| Summary: | Student Number : 9613926H -
MA research report -
School of Translators and Interpreters -
Faculty of Humanities === This dissertation attempts to offer a contribution to the field of translation by
applying the practices of descriptive translation studies to a corpus of Chemistry
terms in English and translated into Sepedi in order to establish whether the
translation strategies opted for prove successful in promoting Sepedi to be a
language for special purposes (LSP). The theoretical framework which is used in
this project is the model of Baker (1992) of translation strategies of Descriptive
Translation Studies (DTS). DTS is one of the three main branches of Translation
Theory (Holmes, 1972). It differs from the other approaches in that it does not
offer a set of guidelines which dictate how a translation should be done. Attention
was also paid to theories of translation, such as those of Lawrence Venuti (2000)
and his concepts of domesticating and foreignising translation in order to
establish whether the translators have domesticated or foreignised the text and
to what extent? Both strategies are evident in the corpus.
This project also focused on the issue of the mother tongue education in the
South African context with the emphasis on the perceptions and attitudes of
learners and educators towards translated materials. Learners and their
educators show some resistance to the use of local African languages,
specifically Sepedi as medium of instruction in high schools. Reasons for their
resistance against mother tongue education are economic and political. African
languages are regarded as “low languages”, languages of inferior status as
compared to English and Afrikaans.
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