Wow, hello blogworld! I sure have been neglecting this blog for the past year!

Life is busy and I continue to build my translation career! I have begun to see this as a lifelong project. After almost two years full-time as a professional freelance translator, I have learned a few things!

I recently heard from a new translator fresh out of school, who is looking for some advice on getting her career in gear. Here is the quick synopsis of almost everything I have learned since dipping my toes into the waters of the world of LSPs (Language Service Providers).

My big suggestion is to research, research, research: the market and the industry, best practices, and what other translators are saying; and then to choose a niche if you don't already have one (or start with general work and then flow towards a niche through time). 

The advice on making top dollar as a translator (assuming you are already competent) is: 

1. Know your own skills and limits

2. Choose a niche to specialize in

3. Know the market and your competition

4. Market, network, put yourself out there, and don't give up! 

5. Grab any opportunity for Continued Professional Development

6. And, my philosophy has been, take what you can get to start with and then keep making strategic choices on projects and opportunities to eventually get to where you want to be. i.e. I started with "AGENCY" at minimum .08 per word but now I mostly work for between 0.10 and 0.12; all my new clients that are agencies, I charge 0.12 to now as a minimum (I already have more work than I can handle at lower rates). So I am climbing up the fee scale but not within the same organization necessarily. For direct clients, rates of 0.20-0.25 per word are not beyond the pale, but you will have to pay your proofreader too, so take that into consideration. 

I myself feel I am about 1/3 of the way to where I want to be after almost 2 years of full-time translating. I still work mainly with "AGENCY"  in "large city in North America". Their rates are quite poor, but I have done probably over 500,000 words for them in just a year and a half. I have a steady income with them alone, and I have learned REAMS about the hidden aspects of translation. I honestly think it takes 5 full years to hit your professional stride, and I understand that now, and am happily continuing to move towards that goal. In 5 years, I hope to be working for min 0.15 all the time. This may or may not be realistic! There is lots of downward pressure on rates globally because people don't understand how qualified you have to be to do the work. 

When I pick a project, this is what I pay attention to: 

1. Type of text - article? Published legal opinion? Court records? (I do mostly legal). If it has a lot of citations of this and that article or excerpts of legislation, charge more because that is very time-consuming. Any time you see numbers, names, it takes longer to do correctly without errors. 

2. FORMATTING. Pain in the butt. I avoid jobs with tables etc, or I charge exorbitant rates so they will not place these jobs with me. You are better to work on a straight text job for .08 per word than a bunch of tables and financial reports at double that rate. By the same token, working off a PDF is less desirable than working into a txml (a CAT tool document). Work with the CAT tool goes faster and there is less chance of missing a segment of text. "Agency" requires that you use Wordfast, and I like it. It's a good tool. I wish I knew better how to get the most out of it. 

3. Deadline. I charge more if it's over 3K expected to be done in 24 hours. 

4. Project manager. Do they sound like an idiot? If so, their mistakes are going to cause your headaches. Takes a while to get a feel for this part. Many agencies hire kids fresh out of school to do this type of work. Which is fine. They have to learn too. But hopefully not at your expense. Watch for stupid requests and just say no. 

5. Is there a proofreader for the project? If not, any complaints will come straight back to you. You need to be more careful when you are working on your own. 

Proofreading: my normal rate of speed is 1500 words per hour (yours may be less or more...). If you are asked to do more, don't! It's not physically possible and they will blame you if the errors are not caught. I started proofing for $20 per hour (duh, they loved me) but now I charge $50 to not get stuck reworking the translation of some poor buffoon who does not know what they are doing and who is charging the agency .05 per word. ALWAYS charge per hour on proofing - you might find a large text done by several different translators so you will get badly burned when you get to the part done by the incompetent person if you have offered to do it for a flat rate. Never do proofing for a flat rate (unless it's like 300 words and then charge your min hourly rate for 15 minutes of work!) Accepting proofing jobs is a good way to learn terminology and lose the fear and trepidation of being new. (You will see that everyone makes mistakes. This is a simple fact. There should always be at least 2-3 layers of QC). 

Have a minimum hourly rate and don't work for less. 

For direct clients, you NEED someone else to tag-team with you and check your work. Never take a job with a direct client and do it all by yourself. The second layer of QC is indispensable, and it will cost you more to get another client than to outsource the proofing. 

