Ebook: Translating Non-Native Speaker

Proshina Z. Translating Non-Native Speaker. // Intercultural Communication Studies XVII: 2 2008. P. 91-97Translation and interpretation from English as a Lingua Franca used by non-native communicators often requires specific knowledge of transference phenomena from the speaker/writer’s native language into English, as well as of contrastive typology of the two languages. This type of translation can be labeled an intermediary translation. Though in this case English seems to be a source language, in fact it is not, it is in-between a native language of a speaker/writer and a target language of a reader/listener. The text that undergoes an indirect translation can contain various deviations from standard English based on the norms of English from the so-called Inner Circle countries (Kachru, 1985/2006).
For the text to be intelligible, comprehensive, and interpretable (Smith, 1992), a translator has to know these deviations on all language levels – in phonetics, graphics, grammar, and lexis. I will illustrate it by samples of translation from China English into Russian, focusing attention on the problems of this translation. To help students cope with translation and interpretation challenges, a course of East Asian Englishes has been introduced at Far Eastern National University (Vladivostok, Russia).