Babel - Volume 54, Issue 4, 2008

In recent years, several authors have underlined the need to enforce a critical approach to translation studies in order to explore ideologies in both source and target languages and cultures (Hermans 1999; Baker 2006). In this article we shall study BBCMundo’s news web texts and their source English BBCWorld reports from a critical approach. The article is divided into three sections. Firstly, we analyse two series of news texts. We shall discuss the use of headlines in the STs and TTs and proceed to study the strategies used in the main bodies of the reports, notably omissions, additions and permutations. Secondly, we shall concentrate on a case study in an attempt to gain further insight into the interplay of translational and editorial procedures within the Spanish service of the BBC. In a final section, we shall carry out the discussion about the ideological implications of the translational strategies identified in the previous sections.

The paper discusses the procedure and findings of a research project that studied the perceived impact of literal vs. meaningful renditions in a mock court situation involving Chinese migrants residing in Sydney. We will begin with a description of a research procedure known in linguistics as matched guise and will then continue with discussions of the use of the procedure in the present project including designing the guises, sampling the subjects and formulating a questionnaire. Then there will be discussions and analyses of the data collected from the survey, which were generated with social-sciences statistics software. The findings generated on the basis of the data are discussed in terms of general statistical patterns, and with special regard to the subjects’ perceptions about the solicitor’s professionalism, solicitor’s personality, court milieu, anticipation of the possible final verdict and knowledge of the judicial procedures. We will conclude the paper with a preliminary discussion of what may have contributed to the shaping of the perceptions formed by the subjects.To the best of our knowledge, the project discussed in this paper is one of the very few that attempts to study the impact on the users of interpreting, hence its academic and professional significance.

Most of the current Translation Memory systems are based on segments determined by marks that in most cases correspond to a complete sentence. The problem of complete sentence matching is that examples are often excluded from the matching candidates even though they probably contain one or more useful sub-segments that could be helpful to the translation.In view of these limitations, some proposals have been made in the literature regarding the possibility of building Translation Memory systems that operate “below” the sentence level, that is to say, at a sub-sentential level. Existing work demonstrates that sub-sentential segmentation of Translation Memories clearly shows a significantly best recall with respect to sentential.segmentation. Accepting the benefits of sub-sentential segmentation of Translation Memories, in this paper we consider different possibilities of sub sentential segmentation and attempt an evaluation of the recall (covering sequences of chunks) and the precision (usability of these chunks) obtained by noun phrase chunk segmentation.Our experiments show that pre- or postmodified NPs turn out to be especially adequate for pretranslation tasks tasks as they show a minimum cost by a maximum gain.. In other words, their translation is on the one side not trivial as it often involves structural divergences between language and at the same time they are context independent enough that they can be reused without changes in most cases.

Whereas translating is generally considered to be a creative activity, mentioning this in the context of legal translation is, rather paradoxically, widely frowned upon despite the fact that the ­incongruency of legal systems makes finding exact equivalents particularly difficult in legal texts.Convinced that in fact translating the law requires taking insightful judgments, detecting interesting alternatives, coming up with novel ways to communicate ideas, and finding useful ­solutions to complex problems, the author examines the dynamic concept of creativity and redefines its meaning with regard to legal translation.

When tackling the issue of translation between Spanish and Catalan, Branchadell and West state that translation into a minority language like Catalan is truly an ill-studied and poorly understood phenomenon (2004:16). This paper aims to start a debate on a language pair that has scarcely been studied and is still poorly known even in the Spanish context: two languages that live together, two close languages, two languages always determined by the socio-political and historical circumstances around them, and, as a result, two languages well understood by all speakers in the crowded Catalan region.We will focus on the contextual factors that take part and determine this translation practice: ­­the linguistic profile of their speakers, the bi-directionality of professional translation, self-translation and the specificity of fields in the professional marketplace. We will also examine the implications that derive from them, especially the implications for teaching. This paper will reopen some interesting theoretical debates, like directionality, self-translation, market relations and power balances between a major and a minor language. For example, the closeness of these two languages does not guarantee success in translation, the concepts of direct and reverse translation are not very useful and precise in this language combination, and the reasons for commissioning a translation are not just to facilitate understanding among the readers of the target language.