## Recipient Roles in Translation 1

## Abstract

In  spite  of  being  taught  to  focus  on  the  communicative  aspect  of  translation,  semiprofessional learners have difficulty in producing translations that are truly communicative. Drawing on actual observations, this paper argues that one reason why semi-professional translators find putting themselves in the place of the addressee so difficult is that translators can be said to have as many as six recipient roles to relate to, and that they find it difficult to tell the roles apart. Below, each of the roles is described in relation to the translator, and it is suggested that confronting the students with errors seen to be rooted in a confusion of recipient roles may help them to a better understanding of the concept of communicative translation, and of the processes and strategies behind it. It is further suggested that the effect of acquiring such understanding depends on a combination of expectancy-, knowledge- and personality factors.

## 1. Introduction

Textbooks  on  translation  used  at  the  Copenhagen  Business  School (CBS) (e.g. Hansen 1995: 15; Lundquist 1994: 18) rightly describe a translation task as an activity involving different persons in different roles, and with the translator holding the dual role of recipient of the source  text  (ST)  and  producer  of  the  target  text  (TT).  Translation teaching at the CBS emphasises the necessity of keeping the needs of the recipient of the TT product in mind when translating. Nevertheless, students'  understanding  of  the  communicative  aspect  of  translation seems deficient.  The  data  on  which  this  paper  is  based  supports  the view that one of the translator's problems is that translation involves far more than one recipient role. In fact there are not less than six partly overlapping roles, which may be the reason why learners seem to have difficulty in telling them apart and especially in understanding precisely how the roles not least that of the teacher (see section 2.4) relate to their own role as translators. Possibly this may also explain why semiprofessionals make a number of errors in areas where they do in fact have the pragmatic or linguistic knowledge necessary to avoid the error.

1 I am grateful to Robert Jarvella and Inger M. Mees for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this paper.

* Inge Livbjerg Institut for Engelsk Handelshøjskolen i København Dalgas Have 15 DK-2000  Frederiksberg

## 1.1. The data

The paper is based on two sets of data:

1. The written translations produced by a class of 29 students at postBA level, who handed in eight translations, four of which were L1 -  L2 translations (Danish English) and four L2 L1 (English Danish)  (see  also  Livbjerg  1997).  Notes  from  retrospection  by means of class discussions, four think-aloud protocols of two of the texts, plus one dialogue protocol followed by immediate retrospection supplement the material.
2. Preliminary findings from the written translations of a different L1 -  L2 text produced by 12 postgraduate students in their final year during thinking aloud and followed up immediately by individual retrospections. 2

## 2. The six recipient roles

The recipient roles involved in semi-professional translation are those of  the commissioner ,  the addressee ,  the translator ,  who,  as  will  be demonstrated below, can be said to hold no less than three different recipient roles, and, finally, the teacher . Let us look at these roles one by one relating each of them to the translator.

## 2.1. The commissioner

In a normal professional scenario, the person commissioning the translation is typically not the person for whom the end product is intended. It should therefore be pointed out to the learner that the commissioner will  generally  not  consider  it  his  or  her  responsibility  to  check  the translator's end product. In fact, the commissioner may not even see it (see also Hönig 1995: 182 and Nord 1989: 101). 3

2 The length of each text was approximately 1000 keystrokes. All texts were general purpose texts.

## 2.2. The addressee

The addressee may of course be identical to the commissioner but, as mentioned in section 2.1 above, this is by no means always the case. It should  therefore  be  pointed  out  to  the  learner  that  normally  the  addressee does not come into contact with the translator at all (note that this  is  different  in  a  teaching  context;  see  section  2.4  below).  This means that the translator cannot enter into a discussion with the addressee about the quality of the product. Addressees typically do not know the source text and may not even know that the text is a translation. They decide solely on the basis of the text in front of them whether they  find  the  product  satisfactory,  and  if  they  feel  the  text  has  deficiencies, they blame its producer, i.e. the translator. Unlike the atypical teacher addressee, they are completely uninterested in the cause of any error.  The  learner  should  therefore  be  warned  that  in  a  genuine  professional  situation,  in  cases  where  a  target  text  sentence  is  in  accordance with the norms of the target language and is contextually coherent, the addressee has no possibility of knowing if the translated sentence in fact represents the intended source text meaning. The responsibility  for  compatibility  between  source  and  target  text  is  therefore solely the translator's, since he or she has access to both texts not the addressee. This can be illustrated by means of the example below:

