Vol/51 No/4 2012AUGUST/SEPTEMBERTheLinguist23FEATURESteaching all four skills to the same level,' saysProf Rogers. Students begin by working ongeneral texts and move on to semi-specialisttexts in the second semester. 'It's a very different way of teaching alanguage than if you were going to speak itand write it,' says Grinsted. 'It was a lot aboutgrammatical structure so you can recognise averb, you know what the verb endings are andhow the sentence is constructed. It's aboutteaching you how the language is constructedso that you can decode it.' On top of a demanding Master's course,students have two contact hours a week onthe ab initio module and are expected to putin a further 5-6 hours of study. 'It is ademanding course but it's very rewarding -in particular the level they are able to reach,'says Tomozeiu. For Grinsted, Portuguese waschallenging because many of her classmatesspoke Spanish, which enabled very rapidprogression. Romanian proved difficultbecause of its complicated grammar, but agrounding in French, German and school-girlLatin and Russian stood her in good stead.'The language evolved from vulgar Latin. It'sgot case structure similar to Latin, and also toGerman, so I wasn't too phased by that. It'scognate with French to a degree,' she says,and she had experience of diacritics fromRussian. Students with German tend to bestronger on Romanian grammar, confirmsTomozeiu. 'In Romanian, just like German, thenouns have cases and it's quite challenging forstudents who are not used to that.' Grinsted had applied to Westminsterbecause the course was 'very vocationallyorientated'. Coming from a marketingbackground, she was acutely aware that shewould need to highlight her unique sellingpoints when it came to looking for work.With that in mind, would she recommend anab initio module to fellow translators? 'If it's acourse aimed specifically at translators, yes. Ifyou just learn a language from scratch you'regoing to spend a lot of time doing thingsthat aren't relevant to being a translator. Buta course like this that's aimed specifically attranslators works very well I think.'Notes1I have found no such modules at any other UKuniversity, although they were offered at theUniversity of Salford in the past.be beneficial, but this has not been possibleat Surrey, largely due to the broad variety oflanguages covered by their MA students. Asa result, the expected end-of-course levelmay vary slightly, with Surrey aiming to givestudents 'the basis for further development'.Even so, both universities have been verysuccessful in getting students to translationcompetence in just two semesters.'I was amazed how we were able to get tothat level in only a year,' says Grinsted. 'Thatlevel', as stated at the beginning of thecourse, is the ability to translate 'any textavailable in the print press', rather thanspecialised or literary texts. 'I think havingthat level of expectation helps the studentsto understand where they need to be at theend of the year, and we have been extremelysuccessful in bringing them to that level, yearafter year,' says Tomozeiu. The Romanian module attracts 12-16students a year, and many go on to translatefrom the language immediately aftergraduating. Grinsted, however, wanted a littlemore tuition and, along with two of herclassmates, took a further year of instructionwith Tomozeiu. 'But maybe that's just mebeing cautious,' she says. Since then, she hashad a number of assignments from Romanian,which has been a great help: German is stillher main source of work, but it has been'ages' since she had any jobs from French.Special materialsThe ab initioRomanian course was approvedat Westminster in 2008, but there followed ayear of preparation before it could be offeredto students. 'A lot of materials weredeveloped in-house because there was verylittle that would facilitate teaching Romanianas an ancillary language for translators with agood understanding of other Romancelanguages,' explains Tomozeiu.Rogers recalls looking to specialisedcourses for inspiration -those designed forpeople, such as historians, who need to readmaterial in another language. 'I picked upsome things from that kind of course. Butthere wasn't any ready-made model for it,'she says. Courses for new languages are nowbased on that first module. The focus is onreading comprehension. 'You can get furtherwith that than you could in a course that is'It's amazing howquickly we were ableto derive translations.We were dropped rightin at the deep end'COMPETITIVE EDGEMA Translation students at the universitiesof Westminster (below) and Surrey (left)