Wow. Quick dissertation on almost everything I have learned in the past couple of years!! 

Obviously, there is a lot more to know. This is what I love the most about my job! I am constantly learning. 

Learning points...enjoyable and not so enjoyable!

Happy Valentine´s Day! Another lull in my work from the agency in NYC gives me the chance to muse about the unexpected aspects of translating professionally.

One of these, perhaps not very unexpected, is to me perhaps the single most enjoyable thing about working as a translator. I learn something new with every project. It is passionately exciting to see words that I have never seen! I LOVE my Real Academia Española dictionary for Spanish words, and my dear partner David splurged and gave me an on-line subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is like pure, exquisite, intense, dark chocolate to a linguist like me :).  I learn new WORDS with almost every project, but I also frequently learn new concepts, and am introduced to fields of human endeavor that are far removed from my daily life and acquire the tinge of fascination provided by the "exotic".

I took a rush job last week in the field of life sciences, where I usually don´t work at all. I do however hold the French Baccalaureate in Mathématiques et Sciences de la Nature, so I was not too daunted by the subject matter. It fit in nicely in a gap in my other ongoing project, a fraud investigation for a major department store chain in Mexico. The life sciences project was full of scientific acronyms in Spanish, and of course knowing the reversal of positioning for adjectives and nouns from one language to another, I was alert to the fact that ARN was RNA and VHC was HVC, and that RVS in English is SVR (sustained virologic response). Then I got to PCR...assuming it would be RCP or something in English. A quick Google search however, led me to conclude that the Spanish scientific language uses the common English acronym for this one, which is in fact the acronym for polymerase chain reaction.

Which leads me to another lesson that is brought home to me every time I translate: never take anything for granted! I am glad that I love research, because I have to do it for every single project! Whether it is an entirely new concept, an idea that resembles another with which I AM familiar, but is not exactly the same, or lack of correspondence between semantic fields from one language to another, it is never safe to make assumptions when translating. Sometimes, I find a word that has no corresponding lexical item in the target language, as I did a couple of weeks ago with a financial term: anticresis. With these obscure legal-financial terms that are in a register that most people don´t ever stumble upon in their daily life, I frequently find an equally obscure English cognate that is virtually identical. And although I think my vocabulary is extensive, as often as not, it is a word that I don´t remember ever seeing. This one, however, can only be translated into English, as far as I could determine after exhaustive research, by "Welsh mortgage". So quaint, fascinating and excellent! This means the owner of a property gives up the product of the property to his creditor.

So these are some of the happy lessons that delight the intellectual magpie in me, shiny things that I put away in my mental nest to later turn over like Gollum in his hoard, deriving an almost obscene pleasure from my new intellectual treasure. Thankfully the place where I keep these things is like a womb...expands to fit its contents...or like the inside of Oscar the Grouch´s house...much bigger than it seems from the outside.

I have had some not-so-pleasant lessons on the business front in the past weeks, as well! Both of them taught me that I am lacking in experience in assessing the potential for problems in an assignment. In the first, I was asked to proofread 12,000 words of contract material in 5 hours. As I looked back at the other proofreading jobs I have done, I realized that experience told me to expect to spend no less than 8 hours on this job--assuming the original translation had been done by a translator who was somewhat proficient. I accepted the assignment anyway, not seeing the potential for trouble there! About 75% of the way through, I realized I would never finish on time, and with still 2 hours to go before the deadline, emailed the project manager and informed her that if the job were to be completed to anyone´s satisfaction, some of the remainder should be handed over to another linguist. She asked me to just do my best, which I did. At the deadline, I told her I had not finished, and sent what I had done to her. She then added another hour to the PO and told me to gallop onward and complete the rest as best I could. Well, I knew I couldn´t do the job to my accustomed high quality standards, but after informing her of this and receiving instructions to go ahead anyway, I did so, KIND of completing the job about an hour and a half later. Knowing it probably still had some pretty glaring problems that could not be remedied by a quick read-through, I handed it over anyway, assuming that the need for perfection with the project must not be as high as I had imagined.   I forgot about it and moved on to other projects, but when I requested the final PO to send in my invoice, was informed that due to the client having found an error, I would not be paid in full. I was outraged to say the least, and responded with a blow-by-blow account of things from my end, including my request to have some of the job assigned to someone else, and my warning that I COULD NOT do justice to the usual quality requirements in such a short time. In the end, they told me that the client had had to take responsibility for the quality issues, due to the job having been submitted as an extreme rush. I could certainly attest to that, as the translation that I corrected, while it was all one document, had 3 clearly defined sections done by 3 linguists of highly varying ability! The first section was great, and sections 2 and 3...well, I don´t want to be uncharitable, but let´s just say, NOT SO MUCH!

