Enhancing thematic competence by exposure to professional discourse in economic translation1

Resumen

This paper discusses a situation in a course on economic translation for BA students, and tries to show how exposure to professional discourse helps master the “lingo” of the professional community. An experiment was carried out to show what impact, if any, exposure to professional discourse has on the terminological and phraseological quality as well as on the overall acceptability of translation in this domain. In controlled classroom settings, students were assigned to translate a text on macroeconomic outlook from English to Czech. The first group of participants was asked to translate the text immediately. The second group was first exposed to three TV interviews on the same topic, and then asked to translate the text. The third group was presented with three newspaper articles on the same topic, and then asked to translate the text. The student translations were then assessed with respect to selected rich points to see if there were any differences between the groups. The results suggest that exposure to professional discourse in written form increases the use of idiomatic terminology and phraseology as well as the overall acceptability of the translation while the oral form only increases the overall acceptability of the translation. The potential of using such exercises in specialized translation classroom is discussed.