have sought to investigate in a range ofscenarios: interviews with translators, analysisof drafts and correspondence in literaryarchives, multiple translations by my MAstudents, and the analysis of the simultaneousinterpreting of sensitive political texts. I pity the interpreters who were in theEuropean Parliament booths in February 2010for Nigel Farage's attack on the President ofthe European Council, Herman Van Rompuy.Farage claimed: 'I do not want to be rude.but, but. you know, really, you have thecharisma of a damp rag and the appearanceof a low-grade bank clerk.'4Unsurprisingly, most of the interpretershesitated at this point, doubtless taken abackat the virulence and directness of the attack.The French interpreter gives vous avez lecharisme d'une serpillière('you have thecharisma of a floor-cloth') and the German dasCharisma eines nassen Lappens('the charismaof a damp flannel'). Both omit any reference tothe bank clerk, while the Italian downplays thefirst part as Lei ha un carisma di una personaincapace('you have a charisma of anincompetent person'). This may be partly dueto time pressure and processing constraints,24 TheLinguistAUGUST/SEPTEMBERwww.iol.org.ukFEATURESWhy do translators make certain, often controversial,decisions? Jeremy Munday investigatesTranslators and interpreters know thatsometimes a single word or expression maycause as many problems as the whole of therest of a text. My interest, as a translator,teacher and researcher, is to identify these'critical' points in a text -those that cause realprocessing problems to the translator andaffect the text's reception, and whichsometimes carry an element of risk because ofthe subjective interpretation they require. In some instances these may be individualnaming words that are an indication of theideological or political stance of the writer ortranslator: the choice, for instance, betweenCatholic Derry and Protestant Londonderry,between Anglophone Montreal andFrancophone Montréal, between colonialBombay and modern-day Mumbai.1In religious texts the impact is magnified. In16th-century Peru, the Jesuits under José deAcosta imposed the Spanish word andconcept Dioson an indigenous tradition thatalready had its own monotheistic divinenames, Viracochaand Pachacamac.2Yet thecontroversy caused by such sensitive terms isnot only of historical relevance. In 1986, thegovernment of Malaysia banned the use ofthe word Allah to refer to the god of religionsother than Islam. This issue resurfaced in 2009,when criticism of the translations of propernames in the Bahasa Indonesia Bible led tothe confiscation of more than 20,000 copies inMalaysia.3For some Muslims, the translationcasts doubt on the Quranic concept of theoneness of Allah and, in the expression 'Son ofGod', may be regarded as blasphemous.How do translators and interpreters come tomake these choices and at what stage in thetranslation process? How can we identify whatthe crucial choices are? These are questions IA risky businessbut also because of the severe face-threatening act and the interpreter's desire toavoid exaggerating it. Since interpreters usethe first-person, they represent the speech actof Farage and incur the risk of the words beingtaken as their own subjective interpretations.Intervention isn't easyAlthough most translators and interpreterswork on less dramatic texts, this does notmean that their intervention is easy. Intechnical translation, subject-specificterminology plays a critical role but it is farfrom being the only issue. I conductedresearch with professionals working in avariety of languages and situations. The mostfrequent problems they noted were singlewords in the source language thatcorrespond to a range of possibilities in thetarget language. An instance where this becomes a questionof interpretation is the German Aufwand,which can mean 'time spent', 'cost incurred','effort expended', or any combination of thethree. The word Belastungcauses headachesbecause it means 'loading', both in themechanical and in the electrical sense, butcan also mean 'impact/stress/strain'. Some ofthese are quite far from the core meaning. Several interviewees raised the question ofpolysemous words, where the equivalentdepends on context and collocation, afrequent problem in translation revision. Anexample is the German noun Leistung, whichcan mean 'service', 'payment', 'performance','power', 'benefit' 'achievement', 'proficiency','effort', 'output', 'efficiency', 'accomplishment','rating', 'showing', 'feat' and more.5In some instances the translator's choicesinvolve what I call 'attitude-rich' wordsMost of the interpretershesitated, doubtlesstaken aback at thevirulence anddirectness of the attack