Assignment+1


 * My Answers and Comments**

A) For me, translation is both a product and a process because while translating something you need to apply a process then the result of your translation is a product. To translate something you need to know techniques and strategies to be able to create a good product. There is specific programs at universities for translation. Language programs have translation courses for their students. This shows that translation is a process. The other aspect of the translation is that to be able to translate sometime you need to observe, need to experience something to understand what you translate. thus applying appropriate process is vital to produce a good product.

B) According to me, translation cannot be just an activity comprising the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language. While doing it, you should have an idea what the culture is it, what the time say, how reflect the tradition etc. It should be human activity because translation cannot be meaningful when done by machines. The goal of translation should be establish a relation of equivalence of intent between the source and target texts, while taking into account a number of constraints. These constraints include context, the rules of grammar of both languages, their writing conventions, their idioms, and the like.

C) I translated many formal letters. One of my father's friend goes abroad for agricultural issues. I wrote letters of request and letter of application. I had difficulties to translate agricultural terms. Requests sentence usually sick me of finding equivalence in English. When I was in New York, I had some difficulties to translate sings and words which are abbreviated. last night I translated a paragraph which was about European unions. Since I had no idea what it was talking about at the beginning of the paper I could make a connection. It was really hard.

 D) Actually, I am thinking that my experience that I have had in America, knowing culture has a big role to translate something very correctly. Translation teaches me new vocabularies, different sentence structures and different way of understanding of the target language. while you translate something you also learn new things about your native language. This is awesome.

E) Taking just two translation courses in four years is not enough to be good at translating something for us of course. We covered many different things in four years so we cannot focus on translating. However, depending on our knowledge about English in terms of vocabulary, culture and the structure of the language we can make translation. It is time consuming but you can learn many things from translation in Turkey. Although our translation courses are not enough, we can work on it and we will be a good translator. We need to specialized on it I think since we have real experiences about language and its culture. MERYEM LULECI