Translating Humanities and Social Sciences texts: Translators’ perceptions of difficulties and competences

Abstract

The translation of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) texts promotes the circulation of knowledge and theories across languages and borders. Given disciplinary uniqueness and the divergence between the source and target discourses and contexts, translating HSS works is challenging. Although the difficulties in and competences for translating HSS texts are mentioned in the literature, they have not been empirically validated so far. This study aims to explore translators’ perceptions of the difficulties in translating HSS texts and their ratings of the importance of relevant competences. A questionnaire was completed by a convenience sample of academic translators of HSS texts. The results indicate that the difficulties proposed in the literature occur to a greater or lesser extent and that the low quality of source texts, which is ignored in the literature, also poses problems for translators. As for competences, the results indicate that the proposed competences (extra-linguistic knowledge, communicative and textual competence and strategic competence) are important. Instrumental competence, though not mentioned in the literature, is also essential. This study also generated results that may inform the choice of translators between generic translators and subject experts with different levels of subject knowledge and translation skills.