Anyway....live and learn! That is the first and last time I will ever accept a proofreading job that expects me to get through more than 1,500 words per hour.

There is one more experience that I want to share, but my lull has just been broken by my first assignment in French! It´s a quick and dirty 1,700-word document due for tomorrow. I know I will have to research this twice as much as I would if it were in Spanish...I am just not as accustomed to working in French. But I do love la belle langue and I am sure to enjoy my research as much as I always do, even though I will be doing a lot more of it on this one!

I LOVE TRANSLATING! Back to work and hasta la vista. 

Legal eagle

Well here it is the end of January already.  I am in a lull with my work from TransPerfect, and it's a perfect time to catch up on administrative and marketing tasks.  I am very pleased that I have been kept busy to more than full capacity with the work from TPT over the past month.  My fears of not getting assignments from them after the holiday rush were quite unfounded.

I have been absolutely LOVING the work that I am getting, and it's all legal translation.  Contracts, bidding guidelines, court proceedings, divorce-related documentations, legal opinions, and financial contracts have constituted the majority of the work that I have been doing.

 I am also proofreading, and it didn't take me long to realize that this obviously means that some of the translators who work for them don't have the same level of skill that I have.  Sigh of satisfaction.  I wasn't sure I wanted to proofread, as I began doing so at a rate of payment that was about 25% of what I could earn translating. However I soon reasoned that the service I provide as a proofreader is almost more essential than the original translation, especially when the latter has been done by someone who is apparently not very skilled or experienced.  As a consequence, I put my price up to where it's worth it for me to be doing this work, and the company didn't bat an eyelash.  I continue to get as much work as I can handle and I am now charging twice the rate I began with.

I FEEL SO BLESSED to have this fantastic opportunity.  While I know my skill level is high, I still have a LOT to learn about the logistics of this business and the broader market, as well as about business skills generally.  It is clear that honing my marketing and presentation is key, and also that I can't do this unless I understand the market, my competition, and how to negotiate.

In all, it's a fantastic adventure, and it's new and fresh every day.  It's freakin' awesome, as my kids would say! And now it's time to run, as I have an interpretation assignment in half an hour.  I have taken up the interpreter's training where we left off in the fall after our instructor fell ill, and I will be fully certified and accredited by the end of February with that.  It has been really useful to me to do the training, not only because I have learned a lot about protocols and professionalism (and some things about the practical side of the task as well, in spite of the fact that I have been doing the job professionally for 4 years already), but in order to obtain translation-related credentials.  I am an accredited translator on the list now at Immigrant Services here in Guelph, and I have actually had a fair bit of work from them in the past month.  When I started this business 6 months ago, I hoped that I would achieve this kind of success, and now I can really see it happening.  I am SO happy and excited about it all!  Onward and Upward!!!!!

Happy New Year!

What a difference a month can make!  My last post was un lamento borricano...not really but a lament still.  In spite of my frustration at my last writing, I came away from the experience of creating another blog post feeling better than when I started.  As I underwent a process of self-questioning as to the effectiveness of the activities I have been engaged in as I nurture my little translation business into being, I came to some important realizations on the concrete front, and gave myself a helpful pep talk on the more intangible side of things.  When I wrote that last post, I had the sense of a buzzing, as of bees, just beyond the reach of my flowers...the work I have been putting into my translation business, it seemed to me, HAD created results, even though as yet they had not resulted in any income.  Well, by the middle of December I received word that I had passed the legal translation test for a large translation agency based in New York City, and on December 19th I started receiving a steady stream of translating and proofreading work from them.  Yay!!  I have been SOOOO happy, excited and thrilled to be finally WORKING!!  In the meantime, I had continued to work on proofreading and editing the very poor translations that were up on the website belonging to the Embassy of Guatemala in Canada, a pro bono project that I took on after going to their website out of curiosity and finding it strewn with egregious translation errors.

