Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2015

This study investigates the potential of machine translation as an efficient and cost-effective means to translate sections of the Ottawa Public Library website into Spanish to better meet the linguistic needs of the Spanish-speaking newcomer community. One-hundred and fourteen community members participated in a recipient evaluation survey, in which they evaluated four different versions of a translated portion of the library’s website — a professional human translation, a maximally post-edited machine translation, a rapidly post-edited machine translation, and a raw machine translation. Participants also considered metadata such as the time and cost required to produce each version. Findings show that while machine translation cannot address every need, there are some instances for which the faster and cheaper post-edited versions are considered useful and acceptable to the community.

This paper provides a linguistic analysis of the interpreter’s role in shaping the discursive reality of the Spanish-English bilingual courtroom. The paper examines the interpreter’s rendition of morphosyntactic features, specifically clitic pronouns and active-passive voice using excerpts from an actual jury trial. The aim of the study is to show how the interpreter’s treatment of linguistic features in exchanges between attorneys and witnesses may attribute agency to the defendant, and possibly suggest a relationship between the defendant and his alleged associates or victims that is not intended in the original utterance. The findings of this study are expected to contribute to the field of courtroom interpreting by providing further insight into the relationship between an interpreter’s rendition of morphosyntactic features in attorney-witness exchanges and the attorney’s and witness’s ability to convey meaning and intent in a bilingual courtroom.

The tools of translation memories and machine translation can be viewed as (not) being able to draw on different aspects of context that are relevant to a particular translation project, such as bilingual text, portions of a text, versions of a text, related text, or extralinguistic context. The aspects of context that the tools can indeed draw on and how well they do so highlight their most important benefits, whereas the aspects of context that the tools may fail to draw on reveal their weaknesses. In cases where, depending on the context, a piece of text being translated may have more than one meaning or a translation of a piece of text may be rendered in more than one way, the contexts the tools are able to draw on are critical. An analysis of different kinds of context in different applications highlights the circumstances in which users of TM and MT tools may risk accepting semantically and lexically undesirable output, as well as when TM tool users may risk inputting contextually inappropriate translations. Further, context is an important consideration when integrating MT output into TM tools. Although TM and MT technologies differ in how they produce translation output, end-users of both tool types may face similar contextual challenges.

Taking China as a case in point, this paper addresses the concern among some Western scholars that the concept of translation in the European tradition is narrower than in some other cultures so that the spread of Western concepts and theories to the rest of the world is threatening “biodiversity”. A re-examination of the evidence presented shows that this claim is based on a series of misinterpretation of ‘fanyi,’ the Chinese word for ‘translation’. In fact, the traditional concept of translation in China used to be very narrow and rigid. It gradually loosened up only after the transfer of Western translation theories into China, which challenged traditional thinking. Ironically, the concern of the few Chinese scholars who resist Westernization is that the process has put an end to uniformity. As a result of the transfer of Western academic norms and ‘pure’ translation theories, translation research in China has become more sophisticated. The influence of Western ideas in China has caused some concern about Eurocentrism mainly among Western scholars. This concern, however, might itself be Eurocentric since Sinocentrism is the major cause for concern among most Chinese scholars.

Since the mid-1950s much research has been carried out in the field of translation theories in Poland. Although the results that emerged were often of considerable interest, Polish translation theories are often ignored by experts in the West. This article investigates the Polish contribution to theoretical discussions of translation. Early contributions to the debate, in 1955, characterized by a “linguistic” approach, warned against theories limiting the “unit of translation” to single words, thus neglecting the “text.” Linguist O. A. Wojtasiewicz stressed the semiotic, psychological, and cultural nature of translation. Around the mid-1960s a group of scholars from the “Poznań School” focused on literary translation. They saw literary translation as a semiotic process and produced a theoretical and descriptive research that could be defined as “target-oriented.” Their methods are typified by the particular attention given to diachronic and reception perspectives. Since the mid-1970s, in marked opposition to the “predominant role of literary texts” in Polish translation studies, F. Grucza and scholars from Warsaw University (“Warsaw School”) favored other areas of research, such as oral translation and specialized translation and interpreting. From the research carried out in Warsaw, a new perspective opened up within the linguistic approach, resulting in a new definition of the equivalence based on cognitive and pragmatic factors. This line of research also involved cognitive linguistics, as of the 1990s the most noteworthy innovation in Polish translation studies. Since 1990 the research field has become more varied: there are now more translation study centers (Cracow, Łódź, Lublin, Gdańsk…), and the field of investigation has broadened, now following on the heels of Western debate, with which there is now more contact.

This paper investigates the use of technical collocations in the genre of popular science articles and the strategies used by translators to render such collocations. The study mainly aims to answer these questions: (1) are technical collocations used in this genre, and if yes, to what extent? (2) What are the strategies used to render such collocations into the target language? A pilot study is conducted to analyze a small parallel corpus of popular science articles from the National Geographic magazine and its Arabic version in order to identify technical collocations in the source texts and their equivalents in the target texts. Implications for future research in this area are discussed.

Advertising is an important part of marketing and greatly influences the way people behave and think. It communicates information about products and at the same time tries to persuade people to buy them, which makes the translation of advertising materials a challenging, yet necessary task. Using critical discourse analysis, this study aims to examine English print advertisements for cosmetic and hygienic products and their Persian translations. The sample consists of seven matching pairs selected from brochures and catalogs available at Isfahan drugstores between 2010 and 2012. Fairclough’s framework (2010) is adopted to analyze verbal elements. In order to analyze the visual components of advertisements, Johnson’s (2008) approach to the study of advertisements is employed. The analyzed data reveals significant differences between the source and target texts in terms of their textual, discoursal, and ideological features.