Evaluating Students' Translation Process in Specialised Translation: Translation Commentary

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.