Personal Knowledge Management in the Training of Non-Literary Translators

Even if the profession of translation as a whole is divided between those who do literary translation and those who do non-literary translation, as Newmark puts it in the very first issue of this journal (2004), all translators have many things in common. Among other things they share a number of problems. As Karl Popper states we may even say that a profession is a conglomerate of acknowledged problems and the disciplinary-internal resources with which to solve these problems (Popper 1979[1962]:108). The particular translation problem, which I will be discussing in this paper, was reintroduced to us by the German translation scholar Reiss back in the 1980s when she laconically stated that "you cannot translate what you do not understand". In this article I will discuss one particular aspect of this problem, namely how students of non-literary translation are currently taught to reach the understanding of subject matter needed in order for them to translate non-literary texts in and for professional settings. The discussion ends with an introduction to a novel - and very pragmatic - way of integrating subject matter into translation curricula. It is my hope that I may contribute to laying the ground for rethinking how we deal with subject matter in the training of non-literary translators

 

KEYWORDS

 

Translator training, translation curricula, subject matter competence, Personal Knowledge Management