Translation Brief

Very good! Thank you, Marijke, for sharing the doc with ous! Accoding to my experience, when composing a translation brief the challenge is to express the ideas clearly enough for the members of the translation team to undesrstand what the details in the brief mean in practice. Afterall, I understand the translation breif mainly as a guiding document for the translators and checkers. Especially challenging is the section Type of translation. In one of my projects the leadership wanted to phrase this by saying "modified dynamic equivalence". When we discussed this, they admitted that they did not know themselves what a modified dynamic equivalence means in practice. What they wanted to say was, we like to see a translation that uses contemporary commonly known words and expressions, but still use literal translations on the Biblical idioms as long as these literal translations do not create false ideas what the text is trying to say. This explanation now stands as a description for the type of translation. As the work has just started, I am not able to say how helpful this is for our translators.

Very helpful, thank you! I and some colleagues have been constructing a similar document to use with the projects we assist, and this will give us some new ideas to consider. Our own template included many of the same details, but was organized under these five headings: Translation Philosophy (What are we doing?) Text and Exegesis (What meaning do we translate?) Translation Principles (How do we express the meaning?) Language (How do we use our language?) Formatting/Extra Material (How do we present it?) One thing that could be included under "Translation issues" is interpretive ambiguities. Should translators follow the interpretation of a model translation? Choose the majority position? Attempt translating ambiguously if possible? I often find that translators who haven't thought this through ahead of time don't know what to do when presented with an ambiguous text, and their decisions are inconsistent. Also, I think it is helpful for translators to specify to what extent their translation will be informed by analysis of their language. For example, this may be relevant for "length of sentences and/or of paragraphs." Will sentence and/or paragraph length be determined by a study of discourse structures of the receptor language, by translator intuition, by the patterns of the base or model text, or by something else? If they choose to depend on linguistic analysis, then putting this in the brief will help them as they work those activities into their plan.

Hello, Ben, the link works fine with me at least. Many thanks for sharing it. It is not a bad idea to place the translation brief to the ParaTExt project. When doing so, one ought to keep in mind - I think and my experience tells me - that we should edit it only with care. If you change the "translation philosophy" in the middle of the project, you will get into a big trouble. I am not saying that we should never do it, but if you want to do it, you should be aware of the consequences.

I understand a brief as being a set of instructions to the translation team. They may be written by the team to themselves but preferably they are negotiated between the translation team and the church/community/committee who are asking for the translation. I would expect the brief to state who is making these instructions/requirements, what their relationship is to the translation team and the process to be followed for changing anything in the brief.

Marijke and Ben, Thank you for sharing your translation brief templates. A few thoughts on them: - At the outset of a translation project, not all stakeholders that need to contribute to and agree with a TB are fully aware and conversant with the relevant issues. Hence it would be important to include in the brief "review times" for the TB, for example, "This TB to be reviewed at least annually." - "Final product": I've come to be a bit suspicious of translation projects (for minority languages) in multilingual situations that aim for a full NT or OT or Bible from the start. Such projects may be appropriate in some places, but as a default, I'd prefer to see initial publication and Scripture Use goals, with some possible intermediate and then final product goals. IOW, if the initial products meet with little acceptance and actual use, why translate more? - Sometimes during a project, decisions need to be made. For example, about key terms, intermediate publications, what to translate next, etc. It would be good if the TB specified who makes which decisions as the project proceeds. Translators? Translation consultant? Church committee? All stakeholder representatives together? - Any funding organizations should be included in the development and signed agreement of the TB. Reason: Their influence/clout is considerable, and it's better to make this explicit from the start rather than pretending that it's a locally owned project (but with lots of implied and assumed and mostly invisible influence from a distant and "impartial" funder.)

Hi, I would add sth. like: 1. policy or procedures about how decision be made and conflict resolution procedure 2. Procedure handling specific issues and allow evolution of these procedure in the future as the team agree? 3. Consideration of make good use and share of resources from and with other related language translation projects,e.g. keyterm list, back-translation, linguistic write-up, to bring the synergy from cluster and global perspective. 4. Considering advanced technology, like adaptation and machine aided translation. 4. Use of languages and cultural ethos during the different process, e.g. source text, back translation, team checking, community checking, consultation, etc. The team may develop a rough outline of the brief and keep customizing the details over time with the consensus of the team, consultants and other stakeholders. The brief should be available in all the functional languages of all team members, or at least the relevant part.