SOME HINTS ON COMMENTARY WRITING

Commentary writing is where you demonstrate your understanding of the translation process
and it will help you to develop and improve your professional translation practice.
Commentary writing prepares you to become a critical translator capable of making well-
informed decisions and it will stand you in good stead when you come to grapple with clients
in the real world (many of whom will have only a partial grasp of what it is you actually do).

The Translation Studies tutors will be giving input on commentary writing at some point in
the course. A good commentary will find points to comment on at least the three core areas
of: 1) whole text/genre and appropriate style issues, 2) sentence level and grammatical issues,
3) word level, lexical choices, register etc.

Students often find it hard to decide on which issues to include in a commentary. These notes
from the Institute of Linguists Diploma in Translation provide some good starting points on
the sort of issues that would be valid for comment:

Commenting on translation issues

The process of translation is also one of decision-making in that a translator makes choices
all the time. For a given feature in the source text, the translator may be able to draw on a
whole repertoire of possible solutions, a variety of alternatives. In weighing up the pros and
cons of these alternatives and making a final choice, the translator draws on a wide range of
criteria including considerations of style, expression and idiom, cultural context,
connotations, the functions of source and target texts, and intended audience (my
emphasis - SGM).

Comments should state the nature of each translation problem selected, how you propose to
solve it and to justify your choice of solution.

Features which might merit inclusion are:

Very long sentences that cannot be split easily because of apposition (unwieldiness),
parenthesis, relative clauses etc.
Sentences without a main clause
Idioms, colloquialisms or proverbs which do not have a standard TL translation
Ambiguities of various kinds
Redundancy or repetition
Stylistic devices or registers which do not translate well into the TL
Humour
Allusions, or terms and phrases with connotations likely to be unfamiliar to a TL
reader
Excessively sparse style which would benefit from amplification or insertion
Technical terms
Usage of words other than with the meaning given in a good dictionary
Neologisms
TL words which should not be maintained in the TL version
Other non-source language (SL) words
 Untranslatable terms whose precise meaning is peculiar to the SL or its culture
Abbreviations and names of organisations
Personal titles and ranks
Currency values and measurements
Any terms for which a paraphrase in addition to, or instead of, a translation would aid
the comprehension of an educated TL reader
Quotations from TL speakers or writers
Apparent omissions or typographical errors
The need to provide extra contextualisation for the sake of clarity
Any other item which can be regarded as posing a genuine translation issue

It is not necessary to say exactly which category each problem belongs to; it is more
important to outline the issues that it raises for the translator.

The commentary should address how relatively problematic translation points have been
dealt with and how choices made adequately or inadequately reflect features and aims of the
source and target texts.

Bibliography:

Hervey (et al), (1999) Thinking Translation Series, Routledge (has a good glossary of terms
for commentary writing in the back (pp 219-225))
Munday, J (2012) Introducing Translation Studies, Routledge (Chapter 12 contains a section
on Translation Commentaries)
Reisinger (et al), (1995) Annotations Explained A Workbook, City University

NOTES PREPARED BY SARAH GRIFFIN-MASON (MA SPANISH-ENGLISH DL TUTOR),

ADAPTED BY BEGOA RODRGUEZ.