JĘZYK, KULTURA, PRZEKŁAD NA STUDIACH FILOLOGICZNYCH
LANGUAGE, CULTURE, TRANSLATION STUDIES

Summary/Abstract: This paper is primarily concerned with French studies. As evident from the sociological research carried out in Poland in 2004, graduates of French departments in the years 2000–2003 have found employment as language teachers, relatively few have become translators but the combination of both of these professional activities is frequent. Language studies do not address the specific needs of the translation profession, they do provide, however, considerable knowledge of French literature, culture and language. It is important that the acquired expertise should then be applied to specific translation tasks. The paper discusses, by way of example, the course in translating Old French texts, offered by the author to students of French over a couple of years. The course sought to accomplish a threefold aim: to familiarize the students, using practice based teaching, with a number of important concepts from the field of translation theory, to make students sensitive to the role of cultural elements and to look for translation equivalents expressed in good, standard Polish. That is so because the single biggest difficulty for students is not comprehending the original text, notwithstanding its specific syntax and lexicon, but the selection of appropriate lexical and syntactic means in Polish.

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