The specific stylistic and pragmatic features of the source texts may cause difficulties to translators, if they fail to take into account the different text-type-bound conventions in source and target culture. The quality of the German translations in our corpus appears at times to be compromised by cases of intercultural interference which could be avoided, if translators were trained better. The paper includes a series of examples, comparing adequate and inadequate translation solutions. Technical manual, cultural difference, style, register, Italian, German, technical translation, distant communication. Nowadays the concept of cultural adaptation in the translation of non-fiction texts is widely accepted. Similarly, the need to respect the text type conventions of the target culture is considered to be one of the principal factors in translation quality. This tendency is expressed in Werner Koller’s (2004) concept of textnormative Äquivalenz and in Juliane House’s influential pragmatic model (1981 1997) by the so-called cultural filter which should be adopted, if a covert translation strategy is chosen. Even the supporters of functional approaches like Skopos theory (who often consider technical translation to be a subcategory of technical writing) usually emphasise that translation should be not only adressatenorientiert but also textsortengerecht (Schmitt 1998), i.e. respecting both the receiver’s needs and the conventions of the relative text type. Specific studies of cultural differences are still lacking for most text classes and language combinations, and thus translators find little hard data on which to base their decisions. Technical manuals belong to the most frequently translated texts and are a valid example of covert translation, but linguistic research has long focussed mostly on their specific pragmatic features (e.g. Grosse & Mentrup 1982 Serra Borneto 1992a further references in Nickl 2001) or on readability problems (e.g. Studies stress the fact that texts should be used together with the respective product (e.g. Saile 1982), but may also contain passages without procedural or operative functions. As form and style depend on a series of factors like the category of the product or the reader’s and writer’s relative levels of technical knowledge, the text type as a whole appears not to be very homogeneous (Ciliberti 1992: 50-52). Thus, most studies propose a distinction between more and less specialised texts, in German normally described as fachintern and fachextern (e.g. Gläser 1990: 241-242), even though the difference could perhaps be defined better as industrial vs. Furthermore, technical manuals may be instructive or directive (Hoffmann 1998: 568) and in German they should have different text titles, if the text producer is authorised to issue directives to the reader (Schmitt 1998: 209).Ĭross-cultural research has concentrated so far on a few linguistic areas only, providing however a series of interesting results.
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