It was interesting to say the least to have a sudden flurry of work coincide with the preparations for our Christmas celebrations.  I have been hoping most fervently that I will continue to get steady work from the agency when the holidays are over.  It has occurred to me that it is possible that many of their regular translators are on holiday, and that may account for some of the volume of work I have received. Nevertheless being the QC FANATIC that I am, I am pretty sure that they will be happy with the work I have been doing.  I agonized over every word of that legal test, and they came back saying that I had only TWO small errors on the test:  one of repetition (I repeated "by and between" at the beginning of the mock contract), and the omission of one word in one of the articles.  Within a day of my returning administrative paperwork to them, they had called to discuss rates and CAT tools.  I was QUITE disappointed to realize that they were planning to offer me 5 cents per word less than I had stated to them was my minimum rate.  However I am at the "beggars can't be choosers" stage of my career at this point, as much as I feel I won't be here for long.  In the end, I can still make damned good money at around 40% of the optimal rate I would LIKE to be receiving for my work.  This is in fact heartening, because I expect to be working at 100% of my desired rate within 6 months to one year.

I have hired Marta Stelmaszak of Websites for Translators and the Want Words blog to help me with my marketing strategies.  While I am convinced that there is still plenty for me to learn on the technical and professional side of this business, the marketing part of it is where I feel I need immediate help.  I DAILY bless the miracle of the Internet, with its fantastical ability to cause barriers of time and space to evanesce.  I am super excited about going through the 8 modules that Marta has prepared for me.  So far, these have consisted of a very thorough recounting of my own abilities, training, education, experience, and on-line presence.

David is here beside me as I write my blog post, and he has just shared a tidbit with me from one of his Google Plus contacts:  Productivity tip:  Tim O'Reilly took this from Clay Johnson's book, The Information Diet:  #1 Productivity Tip: Spend 10% of your time consuming and 90% of your time producing. Make more stuff. Watch less. Read less. Do.  (Source: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/fd5DAQ4bY3p)


This seems extremely relevant to MY last blog post.  I lamented my own distractibility and tendency to go down virtual rabbit holes on the web...I wasn't quite clear on why a part of me was telling me that I was wasting too much time, but I was very clear on that feeling!!  This productivity tip certainly speaks to that feeling.  Producing should be much more prevalent than consuming, when it comes to being productive!  Simple, obvious, but apparently, something that many of us struggle with.

Either way, I am loving this exciting process.  It is much like the creativity of child-rearing...in some sense it feels to me like almost as great a privilege.  I am so lucky to have had my life experiences and the fabulous education that I have had.  Now, I am blessed to have the impetus, confidence, and support from my family, to forge into the grand adventure of running my own business.  I am absolutely empassioned by the daily learning that I must engage in to move forward in my enterprise. I have the strong sense of being incredibly blessed to be able to do this!  Woohoo.  Onward and Upward!!

Still singin' the blues!!

Hello all my almost non-existent followers, here I am, back again.  I must say that today, I am blogging in a probably futile effort to stop feeling like I am wasting so much time fiddling around on the Internet.  I suppose that it MIGHT be possible that the hours I have been spending tweeting, reading others' blogs, promoting myself by every possible means, and of course, wasting time on Facebook, have not been all in vain, but today, I feel like they have been!!  I troll through ProZ every single day looking for jobs to bid on, but I am losing faith that I will ever GET a translation assignment this way.  I HAVE ostensibly been recruited by 4 agencies through the site, but as yet, none of these purported recruitments have resulted in any work.

I did go to Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, with my expenses paid for by the World University Service of Canada, to work as an interpreter at their Forum.  It was a great experience!!  In fact, as I write this....I remember that I have not followed up with the contacts I made there.  Aargh!!  Am I falling into the trap of going down rabbit holes on the web, and not doing the things I should actually be doing to concretely promote my business?!  Why am I so distractable???   On the other hand, my very distractability does lead me to some interesting discoveries.

