Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2010

The default option of the Google Translator Toolkit (GTT), released in June 2009, is to “pre-fill with machine translation” all segments for which a ‘no match’ has been returned by the memories, while the Settings window clearly advises that “[m]ost users should not modify this”. To confirm whether this approach indeed benefits translators and translation quality, we designed and performed tests whereby trainee translators used the GTT to translate passages from English into Chinese either entirely from the source text, or after seeding of empty segments by the Google Translate engine as recommended. The translations were timed, and their quality assessed by independent experienced markers following Australian NAATI test criteria. Our results show that, while time differences were not significant, the machine translation seeded passages were more favourably assessed by the markers in thirty three of fifty six cases. This indicates that, at least for certain tasks and language combinations — and against the received wisdom of translation professionals and translator trainers — translating by proofreading machine translation may be advantageous.

When writers of literary prose adopt a new language — a phenomenon known as exophony — this often leads them to mould the new language until it becomes suitable for their purposes, in a manner analogous to the strategies of appropriation observed in post-colonial literatures (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989). This process often results in a defamiliarisation of the new language through stylistic innovation, which, in turn, has implications for the translation of these texts. This article, influenced by Berman’s ‘analytique négative’ (1985), proposes a series of guidelines for the translation of exophonic texts and illustrates these with examples taken from German exophonic prose texts by Franco Biondi, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Yoko Tawada.

This study focuses on the discoursal role of repetition, exploring the way shifts in repetition patterns in text trigger coherence shifts, altering the meaning potential of translations. As repetition in translation has been hypothesized to be affected by certain universals of translation, the paper also offers initial data to support the universals of explicitation and avoiding repetition. Lexical repetitions are investigated using Hoey’s (1991) theory in a corpus of Hungarian — English news texts. Analyses reveal considerable shifts in repetition in translations; however, these differences are not statistically significant. The corpus also provides evidence for repetition shifts affecting the macropropositional structure of target texts, leading to macropropositional shifts, which alter the global meaning of translations compared to sources.

This article examines the translational choices in the Spanish dubbed version of the American sitcom Will & Grace for the terms ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’, ‘queer’ and ‘fag’. Firstly, I introduce the main features of the programme before moving on to present research on gay-related issues within Translation Studies. Drawing on Fairclough’s approach to discourse, the next section discusses the concepts of ‘schemata’ and ‘scripts’, as used here, and relates them to the concept of identity. The evolution of the lexical items ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’, ‘queer’ and ‘fag’ is examined (Hughes 1991; Allan & Burridge 2006) before presenting data on the preferred choices in the original programme as well as in the Spanish version. Baker’s strategies for word equivalence (1992) will be used to establish whether the use of negative terms such as ‘marica’ and ‘maricón’ aptly replace the source language term, ‘gay’. The article concludes with a discussion of whether the dysphemic nature of the terms prevails and whether traditional schemata are maintained.

This article provides a brief presentation of the development of some cognitive scientific views on technical communication and translation. I look in detail at one of the latest cognitive scientific trends, namely Situated and Embodied Cognition. According to this approach, humans are creative beings who are dependent on their physical and psychological circumstances. I provide a brief overview of the background to situated, embodied cognition, present some of its main concepts and conclude with a number of proposals about how findings in this field can be used to further develop research in Technical Communication and Translation Studies. In doing so, I argue that the new findings in cognitive science will necessarily change some of the common concepts and methodological traditions with regard to the actual text production process and competencies.