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Including Technical and Academic Writing in Translation Curricula
By Tibor Koltay, PhD
Budapest, Hungary
tkoltay@freemail.hu
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Why should we include writing about a technical subject,
intended to convey specific information to a
specific audience for a specific purpose
(Markel 1988) in a translation curriculum? The
reasons seem to be simple and obvious. Technical
Writing and Academic Writing, which in my opinion
both correspond to the above definition, widen
translation students professional horizon.
It allows them to become acquainted with the
characteristics of a number of new genres and
equips them with the necessary skills to produce
texts corresponding to these genres. By designing
a number of assignments in which they have to
decide what is really important in a text and
what is not, writing instruction can be formed
in such a way that students concentrate on the
notion of the importance of information.
Introduction to scholarly
communication is also a great benefit. Activities
and documents related to organizing a conference,
publishing scholarly papers, etc. are novelty
for the majority of students. On the other hand,
translators may very well be engaged in such
activities as often they are in a given workplace
the only persons equipped with substantial language
skills. (At least this is the situation in Hungary.)
Encounters with new texts also develop the students
vocabulary in the target language.
Benefits are especially visible
if we speak about an important genre: abstracting.
Palmer and Uso enumerate the benefits of abstracting
in connection with teaching English as a second
language. I believe that these benefits are
also valid if we teach abstracting to students
of translation (who by the way often regard
their training as an enhanced form of language
learning). The benefits of abstracting are in
turn mostly applicable to the entire spectrum
of writing instruction.
By teaching our students how
to write abstracts we will enhance their reading
and writing ability, engaging them in an activity
that is communicative and in which students
apply knowledge previously acquired. (Uso and
Palmer 1998).
Abstracting not only employs
decoding and encoding and develops critical
reading skills, but it enhances the understanding
of basic rhetorical principles. As some texts
are not perfect, students will discover flawed
patterns while abstracting (Guinn 1979).
The case of Professional Documentation
Professional Documentation (PD) is a course
designed to make students of translation acquainted
with those written genres of linguistic (interlingual)
mediation, that are not translation, but which
a translator may be required to write. PD is
part of the technical translation curriculum
at the Technical University of Budapest. This
program contains courses preparing future translators
for jobs that go beyond the boundaries of pure
translation.
The education of translators
began at TUB in 1990. First there was a course
in English translation only. German translation
was introduced in 1991, French and Russian in
1993. The total administrative, subject, and
examination system framework of the three-year
training has been established. Curricula as
well as syllabuses have become standardized
according to the same principles applying to
the courses in all four languages.
Despite standardization, there
are differences in available teaching materials
in different languages, and the languages themselves
require different approaches to PD. That is
why the description below will be limited to
PD for students of English translation.
Translators are trained in
a 6-semester post-graduate course. Applicants
for the program have to take an entry examination.
Ten subjects are taught in the entire course,
and the classes take eight to ten hours a week
per semester. These time limits are imposed
by the fact that the course can only be taken
as a minor or supplementary degree course so
as to allow students to complete it simultaneously
with their major professional training course.
The only 6-semester course
is English language. Even written translation
begins only in the second semester. Among other
subjects the students have courses in their
native Hungarian language, the cultural and
economic background of the target (foreign)
language, stylistics and terminology of technical
language.
PD begins in the fifth semester
and it is a 1-hour course through the sixth
semester. It is taught in the same semesters
as Technical Style and Terminology, which
provides linguistic background knowledge for
technical translation and interpretation as
well as other types of linguistic transfer activity.
In the third year there is Negotiation Practice,
which is the oral counterpart of PD, dealing
with oral transfer other than interpretation.
From the preceding courses
Contrastive and Functional Grammar has
to be mentioned. Introduced in the second year
of the training, it summarizes and consolidates
the grammar skills related to Hungarian and
the foreign language on the basis of universal
semantic functions.
Due to the recent trends of
student mobility and the increase in the diversity
of essential professional skills, students and
graduates of other universities are now also
admitted to these courses. As a consequence,
there is a great variety of interests and professional
experience within each student group, which
has to be taken into consideration in order
to make the training effective (Szollosy Sebestyen
and Szucs 1996).
The main topics covered in
the course are the following.
