Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 30, Issue 2, 2018

The passing of the Prior Consultation Act (2011) was a turning point in Peru’s history: it enshrined the right of indigenous peoples to be consulted prior to the State’s adopting a measure that affects them and to use their own languages during the consultation, which makes interpreting essential. This article focuses on the complexities of the interpreters’ role and how the beneficiaries of their work perceive it. It reveals that the interpreters’ performance is determined by two circumstances: first, it straddles public service and business interpreting; and second, the fact that the interpreters are trained and employed by the State creates tensions in the communication between the latter and the indigenous peoples. The socio-political context and the initiatives designed to ensure compliance with the law will provide a background to our findings. These derive from observation, interviews and meetings with institutional actors and interpreters, and are illustrated by a case study.

Text drafting is an essential component of many of the contexts in which interpreters are called in to ensure communication (Määttä 2015). As Komter (2006) shows, the drafting process itself can be considered a turn in the interaction. Interpreters involved in such contexts thus perform a communicative pas de quatre, crossing not only the language divide, but also the modal divide (oral vs. written). In this paper, we analyse how an interpreter in a Belgian police interview handles this complex task. It appears that she procedurally and declaratively recognises a written turn in the interaction and uses its authoritative voice to silence the witness by sight-translating the turn as it is being typed on the screen. In line with previous research on interpreters’ handling of dialogues (Hale 1997), the interpreter also shapes turns, including the written turn, to the needs of the addressees: upgrading the register properties of the interviewee’s talk and downgrading those of the written turn.

This paper discusses the issue of translator style through the comparison of two Italian translations of H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Using a corpus linguistic approach, this paper proposes a method for the identification of potential indicators of translator style based on key cluster analysis. Comparing the two translations with this method identifies which clusters – i.e., repeated sequences of words – are used more frequently by one translator compared to the other. The analysis shows that the two translators differ in their usage of some linguistic features, specifically Italian euphonic -d, locative clitics, and distal demonstratives, which are then analysed as stylistic divergences.

In the last two decades, Bourdieu’s sociology has provided appropriate tools for examining the work of literary translators through history. However, Bourdieusian approaches to literary translation seem to reproduce a major problem underlying Bourdieu’s theory; namely, a deterministic view of human behaviour. This article, against the alleged incompatibility between sociological approaches and culturalist paradigms, proposes to combine Bourdieu’s sociology with the notion of transculturation borrowed from Latin American cultural studies. The article demonstrates how transculturation helps elucidating the divided and contradictory nature of the habitus, as it was originally formulated by Bourdieu in his early writings on Kabylian society. Data from my previous study on the translational activity of Dai Wangshu in Republican China are used to illustrate how transculturation reveals itself as a valid model for the study of literary translators through history beyond the limitations of a sociologically-informed approach based exclusively on a Bourdieusian perspective.

Most corpus-based studies of translation use published texts as the basis for their corpus. This overlooks interventions by other agents involved in translation such as editors, who may have significant influence on the translated text. In order to study editors’ influence on the translation product, this paper presents a comparative analysis of manuscript and published translations, which allows a differentiation of actual translated language and edited translated language. Based on a tripartite parallel corpus of English business articles and their translations into German, I analyse translators’ and editors’ influence on grammatical metaphoricity of the text, specifically on the use of nominalisations. One finding is that a significant amount of nominalisation is re-verbalised by editors. The results show that translated language may often be the result of significant editorial intervention. Thus, by just considering source text and published translation, our picture of what translators actually do may be significantly distorted.

Translations available: Hungarian, Dutch, Chinese (Traditional)

Editing and revision are regularly incorporated into professional translation projects as a means of quality assurance. Underlying the decision to include these tasks in translation workflows lay implicit assumptions about what constitutes quality. This article examines how quality is operationalized with respect to editing and revision and considers these assumptions. The case is made for incorporating revision into translation quality assessment models and employs the concepts of adequacy, distributed cognition, and salience – and their treatment in the research on cognitive translation processes, post-editing, and translation technology – in order to re-think translation quality.