Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Online First

In Russian media and statements by Kremlin officials, the current war in Ukraine is regularly imagined through the lens of World War II. Protection of ethnic kins in Crimea against their local “fascist” government is even invoked to justify the annexation of the peninsula in March 2014. A narrative analysis of a corpus consisting of 770 English and French newspaper articles and 39 translations demonstrates how the Russian news translation website InoSMI re-interprets Western reports on the Crimean crisis by triggering “deep memory” ( Wertsch 2008a , 2008b ) of the Great Patriotic War. Through selective appropriation, translation shifts and manipulation of visual material, the internet portal highlights particular aspects of the WW II narrative template that activate simplified schemata opposing Russian “patriots” and Ukrainian “fascists.” The paper thus underscores the role of news translation as ideological memory-work.

Starting with an overview of F. O. Matthiessen’s work on the role of translation during the Elizabethan period, this article delves into the paratexts of the translations of Spanish colonial texts by Richard Hakluyt, Edward Grimeston, Michael Lok and John Frampton to discuss the underlying reasons why Spanish accounts of the conquest were rendered into English. The analysis of the dedications and addresses shows that, although these translations may have served to express admiration for the Spanish conquerors or to criticize their actions, the ultimate goals of these texts were to encourage England to replicate the Spanish empire in the Americas, on the one hand, and to obtain social, political and economic benefits for the translators, on the other.

While Tropical Medicine developed as a new discipline at the turn of the 20th century, Rio de Janeiro’s Instituto Oswaldo Cruz was the only major center not directly linked with neocolonialism, although through a program of multilingual study, personnel exchange and an avant-garde translation policy in its journal Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, it parlayed with the science of the colonial powers and made important discoveries. However, political developments led to increasing isolation for the Institute and increasing monolingualism in its journal. By the late 1970s, Memórias had suspended publication and the Institute was on the verge of collapse. Nevertheless, new leadership and a drive towards globalized English helped form Memórias into the most-cited scientific journal in Latin America. This narrative holds important lessons for Translation Studies, the first of which is that the international scientific community, which has historically depended on translation, is worth more careful consideration as an object of study. In this peripheral institute, translation effected international self-projection, which consolidated national prestige through recognition from authorities abroad. Moreover, the questions of power involved in the literature’s current English-language hegemony, faced even by former European colonizers, are removed only circumstantially from those dealt with in the periphery a century ago.

This paper analyses a possible gendered manifestation of norms in interpreting. It focuses on the use of self-repair, a textual expression of the norm, by male and female interpreters. Two research questions are examined: (1) whether the extent to which self-repairs occur in interpreting is gendered and (2) whether gender influences the way in which the output is repaired using editing terms. Considering the literature on gender and norm-compliance, female interpreters are expected to produce more self-repairs and editing terms than male interpreters. The research is based on the 2008 subcorpus of EPICG with French source speeches and their English and Dutch interpretations. The interpreters’ self-repairs were manually identified and statistically compared. Regarding the first question, it appears that gender influences the use of self-repairs in interpreting. As for the second one, statistical analysis reveals language-based patterns: in the English booth, women use significantly more editing terms than men. The French/Dutch subcorpus yields no significant difference. However, women seem to also use apologies as editing terms.

This article presents a microhistory of Puerto Rico that investigates the role of translation and language policy during the transition from Spanish to U.S. colonial rule. Two specific periods, namely the transitional military government from 1898 to 1900 and the first civilian government from 1900 to 1917, provide the framework within which the study is conducted. Analyses of official language and translation policies, as well as historical documents from governmental and educational contexts, illustrate the multiple, conflicting agendas employed by the new colonial power to Americanize the island. Results also demonstrate how codified policies do not fully account for the linguistic and cultural landscape in colonial contexts, thereby requiring closer examination of translation practices and beliefs and their interplay with translation policy.

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.