One thing I noticed recently during my "research" on the Internet was an article about hope.  http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/good-news/hope-better-predictor-academic-achievement-intelligence-191430642.html

If it's a great predictor of academic achievement, it must be so as well in business.  Perseverance is ALSO touted as one of the main ways to succeed.  I posted something about that on Facebook a couple of months ago and in my stronger moments, I remind myself that it's one of the main predictors of success.

In fact, I have no fewer than 10 business leads right now.  I just need to figure out how to make them come through!!

And I need to keep myself in that hopeful state, and keep on persevering.  It's easier to give this advice to others sometimes than it is to follow it myself.

Another good tip I just got from David, my partner, when he dropped in unexpectedly at lunchtime and found me wallowing in my distractibility....if you have approached 10 people and gotten 1 result, but you need 10 results...get going and approach 100 people!!  If you don't ask for it, it won't fall into your lap.

All good advice.  Be hopeful, be upbeat.  Persevere.  And put yourself out there!

OK.  I'm ready to get back to work now.  I love how writing clarifies my thoughts.  Back to the grind!!

¿Cómo ponerle precio a tu traducción?

Acabo de leer un blog acerca del precio de las traducciones y realmente, para la persona que está iniciando como traductor/a, es bien difícil saber cuánto se debe de cobrar.  La cosa es que traducir es más que saber dos idiomas.  Aquí hay una presentación que hice para un curso de traduccíón que tomé en la universidad, acerca del análisis textual.  Con todo lo que hay que considerar para efectuar una traducción, ¿será de extrañarse que cuesta saber cuánto cobrar?

Este texto es largo y un poco técnico pero toca muchas de las complejidades que tiene que tomar en cuenta el traductor al hacer su trabajo.  Y si le encuentran errores, ya comprenderán porque no se debe de traducir hacia la lengua que no es la materna! (Yo soy angloparlante :)

Análisis textual

Vocabulario:

exegesis o exégesis.

(Del gr. ἐξήγησις, explicación, relato).

1. f. Explicación, interpretación.

eslabón.

(Quizá del gót. *snôbô; cf. a. al. ant. snuoba, cinta, lazo).

1. m. Pieza en forma de anillo o de otra curva cerrada que enlazada con otras forma cadena. U. t. en sent. fig.

acervo.

(Del lat. acervus).

1. m. Conjunto de bienes morales o culturales acumulados por tradición o herencia.

2. m. Haber que pertenece en común a varias personas, sean socios, coherederos, acreedores, etc.

3. m. Montón de cosas menudas, como trigo, cebada, legumbres, etc.

~ comunitario.

1. m. Der. Conjunto de prácticas, decisiones y criterios con los que se han venido interpretando y aplicando los tratados constitutivos de las Comunidades Europeas.

Análisis Textual

El análisis textual intenta desenredar los enlaces complicados que le dan significado al texto.  Va más allá de las palabras y el estilo de lo escrito para analizar la relación entre las ideas que contiene el texto y el ámbito cultural e histórico en donde operan el autor y hasta cierto punto el lector. 

El texto no solamente cuenta una narrativa sino que también hace referencia explicita o implícitamente a un universo de conocimientos.  Esto es importante para los traductores, y se puede expresar con más sencillez recordando que como traductores, necesitamos para lograr una traducción bien hecha no solamente saber las palabras sino que conocer el contexto cultural desde el cual se ha producido el texto y de ahí saberlo relacionar al contexto cultural del lector meta. El lector aportará también sus propias ideas y formas de entender el mundo al texto ya traducido. 

Para comprender un texto, entonces, necesitamos de un conocimiento práctico y concreto del significado de las palabras, necesitamos tener familiaridad con los conocimientos de la disciplina que se trate, y también necesitamos de un conocimiento más amplio y general, el conocimiento enciclopédico.

Umberto Eco dice que para que un texto se actualice,  es necesario que el lector aporte su colaboración.  Cuando el lector también es traductor, esta colaboración se vuelve más activa y el resultado cobra más peso por el hecho de que la traducción representa la única forma por la cual el lector meta puede aproximarse al texto.  Cuando se traduce es necesario tomar decisiones que, quiera que no, fácilmente puedan alterar el valor implícito y explícito del texto y por ende alterar su equilibrio.  El traductor es el eslabón entre el texto y el lector y su responsabilidad es grande.

