Applying the Concept of Linguistic Worldview in Translation Teaching

Abstract

The conception of linguistic worldview has long been researched. Yet, it is only recently that its relevance to translation studies has been pointed out. This study aims to show how the concept of linguistic worldview can be applied in translation teaching to offer students a better insight into the process of translation, raise their awareness of its challenges and provide a certain perspective on how to deal with them, especially in the post-edition stage. Assuming that languages encode different views of the world, translation can be understood as worldview reconstruction. But what or whose worldview is reconstructed in translation? Intuitively, the translator’s task should be to reconstruct the source text (author’s) view in the target text. Two case studies show that this is problematic as the translator needs to base the reconstruction of the source text worldview on the worldview encoded in the target language. A multi-dimensional model of worldview is used in the source-target text analyses to examine how the source text worldview is reconstructed in the target text and identify areas of (in)commensurability between them. The case studies show that looking into (source and target text) linguistic worldviews can be a useful approach, in fact it is an important part of the translator’s decision-making process, particularly useful in post-editing.