Introducing Translation Studies

Case Studies

In the book, the texts in the case studies are taken from a broad range of languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Punjabi and Spanish. Some additional illustrative examples are given in Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew and Irish, amongst others.

This page aims to provide supplementary texts in languages that are not closely treated in the current case studies. To start off with, the following is a Russian addition to the case study which is to be found in chapter 4 of the book ('The translation shift approach').

English source text (taken from The Royal River Thames: Westminster to Greenwich Cruise and Sail and Rail Guide (1997), London: Paton Walker, page 7).

Greenwich

The ancient town of Greenwich has been a gateway to London for over a thousand years. Invaders from the continent passed either by ship or the Old Dover Road, built by the Romans, on their way to the capital.

In 1012, the Danes moored their long-ships at Greenwich and raided Canterbury, returning with Archbishop Alfege as hostage and later murdering him on the spot where the church named after him now stands.

Back translation

Ancient village Greenwich was gate to London during more than one thousand years. On ships or by Old Dover road, carved already by Romans, invaders from Western Europe could not miss it on their way to capital.

Invading on their long ships Danes, moored at shore Greenwich in 1012, accomplished raid to Canterbury, took as hostage Archbishop Alfege and later murdered him in same place, where today stands church bearing his name.

The case study on pages 66-9 of the book examines the published French translation of this tourist information text. The model employed is Vinay and Darbelnet's classical taxonomy of linguistic changes or shifts in translation. This kind of analysis involves dividing the ST into units of translation (see page 67 of the book) and then matching those units with the TT segments in order to identify what changes have taken place.

The reader conversant with Russian is invited to carry out a similar analysis based on the (non-published) translation given here to see if similar shifts can be seen compared to the analysis of the French translation in the book, which had shown twelve direct translations out of twenty-nine translation units. Initial analysis of the Russian TT already points to certain differences, for example the omission of unit 1 (the title Greenwich) and the calque in place of the borrowing Old Dover Road. However, there are also many similarities with the French TT, including the word order shift and cause effect modulation in the final line