## Example 1

The text to be translated was taken from the Independent . The political commentator gives his estimate of the possibilities of forming a new Danish government after the stepping down of the Conservative leader of the coalition government in January 1993. He writes:

The Social Democrats, in exile for 10 years, are itching to taste power again but must win over the pivotal small centrist parties, and most crucially, the tiny Radical Liberals to form a viable coalition. 4

3 There are, of course, exceptions. There may be various degrees of collaboration with the commissioner on some translation jobs (see also Hansen 1995: 15 for other types of relations between role players).

4 The task set was to translate the text for the benefit of the Danish Conservative Party Organisation, who wanted to know how the matter leading to the fall of the Conservative Prime Minister was treated in the world press.

Eleven out of twenty-four post-BA students translate win over with the Danish false friend vinde over (= 'beat') instead of get over on their side/get the support of -  thereby creating a scene in the recipient's mind that was incompatible with the Danish political situation in 1993.

Some learners seem to consider such 'false friend' transfers excusable, viewing it as just a false friend to be learned and remembered next time, but in the real world of professional translation, this is a very serious  error,  since  it  conveys  the  opposite  of  what  is  intended  and thereby depicts the Independent's very competent political commentator as an ignoramus. (Compare the discussion of evaluation criteria in section 3.1.)

Having thus demonstrated to semi-professional translators that the responsibility for producing a text that is loyal to the ST author's intended meaning is solely theirs (cf. Nord 1989: passim ), we can proceed to focus on the three recipient roles of the translator.

## 2.3. The translator as a recipient

## 2.3.1. The translator as source text recipient

This recipient role is described in textbooks and therefore known and accepted by the translator. However, the learner's attention should be drawn to the fact that matters are a bit more complicated than when just 'receiving'  the  same  text  in  a  normal  reading  situation.  The  mental activities triggered by normal text processing are top-down, based on the reader's expectations; in other words, readers activate scenes which are influenced by their world knowledge, and their cultural norms and values.  As  readers  progress,  they  will  check  these  scenes  bottom-up against  the  actual  wording  of  the  text  (i.e.  the  frames,  see  Fillmore 1977) and this continuous comparison of the scenes created with the actual wording may cause changes in their expectation structures.

As pointed out by several researchers, however, in the case of a text meant for translation, the role of ST recipient can hardly be regarded as a 'pure' recipient role. Hall (1996: 115) points out that 'a translator always reads a text in order to decode it and decide on translation strategies', and Hönig (1995: 54) describes how the text meant for translation

... aus dieser ' natürlichen' Umgebung [i.e the normal text reception situation] entfernt und in die mentale Realität des Ü bersetzers projiziert [wird]. Durch diese Projektion wirkt er subjektiv ' grösser' als in der realen Kommunikation, den er bindet nun mehr mentale Kapazität als dies bei der nicht übersetzungsbezogenen Rezeption eines Textes der Fall wäre.

