subject: Localization Models In Translation Theory [print this page] Translation theory may have a lot to learn from localization models, but the latter may have just as much to learn from the former.
Translation theory has a lot to learn from localization. Efficiency, teamwork, how to explain problems to clients, how to work with technology, to name just a few. So why would localization have nothing to learn from translation theory? I suspect it is a problem of sifting ideas from the jargon. But that complaint works both ways. If one cares to see through the clouds, there might just be some interesting ideas in translation theory. Those ideas might even have something to say about localization. More to the point, they might undo a few of the myths circulated by localization hype. Here we shall suggest just a few.
Translation is just a small part of localization
Process models of localization list as many as twelve steps, starting from Analysis of Received Material, Scheduling and Budgeting, through to Post-mortem With Client. Those are the phases that project managers have to consider. Translation is usually just one of those steps, so one concludes that translation is just a small part of localization. Seen in terms of the business model, that is entirely correct. However, you could equally argue that since bilingual secretaries translate, translation should only be taught and studied as part of general secretarial duties. Or better, since people talk on the telephone, phonetics is part of telephony. We are comparing apples with pears here. Translation is one of the fundamental things that people do with language, alongside speaking, listening, writing and reading. The localization models, on the other hand, are just business procedures, suited to a certain kind of product at a certain end of a certain century.
Translation is just the replacement of language strings
If translation is not just a part of localization, it must be more than what localization portrays it as: the replacement of natural language strings. Sure, we get all those wonderful notes on the need to adapt to date formats, currencies, time zones, even symbolic color codes and all those other things that localization seems to add in addition to translation. Those lists might impress clients. But please, translators have been dealing with all that for millennia, adapting as well as replacing language strings.
Translation theory is just part of applied linguistics
For the past twenty years or so, translation theory has been accepting ever wider forms of text transformation, without having to call it localization. From at least 1984, Skopostheorie (theory of purposes) and Handlungstheorie (action theory) have insisted that translation is not dominated by the source text, but by relations with the client and the overall purpose or function that the translation has to achieve in the target culture. Those have been very strong messages, in tune with the developments of the profession. Those theories have pushed translation beyond the concept of equivalence, which always referred to the source text. In so doing, the theories have taken translation away from the clutches of linguistics as an academic discipline. The question of defining the purpose of a translation requires applied sociology, the ethics of communication and a gamut of considerations that are loosely held under the term cultural studies.
Now localization enters to tell us that none of that has happened, that translation is just a language problem, in fact relaying the insult once applied to localization itself. In the development of translation theory, localization represents several steps backward.
Translation output is like translation input
Translation theory now freely admits that translators do more than produce equivalent texts. Another branch of translation theory, called Descriptive Translation Studies, has been showing this for rather more than twenty years. Those empirical studies have looked at all forms of translation in many cultures over long historical periods.
The historical branch of Descriptive Translation Studies has also shown that the norms of translation are very different in different cultures and at different times. When the French translated Russian novels, they usually trimmed them down by at least a third. When Erasmus was first translated into Spanish, his text was expanded by about a third. Some cultures accept the use of foreign terms and place-names; others choose to replace them with home-grown words. Some cultures continue to love performing technical tasks in technical English; others will eternally resent the imposition. Each culture would seem to have its own norms about what is acceptable in translations, and knowledge of those norms is as useful as awareness of any other local paradigms of communication.
The general finding is that, the more prestigious the receiving locale feels itself to be, the less that locale will tolerate the presence of foreign elements in translations. We also find that the bigger the locale, the more this is true, and the smaller the role of translation is in its culture. And then, perhaps paradoxically, the more a culture translates, the more it tolerates the use of foreign languageswithin it.
Translation is thus operating not just on words, but on the ways cultures perceive their relations. The adoption of one translation strategy or another can have an effect on those perceptions. And that is an ethical question of extreme pertinence to localization. It can influence the future of our cultures in the technical discourses most localized, particularly with respect to languages that are being brought into the electronic media for the first time.
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