Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 28, Issue 3, 2016

In considering the challenges for court interpreters, much of the previous research has concentrated on the linguistic aspects of the interpreting process. This paper explores the issue from the perspective of working conditions and professional status. One hundred and ninety-four practicing court interpreters in Australia were surveyed about their experience with working conditions, court protocols and professional status, as well as their opinions about what affects the quality of their work and what improvements may be necessary. The findings of this study give a picture of the reality of court interpreting practice, as compared to the ideal, and generate recommendations for the training of interpreters to work in court, the education of legal personnel on how to work with interpreters in court, and practical suggestions regarding the provision of court interpreting to ensure high quality services.

This paper proposes a new way of identifying and analysing positive transfer on the basis of corpus data. Taking stock of process-oriented research into what is called ‘literal translation’, transfer is defined as an instance in which a translator is primed into using a target language item that is formally similar to the source item to be translated, when alternatives are available. In order to measure the extent to which morphological transfer is present in translation, a study is conducted on translations of negative prefixes in parallel corpora of French, Swedish and Dutch. The corpus study revealed that ( 1 ) transfer is by far the main translation option translators choose in all corpora involved, ( 2 ) transfer is more frequent when translators have the opportunity to use a cognate prefix in the other language, ( 3 ) transfer is more frequent between languages belonging to the same language family. The results of the study contradict the generally acknowledged fact that transfer is more likely from a language which is culturally dominant to a language which is not.

This paper begins by acknowledging translation as an important site of language contact and its primary aim is to reinterpret a theoretical framework from the field of language contact, namely Johanson’s Code-Copying Framework ( 1993 , 1999 , 2002a ), with translation in mind. The framework is then systematically applied to empirical data and a corpus-based study is conducted, using the translation of popular science articles from English into Greek as a case in point, and in particular examining any change in the frequency of passive voice reporting verbs. The discussion and corpus analysis suggest that the Code-Copying Framework offers a new vantage point for understanding translation as facilitating linguistic development in the target language, and that translation studies can benefit from adopting it as a descriptive mechanism when comparing instances of contact through translation across languages.

Audio description (AD) is a unique form of communication that guarantees access to audiovisual material for blind people through an additional verbal commentary that describes relevant visual cues. In spite of its original purpose and target audience, some scholars and some guidelines maintain that AD can be useful for other sectors of the population, and suggest that sighted viewers could usefully listen to AD when ‘watching’ a film with blind people. In order to determine whether AD affects the sighted viewer’s cognitive performance and appreciation of the film, and whether AD can be exploited as an integration tool allowing blind and sighted users to mingle when ‘watching’ a film, we assessed the effect of AD on sighted viewers (n = 125, 18-28 years) empirically. Results suggest that the addition of AD to films does not negatively affect the cognitive aspects of the viewing experience (i.e., general understanding and film scene recognition), nor does it dramatically affect its overall enjoyment, whereas listening to AD without the visuals poses some challenges to sighted viewers.

This article argues for intralingual intertemporal translations as a separate category within the field of translation studies. Not only do these translations seem to have common characteristics and behaviors, but it is precisely their particularities that make them a key to understanding more ‘typical’ translations. Two main sets of examples will serve as demonstration: translations from Old French into Middle and Modern French, and a Modern Hebrew translation of the Old Testament, originally written in Biblical Hebrew, as well as the public discussion following its publication.