Thus both Hall and Hönig point out that professional translators will typically draw on their role as text producers right from the beginning, assessing the type of text, the kind of recipient and the situation it is intended for. They will form an expectation of the kind of problems they may encounter in translating it and devise a global plan or strategy for solving them. Put differently, the roles of recipient and producer cannot -  or at least need not be separated. These mental activities may take place more or less consciously depending on the degree of familiarity with the text type. They may precede the actual translation, as described by Hönig (1995: 55). Alternatively, the global view of the text may be built up, altered and beaten into shape during the translation process as described  by  Kiraly  (1995:  92-93)  in  the  continuous  more  or  less conscious  comparison  between  ST  and  TT.  Kiraly's  findings  are borne out by Lorenzo (1998), seeing that out of the 12 professional translators in her study, only one completed a thorough reading of the ST before starting to translate it. It should therefore in all honesty be pointed out to learners that an isolated preceding phase of ST reception does not seem to be the professional norm, but they should certainly also be warned that the problem for many semi-professional translators is that either they do not acquire a global view of the text at all, or that, if they do, they seem to lose sight of it again in the course of their work with individual text units. The following example illustrates this lack or loss of a global view of the text.

## Example 2

Denmark has many political parties and therefore normally has coalition  governments.  It  has  become  the  custom  in  political  newspaper articles  to  add  the  letter  representing  the  party  a  given  politician belongs to in parentheses after her/his title and name, e.g.:

...  Sådan  lød  kommentaren  fra  udenrigsminister  Niels  Helveg Petersen (R) ...

Literal translation:

*[Thus  sounded  the  comment  from  Foreign  Minister  Niels  Helveg Petersen (R) ...]

These lines come from the Danish quality paper Politiken (17.4.96), quoting the Foreign Minister's comment on the official Danish reaction to Chinese anger at a proposal put forward by the Danish government to submit a resolution in the UN Commission for Human Rights criticising human rights in China. 5

Five  out  of  12  informants,  all  students  in  their  final  year,  work exclusively at the element-oriented level and therefore without further thought proceeded to verbalise their problems in finding a translation for this Danish party designation or, in cases where they had access to a dictionary,  simply  looked  up  the  party  name  in  a  Danish-English dictionary and inserted the translation of it in the TT. Only four students start from a global view of text and recipient situation, establishing the fact  that  the  element  is  irrelevant  in  this  context,  where  Mr  Helveg Petersen speaks in his capacity as Danish Foreign Minister and where the  information  about  his  political  affiliation  would  therefore  appear odd or confusing to an English-speaking addressee. Only one of these four  students,  however,  has  sufficient  faith  in  his  own  reasoning  to leave out the element. The three others, immediately after having established  its  irrelevance,  proceed  to  speculate  about  how  to  translate  it and/or look it up whereupon they provide a translation. One of the three then thinks better of it in the revision phase and deletes it again.

Two students who start by focussing on the isolated element waste quite some time trying to translate it, before they take a global view of the text situation, and then decide to leave it out. The last of the twelve just leaves out the element, but does not verbalise her reasons. So out of the  eleven  students  who  verbalise  the  problem  in  their  think-aloud protocols  only  one  manages  to  keep  the  global  view  of  the  text  in perspective  and  leave  out  the  disturbing  element  without  further deliberation. More strikingly, two students who rightly observe that it should be left out, nevertheless immediately go on to put it in. This leads  us  to  the  translator's  two  next  roles,  i.e.  their  two  roles  as  TT recipients.

5 The  assignment  was  to  translate  the  text  for  publication  in  the Guardian the following day.

## 2.3.2. The translator as target text recipient

It has proved of great pedagogical value to point out to the learner that translators are in fact also target text recipients i.e. they are recipients of their own product and that in a difficult dual role.

## a) The translator as target text recipient with a knowledge of the source text

In contrast with the normal addressee, translators know both source text and target text. When pointed out to them, this role as TT recipient is intuitively  understood  and  accepted  by  semi-professional  translators, who are aware that much of their translation activity consists in comparing elements in ST and (potential) TT. But, as demonstrated in the examples above, if translators do not at the same time accept the other aspect of their dual role as TT recipient (see point b below), they may easily  be  stranded  in  what  Hönig  (1995:  54)  calls  the  labyrinth  of microstrategies, i.e. they may be content to look for pragmatic, lexical or  grammatical  rules  with  which  to  solve  problems  relating  to individual words, phrases, clauses or, at best, sentences, and thereby lose  track  of  the  text  and  recipient  situation  as  such.  It  is  therefore extremely  important  to  point  out  to  translators  that  they  have  yet another role to play, i.e. that of faked addressee.

