Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2019

This study draws on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the international circulation of ideas to examine the sociological formation process of a translation. Taking the translated Chinese novel Border Town as an example, this study investigates the three phases of that process: selection; labeling and classification; and reading and reception. It discovers that the first two phases have created favorable conditions for the reception of the translated novel, but the translation was not well received. This article argues that the reception of a translation depends on the success of every phase of the sociological formation process. The reception of a translation is constructed and consecrated through the joint efforts of different agents in each phase. Only through a holistic sociological consideration of the dynamics of the formation process can we reach a real understanding of the reception of a translated work.

This article conceptualizes translation within the theoretical framework of world literature and discusses the role of translators in the multilingual leftist literary journal International Literature. It focuses on the biographies and work of three translators into English: Leonard Mins, Niall Goold-Verschoyle and Anthony Wixley. Living in Moscow in the mid-1930s, they contributed to the international circulation of authors that later became part of the canon of world literature: Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, and Isaac Babel. Exploring these translations within the historical context of Soviet cosmopolitanism, this article aims to uncover the mechanism by which Moscow in this period became a temporary sub-center of world literature.

This article investigates the experience of Dutch interpreters of Chinese in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) from the mid-nineteenth century until Indonesia’s independence nearly a century later. In the colonial context, the task of interpreters went beyond orally translating speech. They also served as cultural mediators, who prevented conflicts and resolved misunderstandings. Based on theories of interpreting in colonial contexts, the cases in this study will probe the interpreters’ training, their allegiances, and their search for neutrality. The findings reveal that, in the period from 1860 to 1912, the interpreters tried to mediate for the government by resolving problems and misunderstandings, despite their limited authority. However, in the period from 1913 to 1949, the interpreters had less room to maneuver, as a result of changes in training as well as in the work environment of the Dutch East Indies.

Textbooks are a significant source of knowledge and a major factor in shaping teaching and learning; however, textbook analysis has been a neglected area of research. This pilot study examines the coverage of business interpreting competences and their pedagogical treatment in thirty-two business interpreting textbooks. Two analysis frameworks, on business interpreting expertise and pedagogical expertise, were developed. The results indicate that most competences are weakly present in the textbooks and that most pedagogical principles are not well applied. This inadequacy has two potential consequences: (1) students may leave the classroom ill-equipped and form biased views of the profession, by considering topics well-covered in the textbooks as important and legitimate while seeing others as unimportant and (2) students may not be adequately assisted in internalizing and acquiring competences efficiently. This study has implications for translation and interpreting textbook analysis, adaptation, and development.

This article advocates for structured self-reflection as a means to scaffold learning in translator training. Metacognitive activity in translator training requires students to actively regulate their own process of both translating and learning to become a translator. Therefore, the nature and typology of (self-)reflection is examined as are tools that offer students structured opportunities to analyze and evaluate their own learning. Given that additional (self-)reflection in the translation classroom requires trainers to alter their teaching methods, this article also examines how their role in training changes as a result of its inclusion. An exploratory study on translation students’ prospective and retrospective self-reflection is described with student perspectives on the same translation task compared. Student expectations prior to translation are examined both pre- and post-task, emphasizing what students and teachers learn from reflective practice.

Top interpreters are rarely able to discuss publicly negotiations between their bosses-cum-clients. Yet the downfall of Nazi Germany and the USSR allowed some interpreters to speak, in interviews and memoirs, without fear of retribution. In the end, only a few told their story, and some did not always tell it correctly, either because of memory lapses or because of a desire to appear more informed or to distance themselves from the people for whom they had worked. Still, these publications contain material to investigate to what degree, in the service of an all-powerful client, interpreters remained “invisible” or exercised a “special interactional power, […] as a result of his or her bilingual and bicultural expertise” (Mason and Ren 2012: 238). This article presents a case study of Soviet interpreters for Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev and their associates, with memoirs by the interpreters for Hitler and British PMs consulted for cross-correlation.

The article presents a case of interpretation as a political activity during the Cold War. In the 1980s and 1990s, a grassroots citizen diplomacy movement was initiated by the Californian Esalen Institute, the center of the American Human Potential Movement. In and around its Soviet-American exchange program, numerous individuals, NGOs and organizations established personal relationships and professional exchange with citizens of the two super powers and travelled in both directions. Interpreters had a complex and crucial role in this exchange which was different from both the professional experience of conference and of communal interpreting.

This article analyzes the formation of a special professional group of indigenous translator-interpreters in the Russian colonies of America (including Mestizos-Creoles). They shared with the Russians all the hardships of opening up new lands, acted as mediators between the new arrivals and the natives, settled conflicts, warned the Russians about dangers, and sometimes perished during shipwrecks and attacks by hostile locals. Some of the interpreters participated in creating a written language for the native inhabitants of Alaska.