Discourse and text level

Partial translation

Leave defined parts of the source untranslated, by design and on the record. Also called Selective translation, extract translation or gist translation.

Reference/All techniques

Optional Text Catford (1965, partial translation) Chesterman (1997, Pr7)

What it is

Partial translation is a deliberate decision that the target text will not correspond to the whole of the source. Something is left out by design: a stretch is carried across in its original form, a portion of the document is not rendered at all, or the whole is reduced to a summary. The decision belongs to the commission rather than to any sentence in it.

The label carries two senses, and keeping them apart avoids confusion. Catford's is the narrower. In his scheme a full translation renders every part of the source, whereas in a partial translation certain stretches are left untranslated and incorporated into the target as they stand. His category is about untranslated material physically present in the target, and it sits alongside his separate distinction between total and restricted translation, which concerns the linguistic levels involved rather than the extent of the text.

Chesterman's Pr7 is the broader sense. He uses the term for any deliberately non-complete rendering, and his examples include summary translation, gist translation and transcription. Under that definition a five-page abstract of a two-hundred-page report is a partial translation, although nothing of the source appears untranslated in it. Both senses are current, so the term is worth qualifying when precision matters.

Two boundaries follow. Borrowing operates at word level to fill a lexical gap, while partial translation in Catford's sense is a text-level decision about which stretches will be translated at all. Reduction removes an information item within an otherwise complete rendering; partial translation defines the extent of the rendering itself.

When it applies

  • The commissioner needs a decision made about a document rather than the document itself, so a summary or a gist rendering answers the purpose.
  • Only a defined part of the source is relevant: an operative provision, a single entry in a register, one clause of an agreement.
  • The source contains stretches whose foreignness is functional, so rendering them would remove the effect they carry.
  • Volume, deadline or cost make full rendering disproportionate, and the parties agree what will be covered.

Examples

FR>EN

  • Source: Il commanda une choucroute garnie et attendit.
  • Target: He ordered a choucroute garnie and waited.
  • Comment: Catford's sense. The dish name is left standing rather than rendered or explained, and its foreignness is part of what the passage does. This is not borrowing to fill a gap: English has adequate descriptions available, and they are declined.

TR>EN

  • Source: A forty-page court file of which the parties require only the operative part of the judgment.
  • Target: The operative part, translated in full, preceded by a statement identifying the document and specifying which pages were rendered and which were not.
  • Comment: Extract translation, the standard form of the strategy in official work. The declaration is not a courtesy: without it the target represents itself as the whole document.

DE>EN

  • Source: A technical report to be assessed for relevance before any decision to translate it in full.
  • Target: A summary in English setting out the report's subject, method and conclusions.
  • Comment: Gist translation in Chesterman's sense. Nothing survives untranslated, and the target is nevertheless not a translation of the source in the ordinary sense. A summary that omits its own status will eventually be quoted as though it were one.

Watch out for

One professional rule governs the strategy and admits no exceptions: the omission must be declared, in the target text itself, in terms that identify what was left out. A partial translation presented without that statement is simply an incomplete one, and the reader has no means of telling the difference.

  • Extracts from official documents usually have to carry a note of what was omitted and where, and certification regimes may prescribe its wording. Check the receiving authority's rules before agreeing scope.
  • Selecting the extract is an act of interpretation. Choosing which clause is relevant embeds a view of the document that the reader cannot check.
  • Untranslated stretches in Catford's sense need a decision about the reader. What is atmospheric in fiction is an obstacle in an instruction.
  • Summaries outlive their brief. Marking the document as a summary on every page is the cheapest available protection.

References

  • Catford, J. C. (1965). A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. London: Oxford University Press, Ch. 2.
  • Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Benjamins Translation Library 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Ch. 4. Revised edition (2016), Benjamins Translation Library 123, Ch. 4.

Not triggered by any section

Nothing in the sections checked calls for this technique: no structural difference between two language systems compels it, no state of a concept's designation asks for it, and no fixed unit is placed or approximated by it. The absence is a finding rather than a gap. A technique of this kind answers to culture, genre, register or the commission, so it is always the translator's decision, and always requires a justification that a trigger would have supplied on its own.

Sections checked

Language structures Terminology Phraseology Conventions

Related entries

Transediting Reduction Notes and glosses

Translation that can be checked

Every Translyta delivery comes with a quality report and a terminology report, so the decisions described here are visible to your reviser instead of buried in the text.

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