Introduction
Translation is the process of rendering a text from its original language into a second language. The notion of translation strategies is the procedure for reproducing the conceptual image conveyed in an original piece of text into equivalent linguistic units in the second language. Business-focused content modification often involves meaning-based translation, which entails determining the most appropriate way to re-express meanings to the intended audiences.
The source text (ST) selected for this translation assignment was published on the Brookings website and highlighted policy directions to promote access to education for minorities. The reason for choosing the ST was its richness in technology, educational, and policy information relevant to the intended audience, who are familiar with the Arabic dialect. It is the rationale for making briefs with adequate instructions to exhaust the scope to be covered in the new text while delivering the business objectives reflected in the primary communication. The main point conveyed in this translation briefing analysis is that it is vital to ensure accuracy and unambiguity when conveying information from a source text into a second language for target audiences.
Translation Brief
A translation brief contains the instructions a client would provide to a translator, including the specific purpose, details of the primary text, and the target audience. One aim of a brief is to provide the three elements in a way that enables the contracted professional to picture the recipients of the information by connecting their needs to those captured in the primary source. The Skopos theory posits that translation focuses on the target culture and language by illustrating the source text in a way that conveys its primary effects to the reader, based on the original author’s purpose (Lian & Yao, 2023; Zhou et al., 2023; Gasparyan, 2024).
Even as a brief is passed from the instructor to the professional in charge of translation, both parties must focus on applying the principles of purposeful action that define all strategies to be used in the conveyance (Hurtado-Malillos, 2023; Muftah, 2023; Lin et al., 2023). The uniformity in systemizing requirements and clarifying purpose facilitates not only the hired expert’s involvement with the transferal but also the audience’s conceptualization of the message intended for them.
The text being translated in this project is “Why Families and Communities Are Central to Education System Transformation: New Research, Tools, and Strategies.” The choice of the text was based on its hybrid business nature, covering international affairs, technology, information, and race in public policy. More than 6 authors wrote the Brookings article. They are Partington Sophie, Lieblich Max, Nora Laura, Morris Emily Markovich, and Rebecca Winthrop.
The article’s scope is to educate Brookings’ readers about the importance of culturally focused, community-driven research for promoting equity in access to learning opportunities. The key message from the text is that family, school, and community partnerships are integral to achieving seamless student learning and development. Based on the assumption that final readers of the text must be knowledgeable of the policy-defined strategies for multicultural policy planning for access to education, a standard style translation was employed to address the audience. The section below summarizes the brief details and rationales for choosing some strategies over others.
- Source: Brookings.
- Target: Minority communities who are racially disadvantaged by education policies.
- Policymakers in charge of evaluating strategies for promoting equality in access to education.
- Total word count: 1972.
- Specialism/Topic: Domestication in translating educational policy brief.
- Source File Format: Web HTML.
- Delivery File Format: Word document.
- Purpose of the Translation: To connect readers with the current developments in facilitating access to education through policy-making and community-school partnerships. Central to the purpose is conveying ideas based on current United Nations guidelines, maintaining neutrality in racial advocacy for public policies.
- Desired Reader Response: Policymakers, the primary target audience, should respond by implementing guidelines to foster collaborative dynamics in advocacy and community empowerment, especially for minority groups accessing education.
- Minority communities, represented by experts in education, should respond by urging the government and policy-making bodies to implement the UN’s general guidelines and recommendations to promote equality in educational access.
- Tone of Voice / Style of Addressing the Reader: The tone is optimistic, characterized by a sense of hope and projections of a positive outlook into the future.
- Lexical Choice, Terminology and Proper Nouns: In the lexical choice for the translation, major terminologies that were considered for effective language delivery were family, community, and schools, in terms of their partnerships. Sustainable development goals terminologies were chosen to connect the article objective with the call to action (CTA). Community engagement, inclusion and equity, collaboration, and family-school engagement are a few examples of the terminologies selected.
- Proper nouns were mostly picked from the brief terminologies of the collaborative bodies and agencies who contributed to the policy briefing or the background studies. Top choices were Center for Universal Education (CUE), Family, School, and Community Engagement (FSCE). Choices of countries targeted, as proper nouns, were Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, England, Netherlands, Sierra Leone, the US, South Africa, and Tanzania (Zanzibar).
