The translator’s ‘verbosity’’ - cognitive-emotional background

Abstract

Especially in the initial phase of the translator training and also in later technical or even in
diploma translations, unjustified additions can be observed without regard to the subject of the
text to be translated or of the quality of the end product. Although, they don’t cause any
comprehension problems, these subjective additions may appear as striking errors when being
compared with the source text. In some cases, they appear as ’harmless’ signs of emotion, but
sometimes they lead to information distortions as well. Any research work in the field of
translator’s subjectivity can be encouraged by translation studies concentrating beside the
translation process also on the translator itself: translator’s personality, emotional intelligence
and emotions. Through examples taken from my personal teaching experience I would like to
show how the students’ commentaries are reflecting the cognitive emotional background. Then,
I’ll be trying to typologize subjective, unjustified additions. The results obtained until now can
be used in the translation teacher’s feed back comments so that students should be conscious of
avoiding subjective additions for the sake of improving quality and are related also to
methodology initiatives aiming at developing translator competences in the frame of GTK TFK.