Practical Translation Project Design

　Practical Translation Project Design - Translation > Stage 7 > Step 1 > Task 1

　 Understand What Is Relevant

You might have realized that the kind of data to be analyzed varies widely. If we understand 'texts' in a narrow way, they refer to natural language data, for example, produced or published translations proper. As is seen in Stage 6 above, most of your fellow trainees have to deal with such texts. There is an exception, however, in the case of Trainee Q, whose data do not only include students' translations, but more importantly, their commentaries, i.e., 'texts about texts' because they are writings about translations but not translations themselves. Even for the same kind of data, trainees vary in terms of the linguistic phenomena that interest them. All these variations foreshadow huge differences in the ways of dealing with the data.

Whichever kind of data you hold, and whatever phenomena you want to observe, you have to understand first of all what is relevant to you, whereby you would be able to extract eloquent evidence for the points to be made.

A number of the items relevant to your fellow trainees' investigation have been gathered randomly. Pick out the ones that are most likely to be studied by a trainee and put them into the corresponding boxes that stand for the five trainees respectively. It should be remembered that a trainee is always encouraged to explore the data in his/her own way on the basis of his/her own research rationale and his/her knowledge about linguistics in general and the specific languages at work. What is listed below is in fact very limited. You should not be confined to it if you are conducting a similar study. Advice from your advisor would help in this regard.

Task 1 - Task 2