Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Online First

This article contributes to the developing recognition that the challenges raised by the enterprise of translating between languages extend beyond human language. It suggests that there are parallels between the political issues recognised by translation scholars – of exclusion, misrepresentation and speaking for ‘the other’ – and those raised by biosemiotics, the study of signs in all living systems. Following a discussion of convergence in current developments in translation studies, semiotics and human-animal studies, the article presents an analysis of empirical data, with specific reference to the different meanings of the verb hear. The findings demonstrate the anthropocentric assumptions that are embedded in the way hearing is routinely represented, and an argument is presented for the recognition of these in communications about the semiotic resources relevant to non-human life forms. The paper concludes with some reflections on the implications of these issues for the enterprise of translation.

This paper explores the impact of text complexity on translators’ subjective perception of translation difficulty and on their cognitive load. Twenty-six MA translation students from a UK university were asked to translate three English texts with different complexity into Chinese. Their eye movements were recorded by an eye-tracker, and their cognitive load was self-assessed with a Likert scale before translation and NASA-TLX scales after translation. The results show that: (i) the intrinsic complexity measured by readability, word frequency and non-literalness was in line with the results received from informants’ subjective assessment of translation difficulty; (ii) moderate and positive correlations existed between most items in the self-assessments and the indicator (fixation and saccade durations) obtained by the eye-tracking measurements; and (iii) the informants’ cognitive load as indicated by fixation and saccade durations (but not for pupil size) increased significantly in two of the three texts along with the increase in source text complexity.

This paper investigates what effect the length of the source text has both on the translation process and on the translation product. In an eye-tracking and keystroke logging experiment, we compared three conditions, namely full texts, three-sentence sequences and single sentences as source items. The results suggest that translations of single sentences differ significantly from full texts, whereas three-sentence sequences are representative of the full text condition. Therefore, research in process-based translation studies might benefit from using shorter source texts without endangering the ecological validity of experiments.

The best-selling children’s book series Uncle Leo’s Adventures by Yannets Levi became a sensation in Israel when it was translated into several Asian languages including Korean, Chinese, English for the Indian sub-continent, and Japanese. More than just a simple story of cross-cultural exchange, the globalization of the series allows for a look into the ways editors and translators in different cultures handle translation as a cultural and economic opportunity. This article focuses on the Gordian knot that links translation to culturally specific preferences. Combining interviews with a comparative study of the different solutions to the translation of literary and visual elements used in Uncle Leo, it explores the relations between entrepreneurship and culture, the politics of culture, and the universality/cultural specificity of imagination and of being a child.