Translation and Mediation Skills
Domain 7 - Translation and Mediation Skills - tests whether you can carry meaning, function and register across languages, and relay a source text accurately in summary or report form. Fidelity is judged at the level of the text, not the word.
Translation procedures
- Direct procedures: borrowing (email, breakdown), calque, and literal translation where the structures genuinely align.
- Oblique procedures: transposition (change of word class), modulation (change of point of view), equivalence (idioms and fixed formulae), adaptation (cultural substitution).
- Explicitation makes implicit source information explicit where target grammar or readers require it; compensation restores an effect lost elsewhere in the text, not necessarily in the same sentence.
Mediation tasks
- Summarising keeps the propositional core, the stance and the hedging; it drops exemplification, repetition and anecdote.
- Relaying reported speech accurately marks attribution: “The minister denied that…”, not “The minister denied to…”.
- Keep terminology consistent across the whole text; a term translated two ways reads as two concepts.
Register and collocation
- Match target conventions rather than source wording: French “prière de ne pas fumer” becomes “Thank you for not smoking”, not “Prayer not to smoke”.
- Watch false friends and collocational mismatch between source and target verbs.
Worked example
Source: “Il a fini par céder.”
Literal: “He finished by yielding” - grammatical but idiomatically wrong.
Correct: “He eventually gave in.”
Reasoning: “finir par + infinitive” expresses eventual outcome, a modulation of aspect rather than a lexical match; “céder” under pressure is “give in” or “relent”, and “give in” preserves the slightly informal register of the original. “He finally yielded” would be acceptable but more formal than the source.
Traps
- Word-for-word rendering that preserves syntax and loses function.
- Losing modality: “may” translated as “will”, “should” as “must”.
- Over-explaining what the source deliberately leaves implicit.
- Adding information in a summary, or dropping the hedging that carried the stance.
- Flattening register: slang rendered as formal prose, or formality rendered as slang.