DEVELOPING GUIDELINES FOR A SOUTH AFRICAN TEXTBOOK OF TRANSLATION

Abstract

The declaration of eleven languages as the official languages of South Africa brought about an increased need for translation and language planning in South Africa. However, many students of translation experience difficulty to produce quality translations, even after completing a course in translation. The purpose of this article is to report the findings of the original research on an investigation of the possible cause of this problem, as well as to find a possible solution to the problem. The results of the study show that the reason for this problem might be the training of translation students by using foreign textbooks and the lack of a South African textbook of translation. The findings further suggest that a translation textbook true to the South African context might be the solution to this problem. This study focuses on developing guidelines for the compilation of such a textbook.