Babel - Volume 46, Issue 4, 2000

As we are advancing into the new millennium, changes are taking place in translation markets and technology is fast becoming omnipresent. In the face of changes and new technology, translation programs and courses must respond to the changing needs of society.It is argued in this paper that in the process of planning/restructuring/innovating translation programs to address the changing social needs, needs assessment is crucial. Rather than sitting behind closed doors charting out the possible needs of our students, which often are considerably different from the actual needs of translators (Cheung, Xu, Chan and Yim 1993), we need to carry out serious needs assessment to find out what the real needs are.It is further argued that needs assessment should be a continual process and take place throughout the instructional program (Burnaby 1989;Savage 1993), thus influencing materials selection, curriculum design and teaching approaches. Major assessment methods for translation programs/courses are then described in brief for reference. The paper concludes that (1) Whatever the format and focus of the needs assessment, the basic purpose is to determine what are the real needs of our students:and (2) When curriculum content, materials, and teaching approaches match social needs, student motivation and success are enhanced.

In this study, we wish to examine official translation (termed sworn translation in Spain) from the point of view of the function and the communicative intent of documents which are the subject of this type of translation. The theoretical basis for an unusual approach to official translation is discussed;its aim is to render communication more effective. The theoretical foundations of this study lie in the functional theory of translation as formulated by Christiane Nord as well as a number of concepts from pragmatics deemed compatible with the above model. Judicial and administrative practices are also drawn upon in the discussion.Considering the process of official translation as a sequence of speech acts, as outlined by Alesandro Ferrara, this study describes the various functions within the sequence which are performed by the examples of documents examined (a British birth certificate, a U.S. birth certificate and an academic transcript from the U.S.).In applying the above approach the components of the document are analysed in relation to the addressee. Official translation fulfils a function and adapts itself to a number of conditions all different from those of the original text. The end result is that a considerable part of the information contained in the original document goes unnoticed in the translated document and even makes its understanding difficult, but the application of a strategy of omission of those elements runs counter to the perspective of the addressee (and quite often also that of the customer) and may affect its acceptability and validity.

The main aim of this essay is to analyse the translations and reviews of English poetry that appeared in three representative literary journals of post-Civil War Spain: Escorial (1940-1947), Espadaña (1944-1950) and Cántico (1947-1949;1954-1957). The proportion of articles and translations, characteristics and scholarly seriousness of the sections devoted to this topic will give evidence of the ideological background of each of the three publications. We will study the reasons that led to the various choices of both poets and translators and this will also be an aid to our inquiry into the political and aesthetic assumptions of these journals.During the 1940’ś and 50’ś, literary reviews were the place where many Spanish intellectuals and scholars could more or less openly express their different reactions towards Franco ś dictatorship. And — as professor Rubio (1976) has pointed out — as far as ideological involvement was concerned, there were two main types of journals: the “eclectic” and the “confessional”. Within the “confessional” type, Escorial would voice the official dogma whereas Espadaña would stand for the impatient detractors of the règime, the so called “tremendistas”. As for Cántico, this journal was an example of the “eclectic” position, since it welcomed all kinds of aesthetic and political creeds.The three reviews will be examined altogether as a paradigm of the literary situation in Spain, during the years of ideological censorship and intellectual involution that followed the Civil War.

This paper, which deals with drama translations in Spain (English-Spanish) from 1950, presents the results of a four-stage analysis carried out on a large corpus of translated plays.Starting from the assumption that theatre is part of the field of drama (which includes cinema and television, among other spectacles), and taking into account drama’ś inherent specificity (written to be performed), as well as its peculiar structure (dialogue versus prose) this study on translated drama posits, as a starting point, an inherently dramatic unit (réplica) which is instrumental in describing and comparing drama texts, be they translated or not.Starting from an outline of the four-stage process adopted, this paper elaborates fundamentally on extreme cases of translation strategies (addition, deletion and adequacy), found to have been applied in each of the three extreme cases studied, relating them with a previously uncovered twofold characterization (into reading and acting editions) of the translations under scrutiny.