El capítulo diferencia entonces dos tipos de conocimiento:

-los conocimientos vinculados a la competencia disciplinaria (léxicos y temáticos)

-los conocimientos vinculados a la competencia enciclopédica o el bagaje cultural

Se necesita una labor de búsqueda enciclopédica cuando hay una referencia en el texto de origen no comprendida.

Cuando se trata de la cultura anglosajona por ejemplo se suelen emplear muchas referencias intertextuales a la Biblia y a las obras de Shakespeare.  También son comunes las referencias a las rimas infantiles y a los conocimientos escolares. 

Tener en cuenta todo esto cuando se traduce implica un continuo compromiso con el aprendizaje, lo cual nos ayudará a comprender las referencias extratextuales.  El texto compara la traducción a un iceberg, con la mayor parte debajo de la superficie.  El traductor tiene que poner de su curiosidad y su responsabilidad para esclarecer las dudas o ambigüedades.

El ámbito textual

Cada oración en el texto se tiene que relacionar con las oraciones que están alrededor y el texto en su conjunto.  Es necesario reajustar y modificar el texto traducido a medida que se va traduciendo, de acuerdo con las exigencias semánticas y estilísticas contrastadas del texto original y la traducción.  La homogeneidad en la textura y el registro (el grado de formalidad del lenguaje) son de especial importancia.

La unidad de traducción

La palabra, la oración y el párrafo: todos se tienen que analizar en su contexto pero también hay que ver al texto en si como unidad.  Cada texto tiene su carácter social, su cierre semántico y comunicativo y su coherencia profunda y superficial según las reglas del nivel textual y de la lengua.

Los teóricos Vinay y Darbelnet consideran que cada pensamiento es una unidad léxica y que esa es la unidad de traducción (o sea, la palabra). 

La teoría de la traducción de Gideon Toury postula una unidad que se llama textema:

Texteme:  a linguistic unit of any type and level participating in textual relationships and as a result carrying textual functions in the text in question.

Peter Newmark concibe que la unidad de traducción es un segmento del texto original a partir del cual el traductor puede emprender su reformulación en otra lengua y que la escala de esa unidad varía según las exigencias del texto en cuestión y la cual describe así:

The largest quantity of translation in a text is done at the level of the word, the lexical unit, the collocation, the group, the clause and the sentence--rarely the paragraph, never the text—probably in that order.  

Sin embargo contrasta con Newman el concepto de los teóricos del análisis de discurso que consideran que la unidad de traducción es todo el texto.

La lectura del texto

Comprensión:  análisis, exégesis, descodificación

Comprende:

El texto original

La intencionalidad del autor hasta donde se puede averiguar

El traductor

La lengua

La cultura

El público receptor

Objetivo: extraer todo el contenido  y el valor expresivo del texto y reformularlo en la lengua de llegada

El lector aporta:

Sus conocimientos lingüísticos y culturales

Sus experiencias y opiniones personales

Cada lector construye el sentido según estos factores

El traductor hace más, se convierte en portavoz del autor y en autor del texto traducido

Se quiere evitar cualquier omisión o añadidura pero a veces son exigidas por el esclarecimiento del sentido o por las características sintácticas o estilísticas específicas de la lengua meta

Se debe de consultar no solo diccionarios sino obras especializadas, expertos en la lengua y tema del texto original y en casos especiales al autor mismo

Perspectivas analíticas y tipologías

El análisis textual cuenta con múltiples enfoques y métodos propuestos desde la teoría y la práctica de la traducción con perspectivas de:

-la gramática generativa y transformacional

.la semántica

-la sociolingüística

-la semiótica

-la teoría de la comunicación

-la lingüística del texto

-la crítica literaria, etc.

Se requiere de un período de iniciación y práctica para familiarizarse con las técnicas y destrezas de estas perspectivas pero luego deben de formar parte de un análisis polifacético rutinario para el traductor.

Los distintos enfoques analíticos se complementan, enriquecen nuestro conocimiento del texto de partida y llegan a sugerir pautas para la recreación del texto a través de la traducción.

Elementos a considerar:

El género.  Boletín meteorológico, cuento infantil, obituario, etc.

