Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2019

The interpreter-mediated Premier-Meets-the-Press Conferences are an institutional(ized) discursive event in China, permitting the Chinese premier to answer a range of potentially challenging and face-threatening questions from journalists. Arguably, this dynamic and interactive setting can be profitably conceptualized using Bakhtin’s notion of dialogized heteroglossia. As additional subjective actors in the triadic communication process, the government-affiliated interpreters are caught up in an ideological tug-of-war between the government and (foreign) journalists. That is, there is often a centripetal force pulling toward Beijing’s official positions and stances (the central, unitary and authoritative) and simultaneously a centrifugal force exerted by (foreign) journalists who pose sensitive and adversarial questions (toward the heteroglossic and peripheral away from the center). Manual CDA on 20 years’ corpus data illustrates the interpreters’ tendency to align with the government’s official positions, soften the journalists’ questions and (re)construct a more desirable image for Beijing.

After reading L’esprit souterrain, the first French translation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Nietzsche embraced Dostoevsky as a master psychologist, notwithstanding their ideological differences. This article argues that the much-discussed influence of Dostoevsky on Nietzsche can be better understood by unraveling the specific nature of the translation L’esprit souterrain. An analysis shows that as a consequence of the adopted translation strategy, the character of the Underground Man, who in the Russian context functions as a philosophical-ideological type, becomes a purely psychological type. This is all the more important, since Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Dostoevsky led to rereadings of Dostoevsky through a Nietzschean lens.

The present research explores how the self-censoring mechanism is established in the translator’s mind and how this internal mechanism interfaces with external, institutional censorial policies to affect both the process and the outcome of a translation. The paper begins with a discussion of the ubiquitous nature of censorship and how the translator internalizes various coercive censorial forces. Based on detailed case studies of three well-known censorship/ self-censorship-affected Chinese translations – those of Lolita, Animal Farm, and Deng Xiaoping – this research finds that when certain values, ideologies, cultural practices and moral presuppositions become internalized by translators, their censorial behavior is no longer a coerced option but an active choice of their own, and also that there is often no clear dividing line between what is coerced (censoring) and what is one’s own (self-censoring) action in contexts where ‘politically/ culturally sensitive’ source texts are bound to be scrutinized by the censor’s/ self-censor’s eye before they enter the translations market.

Can the prestige of a language be an argument for the translation of a sacred text? Conversely, if a language is perceived as substandard, is that an argument against translation? In the history of the English Bible, scholars and theologians have argued both for and against a vernacular scripture, but the debate has not always been based on religious beliefs. Following the Norman Invasion of 1066, the translation debate shifted from the religious to the linguistic. In other words, the argument against translation became based on the perception that English was “too rude” to properly convey the complex nature of Holy Scripture. Reformers like William Tyndale protested this view, arguing that the linguistic argument against a Bible in the vernacular really masked an almost maniacal desire on the part of the ecclesiastical establishment to control the message. This paper takes a closer look at historical arguments for and against an English Bible from the Anglo-Saxon period through the Tyndale Bible.

Should transpositions between language and other sign systems be considered a kind of translation? The answer could be yes if the comparison is made to interlingual translating that features a high degree of variance. Here, however, the question will be whether there are any kinds of intersemiotic transposition that feature a high degree of invariance. Four criteria are suggested for defining invariance-oriented translation, and a variety of possible instances of invariant intersemiotic translation are considered, with special mention of transpositions to and from music.

Rosario Ferré has been a self-translator since the mid-1980s. For just as long, criticism of her work has been snarled in essentialist arguments that assume that language embodies the values of the culture from which it derives and that words transmit an essence regardless of context. Following this logic, English and Spanish are systems in opposition. This essay compares “El cuento envenenado” (1986) to Ferré’s self-translation, “The Poisoned Story” (1991) in order to recast her as a bilingual writer. Using Marilyn Gaddis Rose’s concept of stereoscopic reading, the essay places two autonomous but interrelated texts in a theory-informed relationship that renders them as one textual space and captures the creative interliminality of a bilingual writer. This reading traces Ferré’s evolution as a writer from the late seventies to the nineties and beyond, when she envisioned a short story of greater inscrutability and resistance that reflected the legacy of colonialism within a Puerto Rican household.

Translation problems have received considerable attention among translation process researchers and different research methods have been used to identify them. Findings are sometimes inconsistent, and as these studies have mainly studied translation between European languages, little research has been conducted to explore the issue concerning non-European languages. To fill this gap, the present study investigates problem triggers in English-Chinese sight translation in both directions (L1 and L2 translation). using eye-tracking data (Dragsted 2012). Results suggest that the type and number of translation problems encountered by the translators are different in L1 and L2 sight translation and that language-pair specificity is at play during the process, indicated by two identified Chinese-specific problem triggers, namely, back-sloping comma and head-final noun phrase.

This paper examines uncertainty encountered by expert interpreters at Chinese Premier Press Conferences by marking interpreters’ five types of hesitation phenomena and analyzes uncertainty management strategies. Results show (1) self-corrections, repetitions, and reformulations occur less frequently than pauses, indicating expert interpreter’s better control of interpreting fluency; (2) speakers may impact interpreters’ hesitation with segment length positively correlated with interpreters’ pauses, self-correction, and reformulation, and speaking rate explains the variance in the occurrence of filled pauses; (3) pauses occur for retrieving lexical and morphological information, eliminating logical doubt, and explicating cultural connotation; (4) expert interpreters adopt addition and rank shift more than ellipsis, simplification, splitting, and repetition as uncertainty management strategies, showing an emphasis on adequacy, comprehensibility, and acceptability in their output.