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Target. International Journal of Translation Studies - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
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Exploring the motivations of student volunteer translators in Chinese queer activism
Author(s): Yizhu Li and Youlan TaoAvailable online: 24 November 2023More LessAbstractAmateur 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.
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The fight metaphor in translation: From patriotism to pragmatism
Author(s): Yang WuAvailable online: 10 October 2023More LessAbstractThe 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.
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How to break a norm and get away with it
Author(s): Jing YuAvailable online: 14 September 2023More LessAbstractNorm 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.
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Can you amuse the audience through an interpreter?
Author(s): Magdalena BartłomiejczykAvailable online: 04 August 2023More LessAbstractIn 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.
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Theorizing a postmodern translator education
Author(s): Kelly WashbourneAvailable online: 20 July 2023More LessAbstractThe 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.
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The translation of extralinguistic cultural references in subtitling
Author(s): Wei Chen, Takeshi Nakamoto and Juan ZhangAvailable online: 11 August 2021More LessAbstractThere 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.
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Translation: universals or cognition?
Author(s): Nina SzymorAvailable online: 21 February 2018More LessAbstractThis paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the existence of translation universals by investigating the use of aspect in modal contexts in translated and non-translated legal Polish and by analysing the observed differences with reference to insights from cognitive linguistics. Corpus analysis highlights significant distributional differences in the use of the two aspectual forms of Polish verbs (imperfective and perfective) in modal contexts. I argue that cognitive mechanisms called ‘chunking’ ( Langacker 1988 ; Bybee 2006 ) and ‘entrenchment’ ( Bybee 2010 ) underlie these differences. I show that what may at first glance seem as behaviour unique to the translation process, is in fact caused by general cognitive processes. The study has implications for both translation studies and cognitive linguistics: it offers support for the basic assumptions about the usage-based nature of linguistic knowledge and highlights the importance of taking these assumptions into consideration when investigating the translation process and translation universals.
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From ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’
Author(s): Andrew Chesterman
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