Publisher's Synopsis
Teoría y técnicas de traducción primeras etapas (second edition) is an advanced undergraduate textbook to teach the theory and techniques of Spanish/English-English/Spanish translation to students who are interested in becoming translators or who might need to translate in their chosen careers. It presents an historic overview of Spanish translation, the theory, methods and techniques for producing accurate and idiomatic translations, and lexical and grammatical problems encountered in translation.
Features
To introduce students to this discipline a chronological orientation to the most important moments and people in the history of Spanish translation begins each chapter. A step by step procedure is presented to approach and translate the source text and revise the target language version. The vocabulary portion of each chapter is aimed at helping students develop techniques to determine the meanings of words without always having to look them up in a dictionary, to recognize and translate idiomatic expressions, to be aware of false cognates, confusing word pairs and other common lexical errors. The grammar segment of each chapter deals only with the problems encountered in Spanish/English-English/Spanish translation and not basic elementary grammar because this text assumes that students have taken or are currently studying an advanced Spanish grammar course. The section presenting comparative erroneous/comic translations is intended to demonstrate common errors in translation and help students analyze these problems. We have also added Spanish headlines (titulares) as they often are challenging for students because they require them to not do a literal translation.
Pedagogical Elements
The text consists of a preliminary chapter and thirteen additional chapters. The preliminary chapter contains basic information such as the definition of translation, what is required to be a professional translator, what characterizes a successful translation, a step by step procedure to produce a translation, the use of dictionaries as well as examples of comparative/erroneous/comic translations. Each of the thirteen chapters consists of the following segments: Chronology of Spanish Translation, Theory and Techniques, Vocabulary, Grammar and Comparative/Erroneous/Comic translations each of which is accompanied by appropriate exercises. Each chapter concludes with an extended passage to translate which reflects the methods, techniques, vocabulary and grammar discussions up to that point in the text and recycles these items from previous lessons. The texts to translate are of a general nature but at a level appropriate for students in advanced Spanish language classes. The text concludes with a glossary of terms, a bibliography and an index.
New to the Second Edition is a section called "Titulares" within the Comparative/Erroneous/Comic translations which will challenge students to translate these phrases into idiomatic English reflecting the style of American newspaper headlines.
