SEMINAR I

1. What does the term translate mean? Discuss its etymology.

2. Argue in favour of the translatability of any text.
3. What is the difference between the activity of a translator and that of an interpreter?
4. What is the source language? What is the target language?
5. What do you understand by literal translation? Why is word for word translation practically
impossible? Discuss this from the perspective of de Saussure's and Hjelmslev's theories of the
linguistic sign?
6. Fidelity versus transparency. Tradutore traditore, the translator seen as a traitor.
7. What kind of problems does the translation of literary texts raise?
8. What is adaptation? What is back-translation?
9. Why is machine translation unreliable? What is the role of the human factor?
10. What is overtranslation? What is undertranslation? What do you understand by paraphrase?
11. What are calques? Flea market/march aux puces/pia de vechituri. Sky scraper/gratte-
ciel/zgrie-nori. Give examples of calqued words and phrases (from English) in Romanian.
12. What is the importance of the beneficiary/receptor? Peter Newmark's concept of communicative
translation.
13. Give examples to prove that extralinguistic (social, cultural) factors may play a decisive role in
translating a text. What does this say about the training good translator must have?
14. Why is Bible translation so important for the history and for the theory of translation?
15. What were the major constraints for the translator in translating the biblical text(s)?
16. What were the original languages for the biblical texts?
17. The Hebrew Old Testament,.The Greek Septuagint (LXX). The Greek New Testament. The
Latin Vulgate.
18. Who were the first Bible translators into English? Why is KJV called the authorised version?
19. What was the first complete translation of the Bible into Romanian?
20. Translatability of sacred texts in other cultures. Translations of the Koran.
21. The dragomans in the Ottoman empire.
22. What is the Rosetta stone and how did it help Champollion crack the code of ancient
Egyptian writing?
23. Who were the first terminologists? Why did the situation change? What kind of background
must a modern terminologist have?
24. What are terms? What is the relation between the vocabulary of a language and various
terminologies? Give examples of words that are members of various terminologies (and of the
everyday vocabulary of the language)
25. What does a terminologist do? When did terminology appear as a distinct discipline? Mention
several meanings for the term terminology.
26. What are the tools of a translator? What are the tools of a terminologist? What major changes
were brought about by modern technology in the field of terminology and of translating in
general?