Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2009

Political discourse has been the subject of increasing interest in recent decades with the development of ideological and rhetorical criticism focusing on US presidential speeches, especially after the events of 9/11. Indeed, extensive research literature already exists in the field of American presidential rhetoric. The same cannot be said for studies of political texts available in translation. Currently, translation studies seems to be more concerned with the politics and the politicization of translation than with the translation of political texts, which have been examined more from a synchronic perspective than a diachronic one. Using a diachronic parallel corpora of Italian translations (published in books and newspapers) of a specific genre of US presidential speech, the inaugural address, this study highlights recurring translation strategies as well as problems, related to culture-bound and value-laden political terms, style, and phraseology. This research also seeks to contribute to the definition of political language as a language for specific purposes.

This article tests the workability of the principle of relevance at the heart of relevance theory by evaluating a corpus of eighteen English and French translations of verse 33 of the Mu‘allaqa of Imru’ al-Qays. This verse embodies a conventional metaphor reflecting a stereotyped image in Arabic poetry, which communicates its ground to the source language (SL) reader by means of inference. The verse challenges the translator to render the metaphor into an equivalent trope and to reflect the ground of the comparison, either by inference or by reference. By comparing the translations in the corpus to the source text (ST) and to each other, this study draws conclusions as to the translatability of a conventional metaphor. Chronology and mode of discourse are taken into account in the evaluation process so as to categorize the translations and the shifts exercised in them. This evaluative yardstick is used to measure resemblance and relevance by taking into account both the ST and the target text (TT) contexts

This paper presents the results of a study on the use of the Dutch modal particles (MPs) maar and wel and their translation equivalents in a translation corpus containing both Dutch-English (DU-EN) and English-Dutch (EN-DU) texts. Although a number of linguistic studies has dealt with modal particles, an in-depth translation approach is still missing. Our first aim is to detemine frequency of use from the corpus; the results point to some remarkable differences in the behavior of the MPs maar and wel in DU-EN and EN-DU target texts and in fiction versus non-fiction. These results can be evaluated against the background of an established hypothesis of translation behavior, the Unique Items Hypothesis (Tirkkonen-Condit 2004), which is relevant in the context of the translation of Dutch MPs into English. The second aim is to present an in-depth analysis of the translation of the MP wel in a number of contexts in order to determine: 1) whether the English equivalents confirm our intuition regarding the category-internal meaning variations of MP wel depending on its context of use (these meaning variations have not been sufficiently dealt with in the literature on wel; and 2) whether there are differences in the use of the English equivalents of MP wel in the DU-EN and EN-DU subcorpora

This study aims to investigate the translation of syntactic pause as an under-researched linguistic observable feature from Arabic into English, with particular reference to Qur’anic examples. Due to the lack of studies in this area, and because the phenomenon has not been treated sufficiently in Qur’anic and non-Qur’anic discourses, Qur’anic verses illustrating the point are sampled, analyzed and discussed so as to uncover the difficulties and to suggest translation solutions. A handful of authentic and authoritative Qur’anic exegeses are consulted, in addition to three translations of the Qur’an, in an attempt to explore the role such interpretations can play in rendering the possible syntactic meanings into English. This makes it possible to provide a solid syntactic-translational ground for assigning syntactic-semantic value to the pause in the selected examples. This also allows the author to point out the problematic aspect of this linguistic phenomenon, where two acceptable readings of one syntactic structure can emerge. This study demonstrates that syntactic pause in the Qur’an presents certain challenges for the translator and requires great effort to render faithfully in the target language. The study also suggests how immediate and broader contexts can guide the translator in prioritizing one interpretation over another

This essay focuses on how stylistic features of different literary traditions can converge in new poetic works through translation. One such example is represented by the Nobel Prize winning Greek poet Giorgos (George) Seferis, who translated many English poets, among them, T. S. Eliot. An interesting aspect of Seferis’s writing is the role played by translation in shaping his literary works. While many critics, such as E. Keeley (1956), G. Peron (1976), N. Vayenas (1989), have explored the similarities of content and rhetorical technique between the two poets, the influence of translation in shaping Seferis’s poetry has been largely ignored. This study addresses that scholarly gap through a comparative analysis of the corpus of Seferis’s translations of Eliot and that of his own poems written in the same period

In relation to two contemporary works of literature, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), this essay sets out a view of reading and writing as essentially translational and transformational acts. It argues that text design and production in the contemporary age, at a time when many writers of works in English are the product of more than one culture and language, depend upon access to and the ability to transform a range of cultural and material resources. It is concerned with ‘how newness enters the world’ (Bhabha 2007) in the era of globalization and postmodernity and sees creativity as an outcome of both readerly and writerly acts of cultural, generic and linguistic translation.