A Common Sense Approach to Translation – Public service translation from a knowledge management perspective

Abstract

This paper examines public service translation, also known as community translation, from a Knowledge Management perspective. Knowledge Management (KM) is a growing discipline in business and management, mainly concerned with how knowledge, which is generally assumed to be in a tacit, inaccessibleform, moves across various boundaries or obstacles between units in an organisation. The scope of this paperis limited to knowledge transfer, one of the key processes of Knowledge Management, which aims to identifythe best practices to elicit and transfer knowledge from a tacit form into an explicit form so that it is accessible by others in a team or an organisation. The main actor in knowledge transfer is an individual called,in KM literature, a ‘knowledge broker’, ‘knowledge enabler’ or ‘gatekeeper’. Public service translators alsowork within an organisational structure and a policy environment in which they translate texts whichcontain knowledge and information from the public services dominated by the host culture and languageinto the languages spoken by ethnic community members. They perform a critical role in making knowledgeand information available to members of ethnic communities. A quantitative analysis of the data collectedthrough a survey of practising public service translators and unstructured interviews show that they undertake such knowledge brokering or gatekeeping activities as filtering, modifying, simplifying and exemplifying to create shared meaning, negotiating linguistic and cultural boundaries to make knowledge relevantand accessible to the members of ethnic communities. This is what we can call a ‘common sense approach’ totranslation. It is a pilot study, introductory in nature with a limited number of respondents and languages,hence the limitations on its findings.