## b) The translator's role as faked addressee

In this capacity, the translator holds the role of a target text recipient without any knowledge of the source text. Here translators must ignore their source text knowledge in order to be able to check if their product can function as a meaningful text in its own right. This is the hardest of all the roles for the students, because of their learning-oriented attitude to translation. The data show that they either do not creep into the role at all or that they cannot strike a balance between their two TT recipient roles. Below follow two examples of the consequences of not playing the role, the first resulting in a lexical, the second in a syntactic error.

## Example 3

A Danish text  has  the  heading Piphans  ryger  passivt ('Piphans  [pet name for small caged birds] is a passive smoker').

## The text goes on:

Burfugle, som herhjemme findes i mindst hver tiende hjem, kan få lungekræft  af  at  tage  passiv  del  i  ejerens  tobaksrygning.  Dyrlæger  er begyndt at advare, efter at en britisk undulat forleden faldt død ned fra sin pind med en kræftsvulst i lungen. Den havde i seks år siddet i en stue, hvor dens 81-årige ejer røg 40 cigaretter om dagen. Især undulater har følsomme luftveje…

## Translation of the relevant part of the text:

Caged birds ... may develop lung cancer by being exposed to their owners' smoking habits. Vets have begun warning after a British budgerigar fell off its perch the other day, dead from a lung tumour ... Especially budgerigars have sensitive respiratory organs ... (my translation).

Among  many  other  suggestions,  the  Danish-English  dictionary  has 'canary' as a translation for Piphans . Ten third-year students out of 29 choose 'canary' as a translation for Piphans in the headline thus completely  ignoring  that  the  text  emphasises  problems  with  budgerigars and not canaries.

## Example 4

## The relevant part of the Danish text runs as follows:

En række begivenheder, der blev til nederlag på nederlag ... var de motiver  som  onsdag  aften  fik den  52-årige  overstyrmand  ...  til  at beslutte sig til at kapre Anholt-færgen. Torsdag formiddag gennemførte han sit forehavende ...

## First a literal translation of the relevant part of the Danish source text:

*[A series of events, which became defeat upon defeat … were the motives which Wednesday night made the 52-year first mate…to decide to hijack the Anholt-ferry. Thursday morning…]

As can be seen from this translation, the definite time adverbial is found between the subject and the verb in the relative clause (see the underlined part of the text). The position of adverbials is a well-known problem area for Danish learners of English, Danish having the possibility of positioning other and longer types of adverbial in mid-position than English. So most students have a built-in automatic warning bell chiming: 'shift long adverbials to the beginning or end of the clause or sentence'. This is the rule mistakenly followed by seven students out of twenty-four, resulting in problematic translations like the one below:

A series of events that developed into a succession of frustrating experiences ... was the motive which made a 52-year-old first mate decide to  hijack  a  small  Danish  ferry  on  Wednesday  night.  On  Thursday morning he hijacked the ferry ...

Note that, as was the case in previous examples, the sentence created by the translation is a perfectly acceptable English sentence when viewed in isolation. However it is also ambiguous. When seen in the context of the next sentence, the word order of the students' rendering creates a rather odd context in which the man might be seen as hijacking the ferry two days running.

