Translation Error Analysis

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TRANSLATION ERROR ANALYSIS AND THE INTERFACE WITH LANGUAGE TEACHING Anthony Pym Published in The Teaching of Translation, Ed. Cay Dollerup & Anne Loddegaard, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1992, 279-288. If the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into science, which without any scruples of that sort goes to work and actually does know, it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust should not be placed in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just the initial error. Introduction to The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baille Empirical evaluations of translation teaching and learning are generally hampered by the complexity of the many fields involved, the subjectivity of the assessment methods used and the difficulty of obtaining representative samples and control groups. These factors tend to restrict clear results to very basic linguistic levels, and even then the interpretation of results requires a mostly lacking idea of what translation is, to what precise end it should be taught and exactly what effects empirical research can have on its teaching. In this context, the identification and analysis of translation errors requires a strong conceptual framework before it can ensure any heuristic validity. This in turn requires conceptually elaborate formalization of the problems to be dealt with, and perhaps some initial humility with respect to what empirical methods can hope to achieve. But most importantly, it requires that the issues to be addressed be very specific and sufficiently problematic to warrant considerable intellectual work. In what follows, I shall propose a definitional framework for empirical research on a question that is problematic both within and between most of our institutions: namely, how translation classes (and institutions) should relate
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