What’s Special about Specialised Translation?

1. A short summary of a long career

This volume honours Professor Federica Scarpa on the occasion of her retirement after a career in academia spanning four decades. Coming from a background in literary studies – she graduated in English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Modern Languages of the University of Udine with a final dissertation on the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott – Federica Scarpa received in 1989 an M.Phil in ←1 | 2→Linguistics from Trinity College Dublin (Centre for Languages and Communication Studies) with a final dissertation on error analysis in Second Language Acquisition. After being recruited in 1984 to teach Translation from English into Italian and English Language and Linguistics at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori (SSLMIT) of the University of Trieste, in 1989–90 she served as the Italian Language Specialist at Dublin-based Microsoft International Product Group, where she was in charge of organizing and coordinating the localization of all Microsoft products aimed at the Italian market. At the SSLMIT, she became Associate Professor in 1993 and, in 2005, Full Professor of English Language and Translation. The final years of her career (from 2011 to 2023) were served in the newly formed Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies (IUSLIT).

←2 | 3→Federica Scarpa was also involved in a number of editorial activities. In particular, from 1996 to 2002 she was editor-in-chief of the Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione/International Journal of Translation.

1. 1. the value of reflection (including self-reflection): all translators become theorists whenever they engage in discussion, with themselves or others, about which translation solution is the more appropriate for the text and task at hand. This idea is discussed at length by Scarpa only once (in 2008b: 91) but it is no doubt a foundational theme of all her work. Self-reflection has another added benefit (Scarpa 2020: 114): by engaging in it, students learn to “talk like a translator” (Robinson 2003: 135), a skill that gives them more credibility in the eyes of commissioners and helps them in arguing their translation choices more convincingly.
2. 2. the need for an ongoing dialogue between theory and practice: translation is always a situated activity and therefore it is impossible to describe and investigate specialised translation without reference to the contexts and settings in which it is carried out and the actors involved. Further, in Scarpa’s (2020: 115) own words, “a collaboration between the ←3 | 4→‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ worlds of translation is the only way to enhance both the status of translation as an academic discipline and that of the translator in society”.
3. 3. a strong belief in the potential and effectiveness of training: this is the assumption that training can provide translators with the necessary competences and skills for tackling the translation of specialised texts in any domain. Knowledge of how specialised languages work and what the expectations of discourse communities in different languages are is a precondition for effective translation. And where the subject matter is too specialised and they struggle to understand the source materials, translators must be taught how to ask for support from specialists, as part of their teamwork skills.²

The even more fundamental assumption of her approach is the belief in the possibility to transfer specialised knowledge across languages based on a model that combines methods of knowledge representation and insights from Hallidayan/Sinclairian linguistics. The methods of knowledge representation are essentially derived from the research on terminology and languages for special purposes (LSPs) as initiated – in the Wüsterian tradition – in Northern Europe and then re-elaborated on by scholars and researchers in France, Spain and Italy – Federica Scarpa herself featuring prominently among them. The publication of Manuale di terminologia (Magris et al. 2001), which Scarpa edited and contributed to with other colleagues from the then School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, was a landmark step in the dissemination of this approach to teaching and researching specialised language. In this approach, which Scarpa ←4 | 5→would faithfully adhere to in all her publications since, the more dogmatic tenets and assumptions of the Wüsterian view of terminology were tempered by the adoption of an essentially Hallidayan/Sinclairian perspective on language that emphasises usage and function. Thanks to this combination, the rigidity of the exclusively terminological approach, its insistence on the drawing of well-defined conceptual maps to be super-imposed across languages in search of terminological consistency, is attenuated by the recognition that languages are governed by specific mechanisms acting at the level of lexico-grammar and interacting with social and cultural factors.

This combination (“terminology + language usage”) is the particular double lens through which specialised translation can be described, but the most important ingredient in the mix is the practice of translation. In other words, while specialised knowledge is the subject of the communication and language is the tool for communication, translation becomes a particular mode of communication. In the words of Scarpa (2020: viii) herself, translation is

a linguistic reformulation and a social/cultural mediation that is oriented towards one or more communicative aims and has the main objective of making it possible for members of different languages (who would otherwise have no chance to do so) to communicate with each other.

Seen from this perspective, a theory of translation is the description of the relations between language patterns observed across languages, the translators using them and the socio-cultural contexts in which the patterns are, or can be, used. The link to practice also emphasises a view of translation competence as essentially the ability to solve (communication) problems and engage in decisions on how best to reformulate something in the target language. Scarpa fully embraces Anthony Pym’s (1991, 2003) definition of translation competence when she presents translation as “the reformulation of a text written in language A into another text written in language B after establishing a hierarchy of possible different translation solutions and choosing the most suitable to a specific translation brief” (Scarpa 2008b: 87). The perspective briefly outlined here has some significant and specific consequences on the way Scarpa has approached the study and teaching of specialised translation. These are illustrated below.