The intended meaning will probably be understood by a recipient employing Grice's co-operative principle of rejecting the first hypothesis in which the adverbial modifies 'hijack' in favour of a second with the adverbial modifying 'decide' in accordance with ST meaning (Grice 1991: 307). However, the phrasing is not felicitous. In examples like this the students admit in retrospection that it simply had not occurred to them to check their change of syntactic pattern for effects beyond the scope of the sentence. As can be seen, the two examples illustrate the lack of co-ordination between top-down and bottom-up processing characteristic of the production of semi-professional translators. In the first case, a lexical, and in the second case a syntactic rule is employed topdown, resulting in a translation error which would have been avoided if the translator had checked bottom-up, i.e. had proceeded to view the translation of the item as an integral part of the text (cf. Kussmaul 1995: 34-37).

For examples of the inability to play the role of faked addressee successfully, see the two students in example two above who insert a translation of the (R) element in spite of having just established that it should be left out in this context. (See also the statement taken from a think aloud protocol quoted in section 3.1)

This tendency to concentrate on words, phrases or grammatical rules is  a  well-documented  phenomenon  in  semi-professional  translation (Krings 1986: 469, Hönig 1995: 55, Lörscher 1996: 30). As stated in section 2.3.2, my data confirm that students generally regard the sentence as the maximum unit of interest and therefore stop when their efforts have resulted in a clause or sentence that seems well-formed and meaningful when seen in isolation. This narrow focus is seen as a con- sequence of the students' view of translation as a language learning activity and not as acts of genuine communication.

We shall now look at the last member of the cast, i.e. the teacher, who seems to hold the key to the problem of confusion of recipient roles.

## 2.4. The teacher

In a normal teaching situation, the teacher shares the dual role of TT recipient with the translator and, in addition, he or she is typically also both commissioner and addressee. But a teacher is a very atypical addressee, namely an addressee with a solid source text knowledge who goes through the translation product with the translator, correcting his or her errors and discussing the product's quality. These observations hold  no  criticism  of  translation  training  as  such  or  of  the  fact  that translation training of course has a language learning aspect, especially in a country like Denmark, where a great deal if  not  most of  the training of semi-professionals is devoted to translation into L2.

In the Danish world of professional translation, there is little tradition of L1 L2 translations being undertaken by native speakers of the target language in question, or of having them made with the assistance of such persons. For practical reasons alone this would not be possible. Hence the demands on the translator's L2 competence are very high, both in terms of grammar, style, vocabulary and domain-specific knowledge. The danger is, however, that the learning aspect easily results in the communicative aspect of translation being reduced or blotted out in the eyes of the translator, and that the all-embracing teacher role will therefore influence the translator's attitude to translation in such a way that the learner comes to look at the activity as a matter of solving a series of isolated problems for learning purposes while the teacher with his or her greater linguistic competence is seen to be responsible for the final version of the product (cf. Krings 1986: 470-471).

Consider the following statement taken from a class discussion in connection with the handing back of an assignment given in the postBA class described in section 1.2.

A student with a high degree of linguistic competence says:

'I must admit that I often choose a different expression in my written assignments than the one which first springs to mind and which I am sure is adequate just to find out if this other solution which I seem to have met before is in fact also acceptable. Just to widen my vocabulary, you know.' (Summary of original Danish statement, based on notes taken during retrospection.)

Compare the following statement taken from retrospection immediately after  a  dialogue protocol involving two third year students' L1 L2 translation.

## One of the students says:

' If I start late on translating a text, then I don't concentrate 100 per cent, because I take it for granted that if I have made a mistake in the text, then the teacher will correct it ...  and then you can always go back and look at the text again ... and then you can learn it that way, can't you?' (My translation)

Although  such  statements,  which  are  corroborated  by  more  or  less explicit statements during think-aloud, do point to a learning attitude to translation, it should be noted that they cannot in themselves be taken to indicate  that  these  students  have  not  understood  the principle of communicative translation. Their choice of keeping the learning-oriented angle may simply be a calculated cost-benefit disposition, based on the axiom 'minimum effort maximum efficiency' essential to learning, especially when the workload is as heavy as described above for these students' multi-purpose translation training classes.

