Relatore: Professor Bruno OSIMO - Bruno Osimo, traduzioni ...

As a result, she overlooked the translation brief and translated the text for a
wrong target group, which may explain the lower-than-expected quality of her
translation. 3 Penny’s behaviour seems a particularly conspicuous example of a
cognitive error, i.e. misinterpreting the situation and therefore not being able
to use all the information relevant to successful task performance. However,
and somewhat more alarmingly, Penny’s implicit assumption that a faithful
translation was required could also reflect her understanding (and her
experiences) of the variety of translating prevailing in translator training.
The third example of the role of personal history relates to Lucy’s
(professional translator) poor success in the experimental task. Lucy differed
from the other professional translators in terms of her occupation; she worked
as a ‘business correspondent’, while Fran, John and Penny worked as free
lance translators at the time. Lucy also reported that she worked with four
non-native languages, whereas the free lance translators reported only two (in
fact, Fran reported that she worked almost solely with English). As a
consequence, the working conditions of Lucy vs. the other professionals can
be assumed to be quite different. According to Toury (1984: 191), ‘the norms
which govern [the] ‘well-formedness’ of translated utterances involve, like any
other norm, sanctions’. The nature of these sanctions, which partly determine
how the translator approaches each translation task, depends on the nature of
each translating situation.
3 In spite of the ‘cosmetic’ revisions (i.e. the above-mentioned omissions), Penny’s
translation remained too difficult for the target column. It is possible that Penny used heavy
structures with low readability, because she was translating for an expert audience.
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