Babel - Volume 60, Issue 4, 2014

The current economic and financial crisis apart from impoverishing many countries has paradoxically enriched language by coining a multitude of new terms to explain and define the new situation. However, due to different cognitive, terminological and socio-pragmatic constraints, many of these financial neonyms, originally created in English, have been poorly transferred into Spanish or left untranslated thus losing most of their original distinctive and explanatory purpose. Many Spanish financial experts tend to use the English forms or render literal and often meaningless translations. This paper explores the structure of financial crisis neonyms in the light of their terminological composition and professional and social practice and focusses on the problems created by their translation into Spanish mainly as a result of cognitive-inferential, semantic-terminological and pragmatic-communicative mismatches.

Drama translation studies used to be the most neglected area in translation studies due to its prescriptive approaches and reductionist illusion of polarization of performability and readability. Corpus stylistics of drama, with the aid of computer technology as well as the understanding of the true nature of drama as the dialectical combination of both literary and theatrical characteristics, appears to be a remarkable theoretical framework and methodology for drama translation studies. The study of (im)politeness in Death of a Salesman and its two Chinese versions is undertaken as a case study. ICTCLAS and Concordance 3.0 were used to calculate the high frequent expressions concerning (im)politeness in both the original text and the Chinese versions, followed by the analysis of their stylistic function. It is found that modal particles and slang expressions in Chinese are useful to reconstruct the characterization, plot as well as performability of the translated drama. In conclusion, corpus stylistics of drama is of high feasibility in drama translation studies.

Onomatopoeia are words with peculiar phonological features and expressive capacity which distinguish them from other types of words. These traits together with other elements related to their use in each language often pose a challenge for translators of specific language combinations. This article analyses how Chinese onomatopoeia are translated into Spanish, and it is based on a case study of the Spanish version of the Chinese novel Huozhe (活着) (To live). This piece of creative writing has been chosen because the original text contains many onomatopoeia and because the target text can be regarded as a fine example from a translation point of view. The article begins with a brief overview of the main features of these words and their role in literary texts, as well as the general results of the analysis of a corpus of seven contemporary Chinese novels and their translations into Spanish. Subsequently, the study explores the translation of onomatopoeia in the selected work of fiction in order to identify the mechanisms and translation techniques the translator has adopted and the results in the Spanish target text.

This paper is a fieldwork study framed in the community interpreting branch of Translation and Interpreting Studies, a current dealing with mediated interactions in Public Services. In accordance with the scope of this discipline, the following pages focus on highlighting the importance of pragmatic theories in an interlinguistic, triangular communication occurring within mental health consultations. The fundamental idea is to combine some of the most relevant pragmatic principles in order to establish an ideal communicative frame we can subsequently contrast with the reality of interlinguistic interactions in mental health settings. In consequence, the first part of the paper seeks to portray the importance of Pragmalinguistics in this context by providing a theoretical frame which is also used as the base for formulating certain questions that arise due to its implications for the interpreting process. These issues are the pillars for two brief questionnaires: the first one is addressed both to novice and experienced interpreters whereas the second set of questions was distributed among mental health professionals. The analysis of the survey results seeks to achieve three main objectives: i) to determine agreement and disagreement points between both parties; ii) to combine their opinions with the aforementioned theoretical bases in order to establish certain guidelines and solutions that may improve communication; iii) to define the interpreter’s role within our field of study.

Linguistic expressions in every language have established patterns with meanings that can be inferred by linguistic conventions. Languages have their own norms and expressing systems that make transferred linguistic formulas seem odd. Any deviation from the established patterns can be referred to as interference. Interference in translation is the transfer of some linguistic aspect of the source text (ST) into the target text (TT). The term includes any kind of influence that is exerted by the linguistic properties of the ST on the linguistic properties of the TT. Lexical items and syntactic structures of the source language are copied into the TT, resulting in the phenomenon called ‘translationese’. As a result of interference, translation has introduced a plethora of words, expressions, and constructions into Arabic, resulting in a change in modern Arabic style. One phenomenon that Arabic has witnessed in modern times is linguistic recycle. This term refers to the re-utilization of translated expressions and syntactic structures in Arabic in its intra-linguistic operation (opposed to the inter-linguistic event of translation). The language community has been using these translation-introduced formulations although they do not conform to the canonical patterns of Arabic. Being unaware of this fact, speakers of Arabic use the translation-introduced expressions and constructions instead of the native ones although they have at their disposal a variety of formulations to express the same ideas. Linguistic recycle can be categorized into the three areas of lexis, syntax, and culture. Using a contrastive approach, the paper investigates the areas of lexis and syntax, demonstrating the pervasiveness of this phenomenon and its impact on Arabic. Corpora of Arabic have been used to detect and verify occurrences of expressions and structures.