## 3. Can the translator's attitude be changed?

Can translators learn communicative translation, i.e. learn to play the role of faked addressee?

For most students it is necessary to feel the need of being in possession of certain types of competence in order to feel motivated for acquiring them. As pointed out by McDonough (1986: 148, 151) this holds true for any human learning operation.

A successful method of creating a motivation for learning communication strategies has proved to be that of simply confronting students with striking examples of the unfortunate effects of disregarding the addressee.  General  purpose  texts  like  those  exemplified  above  have been found especially rewarding as eye openers. It is easier for the student  to  spot  the  communicative  results  of  their  translation  errors  in these types of text. There is no complicated background knowledge and difficult LSP terminology to get in the way of text understanding. The grotesque consequences of the error for communication immediately strike  the  learners  when  the  error  is  pointed  out  to  them.  The  spontaneous reaction is 'Gosh, I knew this, why did I not see it.' Examples of this kind help bring home to students what it really means to put themselves in the situation of the addressee and may therefore motivate them for  learning  to  make  conscious  use  of  methods  based  on  such psychological  notions  as  bottom-up  and  top-down  processing  and scenes and frames.

Recent experience with a class of our Open University students in their first term (the autumn term 1998) indicates that the method works at lower levels as well. These students claim that the notion of functional translation is quite new to them. One student even called it 'a revelation' to have it pointed out that in his translation of a Danish ST dealing with the drinking habits of schoolchildren, his English TT audience would  believe  that  they  were  reading  about  English  schoolchildren because he had not premodified his direct translation of skolebørn into 'schoolchildren' with the explanatory word 'Danish'.

Of course it is fairly obvious', he said, 'but I have never had it pointed out to me, and I have simply never thought about it myself.' The quote is representative of the class. (Cf.. Krings 1986: 469.) The reason for this lack of conscious focus on the addressee may be that translation training in schools is learning-oriented, and/or it may be because the translation tasks set for them were generally aimed at a more or less given type of addressee, as would be the case with standard business letters used for translation in commercial schools or colleges.

The  data,  however,  indicate,  that  whereas  most  students  can  be brought to understand the role of faked addressee in principle , it seems to  depend  on  a  complicated  set  of  interrelated  factors  whether  this understanding does in fact make them learn to play the role well, or whether it makes them choose to play it at all. For practical reasons these factors will be divided into expectancy-, knowledge- and personality  factors,  although the borderlines between the categories will be seen to be blurred. Thus what I have termed expectancy factors below might have been considered a sub-category of personality factors, if personality factors are taken to mean all factors other than linguistic that influence the student's decision.

## 3.1. Expectancy factors

In spite of convincing evidence for the drawbacks of learning-oriented translation,  it  seems  that  old  habits  die  hard.  Many  students  have difficulty in deciding to let go of the learning-oriented attitude. One of the students who rightly omitted the (R) element in the translation of example 2 declared in retrospection that, had this been an exam paper, she would have provided a translation of it, in case the examiners would otherwise  think  that  she  was  unable  to  do  so.  Another  student  says during think aloud that she will leave it out ' not because I don't know it , but because it is irrelevant.' (My translation and italics.) The material abounds in examples of students airing their fear of being 'too bold' or even 'cheating', thus clearly signalling uncertainty because of the awareness of a higher authority. For instance, one student says 'I have the most intense desire to paraphrase a little', whereupon she provides a perfectly adequate meaning-oriented solution. Then she immediately goes on to say: 'I am not sure that it [her solution] does not go beyond what I ought to be allowed to do, so I think I'll try to find a different solution first.' For similar findings, see Kussmaul (1995: 28-31) and Livbjerg & Mees (1999).

As the examples indicate, students need to be convinced that it is quite  legitimate  to  employ  communicative  translation  strategies  and that solutions to problems reached by employing such strategies will be appreciated by their assessors.

