Babel - Volume 61, Issue 4, 2015

In Korea, a first-of-its-kind national medical interpreter training program was launched in July 2009. This program was designed to assist with communication between Korean medical professionals and medical tourists who visit Korea for economical and advanced medical services. Medical tourism (MT) is Korea’s strategic industry for economic growth and the government has implemented various policies to support the MT industry, including the medical interpreter training program. Against this backdrop, recent discussion in Korean society about medical interpreting has been framed around non-resident medical tourists and tertiary referral hospitals engaging in MT. Medical interpreting has been generally considered special language services for foreign patients who seek sophisticated medical care in big-name hospitals. The need for better interpreter services has been discussed mainly in the context of MT; however, little attention has been paid to the situation of language access in ‘non-MT’ (i.e., ordinary) hospitals. The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, the study aims to explore unique conditions in Korea under which issues concerning medical interpreting have been addressed. Second, the study diagnoses problems with the medical communication in ordinary hospitals between Korean medical personnel and patients with limited proficiency in Korean.

Les nouvelles tendances alimentaires observées ces dernières années ont montré un intérêt croissant des populations pour une alimentation saine et équilibrée, c’est-à-dire, fonctionnelle, ayant contribué à l’apparition d’un nouvel axe de recherche dans les domaines des sciences des aliments et de la nutrition : le domaine des aliments fonctionnels et des nutraceutiques. Susceptible d’offrir de nouveaux débouchés sur le marché de la traduction, ce domaine constitue un terrain privilégié pour la formation de traducteurs/trices mais aussi pour les professionnels/elles du secteur. Ledit domaine a donné lieu à la réalisation d’un travail terminographique systématique de type descriptif et bilingue dont nous exposons ici des résultats partiaux. Le présent travail s’articule autour de cinq parties : cadre théorique de la recherche ; objectifs poursuivis ; méthodologie utilisée ; exposition de résultats partiaux de la recherche ; présentation d’un glossaire espagnol-français.

Film translation in China began as early as 1949 and has been developing very fast. This article aims at providing an overview of the current situation of film translation in China and explores the two major types of English-Chinese film translation: dubbing and subtitling. Therefore, it can be roughly divided into two parts. The first part constitutes a general background for the study of film translation. The author of this article first discusses film’s origin and nature, the features of film language and the classification of film translation. Of the four categories of film translation (subtitling, lip-sync dubbing, narration, and free-commentary), dubbing and subtitling are the main forms used in China. Then the differences between the two types and social preference for them are analyzed. The author also presents a summary of film translation’s development and current studies on this topic. The second part probes into the details of dubbing and subtitling. This article investigates the features and technical constraints of dubbing and subtitling. The main techniques adopted in practice are illustrated through specific examples. Both forms have their relative advantages and disadvantages. In subtitling, standardization and simplification are its two important techniques. Standardization is concerned with the transfer of text mode – from spoken text to written text, while simplification is related to the technical constraints in subtitling, namely spatial and temporal constraints. In dubbing, the translator should make his translation fit into the pictures and synchronize the lines and the pictures, so lip synchronization, gestures and pauses are the major constraints in dubbing. As the two main forms of film translation in China, dubbing and subtitling coexist and compete with each other in the market.

This paper aims to explore the strategies that translators adopt when rendering English proper nouns into Arabic and, consequently, offer both qualitative and quantitative insights into this process. It is a case study of proper nouns in professional Arabic translation based on one English novel (The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008); translated into Arabic by Taiba Sadeq (2011). Proper nouns are categorized and analyzed in terms of internal syntactic structure (Central, Converted and Extended proper nouns), as well as thematically (e.g. personal names, names of institutions, bodies of water, etc.), with an eye to establishing correlations between the type of proper noun and the translation strategy opted for. The results indicate that the translator’s choice between different strategies is governed by two main factors. Firstly, the translator needs to check whether the proper noun individualizes entities by means of ordinary language predicates (e.g. common nouns), proper nouns proper, or a combination of both, as each type usually requires a different strategy. Secondly, the translator needs to pay attention to the degree of comprehensibility and naturalness of his/her rendering, which may necessitate consolidating the single strategies of transliteration and translation with addition in the form of a generic word or even substitution in the case of idiomatic proper nouns. The paper concludes that proper nouns cannot be treated uniformly in translation between English and Arabic because they belong to different categories and, consequently, they may require different translation strategies including transliteration, complete translation, partial translation, transliteration plus addition, and translation plus addition.