- The concept and content of Professional
Documentation
- Instructions and manuals
- Scholarly and professional societies
- Scientific conferences
- Report writing
- Scientific literature
- The scientific paper
- Writing abstracts
The latter topic assumes special importance
as at TUB the state examination, which concludes
the education of technical translators includes
abstract writing as we consider abstracting
to be an important skill. Thus, an abstract
of a technical article in English has to be
prepared in Hungarian.
In PD the most typical working
method is to analyze English texts in Hungarian
and then produce similar documents in English
or in Hungarian depending on the genre. The
main emphasis is on the content of the documents
and good style in Hungarian as in the majority
of cases students documents are written
in Hungarian.
The very first class begins
with a discussion with students about the content
of PD. Even though this is a short discussion,
many students have a good idea of the content
of the course.
In the final two years we
try to give more attention to the problems of
writing instructions and manuals. This
is the most technical topic that
is often mentioned in the discussion about the
content of PD. Text and exercises in Markels
textbook (Markel 1988) are put to good use here.
Students analyze efficiency of instructions
given in the book (especially in exercise 2
on page 237). They write simple instructions
choosing from a list given in exercise 1, but
they perform this latter exercise in Hungarian..
The students most frequently choose the following
topics:
- how to load film into a 35-mm camera
- how to change a bicycle tire
- how to parallel-park a car.
The problem of documents related to the functioning
of learned societies is closely connected
to the topic of instructions. Namely we analyze
a How to Start type booklet prepared
by a professional society that is very close
to a short manual though it has different aims.
After a classroom discussion the students are
required to make an adapted translation of this
text. They have to leave out everything that
is untypical for Hungary and they can rewrite
part of the information contained in the original
according to the different situation. Nonetheless,
this exercise is the one that requires the students
to make the most use of their translating skills.
For this exercise we use a
booklet of the American Society of Indexers
How to start indexing. Our students
may not be interested in becoming indexers,
even though subject specialists with language
(translation) skills often do become abstractors
and indexers. Nonetheless we are not interested
in the profession itself but in the way the
professional society delivers its message. How
to start indexing is a short, easy-to-understand
text that fulfills its function of providing
information about the profession. On the other
hand it contains information on training courses
and gives advice on charging for the work done.
Both are different in Hungary, thus the students
have to adapt their text to the reality in our
country. For example, training courses related
to indexing have differing names from those
in the United States and can be attended not
only in library schools but at the National
Szechenyi Library.
The nature of PD often lends
itself to the use of role-playing, which is
not direct oral role-playing, but writing imaginary
documents.
One example of role-playing
is the Call for Papers exercise.
The students become acquainted with a good example
of this genre, then they have to write one for
any fictitious conference, seminar, etc. This
exercise results in a Call for Papers written
in English. Writing is preceded by a short discussion
of the importance of conferences and the main
organizational steps that have to be taken.
Examining a Call for Papers gives one an opportunity
to explain what a plenary session, a round-table,
etc. are. The main goal is not translation,
but to be able to produce a Call for Papers
in English. Nonetheless, we identify the Hungarian
equivalents of the technical terms used in this
field.
One good example of real-life
texts used for this exercise is the Call for
Papers issued for the Fifth Congress of the
International Association for Semiotic Studies
held in Berkeley, CA. This Call for Papers is
good example of this genre, whichon the
other handshows a number of features that
would not be characteristic in other environments.
Participants, for example, could make use of
a special accommodation package, as the conference
was held on a university campus. There was another
special feature in this document as well. Beside
the usual submission of abstracts, a condensed
form of abstracts had to be produced to
allow for the large number of papers to be presented
in written form at the conference. This feature
is less typical at a number of other conferences.
Thus, on the one hand, this
document represents a possible model for a Call
for Papers. On the other hand, it directs the
students attention to the fact that any
similar model should be adapted to local circumstances.
It is the first time during
the course that the students come across
the word abstract. At this stage
we do not explain in detail, what an abstract
is, but remind them that it will play an important
role in our course and will be dealt with extensively.
Report writing is learned
using a workbook that the students can fill
in on their own. This workbook has been designed
for students of the De Montfort University,
Great Britain. Its main objectives are to enable
students to recognise and understand the
report format as distinct from essays and other
written styles and to design and organize
a good report structure (Hilton 1995).
