Vol. 8 No. 2 (2006)
Linguistica

Faute de langue, faute de traduction

Jacek Pleciński
Université Nicolas Copernic, Toruń

Published 01-12-2006

Keywords

  • translation error,
  • idiomatic expression,
  • target language,
  • situational level in translation,
  • subtitles

How to Cite

Pleciński, J. (2006). Faute de langue, faute de traduction. Verbum – Analecta Neolatina, 8(2), 385–389. https://doi.org/10.1556/Verb.8.2006.2.8

Abstract

This paper highlights the difference between linguistic error and translation error. In doing so so, the author provides an analysis of two "extreme" translations. The first one, by a Polish female student of French, cumulates all imaginable mistakes (concerning both comprehension and translation into the foreign language). The second one is a one-sentence subtitle from a film, inadvertently translated from Spanish into (native) Polish. The translation (which should have been carried out with a word-for-word translation) was put into Polish by the translator using a dynamic equivalent of an idiomatic expression. The dynamic equivalent does not match the scene in the film.