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Reading

Comprehension
SUMMARY OF LECTURES 1 & 2

1. TIME & MEETINGS: SATURDAYS @ 10A.M. AUDITORIUM 4


2. BOOK REQUIRED: READING COMPREHENSION BOOK 1
3. POINTING OUT THE IMPORTANCE OF DISCUSSION
4. “WHY IS ‘READING COMPREHENSION’ IMPORTANT TO
TRANSLATORS?”
Importance of Reading Skills in
Translation
 “As well as understanding the explicit meaning of
a word phrase, a translator must be able to
appreciate its many possible functions in a
specific context”

 Words with many different meanings


 Pronouns and their references
Transreader

 M.S. Doyle (1991) came up with the word


“Transreader”
 We need to fully understand the Source Text in English.
 Example: English novels are sometimes wrongly
translated to Arabic because sometimes the meaning
is not clear to translators.
Important Factors to Understand a
Text
 The prior knowledge of the subject
 A well-developed language
 The ability to make inferences (reading between
the lines)
 Good knowledge of the English culture
 Perfect understanding of punctuation marks and
their functions
Reading Strategies

 Predict
 Have a discussion
 Guess the meaning of new words from the
context
 Ask questions for sections
 Summarize
Determine the Genre

 Newspaper articles
 Fiction
 Poetry
 Biographies
 E-mails

 Each genre has its own STRUCTURE &


VOCABULARY
Punctuation
 Clarifies sentence structure
 Adds meaning to written words
 A woman without her man is nothing. 
 A woman: without her, man is nothing. 

 Let’s eat, grandma! 


 Let’s eat grandma! 
Punctuation Marks

 1. Full stop/period (.)


 Marks the end of a declarative sentence: Jane and Jack went to the
market.
 Marks the end of some abbreviations: Our daily meeting is on Saturdays at
10 a.m.
 2. Exclamation Mark (!) indicates surprise, command or strong emotions:
Close the door! / What a beautiful lady she was!
 3. Question Mark (?) Follows an interrogative sentence OR a question
tag:
 When did Jane leave for the market?
 You are studying Journalism, aren’t you?
Punctuation Marks

 4. The colon (:)


 Introduces a list: I’d like to buy these things: two shirts, one robe, and two
skirts.
 Explains, gives example or clarifies what was just said: His mother is in the
hospital: she has heart problems.
 Introduces a formal statement: The proverb says: “No pain, no gain.”
 5. The semicolon (;)
 Links two independent sentences which are closely related in meaning
making a period inappropriate: I have a big test tomorrow; I can't go out
tonight.
 Links two independent sentences connected with ‘however’: Some
sentences are ambiguous; however, we try hard to avoid this.
Punctuation Marks

 6. The hyphen (-)


 indicates that two words (or more) belong together: This is a once-in-a-
lifetime opportunity.
 joins parts of a compound word: well-educated, self-employed

 7. The dash ( ‫) ـــ‬


 indicates an interruption in the flow of thoughts.
 introduces words that explain or summarize a preceding series.
The hero of the play—the townspeople see him as a hero but in fact he is
not—presents himself as an undefeatable man.
 8. The comma (,)
 Separates words, phrases, and clauses in a series: She loves to attend
everything that has to do with art, plays, films, operas, and painting.
 Joins two independent sentences connected with a coordinating
conjunction (and, but, etc. ..): Joe read the book, but his friend saw the
movie.
 Marks the element in the sentence that is not important to its meaning:
What she said, in short, is that he was so lovely.
 Marks non-restrictive relative clauses: Sam Spider, who robbed the bank,
was caught today.
Culture & Translation
 For every translated sentence, the translator must be able to decide on the
importance of its cultural context, what the phrase really means, not
necessarily what it literally means, and convey that meaning in a way which
makes sense in the target language but in the context of the target culture.

 There are many institutions and practices that exist in one culture and don’t
exist in other cultures. Deeply held belief systems, even commitments to truth
vary from culture to culture. Each of these unique culturally based
psychological entities is associated with words that have meaning in one
language that is distinct to that language and not duplicated in other
languages. How would those unique features of culture be translated? Only
someone steeped in the cultures of both source language and target
language can hope to make an interpretation.
Examples

 When President Carter went to Poland in 1977, the State


Department hired a Russian interpreter who was not used to
translating into Polish. Through that interpreter, Carter ended up
saying things in Polish like “when I abandoned the United States”
instead of “when I left the United States”

 When Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations uttered the famous


phrase “we will bury you” it was a culturally insensitive mistranslation
from the Russian which really meant “we will outlast you.”
The mistranslation was widely interpreted as a threat of attack.
 Thank you
 Questions are welcome 

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