Translation Teaching and Methodology: a Linguistic Analysis of a Literary Text

Agorni makes it clear from the start that she sees an inextricable interrelationship between theory and practice, recognising the role that research on translation, but also research on translation teaching and training, is playing today in the modelling of theory. The models being generated within the applied area can actually be seen to be dialoguing with, and even exerting a specific influence on, the theoretical and descriptive branches of the discipline. As far as her own methodological preference is concerned, she argues for what she calls a comparative approach, in place of the contrastive one that, she says, has recently come under scrutiny. The reasons for her choice are also interconnected. In the first place, she argues that the method is better able to collaborate with an interest in the reception of translated texts and a belief in translation as more properly belonging to the target (rather than to the source) culture. Secondly, this comparative method pairs more satisfactorily with a conception of the translation as being at least a partially autonomous text, and the translator as playing a fundamental mediating role in its making. Hence, her refusal to see divergences between Source Text (ST) and Target Text (TT) as losses which could somehow have been avoided with a better translation. Indeed, the method seems to be particularly useful to the translation of literary texts and the vital mediation performed by their translators. It achieves an even-handed emphasis, on one side, on the degree of freedom they enjoy, as well as, on the other, the responsibility they are called to.