THE COMMUNICATIVE PERSPECTIVE IN TRANSLATION STUDIES: A MOROCCAN UNIVERSITY CASE STUDY

ELTR Journal, e-ISSN 2579-8235, Vol. 5, No. 1, January 2021, pp. 63-74 English Language Teaching and Research Journal http://apspbi.or.id/eltr English Language Education Study Program Association, Indonesia THE COMMUNICATIVE PERSPECTIVE IN TRANSLATION STUDIES: A MOROCCAN UNIVERSITY CASE STUDY 1 Abdellah El Boubekri* and 2Marilyn Lewis University of Mohamed I, Morocco and University of Auckland, New Zealand * correspondence: https://doi.org/10.37147/eltr.v5i1.101 received 2 October 2020; accepted 6 October 2020 Abstract Translation of written texts has been a part of international communication for centuries, but courses in how to do it are more recent. This study reports a case study from the context of a Moroccan university where translation courses are taught in two parts. In one semester the students learn about translation from English to Arabic and the next from Arabic to English. We report the teachers’ perspectives on the translation course from Arabic into English, along with the results of the students’ translations based on 400 examination answers. The analysis and discussion of the results will reveal the shortcomings for the current teaching practice of translation; they will also suggest new ways of customizing the course for more effective acquisition of English language as a medium for boosting intercultural communication, the most probable prerequisite for today’s access in the job market. Keywords: Translation studies, English Language Teaching, Intercultural Communication, Higher Education Introduction This study is based on the belief that translation studies need to go further than giving students an in-depth knowledge of the languages involved. Our goal is to add to studies already reported by presenting both quantitative and qualitative data. For the former we analyzed the translations done in final examinations by students in Translation Studies courses. However, as our research questions show, we avoided the error analysis which is sometimes the basis of such studies. Our qualitative data is the set of responses from their teachers through interviews and emails in which we investigated their course content. We hope that this double reporting from the same context will complement what has already been said in our review of the literature. Based on our results we conclude with recommendations to those organizing such courses in future. Translation: defining the task According to Bassnett (2000) translating assumes it is possible to render the original text into the other language so that “the surface meaning of the two texts will be approximately the same and the structures of the source language will be preserved so far as is possible without seriously distorting the structures of the target 63 ELTR Journal, e-ISSN 2597-4718, Vol. 5, No. 1, January 2021, pp. 63-74 language.” (p. 638). However, she acknowledges that maintaining the original structures may be impossible not only for lexical and syntactical reasons but also because “different cultures interpret meaning in different ways”. Groom and Littlemore (2011:22) reinforce this difficulty when they speak of the frequent “trade-off between achieving loyalty to the original text and achieving naturalness in the target language”. They cite idioms as posing a particular problem. For example, how might one translate the phrase “right hand man” into a language that doesn’t use that idiom? In that example they also make the point that a translator with “strong feminist sentiments” (p. 23) might substitute the word ‘person’ for ‘man’. Lasserre (2018:159) expresses the translator’s choices as being either “ ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’”, the visible one simply not translating a particular phrase while the invisible one “would attempt to pin down all the factors in the context…. the register, tone, importance in the text”. For Hall, Smith and Wicaksono (2011) “absolute equivalence at all levels is impossible”(p. 228). In other words, bilingual dictionaries have their limitations, one being that some information from one language is simply not expressed in the other or is expressed more (or less) specifically. As one example they refer to the translation from English into some Romance languages of the pronoun ‘you’. If “you” are invited to dinner, does that include your spouse? In order to translate the word we must know that. The same writers spell out what they see as important elements to be taught in a translation course based on the starting point that the students are already grammatically competent and fluent in both languages. Hendzel (2006) also believes that dictionaries have their limitations since “… translation isn’t about words. It’s about what the words are about. “ (p.210) The purpose of translation studies Translation Studies have been through different phases. Rogers (2000) distinguishes between translation as a means of language learning, which is a centuries-old practice and, more recently, the development of courses in translation for professional purposes, as is the case in our study. The history of Translation Studies reveals controversy as to which principles to apply when translating. Rogers (2000) highlights a number of issues in professional translating, one of the central being the ‘literal versus free’ debate” (p. 636). According to Rogers, the purposes for authentic translation are varied, with tourist brochures and legislation being two examples. This “rich source of innovative, communicatively-based ideas” (p. 637) guides course designers of translation studies. For Hall, Smith and Wicaksono (2011) a translation course needs to address “social and political practices, and the moral and behavioural norms” (p. 232) of both cultures. The prescriptive tradition, informed by structural linguistics, perceives translation as a form of meaning transfer from one linguistic code to another. The concern here is with explaining how language creates and carries meaning in order to make the operation of meaning transfer possible. Against this view, Catford (1965), drawing on a detailed linguistic description, saw translation as a matter of replacing textual materials in the source language (SL) by equivalent textual material in the target language (TL). This said, he considered the linguistic formal correspondence, whereby “any TL category occupies the same place in the 64 ELTR Journal, e-ISSN 2597-4718, Vol. 5, No. 1, January 2021, pp. 63-74 economy of TL as the given SL category occupies in the SL” (p. 27), as an almost impossibility. For him, textual equivalence and meaning replacement (rather than transfer) are possible to attain, especially when a bilingual informer confirms that the SL Text and TL text are interchangeable in a certain situation. The issue of equivalence was central not only for Catford. Nida (1964) had argued for dynamic equivalence. Capitalizing on pragmatics and a communication theory that is transactional (two-way) rather than transmissionally unidirect (...truncated)