Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 27, Issue 2, 2015

Simeoni’s seminal paper (1998) has spurred many to investigate translators’ habitus, both initial and professional, though fine-grained analysis is lacking. This paper argues that a translator’s professional habitus is highly influenced by the adjacent discipline. With Edgar Snow as an illustrative case, it attempts to explore the influence of journalism on the structuring of Snow’s professional habitus as a translator. An analysis of Snow’s social trajectory and inculcation of journalistic habitus and his translation strategies as a journalist translator, especially those of deletion of ‘telling,’ addition of ‘showing,’ and changing of beginning and ending, demonstrates that Snow’s professional habitus as a translator is obviously affected by his profession as a journalist. The translator’s habitus is a locus revealing a visible embodiment of interdisciplinary influences, and his/her professional habitus is a combination of dispositions of both the profession of translation and the profession of the adjacent discipline.

To explore how oral history methodologies could be incorporated into translation studies research, this paper begins by reviewing oral history’s approach to conducting, preserving and analyzing oral, retrospective interviews. It then examines how oral history methods could help enhance existing methodological and documentation standards in translation studies, expand the range of sources available for current and future historical studies of translators and interpreters, and enhance existing theoretical frameworks in translation studies. Particular emphasis is placed on memory and performance in oral narratives, two aspects of interviews that seem underrepresented in existing translation studies literature, and some attention is paid to how existing translation studies research could benefit oral history.

This article investigates the Chinese translations of several English news reports on China’s human rights issue carried in Reference News, a Chinese authoritative state-run newspaper devoted to translating foreign reports for the Chinese reader, and aims to establish how evaluative resources are resorted to by the translators to facilitate ideologically different positioning in presenting events and identifying participants in the translated news. The translations are compared with their English source texts using Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005) as the micro analytical framework and Fairclough’s (1995a, 1995b) three-dimension model of Critical Discourse Analysis as the explanatory framework.

This paper examines the reported actions and strategies of translators working in three closely related languages, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, which have recently undergone re-codification in countries that have greatly changed their language planning and language policy regulations. The legacy of former and unofficial designations such as ‘Serbo-Croatian’ or ‘Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian’ within the post-conflict situation is contextualised and translators’ decision-making processes and reported strategies in relation to language form and designation are examined. The paper seeks to demonstrate the explanatory power of Toury’s notion of norms as a framework to account for new regularities of practice. Texts identified to be different from their nominal code, or market requests to work from or into unofficial designations are now problematised and re-negotiated as secondary practices or a less commonly reported behaviour. The paper extends and applies the notion of norms to the social and occupational, macro-pragmatic role that translators occupy.

Typological studies on the linguistic expression of motion are certainly of interest to translation scholars. The study of how motion is expressed across languages has indeed revealed some striking typological differences (e.g., Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000; Berman and Slobin 1994; Stromqvist and Verhoeven 2004), which can account for some of the strategies translators resort to when dealing with motion expressions (Slobin 1996; Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2003; Cifuentes-Férez 2006, 2013; Ibarretxe-Antuñano and Filipović 2013). However, the question still remains as to whether translators’ decisions are exclusively guided by such typological differences or whether there are other experience- or task-related factors that may explain their behaviour. This paper provides empirical evidence on the type of factors that guide translators’ decisions when translating manner-of-motion verbs, exploring the impact of different types of texts and the translator’s level of expertise. For this purpose, a pilot think-aloud protocol is implemented in order to examine the translation process of ten Spanish translators (five professionals and five graduate students without professional experience) when transferring manner-of-motion verbs from English into Spanish. Our results reveal that the way translators deal with manner information is mainly influenced by typological differences between the two languages. But differences in the translators’ level of professional expertise and in task-related constraints (e.g., the degree in which different type of texts focus on motion verbs) also have an effect on the strategies that translators choose to convey manner information.