Babel - Volume 62, Issue 1, 2016

This paper examines the translation of economic texts authored by Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, published originally by The New York Times in both their printed and Internet editions, and in Spanish by El País. It comprises a small parallel corpus of eighteen original columns and their equivalent Spanish versions, a total of 31,196 words. The article will consider the translation of stable sources (Hernández Guerrero 2009) within the narrative of the economic recession that started in early 2010s. It will use Nord’s functional model (2005) to analyse the texts. The objectives of the study are: (1) to establish whether translators opt for instrumental or documentary translation, and (2) to consider whether stable sources such as the opinion columns written by prominent figures can be regarded as closed sources that do not accept major shifts during the translational process. I will look at extratextual factors such as time, space and motivation, as well as intratextual features such as linking devices, thematic organization, markers of text composition and lexis. In the final section, I will attempt to provide an interpretation from the perspective of communication studies, which might inform translation research as well. For the discussion I will draw on Castells’ proposal for the study of media discourse and its connection with the political power (2009).

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it attempts to demonstrate that Arabic utterances involving euphemisms, tautologies and ironies (henceforth Arabic implicatures) lend themselves readily to a Gricean interpretation and, second, it shows how Arabic implicatures in their immediate, social context of use exhibit pragmatic failures when rendered into English. The study examines and analyzes ten Arabic utterances involving implicatures in their original contexts of situation taken from Mahfouz’s (1947) Ziqāq al-Midaq which was translated by LeGassick (1966) into ‘Midaq Alley’, and Ṭayib Ṣaleḥ’s (1966) Mawsimu al-Hijra ila ashShamāl, which was rendered by Davies (1969) into ‘the Season of Migration to the North’. The study argues that to avoid pragmatic failure when translating Arabic implicatures into English, emphasis should be placed on conveying the pragmatic import of these utterances by the employment of various translation strategies ranging from those capturing the form and/or function to those capturing the communicative sense independently.

The aim of this study is to investigate translators’ behaviors in translating fantasy fiction in Taiwan, with the help of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological model. The application of a sociological approach to translation studies allows an examination of the social and cultural nature of translation by locating this activity within a particular social structure. The investigation was conducted by employing a parallel corpus study of fantasy fiction translations: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone and Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights. Translators’ textual behaviors when dealing with culture-specific items (CSIs) were analyzed. The results revealed a source-oriented tendency when translating CSIs. The evidence from the textual analysis was interpreted and discussed in terms of the interactions between the translators’ collective habitus and the social determinants in the literary field in Taiwan.

A 2011 Gender Violence Macrosurvey carried out by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS, Spanish Centre for Sociological Research) in collaboration with the Spanish Government alerts The Macro on Gender Violence conducted by the Sociological Research Centre (CIS) gives significant figures on gender-based violence (GBV) suffered by foreign women in Spain. Based on the specificity of care for foreign women in issues of gender based violence (GBV) and taking as its starting point previous investigations by FITISPOs, the recommendations and work carried out within the European project SOS VICS and my own experience, the main aim of this article is twofold: first, to draw attention to qualitative aspects of the interactions between service providers, interpreters and foreign victims of gender based violence ( GBV), and secondly, to, investigate what happens when some ethical dilemmas come up between the different professionals that take care of GBV.

The significance of the concept of strategy, broadly defined as a solution for a translation problem, has increasingly been recognised in Translation Studies. It has widely been referred to in descriptive studies of translation and its most practical considerations. This article aims at providing a closer perspective of the term and the area of debates in its practicality in order to draw a plan for its application in translation training. It could ideally been assumed that by finding common strategies applicable in different translation classrooms with different SL-TL pairs, we could find a way towards the general model of translation and translation training. Translation strategies, therefore from this standpoint, could be of assistance to improve translation competence at academia and thereby, to increase translation quality in a global context.

This paper, with an eye to the interpersonal component in translational activities, adopts a systemic functional approach to the examination and comparison of modal patterns in interpreted and translated discourses of Chinese Premier’s press conferences and his reports on the work of the government from 2008 to 2012. Following a comprehensive analysis of modality in terms of type, orientation and value, the study shows that, despite their differences in translational mode (i.e. written and spoken) and temporal constraint (i.e. prepared and impromptu), interpreted and translated diplomatic discourses share some common trends in modal distribution. In particular, the massive use of modulation and the favorite collocation of first person pronouns with volitive modal verbs such as will are classic in discourses as such. Additionally, only a minimal number of low-valued modality is used in both translation and interpretation. Given the political sensitivity and policy orientation of diplomatic translation and the institutional identity of diplomatic translators, it is argued that an effective manipulation of modality is essential to their fulfillment of the capacity of “policy endorsers” in reproducing interpersonal connotations embedded in the source language. The paper may also shed some light on the research on translator/interpreters’ role.

Translation S- and T-universals have been widely discussed in Translation Studies and their psycholinguistic study has been among the priority topics today. The article is focused on the study of translation ‘S- universals’ (Chesterman 2004) and is based both on the psycholinguistic model of literary translation, which combines today’s neuroscience theories of cognitivism and connectionism, and on the experimental data that demonstrate its validity. The model is resulted in a series of experiments held with undergraduate students of translation department. The results of the study proved the idea of existing specific procedural and discursive S-universals in literary translation. As the empirical data showed, these universals maintain the status of common strategies depending on translator’s cognitive style (analytical or synthetic) and his dominant channel (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) of source text perception.

This paper is an attempt to guide the teachers how the assessment process should be and it highlights the effectiveness and suitability of adopting the holistic method of assessment. This method was applied to the correction of students’ translations of the final exam containing different texts to be translated in both directions between English and Arabic. The exam was done by 36 female students at the Faculty for Women – Seiyun, Yemen on the undergraduate degree course of Translation (2). The hypothesis regarding the suitability and effectiveness of using the assessment holistic method and the possibility to improve the quality of the assessing the students’ translations in future based on this method has not been verified. This study concluded that the main factor which is clearly identifiable was translation competence and that this method was found out to be too lenient to give impartial translation quality assessment for the students’ translations.