easy to
forget, but mainly to lose focus on the core. Thus next problem: the core is itself vast and plural.
How to unify it?

Concepts of translation and translation studies, munday's review (2016)

Holmes: pure, applied
machine translation
corpus-based studies
discourse analysis
Descriptive Translation Studies
Polysystems
Manipulation school
Cultural turn
Gender and translation
Cannibalism (Brazil)
Postcolonial Translation Studies

the van Doorslaer (2007) map (categories)

lingual mode (interlingual, intralingual);
media (printed, audiovisual, electronic);
mode (covert/overt translation, direct/indirect translation, mother tongue/other tongue
translation, pseudo-translation, retranslation, self-translation, sight translation, etc.);
field (political, journalistic, technical, literary, religious, scientific, commercial).
approaches (e.g. cultural approach, linguistic approach);
theories (e.g. general translation theory, polysystem theory);
research methods (e.g. descriptive, empirical);
applied translation studies (criticism, didactics, institutional environment).

MUNDAY 2016:23-24 (following van Doorslaer 2007: 226)

Translation strategy types
comprehension strategies, production strategies, training strategies, problem-solving strategies,
survival strategies
Translation Strategies: free translation idiomatic translation, functional translation, literal
translation, sentence-by-sentence, interlinear, source-oriented translation, target-oriented translation,
foreignizing, exoticizing, naturalization, localization, domestication

Translation procedures (following van Doorslaer 2007: 227)

Translation Procedures: acculturation, amplification, calque, compensation, condensation, direct
transfer, expansion, implicitation, interpretation, modification, recategorization, addition,
adaptation, borrowing, coinage, concisionm, denominalization, dilution, imitation, interchange,
modulation, paraphrase, reformulation, omission

Munday 2016:24-25
discipline, interdiscipline, multidiscipline
An interdiscipline therefore challenges the current conventional way of thinking by promoting and
responding to new links between different types of knowledge and technologies. Viewing the
hierarchy of disciplines as a systemic order, McCarty sees the ‘conventional’ disciplines having
either a ‘primary’ or a
‘secondary’ relationship to a new interdiscipline. For us, translation studies would itself be the
Phoenician trader among longer-established disciplines. It has the potential for a primary
relationship with disciplines such as:
linguistics (especially semantics, pragmatics, applied and contrastive linguistics, cognitive
linguistics);
modern languages and language studies;
comparative literature;
cultural studies (including gender studies and postcolonial studies);
philosophy (of language and meaning, including hermeneutics and
deconstruction and ethics);
sociology
history
creative writing

Bertalanffy (1968:51)
Conventional education in physics, biology, psychology or the social sciences treats them as
separate domains, the general trend being that increasingly smaller subdomains become separate
sciences, and this process is repeated to the point where each specialty becomes a triflingly small
field, unconnected with the rest. In contrast, the educational demands of training ‘Scientific
Generalists’ and of developing interdisciplinary “basic principles” are precisely those general
system theory tries to fill. They are not a mere program or a pious wish since, as we have tried to
show, such theoretical structure is already in the process of development. In this sense, general
system theory seems to be an important headway towards interdisciplinary synthesis and integrated
education.

Von Bertalanffy, L. (2010). General Systems Theory. The Science of Synthesis: Exploring the
Social Implications of General Systems Theory, 103.
Von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General Systems Theory. Foundations, Development, Applications.
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Munday, J. (2016). Introducing translation studies: Theories and applications. Routledge.
van Doorslaer, Luc (2007) ‘Risking conceptual maps’, in Y. Gambier and L. van Doorslaer (eds)
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