Abstract
Although much research is currently undertaken on interpreting in South Africa, the profession and academic discourse lack standardised interpreting terminology, especially in the indigenous languages. One possible reason for this relates to the unique South African interpreting context compared to the rest of the world.
It is against this backdrop that a decision was taken to translate the 2008 work, Terminologie van het tolken, by Salaets, Segers and Bloemen, published by Vantilt in Nijmegen, into Afrikaans, English, Northern Sotho and Zulu. However, right from the outset it became clear that a direct translation of the lemma list would not suffice and that a domestication translation strategy should be followed for the South African context.
Firstly, it was necessary to expand the lemma list to provide for educational interpreting as practised in South Africa. Secondly, it became clear that the examples used for the purposes of elucidation would have to be localised. Thirdly, the source list contains several terms that are unique to a Dutch (and European) context, but which are not relevant in South Africa. Such terms were cautiously identified and omitted from the target list. The source list includes a number of terms from foreign languages (mostly French terms, for example cheval, décalage, déclic, perroquet) that were retained in Dutch and English, but for which new terms had to be coined in the indigenous languages in order to increase semantic accessibility for a local audience. The changes in the lemma list also necessitated certain editorial interventions.
This article reports on the translation and localization process and the concomitant utilization of a predominantly domestication translation strategy to accomplish this purpose.