Babel - Volume 60, Issue 3, 2014

Apart from referring to a geographical or physical border, the notion of frontera has also become a metaphorical or psychological construct which represents any situation of contrast, such as belonging to two different national, cultural or linguistic communities. Latino writers in the United States live and write on the frontera. The coming together of two cultures forges a new hybrid identity which fights against essentialism and homogenization. This hybrid identity is reflected in these writers’ language, a border tongue constantly switching from English to Spanish. Sandra Cisneros is one of those Latina writers who resort to code-switching as an identity hallmark. By introducing Spanish words, phrases or syntactic constructions into her English texts, Cisneros tries to evoke the feeling of inhabiting two worlds which can be conflicting and complementary at the same time. Departing from the notion of frontera, several translations of Cisneros’s works are analysed, paying special attention to those aspects related to identity and language. Particularly, I focus on the Mexican Spanish, Galician and Catalan versions of The House on Mango Street, the translation of Woman Hollering Creek into Mexican Spanish, the Catalan versions of several short stories from Woman Hollering Creek and the Galician translation of Loose Woman. In all the analysed versions, the translators use strategies which reflect the border identity present in the source text, such as the resource to code-switching and typographical markers or the use of calques and other borrowings, dialectalisms, and non-standard vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar.

Codes of ethics in translating and interpreting have become increasingly examined in recent literature, as practitioners in ever-widening fields of practice see such codes as essential in underpinning their professionalism. While such codes in various professions set standards for their association’s membership, codes in some sectors of translating and interpreting often have a wider function, detailing ground rules and techniques for practice and serving as educational documents, for users of services as much as for practitioners. The code of ethics developed by the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators [AUSIT] has been often cited in international literature as a broad, comprehensive generic code for professional practice. When this code was recently rewritten by its association, the wider functions of the code, as well as core considerations of practitioners’ role, conduct and autonomy were extensively debated. This article examines the issues that arose in rewriting the AUSIT code, drawing on international comparisons of how other codes have defined their central tenets.

This paper presents a study of the redesign of metacognitive questionnaires carried out along a two-part German-Spanish translation course. The study focuses on post-translation questionnaires used by trainees to self-evaluate their translating, as a function of their strategic subcompetence. Post-translation questionnaires were redesigned ongoingly, as needed, in order to improve their effectiveness in meeting the trainees’ evolving needs. This redesign was based on the students’ feedback combined with the teacher’s perceptions, and led to three types of changes. Firstly, questions not optimally meeting the intended target were modified. As the mental action involved in these questions was not specific enough to prevent off-target answers, each was reworded accordingly and occasionally given an interpersonal dimension favouring intermental reflection. Secondly, certain questions were newly designed, so that they included such interpersonal dimension from the very beginning. These also presented the students with open tasks promoting learner autonomy and asked them to justify their answers, thereby enhancing their translational reflection. Thirdly, a group of questions were suppressed from one part of the course to the other, as the mental action involved in each no longer matched the trainees’ increased procedural knowledge.