It is a well-known fact that translated texts present a number of peculiarities which distinguish its language from the one found in texts produced originally. Many studies have tried to name some of these phenomena, which are usually grouped together under the umbrella term of ‘translation universals’. It has been demonstrated that translations do share a number of features irrespective of the source or target languages involved. Other divergences between original and translated texts are due to source language interference and are, therefore, language-dependent. This paper is a corpus-based study of several highly frequent Spanish adjectives in original texts and in texts translated from English. The unmarked position of attributive adjectives is the pre-modifying one in English and the post-modifying one in Spanish, though. Spanish also allows for the pre‑modifying position with certain connotations. The aim of this study is to identify differences in behavioral patterns with respect to adjective position in original and translated Spanish and explain these differences in terms of translation universals and/or source language interference. The results have revealed cases of simplification, unique item under-representation and untypical collocations in Spanish translations of English source texts.

The objective of this research is to develop a model of consecutive interpretation that can cope with a number of linguistic, pragmatic, stylistic, thematic, discourse and communicative problems a conference interpreter encounters while interpreting from English into Arabic or vice versa. A linguistic corpus of one hundred page English speeches delivered at the United Nation General Assembly sessions and interpreted into Arabic is analysed. The proposed model caters for both the SL and TL communicative contexts and views the conference interpreter as a mediator who decodes the original message and encodes it appropriately. The model is tested against the collected sample of linguistic data. It has proved to be capable of identifying inconsistencies and inaccuracies in five major areas: textual, stylistic, lexical, collocation and structural; the percentage of each is statistically calculated. The stylistic aspects constitute 39.3% of the inconsistencies; these cover the deviant forms that are not acceptable in Arabic: the stylistic variants, the modes of request, and the language forms that need to be reformulated in order to be consistent with the Arabic rhetorical patterns. The inappropriate rendering of lexical items makes up 26.1% of the inconsistencies; this comprises the inappropriately rendered collocation patterns, clichés and idiomatic expressions. The structural aspects constitute 18 % of the incorrectly interpreted language forms; these are the inappropriately rendered passive and modification constructions. The textual aspects constitute 10.9% of the inconsistencies; these are the parallel constructions that are not properly handled in Arabic. Translation inaccuracies, items missed or incorrectly interpreted, constitute 5.1% of the inconsistencies.

High-level political interpreting in China is a specialized interpretation with distinct principles and requirements and among them the interpreter’s political awareness plays a critical role. In this article, the political awareness is investigated through a detailed examination of the interpreter’s experiential meaning transfer using former Chinese Premier Zhu’s debut press conference in 1998 as a case study. The study then identifies three types of political awareness-manipulated strategies employed by the interpreter at the conference: (a) the addition of experiential meaning to express political standpoint; (b) the omission of experiential meaning to eliminate potential negative political effects; (c) the correction of inaccurate experiential meaning to avoid political misunderstanding. Lastly, implications are drawn with reference to field as one of the contextual variables and the social institutional context. The article argues that political awareness on the part of the political and diplomatic interpreter in China is a paramount interpreting competence, that effective interpretation of the Chinese state leader’s speeches depends upon the interpreter’s high level of political awareness, and that such awareness is determined by the source text’s relevant field and Chinese specific social institutional context.

Broadly historical in its approach, this article explores how the Xiaoxue (Lesser or Elementary Learning), or Sohak in Korean, a primary textbook for Confucianism in China, was translated into Korean at two different times with a span of seventy years between the versions in the sixteenth century. It argues that the two different versions of translation of the same book, Beonyeok Sohak and Sohak Eonhae, reflected not only significant differences in the principles and strategies of translation: free translation or literal translation and native words or foreign words, among other things; but they also revealed significant difference in the translators’ – or, for that matter, their commissioners’ – ideologies and worldviews. The two Korean versions of the Xiaoxue was thus a contested battleground for the scholars and the politicians. In sum, it claims that the debate on the methodology of translation is not just an issue specific to Western translation theory but also non-Western translation theory.