Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 30, Issue 1, 2018

Andrew Chesterman’s 2008 article “On Explanation” examines what it means to explain translational phenomena. In doing so, it explores the nature of explanation itself and raises one crucial question: How much is beyond explanation? In other words, to what extent could translational phenomena be due to mere chance? This article addresses this question by drawing on six landmark experiments within the field of psychology. These experiments suggest (1) that we, as translators, might unknowingly be injecting random elements into our translations, and (2) that we, as Translation Studies scholars, might be ‘seeing’ causes in that randomness where there are none. This article also draws on psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s ideas about the ‘illusion of causation’ and on Nassim Taleb’s definition of randomness within the humanities and social sciences. It concludes by arguing that retrospective explanations of translations should pay far more than lip service to the notion of chance.

In the literature on medical translation, the question as to who translates (or should translate) medical texts has been largely discussed on the basis of the traditional linguists versus subject-matter experts opposition. Both scholars and professional translators have attempted to determine medical translators’ profile by making statements about the characteristics of translators with a linguistic background and those of translators with a scientific-medical one. These statements are generally based on intuition or personal experience rather than on empirical data which can be used to back up any kind of evaluation that may be made. This paper aims to bridge this gap by presenting the results of an empirical descriptive study which surveyed practicing medical translators. The survey included questions such as academic qualification, years of experience, customers, genres translated, main difficulties encountered, and degree of self-instruction received, among others. On the basis of these data, this paper approaches the medical translators’ profile and explores the main differences between translators with a linguistic background and translators with a scientific-medical one. The results show that some of the most substantial differences between them relate to the years of experience, difficulties encountered, documentation resources used, and training needs.

This study aims to answer three questions: (1) whether there are differences in the frequency of use of connectives between translated and non-translated Catalan literary texts; (2) whether these differences (if they exist) are sensitive to the type of semantic relation conveyed; and (3) to what extent they are due to explicitation or other factors. Quantitative analysis reveals that there is no significant difference in the overall frequency of occurrence of connectives in translations and non-translations, but the behaviour of connectives in translations is sensitive to the type of semantic relation conveyed. Moreover, the higher frequency of connectives expressing consequence in translations seems to be related to explicitation. Qualitative analysis suggests that explicitation is strongly associated with two factors: the semantic relation conveyed by the connective being part of the common ground shared by participants, and the predominance of the procedural function of the connective.

This paper presents a corpus-based descriptive research procedure for the identification of significant divergences between original Spanish and Spanish translated from English. When considering the language pair English-Spanish, personal pronouns seem to be good markers of significant differences (anchor phenomena), since they must obligatorily occur in English, but not in Spanish. To test this hypothesis, empirical data have been extracted from a large reference corpus in Spanish (CREA) and from an English-Spanish parallel corpus (P-ACTRES), in both cases from the fiction subcorpora. Statistically significant differences have been found in some of the uses of personal pronouns, having textual and pragmatic implications in the target texts. The aim is to use the results obtained in the case of personal pronouns, together with results from other linguistic areas, to build a semi-automated tool for the post-editing of Spanish translations of texts written originally in English.

Despite the claims regarding the potential disruptiveness of subtitling for audiovisual processing, existing empirical evidence supports the idea that subtitle processing is semi-automatic and cognitively effective, and that, in moderately complex viewing scenarios, dubbing does not necessarily help viewers. In this paper we appraise whether the complexity of the translated audiovisual material matters for the cognitive and evaluative reception of subtitled vs. dubbed audiovisual material. To this aim, we present the results of two studies on the viewers’ reception of film translation (dubbing vs. subtitling), in which we investigate the cognitive and evaluative consequences of audiovisual complexity. In Study 1, the results show that a moderately complex film is processed effectively and is enjoyed irrespective of the translation method. In Study 2, the subtitling (vs. dubbing) of a more complex film leads to more effortful processing and lower cognitive performance, but not to a lessened appreciation. These results expose the boundaries of subtitle processing, which are reached only when the audiovisual material to be processed is complex, and they encourage scholars and practitioners to reconsider old standards as well as to invest more effort in crafting diverse types of audiovisual translations tailored both to the degree of complexity of the source product and to the individual differences of the target viewers.