Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2008

An increasing amount of linguistic corpus-based research is being carried out and especially within semantics, some groundbreaking results are highly relevant to Translation Studies. Research has shown that evaluation in language is very much anchored in extended lexical units and not merely in the lexeme. Corpus-based semantic profiles of words reveal evaluative features which may not be accessible through introspection and which have therefore not been part of dictionary information. Previous empirical research has almost exclusively been concerned with native speakers of English. The present study, however, tests and compares the awareness of these evaluative features in the behaviour of soon-to-be translators and first year LSP English students when using their foreign language.

This article addresses ambiguity in translations for children. ‘Ambiguity’, here understood as something that allows for more than one interpretation, is supposed to be critical in translation for children as it clashes with some mediators’ ideas of what children’s literature is or ought to be. Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of “Den standhaftige Tinsoldat” [‘The steadfast tin soldier’] and a sample of twenty-four translations thereof (twelve into Swedish and twelve into Spanish) are used to explore different ways that ambiguity is translated for children. The objective is to determine if and how the tale’s ambiguities are manipulated in the various translations, and thus to initiate a theoretical discussion of ambiguity in translation for children. A difference is established between ‘textually resolvable’ and ‘textually irresolvable’ ambiguities and these two kinds of ambiguity are found to be treated differently in the analyzed sample of translations.

This article argues that when striving for quality in subtitling, special attention should be paid to the requirements of competence not only when recruiting translators, but also when recruiting local managers and subtitling co-ordinators. The findings are based on a stylistic comparison of the Finnish, French and Russian subtitled versions of 8 Mile, a film that tells about Eminem’s early breakthrough as a rap artist (UIP, 2002). The rap sections of the film present many ‘text-specific translation problems’ (Nord), which become even more troublesome in the context of subtitling, as the translator has space for less text. The worldwide subtitling and dubbing of 8 Mile was an especially well-supervised procedure. The translators were given a lot of material support (e.g., a detailed ‘dialogue list’) but their work was also strictly controlled and limited. According to this study, the severe policy of some local UIP offices may have hindered the quality of subtitling in some countries.

This paper focuses on the translations of English -ly adverbs of degree into Spanish. The English suffix -ly has been traditionally associated with the expression of manner. However, it also actualises other meanings, in particular degree. In Spanish, the formal equivalents of -ly adverbs are adverbs ending in -mente, but the latter occur less frequently and with different pragmatic nuances. Adverbs of degree can be translated into -mente adverbs but also into other resources such as non -mente adverbs, prepositional phrases, adjectives, etc. The aim is to establish a taxonomy of translation solutions extracted from a parallel corpus in order to reveal cross-linguistic correspondences useful in translator training and translation quality assessment.

This paper presents the results of a study on research on spoken and signed language community interpreting (CI) in German-speaking countries (Austria, Germany, German-speaking regions of Switzerland). A set of different scientometric, network analytical and text linguistic (keyword analysis, title word analysis, co-occurrence analysis) methodological tools is used to investigate this specific field of research. The paper is a follow-up to a first brief introductory paper on that topic (Grbić and Pöllabauer 2006a) and presents an in-depth analysis of the subject. The corpus of the study includes 595 publications on research into spoken and signed CI in German-speaking countries, which were published between 1979 and 2006. It was compiled on the basis of a comprehensive search of the literature. The study focuses, among other aspects, on the types of documents published in that field of research (with a specific focus on journal articles, collective volumes, papers in collective volumes, graduation and doctoral theses) and the nature of the publications, the overall growth rates of publications on that field, the most common languages of publication, the disciplinary affiliation of the authors, the agents (people, institutions) involved in researching CI as well as the networks of authors and co-authorships, and the topics touched upon in research on CI and the most common co-occurrences of topics.

Ideas, concepts, theories and methods spread within and across disciplines, communities, countries and traditions. Richard Dawkins (1976: 214) has suggested that memes (units of cultural transmission) are in competition for survival, and that in some situations of stability it is difficult for a new meme to invade. My interest is in concepts, theories and methods in academia, and the fact that these memes have more or less difficulty in spreading. They encounter more or less resistance in jumping boundaries, whether those boundaries are disciplinary or boundaries constituted by national research traditions. The aim of my paper is to discuss the spread of ideas, and situations of resistance and non-resistance to the spread of ideas, taking as examples three cases of boundary-crossing research projects in Translation Research. I shall suggest through those examples how resistance may be overcome.

Insufficient attention has been paid in Translation Studies to the challenges particular to translating social scientific texts. Of the few who have taken up the topic, Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that one of the distinguishing characteristics of social scientific texts is that they traffic in concepts. Wallerstein wants the translation of social science to further the possibility of a universal conversation in the social sciences. I argue that a universal conversation in the social sciences is neither possible nor desirable. Instead, this article proposes that translating social science can contribute to conceptual clarification and elaboration. In this way, the translation may complement and further the flowering of the ‘original’ concept. The essay concludes with an extended example — how ‘bewilderment’ might be translated into Spanish.