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e Translation and Comprehensibility
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Karin Maksymski / Silke Gutermuth /
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t Silvia Hansen-Schirra (eds.)
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T Frank & Timme
Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur
Karin Maksymski / Silke Gutermuth / Silvia Hansen-Schirra (eds.)
Translation and Comprehensibility
Klaus-Dieter Baumann / Hartwig Kalverkämper / Klaus Schubert (Hg.)
TRANSÜD.
Arbeiten zur Theorie und Praxis des Übersetzens und Dolmetschens
Band 72
Karin Maksymski / Silke Gutermuth / Silvia Hansen-Schirra (eds.)
Translation and Comprehensibility
Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur
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(cid:3)
Table of Contents
Preface 7
Dimensions of translation 11
Karin Maksymski
Comprehension and comprehensibility 33
Sascha Wolfer
Approaching comprehensibility in translation studies 53
Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Silke Gutermuth
Carrying out ‘advance translations’ to detect comprehensibility problems 77
in a source questionnaire of a cross-national survey
Brita Dorer
The impact of prosody on the comprehensibility and quality of 113
simultaneous interpreting: A pilot study
Cédric Lenglet
Coinage and application of metaphoric terms in scientific and technical 139
texts: Contrastive approach
Larisa Iljinska, Tatjana Smirnova, Marina Platonova
Optimising comprehensibility in interlingual translation: The need for 163
intralingual translation
Matilde Nisbeth Jensen
The ‘unpacking’ of grammatical metaphor as an intralingual translation 195
strategy: From de-metaphorization to clausal paraphrase
Aage Hill-Madsen
Investigating comprehensibility of German popular science writing 227
Daniel Müller-Feldmeth, Uli Held, Peter Auer, Sandra Hansen-Morath,
Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Karin Maksymski, Sascha Wolfer, Lars Konieczny
Are shorter sentences always simpler? Discourse level processing 263
consequences of reformulating jurisdictional texts
Sascha Wolfer, Sandra Hansen-Morath, Lars Konieczny
© Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 5
Preface
Karin Maksymski, Silke Gutermuth, Silvia Hansen-Schirra
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz/Germersheim
This volume collects papers presented in the panel “Translation and Compre-
hensibility” at the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) conference
2013 in Germersheim. Comprehensibility was the main issue in the project
“Understanding Science”,1 and its relevance for translation studies soon became
obvious. The EST conference afforded a good opportunity to combine the two
concepts and to benefit from many different perspectives offered by the various
speakers: problems of comprehensibility in the source text, processes of compre-
hensibility enhancement during text production, evaluation of comprehensibility
in the target text, etc.
In line with the topic of the EST conference, “centres and peripheries”, this
volume does not only deal with the prototypical object of research in translation
studies, i.e. interlingual (written) translation. Instead, we looked at some re-
search “peripheries” as well, such as advance translation or intralingual trans-
lation. Due to the broad range of topics covered in this volume and the equally
heterogeneous potential readership we therefore decided to preface the single
papers with three general chapters.
In the first chapter, the term “translation” as well as other core concepts in
translation research are discussed by Karin Maksymski. In the second chapter,
Sascha Wolfer gives an introduction to the term “comprehensibility” and an
overview of comprehensibility models. Silke Gutermuth and Silvia Hansen-
Schirra round off the introductory section by focusing on research areas in
(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)
1 Carried out from 2010 until 2014 at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz/
Germersheim and the University of Freiburg and funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung for
the programme Science, the Public and Society (grant ID: 85 838).
© Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 7
MAKSYMSKI, GUTERMUTH, HANSEN-SCHIRRA
translation studies in which modelling and measuring of “comprehensibility” are
addressed.
Beginning with the “periphery”, the first panel paper covers advance trans-
lations. Brita Dorer explores how this method can be used to detect comprehen-
sibility problems in a source text (a questionnaire of a cross-national survey) one
step ahead of the actual translation. The next paper takes us further along the
translation process and addresses potential comprehensibility problems during
target text production: Cédric Lenglet analyses the impact of prosody on com-
prehensibility and quality in simultaneous interpreting from German into
French.
All remaining papers deal with aspects of comprehensibility in the context of
languages for special purposes. Larisa Iljinska, Tatjana Smirnova and Marina
Platonova focus on the lexical level and present the comprehensibility chal-
lenges of English metaphoric terms in scientific and technical texts and their
equivalents in Latvian and Russian. The next two papers broaden the perspective
to encompass lexico-grammatical questions, but focus on medical specialised
texts. First, Matilde Nisbeth Jensen shows the advantage of intralingual transla-
tion for defining comprehensibility and applying it in the interlingual translation
from English into Danish. Aage Hill-Madsen then explores the impact of gram-
matical metaphor on comprehensibility in the intralingual translation of English
medical specialised texts into English Patient Information Leaflets.
The last two papers also broach the concept of intralingual translation, but
analyse whole texts. Daniel Müller-Feldmeth, Uli Held, Peter Auer, Sandra
Hansen-Morath, Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Karin Maksymski, Sascha Wolfer and
Lars Konieczny investigate comprehensibility in German popular science writ-
ing using eye-tracking. Sascha Wolfer, Sandra Hansen-Morath and Lars
Konieczny finally use the same methodology, but apply it to the (comprehen-
sible?) reformulation of German jurisdictional texts.
We would like to thank everyone who participated in making this volume
possible. The authors of the individual articles put a lot of time and effort into
their papers, and it was a pleasure working with them. Equally thorough and
thought-provoking work was done by our board of reviewers:
8 © Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur
PREFACE
(cid:16)(cid:3) Prof. Dr. Vahram Atayan
(cid:16)(cid:3) Dr. Martina Behr
(cid:16)(cid:3) Dr. Julija Boguna
(cid:16)(cid:3) Jun.-Prof. Dr. Oliver Čulo
(cid:16)(cid:3) Dr. Sascha Hofmann
(cid:16)(cid:3) Jun.-Prof. Dr. Svenja Kranich
(cid:16)(cid:3) Dr. Kerstin Kunz
(cid:16)(cid:3) Dr. Monika Płużyczka
(cid:16)(cid:3) Sarah Rust
(cid:16)(cid:3) Prof. Dr. Michael Schreiber
(cid:16)(cid:3) Tatiana Serbina
(cid:16)(cid:3) Prof. Dr. Erich Steiner
(cid:16)(cid:3) Dr. Andrea Wurm
Thank you also to Sarah Signer, who did an amazing proofreading job, and
Wendy Fox and Christine Kühn for their help during the formatting stage.
We hope you will enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed putting it
together!
The editors
Germersheim, 19.02.2015
© Frank & Timme Verlag für wissenschaftliche Literatur 9
