Chapter 7. Conclusion
having “high-level” skills which they apply to a specific domain (Sirén and Hakka-
rainen 2002: 80), and the poetry translating skills summarized above (p. 176ff )
meet both these criteria. Experts also spend time analysing problems before tack-
ling them, and have strong self-monitoring skills (Glaser and Chi, cited, in Sirén
and Hakkarainen 2002: 73–74) – just as the five Kouwenaar translators extensively
pre-analyzed the source poem, and repeatedly checked and revised their target
version.
More specifically, expert prose translators are concerned not only with words
and grammar, but also with global text features like cohesion and context, and
have a ‘vision’ of the emerging target text with which they evaluate their output
(Lörscher 1996; Breedveld 2002; Tirkkonen-Condit 2002a) – just like the poetry
translators studied here. For example, prose translators can spend much time
searching for metaphors that fit this vision (Tirkkonen-Condit: 115) – as did Geoff,
Hugo and I when tackling the stroked-hands-heart idiom. With prose translators,
target-text quality correlates with overall translating time and intensity of research
work (Jääskeläinen 1996; cf. Sirén and Hakkarainen ibid.). If this book’s translators
resemble their prose-translating peers on this measure too, their very high trans-
lating time, plus their intensive dictionary and thesaurus work, implies a strong
likelihood of high-quality output.
Jääskeläinen, however, also reports that expert/professional prose translators
use highly automatized, fast work on routine tasks, but non-automatized, high-
time and high-effort work on non-routine tasks (1996: 70). Though this book’s
translators meet other expert criteria, they used very little automatized, fast work.
One distinctive feature of poetry translating, therefore, might be that very little
poetic text can be translated according to routine, pre-set solutions.
The very fact that poetry poses specific translating challenges, however, might
place it in a hyper-genre of ‘special-purpose’ texts (cf. Somers 1996). Just as writers
and readers of such texts – financial reports, say, or publicity materials – require
specialized lexical knowledge and rhetorical skills, so do their translators. Thus at
least some poetry-translating skills may be seen as translating-for-special-purpos-
es skills. The dominance of lexis work in poetry translating, for instance, echoes
how terminology problems dominate the translating of technical texts (Nkwenti-
Azeh 1995). Or, to take an example from personal experience, when translating an
article on the botany of coal-mining slag-heaps I also followed the broad pattern
described earlier for poetry, combining analysis of source-text microstructures
with input from real-world research, and using the resulting text-world schema to
painstakingly shape a receptor-language article that I hoped would be internally
consistent and appropriate for its target readers.
Nevertheless, I would have found a follow-up article on slag-heap botany less
challenging to translate, because I would have encountered fewer new terms and