Of course such legitimisation of addressee-oriented solutions would require  consensus  among  assessors  about  the  criteria  for  evaluation. That such consensus cannot be taken for granted is illustrated in Hönig (1995: 128-131) through a discussion between two prototype assessors, namely  A  representing  evaluation  based  on  the  documentation  of linguistic knowledge and B representing evaluation of the product as an act of communication. The text to be translated was the following:

Any system as complex as a human language is bound to lend itself to a variety of independent approaches. For example, languages are used to communicate: one obvious line of research would be to compare human  languages  with  other  systems  of  communication,  whether human or not: gestures, railway signals, traffic lights, or the language of  ants  and  bees.  (Neil  Smith/Deirdre  Wilson, Modern  Linguistics (Harmondsworth, 1979: 13-14.)

As most often in Hönig 1995 this is a case of L2 L1 translation, i.e. from  English  into  German.  One  student  translated ants  and  bees as 'Bienen und Enten' ( bees and ducks ). A considers ducks for ants a very grave error showing unacceptable deficiencies in the student's elementary vocabulary, whereas B finds that the error is not grave since it does not  significantly  hamper  communication  in  this  context,  especially because the translator has changed the word order so as to have the bees -   with  their  well-known  and  complicated  communication  system  before the less obviously illustrative example of the ducks. Hönig, who sides with B, comments:

Ü bersetzungsfehler in diesem Sinne sind also nachweisbare Störungen  der  (zuvor  definierten)  kommunikativen  Funktion  der  Ü bersetzung. A's Urteil ' schwerwiegender Fehler' bezieht sich jedoch nicht auf diese Textfunktion, sondern auf eine vermutete fremdsprachliche Inkompetenz, die also ganz unabhängig von dieser Textfunktion existiert.  Für  die  Fehlerbewertung ist jedoch nicht die fremdsprachliche Kompetenz  oder  Inkompetenz  entscheidend, sondern allein die Antwort  auf  die  Frage,  wie  sich  diese  auf  das  ' Funktionieren'  der Ü bersetzung auswirkt.

## 3.2. Knowledge factors

It is believed that a change in expectancy factors may induce students to get away from a one-sided focus on knowledge factors and, thereby, make them abandon the widespread but false belief that perfect linguistic competence is something which can be obtained through mere training and diligence, and the equally unfounded belief that, once such competence  has  been  achieved,  they  will  have  become  competent translators. The didactic task is to induce in learners the conviction that perfect linguistic competence is an illusion even in one's mother tongue and to demonstrate, by means of examples, how well-developed communicative  competence  may  make  up  for  deficits  in  linguistic  competence (Cf. Hönig & Kussmaul (1982: 11) and Livbjerg (1998).

This encouraging message cannot be taken to imply that the life-long work of improving and updating one's linguistic and pragmatic knowledge in both L1 and L2 could be dispensed with. Obviously linguistic and pragmatic knowledge is essential, since communicative strategies for translation cannot be employed without linguistic material on which to base their use. Translation products of the type dealt with here will not  satisfy  the  type  of  addressee  that  these  products  are  aimed  at  if wording or syntax has a distracting foreign ring or if the terminology is faulty.  Students  are  well  aware  of  this.  Less  immediately  obvious  to them is the importance of a solid knowledge of text type conventions in both languages or of other cultural similarities and differences between SL and TL. The following example can bring home the point, at the same time demonstrating that, in practical translation, the need to view the TT from the point of view of the recipient is much older than the functional school of translation.

## Example 5

The example is taken from E.M. Forster's novel Where Angels Fear to Tread , written in 1905. Italian Gino sends a letter to his English in-laws, politely declining their offer to adopt his child after the death of his English wife:

Gino wrote in his own language, but the solicitors had sent a laborious translation where 'Pregiatissima Signora' was rendered as 'Most Praiseworthy Madam', and every delicate compliment and superlative superlatives are delicate in Italian would have felled an ox. (Forster 1973: 80)

The effect of this ST oriented translation on the female head of the English family is, of course, a very unfavourable impression of the author of the ST letter.