Reports are in many regards
similar in their structure to scientific
papers, so the knowledge acquired with the
former can be transferred to the latter. To
get a better understanding of the requirements
of a scientific paper we examine a number of
instructions for authors taken from different
scientific journals.
Even though they are referred
to by different names in different journals,
these are instructions. The studentsas
mentioned earlierhave already learned
how to prepare them. This time we use them in
the opposite direction, as a basis
for the discovery of structural patterns in
scholarly papers.
The students will learn that
a typical scientific article shows a structure
that corresponds to one of the varieties of
the IntroductionMethodsResultsDiscussionConclusions
(IMRD/IMRC) scheme. They have to know
that this is less typical in the case of social
sciences and humanities, popular science articles,
magazine articles, etc. To strengthen their
knowledge, the students have to take a scientific
paper in English of their choice and label its
main formal and structural elements. In addition
to this, they have to write a short paper corresponding
to the IMRD structure on any real or imaginary
topic in Hungarian (or, if they wish, in English).
The knowledge of an articles
structure is useful as well when we begin to
deal with abstracting. Students know
that most documents contain background information,
as well as descriptions of well-known techniques,
equipment, processes and results, which should
be omitted in the abstract.
Abstracting classes begin
with reading a short passage, taken from the
Career Guide of Neufeld and Cornog as a kind
of motivation and confrontation with reality.
This passage explains that abstracting is a
series of small challenges: no two are alike,
yet the writing must be consistent, accurate
and finished on time. The abstractor should
also enjoy the challenge of reducing the work
to its essentials. A creative, detective-like
skill is needed to find the main points in a
wordy, poorly written article (Neufeld and Cornog
1983).
It is important to explain
English terminology, even if students write
the abstracts in Hungarian. Students must know
that there is a conceptual difference between
summaries and abstracts and that
informative abstracts are often called descriptive.
Nonetheless terminology does
not need to be overemphasized. We dedicate the
most attention to writing informative abstracts.
It is widely recognized that it is relatively
easy to write indicative abstracts, while it
is very hard to produce informative ones (Manning
1990).
Students are already familiar
with the notion of the abstract in different
contexts. They see that at a congress an abstract
is required before a paper is accepted. They
have to know that this is a pre-text (unfinished,
promissory) text, that will be elaborated
into a full text (Gläser 1995).
The topics we deal with in
the classes on abstracting are the following:
- The notion of the abstract
- The functions abstracts have to fulfill
- Types of abstracts
- Informative
- Indicative
- Mixed
- The abstracting process and its rules
Alongside with the well-known features of informative
abstracts we direct the students' attention
to the fact that informative abstracts concentrate
on what the original says, retaining in condensed
form the inherent thinking of the original (Guinn
1979), while indicative abstracts always contain
some kind of (often implicit) reference to the
original (Kuhlen 1984). This means that the
informative abstract is created in a way that
it is hardly different from an original text.
Similarity is even more evident if we disregard
in the abstract the identification of the source,
the (optional) signature, or initials of the
abstractor, etc., which show its secondary nature.
The students learn that translating
the authors abstracts found in
the original does not produce in most cases
a satisfactory abstract in the target language.
Exercises include looking
for topic sentences in texts, analyzing text
structures and the headings of scientific articles
along with other types of texts. We analyze
the appropriate theoretical passages of technical
writing textbooks (Damerst and Bell 1990, Lannon
1990, Rutherford 1991). The students have to
read these texts critically, compare them to
each other and to the short lecture they receive
on the main issues of abstracting.
We use the textbooks not only
for acquiring theoretical knowledge, but to
do some exercises before we begin to write informative
abstracts (which is the most important activity
in the abstracting part of PD).
This can be illustrated using
the example of Lannons book (pp. 140-150).
After analyzing the theoretical part, we examine
the checklist that highlights a number of important
steps of the abstracting process. We do not
only use the checklist . Lannons
book provides a detailed example of summarizing
a text. This exercise shows the steps taken
and tools used during the summary process and
has proved very useful for our students. We
imagine that our work is to produce a newsletter
summary on the topic of municipal trash incinerators.
