What Is a Translating Translator Doing?

Brian Mossop
Government of Canada Translation Bureau and York University School of Translation

Translating is here defined as the quoting, in sequential chunks, of the wording of a written, oral or signed text, with an imitative purpose. These features distinguish it from other sorts of language activity—intralingual paraphrasing, re-expressing of ideas, fictive quoting, speaking from a script, ghostwriting—and thus provide an object for a theory of translation production. The defining feature 'quoting ' is taken to involve demonstrating to someone selected features of the source text. Thus the translational quoter is engaged in a dual activity: quoting OF the source text (rendering work) and quoting TO the readers or listeners (pragmatic work). The texts commonly called translations arise from some combination of rendering, pragmatic and non-translational work.

Table of contents

The title question is not to be confused with the psycholinguistic question: what is happening in the mind of the translator? Nor is it to be taken as [ p. 232 ]inquiring about the diverse economic, cultural or political functions which the translator is serving: extending a literary tradition by retranslating a novel; censoring information from foreign sources; enlarging a company's market by translating product information; allowing people to avoid learning the language of a neighbouring community.

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