Only  on  the  basis  of  such  comparative  linguistic  and  pragmatic knowledge will translators be able to make decisions in individual cases as to whether meaning may best be rendered by word for word translation or, for instance, by means of paraphrase, and as to whether information should be added to or removed from the ST in translation in accordance with the needs of the TT addressee. A case in point was the Danish party designation (R) in example 2 above. But as the example showed, such knowledge did not in itself automatically make students decide to leave out the irrelevant and therefore distracting (R) element. Apart from expectancy- and knowledge factors at work here, I suggest that whether students do in fact make adequate decisions depends on personality factors.

## 3.3. Personality factors

What is said here about personality factors builds on my interpretations of student behaviour gleaned from think aloud data, retrospection and general class discussions. As Fraser (1996: 95) puts it:

Without a detailed personality profile of each translator accompanying his or her protocol, including reactions to the need to verbalise, it ... seems over-ambitious  to  attempt  to  quantify  specific  strategies  and solutions from such data.

No such personality profile was attempted prior to the think-aloud sessions, partly because it is debatable how such a profile could in fact be brought about. Some researchers suggest the use of questionnaires in addition to think-aloud, but it is hard to see how these could be worked out so as to avoid the problem which is also inherent in TAP protocols, namely that the subjects' answers may to some degree be governed by what they believe the analyst is aiming at.

Class discussions indicate that students rightly look upon communicative translation as a formidable increase in workload, as something that changes translation into an activity that makes different, and greater, demands on the translator's decision making. Concentrating on successive  units  within  the  scope  of  the  sentence  with  a  teacher  in charge is evidently a far more manageable and well-defined job than balancing  top-down  and  bottom-up  processes  in  a  whole  text,  while making  strategic  decisions  about  individual  translation  problems  in texts intended for many different types of addressees. Many students simply do not have the courage to take on this responsibility or the wish to take on the extra workload, in some cases because they feel that their linguistic and pragmatic knowledge is not comprehensive enough to provide a basis for making the right decisions. It has been found that examples of errors like the ones described above can paradoxically help increase students' confidence, a factor which cognitive psychology has shown to be essential for their ability to assume responsibility for  their  own  work (McDonough 1986: 154). As described above in section 3, the reason for the encouraging effect of such examples is that they can demonstrate to the students that in many cases they would in fact have been able to provide an adequate translation if only they had drawn on the combined linguistic, pragmatic and strategic knowledge already at their disposal.

A case in point: The eleven students who made the false-friend translation win over -  'vinde over' [beat] in example 1 agreed that the reason for the error could be said to be that, due to deficient L2 knowledge, win over top-down evoked a false scene in their minds (parties usually do try to 'beat' each other at elections). Ten of them also agreed that, had they used their knowledge of Danish politics when reading the Danish TT in the role of faked addressee, they would have been able to spot that  something  was  amiss  here,  which  again  might  have  made  them doubt that the frame beat was in fact an adequate translation and made them proceed to look up the ST term. It should be noted, however, that the eleventh student, who declared that she knew nothing of politics, would of course have had no possibility of suspecting an error here which serves to demonstrate once again that communicative competence can neither be isolated from linguistic nor pragmatic competence. In fact, linguistic and pragmatic competence are now recognised as an integral part of communicative competence (cf. Canale 1983, Trosborg 1995: 9-13).

## Conclusion

It may be concluded that the main problem is not to make semi-professionals understand the need for a functional attitude to translation, but that two main conditions must be fulfilled before they will act on the basis of such understanding. First, they must be convinced that their addressee-oriented solutions to translation problems will be rewarded when assessed and second, they must gain sufficient well-founded self-confidence to dare undertake the responsibility for the needs of the addressee.

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