We follow up in groups by examining the result
of deleting questionable points, including key
findings, etc. We examine how all these appear
in the final draft and the trimmed-down version
of the abstract.
We discuss here how important
it is to give attention to cultural differences
when abstracting into a different language.
Hungarian readers for example may be familiar
with the problems and lawsuits resulting from
the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
Most probably they do not know what happened
at Love Canal, while the name of Seveso sounds
to them fairly familiar. All this has to be
taken into account when selecting the best possible
dioxin-related example.
The revision checklist at
the end of this chapter shows an obvious difference
between intralingual and interlingual abstracting.
The question Is it written in correct
English? is senseless if the target language
is Hungarian.
The abstract produced in this
exercise is meant for a relatively wide and
nonprofessional audience, while the main aim
of the abstracting classes of course is to teach
how to write abstracts for professionals. We
direct the students attention to this
difference and to the fact that the varied needs
of different audiences will play an important
role in our course.
After using textbooks, we
go to real texts. One of the most
problematic parts of the classes is to determine
the intended audience of the abstract (or any
other text) to be prepared. Much flexibility
is needed here.
For example, the students
are allowed to write longer abstracts or abstracts
that contain more details from the original.
This is possible if they can define their intended
readers and can argue that a longer explanation
is necessary for a less professionally-oriented
readership.
It is also difficult to find
actual scientific texts that would show the
above typical structure and would be understandable
to all students. Thus, we use different texts
and when they do not correspond to the IMRD/IMRC
structure, we make the students aware of that.
Also we can use the texts selected for the abstract-writing
exercise for the examinations in previous years.
The most important activity,
i.e. abstract-writing itself, is done both with
the teachers assistance and independently.
Independent writing and group work are followed
by analyses of the work done and discussion
of possible alternatives, mistakes, and their
correction.
The abstracting exercises
are graded using the following criteria:
- Is there enough important information included
in the abstract?
- Are unnecessary details included?
- Are there any misunderstandings in the abstract?
- What is the level of abstraction?
- How well is it worded in Hungarian?
In the beginning we mentioned that we focus
very much on scholarly communication. For this
reason a brief discussion on the importance
and the nature of scientific literature precedes
the classes dealing with its different genres.
This discussion includes a snapshot on the use
of the Internet and its possible influence on
the future of writing.
Bibliography
W. Damerst and A. H. Bell,
Clear Technical Communication. San Diego,
CA, Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1990.
R. Glaser, Summarizing Texts
as Genres of Academic Writing. Summarizing Text
for Intelligent Communication. Dagstuhl Seminar
Report, 1995, www.bid.fh-hannover.de.
D. M. Guinn, Composing an
Abstract: a Practical Heuristic. College
Composition and Communication 30:4, pp.
380-383, 1979.
A. Hilton: Report writing.
Study pack. Leicester: De Montfort University
Student Learning Development Centre, 1995.
R. Kuhlen, Some similarities
and differences between intellectual and machine
text understanding for the purpose of abstracting.
Representation and Exchange of Knowledge
as a Basis of Information Processes. Amsterdam,
Elsevier, 1984., pp. 87-109.
J. M. Lannon, Technical
Writing. 5th ed. Boston, Little, Brown,
1990.
A. D. Manning, Abstracts in
Relation to Larger and Smaller Discourse Structures.
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
20:4, pp. 369-390, 1990:
M. H. Markel. Technical
Writing. Situations and Strategies. 2nd
ed. New York: St.Martins, 1988.
M. L. Neufeld and M. Cornog,
Abstracting and Indexing: A Career Guide.
Philadelphia, NFAIS, 1983.
A. J. Rutherford, Basic
Communication Skills. Englewood Cliffs,
Prentice Hall, 1991.
A. Szollosy Sebestyen and
A. Szucs. The importance of training towards
human excellence and achievement: recent developments
in the technical translating and interpreting
training program of the Technical University
of Budapest. Folia Practico-Linguistica.
XXV-XXVI.: Theoretical and practical aspects
of training translators. 1996. pp. 161-170.
E. Uso, J.C. Palmer, A Product-Focused
Approach to Text Summarisation. The Internet
TESL Journal, Vol. IV, No. 1, January 1998
www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/
This article
was originally published at Translation Journal
(http://accurapid.com/journal).
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