《on translation commentary》.pdf

Evaluating Students’ Translation Process in Specialised Translation: Translation Commentary Ana María García Álvarez, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain) ABSTRACT The idea of commented translation, which in teaching has the aim of getting students to justify their translation decisions in writing, is not new; it has been dealt with by Holz- Mänttäri (1984), Neubert (1984) and Gabrian (1986). Nevertheless, students are not used to describing their own line of reasoning and usually do not know how to lay the foundations for their arguments in an organised fashion. Establishing commentary with certain methodological guidelines that give students the skills to ground strategies in an organised way has helped to considerably improve students’ ability to rationalise their own translation process. In this paper, an explanation will be given of these guidelines, which reflect both macro- and micro-strategies and help to establish a coherent basis for the translation process. Subsequently, a commentary, made by a student about her translation into Spanish of a scientific text written in German, will be presented. The aim will be to describe the interrelation of the guidelines with the student’s rationale. KEYWORDS Translation teaching, translation process, evaluation in translation, specialised translation, methodology in translation 1. Evaluation: the Current State of Affairs Many translation teachers limit themselves to evaluating the product of students’ translations, without taking into account the process . However, the translation product per se only constitutes a mere surface manifestation of an entire dynamic array of conscious and unconscious mental processes that occur during the act of translation. Using the product as the only barometer is