Babel - Volume 48, Issue 4, 2002

The paper joins forces with the increasing literature on translation and cultural studies and places translation in the context of cross-cultural communication. It is my intention to analyse the factors that affect translation and the influence of stereotypical attitudes on the production of texts for a target culture (TC).Assuming that translations are facts of target cultures as Toury points out (1995), I will concentrate on a very specific topic: stereotypical attitudes towards Latino sexuality and its influence on the production of target texts (TTs). For this purpose, I will first introduce the topic of translation and culture; secondly, I will write about the use and functions of stereotypes in cross-cultural communication with specific reference to attitudes towards Latinos in the USA; and thirdly, I will make a case study of stereotypes on the translation and production of materials related to AIDS. In doing so, I will talk about the position and function of the translations as entities in the target culture (TC), the translating activity related to an ethnic minority within the American culture, and the form the translations have (the product). The article presents the analysis of informative brochures on AIDS originally produced in English and translated into Spanish for the Latino community in the USA.

While most scholars stress that translation and interpreting essentially fulfil the same function, many-especially interpreters-consider that the two are incompatible professions. In a sense, translators deal with written language and have time to polish their work whereas interpreters deal with oral language and have no time to refine their output. Any supplementary knowledge, for example, terminological or world language, can be acquired during written translation but has to be acquired prior to interpreting.A number of experimental studies were conducted by psycholinguists such as Treisman, Oleron, Goldman-Eisler and Gerver (1976). Their primary interest was the effect on performance of variables such as source language, speed of delivery, ear-voice span, noise, pauses, false starts…etc. Later advances during the 1970’s and early 1980’s concentrated on the theoretical aspects and culminated in the so-called théorie du sens. This paper tackles competence in English-Arabic translation and interpreting while highlighting similarities and differences at the textural and performance levels. It sets out by discussing the requirements of quality, audience reception, fluency and quantitative aspects of style such as output ratio and redundancy. A focal point of interest is performance constraints in simultaneous interpretation which include, among other things, personal and logistical factors, lack of a holistic approach, time lag, SL deficiencies, lexico-grammatical asymmetry as well as cultural and rhetorical divergence (including phatic communion). The study concludes with an overview of the compensation strategies employed by interpreters such as intonational clues, queuing, segmentation, approximation, syntactic adjustment, compression and ellipsis.

This paper investigates one aspect of legal translation between English and Chinese, the lexical equivalence and non-equivalence that often present special challenges to Chinese/English translators. It identifies three lexical features and discusses the meanings, equivalents and translation strategies associated with them. The paper suggests the essential requirements for translational competence of a legal translator and argues that, in legal translation, it is essential to consider the contextual factors and pragmatic effects of legal usage in both the SL and TL and to strive to achieve the optimal communicative results given the relative nature of equivalence and the difficulties in cross-cultural and cross-jurisdictional communication. This may also have implications for the training of legal translators in basic knowledge of the relevant legal systems and legal languages, apart from the general translation skills required.

In this paper the author carries out an elementary research into the vague translation method and introduces his practical experiences of the vague translation method of Chinese poems and Chinese cis and the purpose of vague translation method.The application of the vague translation method can help the translator to overcome the difficulties in translation and express the contents of the original perfectly. This method is suitable to translation of any language.