Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2018

This article addresses issues of multilingualism in domestic violence support services, building on Tipton (2017a) and findings from a small qualitative study involving an organization in the North West of England. The aim is to shed light on how organizations construct multilingual spaces, the role played by language service provisions in the mediation of such spaces, and how interpreters handle the specificities of working with victims given the lack of available specialist training. The concept of communicative repertoire (following Blommaert and Backus 2011) is introduced to support analysis of supported and autonomous forms of communication in relation to the semiotic practices of survival in their broadest sense, casting new light on the organization’s handling of multilingual service delivery and the role of interpreter mediation.

Students of interpreting training may go through drastic cognitive changes, but current empirical findings are disparate and isolated. To integrate these findings and to obtain a better understanding of interpreting training, the present article tries to reinterpret students of interpreting training as complex dynamic systems. Relying primarily on longitudinal empirical data from several existing studies, the article illustrates how the initial state of some key parameters influences the progress of the systems, how the parameters themselves evolve, and how interpreting competence develops as a result of self-organization. The hope is that a metatheoretical framework such as Dynamic Systems Theory will allow specific findings and particularistic models for interpreting training to be integrated. Moreover, this approach may allow false dichotomies in the field to be overcome and seemingly contradictory data in empirical reports to be better understood, thereby providing guidelines for future research.

When information is elicited from children in a criminal context, both their ability and willingness to disclose is at stake. In law, the communicative vulnerability of children is manifest in forensic protocols for interviewing children. These are designed to retrieve information in a child-aware fashion, as well as to produce evidence with sufficient integrity to stand up under the scrutiny of the criminal process. This article will consider some of the added challenges of interpreter-mediated interviews for minors. Drawing on research into monolingual child interviewing, the article proposes how some of the interpreting related aspects of this challenge may be addressed through the adaptation of elements of reflexive coordination in the widely used NICHD child interviewing protocol. The authors call for the data-based testing of these adaptations and suggests that modifications of institutional speech genres for bilingual use may be a component of mainstreaming public service interpreting.

Audio description is increasingly used by museums to improve access to their collections by visually impaired visitors. However, research in this field is still very limited. This paper aims to report on a descriptive study of artwork audio description as a modality of intersemiotic translation from images into words. A corpus comprising audio descriptive guides from art museums in the United Kingdom and the United States was compiled and analyzed following a corpus-based methodology. Existing audio descriptions of art museum exhibits were shown to comply with existing guidelines regarding the type of visual information conveyed, the level of detail offered, and the point of view used. These results are discussed in relation to the communication context to contribute to the discussion of current practices and their implications for visually impaired people’s access to visual art.

This article investigates the standard of interpreting services in the Western Cape Provincial Legislature/Parliament to examine the concept of quality in interpreting. This study includes interviews and open-ended discussions with language practitioners, interpreters, and members of parliament. By means of a questionnaire, interpreters provided feedback on their training, working conditions, and their work experience, while the standard of the interpreting service was assessed by users of interpreting services who rated the service on eleven different levels. These different levels were derived from previous studies to connect the literature with the outcomes of the collected data. The article concludes that there is much room for improvement of the interpreting service currently provided at the provincial legislature. Furthermore, the study revealed a lack of understanding and awareness of what interpreting entails and the value of an interpreting service.

In the Anglophone sphere, according to popular and most academic understandings, the term “ideograph” is regarded as an unproblematic synonym of 漢字 hànzì ‘Chinese character.’ On graphological grounds, i.e. as applied to writing systems, it can easily be shown that the concept of “ideograph” is both theoretically incoherent and practically unfeasible (McDonald 2016); while historically it is clear that the notion was founded on an imperfect understanding of Chinese characters as a writing system, and grew out of a European obsession with the notion of a “universal character” at a particular historical moment (Mungello 1985; Saussy 2001). Nevertheless the concept has become deeply embedded in European understandings of Chinese language and culture, to the extent that it is, in effect, a valuable conceptual possession of Western modernity (Bush 2010), and promoted alike by those with a detailed knowledge of Chinese writing, such as H. G. Creel (1936), as by those in blissful ignorance of it, like Jacques Derrida (1967/1976). In the Sinophone sphere, while for most practical purposes, as well as in a large proportion of scholarly work, more grounded understandings of Chinese characters as a writing system operate either implicitly or explicitly, the traditional emphasis on characters as a link between civilization and the cosmos (O’Neill 2013), as well as a long tradition of pedagogical “just so stories” about the construction of individual characters (e.g., Zuo 2005), provide a key point of contact with Western notions of the “ideograph” as symbolizing not a word, but an idea or an object. The situation may thus be described involving a type of inversion of the phenomenon of faux amis or “false friends,” where two different words are understood as being more or less synonymous; or alternatively as an example of Lydia Liu’s (2004) notion of a cross-lingual “supersign” where two comparable terms exercise an influence on each other across linguistic and cultural boundaries. This article will attempt to trace the genealogy of these complex and overlapping notions, and see what differing understandings of Chinese characters have to tell us about notions of cultural specificity, cultural production, and cross-cultural (mis-)communication in the contemporary globalized world.

This article examines the development over time of the English expression “filial piety” in order to document how, at least partly in response to pressure from an equivalence that is established with the Chinese term xiao (孝) in the seventeenth century, the term takes on new and increasingly negative connotations in English. As an important concept in Chinese philosophy, xiao occurs in many important early texts, including the Confucian Analects and, although the way the term is interpreted varies over time, remains central to many debates about Chinese culture right to this day. As the link between filial piety and xiao strengthens through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “filial piety” thus unsurprisingly becomes identified as one of a small group of key terms that were increasingly thought to explain all differences between the British and the Chinese. This article examines how the term “filial piety” evolves from a natural and universal impulse due to its connection with Christianity, with China initially as a particularly good example of this universal from whom everyone can learn, through various increasingly negative shifts due to the perceived conflict between filial piety and romantic love, as well as its increasing association with the Chinese, who by the end of the nineteenth century were seen as held back by the extreme nature of their practices. Today, filial piety as a term is seen as mainly or entirely local and specific to China, and by extension, something potentially holding it back from modernity.

This article contends that the traditional Chinese concept of jiao (teaching) has, through translation, greatly influenced the conceptual development of ‘religion’ in English-language scholarship. The article first demonstrates how the historical development of jiao in Chinese reveals numerous previously neglected patterns of Chinese spirituality. Using Friedrich Schleiermacher’s and Max Müller’s viewpoints, the article suggests the significance of translation in redefining a concept via the particularity of foreign culture. It then examines how James Legge, Jan Jakob Maria de Groot, William Edward Soothill, Bertrand Russell, and Ernest Richard Hughes and K. Hughes redefine religion in their translations of jiao. Highlighting jiao and religion as fluid categories via scholars’ translations and debates, my article challenges simplistic assumptions about Western supremacy in Sino-Western acculturation. It affirms the traditions and translations of jiao as powerful agents for shaping and enriching the meanings and phenomena of religion in the globalizing dynamics of human cultural interactions.