Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2017

This article explores the uses of Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias in the United States of America, with a focus on the Spanish-American War. After introducing the concept of the Black Legend and its use in England, Spain’s main rival in the Americas during the early modern period, I briefly discuss the first two English translations of the tract by Las Casas. The ideological manipulation carried out by M. M. S. and by John Phillips set the tone for the future use of Las Casas as part of the anti-Spanish propaganda characteristic of Renaissance England first and of modern America later. I then proceed to examine how the narrative ascribed to Las Casas has contributed to forge an anti-Spanish feeling in the US, evident in the years before and after the Spanish-American War of 1898. This section suggests that Las Casas’s text was violated in many ways in order to support a narrative of hatred, as shown in the sermons of American Protestant ministers, books, and, above all, in the 1898 US edition of his work.

The article focuses on the issue of spatial positioning of healthcare interpreters. Contemporary research and guidelines for healthcare interpreters recommend either a triadic position or parallel positioning, or else suggest that the position of the interpreter should be defined primarily by the situation. Based on the responses gathered by a nationwide online questionnaire sent to interpreters who work in healthcare settings in the Republic of Slovenia, the article establishes that a triangular position is the spatial positioning the untrained interpreters working in healthcare settings most often assume and find most appropriate. The interpreters prefer this position because they believe that primary role should be granted to the patient and that the interpreters should be regarded as mere conduits, and second, that there is a considerable gap between what the interpreters think they should do and what they actually do. The article concludes with some proposals how to narrow this gap.

Differences in register, lexical use, syntactic shifts or determinologization strategies between source and target medical texts can produce usability or comprehensibility issues ( Askehave and Zethsen 2000a ; Tercedor and López 2012 ; Nisbeth Zethsen and Jensen 2012 ; Alarcón, López-Rodríguez, and Tercedor 2016 ). This study analyzes differences in lexical variation between translated and non-translated online medical texts resulting in potential register shifts, also known as “register mismatches” ( Pilegaard 1997 ). The study uses a corpus methodology to compare (1) the frequency of Latin-Greek (LG) terms in translated medical websites in the USA and in similar non-translated texts in Spain and Latin America, and (2) the frequency of determinologization and explicitation of LG terms in both textual populations. The results show that US medical websites translated into Spanish show lower frequencies of LG terms and higher frequencies of reformulation strategies than similar non-translated ones; they are partly explained through the process of interference from source texts.

A study of the job satisfaction of professional interpreters may cast light on the current state of the profession and its prospects. Through a questionnaire-based survey of 150 professional interpreters in South Korea, this study examines various factors contributing to the job satisfaction of professional interpreters, including individual characteristics and job characteristics. Statistically significant correlations were confirmed between job satisfaction and marital status, the length of the interpreting career, average weekly working hours, and the dominant employment type of the respondents. While the respondents overwhelmingly chose income as the most important factor that determines their satisfaction, a multiple regression analysis revealed that job security was the most important factor, which was in turn strongly correlated with social recognition. This case study provides an analysis of the status quo of the profession in South Korea and has implications for the industry and for interpreter training.

The strict boundaries between disciplines have been seriously challenged by various links established between them through cross-fertilization. Links between literary and translation studies are not new. However, in the (post)-modern world, when interdisciplinarity is starting to give way to transdisciplinarity, a new meeting point has been found in transfiction, enabling translation to become an interpretative paradigm for literature. Attempting to support this rather neglected approach, this paper analyzes Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot in the light of the relationship between source and target texts and the concept of the invariant as a reflection of the postmodern quest for truth, claiming that the novel makes a fictional dethronement of the source text and calls for a shift from instrumentalism to the hermeneutic approach in translation.

This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to integrate insights from cognitive psychology and Cognitive Linguistics into translational inquiry by modeling the translator’s operations as alternating between System 1 and System 2 thinking. We analyze trainee output to investigate translatorial decision-making in scenarios employing instances of basic cross-linguistic asymmetry in the partitioning of conceptual material. The objective is to better understand the role that automaticity plays in those contexts: how pronounced it is, how it influences translation output, and to what extent the skill of monitoring it can be regarded a component of translation competence. The study also tests, in one condition, whether the translator trainer can induce System 2 processing in trainees by issuing extra pre-task instruction, thereby helping optimize their performance.