Annotation and Discussion
In linguistic processing, annotation denotes the process of enriching the final transcript to make additions to the lexical, grammatical, and social details that add weight to the final message delivery. Most translations require intellectual processing, especially at the point where meaning is distinct and inflexible, implying contextualization becomes inevitable. Transcription can be a time-consuming process when the background information is not properly perceived. The rationale is that the process of adding cultural artifacts and other stylistic devices to the translated text’s rhetoric can even lead to deviations from the original intentions of the communication.
The need to integrate cultural tenets in the lexical transfer of an article title and language calls for employing local strategies that have been used by other translators before. The potency of conscious procedures for solving a conveyance problem lies in their ability to circumvent the challenges of translating text segments from one language to another. Specific to the translation of the Brookings article by Parington et al. (2024), several terminologies and phrases were determined to be parallel with the exactness of cultural deliveries in the Arabic language.
Annotation is a two-way delivery process that either makes a text globally readable or locally chained to a specific audience. According to Meng and Meng (2020), the cultural, geographic, and literary contexts of language delivery must be based on function-centered versions that are free from misunderstandings. Although local strategies for conveying a text to an audience speaking a different language can be traced to the guidelines followed by pioneers of such procedures, an equally reliable approach would be to consider statistical approaches to annotation.
According to Meng and Meng (2020), several major functions/purposes must be observed with any other approach in transferring texts to different lexical meanings. The original purpose is to inform, which means the final piece facilitates understanding. Readers should be capable of interpreting the final article personally, allude to it in their other communication applications, or rectifying non-glaring annotation mistakes. The second paradigm is to narrow the gap between correlation and established reception. Meng and Meng (2020) admitted that although final meanings might not ultimately reflect the translator’s poise, there should be clarity in the contextualization for easy reception.
Local Strategies
The translation shifts proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet provided breakthroughs in springboard taxonomies that professionals used to convey messages from one language to another. The major consideration for the implementation of the Vinay and Darbelnet techniques is that all language translation procedures must be associated with their equivalents (Saridaki, 2021). The classification model has been effective in contemporary media text analysis and transmission, albeit only two approaches were proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet. The oblique and direct approaches can be used to complement language and provide lexical meaning, while preserving the artifacts and stylistic devices necessary for interpreting associated rhetoric and descriptives (Saridaki, 2021). Seven other strategies can be converged under the direct and oblique strategies for filling semantic gaps and adding local color to a final piece.
The first one is borrowing, which denotes the direct transfer of the source language into the target equivalent. The reason why it is termed borrowing is that the text is not subjected to formal and semantic modifications, which means the translator works with the simplest transfer to a new lexicon. The following is an example of how borrowing was used in the translation from English to Arabic text.
Source Text (ST): Family, school, and community partnerships are a must, not ‘nice to have.’
Translated Text (TT): الشراكة بين الأسرة والمدرسة والمجتمع أمر لابد منهوليس أمرًا عبثيًا
In Vinay and Darbelnet’s translation techniques, another procedure that can be used is literal translation, which is the rearrangement of the source text’s syntactic structures into the final text’s language, with the major objective being to achieve isomorphic content in the final work. The major limitation of literal translation is that it applies only to dialects belonging to the same family or, in most cases, to a single culture (Saridaki, 2021). Given the differences in the structural arrangements of English and Arabic, it was not feasible to make direct transfers.
In the modulation efforts to maintain the equivalence of delivery in English as in Arabic, obligatory and optional transpositions were used in most texts to convey the intended message. In most instances, there were limited choices for the final direction other than using the transposed expression. Although there were minor attempts to modify transposed expressions stylistically, the complexities of sentence structures curtailed the coordination of text equivalences. The following is an example of the modulation strategies used in the conveyance.
ST: Fulfilling the need for education and achieving holistic change through proper engagement involves four pillars/sides: students, teachers, parents, and the broader community.
