Babel - Volume 63, Issue 4, 2017

Scholars have extensively explored translation as product and as process, but relatively little attention has been paid to translation as a power of defence and construction. This paper proposes a modest step in this direction by conceptualizing the power of translation in the modern world of globalization in terms of the soft power theory, with particular reference to the Chinese context. With this in mind, the author argues that globalization presents both opportunities and challenges for translation as a soft power. In the face of rising fears regarding a crisis of identities and a cultural deficit intensified by globalization, the roles of translation as a “cultural filter” and a bridge for intercultural communication give it a defensive soft power. Under soft-power-oriented policies, translation not only serves as a “charm” tool for public diplomacy and nation-branding, but also contributes to an understanding of China’s ideals and helps export Chinese cultural values, thereby highlighting its role as a constructive soft power.

This study endeavors to explore the problems that Translation trainees’ mother culture poses when translating culture-specific idioms. The study used a translation task that comprises 20 culture-specific English idioms which incorporate lexical entities that can have negative connotations in the Arabic culture. The task was distributed to 40 randomly selected translation trainees, senior undergraduate translation students at the Department of Arabic and Translation, College of Languages, Sana’a University. Findings of the study show that the trainees’ mother culture had a considerable impact on the translation process. This impact exhibited itself in many forms, the most prominent of which is the tendency to offer a culturally-driven judgment of the content of the idiom instead of translating the idiom itself. The paper delineates the various forms of cultural interference as seen in the trainees’ renditions of the idioms in the study.

Translation, according to the German functional approach to Translation Studies, is a purpose-driven interaction that involves many players. Translating children’s stories is no exception. Using her personal experience of translating Mr. Wolf’s Hotline, a book comprising 47 Chinese children’s stories by Wang Yizhen, a contemporary Chinese writer , in light of the Skopos and text-type theories of functional approach in particular, the author has outlined the strategies and methods adopted in her translations in terms of language, structure and culture. With child readers in mind during the translation process, the translator has used rhetorical devices, onomatopoeic words, modal particles, and also changed some of the sentence structures of the stories, such as from indirect sentences into direct quotations, and from declarative sentences into questions. In terms of culture, three aspects, namely, the culture-loaded images, the names of the characters and nursery rhymes are singled out for detailed analyses.

Though marginalized, ‘children’s literature is more complex than it seems, even more complex’ (Hunt 2010: 1), and translation of children’s literature is definitely challenging. This paper outlines the strategies and methods the author has adopted in translating some children's stories from Chinese to English.

In this study we use a translation corpus of English novels translated into two closely related Celtic languages, Welsh and Breton, as one way of shedding light on the extent to which languages can influence each other over time: Welsh has a long history of contact with English, and Breton with French. Ever since the work of Leonard Talmy (1991, 2000 etc.), linguists have recognized that languages fall into a small number of types with respect to how they prefer to talk about motion events. English is a good exemplar of the satellite-framed type, whereas French exemplifies the verb-framed type. Translation scholars have observed that translating between languages of two different types raises interesting questions ( Slobin 2005 ; Cappelle 2012 ), and the topic is also of interest from the perspective of language contact: is it possible for a language of one type, in a situation of prolonged and intense bilingualism with a language of another type, to be influenced or perhaps even to change its own rhetorical preferences? The translation corpus provides a body of data which holds constant the starting point – the cue in each case was an English motion event in the source text. We do indeed find that Welsh and Breton have diverged in important ways in terms of their preferences for encoding motion events: Breton is revealed to have moved significantly in the direction of French with respect to these preferences.

This article draws on three American movies to illustrate censorship in English-Arabic subtitling. The paper argues that in translating languages of little cultural affinity, censorship serves as a remedy that can narrow the potential cultural gap. However, the paper shows that the films have been exposed to excessive censorship in the Arabic subtitles, although not in the original film. Therefore, the subtitles, usually viewed as a verbal-visual channel, work to restrict the flow of communication, depriving the target audience of much information existing in the Source Language (SL) dialogue. The fact that the shots help us understand what is being said is not fully taken into consideration by the satellite channels. The study finally reveals that two major strategies are employed in the translation, namely the omission of obscene utterances in the SL and the rendition of the SL obscenity into a less offensive equivalent in the Target Language (TL).

In recent years an increasing number of institutions have provided translation students with internships and/or placement as part of the curriculum. This paper presents findings from an empirical study in which a mixed-methods approach was employed to examine the perceptions and expectations of translation graduates on internships and to investigate the learning experience of translation graduates who had an internship experience. The findings suggest that internship programs for translation undergraduates should develop students’ translation skills and language skills. Whether or not internships should be paid and be counted towards the grade point average were given the least importance. It was found that “career aspirations” are the most important factor when translation students select an internship agency, followed by “the reputation of the organization”. A discrepancy between classroom learning and workplace practice was revealed, and this poses challenges for translation interns, who attribute the problems they encountered to the fact that the knowledge and skills they gained in university could not fulfil the needs required in the workplace. In addition, they coped with obstacles in workplace communication which are unlikely to be learnt in translation courses. Internships are thus seen to serve as a bridge between classroom knowledge and real-world practice.