Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Volume 37, Issue 4, 2025

This study discusses ‘mansplaining’ as a traveling neologism, tracing its trajectory across online activist platforms in Türkiye. The study shows that the initial Turkish equivalents that were proposed for ‘mansplaining’ on feminist blogs sparked controversy owing to their emphasis on male genitalia and physiology. Those equivalents reveal that narratives of heterosexuality, gender binaries, and biological essentialism may permeate feminist translation, which, despite its progressive intentions, needs to embrace more inclusive and transformative perspectives on gender and sexuality. The research indicates that the initial equivalents proposed were ultimately dismissed in favor of the formulation of other neologisms to confront cisnormativity. The study concludes that the term ‘mansplaining’ has foregrounded the significance of the incorporation of gender and sexual diversity in the translation practices of online activism in Türkiye.

This article explores the phenomenon of authorised translations from the perspective of gender through archival studies of two understudied Victorian women translators from German into English, Fanny Elizabeth Bunnètt (1833–1875) and L. Dora Schmitz (1844–1926). While researchers have started to fill the gaps of a history of translators by focusing on translators of scientific genres, historical translators of humanities scholarship remain underresearched. Archival-based research on these translators may help shift our focus to hitherto little-explored aspects of the translation event, such as authorised translations. The two case studies discussed in this paper shed light on the logistics behind authorised translations, and on how some women translators navigated this mode of publication in order to consolidate their professional positions. The agency of Bunnètt and Schmitz was embedded in a gendered network of professional and personal contacts, which both enabled and restricted them in their translational pursuits. Archival materials on Bunnètt show how women translators strategically selected and cultivated contacts in order to navigate the decidedly male-dominated professional spaces of scholarship and publishing. Schmitz’s case proves that translating by no means had to be a female attempt to evade the public gaze.

There has been substantial scholarly interest in extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs) in translation, especially in audiovisual translation (AVT). However, most scholars have investigated subtitling from English into other languages. Although China has a long tradition of film production, few studies have investigated the subtitling of ECRs from Chinese into English. This article attempts to remedy this by investigating the translation strategies, translation strategy distribution, and fidelity indexes of six subtitled versions of Chinese-language films. We compare our results with Gottlieb’s (2009) results on Danish subtitles, and find that both Chinese and Danish subtitlers hold a target-oriented attitude. We then investigate the share of the strategies in the subtitling of ECRs across different Chinese films and determine that this varies by genre and that the difference in the fidelity index among films of different genres is substantial. The translation of epic films appears to be highly faithful, whereas that of crime and gangster films is much less faithful.

This study investigates the translation strategies and prevailing approaches applied by Arab translators in translating the s-word. To achieve this aim, a corpus of ninety Hollywood films released between 2000 and 2018 was utilized. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted on a self-designed parallel and aligned corpus of the English dialogue and Arabic subtitles. The findings indicate that the cultural substitution strategy is most commonly used in subtitling s-words, followed by the reformulation strategy. The functions of s-words appear to influence the choice of subtitling strategies. The use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for the subtitling of these films also restricts the linguistic options available to subtitlers. Additionally, the affordances of audiovisual translation play a role in subtitler choices since the meaning of a word can be conveyed through gestures, images, or sounds on screen.

In this exploratory study, we investigated rater cognition in English–Chinese translation assessment, drawing on think-aloud, eye-tracking, and interview data. We designed a 3 × 2 × 2 experiment in which experienced raters assessed eighteen renditions of three levels of quality for each translation direction, using a Likert-type scale or analytic rubric scale. We found that: (a) the raters heeded meaning transfer more frequently than other contents; (b) they utilized a variety of processing actions, but a core subset involving eight actions constituted the mainstay; (c) to make a scoring decision, the raters mainly consulted the source text, the target texts, and the rating scale, but also displayed other patterns of interaction (e.g., relying on target texts only); (d) they fixated more frequently per time unit and proportionally longer on the target texts; and (e) translation direction and scoring method seemed to have modulated rater cognition. The implications of these findings for translation assessment are discussed.

This study investigates prediction based on verb semantics in a Turkish monolingual comprehension task in professional and student Turkish (A)–English (B) interpreters. Predictive eye movements were compared between the two groups to examine potential differences in the size of the semantic prediction effect. In addition, the participants’ working memory capacity was measured to see whether working memory facilitates prediction and whether this facilitatory effect differs between the two groups. We found a stronger semantic prediction effect in professional than student interpreters. Moreover, student interpreters with higher working memory capacity showed a stronger semantic prediction effect than students with lower working memory capacity. No such difference was observed for professionals. Our findings suggest that professional interpreters do not need to use additional resources to predict meaning, unlike students. Together with previous findings, we observe an interpreting experience related advantage for prediction in non-interpreting tasks irrespective of type of predictive cue under investigation.