“The use of translation and interpreting in the study of
intercultural communication differences: a few ideas”

It is a matter of common knowledge that traveling overseas and learning foreign languages open up windows to cultures other than one’s native culture. Sociology, social anthropology and related social and human sciences as well as comparative linguistics and stylistics identify general intercultural differences in communication. It will be argued that translation and interpreting can be a useful complementary tool in their investigation. Provided translators and interpreters seek to translate into a natural-sounding text in the target language, as they translate sentence by sentence, they tend to spot most significant discrepancies between communication patterns in the source and target culture because they surface as ‘translation problems’. Translation and interpreting could thus well be a more sensitive detection tool than traditional observational methods and document analysis. Moreover, listing and categorizing such ‘translation problems’ over well-defined corpora could contribute to the quantitative study of frequencies of occurrence of various types of relevant phenomena and help conduct a finer-grained qualitative analysis. In the talk, a few examples will be given, and methodological considerations will be offered

Sophia University,Yotsuya Campus,Central Library L-821