Otto Kade (translation scholar)

Otto Adolf Wenzel Kade (born March 28, 1927 in Friedland im Jizera Mountains , Czechoslovakia ; † November 2, 1980 in Eichwalde ) was a German translation scholar and, together with Gert Jäger and Albrecht Neubert, an important representative of the "Leipzig School".

Life

Otto Kade attended elementary school in Friedland (Frýdlant) as well as the Realgymnasium and Oberschule Reichenberg from 1933 to 1943 , before he signed up as a flak helper for the flak in Berlin in 1943 and was called up for the Reich Labor Service in Freitelsdorf near Radeburg in 1944 . In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the British as a soldier. After his release, he worked as an interpreter at the Národní výbor in Frýdlant until 1946 , then he was resettled in the Soviet occupation zone in Bautzen . There he first worked as a teacher and mainly taught Russian , a. a. at the Institute for Teacher Training in Meißen . At the German Central Pedagogical Institute (DPZI) in Berlin, he completed qualification courses in 1950 and in the same year became deputy head of the pedagogical college for Russian and a technical college lecturer.

Between 1950 and 1970 he worked as a simultaneous or conference interpreter and head of language mediator collectives in the GDR at party congresses, congresses and international meetings at home and abroad. He made the final transition to translation studies when he received a lectureship at the newly founded interpreting institute of the Karl Marx University in Leipzig in 1956 and was appointed deputy director of the institute. Here he was very much supported by the director of the institute Albrecht Neubert , with whom he was later one of the representatives of the Leipzig School.

From 1957 to 1961 he was director and from 1965 to 1969 deputy director at the interpreting institute of the philological faculty of the Karl Marx University in Leipzig . From 1969 to 1980 he was head of Slavic- German translation studies in the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics Section at Karl Marx University in Leipzig.

Act

Otto Kade held numerous influential positions in the course of his life, not only in the context of his translation studies. From 1957 to 1960 he was co-editor of the specialist magazine “Fremdsprache” for the theory and practice of language mediation and from 1957 to 1974 deputy editor-in-chief of the same. Kade was a member of the interpreter section at the State Secretariat for higher education and technical schools in the GDR (1965-1967) and the Presidium of the GDR Peace Council (1965-1980).

Kade's dissertation on “Subjective and objective factors in the translation process”, possibly the first dissertation on translation studies in Germany, was published in 1968 as supplement 1 to the magazine “Fremdsprache” under the title “Chance and regularity in translation”. He tried to overcome the limits of a purely linguistic approach to the translation and interpreting process, which was a fundamental contribution to a general theory of translation.

His habilitation thesis, published in 1980, was on the subject of "Language mediation as a social phenomenon and an object of scientific investigation". In it, Kade attempted to determine the subject matter, tasks and goals of translation studies on the basis of a scientific analysis of language mediation.

Kade was the one who suggested calling his subject “Translation Studies”. He no longer saw his suggestion prevail.

The Leipzig School

Otto Kade, together with Gert Jäger and Albrecht Neubert, was an important representative of the Leipzig School of Translation Studies . This school is an equivalence doctrine in which translation studies are understood as a sub-discipline of contrastive linguistics. The aim of translation studies here is to create a "translation grammar" based on a comparison of the language systems, which a translator had to adhere to.

Kade understands the process of translation as a bilingual communication in which the translator acts as an "intermediate link", here between the sender (S) and recipient (E). Due to the fact that S and E do not have the same code (language) as part of the translation process, the translator (T) does what Kade calls a coding change. He divides this process into three different phases: In phase 1, the translator (T) is the recipient (E) of a text produced or sent by the sender (S) in the source language (L1). Phase 2 consists of the recoding, the coding change, by the translator (T), the "code switch". Finally, in phase 3, the translator (T) communicates as a secondary sender (S ') with the target text recipient (E').

The Leipzig School coined many of the terms used today in translation studies.

Publications (selection)

• Communication problems of translation, Leipzig 1968.
• Coincidence or lawfulness in translation, Leipzig 1968.
• Studies in translation studies, Leipzig 1971.
• (Ed.), Linguistic and Extra-Linguistic in Communication, Leipzig 1979.
• Language mediation as a social phenomenon and the subject of scientific investigation, Leipzig 1980.

literature

• Heidemarie Salevsky (ed.): Scientific basics of language mediation. Berlin contributions to translation studies. (Otto Kade in memory) . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 978-3-63144-547-1 .
• Heidemarie Salevsky: Beyond Language. (In memoriam Otto Kade) . In: Gert Wotjak (Ed.): Quo vadis Translatologie? Half a century of university training for interpreters and translators in Leipzig . Frank & Timme, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-86596-040-5 , pp. 367-386.

Individual evidence

• E-Ope.ee Linguistic Approaches in Translation Studies. equivalence
• Online professor catalog of the University of Leipzig
• Dossier: The Leipzig School of Translation Studies (PDF; 70 kB)