Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2007

Research on the mental processes of written translation has benefited less from the findings of psycholinguistic and cognitive research than interpreting research has. This has left translation research relatively impoverished in the theoretical grounding of research methodology. While the performance speed of interpreting seems to make interpreting research closer to bilingual speech research, the shared features of interpreting and translation suggest that they are points on a continuum rather than discrete production modes. A Translation-Interpreting Continuum is proposed, which allows various production modes to be described in terms of psycholinguistic notions, and which includes a language development dimension to account for second language production. The Continuum allows some very basic questions about translation research methodology to be answered, and opens up the opportunity for a better integration of translation and interpreting research.

This article discusses findings from an ethnographic study of literary translation practice in the Netherlands and Belgium. The article focuses on one aspect of translation practice, namely translatorial ethos. It is argued that the forms of translatorial ethos visible in the data are complex in that they have a bearing both on textual and institutional practice and relations at one and the same time. More specifically, it is also argued that these complex professional stances and positionings need to be taken into account if we are to gain a better understanding of translational norms (Toury 1995, 2000 and Chesterman 1993) or translational habitus (Simeoni 1998). Furthermore, it is argued in a more general sense that linguistic ethnography can provide clear indications of patterns of translational practice and therefore forms a useful means of inquiry in the context of translation studies.

The transfer of sound from one language into another is not a uniform process, but rather, takes different forms depending on the orthographies and phonological properties of source and target languages, the less common of which involve processes significantly different from transliteration between European phonetic scripts. This paper pools techniques commonly used in loanword phonology and second language acquisition to illustrate complications that arise when translating names from English into languages such as Japanese and Chinese, which differ significantly from the source language in syllable structure and orthographic convention. Competing strategies of adaptation and accommodation are placed in the context of lexical retrieval and compared with experimental studies of nativization in interlanguage. It will be shown that for names to be perceived as similar-sounding across language boundaries, it would be desirable to look beyond segmental equivalence and consider stress, syllable count and other suprasegmental factors that play a greater role in phonological memory.

Scientific texts for Jewish children and youth were produced within the German-Jewish culture from the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century. The intention was to fill in the gap in the Judaic literature in Hebrew vis-à-vis the German-Christian literary and educational systems as part of modernization processes. Two case studies of German-Hebrew scientific translations (in natural history and astronomy) are described in an attempt to illustrate the strategies applied by the Jewish translators, which in their turn reflect the cultural constraints they faced and the creative ways they chose to deal with them, taking into account the models already available to the target system and the types of target audience the translated texts were intended for.

This paper describes an empirical contextual study of the English verbs and syntactic resources translated by observar in an extensive corpus of biomedical research articles. Quantitative analysis showed that the frequency of observar was significantly higher in the Spanish translations than in the comparable Spanish language original articles (360 vs. 162 instances; P < 0·001). Qualitative analysis of the Spanish native texts provided a linguistic profile for the verb. This profile was then used in a contextual study to assess the appropriateness of the 360 instances found in the translated texts. The results indicate that observar is only a natural translation equivalent for ‘observe’. For other verbs, an awareness both of the rhetorical, syntactic and collocational restrictions and of the range of alternative choices will allow translators to select appropriate lexical items and avoid excessive repetition of observar, thus creating a more varied target text.

Following an earlier study on professional translators which appears in Target 2000, and another on translation students in Meta 2002, this article reports on an empirical study, based on both quantitative and qualitative data, on how administrators of translation/language services perceive translation training in Hong Kong. It will seek to answer questions such as the usual practice of and major considerations in recruitment of new translators; the major challenges the newly recruited face and methods and strategies they use to cope with them; the difficulties translators have in general as seen through the eyes of administrators, and the methods and strategies they use to cope with them; assistance translation agencies usually provide to help them deal with the challenges and difficulties; changes that need to be made to improve translator training. A comparison is made with my earlier projects on professional translators and translation students and pedagogical implications are also drawn in relation to some of the focal issues in translator training.

This article presents news agencies as vast translation agencies, structurally designed to achieve fast and reliable translations of large amounts of information. It maintains that translation is of the utmost importance in the news agencies and that it is inseparable from other journalistic practices that intervene in the production of news. Rejecting the naïve view that translations are often improvised by people who do not have the necessary training, the article claims that the news editor has the specific skills required for the elaboration of such translations, and that the organisation of news agencies has been conceived in order to facilitate communication flows between different linguistic communities so as to reach global publics with maximum speed and efficiency. If news translation has traditionally been neglected by Translation Studies it is because it usually is in the hands of journalists rather than translators. A detailed examination of the nature and processes involved in news translation problematises central concepts such as authorship and equivalence and leads Translation Studies in new directions.