Habrá convenciones estilísticas para cada género.  A veces no coinciden las estructuras sintácticas que los caracterizan.  Ejemplo, las recetas de cocina emplean el imperativo en inglés y la voz pasiva en español. 

La forma convencional para cada género puede variar según el idioma.

También hay intentos de clasificar a los textos según su funcionalidad.  Para Karl Buhler la funcionalidad es diferente para cada enfoque comunicativo:  para el emisor la función es expresiva, para el contenido del enunciado la función es referencial o representativa, para el receptor la función es connotativa o apelativa.

Katharina Reiss propone cuatro tipos de clasificación:

a.  Informativo ie textos científicos- centrado en el contenido

b.  Expresivo ie literatura- centrado en la expresión y el emisor

c.  Apelativo u operativo ie material publicitario- centrado en el receptor

d.  Subsidiario ie canciones, programas de radio, textos de medios audiovisuales y de comunicación

Sin embargo reducir los textos a una única función dominante ha provocado muchas críticas y ha suscitado modelos alternativos que admiten la multifuncionalidad de los textos y también consideran el marco comunicativo del texto y el tema.

Más recientemente Hatim y Mason ofrecen al traductor una tipología basada en tres tipos textuales principales: 

1.  El expositivo:  exposición conceptual, narración y descripción.  El discurso es imparcial en relación con los hechos y conceptos, solo intenta informar

2. El argumentativo:  Argumentación sostenida y contraargumentación.  El discurso cumple una función evaluativa.

3.  El exhortivo o instructivo:  Los autores distinguen dos tipos:  con opción o sin opción.  Por ejemplo, cuando el lector puede rechazar la propuesta, como con un anuncio o un contrato.  El discurso es operativo y tiene la meta de provocar un comportamiento en el lector. 

Como traductores analizamos la función del texto porque nos ayuda a agudizar la visión durante la fase de análisis y esto nos ayuda a determinar cuales metodologías son las más adecuadas para la traducción.  Para el lector, los marcos de la funcionalidad del texto lo ayudan en la comprensión porque puede predecir como interpretar el texto según su función.  Es un tipo de redundancia que ayuda al lector. 

El tejido discursivo entonces se conforma de muchos elementos:

La cohesión sintáctica—usar las estructuras gramaticales adecuadas.  A veces un elemento que no tiene coherencia sintáctica cuando se considera aisladamente adquiere significado en el contexto. (elementos deícticos, anáfora, catáfora, pronombres referenciales). Example from the Bible:  Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand.  And when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.  Who? 

Also, su=his, her, yours, theirs, your, their. 

La coherencia semántica—usar las palabras que tienen el sentido adecuado.  El sentido varía según el contexto. Cuidado con los campos semánticos:  cognados parciales o falsos...

La pragmática—respetar la función del texto y traducir según esto.  Las funciones tienen formas aceptadas que varían según pautas culturales.

El contexto de la situación—respetar el contorno global tanto lingüístico como cultural y social desde el punto de vista del autor y el lector.  Por supuesto esto varía mucho y tiene casi un sinfín de aspectos. 

Robert de Beaugrande y Wolfgang Dressler describen otras pautas del discurso:

La intencionalidad

La aceptabilidad

La informatividad

La situacionalidad

La intertextualidad

Parámetros de discurso:

Campo, tenor y modo

Campo: ¿Qué es lo que ocurre en la situación comunicativa en la que el texto se genera y funciona?  El campo incluye el tema. 

El contexto:  quién, dónde, cuándo y por qué?

El registro:  qué, cómo y porqué?  Depende del contexto y el campo.

El modo: ¿ Cual es la función del texto dentro de la comunicación y cual es el canal de comunicación?  (hablado o escrito).  El género forma parte del modo y también la tipología del texto basada en la función retórica del discurso (expositiva, argumentativa, exhortativa, etc.)

El tenor: se refiere a los participantes del acto de comunicación y la interrelación que existe entre ellos.  Incluye el grado de formalidad o informalidad, intimidad o distancia entre los participantes, el ámbito público o privado

¿Quiere corregir, enmendar o agregar algo? Bienvenidos los comentarios.

Here's a picture of a lovely valley on the way to las Aguas Georginas in Quetzaltenango. Patchwork valleys of crops speak to us whether they are in Guatemala or Canada!