Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 36, Issue 1, 2024

The goal of this article is to unite the different strands of postpositivist thinking about translator education, including both axiological and epistemological, as well as the often-neglected political dimensions. Accordingly, the study considers evidence-based versus values-based education, performativity, dialogue, deconstruction, reflexivity, emergentism, border pedagogy, complexity, pluralism, and the enactment of “multiple voices” (González-Davies 2004). Thirteen postmodern notions and their implications for translation pedagogics are surveyed, including ethics, intersubjectivity, shifting classroom power structures, and the dilemma of canon. How are uncertainty and fragmentariness reconciled with the inherent progress-orientedness of the educational project? And significantly, how is postmodern consciousness enacted in classroom practice? In seeking what Torres del Rey (2002, 271) calls a more participatory and reflexive educational context, I entertain postmodern teaching and learning in the discipline as a possible approach to active, flexible, creative, collaborative, and inclusive roles and identities for both facilitators and learners.

In this article, I investigate how interpreters handle humorous utterances during plenary debates of the European Parliament, focusing on the input by one Polish Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Janusz Korwin-Mikke. The source speeches (in Polish or English) are analysed bottom-up to identify the types of humour favoured by the speaker. The most frequent ones are irony, ad hominem arguments with an element of ridicule, absurdity, and shifts in register. Subsequently, a pragmatically oriented comparative analysis is conducted to assess whether and how individual instances of humour are transferred by interpreters. Additionally, possible side effects are considered, such as shifts accompanying transferred humour and message incoherence resulting from humour loss. Register humour is typically removed by interpreters. The successful handling of absurdity relies mainly on compression and often fails, while ad hominem and irony appear to be relatively less challenging to interpret. Interestingly, irony is occasionally added by interpreters, either to boost the speaker’s comical intent or to distance themselves from his views.

The fight metaphors discussed in this article are linguistic expressions of physical conflict, a revolutionary legacy that still lingers in contemporary Chinese political discourse. This article takes a critical cognitive-linguistic approach to fight metaphors in translation, analysing a dataset comprising the Chinese governmental and Communist Party of China’s congressional reports and their official English-language translations from 2004 to 2020. The discussion highlights conceptual metaphor’s representational role and its ideological potential in discourse, and operationalises the English-based metaphor identification procedure (Steen et al. 2010) for Mandarin texts. Drawing on corpus-based evidence, the article argues that fight metaphors in the source texts (STs) legitimise and consolidate Beijing’s dominance of domestic power by generating positive representations and reproducing patriotic ideology. The translations of those metaphors transform Beijing’s image, assertive in the STs, into a non-aggressive one for the international readership. The target texts (TTs) also reproduce favourable representations from the STs to justify China’s unique political system and to satisfy a pragmatic need – that of constructing positive images for the Chinese authority and China internationally.

This study examines the style of two English translations of Hongloumeng, by David Hawkes, and Xianyi Yang and Gladys Yang. It makes use of multidimensional analysis to identify how the two translations differ in their sub-registers (narration and fictional speech). The results reveal that the Yangs’ translation of narration is relatively more narrative and context-independent, whereas Hawkes’ is more active and context-bound. Similarly, Hawkes’ translation of fictional speech is more conversational and interactional and tends more towards the orality scale with a strong emphasis on the involvement of fictional characters. In contrast, the Yangs’ translation of fictional speech tends to be more informational and explicit. These stylistic differences reflect the translators’ conscious and/or unconscious choices, which are attributable to their language backgrounds, translation strategies, and cultural stances. By taking sub-register variation and the functions of linguistic features into consideration, the article outlines a new approach to investigating translation style.

Amateur translators have, on a collaborative and voluntary basis, played a notable role in queer activism, but queer translation studies has paid insufficient attention to them, especially in regions other than the Global North. Through the lens of volunteer motivation studies, this study adopts systemic quality of life theory of volunteer motivation and Q methodology to investigate the motivations of Chinese university students to voluntarily engage in a queer translation project. By probing into the translators’ lived experience and subjectivity, it uncovers various contextually mediated motivations, such as the adaptive pursuit for mental compatibility with the environment, exclusive social integration into a valued community, weakened activism for social change, and conservation of cultural belief stability. It also reveals some obstacles and dilemmas faced by the translators in Chinese queer activism.

Norm conformity and violation constitute two sides of norm operation: the former maintains the stability of the system while the latter motivates its modification, evolution, and change. While previous studies have concentrated on the constraints of norms in translators’ behaviour and their conformity to them, few have examined norm violation, especially why translators choose violation over conformity and how they get away with the violation. This study explores motivation and risk management concerning norm violation based on a case study of two Chinese translators who violated the norm of standard Chinese and got away with it when translating a dialect in the source text. The case study shows norm violation is the result of an optimal trade-off between translators’ reward-seeking behaviour and risk management in their negotiation with multiple conflicting norms, rather than an abnormal behaviour involving negative consequences, as suggested in previous studies. Whether one can get away with the violation is often related to its impact on the system. The study contributes to norm studies by illuminating the complexity of norm-governed behaviours and norm violation, offering new insights on norm dynamics and risk management in translation.