Babel - Volume 56, Issue 3, 2010

This increasingly more plural and changing society demands resources that allow communication between those arriving and those who are already there. Such a situation has been occurring since time immemorial, but since the last decades of the twentieth century it has accelerated and reached other countries where until now this phenomenon was unknown, such as the southern and eastern countries members of the EU.

In the article some research about those needs and solutions within the specific field of public service interpreting and translating (PSIT) and from three different perspectives (the scholar and researcher’s; the intermediary’s; and the service provider’s) are presented. These three perspectives are complementary, but for the sake of clarity and given the difficulty and lack of information and resources available in some language combinations, as well as the intricacies of the role played by the translator and interpreter (Tr&In) in these environments, I will structure the article in this way. The main focus will be on Spain, one of the EU countries where the phenomenon of migration has reached the highest level.


This paper focuses on the aspect of question translation between English and Yoruba. Translation serves as a mirror through which any language can be relatively replicated into another. Question proposition between English and Yoruba are significant in the body of language knowledge among about 30 million Yoruba users of English in the western part of Nigeria and diaspora.

This study explored the types of question propositions between English and Yoruba, and their process in translation free from the former to the latter, and, vice versa, using the literal and idiomatic continuum of translation proposed by Larson (1984).
 The findings of the paper revealed that question translation between both languages has implications on the characteristics of language which affect translation. The similarities and peculiarities of each language as they affect the translation to Wh, Yes/no, Echo, Tag and Alternative questions in both languages were highlighted. Also underscored was the significance of translating question proposition between both languages in pedagogical and other contexts of communication.


This study is based on a bilingual corpus made up of advertisements published in North American magazines and their translations for French Canadians, and on a unilingual corpus of advertisements published in France.

Drawing primarily on research conducted in the area of cultural studies and on such concepts as universalism/particularism, individualism/collectivism, monochronic/synchronic cultures, etc., this paper analyses the part played by feelings and language, and the referential preferences in the North American advertisements, their translated versions and the French advertisements.


This essay discusses translation and translator choices in the context of importing a small-language poet into English-language circulation. Small-language imports play a modest but supporting role in counteracting the sort of cultural daltonism that screens any number of cultures and literatures from general global view. Taking the first English-language anthology of poetry by nineteenth-century Catalan-language poet Jacint Verdaguer (Selected Poems of Jacint Verdaguer: A Bilingual Edition, University of Chicago, 2007) as a case in point, the author/translator argues that if the native-culture value of poetic production is to be preserved in the new cultural and literary currency, contextual essentials (historical, social, literary) must be brought to light. Where the texts themselves are concerned, the translator of poetry must seek to re-create the form-content synthesis of the original, even as new intratextual and intertextual meanings and correspondences emerge in translation.