TT: “إن تلبية ضرورة التعليم وتحقيق التغيير الشامل مع المشاركة المناسبةيشمل أربع أعمدة/جوانب وهي كالتالي: الطلاب والمعلمون وأولياء الأموربالإضافة للمجتمع المحلي الأوسع نطاقًا.
The utility of Malone’s linguistic model in translating the text was used to add to the semantics of the delivery process. Malone’s amplification and reduction approaches are specifically employed to bridge anticipated gaps that intended audiences might encounter in perceiving the text’s meaning. The rationale for reduction is to eliminate redundancies in the feature piece, as a single lexicon can convey the public and cultural context intended in the final writing (Janiak, 2020). This technique was common in translation work because it provided the most basic framework for limiting the variations that could occur when returning a translated work to the original language. An exemplary demonstration is in the following pair of statements.
ST: If one of these is weak or broken, the entire system will be affected or collapse.
TT: وإذا كان في أحد هذه الجوانب ضعفا أو خللًا، فسيتأثر النظام بأكمله أوسينهار،
The reduction in Arabic text entailed the omission of the words ‘guests’ or ‘companions,’ which could have not only rendered the statement redundant but also changed its meaning from systems to different objects in the sentence structure. The original ellipsis from the statement referred to parents, students, teachers, and the broader community (Partington et al., 2024). Limiting the sentence to two entries would have locked out other key items listed in the immediate context before the translated text. An observation from the application of Malone’s reduction strategy is that translation is dependent on the context in which terms are to be used. An observed limitation to be discussed later in the report is that individual statements stripped from a main piece cannot convey the original, primary idea.
Translation Technology Used
The evolution of translation technologies has enabled the simultaneous use of multiple engines to compare linguistic devices across two dialects and select the most appropriate version for the final communique. An observation from the brief assignment on moving an article from English to Arabic was that new tools are available for free for individuals to use when translating messages or articles. MemoQ translator is a subscription-based online platform that boosts productivity, especially through its translation memory, which stores previous translations (MemoQ, 2024).
The latest version of MemoQ, 10.5.7, was reliable and easier to use than Google Translate. The rationale is that one of its usability dimensions was the involvement of translation teams in providing new language options and expanding the customization space. Despite MemoQ’s indispensability, Google Translate came in handy for making direct, simple transcriptions of simpler texts.
Google Translate’s most outstanding feature is the ability to embed it with the original website while browsing, such that it can change texts to the destination language without having to copy and paste each paragraph. Its ability to automatically detect languages was also a critical feature that improved the speed of delivering the final results. Currently, Google Chrome is the only browser that supports web translation (Chrome Web Store, 2023). The third tool that made the research smoother and the results more reliable was the use of online dictionaries to look up the meanings of complex terminology.
The main purpose of using online dictionaries was to expand the lexical understanding of key terminologies, ensuring that they appear in Arabic with the same weight borne in English. Although free and trial versions of the technologies were used, given the short engagement with the translation, an observation was that premium usage will transform the domestication of translating educational and media texts to promote seamless communication locally and globally.
Conclusion
Getting a full engagement with two texts provides multiple and diverse insights into a culture’s way of creating meaning from a communication. An observation was that English and Arabic have parallel syntactic structures, suggesting that a translator can omit basic but critically significant elements that shape the intended meaning. Tools and technologies in contemporary translation studies are fantastic assets for improving efficiency and accuracy, especially for translators who use multiple engines. Vinay and Derbelnet’s strategies offer the most flexible techniques for preserving a dialect’s lexicon and semantics, especially the expansion and contraction techniques. Whereas some sentences work best with simple direct translations, others must be modified/rearranged, no matter how brief they are, to provide the appropriate message.
Whereas there are many challenges associated with translation, the only one specific to this assignment was the subdivision of sentences for independent translation. The final versions were limited in the exactness of meaning if an ellipsis had been used in the original statement. Ellipses are necessary for the continuity of writing; the best way to use a translation is to cover the whole article, as with Google Translate for web pages.
A lesson learned from the exercise is that the future of cross-cultural communication in media and educational briefings will be defined by simplicity in shifting between dialects. A prediction is that agency involvement might not be necessary, as individual readers will only need tools to embed in their browsers and read English texts, or any other language, in a local equivalent.
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