Linguistic and Cultural Aspects of Specialised Translation

Andrzej Łyda, Iwona Sikora, Marta Wiśniowska, Marek Zasempa

Linguistic and Cultural Aspects of Specialised Translation. A Textbook for the Students of Business English is a practical course in translation from English to Polish and from Polish to English. It has grown out of a need to run a course of specialised translation for students of Business English at  Częstochowa University of Technology. However, even if this textbook is aimed at this particular group of language and translation students, we believe that this volume has lot to offer to students of translation in other fields. We base our belief in the usefulness of this volume to any translation student on the fact that the primary focus of all chapters is on the question of the language – culture relationship. This relationship is uniquely represented by each individual language and difficult to reproduce in any other language. In other words, this textbook is about translation of culture and culture-bound terms, which poses a perennial problem of translators in all areas of their activity. This volume consists of twelve chapters and has been designed to fit into a standard Polish academic timetable lasting one semester. Some chapters may require more than 90 minutes of seminar time; others are likely to take less time. Generally, the structure of most chapters follows the same pattern. After an exposition of a translational problem, there comes a practice section, in which students are asked to solve the problem. Although each chapter is accompanied  with a key, not every exercise is answered; some exercises allow individual students more freedom to provide a solution and others serve as a material for an in-class discussion. The examples used in the book cover a wide range of topics ranging from business proper to film studies, and are tuned to suit the level of beginner translation students.